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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“By God, You Shall Not Go Down”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Whitman-Swinton Connection

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

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

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

A First Responder Sounds the Alarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Good Gray Poet in the Times

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

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

________________

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

[2] Davis, 53.

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

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

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

[6] Reznick and Koyle, 2378.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[18] Correspondence, 1: 141-143.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[29] Morrison and Casper, Web.  

[30] Morrison and Casper, Web.  

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

[32] Kuusisto, 158.

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

[34] Herman, 22-28.

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

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

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

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

[39] Herman, 33-34.

[40] Herman, 33-34.

[41] Herman, 51.

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

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

Further Reading

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

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

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

About the Author

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

Common-place asks Sophie White about her 2012 book Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana and what it tells us about the role of material culture—especially dress—in the elaboration of discourses about race.

Some important concepts that frame your study are “Frenchification” and “racialization.” How did these function in colonial Louisiana and what was the relationship between them?

This book argues that material culture, especially dress, informed French views of Indians and influenced the development of racial thought in Louisiana. French colonial Louisiana, technically a province of New France, was a vast colony, sparsely populated by colonists and encompassing the central two-thirds of the present-day United States. As a focus of study, it has the advantage of lying at the intersection of two distinct models of French imperialism that were in tension with each other in this period. Upper Louisiana (or Illinois Country) grew out of colonization oriented by missionary activity and the fur trade as first developed in New France. Lower Louisiana would be influenced by the development of slave plantation societies in the Caribbean and was structured by slave codes aimed at Africans. Settlement practices in Upper or Lower Louisiana corresponded to their respective models but with the additional factor that African slavery would be established in Upper Louisiana on a scale never found in New France. Each model determined how the French interacted with indigenous populations, with implications for our interpretation of the trajectory of French racial thinking toward Indians in the two areas, and beyond.

What is particularly intriguing in French America is that the process of racialization needs to be contextualized in terms of an official policy known as “la françisation,” or Frenchification. First promoted in New France in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, this policy was intended to turn Indian converts into Frenchified convert subjects of the king—not only Catholic but also linguistically, culturally, and legally French. Based on the principle of Indians’ potential for transmutation, Frenchification theories were clearly premised on the malleability rather than the fixedness of Indians’ identity. By the latter years of the seventeenth century, having failed to achieve substantial or lasting conversion and assimilation of Indians in New France, the Crown virtually admitted defeat in its Frenchification project, one that had become almost exclusively centered on the promotion of legally binding Catholic marriages between French men and Indian women (for example, through the provision of dowries for Frenchified Indian women converts to marry French men).

Yet, it was at this precise point that missionaries and officials working “on the ground” in the Illinois Country finally claimed some success in actually turning Indians into French by virtue of conversion and, beginning in 1694, Catholic intermarriage. The women who entered into these marriages were described as “whiter” than the Indian women of Lower Louisiana, as well as “more hardworking, more adroit, better suited to housekeeping, and sweeter.” In 1699 one missionary would write about such women, “married to some of our Frenchmen, who would be a good example to the best regulated households in France.” Twenty years later attention was drawn to “many French inhabitants who are married to Indian women, even the most important [French] inhabitants, and they live very well together,” while as late as 1732, another missionary claimed that “there was no difference between a Christian Indian and a White,” and that legitimate children born to intermarried parents in the Illinois Country “behave like true Frenchmen.” These Catholic intermarriages were legally binding. I argue that this is why the way that Indian and half-Indian women were perceived became a key factor in debates about the merits of sanctioning intermarriage and métissage, and ultimately, in discourses about identity and race that transcended the Illinois Country.

The Illinois Country was clearly deemed relevant to broader questions about colonization, intermarriage, and the social order in French America as a whole. But were comments in support of intermarriage merely rhetorical or did some colonists in fact come to believe that the manner of living of Frenchified Indiansdid determine whether or not they were “true Frenchmen”? It is really only when we turn to the material culture evidence from these intermarried households that we can understand local colonists’ claims that Indian women in the Illinois Country had achieved Frenchness. Probate records of French-Indian households reveal that lodgings and outbuildings were built colonial-style, especially after 1719 when the French segregated their settlements from Indian ones. In these colonial villages, wheat cultivation began to overtake fur trading activities, and farming was done according to French methods using French equipment and tools. The dwellings were furnished with French-style furniture, textiles, cookware, and household goods, some of which, like armchairs, coffee pots and crystal glassware, hinted at a degree of refinement. As for the appearance of Indian wives and daughters of Frenchmen, extant records show that there was no visual differentiation between their wardrobe contents and those of French women settled in the Illinois Country: they all wore gowns or jackets and petticoats, over shifts and jumps/corsets, their hair invariably covered. I propose that the manner of living of these Frenchified Indian wives is important, for it allows us to resolve thorny questions about the chronology of racialization in French America; namely, that their material culture affected whether colonists hung on to older views (crystallized in the policy of Frenchification) of identity as mutable and of Indians as being capable of becoming French, or whether they subscribed to new models that defined a fixed and inborn racial identity for Indians.

In other words, my book necessarily recognizes the complex geopolitical factors that paved the way for racialism. But it introduces another influence, and one that is particularly relevant to understanding the shifting contours of racialization at the local and colonial levels: that of material culture. While bodily markers such as skin color were seen as permanent and binding for Africans from the onset of colonization in Louisiana, other official and religious authorities in the colony—those with first-hand exposure to “Frenchified” Indians in the Illinois Country—continued to assert the potential for the identity of Indian converts to be manipulated. My analysis shows that Indians’ external manifestations of religion and culture were central to this debate. Material culture interfered with the seemingly inexorable rise of racialism in Louisiana, creating its own chronology, and highlighting the uneven development and fractured character of the process of racialization in North America.

Would you talk a little about your approach to material culture generally (and cross-cultural dressing in particular) as well as the function of it in Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians? Why do you consider it an essential source relative to (or in relationship with) more conventional “textual” or documentary evidence?

This project began as a material culture study centered on dress, an approach that is especially valuable in illuminating the lives of the non-literate. Material culture is in many ways democratic since it is deployed by everyone using the objects available to them. And as I deepened my engagement with the sources, I realized that material culture was in fact key to understanding patterns of conversion and intermarriage in Louisiana, and that it was central to the way that French and Indians conceived of each other, including, for the French, how they explained skin color.

As a subgenre of material culture, cloth, clothing, and items of adornment had economic value: they were the major categories of commodities imported into the American colonies from Europe and Asia, and far outnumbered metal implements, tools, and guns in French-Indian trade. But beyond this real economic value, dress has the potential to help unpack the meanings and significance of cross-cultural exchanges and encounters.

My book uses an interdisciplinary approach and deploys archaeological and visual evidence, but my study rests in particular on archival sources including legal records, probate documents, court records, and criminal investigations; religious correspondence, parish registers, missionary and monastic records; official and personal correspondence, published and unpublished travel and missionary accounts; mercantile papers and informal records of business activities. My approach to this archival material is indebted to the existing literature on dress in cross-cultural contexts. It is also a qualitative approach that recognizes the variability of connotations (symbolic, aesthetic, economic, spiritual) attached to the same material objects by diverse individuals or groups of individuals. And in order to grasp these meanings, we need to keep in mind that there is more to textiles and adornment than generic categories of goods. I am therefore particularly interested in attending to the actual objects adopted in the course of cultural cross-dressing.

The problem that we are faced with is the fact that organic materials such as those used in dress, furnishings, and furniture deteriorate fast and rarely survive. But even where material culture evidence is not available, we can draw on knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dress to interpret the physical characteristics of clothing and textiles referenced in written sources. Whether their tactile and visual qualities, their three-dimensional embodiment based on weave, cut, and construction methods, their cost and quality based on workmanship and materials—all of these nitty-gritty details mattered in face-to-face encounters, and we need to pay attention to them. My emphasis on the materiality of clothing also requires due regard for temporal and spatial factors. I think it is essential to pay close attention to the environment in which specific items of dress were worn precisely because of the protean nature of dress and the varied meanings that the same object can have for different users. For example, for a member of the French nobility, wearing Indian garb while traversing the hinterlands had a functional justification that did not carry over to an urbanized colonial space like New Orleans. For an Indian woman, wearing a French-style gown was a defining act when the woman in question was an Illinois convert to Catholicism, sacramentally married to a French husband and living within a French colonial village on a French-built property complete with a mulberry picket fence.

