The night shirt was carefully cut into sections, presumably by Colman. For those who might have revered the piece of clothing as a sacred relic, this common act allowed for multiple people to experience the object as a site of history and memory. The shirt’s fragmentation and distribution also worked to multiply the object’s possible monetary value. Although it can be assumed that Lucy Colman simply gave Carrie Day the sleeve due to their personal connection, she may have sold the remaining pieces. Indeed, Lincoln’s murder, and his subsequent transition in national memory to becoming a “Martyred President,” transformed any objects associated with the president into powerful and valuable relics. Commemoration, commerce, and complex social connections combined to dictate the paths and diversions of this obscure object and others. But with the provenance uncertain for this particular object, how is it still valuable to us today? 

The night shirt’s first career as a utilitarian object emphasizes just how ordinary it was across both class and race. By the mid-nineteenth century, northern textile mills were spinning cotton into cloth and streamlining clothing production with the help of sewing machines, participating in the growing industry of mass-production and what historian Michael Zakim terms “ready-made democracy.” This “ready-made commodity” embodied the social mobilization possible because of the Industrial Revolution. The standardization of the making and selling of (mostly men’s) clothing provided a wide variety of consumers with money-saving convenience. 

To further unravel the shirt’s history, we must acknowledge that this cotton night shirt exposes the relationship between the period’s mass-producing textile industry and the slave society of the American South. To be sure, the delicate materiality of the night shirt, itself seemingly representative of a democratic republican culture of civility and gentility, is at odds with the human cost of cotton’s production. The social relationship between the labor of cotton production and the commodified cotton shirt, between the laborer and consumer, mirrors a complicated contest between opposing ideas of civilization in nineteenth-century America. 

If the night shirt did in fact previously belong to the president, its purpose, meaning, and value were dramatically transformed after Lincoln took his last breath. The nation, already in mourning following a bloody Civil War, now had to also reconcile with the sudden death of the president. In Mourning Lincoln (2016), historian Martha Hodes writes that “by gathering and preserving relics, the bereaved sought confirmation of the cataclysmic event [of his death], wrote themselves into the history they had witnessed, and enshrined the past for the future.” Lincoln-related relics became representations of national loss, tangible evidence of the national trauma that Americans struggled to come to terms with. Trophies, souvenirs, keepsakes, sacred relics—objects became a bonding agent between a troubling past and an uncertain future.

In Behind the Scenes or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), Elizabeth Keckley, a seamstress for Mary Lincoln, claims that Mary gave her several keepsakes following the president’s death. She recollects two objects in particular—a comb and brush: “With this same comb and brush I had often combed his head. When almost ready to go down to a reception, he would turn to me with a quizzical look: ‘Well, Madam Elizabeth, will you brush my bristles down to-night?’ ‘Yes, Mr. Lincoln.’ Then he would take his seat in an easy-chair, and sit quietly while I arranged his hair.” Keckley was “only too glad to accept this comb and brush” from the hands of the president’s widow. Her memory of this intimate interaction exemplifies why personal, everyday objects are so valuable for historians and anthropologists. Objects such as these offer an intimate sensory experience, allowing us to feel what the person felt. A shirt and a comb provide us with a sense of the man that we cannot access by reading written documents. As historian Teresa Barnett points out, nothing permits us to engage with the past quite like the “substance of the past itself, materially identical to what it was in that other time and yet equally here and participating in our present.”

Sacred relics provided a material means of engaging with loved ones and memorializing events. For Mary Lincoln, the shirt might have functioned as a material continuation of Mr. Lincoln’s existence after his death. However, according to Keckley, Mary Lincoln gave away all objects that were “intimately connected with the president,” as she “could not bear to be reminded of the past.” After the shirt was transferred, the object-subject relationship and experience changed, as well as the object’s value. 

If the documentation is accurate, Mary passed the night shirt to Lucy Colman, the abolitionist who had escorted Sojourner Truth to the White House in 1864. After the war, Colman possessed several relics that we might find reasonably strange today: tufts of grass from the yard of Jefferson Davis’s Richmond home, a whipping post and slave whip, and a piece of Lincoln’s coffin. Yet, she had given all of these objects away by the time she wrote her 1891 memoir Reminiscences. The only relic still in her possession at the time was the night shirt. In the memoir, she describes the night shirt (and Mary Lincoln) as “strange.” Her ambivalence toward the object echoed her skeptical attitude toward the president. Colman did not shy away from critiquing the controversial president in her publication. Her ambiguous feelings about Lincoln and his legacy might explain her decision to cut and distribute the night shirt. Also, this ambiguity is illustrative of a fragmented and fraught relationship between Americans and the “Great Emancipator.”

Regardless of how she viewed Lincoln’s ethics, Colman must have sensed the intensifying historical value of the night shirt. By carefully and deliberately cutting and distributing objects, Americans shared and created new memories of the national trauma. Moreover, the act also provided individuals with an opportunity for recognition and trade. Circumstantial evidence reveals that it was through her sister, Aurelia (Danforth) Raymond, that Colman likely met Carrie Day. Raymond and Day both studied medicine and both were living and practicing at the same time in Onondaga County, New York. Carrie Day’s family eventually settled in Castana, Iowa, and her own feelings about the president may be understood through her decision to name one of her daughters Cornelia Lincoln Day. What happened to the shirt sleeve following Caroline’s death in 1904 remains unclear. The complicated journey and negotiations of Civil War era relics, like this very night shirt, illuminate the complex evolution of memorializing the Civil War. The transfer of objects, and the resulting social networks, continuously reanimated and reinvented meaning and value. Why would Caroline’s children sell or give away an object that clearly had deep meaning for her? Could ambivalent feelings about Lincoln have contributed to this decision? One obvious possibility is that the economic value of the shirt may have outweighed its sentimental value. Just as it is feasible that Lucy Colman sold the remaining pieces of the shirt, Caroline Day’s family may have also profited from selling the sleeve.

Abraham Lincoln’s violent death added a complex dimension to collecting presidential  memorabilia. The national tragedy enhanced both the material and immaterial value of all Lincoln-related objects. In Stuart Schneider’s Collecting Lincoln (1997), he acknowledges that collectors began their work “even as Lincoln lay dying.” As collecting grew, the focus began to shift from an emphasis on commemoration to an investment opportunity. An obsession with the monetary value of Lincoln-objects by some collectors began to hinder an important relationship between collecting and scholarship. Therefore, not only has collecting and preserving been vital to the ever-growing scholarship on the Civil War era, but so has the willingness of collectors to open up their collections to scholars for study or even give their collections to educational institutions.

The Frank and Virginia Williams collection of Lincolniana was donated to Mississippi State University in 2017 and is housed alongside the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library. Both collections are prime sources for Civil War research and, surprisingly, are located in the state that was only second to secede from the Union. The Lincolniana collection consists of over 30,000 items, approximately 16,000 of which are pamphlets and books. In a recent interview, Williams explained that his decision to give this collection to the southern university was rooted in his own hope that the collection’s presence in this location would aid in the continued process of healing between the North and the South, suggesting that the fight for freedom did not end at Appomattox but “is an ongoing process even today.” 

This night shirt, now displayed in a glass case, is valorized into a decommodified value system. Its fragmentation is evidence of the object’s complex value, while its careful preservation now as a museum object also indicates that it is historically invaluable. The night shirt began as an ordinary shirt—a common product for any common man. But after the president’s death, the object transformed into something much different and much more powerful. If truly believed by its various holders to be a sacred relic, an extension of Lincoln himself, then it may have provided a means for coping with the complex wounds of war. 

Despite the object’s ambiguous provenance and journey, it continues to facilitate important social relationships; this is proven through the valuable interactions that were prompted by this very project. It continues to provoke important questions about what material objects can tell us about our nation’s history: what other stories can be embodied in historical objects? We are continuously compelled to weave together the complicated story of our nation. Written texts can only provide us with a limited understanding of our past. Maybe it is through the medium of material objects that we can work to secure the missing pieces.

 

This article originally appeared in December 2022.

 

Further Reading

Teresa Barnett, Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Lucy Colman, Reminiscences (Buffalo: H.L. Green, 1891).

Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (New York: G.W. Carleton & Co., 1868).

Stuart Schneider, Collecting Lincoln (Atglen: Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 1997).

Frank J. Williams and Mark E. Neely Jr., “The Crisis in Lincoln Collecting,” Books at Brown—Lincoln and Lincolniana (Providence: The Friends of the Library of Brown University, 1985).

Michael Zakim, “A Ready-Made Business: The Birth of the Clothing Industry in America,” Business History Review 73 (Spring 1999): 61-90.

Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

 

Acknowledgments

Special thank you to Chief Justice Frank J. Williams and his wife Virginia, Mississippi State University archivist Dr. Ryan Semmes, and independent historian Jake Harding of Castana, Iowa.

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Amber Morgan Gill is an English Literature and Composition lecturer at Mississippi State University, as well as a part-time History Ph.D. student there. She studies the Civil War era with special interest in republican motherhood, sentimental nationalism, and the value of material objects.

The 1693 Royal Charter for the College of William & Mary identifies multiple lines of funding to support the planned school, including what today appears as a seemingly innocuous designation of quitrents from 20,000 acres in Pamunkey Neck and below the Blackwater River: “tenn [sic] thousand Acres of Land not yet legally taken up or possessed by any of our other subjects lying & being on ye South side of ye black-water Swamp, as also other tenn [sic] thousand Acres of land not yet legally taken up or possessed by any of our other Subjects lying & being in ye neck of land commonly called Pamunkey Neck between ye forks of Yorke River . . .” However, these were the same indigenous lands of the Nansemond, Nottoway, Weyanoak and Pamunkey identified and “Confirmed” in the 1677 Articles of Peace. 

The founders’ intent to propagate the Christian faith “amongst ye Western Indians” is clearly outlined in the first lines of the charter. What is less well known is that the College funding needs resulted in the transfer, survey, and patenting of 20,000 acres of trust lands from Native jurisdiction to the Trustees of the university. Even though the survey of multiple Native territories was decreed by the 1677 treaty, it took nearly 25 years to establish the boundaries for what would later be known as ‘Indian reservations’ and to open the remainder of Indian lands to English plantation. The delay was, in part, because of the need to establish and maintain peaceful relations between Englishmen and Indians through multiple regional conflicts of the 1670s and 1680s, but also because colonial officials, churchmen, and gentry argued about the dispensation of the quitrent taxes from the patenting process. Accommodation among the colonials was reached by 1705, and the survey and development of Southside lands that followed partially fulfilled the fiduciary lines identified in the 1693 Charter. Two areas of “College Lands” were formed out of Native territory in Pamunkey Neck (King William County) and below the Blackwater River (Surry County). King William lands above the Pamunkey Indian reservations were known as Upper College, and those university lands closer to the confluence with the York River, Lower College.

The Reverend James Blair, as the Commissary in Virginia for the Bishop of London and the first president of the College, was the primary colonial agent behind the Charter’s funding streams. Blair’s intent to funnel the Virginia quitrents towards ecclesiastical salaries and College purposes was thwarted by the colony’s elites. They favored maintaining the quitrents for the colony’s administration. King William approved the use of several thousand pounds of Virginia quitrents to construct the College. The 20,000 acres of Indian lands granted to William & Mary became Blair’s only reliable source of quitrent income for the school. To placate Blair and further support the university, additional monies were appropriated in 1718 for the purchase of patented lands which led to the College’s acquisition of a fledgling 2,119-acre Southside plantation from colonist Thomas Jones. Thereafter, this large property was known as the “Nottoway Quarter” due to its recent origins as indigenous land and its adjacency to the Nottoway River. These lands straddled the river within the recently formed Prince George (1703) and Surry counties, and after 1720, 1752 and 1754, Brunswick, Dinwiddie and Sussex counties; by 1780, a portion of the Nottoway Quarter rested in the newly created Greensville County. Combined, the granted and purchased lands provided the collegiate institution with rents and income from tobacco harvests on College-owned plantations. A significant portion of the annual budget for William & Mary was derived from the combination of tobacco tariffs, land rents, and yields of tobacco production and thus directly linked the College to enslaved labor and colonized indigenous lands.

The financial records of the College, while fragmentary, indicate that rents from “college lands” were paid in hogsheads of tobacco, shipped to England, and sold by the university’s agents in London markets at the going price of the day. “Surry Rents” yielded £50 to £70 annually or as high as £183; “King Wm. Rents” also ranged from £60 to £100 or possibly £150 or more during a good year. College-owned farm yields in tobacco, such as from the large plantation at the Nottoway Quarter, produced similar sums. The market and crop yield impacted the annual revenue, which typically produced less than £500 for the College in London tobacco clearing houses.

The Virginia collection points for tobacco tariffs due the College were located at warehouses along the waterways in the Tidewater. These points of collection were known as “warehouse districts.” William & Mary collected duties from the river districts of the Lower and Upper James, York, Rappahannock, Potomac, Pocomoke, and Accomack, with the heavier tonnage of tobacco leaving the lower tidewater. Collectors were assigned to each warehouse district and port, with collections returned to the Bursar at Michaelmas, Lady Day, and Christmas. Tobacco was taxed a pence or “penny” per pound for shipments destined for ports other than England; ships such as the Dear Betsey, Ogechee, and Friendship hailed from Liverpool, Georgia, and Virginia and were bound for British ports in Antigua, Barbados, and Granada, among others. Leading up to the midcentury, College accounts recorded less than a £300 per annum average for tobacco tariffs. From 1755 to 1765, the institution earned £3334.3.5 or “communibus annis £333.8.4.” However, in 1768, the total tax yielded more than £846. Tobacco tariff duties were added to the College ledger alongside crop yields from the Nottoway Quarter and rents from King William and Surry paid in tobacco.

Managing the College monies and lands was complicated and required the services of managers and overseers on both sides of the Atlantic who were skilled in the merchant practices of the day. The proximity of the school to the colony’s capital likely facilitated the construction of the necessary bureaucracy. In Williamsburg, a network of scribes, bookkeepers, clerks, note takers, and agents functioned in support of College and mercantile efforts. There were networks of managers and accountants associated with the Brafferton Estate in Yorkshire; tobacco agents in London; Virginia collectors of taxes on furs, skins, tobacco, and liquor; and managers of the properties in King William and Surry as well as the Nottoway Quarter. All received a commission or fee for their administerial efforts. These functions were needed on both sides of the Atlantic—at the ends and origins of the commodity chains in England and Virginia.

The “Nottoway Plantation,” as it was sometimes referred to in the documentary record, was subject to annual quitrents and poll taxes. Not part of the “College Lands” granted by the Royal Charter, the Nottoway Quarter was taxed, which contrasted with the university land grants in King William and Surry. Other taxed lands yielding rents and or produce were College-owned parcels in Isle of Wight and Elizabeth City counties, among other locales.

In addition to the rental income, annual tobacco yield, and some minor crops in wheat, the Nottoway Quarter and grant lands provided the College with fuel for cooking and heating, which reduced the cost for this necessary expense. Extant bursar records confirm that there were payments for specialized services, sometimes involving enslaved labor. This included a 1740 payment to Gabriel Maupin for cutting and hauling “33 Load of [fire] Wood.” Likewise, College President James Horrocks hired “two Negroes” in 1768 for “Cutting and Carting Wood on the College Lands for the Use of the said College.” In 1770, the College determined that “the sum of £5 be annually allow’d to Mr. Nicholson while he overlooks . . . the College wood.”

Most Nottoway Quarter expenses charged to the College involved the table fare and support of the enslaved plantation population, as well as the oversight of farm productivity. During the 1740s, a “Mr. Dempsey” was compensated annually for managing the plantation and acquiring various “Sundrys,” clothing for the laborers at the College Quarter and submitting bills for “Ferryages” to cross the James River between Williamsburg and Swan Point. In 1760, “Mr. Robert Walker” was “to overlook the College Quarter at Nottoway, & that he be allow’d the Rate of twenty Pounds [per] ann. for his Trouble.” A “Mr. Withers” took the position in 1768. Walker, Withers, and other College overseers kept accounts of “goods sent them,” “Goods imported per Mr. Nicholson’s” and nondescript “Expenses” charged against Nottoway Quarter yields. Tobacco harvests were carted by enslaved persons with “2 work oxen from thence” toward the James River warehouses for “Inspection . . . at Bolling’s point” before the crops’ “Voyage to G. Britain,” received under the care of College agents “Capel & Osgood Hanbury” in London.

The annual income of the Quarter was used by the College to support the plantation, as well as to fund the “Nottoway Foundation,” which typically provided four scholarships for White students of William & Mary. Recipients of the support were identified and recommended by the “President & Masters.” Thereafter, the students were called “scholars” and received financial support for their education. Some scholars of the Nottoway Foundation during the third quarter of the eighteenth century included William West in 1757, James Marshall in 1760, Thomas Davis in 1768, William Leigh in 1769, William Dawson in 1770, Walker Maury in 1770, James Innes in 1771, David Stuart in 1771, Thomas Hughes in 1772, William Starke in 1772, Thomas Clay in 1773, and Thomas Dixon in 1774. While sometimes called “Nottoway Scholars,” these individuals were not Nottoway Indians, but rather came from upper-class White families, most of whom had fathers and siblings of distinction within colonial society. Marshall served as the Second Usher of the Grammar School in 1770. Innes also became an Usher and, later, Attorney General of Virginia. It is noteworthy that some Nottoway Indian students in attendance at the Brafferton Indian School adopted the patronym “Scholar” and were doubtless aware of the connotation and the origins of the land that supported the Nottoway Foundation.

Less is known about the enslaved individuals who resided at the Nottoway Quarter during the eighteenth century. Like the Native students residing at the Brafferton Indian School, who many times were unnamed and listed only as “Indians,” the enslaved were described anonymously as “Negroes belonging to the College.” The names of the enslaved were rarely recorded prior to the American Revolution. The names that do appear in parish records are notations of births and baptisms: Bruton Parish for enslaved peoples in Williamsburg and Bristol Parish for any enslaved persons residing at the Nottoway Quarter. Only one birth and one baptism were recorded between 1718 and 1777, the years enslaved persons worked at the Nottoway Quarter for the College. In 1734 the Bristol Parish listed “Ben, male Slave belongg [sic] to the Colledge [sic] of Wm & Mary”—although many more individuals resided, had families, and toiled on the Nottoway tract of land. When the original acquisition of the land was finalized, President James Blair allocated £467 for the purchase of seventeen slaves to work the new venture. While the documentary evidence does not record the purchase of any additional bound labor for the Nottoway Quarter, expenditures recorded by the Bursar are large enough to assume that the enslaved workforce increased throughout the eighteenth century. By the late 1770s, over thirty enslaved individuals resided on the plantation, most likely the children and grandchildren of the original laborers.

