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A Case of American Revolutionary History and Memory

On July 3, 1775, George Washington needed something to make him stand out in a crowd. He had arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take command of the American Revolutionary Army, but almost nobody in New England recognized their new chief. Clearly some system needed to be devised for identifying him, and the host of other new generals appointed by Congress. But this problem posed another dilemma. What decorations were appropriate in an army in revolt, and one espousing republican principles? What kinds of devices made sense for a rank as lofty as a general or the commander-in-chief?

The decoration he chose, a blue silk moiré ribbon worn across his breast, made allusions to both one of the traditional colors of Whigs, the British political party with which American Revolutionaries identified, and the aristocratic decorations of Europe. At first, he wore the ribbon regularly, and then only on ceremonial occasions and in battles, until he phased the decoration out in 1779, replacing it with stars on his epaulettes. Examples of Washington’s epaulettes have survived and appeared in several publications, but his silk ribbon has remained largely obscure among students of Washington objects and the American Revolution.

A recently re-examined silk moiré ribbon in the collections of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology may well be the very ribbon depicted in the Washington portrait paintings by the Revolutionary artist Charles Willson Peale. It may even have been the one worn by Washington from 1775 to 1779 as referenced in various writings during the war. It may also be the ribbon displayed at Peale’s museum in the nineteenth century.

In 1899, the heirs of Moses Kimball, founder of the Boston Museum and co-owner, with P.T. Barnum, of the objects that had once been on display in Charles Willson Peale’s museum, donated the ribbon to Harvard. At that time, according to Peale scholar and descendant Charles Coleman Sellers, the ribbon had an original Peale museum label pinned to it, identifying it as a gift from Washington to the artist.

Peale had portrayed Washington numerous times, during and after the Revolutionary War, both in miniatures on ivory and with both half-length and full-length portraits on canvas. Many of the portraits of Washington in uniform show him wearing a blue silk ribbon. Peale made his first portrait on canvas of Washington wearing his ribbon as a commission for John Hancock in June 1776 as part of the latter’s celebration of Washington’s liberation of Boston (now in the Brooklyn Museum of Art). In January 1779, the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania commissioned a full-length portrait of George Washington at Princeton, in gratitude for his role in the liberation of Philadelphia in 1778 (now in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) (fig. 1). Peale supported himself in the coming years partly through replicating the popular Princeton image, and at least four other copies are currently institutionally owned. If the ribbon at Harvard is the same as the one portrayed by Peale, it may reveal some new dimensions of Peale’s practices as an artist.

Subsequent to several close examinations of the ribbon at Harvard with the help of head conservator T. Rose Holdcraft, it appears that the extant ribbon is a surprisingly good match (based on physical and technical features) with the one depicted in Peale’s paintings. This analysis was possible due to Peale’s careful delineation of the fabric’s characteristics. The surviving ribbon has oblique-hemmed ends, resulting in one edge being longer than the other, and measures approximately 80 inches long on one side and 77.5 inches long on the other. It is approximately 4 inches wide. These dimensions appear to fit the proportions on Washington’s roughly 6-foot-2 frame, as depicted in Peale’s various paintings. As with most eighteenth-century moiré ribbons, it is woven to be self-finished at the edges, rather than cut and hemmed. The bottom edges of the ribbon have been folded and sewn in a triangle shape to the back of the ribbon’s length. The two pairs (or a set) of polished steel hardware clasps at the ends of the ribbon allow these two oblique edges to face each other in parallel and fall in a cupped shape, pointing up and outward from the hip, as depicted in several of Peale’s full-figure paintings of Washington as general (fig. 2).

The extant ribbon holds enormous potential for students of American military and political culture during the American Revolution, as well as of eighteenth-century American art history. Yet the ribbon has been largely ignored by both scholarly communities. The chief works on Washington’s military equipment have detailed Washington’s use of his ribbon but have not discussed the ribbon in the Harvard collection or any similar to it. It appears that only two print publications have included photographs of the Peabody ribbon. The first was a book dedicated not to Washington or to Peale as an artist, but to the history of Peale’s museum. Charles Coleman Sellers’ Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art provided a single black and white image. Sellers provided no analysis of the object itself to evaluate the possibility or likelihood that it could date to the Revolutionary War. Nor did he examine the wear on the ribbon, to determine whether it showed signs of being actually worn. The other publication is Tangible Things (2014) by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, Sarah J. Schechner, and Sarah Anne Carter, with photographs by Samantha S. B. van Gerbig. This book examines the ribbon as part of a broader discussion about the history and practices of museum categorization at Harvard.

I became aware of the ribbon in 2011, when Ulrich, Gaskell, Schechner and Carter included it in their Harvard exhibit on curatorship, also called Tangible Things, which became the basis for their book. The exhibit and book have aptly called attention to the dangers of categorization by museums. By mixing items from Harvard’s many separate museums into composite rooms, the authors show the ways institutional and collecting categories can impede scholarly and public exploration of objects. The Peabody ribbon associated with Washington turns out to be an excellent case study of how object categories established by museums and academia can mask as much as they reveal. The history of Washington’s ribbon as a museum object reveals something of Americans’ troubled relationship with their Revolutionary past as a subject of historical or ethnographic study, and the complex implications of identifying a Washington object with either field. As an alleged “relic” of Washington, the ribbon had a significance that did not fit easily into these categories. Attending to the physical ribbon object at the Peabody Museum allows us to better understand this complexity in part by weighing the likelihood that the Washington association is accurate. An examination of the object’s appearance, manufacturing process, and exact depiction in period portraits supports the Washington story as a true one. In turn, this close analysis allows a better insight into the technology and symbolism of the ribbon in Washington’s own time, and the conditions and contexts of its subsequent exhibitions.

The appearances and disappearances of Washington’s sash as part of his uniform during the war, and in the memory and scholarship on his generalship and portraiture, reveals various cultural meanings the sash acquired, first as a display of authority during the Revolution and later as a museum object in the two centuries since. Reading the ribbon alongside the work of eighteenth-century uniform historians James L. Kochan and Rene Chartrand suggest explanations for some of these appearances and disappearances. A close scrutiny of the surviving ribbon for its construction details supports its identity as very likely the one depicted in Peale’s painting, while raising the question of what its relative obscurity says about its changing cultural significance since the eighteenth century. Tracing the history of the ribbon since the nineteenth century argues that its obscurity in the twentieth and twenty-first owes more to the way American museums have evolved and categorized their material over the past two centuries than to possible concerns about the ribbon’s authenticity.

“A Ribband to distinguish myself”

When General Washington arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take control of the Continental Army on July 3, 1775, few American soldiers took notice. Despite the mythology of a grand parade and review of the whole American army at Cambridge Common, Washington’s inauguration as commander-in-chief appears to have been quite an understated affair. Nineteenth-century historians and lithographers turned the scene into a great event, and locals in Cambridge anointed a tree on Cambridge Common as the “Washington Elm,” claiming its shade as the exact spot of Washington’s fateful first salute by the whole army. In reality, few soldiers noted Washington’s arrival in their diaries, and soldier diarists instead wrote some version of a common quotidian entry for boring days in camp: “nothing remarkable today.”

Though Washington would soon achieve stature and recognition befitting his rank, most of his troops in 1775 were New Englanders with habits that seemed quite foreign to him, including what he considered an insufficient respect for and deference to their officers. Washington saw these cultural problems exacerbated by the fact that few of the men recognized their general officers, and the makeshift uniforms of his immediate subordinates made it difficult for them to obtain the instant responsiveness to orders necessary for the maintenance of military discipline.

Washington attempted to solve this problem by introducing a system of identifying officers by silk ribbons. In early July, shortly after his arrival in Cambridge camp, Washington noted his purchase of “a Ribband to distinguish myself” for three shillings and four pence. In his General Orders for July 20, 1775 Washington announced that a system of color-coded ribbons would designate his general officers. As commander-in-chief, he would have “a light blue Ribband, wor[n] across his breast, between his Coat and Waistcoat.” The other general officers would wear different colors, “The Majors and Brigadier General,” being distinguished “by a Pink Ribband wore in the like manner,” the aides-de-camp “by a green ribband.” While Washington “recommended” in the same orders that “both Officers and men” should “make themselves acquainted with the persons of all the Officers in General Command,” he suggested that they rely on the system of “ribbands” “in the mean time to prevent mistakes.”

James Kochan, an authority on eighteenth-century uniforms and former director of collections at Mount Vernon Ladies Association, has argued that Washington’s choice of the blue color in his uniform alluded to the traditional colors of the Whig party in England, buff and blue. Washington’s use of a blue base color and buff lapel facings and cuffs for his coat, and buff small clothes, waistcoat and breeches, supports this argument. However, his choice of a moiré ribbon material for his generals’ decorations requires further explanation.

While Washington did not record the sources of his inspiration for this system, ribbons of moiré, or watered silk, were an established European method for distinguishing very high ranking aristocrats and some military officers. In France, the Bourbon monarch wore a blue watered-silk ribbon over the right shoulder, in much the same position as Washington’s. Contemporary portraits of Peter the Great of Russia and George III of England likewise show those monarchs wearing a blue silk ribbon.

In Europe, blue ribbons often denoted royalty, but, as Rene Chartrand of Parks Canada has noted, in France the Bourbons shared their distinction of blue silk moiré ribbons only with their highest-ranking military marshalls and lords. A contemporary painting by Pierre-Hubert Subleyras (1699-1749) depicts the granting of one of these awards by the Duke of Saint-Aignan to Prince Vaini on September 15, 1737, as a kind of classical apotheosis, the dukes and princes surrounded by cherubic and angelic figures approving the ceremony, as if a sacramental blessing. In England, blue and red watered-silk ribbons served as distinctions for Lords of the Order of the Bath and Order of the Garter.

Through the war, few Americans seem to have objected to the use of a garment so closely associated with monarchy and aristocracy by the commander-in-chief of the Continent’s republican army. Nor did British officers apparently see any opportunity for lampooning Washington’s pretense, or any inconsistency of the decoration for a republican soldier. Descriptions of Washington’s uniform in the early years of the war from both sides make no editorial comment about the ribbon and sometimes do not mention it at all. Benjamin Thompson, a loyalist officer who spent time observing the American Army at the Siege of Boston, noted this new system of the marks of distinction among the Continental general officers during the siege:

The Commander-in-Chief wears a wide blue ribbon between his coat and waistcoat, over the right shoulder and across the breast; Major Generals a pink ribbon in the same manner; Brigadier Generals a [blank] ribbon; and all Aids-du-camp a green one; all Field Officers wear red, pink, or scarlet cockades; Captains, yellow or buff cockades; and Subalterns, green ones.

Bostonian Joshua Green, who was still a schoolboy during the siege, got some of the details mixed up in his own narrative of the siege, but captured the basics of the new system of the “Distinction of ye different ranks of ye Officers in ye Continental Army undr. Genl. Washington”:

For ye. General a black cockade & a broad scarlet ribbon from ye. left shoulder to ye. right hip but being under ye. coat is seen only across his breast. Major General a blk cockade wth. a purple ribbon as above. Aid de camps, a blue. Colo:, Lt: Colo:, & Major a scarlet cockade. Captains a yellow cockade. First & Secd: Lieuts: a green.

It is unclear whether Washington wore his ribbon on all occasions or only for special ceremonies. It is also uncertain whether he regularly wore it in combat, though it would certainly have been useful in helping identify the commander on the field. American Army surgeon James Thacher did not mention the ribbon in either his 1775 or 1778 descriptions of Washington’s uniform. Instead, he described “His uniform dress” as “a blue coat, with two brilliant epaulettes, buff-colored under-clothes, and a three-cornered hat, with a black cockade.”

American troops appear to have felt comfortable with demonstrations of hierarchy and even suggestions of aristocracy in the Continental Army. This supports Caroline Cox’s claim that honor and gentility were not inconsistent with the principles of the Continental soldier, but rather central to them.

The French alliance seems to have introduced new concerns about the decoration. In the years after the Revolutionary War, rumors circulated that Washington had received the rank of marshall in the French army as part of his rank in command of the allied French and American armies. In the opinion of nineteenth-century historian Charles Henry Hart, the resemblance of Washington’s ribbon to the blue moiré silk decorations of French officers likely encouraged the confusion. Possibly the confusion grew with a ceremony held by the French Army in the Hudson Valley on March 6, 1781, described by French officer Louis-Alexandre Berthier as a parade “where he was rendered the honors of a Marshall of France,” though this appears to have been a term for distinctions granted by a marshall, rather than the actual achievement of a marshall’s rank.

Whatever the source of these rumors, the timing of Washington’s phasing out of his ribbon from his uniform suggests that the presence of French officers and aristocrats in the allied army increased scrutiny on the allusions and implied pretenses of Washington’s attire. As James Kochan has noted, the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, a French officer serving in America, expressed unease about the ribbon that suggests he considered it too aristocratic or monarchical. Barbé-Marbois wrote with relief in 1779 that Washington’s uniform “is exactly like that of his soldiers.” But he noted that “Formerly, on solemn occasions, that is to say on days of battle, he wore a large blue ribbon, but he has given up that unrepublican distinction.”

It remains unclear how much Barbé-Marbois’ comment reflected a more widespread objection to Washington’s use of the ribbon. Kochan’s argument suggests that the French pushed Americans toward more consistency between their republican principles and dress, perhaps an indication of the way the alliance with the Bourbon monarchy ironically made Americans more aware of their republican symbolism. Charles Henry Hart’s work suggests that it was actually Americans’ discomfort with the French, rather than their placating French tastes, that put pressure on Washington to reconstitute his uniform.

The survival of the blue ribbon in the Peabody Museum allows a close scrutiny of these social and political implications of Washington’s garment. A comparison of the images of the ribbon in Peale’s paintings with the surviving object presents a compelling case that the Harvard ribbon is the exact object depicted by Peale in his portraits of Washington, and likely the one worn by Washington during the war.

The Harvard Ribbon of Moiré Silk

The ribbon at Harvard has foxing from exposure to air or water and a few brownish stains that may be small burn marks, but it still retains the impressive luster and strong warp and weft of moiré silk. It was meant to impress, and it still does (fig. 3).

Creating moiré, or watered silk, in the eighteenth century required an elaborate process of pulleys and weights. The shimmer and ripple of the fabric did not occur naturally in silk. Rather, as Florence Montgomery has explained in her book Textiles in America, they were a kind of scar created by rubbing the ribbed silk fabric against itself when placed under between sixty and 100 tons of pressure. Silk manufacturers would dampen the silk, fold it into even segments, and then roll huge blocks of stone over it. Under the enormous pressure, the ribbed fabric crushed unevenly as the facing sides pushed against their ribbed surfaces, lightening some areas more than others. The force of this deliberate crushing resulted in a pattern that resembled the broken surface of water when rippling in wind or hit with a stone, with each pressing creating a unique pattern.

Contemporary depictions of the process for pressing a watered pattern into silk appear in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers (1751-1780). The Encyclopédie showed that the French and English generally used slightly different methods for producing the force necessary to squeeze the fabric. The French method included a large mill-wheel-like device attached to a giant collection of blocks (fig. 4). The English method used a lateral wheel probably turned by animals (fig. 5). Both devices moved blocks across rollers. The silk was folded and wrapped between the rollers and another piece of cloth, and then placed under the blocks for pressing.

The ribbon attributed to Washington at Harvard is very likely not French, and more likely English-made. Though he noted his purchase of his ribbon shortly after he arrived in Cambridge, in 1775, at that time no American manufacturer is known to have had the capacity to create moiré silks. In the eighteenth century, there were various royal and national systems of measurement used in Europe and America. The Washington ribbon at Harvard fits English units better than other contemporary standards with a width of almost exactly four inches at most points of measure. It varies in width at a few points from 3 and 15/16 to 4 and 1/16 inches, likely due to the effects of pressing during the creation of its watering pattern as well as stretching and wear during its use. French manufacturers used Paris royal inches, which were approximately 1.068 times the size of an English inch, meaning a four-inch ribbon in Paris royal measures would measure 4.272 English inches. Because the ribbon’s measurements fit English units so closely, it is likely English-made.