But this kind of evidence seems to get us into some difficulty when dealing with the impact of colonization on indigenous populations, because the trend among historians has been to be wary of evidence of assimilation, focusing instead on recovering instances of cultural retention. One of my interventions is to probe our rather fixed views of what constitutes cultural retention. So, rather than interpreting the Illinois convert’s Frenchified appearance as an example of assimilation into the hegemonic colonial and religious order, I argue that it should be seen as a sophisticated response to the arrival of the French, one that in fact demonstrates thepersistence of Illinois belief systems. First because Illinois Indians had a history of openness to new cross-cultural exchanges and alliances that did not begin with the incursion of the French in North America, and because marital alliances between Illinois women and French men were extensions of pre-existing practices. Second, we need to explore what it meant for Indian women to marry out and live with Frenchmen, and how that experience might resonate with indigenous rituals (for example captive adoption rituals) that deployed material culture, especially dress, to achieve metamorphosis into a new identity. By showing how Indian women in the Illinois Country lived with French possessions, inhabited them, and used them as a part of their daily activities, we can grasp the nonverbal ways in which these women channeled objects to convey their identity and to define community. So, my analysis seeks to reveal less obvious ways of using objects to retain aspects of tribal culture, complicating the debate about assimilation and persistence, change and continuity.

What difference does attention to gender make in your analysis, particularly with respect to religion and marriage practices?

Colonization itself was gendered, so it was inevitable that gender would be absolutely critical to my analysis, as it has proven to be in other scholars’ work on race, religion, métissageand the fur trade in French America. Where my study differs from those is in emphasizing that the French-Indian marriages typical of the Illinois Country were Catholic marriages. The distinctiveness and uniqueness of these marriages impelled me to re-examine the evidence about the first Catholic intermarriage in the Illinois Country, in 1694, that united one Kaskaskia Indian convert, Marie Rouensa, and a French fur trader and landowner. Doing so led me to unravel the fact that it was Marie Rouensa herself (not the Jesuit missionary who is usually credited with this step and who in fact promoted a celibate marriage that would bear no issue) who insisted that this marriage be a Catholic union and not an Illinois Indian one. Indian women’s agency in establishing this pattern of intermarriage led me to reinterpret how they understood Frenchification, not as the loss of their Kaskaskia identity, but as an extension of indigenous motivations and strategies that were themselves gendered.

The pattern of Catholic intermarriages was itself fundamentally gendered, for it united French males with Indian women. In turn, the daughters born to these unions (beginning with Marie Rouensa’s daughter) became desirable marriage partners for new generations of Frenchmen in the Illinois Country, especially since girls were entitled to a share equal to that of their brothers’ from their parents’ estate according to French customary law, and could therefore provide a valuable entrée into colonial society for newly arrived French bachelors. As I have discussed above, the women’s manner of living was central to the arguments made by proponents of Frenchification and intermarriage, drawing on discourses that hinged on culturally defined gender roles. In Louisiana, questions about the premise of Frenchification coalesced in the experience of one French-Indian girl from the Illinois Country, Marie Turpin, who in 1747 began a journey that would culminate four years later in her becoming an Ursuline nun in New Orleans. Her story crystallizes the tension between the two peripheries of Upper and Lower Louisiana with respect to intermarriage and how the identity of Frenchified Indians was interpreted. One model, bolstered by experiential knowledge of Indian wives and daughters of Frenchmen in the Illinois Country, allowed for the possibility of Frenchification. The other increasingly dominant model was premised on the rigidity and fixedness of racial categories, and imposed limitations on those considered inferior. Marie Turpin’s experience embodied this tension and her story further offers us the opportunity to recover the words and actions of French women in New Orleans—notably nuns—as they responded to her. Brought face to face with evidence of religious, linguistic and cultural Frenchification in the person of Turpin, the nuns chose to see racial difference. They limited this bride of Christ to the lesser rank of a converse (domestic) nun, thus inscribing her status on her clothed body and effectively racializing what were otherwise “appropriate” French performances of femininity.

Marie Turpin’s progression toward becoming a nun took place within the female space of the convent. But her story also brings to light gender dynamics pertaining to masculinity and sexuality. During her weeks-long trip downriver to New Orleans, Marie Turpin was placed in the care of a female chaperone. But the convoy was a predominantly male space, and it was French soldiers and voyageurs who spoke with authority, upon arrival in New Orleans, of the piety and modesty of the “sainted girl who kept her eyes downcast throughout the trip” (thus avoiding the sight of the voyageurs’ semi-clad bodies, dressed in Indian-style travel garb) “and never said an unnecessary word, being always at prayer.” It was the judgment of these male intermediaries between Upper and Lower Louisiana, not that of the female chaperone, that counted when the topic concerned their world. In traveling the Mississippi River and tributaries, or moving across the hinterlands beyond colonial outposts, they, like Marie Turpin, also navigated a shifting panorama of practices and beliefs about identity, and about masculinity. In particular, that these men dressed in Indian garb raised the question of how colonists justified and managed the transgressions implicit in cultural cross-dressing. For there was a corollary to lingering French beliefs in the mutability of identity as epitomized by Frenchification policies. The premise that Indians’ identity was mutable carried the distinct possibility and risk of the reverse: a descent from a cultured to a wild (“sauvage”) state. Where Indians had the potential to be converted and “civilized,” the French could themselves be transformed as a result of their physical presence in the territory they sought to colonize. Though ostensibly gender-neutral, this risk (one that could be managed through dress, as my analysis shows) was seen in practice as pertaining only to French men, reiterating the need to keep gender at the forefront of analyses of colonization and race.

You write that “enslaved Africans serve as a foil in this study.” Can you explain a little what you mean by that?

Wild Frenchmen is centered on French and Indian encounters, but French views of Africans serve as a foil for understanding how Indians were racialized in Louisiana. The presence of Africans inflected every aspect of society. The first slave trade ships arrived from Africa in 1719, the year after New Orleans’s founding. Within twelve years, all but one of the twenty-three slave ships from Africa destined for French colonial Louisiana had arrived. Some Africans were present in Louisiana beginning in 1709, prior to the slave trade to that colony, but only ten were present in 1712, for example (none of them in the Illinois Country, which had not yet been transferred to Louisiana). After 1719, enslaved Africans would quickly become a majority of the colonial population of Lower Louisiana, outnumbering Europeans by four to one in 1731 and by two to one in 1760, and a significant segment of the population of the Illinois Country (25.2 percent in 1726 and 32.2 percent in 1752).

It is when we address the policies of Frenchification that we find the greatest disparities in French views of Indians and Africans. But here too there was a distinction between Upper and Lower Louisiana. In New France, Frenchification policies ebbed and flowed without reference to Africans, since that colony did not develop a significant population of enslaved (or free) Africans. In the Illinois Country, the unique pattern of intermarriage and métissage that evolved there was established without reference to Africans, since it predated their arrival in the area by at least fifteen years. At the same time, the very same missionaries who celebrated French-Indian intermarriages would become some of the largest holders of African slaves; Indian wives and daughters of Frenchmen in the Illinois Country also owned enslaved Africans, who labored alongside enslaved Indians according to French norms regulating the gender division of labor. Conversely, in New Orleans, slave-holding Ursuline nuns formed distinct views of Indian and African girls. Given greater exposure to Africans than Indians, they determined early on that their greatest missionizing zeal would be reserved for Africans, whom they deemed more amenable to conversion, a preference that formed one backdrop for their evaluation of the half-Indian Marie Turpin.

And, where Frenchification policies sought to elevate the status of Indians, the premise underlying the 1685 and 1724 codes noirs (slave codes) was the opposite, seeking to fix the identity and condition of Africans as permanent chattel. Even when freed African slaves were extended the same right as Indians to become “natural subjects,” this right remained legally revocable, so that Africans could never really shed their association with slavery. Yet, the French did plan for Africans in Louisiana to be converted to Catholicism, and they subjected them to degrees of acculturation that in some ways echoes the treatment of Indians. My current book project, Stolen from Africa:Voices of the African Diaspora Within and Beyond the Atlantic World, picks up this thread, placing Africans at the heart of a narrative about verbal and non-verbal expressions within the globalizing world of French colonization.

What do you think are the larger implications of either your approach or your findings, especially as they pertain to scholars’ conception of borderlands?