Scholars who have researched the relationship of William & Mary to slavery have assumed the original seventeen slaves purchased for the Nottoway Quarter were all of African descent. However, Virginia slave purchases, taxes and legal records of the period indicate enslaved Indians were commonly found on Tidewater farms and plantations and in Williamsburg. It is possible that James Blair’s initial investment in founding a College slave population may have included Native peoples. The actual number and percentage of enslaved Indians in the colony from 1718 through 1723 remains unknown, but “Indian slavery was ubiquitous” in Virginia, with thousands of Natives ensnared in chattel slavery. Between 1670 and 1715, it is estimated that 50,000 Southeastern Native peoples were sold into slavery. In comparison, approximately 10,000 enslaved Africans were imported into North America, including the Caribbean and New Spain, prior to 1700. Most Native captives from the North American interior were transferred to South Carolina, then exported to the West Indies. However, records indicate Native “Carolina slaves” were traded northward to Virginia and New England. As late as 1718, Indian slaves composed 28 percent of imported laborers along the Upper York River, adjacent to College Lands in Pamunkey Neck. Similarly, Surry County had the highest number of Native forced laborers during the period from 1680 through 1703, according to the tithes paid in the county register. It is therefore reasonable to speculate that in the earliest years, the rented College Lands in King William and Surry counties were worked, at least in part, by enslaved Indians. Their labor, along with an increasing number of Africans, paid the College rents in tobacco.

The settler colonialism of the early eighteenth century promoted the use of Native labor where possible and indeed, an association existed between cultivating tobacco and American Indians. Map engravings and tobacconist advertisement iconography of the era also conflated trappings of Native peoples with laborers in tobacco fields, so that both enslaved Africans and Native Americans appear adorned with Indian-esque attire, feathers, and tobacco leaves. Furthering the mindset of potential planters from the upper South, those colonizers who read John Norris’ treatise Profitable Advice for Rich and Poor (1712) took note of his recommendation for establishing an enslaved agricultural workforce, composed of American Indian and African laborers in equal numbers. Norris suggested purchasing less-expensive enslaved Native females alongside African enslaved males to “work in the field” and “settle him a Plantation,” where after several seasons “the Slaves and Stock [would be] yearly encreasing [sic].” Additional female Indian slaves were recommended “as Cooks for the Slaves and other Household-Business.” Scholars of collegiate institutional slavery have recently suggested that James Blair may have considered “breeding women” as part of his plan “when he purchased slaves for the Nottoway plantation.” In this reading of the documentary record, the original seventeen slaves “reproduced themselves” for approximately three generations. 

It remains unclear if Blair included enslaved Natives in his initial purchase of human labor for the Nottoway Quarter, but it is not an unreasonable supposition. The Virginia legal category of “slave” included “negroes, mulattoes, and Indians” in slave-related Acts passed by the House of Burgesses until the American Revolution. The 1772 watershed “freedom suit” of Robin v. Hardaway confirms that enslaved American Indians were present in the Nottoway Quarter’s Dinwiddie County after 1718. George Mason argued the case, which emancipated twelve individuals matrilineally descended from Native American laborers enslaved illegally. These twelve individuals were not known to be connected with the Nottoway Quarter, but as an early plantation in the vicinity during a period of heavy Indian slaving, the presence of enslaved Natives there is plausible.

Nottoway Quarter records rarely identified the exact nature of plantation “Expenses,” but instead focused on the export and yield of tobacco and scholarship bills for “table.” Examples of specific allocations to the Quarter include a bill in 1755 that “paid Nottoway Negroes for Hops £2.17.6” and another in 1775 “To Nottoway Quarter for pork, beeves, Mutton & Butter £84.10.” The degree to which these College expenditures represented individual acts to supplement subsistence on the part of enslaved people is unclear. Later records indicate enslaved laborers of William & Mary were allowed to privately work garden plots and sell their produce to the College. The specificity of the inventory—beyond the Plantation “Sundrys,” “Expenses” or “Table”—suggests that these slim notations may be interpreted as the ability of enslaved laborers of the Nottoway Quarter to sell and grow comestibles for the table. Other identified purchases for the Quarter came in the form of textiles for clothing for the enslaved. A note in 1740 recorded “87 ½ Yrds Cottons £9.9.7.” A more detailed 1773 “Clothing” document listed “Pleans [Plains],” “buttons,” “Osnabrugs,” “Shoe buckles,” “Knee buckles,” “hatts,” “stockings,” “shoes” and “Dowlass” for approximately thirty individuals of the “Nottoway Quarter,” priced at “£30.18.2.” 

Bills for “ferryages” appear to be listings of overseers or the enslaved coming to the College on business. Conversely, the records suggest that faculty members rarely visited the Nottoway Quarter. A document from 1742 notes two enslaved individuals, “runaway from Nottoway,” arrived in Williamsburg with a complaint to the faculty about conditions on the plantation. President James Blair and the College Masters appointed Thomas Dawson and John Graeme to “Visit the Plantan:, to enquire into the Matters of Fact, and to endeavour [sic] to put things to rights.” No further information was recorded concerning a resolution of this matter. It appears faculty oversight of the Nottoway Quarter was minimal. The only instance of a Nottoway manager being ordered to make a report on the state of affairs at the Quarter was in 1768. Aside from the 1742 occurrence, no other eighteenth-century documents have been found referencing Nottoway Quarter runaways or those who were reported as absent without leave and nor were any runaway ads posted in The Virginia Gazette. However, one Bursar record from 1765 notes the payment of a charge of thirteen shillings and four pence to the Nottoway Plantation “For takng up a runaway.” It is unclear whether this amount was directed at compensating Nottoway residents for tracking a locally escaped slave or expenses associated with recovering a Quarter laborer.

The Nottoway Quarter was thus firmly situated within, and a product of, settler colonialist ideology. Returning to the extant documents—the bursars’ ledgers, faculty minute books, and College papers—allowed us to look more deeply into these processes. While the documents of William & Mary are not obscure, by using the lens of political economy to evaluate the College’s historical finances, new details emerged about the institution’s reliance on expropriated Native treaty lands and enslaved agricultural labor. The dispossession of Native lands for the purposes of organizing English tobacco plantations was a deepening and broadening of merchant capitalism in Virginia. Colonial taxation of tobacco grown by forced labor on colonized Indian lands, conjoined with quitrents derived from treaty lands transferred from the Crown’s trust to the College were added to yields from William & Mary tobacco sales in London. In nearly all instances, College tobacco was grown and harvested by enslaved peoples. Examining the positionality of the Nottoway Quarter to the early financial support of the fledgling College of William and Mary makes clear the deeply intertwined social relations of slavery, political economy, and settler colonialism. Presently, The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation and the Bray School Initiative are efforts underway at William & Mary to study and respond to the College’s troubling history as it relates to slavery and its legacies. A new consideration of the interconnectedness between the Charter’s call to educate “the Western Indians” and the phrase extolling efforts for the “maintenance and support of the College in all time coming” also requires an acknowledgment of that troubling history and a response to Indigenous communities.

 

Further Reading:

Gregory Ablavsky,  “Making Indians White: The Judicial Abolition of Native Slavery in Revolutionary Virginia and Its Racial Legacy,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 159 (no. 5, 2011): 1457-531.

C.S. Everette, “‘They shalbe slaves for their lives’: Indian Slavery in Colonial Virginia,” in Indian Slavery in Colonial America, ed. Alan Gallay (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

Alan Gallay,  The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

Susan H. Godson et al., The College of William & Mary: A History, vol. 1: 1693–1888 (Williamsburg, VA: King and Queen Press, 1993).

The Lemon Project, William & Mary.

Danielle Moretti-Langholtz and Buck Woodard, eds., Building the Brafferton: The Founding, Funding and Legacy of America’s Indian School (Williamsburg: The Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2019).

E. Morpurgo, Their Majesties’ Royall Colledge: William and Mary in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Washington, D.C.: Hennage Creative Printers, 1976).

Jennifer Oast, Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1680–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Kristalyn Shefveland, Anglo-Native Virginia: Trade, Conversion, and Indian Slavery in the Old Dominion, 1646–1722 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018).

Buck Woodard, “Indian Land Sales and Allotment in Antebellum Virginia: Trustees, Tribal Agency, and the Nottoway Reservation,” American Nineteenth Century History 17 (no. 2, 2016): 161-80.

 

This article originally appeared in December 2022.

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Buck Woodard is a Professorial Lecturer of Anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. and chair of the Virginia Indian Advisory Board’s Workgroup on State Recognition for the Secretary of the Commonwealth. Recent work includes “An Alternative to Red Power: Political Alliance as Tribal Activism in Virginia” (2020) and as co-author of Building the Brafferton: The Founding, Funding, and Legacy of America’s Indian School (2019).

Danielle Moretti-Langholtz is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at William & Mary in Williamsburg. She is also the Director of the American Indian Resource Center and the Director of the Native Studies minor. As well, she is the Curator of Native American Art at the Muscarelle Museum of Art and the co-author of Building the Brafferton: The Founding, Funding, and Legacy of America’s Indian School (2019).

Pushing his way through the crowd was the British consul general to the United States, Sir John Temple, Bt. Having left his horse at a stable, Temple was walking to his Queen Street home carrying his riding whip under his arm. Suddenly, a large man assaulted him with a club. This “ruffian” was nearly thirty years younger than Temple, who was about sixty-five years old. Nevertheless, he had picked on the wrong man. As Temple reported it to Lord Grenville, the British foreign secretary, he “exceedingly well horsewhip’d” the assailant until his whip broke; then he used the butt end to knock the man “down in the dirt his proper place.”

“Had I been but a private Gentleman,” the consul general told the foreign secretary, this “suitable & proper chastisement” would have been sufficient. But because Temple held a “high and important Commission under his majesty in this Country,” he felt compelled to swear out a complaint against “the said large ruffian,” so that “some legal punishment . . . for the high indignity so offered to one of the Kings Servants . . . may forever deter any ruffianly attempts of the like kind in the future.”

Assaults were not rare in New York City, especially during the hijinks associated with Guy Fawkes Night. What makes this one noteworthy is that the “large ruffian” the British consul general had horsewhipped was a United States senator, John Rutherfurd of New Jersey.

What could have caused the senator to attack the elderly diplomat? It is improbable that the Guy Fawkes Night set-to had politics behind it. There was no reason for them to be political enemies. Indeed, they were logical allies. Rutherfurd’s family had been at best lukewarm in its support of the American Revolution, and John spent the war as a Princeton student (class of 1779) and studying law. The Rutherfurds and Temples attended the same social functions and were even guests at each other’s tables. John Rutherfurd, like John Temple (who was the son-in-law of James Bowdoin, the Federalist governor of Massachusetts), was a firm Federalist. Rutherfurd had been a presidential elector in 1788, and the New Jersey legislature sent him to the U.S. Senate in 1790, re-electing him in 1796. In the Senate, he consistently supported better relations with Great Britain. 

John Rutherfurd has been ignored by the major reference works, though he does have entries in Princetonians: A Biographical Dictionary, in the National Cyclopedia of American Biography, and in the online Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress 1774-Present. None of them mentions the Temple horsewhipping nor tells why Rutherfurd left the Senate. Almost the only historian to mention the incident is Joanne Lowe Neel, biographer of Temple’s rival Phineas Bond. She says it is an example of one of Temple’s “notorious temper tantrums.” This seems unfair; even diplomats have a right to self-defense.  

Less than three weeks later, on November 23, 1796, a New York grand jury, after hearing eyewitnesses, duly found that Rutherfurd “with force and arms an assault did make, and . . . did then and there beat, wound, and ill-treat and other wrongs and injuries . . . to the great damage of the said Sir John Temple.” No motive was given. The most logical explanation is simply that Rutherfurd was drunk and spoiling for a fight and Temple was handy.  

The grand jury’s quick action was certainly not influenced by deference to Great Britain; New York was virtually serving as a French naval base and a prize court for French privateers. (Much of Temple’s consular activities involved captured British seamen.) I do not know, but would bet, that the grand jurors knew that Rutherfurd had done this sort of thing before and had used his wealth and prestige to avoid consequences.

Rutherfurd fled back to New Jersey and never showed up for his trial—a more serious offense than the assault for which he had been indicted, and for which Temple believed the U.S. Senate would be compelled to expel him. He never returned to the Senate, to which the New Jersey legislature had re-elected him in 1796. After leaving New Jersey with only one senator for two years, Rutherfurd finally resigned as of December 5, 1798, and thereafter stayed out of national politics. He seems to have learned his lesson. Afterward, he appears to have led an exemplary public life (he lived to be eighty), making donations to worthy causes and serving on many important commissions.

Lord Grenville must have been appalled that Temple had sought the indictment. Whatever his private feelings about the United States, the foreign secretary certainly did not want anything to exacerbate the already chilly relations between the two governments. Britain was in a desperate war with revolutionary France, and Grenville was trying to keep the United States neutral. A Senate hearing on an incident in which a British diplomat had horsewhipped one of its members was not what the foreign minister needed. Nevertheless, Grenville never mentioned the matter in his official letters to Temple nor to the new British minister to the United States Robert Liston.

His silence was not out of support for his distant relative John Temple, whom Grenville concluded had outlasted his usefulness to his majesty’s government. Temple had, in fact, been something of an embarrassment to the British government and the Temple-Grenville family throughout his nearly forty-year career. It is possible that the crafty Grenville saw an opportunity to demonstrate cooperation with the United States when the Senate should denounce Temple. But the U.S. Senate ignored the incident as well. The senators, like the grand jurors, knew their man, and probably conceded that Temple had given him the hiding he had been asking for. 

As for Sir John Temple, we may applaud his spirited defense against an attack by a much younger assailant, but why didn’t he leave it at that, instead of filing a formal complaint? Temple knew better than most that Anglo-American relations were strained, and diplomats are supposed to be able to turn the other cheek when policy requires it. After looking at Temple’s long career, however, no one should be surprised; it was filled with similar ill-advised moves.  

When Temple’s appointment as Britain’s first diplomatic representative to the United States was announced in April 1785, John Adams remarked “He is not a prudent Man, and has the most confused Conceptions of public opinion and of the Reasonings upon which it is founded, and of the real Springs and motives of Events of any Man of so much sense and experience I ever saw.” Adams, himself not the most prudent of the founding fathers, had known Temple for all of his public life. He described his man very well.

John Temple was born in Boston around the end of 1731, the third son of a wealthy Anglo-Irish family related to the powerful Temple-Grenville clan. As a young man, John Temple spent a good bit of time in London, using his family connections to obtain a government appointment. His persistence paid off in 1761, when he was named surveyor-general of customs for the northern district of North America. Despite a complete lack of experience, he did his job reasonably well, in the face of mercantile opposition to the new imperial program of Temple’s patron, Prime Minister George Grenville. But in the process, he got into a bitter quarrel with the royal governor of Massachusetts, Francis Bernard, whom he accused of collusion with a crooked customs officer. Bernard, who also had a powerful British protector in Lord Barrington, succeeded in getting Temple called back to England.

There, in 1771, Temple used the threat of publishing his letters on the Stamp Act to blackmail Thomas Whately (who had taken the followers of the late Prime Minister George Grenville over to Lord North), into creating the post of inspector-general of customs for England for him. Temple enjoyed this sinecure until 1773, when the Massachusetts House of Representatives published sixteen private letters between Thomas Whately (who had died in 1772) and Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor Andrew Oliver. The letters were political dynamite. The Massachusetts legislature petitioned the king to dismiss Hutchinson and Oliver. In England, Thomas Whately’s banker brother, William, suggested that Temple might have taken the letters from his late brother’s files. Temple took umbrage at this and challenged the banker to a duel. It was bloody and inconclusive. To head off another duel—and to protect his real source—Benjamin Franklin published an admission that he had been the one to purloin the letters. The result was that both Franklin and Temple lost their government jobs, and Parliament was in a vindictive mood when news arrived of the Boston Tea Party.

During the War for American Independence, John Temple went back and forth between England and America, trusted by neither side. He landed a post on the Carlisle Commission, created to end the war by granting America all its demands except independence. The commission failed, and Temple was notably dilatory in his duties to it. Lord North’s government decided that Temple had not earned a promised baronetcy. And in America, John Hancock, a bitter political rival of Temple’s father-in-law, James Bowdoin, got Temple placed under a heavy bond to behave properly. The debate over Temple’s status filled the Boston newspapers for nearly two years. 

Realizing he had no political future in America, Temple took his family back to London. The British government was in no hurry to establish diplomatic relations with its erstwhile colonies, but merchants on both sides of the Atlantic were anxious to get trade moving again, which required the services of a consul general. Temple lobbied hard for the job and once again used his family connections (Prime Minister William Pitt was also related by marriage). He was greatly assisted by the fact that the man the government really wanted, Phineas Bond, was under sentence of death for treason in Pennsylvania, and the Confederation Congress was highly unlikely to accept him. The government likely saw Temple’s main value as a stalking horse. (If so, it worked: Bond was quietly accredited as the second British consul general in 1786, and he soon took over many of Temple’s responsibilities.) Congress accepted Temple as the first British diplomatic representative to the United States in December 1785. He styled himself “His Majesty’s Principal Servant” in the United States, and when shortly he succeeded to the Temple family baronetcy, his self-importance knew even fewer bounds. Thus John Temple was acting completely in character when he sought the indictment of Senator Rutherfurd.

John Adams rather liked Temple (a sentiment Temple did not reciprocate) and was hopeful but wary about Temple’s appointment as the king’s representative. Adams feared that Temple would forget his primary responsibility to the king and try to be an American at the same time, causing conflict between the two nations. In this Adams was as prescient as he has proved to be in most things. In the perennial dispute between England and America over impressment of seamen, Temple took the American side. Lord Grenville ran out of patience in 1798 and ordered Temple back to England, undoubtedly to dismiss him. Before Grenville’s letter arrived, however, on November 17, 1798, John Temple died of an aneurysm. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan, the church where George Washington had been inaugurated as the first president of the United States.