A third engraving from Diderot’s Encyclopédie shows the method for winding a silk ribbon around one of the rollers for pressing (fig. 6). The Washington ribbon at Harvard shows evidence of this process. The depiction in Diderot shows the ribbon folded in a slight zigzag pattern and then wrapped around the roller. Other processes lay the ribbon accordion-like in a pile and then rolled or pressed it. Both processes left a series of permanent fold lines at regular intervals across the ribbon.

The Washington ribbon at Harvard has six of these permanent fold lines and these are roughly perpendicular to the edges, indicating the ribbon was probably pressed using the accordion and not the zigzag folding. Five of these permanent folds are roughly evenly spaced at lengths of between 15 and 5/32 inches and 15 and 9/32 inches (38.5 centimeters and 38.8 centimeters). One of these lines is partly folded under one of the obliquely hemmed edges. The farthest line on the opposite edge of the ribbon is only a few inches from the edge of the ribbon, where the ribbon was cut and then hemmed back. The exact measured distance of this line from the ends are: 3.5 inches from the long side of the oblique hem line and 2 and 3/8 inches from the shorter side. This final fold line provides a helpful clue to further substantiating it as the ribbon likely depicted in some of Peale’s Washington portraits.

In Peale’s 1779 painting of George Washington at Princeton, commissioned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Executive Council, the front of the ribbon is visible from just below Washington’s right breast to the bottom where its two edges attached at his hip (fig. 7). Peale’s work shows four folds across the width of the ribbon. The top and bottom of these are straighter and deeper than the center two. These upper and lower folds are probably Peale’s effort at showing the permanent fold marks on the ribbon.

Identifying these folds as matching those on the surviving ribbon in the Peabody Museum speaks to Peale’s exactitude and skill in depicting the fabrics of Washington’s uniform. Understanding Peale’s precision allows us to further consider a greater degree of likelihood that Harvard’s ribbon is in fact the one in the Peale painting. The lowest fold line on Washington’s ribbon in the painting lies a few inches from the bottom front edge of the ribbon. It appears to be perhaps an inch or two more distant than what may be the same fold line in the original surviving ribbon at Harvard. However, the distance of that final line in the painting and on the original ribbon is too similar to be easily thought a coincidence. Assuming the fold line that is 3.5 inches from one of the oblique edges on the Peabody ribbon is on the side that Washington wore on his front, the lines on the front-facing side of the Peabody ribbon and those portrayed by Peale are remarkably close. It would be surprising if a nineteenth-century reproduction or replaced ribbon not only showed signs of this eighteenth-century technology, but showed such close similarities in the spacing pattern.

The method of attaching the edges of the original ribbon lends further support to the claim that it is a late eighteenth-century object and is consistent with the construction details shown in the Peale image. As mentioned before, Peale shows the ribbon as a continuous loop where the base is at Washington’s hip and the top over his shoulder, between his coat and waistcoat. It is not crossed at the bottom, like the sashes of later fraternal organizations.

The extant ribbon shows how the effect of a continuous loop was achieved by linking the two edges. Each of the bottom edges were cut and hemmed, and then one corner was folded toward the opposite edge, like the front of a paper airplane, and then hemmed down with silk cord. This created two oppositely oblique edges that faced each other in parallel when draped over the body. To keep these together, a set of polished steel clasps faced each other at the edges. On one side of the original ribbon there are beveled twisting steel clasps that resemble a modern hiker’s carabineer (fig. 8). Erik Goldstein, curator of Mechanical Arts and Numismatics at Colonial Williamsburg, has confirmed that these clasps are consistent with those found on contemporary sword hangers, though they are of a higher grade. Opposite these two clasps on the other end are loops, cut with a beveled pattern that resembles what eighteenth-century jewelry specialists call a diamond pattern, which often appears on steel shoe buckles and other small items. The cord used to hold these metal parts in place is also silk, and consistent with eighteenth-century construction.

The watered pattern of Washington’s moiré silk surely presented a challenge for any artist, but the survival of Washington’s ribbon demonstrates Peale’s extraordinary talents as a precise illustrator of light and fabric. Patterns in silks of this type appear to move or slightly change shape in light. They would also have been unique on each ribbon, like a snowflake or fingerprint. A 1758 dictionary noted the effect of this silk on contemporary science. Watered silk, the entry on related tabby fabrics in Barrow’s dictionary, “furnishes the modern philosophers with a strong proof, that the colours are nothing but appearances.”

The pattern of watering shown in Peale’s portrait of Washington has enough detail to allow a comparison with the patterning in the surviving ribbon at Harvard. Though the pattern is not exact, certain similarities appear that suggest both are the same ribbon. For instance, a series of five rising arches of watered lines above the second fold line appear at Washington’s mid-chest. A similar pattern appears on the part of the Peabody example that would likely have lain in approximately this location when worn (the clasps and the cornered hemlines make it possible to distinguish the front from the back of the ribbon). This would not be the case with every similar ribbon. The back of the Harvard example, for instance, shows a completely different pattern than that on the front or that shown in the Peale painting. These similarities cannot be conclusive without additional efforts to display the ribbon in differing lights and positions, but they do suggest the possibility that Peale was looking at this ribbon and made a deliberate effort to show the shapes in its watering pattern.

Why does it matter if this is indeed Washington’s ribbon, and in fact the one depicted by Peale? While we may doubt the desire to authenticate as a naïve grasping for certainty in the midst of historical ambiguities, establishing the identity of a historical object does more than feed emotions. It provides a new source for scholarship, a new set of questions. If Washington in fact wore this ribbon, it is one of a very small group of textiles known to have survived from his Revolutionary War uniform. Two of his epaulettes survive in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Another set of his epaulettes are in the Smithsonian Collection. Mount Vernon also owns two red silk waist sashes of a military uniform that belonged to Washington, though it remains unclear whether he or anyone else used either of them during the Revolutionary War. Though the Smithsonian Collections include a Washington uniform, it appears to date to sometime after the war. As an object that Washington wore during the 1775-1779 period, the ribbon may enhance our understanding of how Washington constructed his authority in the early years of the Revolutionary War. Its survival offers a chance to explore changes in the memory of Washington and the Revolutionary War.

The wear and stain patterns on the original ribbon at Harvard clearly confirm that the ribbon was indeed worn. The center of the ribbon bears two darkened and slightly browned areas, probably from either side of his shoulder. Washington’s orders for generals to wear their ribbons under their uniform coats would result in staining in the comparable location on the ribbon. The hardware hooks and eyes at the base of the ribbon have slightly abraded the areas of silk directly nearby. The damage is not as great as might be expected for a garment worn every day. The limited damage around these metal pieces may substantiate the French officers’ description of Washington reserving the ribbon for battles and ceremonies. The bevels on these pieces were designed to minimize the damage to the cloth from rubbing, and the polished steel would have prevented rusting. Washington’s surviving ribbon reflects a high quality of fabric and hardware to fit his rank. Peale’s effort to depict its sheen and drape speaks to the importance of this accoutrement in establishing his authority.

Given Peale’s clear effort to carefully document the moiré ribbon, its disappearance from some of his later copies of the Princeton painting may reflect his changing understanding of the fabric’s symbolism after 1779. In Peale’s 1784 painting of George Washington at the Battle of Princeton, which now hangs at Princeton University, Peale left the ribbon out. While that 1784 example may have simply reflected the fact that Washington stopped using the ribbon in 1779, the example at Yale University Art Gallerysuggests a more deliberate wiping out of the ribbon from the memory of Washington’s leadership. In this version a faint line of blue beneath Washington’s waistcoat may indicate the presence of a ribbon that has been painted out. If this is the case, the ribbon in the Yale painting has quite literally disappeared (fig. 9).

What accounts for Washington’s disappearing ribbon? As a piece of Washington’s uniform that he likely wore for battles and ceremonies between 1775 and 1779, the ribbon should have had enormous appeal to those in subsequent generations who sought to venerate Washington through witness relics of his patriotic actions. So why has the ribbon received relatively little attention? Some history of American museums may provide a clue.

The Peale Museum Provenance

When Peale scholar and descendant Charles Coleman Sellers sought to explain the obscurity of Washington’s ribbon, he noted that Peale himself had “never thought of placing it in a natural history museum.” This seems at least an exaggeration, since Peale did include images of Washington and other founders in his museum. However, the ribbon has had a relatively quiet existence given its significance. Sellers seems partly right in attributing the limited attention it received to its placement in collections focused on natural history and later ethnography and anthropology.

When Harvard University received the ribbon in 1899, according to Sellers, the staff at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology did not immediately accession it. They sent it on loan to the Old South Society of Boston, a group focused on preserving the history of Boston with a particular focus on the Revolution. When the Old South Society returned the ribbon in 1978, according to Sellers, it received “a cool welcome” at Harvard. Around the time that the ribbon returned to Harvard, the original Peale museum label was lost.

Though Sellers did not live to see it, Harvard loaned the ribbon in 1981 to the Museum of Our National Heritage and in 1992 to a traveling exhibit of Peale’s museum artifacts sponsored by the American Association of Museums. However no image or mention appeared in the catalog. It appeared again in Harvard’s 2011 Tangible Things exhibit.

For Sellers, the separation of artifacts into categories of “history” and “archaeology and ethnology” accounted for the ribbon having no glory in its adopted institution. While Sellers may have exaggerated the extent to which Peale and Harvard made this distinction, these categorizations do have a history that at least partly directed the ribbon’s stewardship, and partly explain its various appearances and disappearances in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The history of the ribbon in the generations following the Revolution raises a number of questions about how Peale and other members of his generation and those that followed in the mid-nineteenth century understood the boundaries between the proper methods for chronicling the history of the American Revolution, and those for studying the history and lives of people they considered outside their community, including in many cases Native Americans and African Americans.

According to Sellers and Harvard’s own records, the original Peale museum label that accompanied the ribbon read “Washington’s Sash. Presented by Himself” (most nineteenth-century sources describe the object as a “sash,” though Washington never described it as anything but a ribbon). Sellers believed this meant that the ribbon/sash was given by Washington to Peale as a prop for paintings, rather than as a museum object.

By the 1830s, after Peale’s death in 1827, his children inherited the museum and apparently answered the rising demand for Revolutionary relics, largely following Lafayette’s return to America in 1824, with new displays of these objects, including the ribbon. Sellers found that the first mention of the ribbon/sash in the museum is from an 1832 account of Philadelphia written by Edward Thomas Coke, a British Army officer who had traveled through the United States while on furlough. Coke provided a description of the case that held the sash and the surrounding objects that captures the continued segregation of objects associated with European colonization and revolution in the New World from the story of Native peoples, African Americans, Pacific Islanders, or any of the other groups whose objects the museum displayed:

Among the objects of curiosity are Washington’s sash, presented by himself, an obelisk of wood from the elm tree under which Penn made his treaty with the Indians in 1680, and a manuscript poem of Major Andre’s, written but two months previous to his execution. It is a satire upon the failure of General Wayne, in an expedition which he commanded for the purpose of collecting cattle for the American army; it is entitled the “Cow Chase” and the first stanza is copied almost literally from the old English Ballad of “Chevy Chase.”

Of course, even in this description, the artificial boundary between different types of history, or different “types” of people, required careful management. As Coke’s description unconsciously acknowledged, the objects of Penn’s treaty were also objects of Indian history. Yet they could be categorized alongside Washington’s sash by emphasizing that Penn was the actor in the story, and the Indians only its object: “the elm tree under which Penn made his treaty with the Indians.”

Though Sellers explained the absence of Washington’s sash/ribbon from the Peale museum as an expression of Peale’s narrow categorizations, in some ways Peale and the other members of his generation had a less defined distinction between natural and historical objects, or between the methods of histories and ethnographies, than their descendants. As Peale museum historian David R. Brigham has pointed out, Peale did include objects demonstrating Native American and African American contributions to the American Revolution. He made sure, though, to frame these objects as expressions of natural hierarchy, with white gentlemen like himself at the top. The museum displayed, for example, a bow and arrow of Jambo, an African prince and then slave to Colonel Jacob Motte of South Carolina, and described their use in a confrontation between the American and British armies during the Revolutionary War. “In this context,” Brigham writes, “the African artifacts exemplified collective success.” They emphasized that in Peale’s museum, “harmony of purpose was valued above difference.” Likewise, Peale’s early museum efforts combined his cabinets of “natural” curiosities with galleries dedicated to his portraits of those he considered important and inspiring revolutionaries.

Though Peale’s museum certainly confronted visitors with a powerful message supporting racial, class, and other forms of hierarchy, in some ways his generation did not yet have the idea of a clear distinction between objects of their own Revolutionary history and those of “others” that more often became the province of ethnography in the nineteenth century. Peale’s own collecting, for example, may have included purchases from perhaps the earliest American “cabinet of curiosities” to include historical objects from the American Revolution, the collection of Swiss emigrant and Philadelphia artist Pierre Eugène du Simitière. Du Simitière had avidly sought items from the colonial and Revolutionary history of the thirteen states during the American War for Independence. His 1782 advertisement announcing the public display of his collection promoted it as “the first American museum.” In his list of objects and categories, he included his display of European weapons and utensils alongside similar items from Africa and the “Indians of the West Indies, and the North American Indians.” He distinguished this area as focused on “artificial curiosities,” and separated it from natural ones, like shells and botany. Within his “artificial” category, du Simitière separated objects by continent and culture, suggesting an effort to balance comprehensiveness of coverage with the segregation of people he saw as different and other.

Philip Freneau, the Philadelphia poet, provided a similar reflection on the permeable boundary between history of “settled” European-American communities and the ethnography of peoples more commonly described in travelogues. In 1784, he warned buyers of a French officer’s war journal he had translated and edited that they would find a type of writing more familiarly applied to Western tales of Indian life applied by the Frenchman to areas of European-American settlement he had witnessed during the war. But Freneau urged his readers to celebrate the “philosophical” writer.

Given the ambiguities in the Revolutionary Americans’ understanding of the proper ways to categorize their own objects in museums or private collections, some other possible explanations for Peale’s excluding the ribbon become more plausible. It is possible that Peale treasured the sash too much as a personal memento of his former commander to display it in his museum. Perhaps more likely, the continuing confusion between the sash and decorations of monarchs and French military officers may account for Peale giving the item little publicity during Washington’s life. In the years after the Revolutionary War, Washington publicly corrected the rumors in the press; writing to poet Aeneas Lamont in 1785 that “I am not a marshall of France, nor do I hold any office under that government or any other whatever.” The rise of the French Revolution during his presidential administration likely made these mistaken associations with the ribbon even more dangerous. Washington carefully managed his image to avoid any appearance of equating the presidency with monarchy, or of seeming to favor or be beholden to any foreign power. The ribbon might have endangered either carefully held position.

While Peale may have had a variety of reasons for keeping the ribbon off display, subsequent owners revealed a great deal of their own thoughts about race and history in their choices for how to display it. After Peale’s museum finally dissolved in 1849, the objects were sold through a “sheriff’s sale” auction, with the lion’s share going to a partnership of Moses Kimball, the founder of the Boston Museum, and Phineas T. Barnum, the famous showman. The catalog for the sale categorized the objects by room: “Birds…Insects…Marine Life…” and region for most objects of human origin: “Africa…American Indian…China…Northwest Coast, Pacific, and East Indies….South America” and finally “Miscellaneous and Unidentified.” A separate category of “Historical Relics” locates Washington’s ribbon alongside other items of European construction:

2 flags taken from the British
Ancient carved chair, A.D. 1123
Ancient chair once owned by Washington.
Washington’s letter to the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania
1 case, “Washington’s Sash & various curiosities.”
“Model of Lafayette Arch and Helmets, 9 Pieces.”
Wooden model of a fortification
Anchor, Balls, and 11 Pieces of Iron.

That an “ancient” European chair dated to 1123 A.D. had more in common with Washington’s Revolutionary War ribbon than Native American objects likely used in the same conflict says a great deal about the ways Americans ordered their cultural worlds in the mid-nineteenth century. Long passages of linear time meant less than racial identity in categorizing human objects. The history of Washington’s ribbon thus displays a kind of racially defined non-linear time as an important part of American historical thinking in this period.