My approach highlights the importance of non-verbal expressions as a source for writing history, not least in proposing a methodology for re-thinking the history of the non-literate. I hope in particular to show how paying attention to objects complicates our often inflexible views of acculturation and persistence. Adopting another group’s material culture, and learning how to use and display it, was not only reactive or even emulative. It was also often proactive, confounding binary assumptions that reduce cross-cultural exchanges to questions of tradition or change, appropriation or persistence, authenticity or corruption. This point is especially important in terms of borderlands scholarship that rests on the analysis of subtle interactions and negotiations over people, places, and things. My hope is that this volume opens up new avenues for the interpretation of colonial projects, and the cultural and material exchanges that were fundamental to the establishment of these. So, while the book is the study of one region, its broader aim is to suggest that objects can profitably take center stage in the investigation of colonial societies and borderlands.

Sophie White is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. The author of Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (2012), for which she was awarded an NEH fellowship, she has also published numerous articles on slavery, gender, violence, dress, and culture. Her current book project engages with the global dimensions of slavery, probing the interplay of enslaved Africans’ verbal and non-verbal expressions in Atlantic and Indian Ocean colonies.

Before delving into the rediscovery of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s long-lost first collection of published poetry, Forest Leaves, my contribution to this roundtable comes with a disclaimer: I’ve had the pleasure of working with Johanna Ortner as a graduate student in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and I’ve had some difficulty parsing my enthusiasm about this discovery from the excitement that comes from seeing students making real and valuable discoveries in the archives through the process of primary research. That said, the rediscovery of Forest Leaves is surely an important one all on its own, one that will draw attention to Harper’s early life in Baltimore, to her craft and meticulous revision process across her career, and to the contours of African American women’s authorship in the nineteenth century. In what follows, I want to explore Harper’s striking resistance to nostalgia in Forest Leaves, especially exemplified by her refusal to endow her meditations on childhood and youth with sentiments of reverie or innocence. At the root of Harper’s anti-nostalgia is an understanding that any look to the past in the antebellum United States is simultaneously a look to the slave past. I go on to think about what lessons Forest Leaves might offer to scholars, especially given the recent turn, or more properly, return to the archive in African American literary studies.  Forest Leaves—a text that contains both tantalizing glimpses of origin stories and past recoveries—is also precisely the text that can warns us about the dangers of nostalgia for particular origins, or clear genealogies, in recovery work around early African American literature.

Schoolwork, Aesthetic Work, Public Work

How do we begin to understand Harper’s “leap” into print in the late 1840s or possibly, as Carla Peterson indicates, in the early 1850s, when the poet was in her twenties? The intertextuality of the poems as well as their careful curation within the volume points to a young Harper’s interest in addressing a public, or possibly multiple publics. And while the poems do traverse a range of themes and disciplinary subjects, they do not seem beholden to the demonstration of knowledge that marks nineteenth-century schoolwork productions. In other words, these are not schoolhouse verses: they display a poet who has already established a strong poetic voice and a set of clear aesthetic and political commitments that continue to be reflected in subsequent published works, especially in her other antebellum pamphlet collections that Meredith McGill calls Harper’s chapbook poetry.

At the same time, Forest Leaves does bear some of the traces of Harper’s schooling, her religious education, and her experiences as a young, nominally free woman of color growing up in Baltimore. Harper’s uncle, the preacher, activist and educator William Watkins, looms large in the story of the poet’s upbringing since he served as both an adopted father and schoolmaster. Melba Boyd notes that Watkins was largely an autodidact who taught himself English language and literature, Greek, Latin, and even medicine. At the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, Harper was immersed in a curriculum that focused on the study of the Bible, but also history, geography, mathematics, English, rhetoric, and oratory, among other fields. Boyd notes that at Watkins’s school, composition was an almost daily activity, and it is likely that this intensive practice of writing and rhetoric shaped the precision and control displayed in her poetry. The woods and nature also served as a type of classroom for the burgeoning poet, who, according to Theodora Williams Daniel, “frequently visit[ed] the woods where she listened to the birds and gathered leaves tinted by the sun in order to stimulate her imagination.” In addition to spending time in nature, Harper also learned natural history and natural philosophy at her uncle’s school. Harper’s poetry was thus shaped by the disciplinary and learning structures of formal schooling, but also by forms of learning and auto-didacticism in the parlor as well as “in the field.” We might also think about the city of Baltimore as an important laboratory space for the development of Harper’s thinking about the complexities of race, gender, slavery, and the precariousness of freedom for African Americans in the antebellum period.

For my own research on African American engagements and experiments with natural science in the antebellum period, I am interested in thinking more about Forest Leaves’s relationship to black women’s manuscript cultures and compositional practice in the antebellum period, especially as they reflect the study of natural history among free African American women. Just as the title of Forest Leaves plays with the connection between “leaves” in the forest and the leaves of her book, black women’s friendship albums from the period connected “poesy” to “poesies.” These sentimental albums paired floral-themed verse with paintings of flowers, included natural history lessons on flora, and also served as part-herbariums, offering up a number of floral specimens in painted form. Looking ahead to 1855, Walt Whitman would also reflect on the intertwined materiality of writing, print, and nature in Leaves of Grass, a title that resonates with that of Forest Leaves.

Harper All Grown-Up

At least at this preliminary stage, I’m thinking about Forest Leaves as a transitional volume: a collection that reflects Harper’s youth and schooling, but that is also already attuned to the fleeting nature of life, to the moral stain of slavery on the nation, and to many other “grown-up” topics. This is a youthful production, to be sure, especially reflected, as Ortner points out, in the poems that address romance and budding sexuality. But as much as Forest Leaves reflects the sentiments of the young, it also feels like the writing, please excuse the cliché, of an old soul. The pamphlet is filled with poems about illness, death, and looking for peace granted by Christ at the end of one’s life. This is not a collection that looks back lovingly to the days of childhood, and the poet does not seem to have any particular attachment to the past. This striking lack of nostalgia for the days of “childhood innocence” recurs across Harper’s subsequent poetry. For example, in “Days of My Childhood,” printed in the Anti-Slavery Bugle in 1860, the desire to return to the joys and carefree nature of childhood are replaced with “holier hopes” of meeting Christ in death:

Days of my childhood I woo you not back,
With sunshine and shadow upon your track,
Far holier hopes in my soul have birth,
Than I learned in the days of my childish mirth.

Of course, Harper’s biography suggests concrete reasons for not wanting to return to the “days of my childhood.” The poet was orphaned at the age of two and her early letters frequently convey a deep sense of isolation and loneliness. But beyond these biographical details, Harper’s resistance to sentimental reveries about childhood also connects to her political vision: sentimentalism may be mobilized for abolition, but for her, its attendant nostalgia just isn’t productive for the antislavery cause.

Already here in Forest Leaves, we can see something deliberately anti-nostalgic at work in Harper’s poetry. The poet regularly looks back to the past, but she never desires a return to it. As the previously unknown poem, “The Presentiment,” opens:Foley

There’s something strangely thrills my breast,
And fills it with a deep unrest,
It is not grief, it is not pain,
Nor wish to live the past again.

Harper’s disinterest in returning to the past is clearly part of her belief in Christian redemption and the resurrection. It is possibly also a meditation on what Robin Bernstein has identified as the construction of “racial innocence” around white children simultaneous with the exclusion of black children from the category of childhood itself in the nineteenth century. But I want to suggest that Harper’s anti-nostalgia is also about what it means to look to the past in a slave-holding nation. For Harper (as for all antebellum Americans), to look to the past, to look to the “days of my childhood,” is also to look to the time of slavery. “Yearnings of Home,” another previously unknown poem in Forest Leaves, bears a title that promises to indulge in reveries about the past. Sure enough, “Yearnings for Home” voices a wish to return home once more to feel the “native air” and to die in the presence of family. But crucially, the poem expresses a yearning to return only to the place and geography of childhood, not to the time of it. Here, in the years before she joined the Abolitionist movement, a young Harper is already suggesting that black people only have one option: to keep moving forward, even if the prospects for freedom seem dim. The (slave) past is not a place to which to return or retreat.