And to date, however much deserved, no other representative of a foreign nation has horsewhipped a U.S. senator.

 

Further Reading

Despite his lengthy and important career, John Temple has no full-length biography nor an entry in the Dictionary of American Biography or Dictionary of National Biography. The basic details of his life are in the American National Biography, s.v. “Temple, John,” by Neil R. Stout. The sources for this article are mostly in manuscript, particularly in the British Public Record Office, FO/5, especially 5/15. Other sources come from Neil R. Stout, ed., “The Missing Temple-Whately Papers,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 104 (1992): 123-47 and Warren-Adams Letters: Being Chiefly a Correspondence Among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren vol. 2: 1778-1814 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1925). See also Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); Jordan D. Fiore, “The Temple-Bernard Affair,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 90 (1954): 58-83; Joanne Lowe Neel, Phineas Bond: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1786-1812 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); and Lewis M. Wiggin, The Faction of Cousins: A Political Account of the Grenvilles, 1733-1763 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).

 

This article originally appeared in November 2022.

 

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Neil R. Stout was Professor of History emeritus at the University of Vermont. He was past president of the New England Historical Association and sometime editor of Vermont History, the journal of the Vermont Historical Society. His books include The Royal Navy in America, 1760-1775 and The Perfect Crisis. He passed away in February, 2023 (1932-2023).

In the 1830s, the new science of geology was enjoying considerable worldwide interest, and Charles Lyell’s three volume Principles of Geology (1830-33) challenged biblical accounts of ancient history with its own creation narrative rooted in a “deep time” that far outstretched previous estimates of the earth’s age. Like the fascinating stories that rocks could now share with scientists, the study of shells—as similarly striated deposits of minerals—was also gaining momentum. Wyatt jumped on the opportunity to assemble his own American textbook on conchology, and in 1838 Harper & Brothers, a leading publishing house, snapped up the chance to publish his Manual of Conchology, according to the system laid down by Larmarck, with the late improvements by De Blainville. 

As its title suggests, Wyatt’s textbook compiled existing scientific materials, and, as John Tresch outlines in The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, the author also incorporated ideas from famed naturalist Georges Cuvier and Philadelphia publisher-scientist Isaac Lea. (Given the lack of strong international copyright laws, Wyatt also plagiarized large sections of text from Captain Thomas Brown’s The Conchologist’s Text-book that had recently been published in Glasgow in 1836.)  Nevertheless, as historian of science Steven Jay Gould has documented, Wyatt’s textbook was still rather expensive (eight dollars) and unwieldy. “Sales were predictably slow, and Wyatt wished to produce a shorter edition with uncolored plates at a much lower price,” Gould notes. Wyatt’s publisher was not convinced, however, and “objected, citing a reasonable concern that its fancy edition would then become entirely unsellable. Wyatt, still wishing to proceed, but fearing legal action . . . sought a surrogate to help with his new volume and to serve as name-bearer for a flat fee.” 

Although Edgar Allan Poe might seem like a strange choice for “surrogate man of science,” he had retained a fascination with (and training in) various branches of applied and theoretical science throughout his impressive schooling in England and Richmond, and later at the University of Virginia and West Point. Indeed, just before Poe arrived in Philadelphia, he had published a novel that provided its own unique blend of timely scientific speculation and (similarly plagiarized) primary source material: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). It wasn’t unusual for Poe to review recent books of interest in natural history for the many journals he was associated with during his lifetime. For example, like many of his fellow Americans, Poe was intrigued by John Cleves Symmes Jr.’s theory that the earth was hollow at both its poles; and in a lengthy Messenger article of 1837 he wrote in support of funding an expedition to be led by J. V. Reynolds that would explore these and many other mysteries surrounding the polar extremes of the globe. When Poe composed his only novel the following year, he drew on some of these same polar fantasies while imagining Pym’s own bizarre expedition to the South Seas, and he incorporated (sometimes verbatim) reports from explorers such as Benjamin Morrell who had recently returned from these same alluring aqueous spaces.

Poe’s work reminds us that the separation of “Arts” and “Sciences” into discrete discourses of knowledge is itself a quite recent invention. Indeed, what the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries understood by the term “natural history” incorporated a remarkably heterogenous array of enterprises and obsessions. In addition to Symmes’ hollow Earth theory that inspired the topography of his only novel, Poe’s fiction is filled with references to—and engagements with—an array of what today would be called both “scientific” and “pseudo-scientific” knowledge. For example, while Poe relied on (and footnoted) Archimedes when describing the fluid dynamics of the whirlpool swallowing up his protagonist’s ship at the conclusion of “A Descent Into the Maelström” (1841), his tales were also inspired by contemporaneous “pseudo-scientific” debates concerning mesmerism (animal magnetism) and phrenology (the study of skull shapes). Indeed, Poe even extended the central logic of phrenology in order to advance his own unique and playful “science”: published in a popular series of articles in Graham’s Magazine, Poe’s work on “Autography” interprets and analyzes the peaks and valleys found in the signatures of famous nineteenth-century literary figures, drawing cheeky conclusions about the character of the person behind the script. Viewed from our twenty-first century perspective, then, Poe’s fiction finds its home in the nebulous middle ground between hoax and official truth that existed before modern science could emerge as its own respectable and distinct discipline of knowledge.

From the perspective of Thomas Wyatt in 1838, however, Edgar Allan Poe was a perfectly suitable, affordable, and eager prospect who could help steer the new edition of his shell book into publication. While the full extent of Poe’s involvement as surrogate editor of Wyatt’s text isn’t easy to discern, scholars generally agree that, at the very least, Poe wrote a new introduction to the abridged textbook, reshaped the taxonomic categories under which it was organized, and likely added some of his own translated material (thanks to his schooling in French) from Cuvier. The abridged version of Wyatt’s textbook, now “authored” by Poe and published in Philadelphia by Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell, was titled The Conchologist’s First Book: A System of Testaceous Malacology. Unlike the vast majority of Poe’s work (Pym included), it was a considerable success. No other work attributed to Poe was reprinted during his lifetime: his shell book, however, sold out in two months and was reprinted twice in six years.

The Conchologist’s First Book remains something of a footnoted curiosity for most Poe scholars, noteworthy because of its relatively successful publication history and for the charges of plagiarism that would later be levelled at Poe regarding its composition. More recently, however, Poe’s shell book has gained renewed attention from prominent scholars in the history of science, as well as from specialists in a particular branch of science that Poe is now credited with helping to originate: malacology. I’ll close by giving you a sense of why Poe’s involvement in what Maxim Vinarski calls the “birth of malacology” is important not only because it brings to light an important moment in the development of American science but also for how it helps us to connect Poe’s vision of the natural world with the aesthetics of his gothic fiction. 

What is malacology, and how did Poe help to create this branch of modern science? When The Conchologist’s First Book was being assembled by Poe, a few scientists had recently begun to question why taxonomies of shelled animals tended to ignore the creatures that lived inside, instead focusing on the specifics of shell structure to organize and differentiate between these invertebrate animals. As Vinarski notes, before Cuvier “internal anatomy as a tool for classification of invertebrates was commonly ignored.” Indeed, it was only after Cuvier’s work in the 1790s that shelled and unshelled invertebrates were incorporated under the classificatory term we still use today: mollusks. (Malacology is the science of the study of mollusks.) When Poe was given the task of abridging Wyatt’s textbook, he not only cut some of its text and color plates (many of which had been plagiarized from Brown); he also decided to reorganize its decidedly shell-centered pages to foreground instead the “internal anatomy” of the animals inside the shell. Poe then translated descriptions of these animals from Cuvier to include alongside the descriptions of their shells, effectively converting Wyatt’s textbook from a conchological to a malacological study. 

Poe was quite explicit about his intentions. “The common works upon this subject,” he wrote in the introduction to The Conchologist’s First Book, “appear to every person of science very essentially defective, inasmuch as [they ignore] the relations of the animal and shell, with their dependence upon each other” (3), choosing instead to focus their attention solely on the intricacies of the animal’s shell. As malacologist Matthias Glaubrecht notes, Poe “was among the first to recognize and comment that a reliable classification of mollusks requires a combined analysis, which meant in his times reconciling a system based on hard shells . . . with evidence from soft body anatomy” (3). What seems most important to Poe, then, is not so much the isolated complexities of either shell or animal: instead, he focuses our attention on the “relations” each forms with the other—a shared “dependence” that is capable of transforming the earth’s crust into a living and moving protective shell. Quoting another contemporary scientist who shared his renewed emphasis on the relations between animal and shell, Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Poe is fascinated with the ways that these seemingly micro-relational processes produce significant “changes upon the surface of the earth [that, in turn, alter] the superficial structure of the globe” (7-8).

As I have argued in more detail elsewhere, Poe’s own fascination with mollusks—and, in particular, with the micro-relationships animals establish with inert matter—is registered throughout The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. (It is also hard not to think of The Conchologist’s First Book’s colored plates when Poe describes an eel-like sea monster with protruding eyes and tentacles in “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” (1845).) Pym, for example, contains a famous extended digression concerning the importance of the echinoderm known as the “sea cucumber” to the economy and health of one of the islands its narrator visits. Although it lacks a shell, Poe is drawn to the way in which this mollusk still manages to move itself through the play of oppositional forces, and how the gelatinous material that can be harvested from within the mollusk’s body (typically by the sharp bill of a swallow) itself mobilizes a lucrative Chinese economic trade in edible birds nests that, in turn, are thought to heal and energize the human body when ingested. And even the form and plot of Poe’s novel is shaped by incidents through which inert, shell-like materials and vulnerable human animals enter into relationships of protection, even communication, with one another (such as the striations of rock found in mountains that collapse into hollowed out caves, or the space of vacant hulls created by the chaos of shipwrecked timber).

In a similar vein, the fifty dollars Poe is thought to have made from his shell book might also be said to have provided its own vulnerable “author” with some temporary—but nevertheless extremely welcome—protection from the vagaries of life as a professional writer in 1830s Philadelphia. In the remaining years before his untimely death a decade later, Poe’s work continued to flourish in the murky spaces in which theoretical science becomes indistinguishable from science fiction and the campy excesses of gothic horror. Indeed, his 1848 prose poem “Eureka” (considered by Poe to be his masterpiece) proposes numerous theories concerning the origins of the universe that have been viewed by some as legitimate precursors to Einsteinian science and Big Bang cosmology. Einstein himself was impressed, at least at first. But then, so the story goes, he realized he didn’t want to be scooped, and so wrote Poe off as a hack. As the epigraph to “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” puts it, sometimes “Truth is Stranger than Fiction.”

 

Further Reading

Matthias Glaubrecht, “On ‘Darwinian Mysteries’ or Molluscs as Models in Evolutionary Biology: From Local Speciation to Global Radiation,” American Malacological Bulletin 27 (no. 1-2): 3-23.

Stephen Jay Gould, “Poe’s Greatest Hit,” Natural History 102 (no. 7, 1993): 10-19.

James D. Lilley, “Poe, Movement, and Matter: The Malacological Aesthetics of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Arizona Quarterly 73 (no. 4, 2017): 1-31.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Conchologist’s First Book: A System of Testaceous Malacology (Philadelphia: Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell, 1840).

John Tresch, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021).

Maxim Vinarski, “The Birth of Malacology. When and How?” Zoosystematics and Evolution 90 (no. 1, 2014): 1-5.

 

This article originally appeared in November 2022.

 

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James D. Lilley is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University at Albany, New York, where he teaches and publishes work in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British, American, and transatlantic studies. He is currently working on a number of Poe projects, including a book on Poe and philosophy.

Much was written about the “Jewish Frontlet” in the following years, and numerous scholars attempted to consult it at the AAS, where it was housed alongside other early donations such as an “Antique Indian Axe of the Choctaw Nation,” an “Indian pounder” from West Boylston, and cloth “manufactured by the Natives of the Sandwich Islands.” The “strange incident” in Pittsfield stirred the imaginaries of theologians and antiquaries alike because it supported millennialist Christian nationalism. Indeed, the phylactery allegedly provided physical proof that America’s Native peoples were “ancient Jews,” and this in turn offered empirical confirmation of the Bible’s “eternal truths.” This was an old trope: Atlantic scholars since at least the sixteenth century had proposed an Old World origin for America’s original peoples, including one that saw Indigenous ancestors trekking from the “Holy Land” across Asia and the Behring Strait to America, all the while “adhering to the rites of the Jewish Religion,” as Watson explained. Historians Eran Shelav and Shalom Goldman, moreover, have documented the ubiquity of “Hebraic” political rhetoric in early America, while Andrew Lewis, Sarah Rivett, and others have documented the significance of Old-New World theories to transatlantic colonialism and science.

Given the popularity of the “lost tribes of Israel” hypothesis in colonial America (as recently described by historian Elizabeth Fenton) and its revival during the Second Great Awakening, the phylactery’s inclusion in the AAS Cabinet—as a suspected “aboriginal” item—is unsurprising (it was rumored to have been buried with an “old Indian chief,” which is not true). AAS member and president of the American Bible Society Elias Boudinot (who was also the sponsor and namesake of Cherokee Phoenix editor Buck Watie/Elias Boudinot) expounded on “Hebraic Indians” in his influential A Star in the West, Or, a Humble Attempt to Discover the Long Lost Ten Tribes of Israel: Preparatory to Their Return to Their Beloved City, Jerusalem (1816). Boudinot’s words were repeated in Ethan Smith’s best-selling View of the Hebrews; Or, The Tribes of Israel in America (1823) (and later reworked re-worked by Pequot minister William Apess in the Appendix to his 1829 memoir A Son of the Forest), and Smith’s 1825 edition referenced the Pittsfield phylactery in detail. The phylactery’s inclusion in the AAS collection thus illustrates a larger ideology in which Anglo-American settler society is positioned within a divinely-sanctioned order and helps create what historian William N. Goetzmann called “a religious vision of American prehistory.”

The phylactery’s inclusion in the AAS cabinet tells us more about early US antiquarianism than just its exclusionary anti-Indigenous and anti-Semitic origins, and a consideration of the early collection provides a wider angle on its political project. When the AAS was established in 1812, it was with the mission “to discover the antiquities of our own Continent . . . as well as to collect and preserve those of other parts of the Globe.” The “Jewish Frontlet” was accessioned along with Indigenous heritage items and other donations including an inscription from a Babylonian ruin, a lock taken “from the church of the holy sepulcher in Jerusalem,” “Relicks of a real Egyptian mummy,” and a Canton trade passport from the ship John Jay, these latter items evincing the conflation of the non-Christian Mediterranean world with the large mass of non-Christian Asian lands stretching from Persia to China. Certainly, the allegedly “backward” non-Christian world has long been a crucial foil to the United States’ conception of its own modernity, and it is thus unsurprising that an item for Jewish worship would have been unceremoniously held next to a preserved body and trading papers. This interchangeability and desacralization of non-Christian materials was part of the point, for it allowed US Americans to portray “their” (Indigenous) past as equal to all ancient global cultures and their national present as best. Symptomatic is an exchange between Elias Boudinot and AAS president Isaiah Thomas in 1819: when Boudinot requested to examine the phylactery and Thomas was unable to locate it among the cabinet’s boxes, he reportedly showed Boudinot an “ancient” Arabic manuscript instead. But the collapse of (Indigenous) American and Mediterranean “natural history”-style collectables here is not only about the intellectual pursuit of Indigenous origins: it is an expression of the United States’ early global and imperial ambitions, both with regard to the North American continent and to world markets, as well as an indication of the value of natural history collections to US political salvation. An exclusive focus on US settler colonialism without a critique of Orientalism, however, distracts from the imperialist context for US natural, and national, history.

Massachusetts-born Thaddeus Mason Harris, one of the founding members of the AAS, spent as much of his life studying the history of the American continent as he did about the ancient world of the Israelites. Harris trained for the ministry at Harvard and served as the College’s librarian from 1791 to 1793 before becoming pastor at First Parish Church in Dorchester, a position he held until his death in 1836. As early as 1789, Harris began to explore his interests in “the first peopling of America” (although none of these interests saw publication until his 1805 Journal of a Tour Into the Territory Northwest Of The Alleghany Mountains, in which he suggested that America’s aboriginal peoples were descended from the “ancient Scythians” of Siberia). His commonplace book, titled “Ancient Inscriptions, Hieroglyphics, &c.” and held at the AAS, is a compilation of Orientalist studies, natural history, and antiquities that includes sections on customs, manners, and literature as well as Egyptian hieroglyphics, “Siberian languages,” Mexican history, and Indigenous American artifacts. While working on this project, however, and serving as Harvard’s librarian, Harris published something seemingly far afield from his North American speculations: The Natural History of the Bible, or, A Description of All the Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Insects, Reptiles, Trees, Plants, Metals, Precious Stones, &c. Mentioned in the Sacred Scriptures (Boston, 1793). True to the title, the entries focus on the plants, animals, and minerals mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Taking the dictionary as its type—complete with a reference to Samuel Johnson in the introduction—each entry provides definitions, usage, and cross-references similar to a contemporary lexicon. Harris’s Natural History demonstrates a decidedly philological and ecological approach to biblical criticism, attempting to save Old Testament landscapes from European ignorance and restore them to new life in North America. 

 

Harris belonged to a long line of Atlantic theologians who believed that the “Book of Nature” complemented the “Book of Revelation,” a common contemporary starting point even with the increasing secularism of late eighteenth-century transatlantic scholarly culture. He also believed that God’s Truth was reflected in human language. This particular kind of biblical scholarship, later known as “Higher Criticism,” was a form of Christian hermeneutics that embraced empiricism as the basis for biblical interpretation. During his theological studies, Harris had come to believe that previous English translations of the Old Testament had distorted Scripture’s true meaning due to insufficient knowledge of the natural landscape of the “Holy Land,” which at the time included all the areas of greater Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Nubia, and Abyssinia. Previous mistranslations of the Bible, Harris contended, obscured not only metaphors and felicities of ancient phraseology but had transmuted entire ecologies. Indeed, the authorized King James edition was so full of creatures with which “the Jews must have been wholly unacquainted”—like the badger and unicorn—that the effect was, at best, befuddling. Dragons, whales and apples, appearing in the place of crocodiles and citrons, placed the reader in seventeenth-century England, not ancient Palestine, and effectively miscommunicated God’s truth. Harris found, however, that consulting Hebrew etymology and the foundational Greek and Latin sources in combination with European naturalists’ reports from the East, “serve[d] to clear up many obscure passages . . . and open new beauties, in that sacred treasure.”  To Harris, reconstructing a word’s relationship to climate and geography—as a cipher for the ancient Hebrews’ relationship to place—could restore previously uncommunicated knowledge. Just as the Pittsfield phylactery would, almost two decades later, the environment of the Holy Land would prove the “eternal truths of Scripture” and, crucially, America’s place in it.