After roughly fifty years on display in the Boston Museum, the heirs of Moses Kimball donated Washington’s ribbon/sash to Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where it remains today, rolled on an archival tube, tied and housed in an archival box, in climate controlled storage. The ironic legacy of the Peale museum’s message of racial hierarchy has been the obscuring of an object Peale himself likely treasured, and one that figured prominently in his depiction of a man whose life exemplified, for him and other Revolutionaries, the highest capacities for human “virtue” and “civilization.” The ideals of race and society that Revolutionaries like Peale wished to propagate with his museum masked one of the great objects of his own Revolutionary moment and one of the great “relics” of Washington, the man who was, as Revolutionary General Henry Lee put it in 1799, “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his country.”

Its 2011 reappearance in Harvard’s Tangible Things exhibit on collecting and the categories of curatorship has brought it back to light. Perhaps it will prompt some new investigations into the ethnography of American collecting in the Revolutionary generation.

Acknowledgements:

I want to thank Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for stopping me in the street four years ago to tell me that she and the Tangible Things team had encountered an exciting Washington item in the Harvard collections. Over the past few months, as I have weighed evidence of the ribbon’s authenticity and sought clues to its history, I have received the generous assistance of numerous individuals, and would like to particularly thank Neal Hurst for pointing me to some of the key sources on moiré construction; Jim Mullins for encouraging me to compare the fold line distances in the Peabody ribbon and Peale’s paintings; Erik Goldstein for help with identifying the hardware; Rene Chartrand for helping me sort through the nuances of French military decorations; Linda Baumgarten and Linda Eaton for assistance in understanding the technology of watered silk, and T. Rose Holdcraft for the many hours she spent examining the sash with me, her thoughtful edits, and for providing key suggestions on how to read the patterning and compare it to the Peale paintings. Most of all, I would like to thank Ellery Foutch and Sarah Carter for their incisive editorship.

Further Reading:

The original ribbon is in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology under the accession number 979-13-10/58761. Images and catalog information can be found on the Harvard Peabody Museum Website.

Other key primary sources can be found in the Washington Papers at the Library of Congress American Memory pages. Washington’s July 14, 1775, order creating the system of ribbons can be found here. The manuscript account book entry for Washington’s purchase of his ribbon can be found here.

Three key works on Washington’s military equipment and other personal possessions capture changing attitudes toward the subject over the twentieth century. See the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, General George Washington’s Swords and Campaign Equipment: an illustrated catalog of swords and memorabilia in the Mount Vernon Collection (Mount Vernon, Va., 1944); Carol Borchert Cadou, The George Washington Collection: Fine and Decorative Arts at Mount Vernon (Manchester, Vt., 2003). (These two focus on Washington items at Mount Vernon, though they explore items elsewhere as well.) Also see James L. Kochan, “‘As plain as blue and buff could make it’: George Washington’s Uniforms as Commander-in-Chief and President, 1775-1799,” catalogue for the 44th Washington Antiques Show. Kochan and Cadou connect the study of Washington’s equipment, uniform and other objects to questions about the meaning of republicanism. The quote from Marbois criticizing Washington’s ribbon as “unrepublican” is included in Kochan’s article and Cadou’s book.

For more on the reaction of New England troops to the arrival of Washington in camp in 1775, see Justin Florence, “Minutemen for Months: The Making of an American Revolutionary Army before Washington, April 20-July 2, 1775.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 113: 1 (2003): 59-101. The quote about little going on in camp during Washington’s arrival appears in Florence’s article and is originally from Samuel Hewes, A Journal for 1775, in the Military Journal of Two Private Soldiers (Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 1855). Quotes from American Army surgeon James Thacher describing Washington’s uniform may be found in James Thacher, Military journal of the American revolution, from the commencement to the disbanding of the American army, comprising a detailed account of the principle events and battles of the revolution, with their exact dates, and a Biographical Sketch of the most Prominent Generals (Hartford, Conn., 1862). The Joshua Green and Benjamin Thompson quotes can be found in J. L. Bell’s March 12, 2012, article on his blog, Boston 1775, “Distinction of ye. different ranks of ye. Officers.” Also see his other related articles, “A Ribband to Distinguish Myself” (March 11, 2010) and “Took their Cockades from Their Hats” (March 13, 2010). For an excellent cultural analysis of hierarchy and honor in the Continental Army, see Caroline Cox, A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington’s Army (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004).

For more on the French perceptions of Washington’s ribbon and rank among French officers, see Charles Henry Hart, “Peale’s Original Whole-Length Portrait of Washington, a Plea for Exactness in Historical Writings,” The Annual Report of the American Historical Association I (1896): 189-200. For a French officer’s description of the ceremony in which Washington received “marshall’s honors,” see Louis-Alexandre Berthier, journal entry for March 6, 1781, in Howard C. Rice, Jr., and Anne S.K. Brown, transl., eds.,The American Campaigns of Rochambeau’s Army 1780, 1781, 1782, 1783 (Princeton, N.J., 1972). Conversations by e-mail with Rene Chartrand in June 2014 clarified for me the role of the ribbons in the French service.

For more on textile technology, see Florence M. Montgomery, Textiles in America, 1650-1870, (New York, 2007). Also see John Barrow, Dictionarium Polygraphicum, 2 vols. (London, 1758). Montgomery’s description of the process is still helpful, though new research has showed her description of the process of creating moiré as involving a molecular change in the fabric is incorrect.

Paris royal inch measurements for the eighteenth century are taken from William Croker, Thomas Williams and Samuel Clark, The Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, 1765), accessed online at Google books. I am grateful to Steve Rayner for pointing me to this source.

The primary material quoted in the discussion of ethnological collecting among Revolutionary Americans are: Abbe Robin, New Travels through North-America: In a Series of Letters, Philip Freneau, trans. (Boston, 1784); du Simitière, “American Museum” (broadside), 1782, accessed online at America’s Historical Imprints. For more on the history of Peale’s museum, see Paul Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic (Washington, 1995).

The quote “first in war…” is from Henry Lee, A Funeral Oration in Honor of the Memory of George Washington, Late General of the Armies of the United States (New Haven, 1800), accessed online at America’s Historical Imprints.

For more on the history of the Peale collection in the hands of the Kimball family, see Castle McLaughlin, Arts of Diplomacy: Lewis & Clark’s Indian Collection (Seattle, 2003). Also, for more on the history of Washington’s ribbon in the Peale and Kimball museums and at Harvard, see Charles Coleman Sellers, Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York, 1980). An excellent overview of the history of the Peale museum can be found in the exhibit catalog, William T. Alderson et al, Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastadons: The Emergence of the American Museum (Washington, D.C., 1992). This was the exhibit that displayed the ribbon, though there is no image of the ribbon in the catalog itself.

For more on du Simitière as a collector, see Mairin Odle, “Buried in Plain Sight: Indian ‘Curiosities’ in du Simitière’s American Museum,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Volume 135, No. 4 (October 2012): 499-502.

For more on the various combinations of uniform accouterments Peale used in his full-length portraits of Washington, see Graham Hood, “Easy, Erect, and Noble,” CW Journal, Summer 2002.

For more on the ribbon in the context of Harvard’s current collections, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, Sara Schechner, Sarah Anne Carter, and Samantha van Gerbig, Tangible Things: Making History through Objects (Oxford, 2015).

Full-length portraits of Washington by Peale are in the collections of the United States Senate; the Yale University Art Gallery; Colonial Williamsburg; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Princeton University Art Museum. The original Peale painting of Washington at Princeton belongs to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Another version sold at Christie’s Auction house in 2006.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Philip C. Mead is historian and curator of the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. He received his PhD in history from Harvard University in 2012. His dissertation, “Melancholy Landscapes: Writing Warfare in Revolutionary America,” examined the role of diary-writing conventions and wartime travel descriptions in shaping American Revolutionary soldiers’ definitions of civility and barbarism and the boundaries of family, local, and national belonging in the early American republic.

St. Louis confronts an icon of slavery, 1857-2007

Where was Dred Scott Way? St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Jake Wagman pondered the question as he walked through downtown St. Louis in May 2007. “Famed broadcaster Jack Buck has his way, bowling great Dick Weber has his lane and comedian Dick Gregory has his place,” Wagman wrote, as he stopped to consider the avenues of St. Louis history at a bench overlooking Mark McGwire Highway. “In a city that loves to name streets for its famous citizens,” Wagman wrote, “it has taken well over a century for Dred Scott—whose struggles helped shape the nation—to get any consideration.”

On March 6, 1857, in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Dred, Harriet, and their daughters Eliza and Lizzie would remain slaves. In words painful though familiar, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that all of American history regarded “the class of persons who had been imported as slaves [and] their descendants . . . so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Even when the Scotts were emancipated on May 26, 1857, they remained prisoners of the Dred Scott case, symbols of a moment when the noose of slavery tightened.

In March 2007, Dred Scott made national news again. On its 150th anniversary, the decision was protested in ceremonies and performances, repudiated by Missouri justices, and mourned at a gathering of Scott descendents. And in May 2007, a ceremony less noted but more momentous occurred on Fourth Street, just outside the Old Courthouse in St. Louis. The approval came in time: on the 150th anniversary of the Scott family’s emancipation, descendents and city council members celebrated together as the street was renamed Dred Scott Way.

The Dred Scott case is universally known. High school students are taught how to properly disparage it and to understand its role in causing the Civil War. Legal theorist Derrick Bell has called the Dred Scott case “the most frequently overturned decision in history,” given its subsequent denunciations by many courts. Yet repudiating the case did not always mean freeing the participants from its burden. For over a century, the Scotts themselves were little noted by the political and legal theorists who debated the Dred Scott case. The details of their lives were forgotten even in St. Louis, where they struck out for freedom. But one hundred fifty years later, the Scott family has been recovered, thanks to the actions of their descendents, African American leaders, activists, and historians, all determined to see Dred Scott and his family remembered in St. Louis and the nation.

The man known as Dred Scott—a name he adopted later—was born into slavery around 1799 in Virginia. By adolescence, he was held by the Blow family, who moved him with their other possessions into Alabama and then Missouri. After the death of the family patriarch Peter Blow, Scott was sold to Dr. John Emerson, a U.S. Army surgeon, who in 1833 transferred from Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis to the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois and then to Fort Snelling in what is now Minnesota. These moves made the case: Scott had been brought into a state and then a federal territory where slavery was prohibited.

Dred Scott did not intend to become famous. When he and Harriet Robinson Scott (a Pennsylvania-born slave he had met and married at Fort Snelling) filed for freedom in 1846—each signing Missouri court documents with an “X,” the only remnant in their own hands—they did not see their petitions as test cases. For decades, the legal precedent in Missouri directed judges to set slaves free who could prove, with white witnesses, that they had been brought to reside in free territories or states. The first jury to hear the Scotts’ case was told to ignore some of their key evidence and so the Scotts lost; after a new trial was granted, the second jury found for them in 1850.

Yet in 1852, on appeal, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in Scott v. Emerson for Dr. Emerson’s widow—despite the fact that she no longer resided in Missouri. Newly elected with a proslavery mandate, the justices could not have been clearer about their reasoning: “Times now are not as they were when the former decisions on this subject were made,” the majority opinion read. When the Scotts’ lawyers refiled in federal court, it was Irene Emerson’s brother, the fur trader and railroad executive John F. A. Sanford, who became the defendant. As the case made its way to the Supreme Court, a clerk misspelled Sanford’s name, hence the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. Sandford.

When the decision was made, a few newspaper reporters sought out Dred Scott, finding his alley address in St. Louis. Their legwork affords the faintest glimpse of the man whose name the infamous decision immortalized. The reporters revealed Dred Scott had been married once before, but the marriage was disrupted when his wife was sold. The couple had had two sons, though both were dead. The articles also attested to the Scotts’ long struggle to keep the family together, first by offering to purchase their own freedom from Irene Emerson and only then by petitioning for manumission. But the reporters performed their greatest service in allowing Dred Scott himself to speak. The prolonged nature of the case had provided him “a ‘heap o’ trouble,’ he [Scott] says, and if he had known that ‘it was gwine to last so long,’ he would not have brought it.” In the final sentence, the reporter said Scott believed “he could make thousands of dollars, if allowed, by traveling over the country and telling who he is.”

The briefest words from Dred Scott add to the haunting power of his only known image. A month after Taylor Blow purchased the Scotts in order to free them, a correspondent for Leslie’s Illustrated coaxed the family into the local photography studio. The resulting daguerreotypes served as the basis for engravings on the front cover of the newsmagazine (figs. 1-3). The family appeared dignified but without joy, their frustrations displayed in slow exposure. Speaking with Harriet Scott, and raising the possibility of her husband touring the nation with his story, the Leslie’s reporter elicited a rebuke: “Why don’t white man ‘tend to his business, and let dat nigger ‘lone?” the dialect depiction read. Harriet Scott was adamant that her husband would stay home and that “she’d always been able to yarn her own livin, thank God.” No more would be heard: Dred Scott died on September 17, 1858, after less than sixteen months of freedom. He was buried in St. Louis’s Wesleyan cemetery, with expenses paid by Henry T. Blow. Dred Scott’s story would have to be told by others.

When Dred Scott died, the New York Timesnoted his passage with a column-length obituary. “Few men who have achieved greatness have won it so effectually as this black champion,” the editors declared, and certainly “the adverse decision [Scott] encountered here will . . . meet with reversal” as Scott “carried his case to the Supreme Court above.” Despite the constant invocation of his name and his court case before and during the Civil War, Dred Scott’s grave remained unmarked, even after Taylor Blow arranged for reinterment at Calvary Cemetery on November 27, 1867. In line with the growing segregationist sentiment, Scott’s remains were placed near the center of two plots, so no white St. Louisans need spend eternity shoulder to shoulder with any African American, no matter how famous. When Harriet Scott died on June 17, 1876, she was buried in the Greenwood Cemetery, and her grave too was unmarked.

Despite their anonymity in burial, the Scotts remained notable to a small number of white St. Louisans. In 1882, Mary L. Barnum, whose husband had owned the hotel where Dred Scott had worked, commissioned Scott’s portrait for the Missouri Historical Society. For the dedication of the portrait, the Historical Society turned to James Milton Turner, a St. Louis County freedman who had been the Grant administration’s ambassador to Liberia. The dedication of this portrait, Turner argued, demonstrated “the strict impartiality of all true history,” integrating the story of how “the Negro has been with us . . . from the very beginning of the history of our State, and, indeed, of the nation itself.” Turner hoped this commemoration would be “another olive branch from the strong, gracefully extended to the weak.” Dred Scott became Turner’s symbol of opportunity, opening a space for racial justice.

In 1886, the St. Louis Daily Globe marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Dred Scott case by reengraving the daguerreotype images of Dred, Harriet, and Lizzie Scott and adding an image of John Madison, one of two surviving grandsons (fig. 4). Yet no quotes from Scott descendents accompanied the images. Instead, the reporter questioned Thomas C. Reynolds, a former secessionist governor of Missouri who in 1857 had been U.S. district attorney in St. Louis. “Scott was a very respected negro,” Reynolds observed, but he then said he had little memory of the actual people—including Scott—involved in Scott’s court case.

“What Became of Dred Scott?” the Globe-Democrat asked when Scott’s portrait was given a place of honor at the 1904 World’s Fair. By then, white memories of the Scott family had so eroded that all kinds of falsehoods were put forward: Dred Scott living past the Civil War; Dred Scott cooking for the Prince of Wales on his visit to St. Louis, two years after Scott’s death. These fictions colored the historical record—despite the accurate information present in the newspaper’s own past articles.

Continuing down the path of misinformation, Mary Louise Dalton, librarian of the Missouri Historical Society further altered the picture. Scott was a “no-account nigger,” she told Harper’s correspondent and amateur historian Frederick Trevor Hill, who then labeled Scott “a shiftless, incapable specimen.” (Even attempts to dignify the Scotts were tainted by caricature and distortion. Walter B. Stevens, the dean of the era’s St. Louis historians, depicted Dred Scott as “the St. Louis slave who looked like an African king.”) By 1935, Dred Scott was “shiftless and unreliable, and therefore frequently unemployed and without means to support his family.” So read Scott’s entry in the Dictionary of American Biography. Insofar as the entry says anything else about Scott, it characterizes him as merely a placeholder for the actions of others—bought by others, sold by others, freedom filed for by others, court case fought by others. Scott was an “ignorant and illiterate Negro,” the entry stated, who “comprehended little of [his case’s] significance, but signed his mark to the petition in the suit.” The memory of Dred and Harriet Scott had reached its nadir.