Harper’s Lessons

I wonder if Forest Leaves’s unsettling of convenient origin narratives might also pose a challenge to scholars of African American literature, especially those engaged in recovery projects. In light of recent scholarly conversations and publications, I have been wondering about the limits of scholarly narratives produced around recovery, especially in the archives of slavery and nominal freedom. More specifically, I have been thinking about how the editorial imperative to introduce and promote newly recovered texts at times produces critical narratives that may not enable the most generative or even accurate scholarship on such texts. For example, the claiming of “firstness” for the African American novel has produced all kinds of confusions, errors, and obfuscations (of, for example, the literary productions of black women writers). Might recovery narratives begin to tell different stories, beyond problematic origin narratives, and beyond presumptions that the significance of recovered works is always transparent, obvious, unquestionable? For example, in the case of Forest Leaves, is there a way to capture the significance of Harper’s first book of poems without relying on the supposedly inherent importance of firstness, or following Kinohi Nishikawa’s recent essay, without relying on the tautological assumption that a recovered work of literature is important because it was recovered? Moreover, how do we read an object of the early black print sphere that was published, but did not circulate widely, if at all? How should scholars talk about published works that were not circulated? Like manuscripts? In the terms of counter-publics? Nishikawa suggests that we should be also thinking about the condition of “lostness” of recovered texts, rather than seeking recognition for such works by immediately incorporating (re)discovered works into a pre-determined canon, and its associated scholarly narratives. In the words of Leif Eckstrom, how do we know that we even know how to read a work like Forest Leaves?

Despite these qualifications and provocations, the recovery of Forest Leaves points to the ways that recovered works can fundamentally transform our understanding of an author’s known oeuvre. As Ortner mentions, because Forest Leaves contains early versions of well-known poems, we must now understood those poems as revisions of earlier works. This is really a modest understatement by Ortner since her rediscovery of Forest Leaves means that future readings and analyses of these poems will now have to account for the changes made between their appearance in Forest Leaves and in subsequent publications. In this way, we see that origins do matter. At the same time, the embeddedness of Harper’s poetry in schoolwork and composition, the discovery of Forest Leaves in print rather than manuscript form, and the importance of revision for Harper, all unsettle Forest Leaves as the origin of Harper’s poetry. The primacy of revision in Harper’s poetic practice further relates back to Harper’s own refusal of nostalgic origin stories, and to her understanding that a backward-looking poetry—or even a look back to one’s own poetry—is only as good as what it might enable in and for the future.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Carla Peterson, Eric Gardner, Kinohi Nishikawa, Leif Eckstrom, Anna Mae Duane, and Paul Erickson for valuable feedback and assistance with this response piece, as well as to Johanna Ortner for her discovery and work on this project.

Further Reading

My thoughts on Harper’s early life and relationship to childhood have been largely inspired by Frances Smith Foster and Melba Boyd’s foundational studies. See Foster, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York, 1990) and Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E.W. Harper, 1825-1911 (Detroit, 1994). Rather than viewing her writing as “all of a piece,” Meredith McGill focuses on the important discontinuities of Harper’s poetry over time, especially between the earlier volumes of poetry that were printed as pamphlets or “chapbooks,” and the poet’s late nineteenth-century volumes that appeared as handsome, cloth-bound books. Forest Leaves certainly does not suggest an aesthetic sensibility that can be traced continuously across all of her poetry, but it does reflect important connections between her first book of poems and her other pamphlet-printed collections, especially Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, which was first published in 1854. On the importance of the pamphlet format in the study of Harper and nineteenth-century poetry more generally, see McGill, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry,” Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia, 2012). On the schooling of American women, including some African American women, in the post-Revolutionary and antebellum U.S., see Mary Kelley’s Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill, 2006). Kim Tolley’s The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (New York, 2002) is also an excellent resource on the place of natural science and natural history in the classrooms of nineteenth-century girls and young women. For more on antebellum black women’s friendship albums, see Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven, 2008) and Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York, 2015). The friendship albums of Amy Matilda Cassey, Mary Anne Dickerson and Martina Dickerson are available in the holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia and digitally at the Cassey & Dickerson Friendship Album Project. On the pitfalls of common recovery narratives surrounding twentieth-century African American literature, see Kinohi Nishikawa, “The Archive on Its Own: Black Politics, Independent Publishing, and The Negotiations,” MELUS 40:3 (Fall 2015): 76-201. My citation of Leif Eckstrom comes from personal correspondence. On the politics of recovery in the study of slavery and freedom, see the forthcoming special issue of Social Text, “The Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive” 33:4 (2015).

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

Britt Rusert is assistant professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and visiting assistant professor of English at Princeton University. Her book, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture, is forthcoming from New York University Press.

Art historians are fond of saying that early American landscape paintings are primarily topographical, while the Hudson River School landscapes that followed in the antebellum period rise to the status of painted poetry. However, just as colonial and early national portraits have proven to reveal more about the culture than the appearance of a select group of individuals, landscapes from the same period can tell us about the aspirations and values of early Americans. For example, the artist Ralph Earl (1751-1801), who was primarily a portraitist, painted a small group of landscapes at the end of his career that are not only descriptive views but that also tell stories. As a case study, I invite you to share in the stories, both personal and cultural, that are told in Earl’s Looking East from Denny Hill (fig. 1).

At first glance, Looking East from Denny Hill is merely a topographical landscape. Like a surveyor, the painting’s viewer stands at a particular vantage and takes measure of the land: the Denny farm in Leicester, Massachusetts, in the foreground; the towns of Worcester and Shrewsbury along the left side; and the farms of southern Worcester County at the right. More than fifty houses, barns, churches, and other buildings are depicted in the painting, with enough specificity to suggest that Earl was intent upon cataloguing exactly what he saw from the top of the 950-foot-high Denny Hill.

Upon further examination, however, one finds in the composition explicitly artificial elements that Earl introduced to signal his intention of moving beyond a literal record of what lay before him. Two symmetrically placed tall trees frame the scene and offer a stage-like setting upon which to depict stories about the role of the land in the lives of the people who shaped it. This pair of trees is echoed by another pair in the near distance; by making the one on the left lower than the one on the right, Earl opens up the left side of the composition and directs the viewer’s attention there.

But stage directions alone do not make a story. In order to lend a narrative quality to the Denny Hill landscape, Earl also needed to invoke time. He accomplished this by painting the sky in a range of pinks and blues that imply a rising or setting sun. The edges of the trees are tipped with orange and red, invoking not only a time of day but also a time of year: late August or early September. The vivid colors of the sky and foliage also set an optimistic tone of peace and prosperity for both the personal and national stories that unfold in the land. Earl populated the foreground with a group of farmers harvesting the hay and a pair of fashionably dressed women strolling across the farm. These figures become characters in stories of cultivation and prosperity, both individual and collective.

Before exploring the specific stories embedded in the painting, it is important to note that Earl also manipulated the scene through the vantage point that he selected for the composition and the way that he chose to frame the image. Anna Henshaw (1778-1854), a resident of Leicester at the time the painting was done, recorded the view from Denny Hill: “There is a most splendid panorama view from Denny Hill, which embraces the surrounding country, dotted with the white houses of the inhabitants and a dozen or more churches. At the north west is seen Leicester village situated on a hill equal, if not superior in height, about two miles travelling distance . . . In the north east in a valley are Worcester and New Worcester villages. All around below are hills and dales, woodlands, plots of grass, and arable fields, delightfully diversified.” Henshaw’s description demonstrates that there was nothing inevitable about the view represented in Looking East from Denny Hill, since she described a different view from the very same spot where Earl painted his panoramic view of farms, towns, and woods. Most notably, Earl pointed his easel to the east, leaving out the village of Leicester. Thus Earl’s landscape reflects a set of choices made by the artist, probably in consultation with his patron, Thomas Denny Jr. (1757-1814).

Earl’s choices concerning viewpoint and composition helped to set the stage for the stories he would paint inLooking East from Denny Hill, stories that range from the individual to the national. On the personal level, we can read Looking East from Denny Hill in relation to the lives of the artist and his patron. Both Earl and Denny grew up in this landscape and were the grandsons of some its original white settlers. In relation to the artist’s life story, Looking East from Denny Hill expresses Earl’s reconciliation with the town from which he was alienated as a young man. In 1778, Earl was a loyalist who was driven from New Haven (where he had gone to advance his career as an artist) by town leaders and fled to England, leaving behind a wife and two children. In remaining a loyalist, Earl was also estranged from his father who fought as a captain in the militia company led by Thomas Denny’s uncle, Samuel Denny. Upon Earl’s return to Massachusetts in 1785, he brought a second wife from England, even though his first marriage had never been legally terminated. That there are no paintings known by Ralph Earl of Leicester subjects until 1800, the last full year of his life, suggests that he remained dissociated from his kinsmen and townsmen until then. Besides Looking East from Denny Hill, Earl painted a portrait in 1800 of his cousin, Thomas Earle (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), a gunsmith who supplied weapons to local Revolutionary War hero Colonel William Henshaw, among others. While the painting commissions themselves signify Earl’s reconciliation with the people of Leicester, the orderly character of the landscape that he painted for Thomas Denny imparts the personal narrative of Earl’s return to the fold.