Traditionally, the two projects to “clear up” the natural history of the Bible and the ancient history of the Americas have been understood as expressions of the universalism inherent to Enlightenment-era science, or seen in terms of typological exegesis wherein the United States is read as a latter-day Israel. But the coincident methods of biblical criticism and salvation antiquarianism on display in Harris’ life’s work trace a knowledge-making project that transmitted US exceptionalism across the continent and across the oceans: what he called the “natural history of the East” runs crosswise, not parallel, to contemporary efforts to establish an ancient American history.

At the time, there was little in the European naturalist tradition that supplied the sought information aside from Lemnius’ An Herbal for the Bible (1587), Rudbeck’s Icthyologia Biblica (1705), and Rauwolf’s Flora Orientalis (1755). The great Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, who was concerned with expanding the natural history knowledge of the globe in the pursuit of a universal system for ordering Nature, personally encouraged his students to travel and gather widely. One of his students, Fredrik Hasselquist, traveled to Arabia from 1749 to 1752 (when he perished) for the Levant Company; his papers, “Containing observations . . . particularly on the Holy Land, and the Natural History of the Scriptures,” were published by Linnaeus in 1757 and translated into English in 1766. Another of Linnaeus’s students, Pehr Forsskål, traveled to Arabia from 1761 to 1763—in the employ of the Royal Danish Expedition—and his Flora Aegyptiaco Arabica was also published posthumously, in 1775. Harris relied on these works for his own Natural History, and also consulted travel narratives such as the one published by Scottish traveler James Bruce in 1790.

Indeed, as philosophers and economists such as Montaigne and François Quesnay studied “Asiatic stagnation” and “Oriental despotism,” eighteenth-century naturalists and travelers sought to add the southern circum-Mediterranean world to Europeans’ stores of plant knowledge—all taking advantage of the Ottoman Porte’s weakening control of the eastern (Levant) and western (African) lands in the mid-eighteenth century. Bruce, for example, collected specimens during his attempts to find the source of the Nile from 1768 to 1773. Natural history, certainly, has long been a strong arm of imperial power: collecting information about the Levant, for example, was a way for France and Britain to assert imperial control over the Mediterranean—explaining the vast collections of flora and fauna taken by Napoleon I during his 1798-1801 campaigns in Egypt and Syria—or to imaginatively “domesticate” disputed territory, as with Lewis and Clark’s 1804 Corps of Discovery over the far western expanses of the American continent.

Largely influenced by the popularity of Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (at least four American editions of which were published before 1800), British, French, and American travelers flooded the circum-Mediterranean in the eighteenth century, taking souvenirs and leaving behind travel narratives. From 1773 to 1775 Ward Nicholas Boylston, of the wealthy Massachusetts merchant family, traveled through Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and along the Barbary Coast to escape the war coming to Boston. He brought his souvenirs and self-proclaimed expertise back to his home state (and, in 1819, to the AAS cabinet). After the Revolutionary War, the growing crisis with the Barbary States and the situation of US captives in the Mediterranean continued to attract US attention eastward. Under President George Washington, Congress pledged $100,000 in annual tribute to Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis to protect US ships attempting to access the Levantine trade. In 1793 alone, eleven US ships and 100 US sailors were captured by so-called Barbary pirates. This conflict in the Mediterranean would result in the US’s first overseas military action in 1801—which Jefferson had been pushing for since 1785—and the establishment of a US Navy in 1794. Into the nineteenth century, news and literature inspired by the themes of the Barbary Wars competed and combined with “redemptive” interest in the Holy Land.

The outlines of “salvation antiquarianism”—with the emphasis on “saving” both in terms of preservation and Christian redemption—appears particularly clearly in the AAS’s inaugural 1813 address. Delivered by founding member William Jenks, Professor of Oriental Languages at Bowdoin College, it reiterated that the role of the antiquary was to “search out, preserve and transmit the discoverable traces of ancient knowledge” and to rescue Biblical knowledge from skeptical secular degradation by disproving accounts that tried to invalidate, scorn, or ridicule. And this goal of saving Scripture was never far from the rescuing of supposedly forgotten American history. Jenks expanded, “it may be found, that etymological enquiry, cautiously and diligently pursued, with a careful investigation of religious rites and ceremonies, and the prevailing manners, will connect the history of our Indian population with the ancient achievements of the early descendants of Noah.” With Jenks’s address as reference, it is easier to see that Harris’ use of etymology and his collection of all animal, vegetable, and mineral references in The Natural History of the Bible was meant, as sure as “Ancient Inscriptions,” to provide a universal account to bring America and the Holy Land together.

In 1816, the same year the “Jewish Frontlet” was sent to Worcester and Boudinot’s A Star in the West appeared in print, Harris delivered a sermon to the Female Society of Boston and the Vicinity for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. In the early nineteenth century, transatlantic Christians increasingly advocated for the conversion and “restoration” of Jews just as their ancestors had done for Natives since the seventeenth century. In Harris’s sermon, “Pray for the Jews,” he seems to compare the “saving” of conversion to antiquarians’ “saving” of history, counseling: “While zealously engaged in sending out into the wilderness to collect into the fold of Christ the sheep that are scattered abroad; let us cast a look after the lost sheep of the flock of Israel; and at least pray that Jew and Gentile may be brought to hear the voice and own the care of the same divine shepherd.” Indeed, the members of the newly founded women’s group, many of whom were involved with contemporary missionary organizations such as the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM), also considered themselves “collectors” in a way not altogether different from their antiquarian friend Harris (the Boston Female Society raised money to send Hebrew translations of the New Testament on the ABCFM’s 1819 “Palestine Mission”). While the Second Great Awakening is the usual context for this project of “collecting” Jewish souls and Holy Land “spiritual conquest,” it was also the period that saw the first coordinated attempts to remove the Israelites’ supposed descendants from their American homelands by “collecting” them into reservations or western lands, all to make way for the new Jerusalem in old Indian Country.

As Harris intensified his own studies of the “ancient Israelites” in the early nineteenth century, he updated his Natural History in 1820 (although most of the copies were destroyed in a fire at the publishing house). A transitional and transhistorical text bridging theology, philology, naturalism, and antiquarianism, Harris’s Natural History of the Bible—which enjoyed a long life in pirated and abridged editions—helps explain the coexistence of Indigenous heritage items, natural history specimens, and souvenirs from the Mediterranean world in East Coast learned society collections, collections that themselves trace a zealously exceptionalist relationship between America and “the East.” In the period signaled by Harris’ two editions—1793 and 1820—the United States was urgently trying to figure out its policy with regard to the (eastern) Barbary States as well as the (western) Native nations living on lands increasingly claimed as US territory. In this context, studying ancient natural history and establishing natural history cabinets isolated “East” and “West,” sequestering these areas and their histories from the contemporary world order, domesticating them as intellectual topics rather than polities representing existential threats to the early nation. The Natural History of the Bible reveals the ideological, rather than the philosophical or exegetical, collapse of Mediterranean and American geographies, and it provides an opportunity to reframe understandings of antiquarianism and natural history within a global exceptionalist model. Harris’s salvation antiquarianism was a divinely-driven hermeneutic that insisted God’s Truth would be made manifest through its application across the Americas and the Bible’s lands. For Harris, the true version of ancient history would be the one saved by the United States. 

Further Reading

Robert Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Charles Crawford, Essay on the Propagation of the Gospel, in which there are Numerous Facts and Arguments Adduced to prove that many of the Indians in America are descended from the Ten Tribes (1799).

Elizabeth Fenton, Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel (New York: New York University Press, 2020).

Pliny Fisk, The Holy Land an Interesting Field of Missionary Enterprise: A Sermon Preached in the Old South Church, Boston, Sabbath Evening, Oct. 31, 1819, Just Before the Departure of the Palestine Mission (Boston: 1819).

Lee M. Friedman, “The Phylacteries Found at Pittsfield, Mass.,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (no. 25, 1917): 81–85.  

William N. Goetzmann, “The Case of the Missing Phylactery,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 95 (1985): 69-79.

Shalom Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

William Jenks, An Address to the Members of the American Antiquarian Society, Pronounced in King’s Chapel Boston, on Their First Anniversary, October 23, 1813 (Boston: 1814).

Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Andrew Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylania Press, 2011).

Hilton Obenzinger, “Holy Land Narrative and American Covenant: Levi Parsons, Pliny Fisk and the Palestine Mission.” Religion & Literature 35 (no. 2/3, 2003): 241–67.

Sarah Rivett, Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Stephen Salaita, The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006).

Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution; Or Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, Including His Journals of Travels in Europe and America from the Year 1777 to 1842 (New York: 1858).

 

This article originally appeared in October 2022.

 

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Christen Mucher is Associate Professor of American Studies at Smith College. Her recent publications include the co-edited volume Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021) and Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022), part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot. Mucher was an NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society in 2015. The author would like to thank Laura Costello, Cynthia Mackey, Nan Wolverton, and Joshua Greenberg.

In the first decades after its founding in 1810, the ABCFM established mission stations close to home—among the Cherokee in Tennessee, for instance—but more often across oceans and continents, where missionaries encountered entirely new cultures and ways of life. While dreams of religious revival rather than rollicking revelry were what led them to abandon their comfortable lives in the United States, they did share one pressing concern with today’s study abroad students: learning the languages of their host cultures.

This is the story of the linguistic trials and travails of the first band of American missionaries sent to evangelize the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in the 1830s and 1840s. Seemingly unlikely targets, Armenians had adopted Christianity beginning in the fourth century and had their own ecclesiastically independent church. From the missionaries’ perspective, however, they were nothing more than “nominal” Christians who had strayed from biblical teachings and needed a new dose of spiritual enlightenment. 

While the number of American missionaries who worked among Armenians in various corners of the Empire would swell later in the century, their numbers were much humbler at the start. With less word-of-mouth knowledge and fewer language-learning resources, the linguistic challenges they faced were also much more palpable. Yet in no time, not only were these young men and women from South Carolina, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and across New England teaching and preaching in local languages, but they were also supervising translations into them and, in the case of one particularly industrious missionary, codifying them in grammars and dictionaries.

Male missionaries arrived in the mission field well versed in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew from their seminary days. But Armenian was a terra incognita for male and female missionaries alike, who embarked for the Ottoman Empire with little to no knowledge of the language. With its own distinct alphabet, a set of commonly used guttural sounds and few cognates with English, Armenian contained an array of unique stumbling blocks for them. 

Nevertheless, many jumped into the study of Armenian with both feet. For example, Massachusetts-born Seraphina Everett initially devoted herself to studying Armenian for five hours each morning. She practiced by writing letters in her newly acquired tongue to her friend and fellow missionary Harriet Hamlin and by reading Armenian translations of The Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe. “Our great anxiety is to have our tongues loosed, and we are willing to toil for it,” Seraphina wrote to Harriet in 1845, the year both women arrived in the mission field at age twenty-two and twenty-five, respectively.

Upon stepping off the ship in Constantinople (Istanbul) or Smyrna (Izmir), however, the missionaries quickly realized that the linguistic landscape was far more complicated than they had imagined. First, there were different kinds of Armenian to master. In addition to sometimes mutually unintelligible spoken forms that varied by region, there was also a classical variety used only in writing. Imbued with prestige, this classical form was the main language of print at the time as well as the main language of religious texts and rituals.

Second, much to their surprise, many Armenians did not, in fact, know any Armenian. Missionaries consistently expressed shock that even those who spoke regional forms of Armenian had little grasp of the classical language and thus could not understand the liturgy of the Armenian Church or the fifth-century Armenian translation of the Bible. When Massachusetts-born William Goodell first arrived in the Ottoman Empire, for example, he noted with dismay that the Armenians he met were much more apt to kiss religious books and to admire their bejeweled covers or gilded pages than to read them. 

Beyond a widespread unfamiliarity with the classical language, some Armenians had no knowledge of modern forms of Armenian either and instead used Turkish or Kurdish in their everyday lives. This meant that to spread their message, those stationed in these communities needed to set about acquiring these languages too. As the ABCFM leadership in Boston expected them to get down to business preaching, teaching, writing and translating as soon as possible, learning the local languages quickly and starting to publish in them was of the essence. 

How did these Americans on foreign shores manage to navigate such linguistic diversity? How did they gain such a firm grip on these languages that they were able to convincingly convey abstract religious concepts in them? Here the missionaries were indebted to a small coterie of Armenians who were curious about, if not sympathetic to, their mission and message. Especially in the early years, with no grammar books or dictionaries of spoken languages, missionaries relied heavily on their cultural know-how and linguistic expertise and came to learn about the nuances of Armenian culture through them. This coterie included some of the most learned Armenians of the day who, while shepherding the missionaries into an Armenian social sphere, concurrently held positions as teachers, school principals, writers, and newspaper editors.

Often in exchange for English lessons, these Armenian intellectuals began by tutoring the missionaries in Armenian and Turkish, sometimes within days of their arrival. They were their language teachers, their interpreters, their cultural conduits. In a word, they were their voices in a new land. In the process, many became advisors, close collaborators and friends, living with the missionaries and their children and breaking bread with them. The South Carolina-born missionary John B. Adger, in particular, wrote with effusive affection and respect for his right-hand man, Sarkis Hohannisian, deferring to his expertise, including his news in letters back home to Charleston, and keeping vigil at his bedside in his final hours. Such warm, symbiotic relationships contrast sharply with the caste-like system imposed by later waves of American missionaries.

These “native assistants,” as they were called, were taking a considerable risk in associating with the missionaries. Armenian church leaders saw the missionaries as poachers among their flock and accused all who rubbed elbows with them of heresy, threatening them with excommunication, exile, social ostracization, and property confiscation. In their lifetimes and beyond, when these figures have been discussed in Armenian sources, there is rarely any mention of their intellectual labor for the mission, as if to avoid besmirching their reputation as Armenian patriots. These teachers, translators and interpreters were driven to do this work for a whole host of reasons: some were genuinely drawn to the missionaries’ alternative approach to Christianity; others thought their work could elevate Armenians spiritually and prompt reform within the Armenian Church; and others still were just looking for a way to make extra money. 

The most skilled among them were hired to work closely with the missionaries in the preparation of more than one hundred translations. Given the fierce resistance to their schools and oral preaching, publications were thought of as a way to introduce Armenians to Protestant ideas under the radar, entering homes and communities more easily and covertly than any missionary could. These books ranged from massive religious tomes to school textbooks to moralizing tales by the American Tract Society. In the first decades of the mission, these materials were published by an independent missionary press in Malta—and later in Smyrna—that used Armenian letters cast in Brooklyn, among other locales. 

Preparing a translation was a long, painstaking, and collaborative process with a clear division of labor. First the missionary selected the text in consultation with the ABCFM and/or with fellow missionaries, at times abridging and adapting it for an Armenian readership. Then the Armenian translator prepared a first draft, careful to be as clear and idiomatic as possible so as not to alert readers to the text’s “foreignness.” This draft was thoroughly examined by the missionary, who considered whether all meanings had been accurately conveyed. In some cases, the missionary relied on his (never her) training in biblical languages and reviewed the translation against the Greek or Hebrew originals. If there was a discrepancy, the passage was marked for discussion. The missionary and translator then went through the entire text together, comparing the translation to the source text line by line and making revisions along the way. The missionary deferred to the translator and to the other Armenians he consulted in all matters of style and usage, relying on their knowledge of Armenian written norms and conventions. After multiple rounds of edits, the translation was typeset and the missionary reviewed the proofs, reading for errors in a language that he had sometimes only just begun to learn a few years earlier. Many reported that this exacting and laborious work took a tremendous toll on their eyes. 

Missionaries responded to the linguistic diversity among Ottoman Armenians by publishing in a range of languages. They often specialized in preparing translations in either Armenian or Armeno-Turkish, the Turkish language written using the Armenian alphabet. Later in the century, a handful of books were also rendered into Armeno-Kurdish, the Kurdish language written using the Armenian alphabet. The key to accessing all of these publications was the alphabet primer, which numbered among the missionary press’s most popular books. Instilling the desire to learn to read—which was not at all widespread among Armenians at the time—was one of the missionaries’ primary objectives. This push was the first step in their evangelizing mission. For them, learning to read was crucial, because it would give Armenians the ability to interpret religious texts for themselves and to enter into a more direct relationship with the divine, without the mediation of the Armenian priest. 

To this end, the missionaries also published their materials in vernacular rather than classical forms. In describing the linguistic status quo among Armenians in the 1830s to Sunday school children in his native Pennsylvania, missionary Benjamin Schneider tried to explain the need for vernacular materials in terms they could understand: “What would you think if your ministers should preach and pray in Latin? And how much would you learn, if your teachers should undertake to instruct you from the Bible in Greek or Hebrew? I think you would not long go to the Sunday-school.” Books composed in vernacular Armenian were so rare in the early years of the mission that some Armenians, especially those who disapproved of using anything but the classical variety in print, began to refer to it as the “language of the Protestant,” acting as if the missionaries had brought this form of the language with them from the United States.

Missionaries often began teaching Armenians to read in the Armenian alphabet shortly after learning how to do it themselves. This was especially common among female missionaries, who promoted literacy among girls and women and organized lessons in their homes in the years before mission schools were established. The early missionaries who managed to become literate and conversant in local languages also did their best to help their successors quickly acquire these skills. No missionary did more in this regard than New Jersey-born Elias Riggs, who was said to have picked up languages as effortlessly as most people pick up a tune. To help new waves of missionaries find their linguistic bearings in the mission field, he composed a grammar of vernacular Armenian (1847), a dictionary of vernacular Armenian (1847), and a grammar of Armeno-Turkish (1856), all with English explanations. In addition to having been critical resources for new missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these books are also vital for researchers in Armenian studies today, who are indebted to Riggs for having documented some of the ways mid-century Armenians spoke. 