While white memories denigrated the Scott family, Nathan B. Young Jr. joined those African Americans searching out more truthful tales. The son of a prominent African American educator, Young had grown up in the circle of Booker T. Washington, graduated Yale Law School in 1918, and moved to St. Louis in 1927. In 1937, he published Your St. Louis and Mine, a compendium of African American history and culture in the city, that prominently featured Dred Scott and his descendants (fig. 5). Declaring that history had “paid little attention to Dred Scott as a man and pictured him as a puppet, as a simpleton,” Young insisted that Scott understood both what slavery had done to him and what his court case might do to the nation. This Dred Scott—the self-aware abolitionist—would become a hero of black activists and urban reformers.

During a 1954 conspiracy trial, Marcus A. Murphy, one-time Communist Party candidate for lieutenant governor in Missouri, declared, “I can at least speak to you as a human being.” It was “ninety-seven years ago,” Murphy said, when “another Negro stood in federal court to hear . . . that he was not a human being and had no rights which a white man was bound to respect”—repeating Taney’s exact phrase. That year the Brown v. Board of Education decision repudiated formal segregation, and Rosa Parks refused to move from her bus seat. The time had come for Dred Scott’s resurrection.

It was a genealogist, the Jesuit Father Edward Dowling, who rediscovered Scott’s gravesite in time for the centennial of the Dred Scott case in 1957 (fig. 6). Dowling spoke of a modest effort to mark the resting place. “We have in mind putting up only a simple monument,” he told the newspapers. “Then if someone some day wants to put up a better monument it will at least be known where Dred Scott lies.” On March 6, 1957, Scott’s descendants and Father Dowling joined the president of the St. Louis University Law School Student Bar Association to lay a wreath on the still-unmarked grave, following ceremonies in the Old Courthouse. When the granddaughter of Taylor Blow came forward to pay for a gravestone, one commentator, local socialist and journalist Frank P. O’Hare, worried about the symbolism. “A hundred years has not erased the ideology of the slave owners,” O’Hare charged, as forces still aligned to prevent “a monument for a slave to overtop the monument for the master.” Yet as O’Hare was writing, change was coming, with federal troops desegregating Little Rock High School.

In 1977, the originators of Negro History Week (now known as Black History Month) placed the first memorial to the Dred Scott case at St. Louis’s Old Courthouse. Scott’s great-grandson, John A. Madison, introduced his fellow Scott relatives. While working as a mail handler, Madison had studied for a law degree, preparing to argue cases, as one reporter put it, in the “courts in which Dred Scott couldn’t even sue.” Madison, who had embraced his family history as national history, also provided the invocation and created the bold program illustration, “Breaking the Chains of Slavery” (fig. 7)

In 2000 Dred and Harriet Scott’s petitions for freedom were retrieved from storage and placed on display at the main branch of the St. Louis Public Library, their “X”s speaking across history. Despite the resurgent interest in the Scotts and hundreds of other Missouri freedom petitions, only in 2006 was the true resting place of Harriet Scott finally rediscovered. A new plaque on the Old Courthouse emphasized the actions of Dred and Harriet in their own legal proceedings, and in time for the 150th anniversary of the famed court case, three novels about Dred Scott were published, two of which imagine the case from Scott’s perspective.

The effort to recover the experience of Dred and Harriet Scott continues today: Dred and Harriet Scott’s great-great-granddaughter, Lynn Jackson Madison, has founded the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation to promote anniversary events and raise money for a life-size statue of Scott at the Old Court House, the place where his case was first heard. To remember Dred, Harriet, Eliza, and Lizzie Scott is to open the door that the Dred Scott case closed and to acknowledge the universal humanity of those long held beyond the pale of citizenship or of memory. Their actions revealed injustice and hastened the end of slavery in the United States—an accomplishment well worth celebrating along Dred Scott Way (fig. 8).

Further Reading:

I thank the organizers of “The Dred Scott Case and its Legacy: Race, Law, and Equality,” a March 2007 conference at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, where an earlier version of this essay was presented. For comments and suggestions, thanks also to Bonnie Stepenoff, Jill Lepore, Ken Winn, Bob Moore, Dennis Northcutt, Molly Kodner, Sophia Lee, Caroline Sherman, Katherine Foshko, Gretchen Heefner, Theresa Runstedtler, Jenifer Van Vleck, Helen Veit, and Edward Gray.

For the Dred Scott case, the classic sources remain Walter Ehrlich, They Have No Rights: Dred Scott’s Struggle for Freedom (Westport, Conn., 1979) and Don Edward Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York, 1978). For a quick summary, see Christyn Elley, “Missouri’s Dred Scott Case, 1846-1857.”

Also see Kenneth C. Kaufman, Dred Scott’s Advocate: A Biography of Roswell M. Field (Columbia, Mo., 1996); Paul Finkelman, “The Dred Scott Case, Slavery and the Politics of Law,” Hamline Law Review 20 (Fall 1996): 1-42; Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, “Dred Scott’s Daughters: Nineteenth Century Urban Girls at the Intersection of Race and Patriarchy,” Buffalo Law Review 48 (Fall 2000): 669-701; and Mark A. Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (New York, 2006), among others.

On the Scott family themselves, the authority is Lea VanderVelde. See her article Lea VanderVelde and Sandhya Subramanian, “Mrs. Dred Scott,” The Yale Law Journal 106.4 (January 1997): 1033-1122, and keep track of her forthcoming work.

Recent events and commemorations are chronicled in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch news and editorial pages. Jake Wagman’s Post-Dispatch article “Dred Scott may join famous names on St. Louis streets,” quoted in the first paragraph of this essay, appeared on May 18, 2007. See also the exhibits and programs at the following organization’s Websites: Washington University in St. Louis Libraries, the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, and the Missouri Historical Society.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

Adam Arenson is completing a dissertation, “City of Manifest Destiny: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War, 1848-1877,” at Yale University. He will become an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso in January 2009.

Barbara McCaskill’s study of the life and work of William and Ellen Craft retells a celebrated story, but one that, as she persuasively argues, has been denied extensive and nuanced scholarly treatment precisely because of the sensational details at its core. McCaskill aims to bring into public memory important elements of the Crafts’ experience as escaped slaves and activists that have proven unassimilable within nineteenth- and twentieth-century political, pedagogical, and aesthetic paradigms. Piecing together a wide range of archival materials, Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory “decod[es] observations and reminiscences of both American and European allies and detractors in order to separate these perspectives and expectations from the possible aspirations, motivations, and opinions of the couple themselves” (11-12). As a result of her exemplary efforts, McCaskill has given us not only our richest account of the Crafts’ remarkable lives but also made a significant contribution to African American print culture broadly construed.

 Seeking to move beyond “English-speaking audiences’ assumptions about how African peoples functioned in bondage” and expectations for those who gained freedom (5), McCaskill positions her study within the African American literary and cultural recovery and revisionary work of the last fifty years. Each of the book’s four chapters is devoted to “extraordinary moments of the Crafts’ public lives of service and activism” (9). Chapter one pieces together the narrative of the Crafts’ brilliant escape from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia, during which they journeyed by land and sea, the light-skinned Ellen disguised as an invalid slave holder and William as her man servant. McCaskill’s account of the escape proceeds as a reading of multiple tellings that considers gaps in the Crafts’ own account and the specific emphases of contemporaneous versions. These critical reflections, even those that must remain in part speculative due to a lack of extant archival material, are carefully informed by historical and literary scholarship. For example, McCaskill considers the rhetorical dynamics influencing differing racial representations of the mixed-race couple. Chapter two traces how the Crafts were received and integrated into the vibrant abolitionist milieu of Boston, where they made valuable friends and from where the regional and transatlantic circulation of their escape story began in earnest. McCaskill charts how, as they began their lives beyond slavery, the Crafts had to negotiate “the good intentions of northern abolitionists” and the couple’s “willfulness and determination to chart their own direction in life” (42). Welcome attention is given here to the production of Ellen Crafts’ daguerreotype in the guise of her escape, cross-dressed as male and passing for white, an image, McCaskill notes, that unsettled “assumptions about the fixity of gender, race, normalcy, and class” as surely as it provided rhetorically potent abolitionist publicity. Chapter three concludes by recounting the Crafts’ second flight from Boston to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1850 (and shortly thereafter, to England), orchestrated by the Boston Vigilance Committee after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law.  

In England, settling once again into a welcoming abolitionist community, the Crafts produced the memoir, Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom, which McCaskill argues offers an important lens on the alliances and tensions within transatlantic abolitionist networks. Chapter three offers a careful contextual reading of the memoir, considering how its publication history was bound up with the Crafts’ attempts to secure stability through their family. Drawing on Beth A. McCoy’s analysis of the “paratext” of African American print, which complicates Gerard Genette’s original, McCaskill attends to related, ephemeral documents to highlight multiple influences in the composition of the memoir, and to begin sketching its reception history in England. McCaskill calls the book “no boilerplate slave’s story,” and suggests that it was resistant “to easy comparisons to other printed slave narratives” (57). These claims rest primarily on the memoir’s noncomformity to the conventions of the heroic, masculine fugitive narrative and its alternative highlighting of “connection, collaboration, and partnership” (56-57). This chapter offers the most sustained analysis of the print record, turning to a number of lesser-known slave narratives, and multiple British and U.S. journalistic sources including the American Antislavery Standard, the Anti-Slavery Bulletin, the Newcastle Courant, and the Bristol Mercury. While chapter three offers this instructive retelling of the more widely known details of the Crafts’ antebellum life and work, chapter four, which recounts the Crafts’ return to the United States and subsequent work as reformers during Reconstruction, offers the most important addition to the abiding cultural memory of the Crafts, detailing as it does the less often studied years of the Crafts’ lives. At the center of this chapter are the Crafts’ founding of the Woodville Cooperative Farm School in Georgia and the libel case William Craft lodged against an alliance of vindictive Georgians and Bostonians accusing him publicly of financial impropriety.

McCaskill’s insistence on retelling the Crafts’ story through an intertextual analysis of an expanded archive vividly illustrates Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein’s claim that the study of early African American print can productively destabilize the founding categories of African American literature as a field of study. To be sure, though McCaskill is attentive to “print’s role in the process of racialization,” she is also unequivocally committed to exploring “the possibility that early African American print culture might unmake identity as plausibly as make it.” She thus takes up the challenge of writing African American cultural history “with recourse to moments where identity diffuses as much as moments where identity consolidates,” as Cohen and Stein put it. McCaskill has a keen eye for such moments of making and unmaking, particularly in her attention to the understudied transatlantic trajectory of the Crafts’ story, in her unsettling of masculinist renderings of William as a heroic fugitive, and in her reading the print record against the grain in order to restore Ellen’s prominence in the couple’s public life and in the shaping of their reputation.

Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery brings several remarkable documents into the print record and thus extends what we know about the Crafts. As importantly, it models an expansive and creative approach to archival work. An open letter to President Millard Fillmore, for example, written by the Crafts’ former owner, Robert Collins, and published in the New York Herald in November 1850, demonstrates the rhetorical force available to slave owners in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law (63). Consideration of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case filed for William Craft’s libel case likewise illuminates the rhetorical skill of the Crafts, the faithfulness of abolitionist friends who testified and advocated on their behalf, and the “limitations of the politics of respectability as a blunting force against racial bigotry” (83).

Among the most engaging of McCaskill’s readings is her analysis of Lydia Maria Child’s Unionist stage rendering of the Crafts’ story, Stars and Stripes: A Melo-Drama (1855), which, as McCaskill argues, confines Ellen’s character within the conventions of the sexually imperiled female slave, politically salient perhaps but contrary to Ellen’s own account of her experience and motivation for hazarding escape. In some instances, McCaskill moves more quickly through these texts than one might wish. For example, William Wells Brown’s depiction of the Crafts in Clotel (1853) receives only a brief mention, as does the biographical sketch in abolitionist William Still’s landmark history, The Underground Railroad (1872). Analysis of Child’s account of the Crafts, included in her 1865 Reconstruction reader, The Freedmen’s Book, seems similarly curtailed. These limitations, even if we judge them as such, hardly detract from McCaskill’s feat of memory work, an accomplishment that will undoubtedly reframe critical conversations about William and Ellen Craft for years to come.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4.5 (Fall, 2017).

Michael Stancliff is associate professor of English at Arizona State University where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century American literature, African American literature, rhetoric, and composition. He is the author of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Literature and the Rise of a Modern Nation State.

