With bewitching results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reports of witches’ meetings in Salem Village in 1692

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

Weaving the Wicked Web of Antebellum Religion and Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Devils Dressed in Angels’ Robes”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The King of Hell in the Halls of Congress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

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

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

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

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

Dead celebrities

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

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

“Is—is he dead?”

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

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

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

Medical cadavers

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

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

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

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

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

Civil death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

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

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

French historians rediscover their American past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

Comparing American and Turkish history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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