For the patron Denny, the painting tells a very different story, one of his and his forebears’ role in transforming the land from a wilderness to an orderly and prosperous community. The original Denny farm, established by his grandfather Daniel Denny, consisted of 70 acres. By 1784, Thomas Denny owned 431 acres (an area about two-thirds of a mile in each direction), the land that occupies the lower half of the green area of the painting. Denny’s property holdings in 1784 encompassed 4 unimproveable acres, 5 acres of tillage, 8 acres of fresh meadow, 40 unimproved acres, 50 acres of upland mowing, 118 acres of pasturage, and 206 acres of woodland. What may appear to the modern viewer as a uniformly rural landscape was understood to eighteenth-century landowners and landscape viewers in more diverse terms that were defined by function and the level of the owner’s success in improving the land. By employing the laws of linear perspective and a vantage point from the Denny farm, Ralph Earl gave equal weight to Denny’s 431 acres and the 11 or so miles of land that recede into the distance. Through this choice, Earl established Denny as the main protagonist of any stories inscribed in the land.

Moreover, the structure established by Earl with the symmetrically framing trees in the foreground complements the structure that Denny wrought in the land. The farm is partitioned into neat fields by fences and stone walls. Different shades of green imply a variety of grasses and staple crops to feed the livestock that is penned at left and grazing in the middle distance. A team of nine hired men reap the hay in the foreground and load it into an ox-drawn cart, demonstrating that Denny had graduated from the hard work of the fields to the role of gentleman-farmer. In this way, Earl represented Denny as a model citizen whose leadership demonstrates to fellow farmers that clearing, planting, and partitioning the land results in order, beauty, and wealth. Indeed, Denny’s example is followed throughout the expanse of the valley below.

Earl’s painting was not just a biography; it was a local history as well. In the painting, as in life itself, we sense that Denny was active not only in shaping his own farm, but also in defining the contours of the community. Town records reveal that Denny served Leicester as town clerk, selectman, moderator, representative to the General Court, and justice of the peace. He was also Leicester’s tax assessor, an office that required him to enumerate his neighbor’s property in a manner that Earl echoes in his descriptive approach to the landscape. Denny was active in Leicester as a fence viewer, hog constable, and surveyor of the highways, lesser offices that entailed maintaining order among his townsmen. He also participated in the annual “perambulations” in which selectmen of abutting towns met to affirm the boundaries. Denny’s contributions in these ways are also reflected in Earl’s painting: fences are in repair, livestock is enclosed, roads are in good order, and towns flow into one another without signs of dispute.

Denny was not content to see himself merely as a local leader, and so Earl positioned him in relation to changes in land use that were afoot nationally.Looking East from Denny Hill was commissioned at a critical juncture in Thomas Denny’s life–the time of his move from the family homestead to his newly built Federal mansion in the center of Leicester. Denny’s move coincided with the shift from his life as a farmer to that as a storekeeper and manufacturer of card clothing. While Earl’s painting does not explicitly tell that story, it provides a narrative structure that mirrors the changes taking place in Denny’s life.

The axis from foreground to background relates the Denny farm to two key elements in the transformation taking place in Thomas Denny’s lands and work at the end of the eighteenth century. Just to the right of the tall tree, in the near distance, there is a field of sheep. These are clearly Denny’s animals, as in 1784 he is documented to have owned a pair of horses, six swine, six oxen, eleven cows, and twenty-three sheep and goats. These numbers are themselves significant, as historian John Brooke has shown in his history of Worcester County that farmers who owned more sheep than cows were more likely than other farmers to be entrepreneurs in Worcester’s first experiments in textile-related industries.

The road winding through the left half of the painting offers a second hint of the relationship between the agrarian world and the emerging industrial economy. The road connects the rural part of Leicester with the county seat of Worcester in the valley below. At a key intermediate point–the bend in the road that serves as the turning point of Earl’s painted story–there stands a mill with a bell tower, a concrete sign of the industrial transition that is underway and which Thomas Denny was intent upon helping to usher in. Thus, Ralph Earl used both time and space to impart stories about Denny and his role in the communities depicted in this landscape.

To demonstrate that contemporary viewers would have understood Earl’s painted stories of Denny Hill both in personal and communal terms, we need only turn the pages of the popular illustrated magazines of the day. For instance, when the nearby estate of Moses Gill (fig. 2) was engraved by Samuel Hill forMassachusetts Magazine, it was accompanied by a brief text that framed Gill’s success as an emblem of national importance: “Foreigners must have an high idea of the rapid progress of improvement in America, when they are told that the ground which these buildings now cover, and a farm of many hundred acres around it, now under high and profitable cultivation were, in the year 1766, as perfectly wild as the deepest forest of our country. The honourable proprietor must have great satisfaction in seeing Improvements so extensive, made under his own eye, under his own direction, and by his own active industry.” That landscape, like the Denny Hill painting, includes a harvest scene in the foreground. The Gill estate view was published in 1792, eight years before Earl’s painting was done. Moreover, Gill was related to Denny by marriage. It seems likely, therefore, that Earl and Denny would have been conscious of Hill’s engraving and its implied narrative of personal and collective productivity. In this way,Looking East from Denny Hill uses established visual and verbal conventions for representing individual wealth as a common good.

Earl also included two tiny female figures that inform the viewer that this landscape is a civilized place. Just left of center, a pair of women stroll across the field in white dresses decorated with blue sashes and large hats embellished with coral-colored ribbons. Perhaps meant to suggest members of the Denny family, these figures also relate to the larger story of republican community. A contemporary print of Dartmouth College (fig. 3) depicts a woman and a girl walking together under a parasol, while a group of boys play ball nearby. An accompanying text explains that a few years earlier this was a frontier that was heavily battered during the Revolution, but now 160 students attend the college, fifty or sixty more attend the grammar school, and “about fifty dwellings, beside five or six stores and other buildings” now grace the town. Children and women at leisure marked the development of stable communities, a story common to the Dartmouth and Denny Hill landscapes.

In the juxtaposition of agrarian Leicester and the commercial center of Worcester, with a mill standing for the dawn of industry between the two, Looking East from Denny Hill also provides a narrative of the national interest in developing a balanced economy to ensure lasting political independence. The road that connects Leicester to Worcester reemerges just below the horizon as it enters the town of Shrewsbury. As every resident of central Massachusetts would have understood, that road continued to Boston, the capital city and principal port of the state. Denny’s move from the family farm to his store and card clothing manufactory echoed the national drive to balance agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing.

In short, visitors to Denny’s home in Leicester would have encountered a fashionably appointed Federal mansion and a genial host who was one the wealthiest men in town. The landscape painting that he commissioned Ralph Earl to paint in 1800 suggests the manner in which he wanted to be perceived by his neighbors. The Denny farm scene represents him as a third-generation resident of Leicester, whose own fortunes helped to fuel the general prosperity. He contributed to the growth of the town through his own enterprise as a farmer, a storekeeper, and a manufacturer as well as through his diligent service as a public official. Although a man of means, in the end, his heart belonged to the commonwealth.

Further Reading:

The most complete study to date of early American landscape paintings is found in Edward J. Nygren, et al., Views and Visions: American Landscapes before 1830 (Washington, D.C., 1986). Thomas Denny’s neighbor Anna Henshaw kept a diary that is currently unlocated. The fragment of her diary containing her description of the view from Denny Hill was transcribed by a descendant of the Denny family, Mary D. Thurston, and is preserved in the painting files at the Worcester Art Museum. A monograph on Earl is Elizabeth Kornhauser, Ralph Earl: The Face of the Young Republic (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1991), an exhibition and catalogue organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum, which traveled to the National Portrait Gallery and the Amon Carter Museum.

The best source for learning more about the early settlers of Leicester, Massachusetts, especially the Denny and Earl families, is Emory Washburn,Historical Sketches of the Town of Leicester, Massachusetts, during the First Century from Its Settlement (Boston, 1860). Earl is branded a Tory in the Connecticut Journal, New Haven, April 2, 1777. He told his version of the story and pled for financial relief in his loyalist petition to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, with a supporting letter from John Money, January 28, 1779, Public Record Office, ref. no. AO 13/4. Earl’s father’s military service is recorded in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, 17 vols. (Boston, 1896-1908), 5: 150.