Ask the Author talks to historian Richard Bell about his new book We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self Government in the Newly United States. Early in the book you discuss suicide as an important “political vocabulary” in the early American republic. Can you explain a bit what you mean by that, and why suicide was such a fraught issue? We Shall Be No More is about the politics of self-destruction in the new republic. My goal is to try to explain why so many public battles about the state of this fragile new political union found expression in bitter, frenzied fighting over the meaning of certain suicides. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, “suicide” came to function as one of the most evocative and incendiary words in Americans’ political lexicons. Like “freedom,” “slavery,” “democracy,” “tyranny,” and “disunion,” “suicide” became a keyword in the new nation’s vocabulary not only because of its connotations of finality and extremity but also because of its ability to embody complex ideas and provoke visceral emotional responses. That peculiar power stems from the difficulty of deducing the precise intent of those who commit suicide. Even today, I think, the act of self-destruction can be read in various ways: as submission or as protest, as dispossession or as mastery, as madness or as calculation. In all these ways, suicide can be interpreted as an inherently political act. After all, personal choices about how and when to die take place at the nexus of self and society, and for that reason the problem of suicide seems to strike directly at the core of questions about individual autonomy and collective organization, doing so in ways that are agonizingly personal, pointed, and profound. In the early United States, questions regarding whether or not individuals should have the freedom to do with their life and liberty as they see fit or have an obligation to serve the interests of a larger community were not abstract inquiries. On the contrary, these questions plagued all who wondered whether their fellow Americans had sufficient virtue, self-discipline, and care for one another to foster a stable and self-governing republic. As such, it’s not so strange that the meaning of suicide became a principal locus of contention in this time and place. For the most part you sidestep the question of whether or not there really was a suicide epidemic—or, at minimum, increasing numbers of self-murder—in this period. Can you talk a bit about that choice? The book opens by confronting readers with a tidal wave of hand-wringing jeremiads, each one claiming that post-revolutionary America was in the grip of an escalating suicide epidemic. Ministers, newspaper editors, judges, and doctors filled the press with dire warnings that their fellow Americans were taking their own lives in unprecedented numbers. “Suicide is making a most alarming progress in these states,” a writer in the Pennsylvania Evening Heraldannounced in June 1785, before describing the deaths of “three persons … who have dared to rush into the presence of their Creator.” The proof of this progress was there in black and white: in Annapolis’ Maryland Gazette, reports of completed suicide published during the 1790s were up three hundred percent over the previous decade, while New York City’s Weekly Museum reported four times as many self-destructive acts during the 1800s as it had ten years earlier. So it’s easy to see why people of standing and status were so concerned. If the papers were to be credited, suicide was suddenly so common that it had become a defining feature of life in the new republic. These sources are treacherous, however, and although precious few people at the time paused to question the assumed correlation between rising reportage and elevated rates of self-destruction, we’d be wise to be more careful. For one thing, the 1792 Post Office Act—which made every variety of domestic news-gathering dramatically cheaper, faster, and easier—gave American newspaper editors subtle financial incentives to replace a good deal of their coverage of suicides in distant European cities with reports about men and women who took their lives here on American soil. These editorial decisions likely contributed to the perception that suicide rates in cities like Philadelphia and New York were actually rising. For this and several other reasons I won’t go into here, I believe that we simply can’t trust early national press coverage to provide an accurate index of suicidal behavior. Government statistics are no better. Although the bills of mortality compiled by city inspectors and the boards of health in cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia offer a tally of the number of inquest verdicts of suicide in these jurisdictions each month, that data is also spectacularly subjective. Early national coroners and jurors didn’t even have a common definition of what constituted an intentional suicide and certainly could not agree on which forms of evidence—physical, eyewitness, circumstantial, forensic—deserved the most weight. They also struggled mightily to differentiate between accidents and genuinely self-intentioned deaths, especially when family members destroyed suicide notes, lied during testimony, or explicitly coerced jurors to return non-culpable verdicts (e.g. non compos mentis) that would prevent state officials from confiscating the deceased’s heritable property. Because legal prohibitions against suicide varied considerably among states and also changed dramatically over time, these various sub-cultural factors should not be discounted or assumed to be random. So in the book, I try to refrain from placing too much weight or emphasis on the raw numbers contained in the extant bills of mortality; the data is vastly more subjective than it seems. So much so, in fact, that I think those sources are not very useful as statistical indicators of the frequency of suicidal behavior in a given time and place. That said, many Americans truly felt that suicide was on the rise in this period, and were disturbed by its perceived proliferation. The accounts, then, do offer a means to better understand which behaviors people on the ground interpreted as acts of intentional suicide and provide a lens through which to examine the larger meanings that they attached to self-destruction. One of the book’s big points is that Americans hotly contested the meaning of suicide in this period. How and why were these struggles inflected by gender and race? In the book I argue that the way early Americans interpreted suicide was fundamentally relational. Then, as now, the way we react to another person’s decision to die depends in great part on the assumptions we make about the deceased, and about that person’s relationship to ourselves and to people like ourselves. For that reason, early Americans’ ideas about race and about gender played important roles in determining how individuals and groups responded to the suicides they witnessed or, more commonly, read about. For instance, to test his theory that self-destruction was essentially a “crime of civilization” committed only by enlightened white Europeans (including his own troubled son, John, who attempted suicide by razor in March 1809), Benjamin Rush would sometimes question Native leaders like Alexander McGillivray and frontiersmen like Meriwether Lewis as to whether “suicide [is] ever known among the Indians. And from what causes, if it be?” In a similar way, debates about the moral consequences of the rise of the novel in America in the 1780s and 1790s rested upon parental assumptions that young girls, in particular, were naturally too weak-willed to resist the power of sympathy; the more romantic teenage suicides these young women encountered in print, this argument went, the more likely such eminently suggestible readers would be to follow in the same bloody footsteps if ever their own adolescent romances encountered obstacles. In truth, race and gender seem to inflect almost every debate about suicide described in the book, and in several contexts they work in tandem. As I demonstrate in a final chapter, antislavery novels, pamphlets, and newspapers were filled with polemical descriptions of black suicide. Yet, depictions of slaves taking their own lives oscillated wildly over time as activists reached out to different audiences and experimented with different tropes. In the 1780s and early 1800s, for instance, antislavery authors trying to convince state and national legislators of the merits of ending the international slave trade focused upon enslaved black males, and represented their decisions to die as violent yet dignified assertions of autonomous manhood. “Such greatness of mind,” mourned a writer for Philadelphia’s Independent Gazeteer in a typical eulogy. Yet by the 1830s, that sort of language was in decline, overshadowed by the output of William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child and their disciples. In order to touch the hearts of northern evangelical families, this small army of moral suasionists chose to reimagine slaves’ self-inflicted deaths, not as noble acts of mastery, but as feminized capitulations to the Slave Power. For a generation, desperate, distracted and abused wives or mothers, brutalized to the point of extinction, took center stage in a pageant of suffering. It was not until militant black abolitionists like Henry Highland Garnet and Martin Delany muscled their way into print in the 1840s and 1850s that depictions of the suicides of enslaved males again returned to assumed heroic status. “Oh! why is he not man enough to kill himself?” an inconsolable young black woman reportedly wailed as she watched Anthony Burns’ arrest and re-enslavement unfold in Boston in 1854. The book is organized topically for the most part, with chapters focusing on politics (broadly defined), novels, humane societies, religion, the state, and antislavery/abolition. Yet what are some of the significant changes over time in the “career” of suicide? One of the goals I set for myself was to show readers that suicide was the subject of incessant debate in the newly United States, and that in this formative period between Revolution and Civil War the language of suicide became a conspicuous resource for the advancement of larger arguments about the proper balance to be struck between liberty and order. Consequently, the book exhibits quite catholic interests and traces pervasive quarrels over what certain suicides seemed to say about the primacy of the self and about the stability of society across a range of terrain, from the fallout of an 1816 capital trial in which an inmate was accused of talking his cellmate into killing himself, to the highly politicized depiction of suicidal slaves in the pamphlets and newspapers that poured forth from abolitionist presses. However, I do hope that readers will also perceive the over-arching chronological argument embedded in the text. The period between the Revolution and the Civil War was, after all, a period of extraordinary transformation in which the United States experienced dramatic demographic changes and unprecedented economic expansion and restructuring. Simultaneously, the inheritors of the Revolution witnessed the rise of systematic electoral competition, religious disestablishment and disintegration, and a velvet revolution in gender and family relations. Important in and of themselves, together these broad changes signaled a vast and atomizing transformation, the arrival of what Ralph Waldo Emerson later labeled “the age of the first person singular.” Those sea changes provided the context for a significant transformation in the way many early Americans began to respond to the divisive social and political implications they perceived in acts of suicide. The longer the republic endured, the easier it became to publicly express compassion for men and women driven to suicide, albeit only in certain highly circumscribed situations. This small but significant shift in the way Americans responded to acts of individual suicide committed beyond their immediate circle of family and friends provided an opportunity that liberal activists did not pause to nurture and to exploit. Thus in the decades after 1815, the reading public occasionally found themselves confronted with depictions of suicide that assumed that mature, sensible readers possessed the capacity to sympathize with stricken strangers who took their own lives to escape oppression or protest tyranny. Stopping far short of any universal claim to a right to die, reformers began presenting certain end-of-life decisions as imperfect challenges to entrenched interests that could be dislodged no other way. Of course, this was an uphill battle and there were significant reversals. In fact, as the threat of secession and civil war grew ever more tangible in the late 1850s, a new generation of commentators decried disunion itself as something monstrous and heinous; as—what else?—a species of suicide. Did some people believe there was a “right to die” in this period? Although folks back then weren’t always as quick to talk about “rights” as we are today, it’s certainly true that some of them considered human dignity to encompass the autonomy to take one’s own life. Of course, plenty of other people took the opposite view, and in the book I try to zero in on those moments when these two diametrically opposed positions come into contact and conflict. There’s no better example of this than in a chapter devoted to a league of little-known suicide prevention charities. The agents and officers of these humane societies—Benjamin Rush served as a founding vice president and President John Adams was an honorary member—based their interventionist mission on the assumption that no one in their right mind could want to die. Yet as we see from the case notes of one humane society doctor, the people they tried to help sometimes seemed to be coldly rational actors asserting what we’d recognize today as a right to die. Around 6 p.m. on Sunday, February 21, 1795, Thomas Welsh was called to a property in Charlestown, Massachusetts, to save the life of a man who’d swallowed a massive overdose of twenty-nine grains of opium. Somehow still conscious when the doctor arrived, “A.F.,” as Welsh referred to him in his case notes, still had his wits about him and was not about to be rescued by a meddling stranger. “As soon as I had seen him and understood the state of the case,” Welsh later recalled, “I proposed to administer to his relief; but he strenuously refused to take any thing, avowing his intention was to deprive himself of life.” With the morphine metabolizing rapidly, Welsh had no time to argue. But A.F. was adamant, “asserting that he was a free agent, and that, as such, he had a right to free himself from the calamities which he suffered.” No one, not even a doctor, could “compel him to take medicine against his will.” But Thomas Welsh was not about to back down: “I maintained that he had, according to his own confession, attempted to commit a crime against society and to deprive it of one of its members; in consequence of which I should, if he persisted in his refusal of the medicine, compel him to take it.” In the chapter, I take this extraordinary encounter as a starting point for a discussion of the complex power dynamics that informed the work of early national humane societies, and use the episode to try to scrutinize the assumptions about insanity that undergirded their agents’ coercive interventions. But what happened that day in Charlestown is also clearly relevant to any discussion about the origins of a right-to-die movement in America. It’s hardly a stretch to read A.F.’s verbal defiance as a rebuke to elite opinions in support of a republican version of the social contract in which we are all our brother’s keepers. In A.F.’s clear-headed decision to die, one can perceive an alternate view emerging—a view that embraces the individualist position that we answer to no one but ourselves. Many of the issues raised in the book have contemporary resonance, but in particular your treatment of the “anti-gallows” movement. How is it a predecessor of and yet distinct from modern critiques of capital punishment? Although I sometimes hesitate to make them in the book, I think that there are all sorts of comparisons to be drawn between today’s cultural politics and the fierce arguments about the meaning of self-destruction in early America. I’ve lived in the United States for going on thirteen years now, and I can’t help but notice just how frequently public figures here try to leverage other people’s decisions to die for political purposes. So in that sense, at least, perhaps not much has changed. The early national crusade to police sentimental novels deemed to be a deadly influence on adolescent minds seems to correspond closely to modern assumptions about the copycat consequences of listening to expletive-laden rap music or playing violent video games. The same concerns that motivated suicide prevention campaigns at the turn of the nineteenth century find echoes in attempts to overturn assisted suicide laws passed in Oregon and Washington in recent years. Likewise, the demagoguery about the meaning of certain suicides first heard in debates over abolition now accompanies news reports of the suicides of bullied students and ruined executives, as well as war veterans, cult members, terrorists, and hunger strikers. Capital punishment is, as you suggest, a great example. In my chapter on the early American debate about the issue, I show how activists on both sides tried to manipulate public reactions to the suicides of death-row inmates to press their cases for and against the death penalty. For their part, officials within the criminal justice system represented inmate suicides as brazen challenges to state power, to their own authority, and to the integrity of public executions as a legitimate form of criminal sanction. In fact, in at least one case, a humiliated county sheriff refused to abandon a planned execution after his prisoner hanged himself in his cell, carting the man’s dead body out to the gallows and stringing it up anyway. Antebellum anti-gallows activists were, of course, outraged by this sort of behavior and took to the papers to push some very different ideas. In a torrent of ink they depicted the same cellblock suicides not as affronts to state power, but as bloody evidence that capital punishment was a barbaric torture that drove the very people it was supposed to punish to kill themselves. Our public discourse today doesn’t seem that much different. Because the United States continues to execute its own citizens—carrying out roughly the same number of executions in 2010 as North Korea, Yemen and Saudi Arabia—our national debate about capital punishment rages on. For instance, I recently learned of the apparent suicide of James Lee Crummel, a pedophile and convicted child-killer who had spent eight years on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California. Because his death by hanging comes just two months before voters in California will be asked to weigh in on a ballot measure to repeal that state’s death penalty, I will not be surprised if Crummel’s suicide is soon leveraged by media-savvy campaigners on one side or the other. Already reports have surfaced that the state’s automatic appeals system is so dysfunctional that the 723 men and women on California’s death row are more likely to die of old age or by their own hand than they are to ever face the state’s ultimate sanction. In this dim light, Crummel’s recent suicide may be a boon to the anti-gallows cause both in California and in the other 33 states that still practice legal execution. The question on everyone’s mind (or on mine, at least): what is it like to research and write a book on suicide? There’s no getting around it. Spending the last ten years in the company of so many soul-sick people has been sobering. Even after all this time in their company, it is not at all difficult to summon compassion for a grieving mother who can’t accept the loss of her infant or for a blind old widower struck down by sorrow and confusion, or to be affected by stories of a deluded father who turns a pistol on himself after murdering his wife and children as a sacrifice to God or a fugitive slave who can hear his master’s dogs in the distance. Two hundred years of detachment cannot numb a person to this sort of suffering. Yet if anything, this project has taught me most about the sufferings of those left behind in the wake of a suicide. While my book recounts the aborted lives and premature deaths of dozens, if not hundreds, of people, its focus is squarely on the fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, neighbors and fellow citizens forced to pick up the pieces—on those who are left to agonize about their own culpability, to lay blame, and to pass judgment. In some cases, I found their efforts to make meaning out of others’ oblivion to be generous and endearing; on other occasions their responses seemed to me narrow-minded and hateful; but on every occasion it was clear that survivors were struggling mightily to make sense of their changed worlds, and in that they seemed to be poignantly, pitifully human. Writing a book about dealing with death has also sharpened my sense of my own mortality and the mortality of those nearest and dearest to me. How could it not? It’s also shaped my views about suicide as a moral and ethical question in serious and permanent ways. I won’t offer too much introspection here, but I will say that working on this book has taught me that people take their own lives for all manner of reasons and that presuming to precisely understand why a person would do this is folly, if not hubris. I’ve learned that rationality and insanity sit on a long spectrum, and that courage and cowardice can coexist in a single moment.

  Richard Bell is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the co-editor ofBuried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America (2012), a volume of essays centered on the experience of incarcerated subjects and citizens in early America. Prof. Bell is currently at work on a book about a multiracial gang whose members kidnapped free black people from Baltimore and Philadelphia and sold them into slavery in Mississippi in the 1810s and 1820s.  

 In his History of The New York Times, 1851-1921, Elmer Davis wrote that the outbreak of the Civil War “effected a great transformation in American journalism.”^[1] With the Union in danger of dissolution, readers everywhere demanded “to know what had happened yesterday rather than some man’s opinion on what happened last week.”^[2] With their superior resources for gathering and transmitting the news, the leading New York papers were well positioned to capitalize on the public’s seemingly insatiable demand for the latest information and opinion. Three New York dailies—Henry Raymond’s Times, James Gordon Bennett Sr.’s Herald, and Horace Greeley’s Tribune—emerged as essential sources of information and opinion for readers throughout the Union. With their power to exploit the latest technologies for gathering, editing, printing, and distributing a wide range of news and opinion, these papers—the only ones to be issued in editions of eight pages—came to exert an outsized influence.

On January 26, 1861, New York-based Harper’s Weekly, writing with a pronounced dose of New York swagger, claimed that Washington lawmakers “have no opinions at all until they receive the New York papers. People in Washington actually look to the New York papers for the news of their own city. It is New York journalism which does the thinking for the whole community—Washington included. This city is the centre of news, the centre of thought, the centre of all our commercial, intellectual, political, and national activity.”^[3] Harper’s used the excellence of the city’s newspapers as dispositive in its argument for moving America’s capitol to New York.

This essay explores how Walt Whitman made brilliant use of Raymond’s Times during the Civil War to reach a national audience with acute, penetrating analyses of the medical catastrophe that had engulfed the nation.^[4] Writing from Washington, where he spent the war years as a devoted hospital visitor or nurse, Whitman deployed his considerable skill as a journalist to introduce readers everywhere to the suffering of the hospitalized soldiers, focusing particularly on syndromes that, he claimed, were not well understood: trauma and its intersection with a wide range of disabilities. In moving, unsparing prose, he invited readers to think with him about just how to respond to the traumatized, the ill, and the dying—those in the hospitals and those who would be returning to their fighting units and to their communities.

Whitman was writing at a time of rapid improvement in military medicine, especially in the North. Credit belongs in the first instance to the “brash new Army surgeon general,” Dr. William Hammond, appointed in 1862 as a result of intense lobbying from the United States Sanitary Commission.^[5] Unafraid of controversy, he “implemented rigorous examinations for all regular Army officers, emphasizing public health, hygiene, and surgery,” thereby improving the quality of care.^[6] Through his famous Circular  No. 6 of 1863, he removed such destructive medicines as mercury and calomel from the formulary, since there was no evidence that they improved outcomes. Life-saving progress was being made in such areas as the pavilion-style design of hospitals; use of anesthetics; general cleanliness, hygiene, and sanitation; surgical practice; and increased use of both male and female nurses, who brought their healing presence to the wards.^[7] In a dispatch to the Times, Whitman singled out the healing power of “[M]others, full of motherly feeling, and however illiterate, but bringing reminiscences of home, and with the magnetic touch of hands.”  Such maternal attention was essential, since “[M]any of the wounded are between 15 and 20 years of age.”^[8]

Under Major Jonathan Letterman, M.D., appointed by Hammond to the position of Medical Director of the Army of the Potomac, the Army developed systems to treat the wounded in facilities positioned as close to the battlefield as possible and then transport them rapidly and safely to hospitals in Washington or elsewhere (fig. 1).^[9] Among other discoveries, the medical community learned that amputations—the sooner performed the better—saved lives by reducing the risk of uncontrollable infections. The work of Dr. Stephen Smith (1823-1922), a pioneering New York surgeon and tireless public health crusader—he became the founder of the American Association for Public Health in 1872—illustrates the way that American medicine developed in response to the catastrophe. Smith assembled an illustrated pocket manual, titled Handbook of Surgical Operations (1862), designed for practical use in the field. Smith’s manual was circulated widely among Union army surgeons. (The handbook was copied and anonymously reissued among Confederates as well.) Among his contributions, Smith has been credited with developing a more effective method for amputation below the knee, “in which he revised the placing of the incision so that the resulting scar would receive much less pressure from an artificial leg.”^[10]

While it has long been recognized that improvements in military medicine occasioned by the Civil War have had a lasting impact, that has not been the case in the response to trauma and disability. Here cultural amnesia has been the norm. As Judith Herman observed in 1992, “The knowledge of horrible events periodically intrudes into public awareness, but it is rarely retained for long. Denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as individual level.”^[11]  It was only in 1980 that post-traumatic stress disorder became an established diagnosis as recognized by the American Psychological Association. In the years since Herman’s book appeared in 1992, there has been a growing recognition of the many dimensions of trauma’s intersection with disability. For that reason, recovery of the insights of one of America’s greatest poets, Walt Whitman, into these subjects—and the way he communicated them to a nation that was itself seized by the multiple traumas of civil war—is all the more important.