Whether they returned home to the United States after only a few years or lived out their lives in the Ottoman Empire, these nineteenth-century American missionaries were rooted in Armenian communities for the extent of their time with the ABCFM. This rootedness was deepened by their facility with the languages of these communities, ones that they had spent years working to master. The process of acquiring these languages and of publishing in them underscores the degree to which these missionaries were reliant on the sympathies and skills of those they had come to convert, complicating the expected power dynamic and revealing the indispensable intellectual labor of Armenians within the early American mission.

 

Further Reading

John B. Adger, My Life and Times (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1899).

Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).

Mary Gladding Benjamin, The Missionary Sisters: A Memorial of Mrs. Seraphina Haynes Everett and Mrs. Harriet Martha Hamlin (Boston: American Tract Society, 1860).

William Goodell, The Old and the New; or The Changes of Thirty Years in the East, with Some Allusions to Oriental Customs as Elucidating Scripture (New York: M.W. Dodd Publisher, 1853).

Cyrus Hamlin, My Life and Times (Boston: Congregational Sunday School and Publishing Society, 1893).

H.G.O. Dwight, Christianity in Turkey: A Narrative of the Protestant Reformation in the Armenian Church (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1854).

Elias Riggs, Reminiscences for My Children by Elias Riggs, Missionary of the A.B.C.F.M in Greece and Turkey (n.p., 1891).

Benjamin Schneider, Letters from Asia Minor, Respecting the Greeks and Armenians. (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1837).

Eli Smith, Researches of the Rev. E. Smith and Rev. H.G.O. Dwight in Armenia: Including a Journey through Asia Minor, and into Georgia and Persia, with a Visit to the Nestorian and Chaldean Christians of Oormiah and Salmas (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1833).

 

This article originally appeared in October 2022.

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Jennifer Manoukian is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research explores the social and intellectual history of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

In the eighteenth century, writers such as A.-R.-J. Turgot and Adam Smith took what had been invidious distinctions about proper land use and the rationality of dispossession found in the work of John Locke, among others, and transformed them into a theory about how societies developed over time. So-called savages hunted, barbarians tended flocks, the civilized farmed, and at the apex of this sociocultural progression—or evolution—came European commercial society. Each stage was defined by modes of obtaining food and transforming the environment, increasing size and complexity, and different ways of thinking and speaking. That it was women who farmed in eastern North America disqualified them from practicing true agriculture in the minds of interested categorizers. What began as a justification of colonization and philosophical conjecture became the basis of more scientific hypotheses as scholars sought empirical evidence through excavation or collection to confirm evolutionary theories. The discarding of older labels and substitution of other, still pejorative, terms such as “modern” and “developing” did little to change the story. The invention of agriculture in most versions of this conventional narrative was a trap, one that multiplied the number of calories human beings could produce and allowed for the growth of urban settlements and specialization of labor, but which yoked human beings to longer and harder work under new hierarchies of rulers. 

Graeber and Wengrow, however, insist that human beings are not trapped. Inequality is not a necessary price of “civilization.” This insistence pits them against the long line of writers, including Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—whose very different arguments about human beings’ natural condition and the effects of society and government formed another layer on which theories of sociocultural evolution rested—to contemporary writers of sweeping histories such as Jared Diamond, Stephen Pinker, and Yuval Noah Harari. The Dawn of Everything argues that some of the most important archaeology of the last several decades reveals monuments and cities arising without agriculture or apparent hierarchy. Different forms of subsistence and exchange existed alongside one another for millennia. Zones of cultural influence based on ritual knowledge existed without states, as at Poverty Point in today’s Louisiana some 3,600 years ago or the more recent Hopewell sites of the Ohio Valley, and some societies established hierarchies confined to particular places or times. The archaeological record, in Graeber and Wengrow’s telling, shows that human beings have experimented with social-political-ritual orders throughout their history. 

The Americas occupy a particularly important place in the authors’ argument, an “independent point of comparison” with societies in Eurasia (451). They provide evidence that the development of agriculture did not foreordain the rise of monarchical states or highly stratified societies. When hierarchical and warlike societies did develop, Graeber and Wengrow stress, peoples across the Americas rejected the models they offered.

It is an old tradition in Euro-American literature to use Indigenous societies as mirrors to evaluate their own societies’ shortcomings; but Graeber and Wengrow avoid romanticization and stress historical change, driven by human choices, in their interpretations of archaeological evidence. At times, they point to “schismogenesis,” a process in which rival societies continually formulated social practices, cultural forms, and values in opposition to one another. The authors devote a chapter to contrasting the Indigenous societies of the Northwest Coast and California in these terms. The theory presents an alternative to models that presume some seemingly natural process of fission and divergence, presenting “culture areas” as the products of political debates and decisions. In other societies—Tlaxcaltecs in central Mexico, southeastern peoples who turned their back on the Mississippian chiefdoms, and the Haudenosaunee, among others—the authors see varieties of an Indigenous republican tradition. In her essay below, Robbie Ethridge questions an aspect of this argument. Even as such claims risk distorting Indigenous categories of meaning, they complement work that has centered Indigenous politics, borders, and sovereignty.

Not only were the Native societies that colonizers encountered the “products of centuries of political conflict and self-conscious debate” (452), Indigenous people engaged Europeans in this debate. The template for sociocultural evolution, Graeber and Wengrow argue, was first formulated in rebuttal to what they call “the Indigenous Critique.” They refer to the record, especially pronounced in French missionary and literary sources, of Native speakers criticizing European societies for their inequality and lack of freedom. The form their argument takes opens it to criticism. They claim the Indigenous Critique propelled the Enlightenment, but the authors have not read as deeply in Euro-American cultural and intellectual history as they have in archaeology. They substitute a typology of liberty in place of historical analysis. Scholars will also continue to debate—as do Barbara Alice Mann and Gordon Sayre in their essays below—whether they place undue weight on the words of the literary character Adario as a faithful transcription of the words of the Wendat traveler and statesman Kandiaronk.

As for any ambitious synthesis, specialists will find fodder for objection—the several essays below articulate some of these. Regardless of the persuasiveness of any of Graeber and Wengrow’s particular interpretations, The Dawn of Everything provides a framework that engages with “big history” or “deep history” while avoiding explanations that flirt with biological, demographic, environmental, or technological determinism. It provides, instead, archaeological (and some ethnographic) evidence of sociopolitical experimentation, and thus of human decisions, and perhaps of human ideals. It is a point that both Daniel K. Richter and Keith Pluymers make in their essays below. Even in the absence of many identifiable individuals, it is a framework that scholars and readers should welcome, and debate, as they think about a deeper history of early America.

Sean P. Harvey

 

But What About the Modern World?

The first thing one notices about The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow is that it is literally a “big book.” It comes in at a dense 526 pages, with an additional 83 pages of endnotes, and an 81-page bibliography. It is also a “big book” in the figurative sense in that Graeber and Wengrow propose to not only dismantle a social theory that has been foundational to Western thought for centuries, but also to offer an original and wholly new perspective on the history of humankind. Their central argument is that the social hierarchies, inequalities, and uneven development that characterize the modern world is not a preordained, inevitable outcome of human history. Rather, they argue that humans have always had social choices and political consciousness, from our Paleolithic hunter and gatherer days to the early agricultural communities that dotted the globe soon after the end of the Ice Age, to the teeming social orders of Mesopotamia, the Inca, the Aztecs, the Shang Chinese dynasty, and so on. In short, humans have always experimented with social formations.

Why is this such a revelation? Because, as recounted by Graeber and Wengrow, modern Western thought is rooted in an origin myth derived from social evolution theory. With teleological aplomb, social evolution posits an orderly progression of humanity through time, and for any modern peoples left out of the benefits of the modern world, well, social evolution theory has an elegant, if wrongheaded, explanation—those people have simply not progressed as fast as others. It is a self-serving and comfortable theory for the Western world, and it relieves Western nations and peoples from facing our own culpability in the uneven development and the stark inequalities of the modern world.

Anthropologists jettisoned social evolution theory decades ago, recognizing that the social types were inaccurate and too categorical, that there was no place for history in the process, and that it was deterministic, ethnocentric, racist, and just plain wrong. Even so, one can occasionally detect remnants of the theory in modern anthropological, archaeological, and historical scholarship. Above all, it is still deeply embedded in popular thought. It is to the latter audience that Graeber and Wengrow address the book. Collecting evidence to the contrary from an awesome temporal and spatial reach, Graeber and Wengrow administer a massive and much needed slap in our collective face. It remains to be seen, however, if the blow will steer us away from social evolution theory once and for all.

Given the gargantuan nature of their evidence, it is almost inevitable that experts in various fields will take exceptions to the use of some of it. I, for one, take exception to a specific claim related to indigenous North America. Graeber and Wengrow use the ancient city and archaeological site known as Cahokia to make a point about political choices and human agency. They argue that social hierarchy, political centralization, violence, and the loss of some basic freedoms were integral to Cahokia’s political and social order, and that when Cahokia declined in the fourteenth century, people did not inevitably reorganize themselves into hierarchically ordered political and social systems. Rather, they posit that former Cahokians and descendants of Cahokia, assessing their options, reorganized themselves into “tribal republics,” with governing bodies consisting of councils rather than centralized authority.

Cahokia arose on the banks of the Mississippi River, near present-day St. Louis, and inaugurated an era known as the Mississippi Period (900 CE to 1700 CE). At its peak, Cahokia’s influence emanated far and wide, with its greatest impact emerging in the American South. However, after offering only a brief history of the Native South from the rise of Cahokia to the end of the Mississippi Period in the seventeenth century, Graeber and Wengrow cinch their argument with an ethnographic analysis of clan assemblies among nineteenth-century Osage of the Plains, whom archaeologists believe were some of the descendants of Cahokians, and the political experiments of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Haudenosaunnee (Iroquois), who had little, if any, connection to Cahokia. They conclude that the Haudenosaunee and Osage transformed into tribal republics because they consciously eschewed the authoritarianism of fourteenth-century Cahokia. This jump in time (over three to four hundred years) and space (into the northeast region) results in a muddled case study and, for experts in the field, an unconvincing and quizzical argument.

A better fit, then, would be to examine what happened in the Native South after the fall of Cahokia. It is true that with the decline of Cahokia, people of the Native South reorganized their lives, but for the next 250 years after Cahokia their lives still resembled much about the chiefly order of Cahokia. Inherited authority was still the order of the day, only on a smaller scale. Rather, the transformation from hierarchically organized polities to tribal republics in the Native South occurred almost three-hundred years after Cahokia with the European invasion and the incorporation of Native people into capitalism and the global market system. The indigenous republics of the Native South were not a response to the fall of Cahokia but rather to living in a world of modern nation states. Those economic forces, and the attendant social, cultural, and political historical forces, resulted in the transformation of the small-scale, sixteenth-century hierarchical polities into the large Native nations of the American South—the Muscogees, Cherokees, Catawbas, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and so on. Not incidentally, I also would rather call these formidable polities Native “nations,” rather than “tribal republics” since they held the balance of power in the American South for the next 150 years.

Graeber and Wengrow cannot fully explain this transformation of the Native South because they, more or less, end their history of humankind in the early seventeenth century, before sustained European colonization in the Americas. They neither discuss how, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European colonialism bound the world within the structures of the capitalist world economic system, nor how those structures blended with and transformed everyday life for both Western and non-Western peoples, nor how those structures trend toward (if not actually mandate) uneven development. Graeber was an ardent critic of modern capitalism, and one is left wondering why they stopped their history when they did. I’ll take a stab at answering this question. Throughout The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow emphasize human agency and choice and, although not completely ignoring the structures of history, they minimize materialist structures such as ecology, economy, biology, demography, technology, geography, and so on. Moving their history into the capitalist era would not only undermine their arguments about agency and choice, but it also would raise the question: are the inequalities of today due to people making bad choices or are they part and parcel of the structures of capitalism? (I understand this book was to be one of a trilogy, and perhaps they intended to grapple with modern capitalism in a subsequent volume. But with Graeber’s untimely death, Wengrow, understandably, may not desire to see the other volumes to completion.)

The Dawn of Everything asks us to imagine a new kind of history, a history in which humans have been experimenting with social and political orders for thousands (if not millions) of years. It insists that we have choices and that, despite a deeply held and flawed Western origin myth, we are not stuck with the inequalities and inhumanities of the modern world. What is does not give us, however, is a way forward, a way to contemplate and be change agents in the modern world, a way to challenge and rectify the massive structural inequalities and uneven development of modern capitalism.

Robbie Ethridge

 

Hoc Tempore

Anthropology and its subdiscipline, archaeology, have a lot of repair work to do worldwide, at least with Indigenous peoples. Since the eighteenth century, myths about racial differences and evolutionary stages were precisely what Europeans wanted to hear, so they transmuted them into Unassailable Facts. Albeit transparently self-serving, at least in Western minds, these myths justified the 500-year crime spree called colonialism.

David Graeber and David Wengrow begin some repair work in their Dawn of Everything, showing that Rousseau’s ideas about the “noble savage” and Hobbes’s concept of “war of all on all” are not, in fact, polar opposites, but are both conservative, European-excusing cover stories. They illustrate what the eighteenth-century Ohio Lenape called Europe’s “scissors strategy” of conquest. The two, sharp blades of a pair of scissors look like enemies aiming to “destroy each other’s edges” in closing, but all they wind up cutting is “whatever comes between them.” Regardless of how they are dressed up, as modern Shawnee-Lenape scholar Steven Newcomb notes, all European philosophies cooperate to serve the “domination code.”

Citing the recorded discourses of Wendat Speaker Kandiaronk (ca. 1649−1701), Graeber and Wengrow present Indigenous American Woodlanders as the real initiators of European “Enlightenment” thought, which Indigenous Americans pretty clearly were. Still, while quite eloquent, Kandiaronk—who as I have argued in another essay likely visited France—was neither unique nor first. Disdain for oppression with recommendations for freeing the self from servility was pretty much the Indigenous position from the beginning. In one of the earliest recorded instances I know of, the 1539 cacique of Acuera in Florida demanded to know why the Spanish adventurers before him put themselves under some distant bully, when they could just as easily walk free in a faraway place? Such Indigenous refuseniks are traditionally called “walkaways.” Walking away was, and is, a regular thing.

Graeber and Wengrow also question the “teleology” inherent in Western schemas of culture, which follow the linear, Aristotelian requirements that all stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that stories run at breakneck speed from the starting gate to the finish line. Interestingly, linearity is not primarily a Greek proposition, but an overall monotheistic proposition birthed on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. It stems from what I call One-Thinking (or what Laguna Pueblo scholar Paula Gunn Allen termed “Euro-Think”). Western One-Thinking is why Euro-scholars act as if they are oblivious of the existence of Other epistemologies, despite their clear, documented existence, of which many Euro-scholars are entirely aware. For instance, the Twinned Cosmos of the Americas has been relentlessly documented since at least 1724 when Joseph-François Lafitau recorded the two spirits (âmes, “souls”) possessed by every person: the erienta (Sky) of the uki half and the ganigonrha (Earth) of the otgon half. As unsettling as this multiplicity of sophisticated worldviews may be to Westerners accustomed to monotheism, they are stable and ancient approaches to understanding the world, consisting neither of “primitive” nor of partially evolved ideas, as Graeber and Wengrow rightly insist.

I was happy to see Graeber and Wengrow mention Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994), the Lithuanian archaeologist who posited ancient Eurasian matriarchy as the dominant cultural form, noting that her findings turned out to be more accurate than her male counterparts. However, even today, talk of Gimbutas is suppressed in Euro-male archaeological circles, making Dawn’s mention of her sound daring. Alas, Graeber and Wengrow also accepted that matriarchal studies offer a crude theory stuck in nineteenth-century propositions, starting with Johann Bachofen (1815−1887) and ending anachronistically with Gimbutas. Au contraire, mes amis: matriarchal studies is today a burgeoning field, with extensive work being done in it, as matriarchal cultures can be found around the world, including the Kerala of India, the Lahu of western China, the Minangkabau of Indonesia, the Iroquois of the American Woodlands, and the Igbo of Central Africa.

I was glad to see Graeber and Wengrow call out the mistaken formulations of Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and others, who essentially still push the old evolutionary explanation of culture, while desperately pretending not to do so by tinkering with its diction. I was less thrilled by the habit, which is becoming fairly common in some Euro-circles, of calling Indigenous Americans, Africans, Asians, Australians, etc “our ancestors,” as though we were all in this together, just one big ol’ undifferentiated lump. I know that a standing Euro-dodge around histories of genocide and enslavement of Others is just such “we” talk, but as a friend of mine quipped to me a while back, “We, wii, oui—what are they? French?” Before the “we” stage can be honestly reached, some contrite acknowledgements, public apologies, and yes, reparations and land return must be forthcoming. Modern Euros might not be responsible for historical crime, but as long as they continue living high off the hog on the proceeds of historical crime, they bear some responsibility for it.

One of the most important insights offered by Graeber and Wengrow is that decentralization is a cultural choice rather than an evolutionary step on the inexorable path to statehood, the predetermined “end” of an Aristotelian tale. Graeber and Wengrow are correct that agriculture did not energize centralization or tyranny, but again, they are not the first to make this observation. Indigenous American Woodlanders deliberately kept their towns small, splitting into twinned sister towns whenever the population outgrew its britches. Typically missed by Euro-scholars is the deliberate de-gendering that accompanies decentralization. Gender play is anything but unusual in decentralized matriarchal cultures, where it is the job that is gendered, not the human being doing the job. 

Working from the concept of illo tempore (back then) to come forward into hoc tempore (nowadays), Graeber and Wengrow propose a multiplicity of ideas that cannot possibly be broached in this one, short essay. However, I will say that, all in all, anyone who comes out of The Dawn of Everything continuing to believe that stages guide the cultural history of “progress” was simply not paying attention.

Barbara Alice Mann

 

“Croy-moi; fais-toy Huron” (Trust me, make yourself a Huron) – From the Dialogues Curieux

The Dawn of Everything stands apart from other popular “Big History” books such as Sapiens and Guns, Germs, and Steel in part because it was written by anthropologists. David Wengrow studied archaeology at Oxford, while David Graeber studied with Marshall Sahlins at the University of Chicago. Their collaboration sets out to refute the stage theory of social development that has shaped anthropology since the eighteenth century, and to debunk the ideology of progress sacred to both capitalists and Marxists. A key weapon in their polemic is “the indigenous critique” of European imperialism and modernity.