Thomas Denny’s tax assessment was discovered by Laura K. Mills in “A list of the Polls and of the Estates, Real and Personal, of the several Proprietors and Inhabitants of the Town of Leicester . . . ,” Massachusetts General Court, Valuation Lists, Leicester, 1784, Box 380, State Library of Massachusetts, Boston. Denny’s activity in local government is recorded in two manuscript volumes entitled the General Records of the Town of Leicester, covering the dates 1745-1787 and 1787-1829.

For an excellent study of the evolution of Worcester and the surrounding towns of central Massachusetts, see John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (Amherst, Mass., 1992). Robert Blair St. George was the first scholar to identify the building at the bend in the road as a mill, in his book, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 342.

For the image of Moses Gill’s house and the accompanying text, see “Description of the Plate,”Massachusetts Magazine 4: 11 (November 1792): [651] and opp. [651]. Moses Gill married Sarah Prince, whose mother was the sister of Daniel Denny, Thomas’s grandfather. For the view of Dartmouth and its description, see Massachusetts Magazine 5: 2 (February 1793): [67]-68 and opp. [67].

This article originally appeared in issue 1.3 (March, 2001).

Since 1996 David Brigham has been the curator of American art at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington, D.C., 1995), and co-author of an Online book entitled Early American Paintings in the Worcester Art Museum.

Statement of Poetic Research

On the cold morning of November 29, 1864, a force of U.S. soldiers under the command of the minister/Colonel John Chivington carried out a brutal and unprovoked attack on a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment at Sand Creek in southeast Colorado Territory. In the resulting carnage that spread over forty square miles and into the next day, at least 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho were killed, with many scalped and mutilated, including a large number of women, children, infants, and elderly. Determined by the U.S. military and government in the ensuing months to be a massacre, this event forms one of the most infamous chapters in Colorado history and the annals of the American west. For Cheyenne and Arapaho people, whose legal right to Colorado lands were denominated in treaty covenants with the U.S. government, the massacre served to drive them from their ancestral homelands and reduce them to the status of exiles. 

The far-reaching impacts of this massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people, as well as its broader effects on Native peoples of North America, was the concern addressed by Acoma poet Simon J. Ortiz in his seminal poetic work, From Sand Creek (1981).  “How to deal with history,” our collective American past that so often excludes Native people? This question forms the central organizing concern of the work as a whole, and operates as a provocation to see the world from a different perspective. And not just to do so passively, but also to interrogate a largely one-sided conception of the past that has been reinforced in the dominant culture’s narrative of Sand Creek, which is still referred to by some as a “battle,” rendering Native people “invisible.” The maintenance of this other posture is what tolerates the perpetuation by so many Americans of “an amnesia that doesn’t acknowledge that kind of history.” This sort of response, however, is not available to all, for as Ortiz perceptively asks, “but Indians? What choice do we have?”

These simple but vital questions are ones that the Native writers and artists included in this issue of Common-place also seek to address through their own words and art. The positioning of the poetry, prose and art around the specificity of Sand Creek on its 151^st anniversary is not done due to it’s “uniqueness” within frontier history, for the event itself is not unique, but because of the place that Sand Creek holds within a broader context of systematic oppression and violence, spanning several centuries from Mystic River, Block Island, Fort Neoheroka and Gnadenhutten to Clear Lake, Bear River, Sand Creek, the Marias River and Wounded Knee . . .

It is hoped that the creative insights presented by such a rich diversity of Native voices can serve as a basis for a more comprehensive conception of what such traumatic events mean in their historical relativity, while also demonstrating the capacity of Native people and cultures to resist, persist and survive. The joining of these words as a means of repudiating narratives of victimry and tragedy in favor of an active presence is what Gerald Vizenor defines as “survivance.”

The legacy of the Sand Creek Massacre has been brought into sharp focus over the last several years at the University of Denver where I teach, which just last year celebrated its 150^th anniversary. The intertwining of DU’s anniversary with the horror of Sand Creek is no mere coincidence in time or place within the mythologized history of the American West and its “civilizing” and “winning” that Ortiz deconstructs through his poetry. It is the direct result of the intentional actions and inactions of settlers, soldiers and government officials, including DU’s founder, John Evans who was Governor of Colorado Territory at the time and also Superintendent of Indian Affairs. The massacre that precipitated the wholesale removal of two distinct Native societies from Colorado, whose rightful claims to the land had been validated by the U.S. federal government through the ratification of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, and was of such devastating consequences to the Arapaho and Cheyenne people that they continue to live with the effects of the trauma inflicted upon them. And always to remember. It is a regrettable truth that the legacy of Sand Creek seems to have laid buried for so long within DU’s institutional memory, perhaps reduced to that shadowy absence “within” what Ortiz calls “the socio-cultural-historical schematic of ‘victors and victims’” that naturalize such events while simultaneously erasing them from our collective cultural memory. As we lament and even condemn such a process, we must also cultivate and maintain an awareness of the direct intentionality that leads so many to unknowing, along with the failures of those who led us to this place and continue to work to make people forget.

While the effort to confront the pervasive nature of the historical amnesia Ortiz speaks of is one of the goals of the selection of work presented here, we know that it can only have a limited value if operating in isolation and must be part of a broader network of creative labors to be truly successful. Hence, this issue of Common-place is joined to previous collaborations including a special feature on Native writing and art in commemoration of the Sand Creek Massacre included in the Fall 2014 issue of Denver Quarterly. As editors of the feature, Eleni Sikelianos and I addressed the tangled interconnections of these events at DU with an awareness that “history is not something of or in the past, but the very field we walk upon.” Indeed, the Native writers who contributed work to this previous project, many of which are also included in Common-place, highlighted the myriad ways that the Sand Creek Massacre and related events impact Native people and communities, while continuing to weigh on the contemporary lives of Native people. Together, both selections are intended to offer a means to create a more complete and multivocal understanding of our collective pasts and to confront the distressing truths that lie hidden in a way that eschews the debilitating narratives of tragedy and victimry. In an essay published at Salon.com on the day of the anniversary, November 29th, I further explored the ways in which memory, trauma and place are inextricably connected through historical events and the process by which particular narratives gain legitimacy by the creation of historical monuments, but also how the creation of respectful and honest memorials can contribute to healing and peace.

During this same time and growing out of some ongoing discussions about the place of Sand Creek in Colorado history and John Evans’ role as territorial governor, I, along with a small group of other concerned faculty, formed a scholarly research group to formally address these issues. As our work marked the first time that members of DU’s academic community had confronted this question, and the difficult truths to which it is inextricably connected, in a direct and comprehensive way, our task often seemed overwhelming. It was the unanimous belief of our committee members, however, that after so many years such an effort was long past due, regardless of the challenges and internal tensions our research brought to the surface. At Northwestern University, which was also founded by Evans, the administration formed an official committee to conduct their own examination of Evans’ actions as a response to protests from their Native students and concerned community members. The independent efforts of the two groups of scholars promised an unprecedented consideration of our shared institutional heritage, while marking an extraordinary opportunity to engage with Cheyenne and Arapaho communities to promote healing and peace, as well as renewed friendship and collaboration.

From the onset, we at DU recognized the critical importance of engaging with the Cheyenne and Arapaho communities as a fundamental component of our efforts to understand the complexity and multilayered narratives that make up the history of the University of Denver, the state of Colorado and the frontier West. Accordingly, we reached out to representatives of survivor descendants from Cheyenne and Arapaho communities residing in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Oklahoma and invited their participation in the project. Through our meetings and ongoing communications with Native community members including, Gail Ridgely (Northern Arapaho), Otto Braided Hair (Northern Cheyenne), Karen Little Coyote and Joe Big Medicine (Southern Cheyenne), and Henry Littlebird and Chief Willey (Southern Arapaho), among others, as well as consultations with respected scholars and historians who are widely recognized as the leading experts on Sand Creek, such as Gary Roberts, David Halaas, and Tom Meier, our study group generated a scholarly report that we hoped would offer a more inclusive and nuanced conception of this traumatic period of Colorado and Western American history. It was an effort that was guided by a search for truth and shaped by a mindful independence from the artificial partitions imposed largely by arbitrary disciplinary categories endemic to historical methodologies that tend to assign ultimate authority to colonial documents and testimony.