Whitman did not hesitate to identify deficiencies in the medical treatment of soldiers. His major contribution, however, came from his recognition of trauma as a disabling syndrome and his search for ways to mitigate it. In a dispatch to the Times published on December 11, 1864, he went so far as to claim that a “magnetic flood of sympathy and friendship” from a medical professional or dedicated hospital visitor is capable of accomplishing “more good than all the medicine in the world.” This was not hyperbole. An assistant surgeon in the Union Army observed that the distress caused by such conditions as homesickness and the constant pressures of military life, as well as illness and injury, had become “the most pitiless monster(s) that ever hung about a human heart,” killing “as many in our army as did bullets of the enemy.”^[12] Whitman wrote with great urgency, since, to use the title of his first essay for the Times, published on February 26, 1863, the entire country now comprised one “Great Army of the Sick” (fig. 2).

“By God, You Shall Not Go Down”

As a poet, Whitman had long dreamed of reaching a national audience. However, successive editions of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, 1856, and 1860, had limited circulation. Through the Times, however, he now had a fair chance of coming before that large national readership as a compassionate healer, a role he had claimed for himself in his poetry. In “Song of Myself” the Whitman persona boasts of his life-saving powers:

To any one dying–thither I speed, and twist the knob of the door,
Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,
Let the physician and the priest go home.

I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will.

O despairer, here is my neck,
By God! you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me….

I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,
And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.^[13]

Now, as a regular visitor in the Washington hospitals, Whitman accepted the challenge of devising ways to save lives and alleviate suffering, and to communicate his insights to a broken nation.

These goals required the development of a new style of journalism, one that would be both factual and experiential, one that, drawing from the techniques of fiction, would enable readers to cross a mental barrier so as to enter into the realm of disease, suffering, and death. In these signed dispatches, Whitman is both a reporter informing the nation about the facts of medical catastrophe and a participant incorporating his own story.  He warns in “Great Army of the Sick” that the wartime hospital is a place where “the mere sight of some of [the severe wounds has] been known to make a tolerably hardy visitor faint away.” But in reporting the deeply affecting stories of representative patients, Whitman serves as a reassuring, compassionate, and even loving guide, tutor, and interpreter: “Upon a few of these hospitals I have been almost daily calling as a missionary, on my own account, for the sustenance and consolation of some of the most needy cases of sick and dying men, for the last two months.” Such a narrative presence is essential since “One has much to learn in order to do good in these places. Great tact is required. These are not like other hospitals.” 

Whitman’s war dispatches for the Times, then, represent an extraordinary coming together of writer and medium at a moment of national crisis. Under Henry Raymond’s astute, energetic leadership, the Times had emerged as perhaps the most influential newspaper in the country—much as it is today. A giant in American journalism, Raymond was also a leader in the Republican Party, a staunch supporter and confidante of Abraham Lincoln. To aid in the president’s reelection campaign, in 1864 Raymond published History of the Administration of President Lincoln. And as chairman of the Committee on Resolutions of the 1864 Republican Convention, he astutely shaped the party platform, developing its key planks.[14] Praising the Times for always being “true to the Union,” Lincoln considered Raymond to be his “Lieutenant-General in politics.”[15] But of course, as Harold Holzer demonstrates, the press-savvy Lincoln had long known how to make excellent use of editors and reporters in pursuing his objectives.

On April 22, 1861, less than two weeks after the Union surrender at Fort Sumter in South Carolina signified that a bloody war between the states was inevitable, Raymond placed a notice in the Times urging women in New York to join his wife at a gathering at their home “for the purpose of preparing bandages, lint, and other articles of indispensable necessity for the wounded.” As the war ground on, Raymond came to know of Lincoln’s deep concern for the wounded, whom he and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, visited in the hospitals. It should not surprise us, then, that Whitman would seek out the Times as the most effective medium to bring his insights on the needs of the wounded to a wide and influential readership, which might well include Lincoln, other members of the administration, legislators, and military leaders.    

In addition to numerous essays about the war in several Brooklyn papers, Whitman published some ten pieces in the Times; all of these are available online in the essential Walt Whitman Archive. Many—but not all—of the essays for the Brooklyn papers take on a “local interest” flavor. Here Whitman is avowedly writing as a Brooklynite for his fellow Brooklynites. For instance, “Our Brooklyn Boys in the War” appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on January 5, 1863. But in the Times he addressed a national readership on subjects of the most fundamental importance. I will focus on two of these essays, “The Great Army of the Sick” and the comprehensive “Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers,” published on December 11, 1864. Perhaps better than any other contemporary, Whitman brought to his fellow citizens a deep understanding of trauma and disability—along with some well-considered and prescient suggestions on how to respond to what we now know as PTSD and the despair of wartime injury. 

The Whitman-Swinton Connection

Whitman sent “The Great Army of the Sick” to John Swinton (1829-1901), who worked during the war as the chief of the Times’ editorial staff. Swinton and Whitman were well-acquainted from their days as fellow denizens of Pfaff’s café in New York. Born in Scotland, Swinton had taken courses at New York Medical College in 1857, and so had more than passing familiarity with questions of etiology and therapeutics.^[16] In accepting “The Great Army of the Sick” for the Sunday edition of the paper, he reported to Whitman on February 25, 1863, that “I have crowded out a great many things to get it in, and it has taken the precedence of army correspondence and articles which have been waiting a month for insertion. It is excellent—the first part and the closing part of it especially. I am glad to see you are engaged in such good work at Washington. It must be even more refreshing than to sit by Pfaff’s privy and eat sweet-breads and drink coffee, and listen to the intolerable wit of the crack-brains.”^[17] Swinton must have known that he would have Raymond’s support in thus including Whitman’s essay. But then, too, Raymond and Whitman may also have been acquainted; in a letter written from Washington on September 5, 1863, to Nathaniel Bloom, Whitman fondly recalled his association in the pre-war days with a number of individuals, including “our friend Raymond.”^[18] That friend may or may not have been Henry Jarvis Raymond. However, as we will see, Raymond was quite willing to open the Times to Whitman and his advocates.

Swinton, who “read the first edition [of Leaves of Grass] right after publication,” had become a passionate admirer of Whitman’s poetry.^[19] He is almost certainly the author of a penetrating review of the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass that appeared in the Times on November 13, 1856.  “As we read it again and again,” Swinton wrote, “and we will confess that we have returned to it often, a singular order seems to rise out of its chaotic verses.” Surprisingly, Swinton charged that Whitman was himself the author of three anonymous reviews of the 1855 edition. One scholar, C. Carroll Hollis, has plausibly suggested that Whitman himself alerted his friend Swinton to his own duplicitous acts of self-promotion as a way of generating notoriety, controversy, and then attention.^[20] But what matters for Swinton in his review is the unfolding of poetic power: “Since the greater portion of this review was written, we confess to having been attracted again and again to Leaves of Grass. It has a singular electric attraction. Its manly vigor, its brawny health, seem to incite and satisfy. We look forward with curious anticipation to MR. WALT WHITMAN’S future works.”^[21] Echoing Emerson’s famous letter of July 1855 greeting Whitman at the “beginning of a great career,” Swinton concluded by predicting that Whitman was sure to “contribute something to American literature which shall awaken wonder.”^[22]

Over the course of his prolific career, Swinton, a great champion of the cause of labor, remained a staunch Whitman champion, doing “what he could to bring the poet’s work to the attention of the public,” as Thomas Winter succinctly put it.^[23] Now, in the midst of the national crisis, Swinton served both as friend of the poet and his adopted nation by making room in the Times for Whitman’s hospital dispatches.  

A First Responder Sounds the Alarm

In opening “Great Army of the Sick,” Whitman claimed that most Americans “have little or no idea of the great and prominent feature which these military hospitals and convalescent camps make in and around Washington” (figs. 3-4). There are “some fifty of them, of different degrees of capacity. Some have a thousand or more patients.” Whitman assumes the role of guide to the mangled bodies lying in row after row of beds in those hospitals. In challenging readers somehow to embrace those bodies and to accept the reality of death, Whitman is limning a new America.

As I have written elsewhere, Whitman’s Civil War writings marked a shift away from earlier writings such as “The Eighteenth Presidency!” (1856) which promoted a proto-eugenic program for the nation.^[24] Also, in a series of thirteen essays published in the New York Atlas from September 12, 1858, through December 26 of that year on “Manly Health and Training,” Whitman expanded these eugenic ideas by providing detailed instruction on how men—young and older alike—could “attain,” as he wrote in the first essay, “a perfect body, perfect blood—no morbid humors, no weakness, no impotency or deficiency or bad stuff in him, but all running over with animation and ardor.” Using the pen name of Mose Velsor, Whitman wrote on the assumption that good health is a normative expectation for everyone; failure to achieve that status signals a defect of character and so poses a threat to the body politic. In short, Whitman makes no room in his America for disability.^[25] But the war changed him. Now, writing from the vast Washington hospitals, Whitman’s task as journalist was no longer to inspire and instruct Americans in the search for perfect health, but to embrace a wounded nation and heal broken spirits.

Whitman focuses on the ordeal of a certain J. A. H. of Company C. of the Twenty-ninth Massachusetts. His story reveals that the life-threatening trauma faced by this representative soldier can be understood both as a function of a complex, seemingly intractable organic illness and callous—even cruel—treatment by his caregivers.^[26] This soldier participated in the first Fredericksburg battle, December 11-15, 1862, a battle that revealed the shocking incompetence of the Union generals and the failure of the medical system to prepare adequately for such devastation. Growing progressively weaker and suffering from a fever from his intestinal illness, J. A. H., after being told by a physician at Fredericksburg that “nothing could be done for him here,” was sent on to Washington. But along the way, he was mishandled, even though he was “very much enfeebled.”  Unceremoniously “dumped with a crowd of others on the boat at Aquia Creek,” he fell “down like a rag…too weak and sick to sit up or help himself at all. No one spoke to him, or assisted him.” Sadly, the Massachusetts soldier was treated “either with perfect indifference, or, as in two or three instances, with heartless brutality.”

Whitman charges that this representative soldier’s life was endangered by such callousness. After being denied assistance in securing blankets on the boat trip to Washington, he was deposited on the wharf “without any nourishment.” Even after arriving at the hospital, he was so harshly treated that his “half-frozen and lifeless body fell limpsy” into the hands of the attendants. The result: he lapsed into the deep state of “despair and hopelessness” in which Whitman found him. Whitman now took it upon himself to rescue a young man, someone whose “heart was broken,” one who “felt that the struggle to keep up any longer was useless.” His mode of therapy included pleasant, cheering conversation, writing letters home for him, the provision of small favors, such as securing the fresh milk that he craved, and, above all, emotional encouragement and support. Whitman claims that he helped bring a despairing soldier back to life. To quote “Song of Myself,” he had “seize(d) a descending man and raise(d) him with resistless will.”

J. A. H.’s case would seem to fit the definition of the condition we now understand as dissociation, a syndrome of wide concern among professionals. Herman explains that “Traumatic reactions occur when action is of no avail. When neither resistance nor escape is possible, the human system of self-defense becomes overwhelmed and disorganized. Each component of the ordinary response to danger, having lost its utility, tends to persist in an altered state long after the actual danger is over.”^[27]

As a result of his worsening intestinal illness, the trauma of the horrific Fredericksburg battle, and the callous treatment he endured, J. A. H. had faced grave threats to the structure of his very being, his sense of self, and connection with his past. Ominously, he had given up on a future. But with supportive care and the sort of personal connection that Whitman in his role of hospital visitor forges with him, he “will not die, but will recover.”  Through such stories, Whitman argues for the development of therapeutics fully responsive to the emotional condition of the wounded and ill. In “Intersection of Disability Studies and Critical Trauma Studies,” Daniel R. Morrison and Monica J. Casper write that “the body itself provides a link between disability studies and critical trauma studies, arguing both for the significance of representations as well as a materialist understanding of breach, for a notion of the organic, fleshy body as it is damaged, sometimes profoundly, in its operations of life.”^[28] Whitman’s dispatches from the hospitals—including from the elegant, grand Patent Office building, which, incongruously, had been used as a hospital at the beginning of the war—helps us address a lacuna of current disability scholarship.

Morrison and Casper claim that “disability studies and its ‘cultural locations’ have been remarkably silent on matters of the traumatic origins of many disabilities, and on the ongoing relationship between shocking events, their abrupt and chronic impacts, and experiences of disability.”^[29] What is required, they argue, is the development of a “shared conceptual vocabulary” of trauma studies and disability studies.^[30] In his dispatches to the Times, Whitman combines an acute analysis of physical malady with a deep understanding of trauma and disability, conditions complicated by the failure to address the soldiers’ psychosocial needs.   

Two short sections, “The Field is Large, The Reapers Few” and “Official Airs and Harshness,” conclude this dispatch. The first urges Americans to devote themselves to hospital service, since a “benevolent person” could not possibly “make a better investment of himself…anywhere upon the varied surface of the whole of this big world, than in these same military hospitals.” It’s a direct, emotional appeal: “Reader, how can I describe to you the mute appealing look that rolls and moves from many a manly eye, from many a sick cot, following you as you walk slowly down one of these wards? To see these, and to be incapable of responding to them, except in a few cases…is enough to make one’s heart crack.” And “Official Airs and Harshness” argues that systemic reform throughout the medical corps is essential. Certain of the ward doctors are “careless, rude, capricious, needlessly strict.”

Whitman had good reason to expect that through such dispatches he would reach Lincoln and others in positions of authority. We can see that Swinton was right to push aside other material, even important military intelligence, from the Times in favor of “The Great Army of the Sick.” A new approach to treating all those who suffer from “[E]very form of wound…every kind of malady, like a long procession, with typhoid fever and diarrhea at the head as leaders” is mandatory. Further, Whitman’s prose takes on something of the cadence, the rhythmic structure, of his poetry, particularly through the use of parallelism:  “The soldier’s hospital! how many sleepless nights how many woman’s tears, how many long and aching hours and days of suspense, from every one of the Middle, Eastern and Western States, have concentrated here!” His plea for generous, supportive treatment of the wounded takes on particular force: “Of all the places in the world, the hospitals of American young men and soldiers, wounded in the volunteer service of their country, ought to be exempt from mere conventional military airs and etiquette of shoulder-straps. But they are not exempt.”

“Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers”

“Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers,” published in the Times on December 11, 1864, maintains the clipped quality of the diary entries on which it is based. Many of the essential observations and incidents from those notebooks would be explored brilliantly in Whitman’s unconventional autobiography Specimen Days, and Collect (1882). There Whitman would bring into completion a powerful new style, one capable, as the poet and memoirist Stephen Kuusisto has observed, of providing readers with a “wholly conscious rendering of altered physicality in prose.”^[31] From this perspective, Specimen Days may be seen as the “progenitor of the disability memoir.”^[32] Such prose makes palpable the crisis of “extremities of subjectivity” and the “outer circumstances” of disability, “which often includes pain, suffering, poverty, and violence.”^[33]

The comprehensive “Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers” seeks to plumb the depths of that complex truth. Opening with Whitman’s visit to Fredericksburg in December 1862, the account comes “down to the present hour,” some two years later. The narrative tension in the essay derives from the fact that Whitman recognizes that while the subjects of trauma and disability defy representation, nevertheless they must be explored so that as wide a readership as possible will comprehend the depth of the medical catastrophe and learn how to respond productively.