The primary example is from the Dialogues Curieux avec un Sauvage, written by the Baron de Lahontan as the third part of his Nouveaux Voyages dans l’Amérique Septentrionale (1703). Lahontan was a military officer gone AWOL, and an anti-clerical skeptic of imperialism. I was also inspired by this text in my dissertation and first book, but my initial reaction when I read The Dawn of Everything was to disagree with Graeber and Wengrow’s interpretation. I reviewed what I had written of how “the deism and primitivism” and critique of Europe that Lahontan was “placing in the mouth of the Huron character Adario in the philosophical dialogue . . . were in fact learned from the Indians.” The Dawn of Everything makes a very similar argument, but the way it cites other scholars of Lahontan’s text conflates the rhetorical construction of Adario with the historical individual on whom he was based. 

Barbara A. Mann’s chapter in a collection she edited, Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands (2001) was a key source for Graeber, who I believe wrote the section about “the Wendat Philosopher-Statesman Kandiaronk” in The Dawn of Everything (48-59). Mann is a scholar of Iroquois ethnohistory who celebrates the speech of “Adario” in Lahontan’s dialogue and attributes it directly to the Wendat leader. The chapter is a study of Kandiaronk’s career as a savvy negotiator, and as a Huron (also known as Wendat or Wyandot) allied with the French against the Iroquois. Mann defends the Iroquois cause and writes: “French bigotry was obvious in the word ‘Huron,’ their term for the Canadian Iroquois. ‘Huron’ is a slur compounded of the French word ‘hure’ which indicates the spiky hair on a wild boar’s head” (37). The chapter concludes with the text of “On Religion,” the first of four sections in Lahontan’s Dialogues. Mann edited the translation, her headnote explains, so as to eliminate archaic spellings and typography and to give the speeches a more modern vernacular style. The Dawn of Everything quotes from Mann’s version of the dialogue (53; Mann 67-68), but where Mann attributes the speeches to “Adario” as Lahontan did, Graeber begins each speech “Kandiaronk” (the spelling Mann used, rather than the “Kondiaronk” in Lahontan), and refers him a dozen more times in the book as an indigenous critic of European modernity.

However, the Adario who speaks in Lahontan’s dialogue is not Kondiaronk the Wendat leader. Contrary to Mann’s and Graeber’s claims, there’s no evidence Kondiaronk voyaged to France and back in the 1680s or 1690s, whereas Adario did, so as to authenticate his satire on the poverty of French peasants, the hypocrisy of Jesuit missionaries, and the sycophancy of the Sun King’s courtiers. Graeber was aware of the genre of philosophical dialogues, but uses a straw-man rhetorical claim: “arguments attributed to figures like Kandiaronk could be written off as simple projections of Western ‘noble savage’ fantasies” (94-95). In fact, scholars such as Réal Ouellet and Gilbert Chinard who studied and edited Lahontan’s Dialogues showed how “Lahontan” shifted his positions and contradicted himself. There are in effect four voices, not two, in the Dialogues, for Lahontan and Adario each play Devil’s (or God’s) advocate as they parry one another’s claims.

Another key scholar of Lahontan is Georges Sioui, a Wendat from Wendake, Québec. In Pour une Autohistoire Amerindienne, based on his doctoral thesis in History at Université Laval in the 1980s, Sioui wrote a chapter entitled “Lahontan: Discoverer of Americity.” “Americity” is a kind of continental gospel of freedom: “Lahontan . . . had simply discovered another truth. Indeed, he was like so many Europeans (particularly the French) who, after simply breathing the free air of America, had repudiated old truths.”

Whereas Graeber follows Mann’s lead by conflating Kandiaronk and Adario into a single historical person, Sioui claimed Lahontan himself as a kind of polymorphic avatar of Native consciousness because in the Dialogues the critique of imperialism fuses Lahontan and his Huron/Wendat surrogate. “Adario’s message . . . through his interpreter, Lahontan, has echoed so profoundly in the hearts of other peoples” (68), Sioui asserts, but then switches directions: “Lahontan, through Adario’s voice, declares that he [Lahontan] is convinced” that the French have been “brought to this Land by Providence so that you may correct yourselves through our example” (70). The problems of cultural appropriation or rhetorical sovereignty, so potent today, did not trouble Sioui, who saw a hybrid, tricksterish critique in the Dialogues.

The Dawn of Everything cites Lahontan and other eighteenth-century French texts, such as Françoise de Graffigny’s epistolary novel Lettres d’une Peruvienne (1747), as indigenous critiques of hierarchy and modernity. But other French colonial authors wrote quite different arguments. Natchez tribal leaders, whom they called Suns, were seen by French colonists as resembling the French Roi de S. In a section of The Dawn of Everything borrowed from Graeber and Sahlins’ book On Kings, the Natchez are called “the only genuinely unambiguous example of divine kingship north of the Rio Grande” (On Kings, 390; Dawn of Everything 391-96). These indigenous Americans become a model for despotic sovereignty, defined as a control of violence, instead of an inspiration for Enlightenment egalitarianism. The story is abridged in The Dawn of Everything and it leaves out the most important source on the Natchez Grand Soleil, Antoine Simon Le Page du Pratz. There’s a hidden irony here. Le Page du Pratz in fact wrote a colonial history like Lahontan’s. He was critiquing European imperial politics and using the voices of Natchez leaders to do so. Other scholars have excerpted Natchez speeches that Le Page du Pratz published as anti-imperial oratory, in the same mode as Mann did Kandiaronk/Adario. The Natchez rose up and attacked the French in one of the strongest indigenous rebellions in American history, but the revolt was not a rejection of despotic authority. As Gilles Havard argues in a recent article, the Natchez performed a sacrifice of French men whom they saw as part of their own caste system. 

The Dawn of Everything is persuasive, and the authors’ rhetorical style wins the trust of the casual reader. Graeber and Wengrow accuse other scholars of failing to take seriously “ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers” and of dismissing them as “sock puppets.” However, closer study shows that many indigenous critiques arose from hybridized sources.

Gordon Sayre

 

Determinedly Indeterminant

According to David Graeber and David Wengrow, all of our common assumptions about the deep human past are wrong. There was no primitive childhood of humanity, no Garden of Eden, no originary state of nature, in either its nightmarish Hobbesian or paradisaical Rousseauian guise. There was no vast undifferentiated stretch of time when all humans lived in small egalitarian foraging bands, and so there also was no inevitable development from foraging, to agriculture, to cities and states, determined by forces such as population growth, ecological change, or technological inventions. Graeber and Wengrow amass examples from across the globe and calendar to demonstrate that the story was far more complex, far less unilinear, and far more diverse than the standard narrative permits.

As a result, they conclude, the questions usually posed about the sources of inequality or the origin of the state are meaningless; in some way, humans have always been unequal, in multitudinous and shifting ways. During the past 20,000, or even 200,000 years, people moved in and out of a dizzying array of political arrangements, some of which looked like states, many of which did not. Allegedly epochal inventions such as pottery or even farming seem to have started as part-time activities that may have had little to do with why people decided to live in cities, how they stored and acquired most of their food, or how they came to consider that food and the ground on which it grew private property. The real question, then, “is not ‘What are the origins of social inequality’ but ‘How did we get stuck’” in one particular form of economic, social, and political organization—so stuck that we have convinced ourselves that no other way is possible (112)?

Western Europeans got stuck long before the modern era, but they got stuck intellectually because of a set of deterministic fictions created during the Enlightenment. Turgot, Smith, and all the rest insisted that their own way of life, with its many inequities and power differentials, was the product of natural, inevitable, processes. Their insistence on inevitability, Graeber and Wengrow argue, was a deliberate response to an “indigenous critique” from Native Americans whose ways of life proved otherwise. During the era of imperial expansion, this indigenous critique entered European discourse in many ways, but it did so most profoundly in 1703, with the publication of the widely read set of Dialogues between a down-at-the-heels French aristocrat named the Baron Lahontan and a Wendat statesman-intellectual named Kandiaronk. If indigenous people could thrive without private property, massive inequality, authoritarian government, Kanadiaronk asked Lahontan, why couldn’t we all? The Enlightenment answer was that “we” had once lived that way. But that was then, and this was now. Kandiaronk and his ilk were not viable present-day alternatives but instead living relics of the distant past, before hunting gave way to herding, then to agriculture, and finally to commerce. Inevitably, the same process would engulf indigenous people too, as superior Europeans colonized the globe. Thus, for Enlightenment philosophes and all who followed in their footsteps, “modes of subsistence and division of labour,” or, more crudely, a people’s “primary mode of acquiring food,” became the sole determinants of an inexorable process that justified imperial domination (61).

For Graeber and Wengrow, how we see the past is also how we see the future. If we truly are deterministically stuck, there is no way out for us in the twenty-first century. Necessarily, then, their “New History of Humanity” rejects any form of determinism—economic, ecological, biological, technological, or sociological—in favor of an emphasis on conscious choice. In essence, we decided to get stuck, and so we can also decide to get unstuck.

A book of such audacious reach provides easy targets for crotchety or just lazy reviewers. It is not hard to charge authors who set out to sweep away sweeping generalizations with introducing sweeping new ones. The authors proclaim, for instance, that, “when sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship” (402). Nor is it difficult to construct straw-people criticisms when authors assert that “intellectual historians have never really abandoned the Great Man theory of history” (27)—particularly when they go on to set up Kandiaronk as a Great Man. And specialists on any given topic can easily identify subtleties overlooked, historiographical contexts lost, or borrowed ideas inadequately credited (for an example of the latter, see p. 511). “Had we tried to outline or refute every existing interpretation of the material we covered,” Graeber and Wengrow confess, “this book would have been two or three times the size, and likely would have left the reader with a sense that the authors are engaged in a constant battle with demons who were in fact two inches tall” (515).

Still, some of those diminutive demons must use their squeaky little voices to yelp “Wrong!” I squeaked myself when Graeber and Wengrow repeated the long-discredited notion about “settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies . . . almost invariably choosing to stay” (19). I did so again when I read that the fifty-some diverse Haudenosaunee prisoners that the French governor Denonville perfidiously sent into slavery in Louis XIV’s galleys included “all the permanent officers of the confederation and many from the women’s councils as well” (490–91). And I chuckled when the book’s bibliography credited a fine 1972 article, “Lahontan dans l’Enclopédie et ses suites,” not to its actual author, Maurice Roelens, but instead to “Richter, Daniel K.,” who in that year was just graduating from high school having never studied French (655). Other early Americanists may squeal more approvingly, if skeptically, at Graeber’s and Wengrow’s speculations about the shape of Indigenous North American history after 1000 CE  (463–73), even as they wince at the authors’ oversimplified account of how the indigenous critique influenced the Enlightenment.

But in the end, none of this really matters. The Dawn of Everything is a book to think with, and boy does it make you think. The authors present not so much an argument as a way of framing better, or at least more complicated, questions. I set out to try to create a map of those questions and the historiographical epistemology they embody. But I quickly blew past the word limit for this essay while fearing that I would lose readers in a swamp of my own devising. So instead, I’ll just allude briefly, even cryptically, to three key insights. The first is about freedom, which, Graeber and Wengrow posit, exists in three dimensions: “the freedom to move away,” “the freedom to ignore or disobey commands,” and “the freedom to shape entirely new social realities” (503). Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, anyone? The second is about restraints on freedom: “control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma” constitute “the three possible bases of social power” (365). Nathaniel Bacon, anyone? The third is harder to summarize, but is about the centrality of emotions to the choices humans make about freedom and control. By a chain of reasoning too complicated to trace here, Graeber and Wengrow make a remarkable generalization. “Perhaps this is what a state actually is,” they write, “a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion” (408). Politics in 1776 or 2022 anyone?

Daniel K. Richter

 

Ecologies of Freedom and the Challenge for Environmental History

David Graeber and David Wengrow wrote The Dawn of Everything, they claim, “to lay down foundations for a new world history” (25), one emphasizing freedom and creativity, while simultaneously attempting to synthesize decades of work in archaeology and anthropology that has challenged longstanding notions of exactly how “prehistory” looked. Rather than offering a complete picture, they describe their task as “to start putting some of the pieces of the puzzle together” and note that they hope their work will set off a process of “years of research and debate” (4). In taking on that challenge, they have produced an exciting and provocative work that should be read as the beginning of a conversation rather than the final word.

For historians of early America and the Atlantic World, The Dawn of Everything should be particularly useful to prompt new questions and discussion about relatively well-known sources. Indeed, their concept of the “Indigenous Critique” promises to spark new debates about how to distinguish between acts of ventriloquism and the presence of pointed commentary in early modern European sources purporting to record the words of Native people. Even beyond these obviously relevant sections, however, Graeber and Wengrow’s work offers useful challenges, particularly to early modern environmental historians.

Recently, historians have increasingly turned their attention to the impact of climate on human history, and early modernists have been at the forefront of this work. The presence of new, more detailed paleoclimate data and the pressing imperatives of our own climate crisis have prompted a series of books investigating the Little Ice Age and its impacts, including on moments of contact and early European colonial efforts in the Americas. For environmental historians working on this period, the challenge has often been how to navigate questions of determinism—how do we show that specific environmental conditions shaped human history without appearing to claim that societies fell or wars began, necessarily, because of them?

Graeber and Wengrow offer a complete reorientation to this problem. They are firmly opposed to any sense of environmental or ecological determinism, so much so that anthropologists Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale argue that Graeber and Wengrow wind up with an “allergy to ecological thinking.” That aversion, Lindisfarne and Neale claim, leads them to abandon any sort of materialist explanation because “thinking about ecology and technology threatens to make the choices and revolution they want impossible.”

But that charge is not quite right. Graeber and Wengrow acknowledge that “the intersection of environment and technology does make a difference, often a huge difference” (205), and warn against “ridiculous extremes” in rejecting Marx’s dictum that we do not make history under conditions of our own choosing (206). Rather, they attack environmental determinists for failing to fully consider environmental conditions in their explanations—for claiming that environmental limits required a set of behaviors when, in fact, other options were ecologically possible.

This focus on choice animates their treatment of the environment throughout the book and is developed most explicitly in Chapters 6 and 7, “Gardens of Adonis” and “The Ecology of Freedom.” Here Graeber and Wengrow take on the idea of an “Agricultural Revolution,” arguing instead that the process by which farming was adopted was far slower, more intermittent, and more limited than the phrase “revolution” implies. They reject claims that environmental catastrophe or the changing climate of the early Holocene necessarily prompted the adoption of agriculture, but rejecting environmental causation does not mean abandoning attention to the environment. Instead, Graeber and Wengrow argue that closer attention to the diverse ecosystems in which neolithic peoples lived reveals that they were often spaces for play.

For example, Graeber and Wengrow challenge the idea of the “Fertile Crescent,” noting that “in ecological terms, it’s really not one crescent but two—or no doubt even more, depending how closely one chooses to look” (226). The sheer diversity of environmental conditions enabled diverse Neolithic experiments with subsistence practices, but “experiments” is the key word here. Early cultivation “was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature” (239). Environmental knowledge—specifically women’s environmental knowledge, lay at the heart of these practices, which took place in ecological niches in areas that might otherwise hold importance as sites of trading, hunting, fishing, or foraging—activities that often remained culturally central even as subsistence shifted towards domesticated plants or animals.

The types of “fluid ecological arrangements” that characterized early farming in the Fertile Crescent also frequently defined cultivation elsewhere in Eurasia, Oceania, and the Americas. There was a strong preference for what Graeber and Wengrow call “an ecology of freedom” (a term they adapt from the social ecologist Murray Bookchin), which they define as “the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one’s existence to the logistical rigors of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death” (260). The desire to maintain this ecology of freedom animated site selection for some of the first cities, they argue, allowing a wide variety of resources from foraging, fishing, and hunting and ensuring that agricultural practices retained their flexibility even as they scaled up. Such arrangements also structured environments in early America. As historian Anya Zilberstein has shown, Native peoples across North America cultivated multiple species of Zizania (wild rice) in ways that led consistently-confused European observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to label the plants as wild or naturally occurring and in need of “improvement.”

Focusing on flexibility, freedom, and play, as they do, would re-orient early modern and early American environmental history (and the field of environmental history more broadly). Concepts like adaptation and resilience/vulnerability have become increasingly important in climate history to provide more nuanced explanations for the effects of climate and weather. Graeber and Wengrow push us to go further, to ask how the desire for freedom shaped engagement with the other-than-human world, to treat our subjects as creative rather than reactive. We need not always “set the dial between freedom and determinism” (206) where they do; acknowledging that it can turn that way and asking questions accordingly can transform our field.

Keith Pluymers

 

Further Reading

Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Charles R. Cobb, The Archaeology of Southeastern Native American Landscapes of the Colonial Era. Gainesville:University Press of Florida, 2019.

Christine DeLucia, “Terrapolitics in the Dawnland: Relationality, Resistance, and Indigenous Futures in the Native and Colonial Northeast,” New England Quarterly 92 (November 2019): 548–83.

Robbie Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1716. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Mairja Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe: Myths and Cult Images, 6,500−3,500 BC, Myths and Cult Images. 1982. Reprint. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.  

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021.

Gilles Havard, “Le Grand Soleil et la Mort: Anthropologie du coup natchez de 1729,” Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec 50 (no. 2, 2021): 71-91.

Vernon James Knight, Jr., Mound Excavations at Moundville: Architecture, Elites, and Social Order. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010.

Louis de Lom Darce, Baron de Lahontan, Dialogues curieux entre l‘auteur et un sauvage de bons sens qui a voyagé, et Mémoires de l’Amerique septentrionale. Edited by Gilbert Chinard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1931.

Barbara Alice Mann, “‘Are You Delusional?’: Kandiaronk on Christianity,” in Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands: Selected Speeches and Critical Analysis. Edited by Barbara Alice Mann. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Barbara Alice Mann, Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 

Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Georges Sioui, For an Amerindian Autohistory: An Essay on the Foundations of a Social Ethic. Translated by Sheila Fischman. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.

Sam White, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Cambridge, MassachuMAsetts: Harvard University Press, 2017).

Anya Zilberstein, “Inured to Empire: Wild Rice and Climate Change,” William and Mary Quarterly 72 (no. 1, 2015): 127.

 

This article originally appeared in October 2022.