In addition to the literary projects and the sharing of stories with the tribal representatives noted above, the University of Denver also hosted numerous lectures to give members of our community the opportunity to attend readings and exhibits featuring Native scholars, writers and artists who so generously shared stories of Native cultural survivance. Among these we were honored to host the renowned Cheyenne-Arapaho scholar and educator Henrietta Mann, who shared White Buffalo Woman’s (her great grandmother) harrowing account of traumatic experience and survival at Sand Creek, as well as Cheyenne artists George Levi and Brent Learned, Merlin Little Thunder, B.J. Stepp and Nathan Hart, whose drawings and paintings on the theme of the massacre function to reclaim the narrative of these events from the inflexible apparatus of colonial historiography that tends to consign Native people and cultures to a static and doomed past.

Through these participants’ memories of their ancestors and their enduring active presence in stories passed forth from one generation to the next, such accounts live on and demand to be told, but also listened to. We took it as our obligation and responsibility as scholars and educators, but also as occupiers of a land so violently appropriated from its rightful Native owners, to listen to the Native peoples who generously shared their stories and memories with us. And it was the insights gained from these encounters that allowed us to offer a fuller accounting of the historical, political and social contexts out of which the Sand Creek Massacre emerged. For reasons that remain unclear, the scholars involved in the production of the Northwestern report decided to take a different approach without the active participation of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal communities who were the very people most affected by the truly horrific events that both study groups worked to understand. This crucial distinction, perhaps, best typifies the contrasting methodologies that each group employed in their research and seems to reflect strongly in the apparent divergences in our findings, which again recall Ortiz’ questions about the systemic and consistent exclusion of Native voices and perspectives in American history.

While both reports severely criticize the actions John Evans took as Governor of Colorado Territory, and his failures in his duties as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, the DU report found him to bear culpability for the Sand Creek Massacre due to his position as the highest political authority and his significant role in stoking the violent anti-Indian sentiment and dangerous hostility in the months leading up to the massacre. This finding was echoed and specifically cited in the official apology conveyed to the Arapaho and Cheyenne people by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper on the steps of the Capitol building in Denver on December 3, 2014. The Northwestern committee came to a different conclusion which was viewed by many, including their own Native students, as ultimately absolving John Evans of responsibility for the massacre using the relativist claim that he was a “representative figure who believed in and lived out the dominant ideas” of his time. But as Ortiz illustrates, there was another way, there was always another way: “pain and death did not have to be propagated as darkness and wrong and coldness; they could have listened and listened and learned to sing in Arapaho.” Despite the differing conclusions of our committees, both universities are moving forward with efforts to acknowledge historic wrongs and repair the damages of the past to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment for Native students on their respective campuses.

It is a regrettable truth that the founder of Northwestern and the University of Denver, John Evans, forever binds our institutions to the Sand Creek Massacre. This past, our past, however, does not have to define our futures, nor the relationships we have forged with Cheyenne and Arapaho communities. As members of the DU community we have chosen to no longer hide from the reality of the past and to underscore the belief that true healing can only take place when the legacy of history is reckoned with in an honest and open way. Not through obfuscation, neglect, equivocation and silences. We owe it to ourselves, and the students we are dedicated to serving, to resist this easier path at every turn. To stand against the implacable attitudes of tradition and nostalgia that all too often renders necessary change inordinately slow or worse yet, ineffective. And we also owe it to the memory of courageous leaders such as Lean Bear, White Antelope, Big Man, Left Hand and Black Kettle who represented their people with honor and dignity in the face of violence and hatred and greed, as well as men like the U.S Cavalry officers Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer, men that refused to be driven by the dominant ideas of the time and instead understood the injustice that is driven by hatred and greed, and who stood up against it. Men who give Ortiz reason, perhaps, to turn away from the incapacitating power of hopelessness and despair: “I know/ there is a world/ peopled with love./ I know/ there are people/ who speak/ not in undertones/ but gallantly and joyously,/ who are valorous/ with simple courage.” Such are the people who truly deserve to be remembered and honored in history and in monuments over those who perpetuated a shameless legacy of violence and oppression.

Most importantly, we maintain our most hallowed responsibility to the original owners of the land on which the University of Denver stands, the Arapaho and Cheyenne people who were driven from their homes, from their bountiful landscape, from their places of tranquility and their holy places and sacred sites . . . We owe it to the land itself. Likewise, for Indigenous peoples of the Americas, this history, and the struggle against greed, hatred, oppression, deracination . . . extermination . . . a seemingly unending series of catastrophic events that continue to hold power and affect their lives and communities, must be remembered. Throughout North America, as the writers and artists included here in Common-place bear witness, the wreckage of this history has now been accumulating for over 500 years . . . And Native people continue to respond in their own creative ways to the results of this enormity.

Despite this history and the traumatic events it set into motion, however, the people have persisted. Native peoples of North America have persevered and the people have continued to live, to love, and to flourish—to sing and tell stories, their stories. For as Ortiz writes, “I have always loved America; it is something precious in my memory in blood and cells which insists on story, poetry, song, life, life.” This selection of creative work in Common-place offers simply one small contribution to the ongoing endeavor to open up new spaces for Native writers and artists to share their own stories, memories and histories within a context where such perspectives are so often denied a presence, intentionally or not. So while this latest journal selection includes new work by several of the writers from the Denver Quarterly feature, such as George Levi, Kimberly Blaeser, Frances Washburn, Toni Jensen, Crisosto Apache, Byron Aspaas, and Sara Ortiz, it also includes the deeply affecting voices of Simon Ortiz, Lance Henson, Margaret Noodin, Michael Wasson, and Brent Learned.

This collective work is offered as a virtual gathering of Native voices and a diverse yet unified testament to the power of memory in giving substance to the ideas I have attempted to convey through these admittedly insufficient words. In spite of its inherent limitations, my hope is that this feature can offer renewed testimony to the resiliency of Native people; that combination of persistence, resistance, and survival that Gerald Vizenor has championed in his work, to create within the ether of these virtual pages a sense of Native presence and actuality over absence, nihility, and victimry . . . Survivance, in all of its forms, is the renunciation of dominance and oppression in “the continuation of stories.”

Billy J. Stratton
University of Denver

Further Reading:

Ortiz, Simon. From Sand Creek: Rising in this Heart which is Our America. 1981. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000.

“Report of the John Evans Study Committee,” Northwestern University, May 2014.

“Report of the John Evans Study Committee,” University of Denver, November 2014.

Stratton, Billy J. and Sikelianos, Eleni. “In the Shadow of Mt. Evans,” Denver Quarterly 49:1 (2014), 2-3.

Vizenor, Gerald. “The Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Lincoln: U Nebraska Press, 2008: 1-24.

Crisosto Apache

Of Thunderous Blood Storm

The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights. [Genesis 7:12]