Whitman includes the sort of grim statistics that are essential if the reader is to comprehend the extent of the slaughter. On the number of “cases under treatment” in government hospitals so far, “there have been, as I estimate, near 400,000.” Some 200,000 individuals are “currently on the doctors’ lists.” It is essential to realize that no one has been unaffected: “Every family has directly or indirectly some representative among this vast army of the wounded and sick.”

In the section on “Camp Hospitals, Fredericksburgh [sic], Near Falmouth,” Whitman returns to his first encounter with the scenes of battle. Entering a makeshift hospital, he confronts unparalleled devastation: “I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c….Several dead bodies lie near, each covered with its brown woolen blanket.” He quickly sees that “all the wounds pretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean and bloody.” There is little that Whitman, who had gone to Fredericksburg in search of his wounded brother George, can do to help the wounded. Nevertheless, “I cannot leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds on to me convulsively, and I do what I can for him; at any rate, stop with him and sit near him for hours, if he wishes it.” Here is the moment that Whitman discovers his calling in embracing the disabled and comforting the dying. This young soldier holds him “convulsively,” signifying that combat trauma has possessed him. Incapacitated by his own involuntary muscular movements, he is not a malingerer, but someone who is simply incapable of returning to the fight. We know that the younger the soldier, the more severe battle trauma is likely to be; also, the longer the individual is subjected to battle, the more likely it is that he will experience trauma.^[34] This is a war, Whitman reminds his readers, that is being fought in large part by youths and young men.

One of the most important interventions in disability studies has been to revise a medical model of disability with a social model: one that acknowledges how disability operates as a socially constructed category defined by one’s access to resources, the adaptability of one’s built environment to a diversity of needs, and ideological divisions that mark some bodies as normal and others as abnormal.^[35] Yet scholars have also emphasized that disability scholarship has made and continues to make transformative changes in the nature of medical care. As Tobin Siebers observes in a reconsideration of the social model, “the disabled body” holds the potential to radically transform “the process of representation itself.”^[36] This potential extends to histories of disability and medicine too. In an essay that aims to put these fields in dialogue, Beth Linker proposes, “We should work to make these connections rather than throwing up dividers between medical and disability history.”^[37]

It is in precisely this context that Whitman’s Civil War writings take on new salience. For Whitman reveals the essential importance of combining the best possible medical care with full attention to the experience of trauma and disability, as in the case of the Massachusetts soldier who was treated so callously during the trip from Fredericksburg to Washington. At times, as in the cases of the young soldiers suffering from disabling homesickness, clinical medicine is actually powerless, and only an expanded understanding of the experience of disability will be of service. In these and other ways, then, Whitman’s Civil War writings—first in these newspaper dispatches and then in the full realization in Specimen Days—alert us to the continuing challenge of expanding comprehension of the experience of trauma, both in the hospitals and then as soldiers returned to their communities.

Recognizing the journalistic challenge of conveying the enormous scope of the medical catastrophe while also bringing home the human dimension of the suffering, Whitman develops the concept of “specimens,” a term that will serve as the organizing principle of Specimen Days.^[38] Under the subtitle “Specimens of Hospital Visits,” he recounts his interactions with individual patients, mentioning, for instance, the traumatized D. F. Russell of Malone, New York, who was “downhearted and feeble; a long-time before he would take any interest; soothed and cheered him gently; wrote a letter home to his mother…gave him some fruit and other gifts.” The need for such seemingly small but still essential gifts for the wounded had been overlooked. These gifts include possessing even a small amount of money; access to reading materials; help with letter writing; and the provision of such treats as fruit, cookies, ice cream, and tobacco (figs. 5-6). Lifting the spirits of the hospitalized, these gestures remind the wounded that they are part of ongoing human society. Even the once “downhearted and feeble” D. F. Russell is “remarkably changed for the better; up and dressed, (quite a triumph; he afterward got well and went back to his regiment.)”

Further, not only must the visitor be attuned to the needs of individuals, but also he or she is to be responsive to the mood of an entire ward. All too frequently, “there is a heavy weight of listlessness prevailing, and the whole ward wants cheering up.” One way to accomplish that “cheering up” is by reading to the entire group. Since the work of the hospital visitor may make the difference between life and death, it is essential, Whitman makes clear, that it be incorporated into the practice of military medicine.

One of the most important means of addressing the pathology of isolation, depression, and despair is through “Writing Letters at the Bedside,” to use one of Whitman’s subtitles. The traumatized, Whitman discovered, must begin the process of reconnecting with the significant people in their lives. The insights of Pierre Janet (1859-1947), the pioneering French investigator of split personality, dissociation, and trauma, are illuminating on this point. Janet, as Herman has summarized his achievements, demonstrated “that the traumatic memories were preserved in an abnormal state, set apart from ordinary consciousness.”[39] The severing of “the normal connection of memory, knowledge, and emotion resulted from intense emotional reactions to traumatic events. He wrote of the ‘dissolving’ effects of intense emotion, which incapacitated the ‘synthesizing’ function of the mind.”[40] All those who care for the hospitalized must be alert, able to recognize that incapacitating syndrome, and then deploy techniques that help to rebuild those severed connections.  The complex feelings of despair and grief for all that one has lost must be acknowledged and explored.

In the section titled “Writing Letters by the Bedside,” Whitman explores the processes of mourning and reconnection, noting:

I do a good deal of this, of course, writing all kinds, including love-letters. Many sick and wounded soldiers have not written home to parents, brothers, sisters, and even wives, for one reason or another, for a long, long time. Some are poor writers, some cannot get paper and envelopes; many have an aversion to writing because they dread to worry the folks at home—the facts about them are so sad to tell. I always encourage the men to write, and promptly write for them. (figs. 7-8)

Herman recognizes that “Traumatic events have primary effects not only on the psychological structures of the self but also on the systems of attachment and meaning that link individual and community.”[41] In the face of the profound physical and psychological wounding of its youth, the entire community has been traumatized, and so must find ways to reestablish the vital human connections. In writing about “Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers” in the Times, Whitman contributes to this purpose. Further, as these dispatches make clear, the community must begin thinking beyond the hospital—to prepare, that is, for a lifetime of disability that many veterans will face. Whitman returns frequently to the subject of amputations, since a “large majority of the wounds are in the arms and legs.” But then too the war is responsible for injuries of “every kind of wound in every part of the body.” Speaking of the “arrivals” to the hospitals from the battle of Chancellorsville, he documents “all sorts of wounds. Some of the men are fearfully burnt from the explosion of artillery caissons.” The previous day had been particularly horrific, with numerous amputations “going on—the attendants are dressing wounds.” 

In his poetry Whitman famously addresses his reader directly, asserting at the outset of “Song of Myself” that “what I assume you shall assume.” In “Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers,” he also speaks directly to his readers, inviting them, for instance, to join him in wandering about Washington, in search of some high ground from which to observe “these white clusters of barracks in almost every direction. They make a great show in the landscape, and I often use them as landmarks.” But their whiteness is deceptive, since these “clusters are very full of inmates. Counting the whole, with the convalescent camps, (whose inmates are often worse off than the sick in the hospitals,) they have numbered, in this quarter and just down the Potomac, as high as fifty thousand invalid, disabled, or sick and dying men.”  

Even while encouraging readers to take up the work of the hospital visitor, Whitman seeks to educate potential volunteers on its emotional burden and the complexity of such work. He emphasizes in “Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers” that the visitor must possess “both experience and natural gifts, and the greatest judgment.” Caring for the hospitalized is both an “art” and a “trade.” The use of the word “trade” would suggest that Whitman recognized that hospital visiting might well become a profession. The challenge is to develop a therapeutic relationship with the patient, one in which the wounded individual is able to share his deepest fears and concerns with a sympathetic individual. The work demands the “conscientious personal investigations of cases…in the fullest spirit of human sympathy and boundless love. The men feel such love, always, more than anything else….I have met very few persons who realize the importance of humoring the yearnings for love and friendship of these American young men, prostrated by sickness and wounds.”

The penultimate section of this dispatch, “Human Magnetism as a Medical Agent,” expands on this insight. Recovery occurs when the patient is able both to love and to accept the love and concern of others. Caretakers must recognize that these wounded are “laid up with painful wounds or illness, far away from home, among strangers” and respond accordingly. This is not mere “sentimentalism,” but “the most solid of facts.” The goal for the visitor is to become “a hearty, healthy, clean, strong generous souled-person…sending out invisible, constant currents” of love and magnetism, which “does immense good to the sick and wounded.” 

Whitman finds a balance between telling the stories of those individual soldiers who do survive and those, like Oscar F. Wilber, Company G, One Hundred and Fifty-fourth New York, described in the section titled “Death of a New-York Soldier,” who succumb. Deeply religious, Wilber asks Whitman to read to him from the New Testament, especially stories of “how Christ rose again.” Prostrated as he is from an intestinal disorder and wounds that would not heal, Oscar is aware of his approaching death. The role of the visitor includes being responsive to the emotional and spiritual needs of the dying,

Reflecting the way that such work exacts a heavy toll on the hospital visitor, in May 1864, Whitman too became one of the disabled. The precipitating factor seems to have been the arrival in Washington of the wounded from the horrific battles of the Wilderness and Spottsylvania. The “severity of the wounds, outvied anything that we had seen before,” he writes in a section titled, “Wounded from Wilderness, Spottsylvania, etc.” Further, the Army’s transportation systems, carefully designed by Dr. Letterman as they were, became overwhelmed, and the weather was unusually hot, so that many of the “wounds had worms in them.” Now, “for the first time in my life,” Whitman confesses, his health has broken: “I began to be prostrated with real sickness, and was, before the close of the Summer, imperatively ordered North by the physicians, to recuperate and have an entire change of air.” Here is another marker on the human toll of the war: the experience of what is known as secondary or vicarious trauma.

Still, in the final section of “Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers,” he makes a profession of unwavering service, claiming that he has always “tried to do justice to all the suffering that fell in my way.” This dispatch serves as a powerful charge to the readers of the Times and to us as well to be present for those debilitated by trauma. It concludes with a catalogue of all the states and regions represented in those hospitals. For one and all, both for whites and blacks, he “did what I could for them.”

The Good Gray Poet in the Times

As is well-known, Whitman was discharged by Secretary of the Interior James Harlan on June 30, 1865, on suspicion of immorality. Rushing to Whitman’s defense was his friend William Douglas O’Connor, who published a stirring pamphlet, The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, in 1866. Raymond gave O’Connor a four-column platform on the Sunday editorial page on December 2, 1866, for the purpose of reviewing the newest edition of Leaves of Grass. Raymond introduced the article with a calculated half-column endorsement of the value of the article. The charge of “indecency” in Whitman’s poetry may be warranted, he admits. But he insists, “We do certainly recognize in some of WHITMAN’S poems, especially in those written since and upon the war, and notably in that noble almost unrivalled hymn on the funeral procession of LINCOLN, beginning ‘When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed,’ some of the loftiest and most beautifully majestic strains ever sounded by human meditation.”[42]

O’Connor concludes The Good Gray Poet with an extended encomium to Whitman’s “immense and divine labors in the hospitals of Washington, among the wounded of the war, to which he voluntarily devoted himself as the best service he could render to his struggling country.” Also recognizing Whitman’s hospital service was Whitman’s friend John Burroughs, who, in an article published in The Galaxy on December 1, 1866, explained that Whitman’s “theory seems to have been that what the soldiers—many of them becoming worse and even dying of sheer home-sickness—most needed, was a fresh, cheerful countenance, a strong, helpful voice and the atmosphere and presence of a loving and healthy friend.” Burroughs notes that Whitman went “among the [wounded] purely in the spirit of love, distributing small gifts.”  And he claims that “Many soldiers can be found who aver that he saved their lives out and out.”^[43] Burroughs identified the essential purpose of Whitman’s hospital visits: the pressing need for decisive, compassionate interventions aimed at helping the soldiers recover from trauma in its many and frequently baffling manifestations. Making use of the leading newspaper of the time, Henry Raymond’s Times, Whitman wrote compellingly, fervently, persuasively, and informatively to urge his fellow citizens to join him in that life-saving work.

________________

[1] Elmer Davis, History of The New York Times, 1851-1921. (New York: New York Times, 1921), p. 53.

[2] Davis, 53.

[3] “Wanted—A Capitol.” Harper’s Weekly (26 Jan. 1861), p. 50. 

[4] All of these essays are available online in the essential Walt Whitman Archive, whitmanarchive.org.

[5] Jeffrey S. Reznick and Kenneth M. Koyle, “Combat and the Medical Mindset—The Enduring Effect of Civil War Medical Innovation.” New England Journal of Medicine (June 18, 2015), p. 2378.; See also: Bonnie Ellen Blustein, “Hammond, William Alexander, 1828-1900,” American National Biography.

[6] Reznick and Koyle, 2378.

[7] F.W. Blaisdell, “Medical Advances during the Civil War,” Archives of Surgery, Sept. 1988: 1045-50.

[8] “Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers,” New York Times, Dec. 11, 1864, WhitmanArchive.org.

[9] Jonathan Liebig, et. al., “Major Jonathan Letterman: Unsung War Hero and Father of Modern Battlefield Medicine,” American College of Surgeons, 2016. FACS.org.

[10] Gert H. Brieger, “Smith, Stephen,” American National Biography.

[11] Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery. (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 2.

[12] Carrington Macfarlane, Reminiscences of an Army Surgeon. (Oswego, NY: Lake City Print Shop, 1912), p. 73.

[13] Variations on these lines date from the 1855 edition. Here I have quoted the third edition of 1860. Whitman would not give the poem the title “Song of Myself” until the 1881 edition. I use the title here due to its widespread familiarity today.

[14] Augustus Maverick, Henry Raymond and the New York Press, (Hartford, CT: A.S. Hale, 1870), 168.

[15] Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 306.

[16] Thomas Winter, “Swinton, John,” American National Biography.

[17] John Swinton, “Letter to Walt Whitman, February 25, 1863.” The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961-1977), 1: 141-143.

[18] Correspondence, 1: 141-143.

[19] Donald Yanella, “Swinton, John (1829-1901).” Eds. J.R. LeMaster and Donald K. Kummings. Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. (New York: Garland, 1988), 698-99.

[20] “Whitman and John Swinton: A Co-operative Friendship,” American Literature, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Jan.,1959), 425-449.

[21] “New York Daily Times, 13 November 1856, p. 2.” Ed. Kenneth M. Price. Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews, (Cambridge UP, 1996), p. 66.

[22] Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews, p. 66.

[23] Thomas Winter, “Swinton, John,” Dictionary American Biography, accessed March 31, 2019.

[24] “‘How Dare a Sick Man or an Obedient Man Write Poems?’: Whitman and the Dis-ease of the Perfect Body” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: Modern Language Association, 2002), 248-259.

[25] For more on the “Manly Health and Training” series, see Jess Libow, “Song of My Self-Help: Whitman’s Rehabilitative Reading.” Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2019). With regard to the aspects of these articles noted above, Libow observes, “Whitman’s proto-eugenic language for those lacking idealized health (as well as manliness) denotes his concerns about disability. By offering reading as a means of training the ubiquitous ‘feeble’ male body, Whitman escalates middle-class ideals about masculine self-help into a comprehensive rehabilitative project.”

[26] I have discussed this incident in an earlier essay, “Trauma’s Interior History: Walt Whitman’s Civil War and Sequelae” in Still Here: Memoirs of Trauma, Illness and Loss. Eds. Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph. (New York: Routledge, 2019), 98-111.

[27] Herman, 34. The growing scientific recognition of the importance of these issues today is reflected in the work of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, which publishes the highly regarded Journal of Trauma and Dissociation. Among 164 scholarly journals in clinical psychology, in 2016 this journal was ranked 64th in citations, the editors report (Vol. 20, 2019).

[28] Daniel R. Morrison and Monica J. Casper, “Intersection of Disability Studies and Cultural Studies: A Provocation.” Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2012

[29] Morrison and Casper, Web.  

[30] Morrison and Casper, Web.  