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Robbie Ethridge is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Mississippi. In addition to editing four anthologies, writing numerous articles and book chapters on the history and ethnography of Native peoples of the American South, she is the author of Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World, 1796-1816 (2003), the Mooney Award-winning book From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715 (2010), and co-author with Robert J. Miller of A Promise Kept: The Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the End of the Trail of Tears (forthcoming 2023). Her current research reconstructs the 700-year history of the pre-colonial Mississippian world.

Sean P. Harvey is associate professor of history at Seton Hall University and a member of the editorial board of Commonplace. His publications include Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation (Harvard University Press, 2015) and articles that have appeared in Journal of the Early Republic and William and Mary Quarterly. His current research examines Albert Gallatin, colonialism, and capital in the Atlantic world from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

Barbara Alice Mann, Ph.D., is Professor in the Jesup Scott Honors College at the University of Toledo, in Toledo, Ohio, USA. She has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous books, most recently including The Woman Who Married the Bear (forthcoming from Oxford, 2022); President by Massacre (2019, ABC-CLIO), and Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath (Oxford, 2016).

Keith Pluymers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Illinois State University, where he teaches early modern environmental history. His first book No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania, 2021) examines how fears of wood scarcity shaped early modern English colonialism.

Daniel K. Richter is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania and the former Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. He is the author of Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Harvard University Press, 2011).

Gordon M. Sayre is Professor of English and Folklore at the University of Oregon. In addition to his book Les Sauvages Américains (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), he is Academic advisor for the entry on Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de Lahontan in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, vol. 280.

What made you want to write your first book? What drew you to your topic initially? Did your thinking about it change over time?

Cassie: I entered my PhD program knowing that I wanted to write about friendships between men and women in the early American republic. I had done a master’s degree already, and in researching my MA thesis (on etiquette in early Washington, D.C.), I came across this amazing letter by a female friend of Thomas Jefferson talking about how much she cared for him. I thought I had discovered an affair, but my advisor explained that people described emotions differently then and I couldn’t make that leap. I wondered how people in the early American republic, when gender roles were much more strictly constrained, could have had male/female friendships when I personally found it tricky in the twenty-first century. Starting out, I had no idea what kind of arguments I was going to make, so that really did evolve over time. I’m guessing that, given the topic of your book, you had less of a personal connection to it. What brought you to writing about missionaries?

Emily: I came into grad school planning on writing about missionaries, but with a very different focus. I had initially wanted to write about missionary marriages in the early republic. Who were these men and women who had picked up their whole lives to marry someone they hardly knew and move to a whole other part of the world? But then, like you, I came across something in a source that really surprised me and had me thinking about doing something a little different. Ann Judson’s memoir has these amazing scenes in India during the War of 1812 as the Americans were trying to figure out where they should go to avoid being arrested—reading that had me asking why this group of missionaries had imagined that this was a good time for foreign mission work in the first place. It got me started down the path of thinking about missions and empire and I set aside the questions I had about marriage for a little bit.

 

What did you anticipate the criticisms of your book would be? Is that what reviewers actually critiqued?

Emily: I was sure that I would hear a lot of criticism about my reliance on English-language archives. Given Christian Imperialism’s globe-trotting scope, I think a very fair critique of the book is that I did not make use of many sources from the people the missionaries sought to convert (with the exception of a few in translation). Surprisingly, this was not the major critique I heard, which I hope means that readers accepted the ways that I limited the scope of the book to focus on American understandings of empire and mission. How about you, Cassie? What were the critiques that you were worried about?

Cassie: I expected particular criticisms about what I truly thought were weaknesses in the book, but those weren’t actually the criticisms reviewers had. Most of their critiques had to do with the degree of equality and political power women gained from these friendships. I was surprised that only one reviewer brought up something I found problematic: that I had limited my project’s scope, just focusing on elite white people. But I just couldn’t figure out how to get at this story for lower class people; I tried a few different avenues and hit dead ends. The other thing I could never quite wrap my head around was what these friendships meant for masculinity and men; I spent a lot more time on women and norms of femininity, but no reviewers brought this up. In both of these cases, I hope future scholars will be able to move this topic in new directions.

 

Is there anything readers or reviewers brought up that made you rethink your arguments?

Cassie: Absolutely. One of my readers pre-publication noted that the book focused almost entirely on challenges to male/female friendships rather than providing a picture of the actual experience of individual friendships. As a result, I added a new first chapter that examines three different friendships in detail, and it was a lot of fun to write. The most common critique from reviewers was that saying there was equality in these friendships was an overstatement. That’s a fair point, and one I usually qualified—but I went bolder in the introduction. One reviewer referred to my take on these friendships as “optimistic” and I think that helps explain why I emphasized how much power women had in these friendships. It’s interesting to think that coming at the same sources with a different mindset would have changed my argument. How about you, Emily?

Emily: I love that first chapter in your book. It’s such a powerful way to start the book—what a great example of the peer review process at work! I added a chapter at the suggestion of one of my initial readers, too. They had commented that I could and should expect critique for my English-language sources and might try to speak more directly to what I can and cannot say about the experience of those the missionaries were trying to convert. The chapter on schools and the meaning of conversion was my attempt to do that. After the book was published, one reviewer commented that it would be impossible to write the full history of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), given the size of its archive (1,261 linear feet). Their point was that my broad scope meant that I missed some key details in some locations. I wouldn’t say that this made me rethink my larger argument, but it is a point well taken. When I set out to write the book, I knew that I should either go deep on one particular place or broad and try to capture the movement as a whole. There are definitely costs to either approach.

 

Who did you think your book would be in conversation with and who ended up taking up your work?

Emily: When did you start thinking about this, Cassie? For me, it was something I was really conscious of as I was talking to potential editors because I really wanted some help in reaching out to US in the World scholars. During grad school, my major conference had been SHEAR and, to a lesser degree, the American Society for Church History, so I felt pretty sure that I was already in conversation with those scholars. But I wanted to be sure to find ways to make my work resonate with folks thinking about empire and American foreign relations in different time periods. It was a big part of the reason why I ended up publishing with Cornell in their US in the World Series.

Cassie: I also had a really specific audience in mind. I essentially saw my work as an ethnographic study of a particular form of relationship in the past, and my hope was that other gender scholars would start looking for male/female friendships in other settings. That’s why I published the article drawn from the book in the journal Gender History rather than an early US history journal. Apparently, the Library of Congress cataloguers thought my book went with books on the psychology of emotion, even though I (intentionally) don’t cite a single psychologist in the book! Nonetheless, it does seem like mostly historians of early America have been citing the book. There have been scholars looking at male/female friendships in other times and places—including non-historians—who have used the book, and that is really encouraging. Emily, who ended up citing your book? I hear people in our field talking about it all the time!

Emily: It’s mostly landed where I expected—religious studies, foreign relations, early US and the world. It gets cited sometimes as the “early” example in work focusing on later periods, which is something I’ve really enjoyed.

 

What might you change if you were to rewrite the book?

Cassie: I have thought about this a lot over the past seven years. There is one key omission that just feels so glaring to me now: in writing about Thomas Jefferson’s friendships in Paris with women, I failed to note that he likely began his sexually exploitative relationship with Sally Hemings during his time there. I was working from the correspondence, and of course Hemings isn’t there; I needed to widen the frame and bring her in.

Emily: That’s a really interesting point. Do you think widening the frame would have changed the argument at all? How is that helping you think about how to approach your current book?

Cassie: Certainly, when it comes to what I was arguing about Jefferson as a friend to women, juxtaposing that with his sexual exploitation of Hemings puts his behavior in a different and more complex light. Many of the very men—and women—who could have such emotionally rich friendships were at the very same time exploiting enslaved people. I’ve been much more cognizant in this second book of placing the people I’m writing about in the context of events going on in all aspects of their lives and in the country. My writing style is also very different for this book; because it’s for a popular audience, there is a clear chronological narrative and more accessible language. Focusing on storytelling rather than solely analysis is, for me, just so much more enjoyable. What is your approach to structuring your second book?

Emily: Like you, I’ve been writing my new book differently—though I’m not writing for a trade press, I’m thinking more about narrative and hoping to reach a broader audience this time around. Missionary Diplomacy explores the relationship between the mission movement and the US government over the course of the nineteenth century (and a bit into the twentieth), with chapters comparing experiences in different regions. I’ve had to work through the same kind of structural questions about how to tell a story about Americans moving all around the globe in a manageable kind of way. The new book is organized chronologically and thematically, with some chapters that globe-hop and others that zoom in on particular case studies. Each chapter is more character-driven and narrative than I’ve written in the past. It’s been a lot of fun to play around with writing in a different style and voice. 

Cassie: I’ve often thought about how Founding Friendships would look if I had written it in the style of my current book, although I still have never figured out how I could write it chronologically rather than thematically. I didn’t have a clear thread of how friendships changed over time in the early republic, but I did have sets of themes that my evidence cohered around. How did you structure Christian Imperialism?

Emily: The structure I ended up with really reflects the argument I was making in the book and was a big revision from the dissertation. The dissertation actually took on more of a narrative arc—maybe that’s why I really wouldn’t rewrite the book as a narrative now! The dissertation had more of a narrative arc as a religious history and focused a lot on the question of how missionaries and their supporters defined what was “morality” and what was “politics” as they evangelized in a world of empire. When I thought about how to turn the dissertation into a book, I wanted to do a better job of centering the questions about empire that had gotten me so excited. To do that, I restructured the chapter outline a bit to allow each chapter to be more of a case study of different types of imperialism. This meant that I dropped one chapter in the dissertation about slavery that I need to come back to one of these days, but I don’t think I could have made the argument I wanted to make in a more narrative style. I still really like the structure I used there, and I couldn’t change it without having to really change the heart of the book.

 

How did working on this book lead you to your second book? What did you learn through that process that has influenced what you’re doing now?

Emily: I love talking to folks about this question, because there are so many different journeys from the first book to the next. Some folks really seem to want to do something completely different; others have a very clear progression from one to the next. It took me some time to decide on which route I wanted to go in. I had actually received a warning from one mentor that I might not want to do the next book on missions—lest I get stuck in a “missionary ghetto.” But I ended up taking the advice of another mentor that it could make a lot of sense to build on what I already knew to position myself as one of the experts in this field. And I’m still finding lots to say about missionaries and American foreign relations, so I’m okay continuing to work on them for a bit longer. In the end, I wanted to answer some questions that I had received at conferences about missions and policy, which I didn’t get to at all in the first book. That was the springboard for Missionary Diplomacy, the book I’m finishing up now.

Cassie: I definitely had a different journey to my second book, because I have shifted to writing a biography of a family. I’m still focused on early America and the intertwining of relationships and power, but otherwise this is a very different book. Nonetheless, I came to it from the first book; I read some correspondence of the people I’m now writing about, George Washington’s step-grandchildren, in the research for Founding Friendships. I really enjoyed digging deep into the stories of some of the people I wrote about in the first book, and I wanted to immerse myself in just a few individuals’ stories. First Family tells the story of four rather eccentric but at the time very famous siblings from the American Revolution to the Civil War, and while the research for it took a decade, it’s been so much fun.

 

Ultimately, books are static, material things. As historians and writers, we’re always changing, and so is the field of history. We can shift approaches and apply lessons learned to the next book, but only in the rare cases of a second edition of a book does the author get to add later reflections to the physical text. We hope this conversation spurs more authors to find ways to remain in dialogue with their books and critics.

 

This article was originally published in September 2022.

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Cassandra Good is associate professor of history at Marymount University in Arlington, VA. She writes and researches on politics, gender, and culture in the early American republic. Her first book, Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic, won the Organization of American Historians’ Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize in U.S. women’s and/or gender history in 2016. Her next book, First Family: George Washington’s Heirs and the Making of America, is forthcoming from Hanover Square Press (an imprint of Harper Collins) in 2023.

Emily Conroy-Krutz is associate professor of history at Michigan State University and the author of Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (2015). Her writings on religion, reform, empire, and gender can be found in the Journal of the Early Republic, Early American Studies, Diplomatic History, and several edited volumes. Her next book, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and American Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

The desk, dated to the 1690s, has seen the homes of several New England ministers. Curators speculate that it may have first belonged to the minister Edward Taylor (1640s-1729) before it came to reside in the home of Nehemiah Bull (1701-1740) of Westfield, Massachusetts. While Taylor’s ownership remains speculative, Bull made his ownership known by signing his name to the bottom of one of the drawers in a large but neat script that has been confirmed as a match with his signature in a surviving daybook. Today, both desk and daybook are owned by Historic Deerfield and the desk sits on display in the study of the eighteenth-century Ashley home, the residence of the Reverend Jonathan Ashley (1712-1780). Although we do not know what Bull’s house looked like, we can presume that the desk sat in a study like Ashley’s, or in a chamber that served at least part time as a study for the minister. In this space, the desk would have served practical functions while also acting as a status symbol, shoring up Bull’s authority as a household head, minister, and prominent figure in the community. Its design—especially its turned legs—suggest it was intended with outward display in mind. While Bull was likely the desk’s primary sitter, it would have had meaning as well for all those who lived in and visited the home.

Bull’s house, where the desk lived for several years, was bustling. There was his wife Elizabeth and their three children as well as many non-kin members of the household that came and went. Nehemiah and his wife were enslavers, and there were at least three enslaved people who lived in their home, three women named Tanner, Phillis, and Dido, who were all included in Bull’s inventory at his death in 1740. Additionally, the couple regularly hired white women who served as maids for various and sometimes overlapping periods of time ranging from a few months to multiple years. Others came as laborers, boarders, and students. For example, there was Benjamin Collam’s son who came to board, Hannah Dewey who came for “service,” Jacob (“a young Indian”) to board, Edward Coats to “live,” and Tim Woodbridge who came “to board with me and to be instructed.” Others came to “school” but may not have necessarily boarded in the house. At times, the house was so full that Bull was forced to board laborers in his neighbors’ homes. As we imagine the life of this desk, we must place it within this lively space.

For Bull, the desk may have symbolized a retreat from the noise of the home, a place to carve out relative privacy. This was often how Bull’s contemporaries described their time in their studies. The minister Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), for example, was known to have spent up to thirteen hours a day in his study. Bull’s slightly earlier contemporary, the minister Peter Thacher (1651-1727) of Milton, Massachusetts, was perhaps less extreme, but habitually wrote of working independently in his study, sometimes to little avail, as when he wrote in November 1684: “I did little in my study tho I did something.” Thacher’s seclusion in his study rested on a system of racial and class-based unfreedom that his diary laid bare, a reality that was true for Bull as well, who was ordained as a minister in 1726. In the above entry, immediately after indicating that he had worked in his study, Thacher added a note “Ebed and Ephraim plowed.” By this, he referred to the labor of his enslaved and indentured laborers that made his studying possible. The same was almost certainly true of Bull’s household; the labor of his enslaved laborers, Tanner, Phillis, and Dido, as well as his many hired and indentured workers allowed Bull the occasional quiet time in his study to read, write, and think at the desk.

In part, the study—and the desk itself—may have demarcated spiritual space in the minister’s home. Ministers like Bull, Thacher, and Edwards retreated to their studies in attempts to gain distance not only from other members of their household but also from temporal concerns. Bull would have read and written sermons at the desk, prepared for the Sabbath, and carried out spiritual work and reflection in this space. While many of these activities were solitary, the desk may have symbolized a spiritual space for others who entered the chamber, whether to receive religious instruction or to engage in theological discussions with Bull. This was the case for Peter Thacher, who described how his maid Lidea would approach him in his study to discuss her spiritual state. At the desk, Bull may have conducted much of his inner religious life, just as he may have communed with other members of the household and community about spiritual affairs. We might ask how members of his household—especially those who were enslaved or otherwise unfree—might have seen and interacted with the desk, given its association with Bull’s religious duties. It is quite possible that members of Bull’s household would have regarded the desk as an anchor of spiritual space within the home.

Even as the desk may have been a space for spiritual work, Bull would have struggled to keep this fully separate from his temporal affairs, these multiple demands converging on the writing surface of the desk, where Bull brought quill to parchment. The varied nature of writings produced at this desk are reflective of this, as they covered both worldly and religious concerns, some public and others private. Surviving records offer a glimpse of the types of materials that crossed his desk. In addition to sermons, Bull wrote letters to fellow theologians like Solomon Williams, some of which survive today at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA) Library, just up the road from the Ashley house. Bull likewise may have been sitting at this very desk when he opened and read a 1734/5 letter from Konkapot and Umpachenee, which alerted him that members of their tribe had been poisoned. Presuming he followed Konkapot and Umpachenee’s instructions, after breaking the letter open and reading it, he sealed it up again and sent it along to Reverend Stephen Williams of Longmeadow. To this end, we might imagine that Bull used this desk to read and draft correspondence concerning his affairs in establishing a mission at Stockbridge in the 1730s. Although only a small fragment of Bull’s incoming and outgoing correspondence survives, the desk offers a reminder of Bull’s assorted affairs from family matters to theological concerns to his interest in the Stockbridge mission.

In addition to writing and receiving letters, Nehemiah Bull likely sat at this desk with his daybook, which also survives at the PVMA library. As Bull recorded on the title page, this book was an “account of my dealings with men.” The book—kept throughout the 1720s and 30s—gives a sense of Bull’s personality and perhaps how he interacted with members of his household, as he inscribed on the title page his motto: “Honesty is the best policy! Let this be my motto forever.” The bulk of the pages included notes about debts due to friends and neighbors as well as those owed to Bull. He also used the space to record the dates when various laborers came into his home and their accounts with him. The book was large enough that Bull probably did not carry it with him on daily errands but instead may have stored it on the desk where he could lay open its pages and mark his accounts.

Although Bull would have spent much independent time in his study, his accounting practice occasionally required the collaboration of those in his household. For example, his wife, Elizabeth may have kept her own accounts—either in a book of her own, or in some other style like the many women who recorded accounts with chalk tally marks. She may have joined him at the desk, perhaps standing alongside it or sitting close by as he confirmed with her these accounts. In other cases, she may have made her own marks in his book, a collaborative accounting practice that comes across in other account books of this era.