[31] Stephen Kuusisto, “Walt Whitman’s ‘Specimen Days’ and the Discovery of the Disability Narrative.” Prose Studies, Vol. 27 (2005), p. 158.

[32] Kuusisto, 158.

[33] Gregory Orr, Poetry as Survival (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 4. (Quoted in Kuusisto, 159).

[34] Herman, 22-28.

[35] See Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. (New York: New York University, 1998).

[36] Tobin Siebers, “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” American Literary History, vol. 13, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 737-54.

[37] Beth Linker, “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History: A Survey of the Fields.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 87, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 499-535.

[38] See Lindsay Tuggle, The Afterlives of Specimens (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017).

[39] Herman, 33-34.

[40] Herman, 33-34.

[41] Herman, 51.

[42] See Gay Wilson Allen, Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. (New York: New York University Press, 1955), p. 376.  

[43] John Burroughs, “Walt Whitman and His ‘Drum Taps.’” Galaxy, Vol. 2 (1 December 1866): 606-615. On the Galaxy, see my “The Galaxy and American Democratic Culture, 1866-1878,” Journal of American Studies, 16:1 (April 1982): 69-80.

Further Reading

For more on the serious effects of homesickness during the Civil War, see David Anderson’s “Dying of Nostalgia: Homesickness in the Union Army During the Civil War,” Civil War History 56:3 (Sept. 2010): 247-282. For an excellent resource on Pfaff’s café, see Lehigh University’s “The Vault at Pfaff’s: An Archive of Art and Literature by the Bohemians of Antebellum New York,” edited by Edward Whitley. See also the essay collection Whitman among the Bohemians, eds. Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley (Iowa City, 2014). For an important exploration of Whitman’s poetics of mourning during and in the wake of the Civil War, see Max Cavitch’s American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minneapolis, 2006).

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

This article originally appeared in issue 19.1 (Spring, 2019).

About the Author

Professor of English and American Studies at the College of William and Mary, Robert J. Scholnick recently published Poe’s Eureka, Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Sciences in Britain and America, 1770-1850. Founding president of the Research Society for American Periodicals, he has published extensively on British and American periodicals, transnationalism, and the work of Walt Whitman. The focus of his teaching in recent years has been on the medical humanities, including a course in Trauma and Recovery in American Literature, which provided the stimulus for the current project. 

Johanna Ortner’s discovery of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s long-missing first collection of verse, published under her maiden name, “Watkins,” invites us to reconsider much of what we thought we knew about her life and writing. Of course, we could easily proceed without rethinking much of anything. Historians have been aware of this volume at least since William Still mentioned it in his encyclopedic 1872 history The Underground Railroad. At this point, we could simply slot this volume into the hole left for it in the bibliographical record and treat it as a set of warm-up exercises for her later, celebrated career as an antislavery poet, lecturer, novelist, and reformer. However, the belated unearthing of these poems—long after the critical narratives through which we have come to value her writing have been formed—offers us a rare opportunity to reconsider the grounds and the shape of those narratives: to reexamine the material conditions of publication for free black writers in 1840s Baltimore, and to think anew about how the author’s name organizes literary culture.

It is not entirely clear why Forest Leaves was hidden in plain sight for so long in the Maryland Historical Society, but it is likely that catalogers failed to connect this antebellum collection of decorous verse to the well-known antislavery lecturer, poet, novelist, and women’s rights activist Frances E.W. Harper, despite the fact that a meticulous librarian added the author’s married name in pencil to both the paper wrappers and the title page (fig 1). Among other things, Ortner’s discovery promises finally to clear up a misattribution that has stuck with remarkable tenacity to Harper’s bibliography, despite conclusive evidence that it is erroneous. Reports of a missing volume of verse led someone, somewhere, to speculate that Harper was the author of Eventide: A Series of Tales and Poems (1854), published under the pseudonym “Effie Afton” (J.M. Harper registered the copyright for this volume, which may have been the source of the misattribution). Bibliographies, encyclopedias, and Websites have passed this error along, despite scholars’ insistence that Afton’s poetry, and the riverboat named after her, had nothing to do with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

But Ortner’s discovery promises to do more than put speculation about this missing volume to rest; for a while, at least, it ought to shake up our understanding of the early work of the author who was known as Frances Ellen Watkins for the first decade or more of her career as a poet and antislavery lecturer. Watkins was a name to conjure with. As Ortner notes, Frances’ uncle, William Watkins, ran a prominent school for black youth in Baltimore. He helped shape William Lloyd Garrison’s opposition to colonization during the years in which Garrison lived in Baltimore (Garrison moved south in 1829 to help edit Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation). William Watkins was also a frequent contributor to abolitionist periodicals under the pseudonym “A Colored Baltimorean.” Frances’s cousin William J. Watkins, who moved to Boston in 1849, was also actively involved in abolitionist circles, both as a lecturer and as an editor and contributor to Frederick Douglass’s Paper. Though we have gathered up her early writing under the poetically appropriate name “Harper”—the name she took when she married in 1860—it is the surname Watkins that likely opened doors for the young poet and antislavery activist.

Forest Leaves helps us place Frances Ellen Watkins in educated, free black Baltimore in the late 1840s at a formative time: before much of her adoptive family emigrated to Canada, before she tried her hand at teaching in Columbus, Ohio, and York, Pennsylvania, and before she settled in Philadelphia, intent on becoming a full-time antislavery activist. The printer of her slim pamphlet, James Young, published numerous titles in this inexpensive format (figs. 2, 3), mostly works commissioned by religious organizations such as the Universalist Society (One hundred arguments in favor of Universalism, 1841) and the Methodist Sunday School Society (Speeches, dialogues, Scripture lessons and spiritual songs, 1845), and by voluntary associations such the Baltimore United Fire Department (Charter, by-laws, rules and regulations, 1842), the Sons of Temperance (Proceedings of the Grand Division, 1846), the Independent order of Odd Fellows (General laws, 1848), and the Baltimore Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (Directory, 1851).

While a collection of verse might seem unusual in this group of titles, publishing belles lettres in pamphlet format was more common in the antebellum United States than we have acknowledged, particularly for writers at the beginning of their careers. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe’s first volume of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)—known to collectors as one of the most valuable titles in American literature due to its rarity—was printed as a 40-page pamphlet. Poe paid a job printer, Calvin Thomas, to publish a mere 50 copies of this work. Like Forest Leaves, Tamerlane and Other Poems was deemed lost or non-existent until a copy was discovered a decade after Poe’s death. Similarly, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s first book, his travel narrative Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea (1833-4), was published (by different printers) as a set of two pamphlets before being expanded and published in book form by Harper & Brothers in 1835. To be sure, James Young published significantly more charters, by-laws, memorials, and speeches than belles lettres, but he did publish at least one other volume of verse, Jennie Yates’s Fragments (n.d.), also in pamphlet format.

Verse collections such as Tamerlane (“By a Bostonian”) and Forest Leaves may seem to us to be sharply different from the workaday, ephemeral texts frequently published as pamphlets; we tend to let our perceptions about genre override or subsume the connotations produced by print formats. But these pamphlet collections of verse share many characteristics with the less-heralded works Young published for Baltimore religious and voluntary associations: they are informally financed, published for a commissioning society or author, and, while loosely connected to national cultural trends, they display a decidedly local or regional inflection. The relief cut of a cemetery scene (fig. 4) on the last page of Forest Leaves shows this shuttle between local and national culture at work. The image is probably a generic or stock illustration, but for Baltimoreans it would have invoked the relatively new Green Mount Cemetery (dedicated in 1839), a rural or garden cemetery modeled on Cambridge’s Mt. Auburn. Like Watkins’ Forest Leaves, Green Mount Cemetery was designed to awaken sensibilities and encourage contemplation. Both her verse collection and the image chosen to embellish it depend for their legibility on larger cultural trends while also pointing to the local field of their circulation. This restricted field is signaled textually by a poem such as “An Acrostic,” which encodes a beloved friend’s name (Adel Martin) within the conventional poetic exercise, trading on the thrill of public intimacy. It is signaled materially by the limited print run and range of the inexpensively produced, privately printed pamphlet.

If Forest Leaves helps us locate the young poet Frances Ellen Watkins in time and space, the retrospective addition of these poems to her corpus unsettles the literary order in interesting and jarring ways. In his essay “What is an Author?” Michel Foucault famously distinguished between ordinary proper names and authors’ names, arguing that the name of an author doesn’t simply refer to a person but rather performs a “classificatory function,” enabling critics to “group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others.” The addition of ten “new” poems to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s oeuvre doesn’t just make her work more capacious, it changes the relationship between and among existing texts, altering the stories we tell about the nature and limits of her style, and how we use particular poems to make sense of others—what Foucault calls “reciprocal explanation.” One of the more unsettling aspects of the late discovery of an early volume is its disruption of our sense of the poet’s development. We suddenly have early versions of poems we have thought of as later productions, such as “Ruth and Naomi” (which appears in the extended 1857 edition of Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects) and “I Thirst,” which we now know is not a new but a significantly revised poem, one recast as a dialogue between two voices for the 1872 Sketches of Southern Life. Stranger still, we now can identify a group of poems that the poet left behind as she placed some early poems in periodicals and gathered up and revised others for later collections. Forest Leaves provides an exaggerated instance of the general rule that a poet’s juvenilia doesn’t precede his or her major work but rather is produced as a back-projection once an author’s name has been attached to a principle of style.

What does this reordering and resifting of poems by their history of publication tell us about the arc of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s career? Only six of the poems from Forest Leaves make it into the 1854 Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, which suddenly seems less miscellaneous and more strategic, carefully designed to capitalize on the energies surrounding the “Sisterhood of Reforms”: temperance, antipoverty, religious reform, and antislavery. Scholars have long noted that this second volume echoes the title of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), but this reverberation seems more deliberate when compared to the new world pastoral invoked by Forest Leaves. (Interestingly, the 1838 abolitionist reprint of Wheatley’s poems, bound together with those of enslaved poet George Moses Horton [fig. 5], refers to Wheatley’s as “Miscellaneous Poems” on the intertitle that introduces her section of the volume [fig. 6]; this very well may have been the edition of Wheatley’s poems read by the young Frances Ellen Watkins.) The “new” poems in Forest Leaves—that is, the poems that are new to us, those that the poet neither placed in periodicals nor included in later collections—may have been discarded because they were less easily yoked to reform purposes. For example, “Let Me Love Thee” seems to be a simple, conventional love poem, sharing with Watkins Harper’s later verse little more than a characteristic mode of address—a fondness for apostrophe and the poetic fiat (“Oh! Let me love thee”). Although tantalizingly autobiographical, “Yearnings for Home” recalls the “eternal snow” of Felicia Hemans’s or William Wordsworth’s alpine landscapes more than it does any Maryland locale.

And yet the classificatory work of the author’s name is a powerful thing; it is difficult to keep “reciprocal explanation” at bay. For example, if we read the love poem “Farewell, My Heart is Beating” alongside Watkins Harper’s most frequently reprinted poem, “The Slave Mother,” it seems to foreshadow some of the brilliant political strategies of the later antislavery verse. The scenario of reluctant parting and the weak counterfactual question that nags at the lovers in this early poem—“This heart the lone and trusting / Hath twin’d itself to thee; And now when almost bursting,/ Say, must it sever’d be”—prefigures the scene of mother-child separation and underscores the kinship between love poetry and slavery that Joan Dayan detailed in her 1994 essay “Amorous Bondage.” But it also shows the sophistication of the poet’s revision of this scenario in the later poem, in which a child is forcibly torn from his mother’s grasp (“Oh, Father! Must they part?”). Somewhere between the late 1840s and the early 1850s, the poetic lover’s wistfulness has been transformed into a call for active intervention.

Recognizing characteristic poetic strategies in embryo in the early work and reading later poems as outgrowths of texts we now know to have preceded them can feel both powerful and irresistible. This is the author function busy at work: leveling out uneven stylistic and thematic terrain, producing conceptual or theoretical coherence across a diverse collection of texts, and extending an already established sense of value to newly authenticated texts. And yet there is an uneasiness that accompanies the experience of the author function in action, a shifting of the ground beneath the critic’s feet as the messiness of the historical transmission of texts is subordinated to the orderly chronologies of literary time. Welcome as it is, the restoration of Forest Leaves to the historical record puts us in danger of forgetting the uncertainty that has attended the survival of nineteenth-century black writing, published (as most of it was) in ephemeral formats such as the pamphlet, the periodical, and the newspaper. Today, when the volume is still new to us, we can appreciate that fragility while also projecting a time in the very near future when Watkins Harper’s corpus will be rewritten as if we have known these poems all along. Right now, however, we occupy a kind of odd middle space, one in which these previously unknown texts feel uncannily familiar, and under-motivated connections between and among newly restored and established texts are beginning to feel inevitable.

One of the most interesting poems in Forest Leaves takes a similar sort of temporal dislocation as its explicit subject, exploring the sheer strangeness of being on the verge of something without understanding the precise nature of what one perceives. “The Presentiment” unfolds as a riddle poem much like Emily Dickinson’s “It was not Death, for I stood up” or “I felt a Funeral in my Brain,” poems in which the speaker struggles to define a baffling internal state and ends up settling for evocative description. “The Presentiment” toggles between the present tense of enunciation, in which “something strangely thrills my breast / . . . something which I scarce can tell,” and a set of declarative statements that, instead of delivering a more precise definition of this feeling, testify only to the speaker’s certainty that she has experienced this sensation in the past: “I felt it when. . ../ I felt it when. . . / I felt it when. . . . ” The reader’s experience of this poem, then, is one of being perpetually out of synch. Initially promising to explain a thrilling intuition—a feeling about or before feeling, a “pre”-sentiment—the poem offers not a vision of the future held tenuously in the present but rather a series of isolated instances from the past, disarticulated episodes that seem to recur without governing principle. The prophetic voice that speaks to the poet in “accents” and “whispers” repeatedly reminds her of the proximity of death, but the past tense of this reported speech gives the lie to its promises; the present tense of enunciation confirms that the imminent death it foretells has yet to arrive.

It is tempting to read this poem allegorically, to fill this strangely thrilling space of mingled anticipation and recollection with one or more truisms about Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s life and writing. One might suggest, for instance, that this final poem in her first collection of verse speaks to the poet’s premonition of the great career that lay ahead of her, one that would require, however, that love poems and meditative verse about vexing internal states be attached to higher purposes. The poem also enables us to put Watkins Harper into dialogue with William Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson, both of whom wrote poems about presentiments. At least for a little while, however, I’d like to linger with the poet’s dislocating sense of the presentiment, holding off the sense-making clarity of literary criticism’s orderly meta-narratives in favor of the uncanniness, the uncertainty, and the interpretive promise represented by a handful of texts that still feel out of time and out of place, internally contradictory, not yet successfully brought under the superintendence of the stories we tell about their author.

Further Reading

I discuss Harper’s dual career as a poet and an antislavery lecturer in “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry,” Early African American Print Culture, Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, eds. (Philadelphia, 2012): 53-74. Michel Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” has been widely reprinted; it is perhaps most easily found in The Essential Foucault, Paul Rabinow and Nicholas S. Rose, eds. (New York, 2003). I discuss the curious translation and publication history of Foucault’s essay in the introduction to Taking Liberties with the Author (2013). Joan Dayan’s provocative essay “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves” was first published in American Literature 66:2 (June 1994): 239-273 and reprinted in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman, eds. (Baltimore, 1995). Joanna Brooks discusses the fragility of nineteenth-century black print in “The Unfortunates: What the Life spans of Early Black Books Tell Us About Book History,” in Cohen and Stein, Early African American Print Culture, 40-52. Readers who are intrigued by the odd yoking of the poetry of “Effie Afton” to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s oeuvre might want to read the poems of Forest Leaves in the company of those published in Eventide (Boston, 1854). Readers who delight at going off on tangents can read all about the riverboat accident that has kept “Effie Afton” alive in historical memory in Larry A. Riney, Hell Gate of the Mississippi: the Effie Afton Trial and Abraham Lincoln’s Role In It (Geneseo, Ill., 2007).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Meredith L. McGill is associate professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003), and editor of two collections of essays: The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008) and Taking Liberties with the Author (2013). In addition to essays on nineteenth-century poetry and poetics, she has published widely on intellectual property, authorship, and the history of the book.