The pair hired several maids, who would have likely fallen under Elizabeth’s purview, and Bull may have turned to Elizabeth for clarification about their accounts. Likewise, he may have called some of these women—Patience Stockwell, Esther Lyon, or Ruth Trumble, just to name a few—to the desk when it was time to settle accounts, as when Peter Thacher described calling his maid Lidea into his study where he “discoursed her concerning her going home . . . and paid her what I owed her.” More regularly, though, Bull may have relied on enslaved, indentured, and hired members of his household to assist with his accounts. In their aprons, Tanner, Phillis, and Dido may have stuffed receipts from local merchants like Samuel Barnard after returning from his shop, presenting these to their enslavers as proof of their errands. In cases like these, we can imagine the daybook sitting open on Bull’s desk, its contents shaping his interactions with various members of the household.

Just as Bull may have called members of the household to assist him at his desk, this too may have served as a place where Bull conducted affairs with friends, neighbors, members of the church, and various others. When he filed a suit with his congregation for his salary, for example, the sheriff or other legal officials may have brought their paperwork to this space. When he met with relatives or members of the town to bring in apprentices, their indentures may have been signed on this very surface. And when he signed deeds for land at Stockbridge, or other bills of credit, he and others may have gathered around this desk space.  

Some of these transactions would have pulled in members of his household to sign as witnesses. In many cases, they may have stood on the side of the desk when they signed, their marks and signatures appearing sideways on the page as some of these surviving papers show. Even when they did not officially witness and sign documents, diverse members of Bull’s household listened in and watched on as these activities were carried out. Perhaps they were busy sweeping the room, polishing the silver, or spinning wool, but in the multifunctional rooms of an eighteenth-century house it was common for laboring people to inadvertently act as witnesses to the household head’s dealings. We might ask what they would have taken from these interactions? Might such affairs have shaped their ability to navigate the courts or to plot potential routes out of bondage? What words and practices did they glean from the public affairs in this space?

In addition to a space for carrying out business, Bull’s study—and his desk—were spaces of instruction and may have been occupied by Bull’s various students. Several young men in Deerfield came to Bull’s house for schooling, often boarding in the house while they received instruction. While his students were mostly white men and boys, Bull too has been recognized as an early teacher for Jupiter Hammon, who became one of the earliest known Black writers in America. Although the story goes that Bull carried out this training in the library of the Lloyd Manor Estate in New York, it is possible that Bull may have taken on other African American students, enslaved or free, in the Deerfield area. Tanner, Phillis, and Dido, or any other enslaved people who lived in his household may too have received some schooling from Bull, perhaps using the desk’s writing surface during their lessons. Bull’s daybook provides some evidence of this type of instruction, as there are several pages that appear to have been used for practice writing—possibly by Bull but just as likely by some of his children and students.

The desk may have been a curiosity to his household, not only for what activities happened on and around it, but for the things stored within its drawers. The desk has four drawers, but only two are immediately visible when facing the desk; the other two have been somewhat ingeniously built into the sides of the desk, allowing for significantly more storage space. Notably, none of these drawers ever held locks, providing easy access to those interested in peeking at the contents. Unlike the somewhat ubiquitous chests of this period which opened from the top and would have required rifling through miscellaneous storage items like linens to find any stored papers, this desk left papers rather accessible.

These papers may have been objects of fascination to members of Bull’s household, especially since enslaved and unfree people in New England—even those who were illiterate—were likely familiar with the power of writing. Papers could lead to pain and separation as with a bill of sale, just as they could lead to relative freedoms in daily life as with passes and currency notes. For indentured members of the household, indenture papers offer another example of the power of the written word, as indentures could provide important proof of freedom dues or of service terms. Of course, Bull may have taken this into consideration with what he stored in this desk and what he kept elsewhere, perhaps in a locked box or drawer, just as he may have placed more confidential items in the side drawers, which may have been slightly less visible to onlookers, depending on how the desk was positioned in his home. The desk’s deep drawers, now empty, invite many questions about what was stored there but also about how members of Bull’s household may have interacted with them. Might they have slid the drawers open when Bull was out of the home carrying out social and business affairs? Would the papers inside have made any sense to those who viewed them? What types of information did they provide?

When we encounter this desk as visitors, it is easy to see Nehemiah Bull sitting alone at it. This is perhaps for good reason as the desk was a symbol of his position in the church and in colonial society as well as his authority as male household head. It would also have been a space that he sometimes went for solitude. But while visitors today enter empty homes and are met with a static world, the eighteenth century was far from this. When we repopulate the room, we must consider additional interactions around the desk. Artifacts like the Bull desk recall all types of stories of the diverse people who made these objects and interacted with them. When we bring this world into motion again, we are greeted with a much richer and more diverse view of colonial America.

 

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was carried out thanks to a New England Regional Consortium Fellowship, with special thanks to Dan Sousa, furniture curator at Historic Deerfield, for showing me the desk and the drawer with Bull’s signature. Thank you as well to Karin Wulf, Kristen Beales, and Alison Bazylinski for reading early drafts of this article.

 

Further Reading

On desks and colonial storage furniture, see Wilson H. Kimnach and Kenneth P. Minkema, “The Material and Social Practices of Intellectual Work: Jonathan Edward’s Study,” William and Mary Quarterly 69 (Oct. 2012): 684; Gerald W. R. Ward, “The Merchants’ Real Friend and Companion” in Boston Furniture, 1700-1900, ed. Brock Jobe and Gerald W.R. Ward (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2016), 166-179; A Place for Everything: Chests and Boxes in Early Colonial America (Winterthur, Delaware: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1986); Brock Jobe and Myrna Kate, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984).

On the Nehemiah Bull desk, see Katherine Fecteau, “It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s … a table-desk” Past@present blog, Umass Amherst Department of History, https://umasshistory.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/historic-deerfield-internship/; “An Historic Desk from Before Desks Were Desks” The Appraisal Group, https://appraisalgroupusa.com/an-historic-desk-from-before-desks-were-desks/; Robert Rober, “Besides historic desk, Rev. Bull owned people,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, April 25, 2016 https://www.gazettenet.com/Romer-letter-1612543.

On Nehemiah Bull’s involvement in Stockbridge, see Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). On Bull as teacher to Jupiter Hammon see Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1683 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 66.

On manuscript culture in early America, see Catherine La Courreye Blecki, “Reading Moore’s Book: Manuscripts vs. Print Culture and the Development of Early American Literature,” in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America, ed. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 59-106.

On slavery in Deerfield and western Massachusetts, see Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved out of Slavery and Into Legend (New York: Harper Collins, 2008); C.S. Manegold, Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Robert H. Robert, Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts (Florence, Massachusetts: Levellers Press, 2009); Marla R. Miller, Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2020).

On enslaved people and space, see Dell Upton, “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Places 2 (no. 2, 1984): 59-72; Bernard L. Herman, Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2012; 1999); Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2006).

 

This article originally appeared in September, 2022.

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Caylin Carbonell is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture. She is a historian of race, gender, and power with a focus on the lived experiences of unfreedom in early New England. Her book project, Laboring Lives: Households, Dependence, and Power in Colonial New England, uses innovative archival practices to reveal stories of the everyday lives of diverse New Englanders.  

This surprising exchange in the Missouri Republican sent me searching for traces of the play on American stages, where I discovered its enduring popularity for at least a half century following its 1835 debut in New York. I found no other evidence of controversy, in St. Louis or elsewhere, which surprised me given that the play first appeared in Boston the spring after the Ursuline Convent riot in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In America, Pet would have resonated with the bestselling convent captivity narratives Six Month in a Convent, Or, the Narrative of Rebecca Theresa Reed (1835) and Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), which cast the convent as a danger to Protestant womanhood and domesticity, exciting prurient interest and controversy. What was the relationship, I wondered, between this “revolt of the convent” and the intensifying anti-Catholicism of the 1830s that scholars have found across Anglo-American print culture? Pet offers a tantalizing glimpse at the way comedy translated these themes as light fare. 

Pet of the Petticoats extends the reach of Anglo-Atlantic anti-Catholicism to the stage, illustrating the ways its tropes and anxieties moved across genres and into sentimental stage comedy. The 1832 opera dispenses with villainous priests and nuns of the Gothic drama, instead using the convent setting to dramatize gender gone wrong when women are kept from men and boys are raised in a world of women. Paul’s case highlights the dangers of over-feminization for boys and men, exemplifying how ambivalence about aspects of Protestant culture was often worked out through anti-Catholic imagery, as Susan Griffin and Jenny Franchot have shown in their analyses of nineteenth-century literature. If much anti-Catholic literature of the period presented the priest and the convent as a dark mirror reflecting Anglo-Protestant anxieties, this farce mined those anxieties for comedic effect while offering audiences a reassuring moral conclusion.

Anti-Catholic literature, which crested in the 1830s and 1850s in relation to expanding Catholic communities, mobilized views of Catholicism to grapple with questions about Anglo-Protestant culture, particularly the status of women and the family. A turning point was the 1834 Charlestown riot, when a working-class mob attacked the Ursuline convent, founded in 1827, that was home to student boarders from elite Boston families. The fate of a disaffected nun, who had left and then returned, inspired the attack. Rebecca Reed’s unpublished account of her years as a charity student also fueled suspicion of the convent and its role in the community. An estimated two-thousand spectators watched the rioters systematically destroy convent property. In the trial that followed, only one man was found guilty. The victims received no damages, and the convent was never rebuilt.

These events mobilized competing views of new Catholic institutions and communities, but the convent also became a target because it symbolized how America’s democratic promise was being corrupted by elites, as Jenny Franchot has argued. The convent represented a danger to American purity in the guise of elite education, an anti-democratic force in America’s competitive market society, and a threat to the patriarchal family. The fixation on the tyrannical masculine figure of the Mother Superior found in trial testimony and Reed’s account policed the boundaries of female authority, which were at the time being reshaped by the Protestant cult of domestic femininity. The year after Reed’s account appeared, ghostwriters published Maria Monk’s more sensationalistic (and false) account of a Montreal nunnery where priests prostituted novitiates and illegitimate infants were buried in quicklime. This narrative engaged the politics of sexual virtue catalyzed by the moral reform movements of 1830s, asking how women might protect their virtue and secure class stability. Pet of the Petticoats spoke to these themes in the form of an English breeches comedy.

Pet exemplifies the transatlantic character of early U.S. theater (and print culture more broadly). It debuted in 1832 as a vehicle for London-based actress-manager Fanny Fitzwilliam adapted by John Baldwin Buckstone. Like many of Buckstone’s comedies, Pet derived from a continental European source, a French vaudeville based on Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset’s poem “Vert-Vert,” about a bird who disrupts a convent with the blasphemy he learns from sailors. The bird learns reform, as does the boy protagonist at the center of the French original, in Buckstone’s version an actress-boy role. In England as in America, the piece was popular, enjoyed for its “wit” and “excellent moral lesson,” according to the London Theatrical Observer. Pet was initially marketed as “The Convent of St. Eloi, or the Pet of the Petticoats,” though by the time it reached the United States in 1835, it was usually billed simply as “Pet of the Petticoats,” which highlighted the problem of the protagonist’s upbringing in a world of women.

In the absence of dramatic copyright law in the U.S., English plays were regularly imported, adapted, and produced by American theater companies. Pet first began appearing in U.S. theaters in 1835, usually selected by leading actresses for their benefit night, when performers could decide the repertoire and take a cut of the house. Benefit nights gave actresses an opportunity to try new roles and were often used to debut a new piece, like the English comic opera recently published in London. Pet was deemed the “sensation of the season” in Boston and New York in the spring of 1835, but it received little critical attention as it was not literary drama. This is unfortunate given the ways it surely resonated in the aftermath of the Ursuline riot and American convent captivity narratives, which might have been a factor in its selection.

Pet is representative of comic opera and breeches drama in this period, mobilizing essentialist gender roles in a plot celebrating sentimental domestic ideals. The setting is a vaguely foreign, vaguely historical past. Though adapted from a French original, in the American context it spoke directly to concerns of Anglo-American Protestant culture with legitimate family structure, courtship, and sexual virtue. In this play as in broader anti-Catholic literature, the convent represents a threat to the institution of marriage and raises questions about legitimate female authority. Its boarders have been separated from their husbands and must live behind high walls and locked gates under control of the Mother Superior. The “under governess,” Sister Vinaigre, whose name evokes the dried-up spinster deprived of marital sexuality, “does nothing but watch and torment the poor young girls from morning till night.” All is not as it seems: Vinaigre is carrying on a clandestine romance with the dancing instructor, Monsieur Zephyr.

By casting the protagonist, Paul, as a breeches role, the piece highlights the convent as a site of gendered disorder: wives kept from husbands, and a boy raised as a girl and infantilized by the convent borders. Paul’s mother has sent him to the convent to be “educated in innocence, and brought up as pure and as virtuous as a girl” because “his father was a sad rake.” The result, the convent gardener jokes, is that “he don’t know whether he is a boy or girl.” Paul evokes the androgyne prominent in anti-Catholic imagery but also in Protestant writing concerned with the proper way to raise sons. Alas for his mother’s intentions, he tries to emulate the arts of seduction, producing a comedy of gendered errors where the actress likewise tries but ultimately fails at manhood. Actress Charlotte Watson was praised for her chaste performance as Paul, an indication that she conveyed innocence rather than knowingness, enhancing Paul’s feminine youth.

 The allure and humor of actress-as-boy roles like Paul relied on the association of youth and immaturity with femininity. Though Pet is unusual in following Paul through a coming-of-age tale and hints at his burgeoning manhood, the character fails in his approximation of adult masculinity. For the audience at least, Paul’s essential femininity is never in doubt. (Some dramatic actresses did take on adult male leads like Hamlet, Romeo, and Ion to critical acclaim, roles otherwise intended for actors.) While breeches acting had a clear heterosexist allure, resting on fixed notions of gender difference and infantilization of women, these roles gave actresses new realms of expression and stage business, like combat. And while male theatergoers were avid fans of actresses who played roles like Paul, the excitement of watching a young women wear the breeches and, in the case of Paul, satirize male libertinage also entertained women in the audience. Roles like Paul were innocuous, if somewhat racy fun, because their morals reinforced contemporary gendered order. Pet reassured viewers of the natural desire for domesticity even as it titillated audiences with a ribald celebration of male libertinage.

Paul’s failed attempt at sexual conquest shows the consequences of his innocence, a product of over-feminization. Paul arrives at an inn, where he discovers the soldiers entertained by opera star Madame Bravura. Paul has no context for the world of adult sexual vice and cannot even explain his attraction to Bravura. He overhears the soldiers discussing the arts of seduction and decides to win Bravura by attempting “love a la militaire.” He follows the advice of Chevalier St. Pierre: “the cooler she may appear, the warmth of your fervor should increase; if she repulses you, charge again—hem her in—take her round the wait—kiss her—she’ll scream—never heed that—but call for a delicate dinner and a dozen of Champagne” and “the victory is yours.” When Paul tries to caress and kiss Bravura, she is “repulsed.” The scene made light of seduction techniques practiced by male libertines yet gave its actresses a rare opportunity to satirize male sexual aggression. (In one of the French versions, Paul’s love interest Mimi finds and intercepts him in successful pursuit of the opera singer. He becomes the caged parrot rather than an innocent cupid reuniting lovers.) 

Pet pokes fun at efforts to discipline urban sexual culture. Soldiers separated from their wives by the convent’s “squadron of governesses”—note the masculinization—were expected to pursue illicit romance. The play assured audiences that while male libertinage could not be prevented, neither was it a threat to domesticity. The play concludes with a tidy moral: Paul offers to help the soldiers liberate their wives but only if they agree to “no more assignations with ladies.” The bonds of marriage to a virtuous woman will properly channel male sexual desire. Paul asks for forgiveness from the Mother Superior by affirming the natural order disrupted by the convent: “I have but restored husbands to their wives, and wives to their husbands; and those who have been once united in Hymen’s bonds, we are instructed never to put asunder.” The play also resolves the problem of Paul’s “feminine education.” He promises himself to the boarder Mimi but asks her to wait for him while he joins the army. With Paul destined to a proper masculine education prior to marriage, all sing “the conqueror love smiles on us now.”

The convent as a site of mystery, seduction, and illicit authority are present in Pet but rendered ineffectual rather than sinister, like the bumbling gardener or the repressed Sister Vinaigre. For audiences steeped in the dark salaciousness of convent captivity literature, Pet represented a lighter fantasy of revolt against elite conspiracies that threatened men’s legitimate access to American women. With actress-as-boy Paul at the center, the play also spoke to anxieties about over-feminization in middle-class Protestant culture. Paul is a failed boy in a world of cloistered girls and a failed seducer among worldly men. His character both celebrates youthful innocence and satirizes the feminization of American culture, but the revolt of the convent promises to restore him to his proper role.

Pet of the Petticoats was titillating but not offensive, prescient enough to excite laughs of recognition without inciting outrage or scandal. It celebrated a sexual double standard associated with American theater culture that was being challenged by Protestant reform, while still delivering a satisfactory moral lesson. If few found offense, this was because so much of its themes were so familiar to Americans steeped in anti-Catholic tropes, convents as sites that disrupted the natural order of things, where women exercised a masculine authority, and men were emasculated androgynes. Pet made ridiculous what convent captivity literature cast as dangerous, while assuring Americans that marital domesticity “conquers all.”

 

Further Reading

After first learning about Pet of the Petticoats in Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), I rediscovered the play through the discussion in the Missouri Republican in March 1838 while I was researching theater culture in St. Louis, Missouri.

Unfortunately, many of the pieces appearing on American stages from the 1810s to the 1850s, especially short comic afterpieces, never found their way to print. John Baldwin Buckstone’s The Pet of the Petticoats was unusual in this regard, first published in London in 1834 because of its popularity and then anthologized in Popular dramas by John Baldwin Buckstone as performed at the Metropolitan theatres, vol. 1 (London: William Strange, 1835), available through the Internet Archive.

Understanding the play in relation to contemporary anti-Catholicism led me to the following key works: Susan Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Marie Anne Pagliarini, “The Pure American Woman and the Wicket Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 9, no. 1 (Winter, 1999); Timothy Verhoeven, Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism: France and the United States in the nineteenth century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Thank you to Kara French for encouraging me to write about this play for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Annual Meeting.

 

This article originally appeared in September, 2022.

 

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Sara E. Lampert is an Associate Professor of History at the University of South Dakota and coordinator of the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies program. She is the author of Starring Women: Celebrity, Patriarchy, and American Theater, 1790-1850 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020). Learn more at Saraelampert.com and follow @slampie2.