dawn bleeds through biosphere, back to a beginning—

clouds gather from onyx and water falls, always—

in a beginning, as (s)he / our hands caress,

in a beginning as (s)he / we are meant to exist,

in a beginning (s)he /our voice heaves

immemorially—

blood shot eyes clamp down around all fingers—

seam of sideways light filters through glass caps—

tireless legs climb up our white mountainside—

wet clay debris mesh between toes and dermal ridges—

water slab backs hinder an exertion to higher ground—

russet liquid skirts channel continuously through embankments—

sheaves slide underfoot, coursing always before and now—

top center veins mend through reformation of red skin—

memories of mankind work in this same way,

memory is the skin that is all our body,

memory is the milk that is our feminine,

memory is the fist that is our masculine,

memory is the cradle that is our born,

memory is the heap that is our stolen,

memory is the council that is our dead and massacred,

memory is our placental land, our Americas—

will our memories eventually reach our mountain top—

baptismal levels rise rapidly, as the always have—

clad bones and flesh pour from the mouth of basalt cliffs—

dense clusters of by-the-wind sailor jelly fish engorge with algae—

a hollow tree trunk hastily purges somnolent vessel—

thunderous static charge trade a task of inert limbs—

flouting blood sputters inward, coating whiting eyelids—

lightening surges through a course edge of tangled fingers—

swollen arms grapple alongside a timber raft—

a stutter set afloat a mucus current, rowing slowly away—

whitewash membrane collides into a small piece of island womb—

inflamed curtains suspend inside a buoyant flux of cavity—

reddish tight skin ewers stay bobbing, adjacent to crossing legs—

stagnant waves balance through droplets, as it always has—

this beginning, undulates toward an abyss that is whirling—

a grand empty opulent complex bulges painfully from the navel—

an ubiquitous scar imprints at the base of all abdomen—

umbilical pulls us closer to disintegration—

our sacral bone cleaves us apart, toward a state of decay—

tiny blood bulbs echo from fused linings—

centrifuge plunges us into an umbral slant of shadow—

our pelvic descent carries through a breakage of plasma—

broken shell and stone carry refrains of lanterns and litany—

inside an elongate throw we stretch our grip on each another—

we tether toward the outer ends of a black plastic lining—

an imminent sieve lost in a slog of a murky epithelium—

a gild silence hovers over whispery monuments—

twinkling ghost cut intermittent signals of encumbering monsoon—

a marching sound of water droplets reveal a sulfurous match—

epidural drape shapes a drain that corrode arroyos—

cross currents liquid ages fruit blood casks for infallible lips—

northern hemisphere air is a heavy static—

droplets stains of ancient liquid fall onto face—

fire ants and pinacate beetles scurry into burrows—

coves corrode in a bath of matching pelvic flaps—

barn swallows take no flight today—

small hairs on our forearm sway by the unseen—

loose air confines the expansion of deep clouds—

dził gais’ání / sacred mountain is still visible in our approach—

an infant wails for first breath at Mt Sinai Medical Center—

in the thickest part of the Congo, leaves thrive—

plankton multiplies inside the north Atlantic currents—

magma toils as afterbirth beneath the earth’s crust—

tectonic plates ease with lenient fractures—

basalt plummets off a western sea cliff into the colliding waves—

accruing globule course down the right side of nostril—

oceanic spay, dusts the coast line—

placental fluid washes the floor in a prenatal unit—

the last remaining white rhino falls to its knees—

we pull the noose tighter before finally dangling on a closet rack—

a sapphire colored car abruptly stops as an ambulance darts by—

a murder of crows gather outside a window planning their demise—

ceiling fans rotate with the concave of last breath—

the sun unleashes a powerful solar flare on March 11, 2015—

fires extinguish in the arctic circle as the sun rises—

tears of red wine saturates our face as we emerge—

our limbs convulse a blurry apparition in the world—

our pelvic muscles contract and constrict uncontrollably—

losing sounds to letters as fluid rushes from our skull causing syncope—

training wheels detach from a child’s bicycle in Florida—

somatic cells begin their splinter—

coccinella magnifica separates her elytra and takes flight—

the same fleet of fire ants dismantles and consumes a mouse carcass—

tumble weeds herd the highways and are shepherd by gale forces—

blood passes from one vacuum to another—

x will always remain as anomalous blood in our identity—

at the collapsing center of a desert universe, dawn arrives—

Byron Aspaas

Candy Land Has A Front Range

To escape, I started to run again. I started to run along the paths of Colorado Springs which was flavored much different than the taste I was used to. I say flavored because the recipe of the landscape is measured differently and calls for different types of spices and ingredients which created a different delicacy with a different visual flavor. If I could describe Colorado to my family, to my friends, to you. I would say Colorado has a front range frosted with different layers of green: forest green, emerald green, marijuana green. I would say the land is cemented and massacred with decorations of foreign flowers from different lands placed strategically to detour your eyes from the blemishes of its history which is now laced with red white and blue ribbons edged in a signia of calligraphy, America the Beautiful.

Kimberly Blaeser

Mochi, Prisoner of War

Remember her in winter. Picture her as she was then in Black Kettle’s camp. A young woman of 24. Southern Cheyenne, of the Tse Tse Stus band. In the tipi of her parents.

Remember her at Fort Marion. Imprisoned with her warrior husband Chief Medicine Water. The infamous Captain Richard Pratt her warden.

Try to imagine the slow-motion-minutes that changed her life: Dawn. November 29, 1864. You are Mochi—Buffalo Calf. Your band is camped at Big Sandy Creek. Your leader Black Kettle flies America’s stars and stripes above his lodge. Flies the white flag of truce. You are safe here and Black Kettle has sent the warriors to hunt buffalo.

This is United States History 101. Fact: Black Kettle’s peaceful camp is not safe. Mochi is not safe. Indians in colonial America cannot be safe. Fact: U.S. Army Colonel John Chivington was a Methodist preacher. He was a freemason and opponent of slavery. Chivington, however, was not an opponent of murdering Indians.

You are Mochi in winter camp with your mother. It is dawn when your life explodes around you. The first explosion is the bullet entering your mother’s forehead. The second explosion comes as you fight off the soldier attempting to rape you. You have made that explosion with your grandfather’s rifle and the soldier falls. You run then into the chaos and through the cannon fire and the screaming and the slashed and disemboweled bodies.

Imagine your life now as a long series of explosions and escapes. You are Mochi the warrior, the raider. Imagine you are remembering the explosions when you sleep. Imagine you are imaging the soldiers each time you raise your rifle. Killing the memories over and over for eleven long years. Exploding them and running from them, until finally you surrender at Fort Leavenworth.

Remember her in winter. Picture her as she was then in Black Kettle’s camp. Remember her at Fort Marion. Imprisoned with her warrior husband Chief Medicine Water.

Text books call it Chivington’s massacre; but Sand Creek was also Mochi’s spiritual transformation. Let us call her Mochi the witness, the survivor. Prisoner of War.

↔↔↔↔

            In taking account of Sand Creek, the Wounded Knee massacre, the Trail of Tears, the Sandy Lake tragedy, the Long Walk, or any of the other long list of atrocities inflicted upon Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, the cold facts still stun. But among the sad litany of military barbarisms—Jewish Holocaust, Pol Pot, My Lai, Abu Ghraib—they remain among the least known. The historic campaign to displace or eliminate Native tribes has been trivialized beyond recognition into some Western fantasy of American frontier justice.

            What is survivance in the face of denial? In recent news, the picture of a drowned three-year-old boy, a Syrian refugee, has put a human face on the ongoing refugee crisis. “We are human beings, just like Westerners,” said his father. To survive, to resist, as Native nations we too reject the comb-over caricature of simply tragedy. Real people like Mochi saw the brutal slaughter of family and community they loved. They were changed by it. Their lives and the lives of each succeeding generation have been irrevocably altered. With real fingers on this keyboard, I write to recall and to repair.

            Chivington’s triumphant army of Sand Creek decorated their uniforms, their saddle horns, their bars and barracks with the body parts of Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and babies. Such was their celebratory memorial.

            The Cheyenne warriors imprisoned at Fort Marion, many of whom saw their band decimated at Sand Creek, chose another path of remembrance. Moving beyond despair, they depicted in Ledger Art images of their old life, of spiritual connection, their memories of battle—each powerful expression drawn over the colonial accounting, symbolically reclaiming a kind of tribal autonomy.    

            And what of America’s memorializing 150 years after the Sand Creek Massacre? In a country that celebrates “Columbus Day” and a cardboard-cut-out pilgrim and Indian “Thanksgiving Day,” how do we make space for historic truth? Native lives are not merely mile markers on a tourist highway. This new nation should acknowledge the history and continuing existence of each Native Nation within its bounds. Imagine with me “Indigenous Survivance Day.” 

“That we may not be mistaken by them for enemies.”                                    Motavato (Black Kettle), autumn, 1864          

 Estate of Chief Black Kettle (1813-1868)

Peace medal from Abraham Lincoln

34-star American flag presented by Colonel Greenwood—flown over his tipi to stave off attack

White flag of truce

Appointment as Chief in the Cheyenne Council of Forty-four

Official papers declaring him a “good friend” of the United States

Treaty at Fort Laramie.

Treaty at Fort Wise.

Peace settlement at Fort Weld.

Livestock: 21 horses and 6 mules—valued by U.S. at $1,425.00 after their destruction at Sand Creek

Nine bullets removed from his wife Medicine Woman Later after the Sand Creek Massacre

“Perpetual Peace” in the Treaty of Little Arkansas River

Medicine Lodge Treaty.

Title of “Peace Chief”

A rally of bullets to the back while retreating at Washita River

Portrayed as “good Indian” in television’s Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman

Memorial at Black Kettle National Grassland

Lance Henson

Just after midnight in the denver bus station
I ask a shoeshine black man where the indian bars are

We walk outside and he points toward the rounded moon
Soule street he whispers

Three blocks away i find soule street
And a red neon bar sign with the r shot out
Inside merle haggard sings mama tried

I settle in and order a 25 cent beer lighting a toscanello
an old man behind the bar watching
Im sitting next to a midget
His legs dangling beneath him
Wearing little boy tennis shoes
He asks me for a cigar

They call me the prophet he says
I didnt think they called you slim i said
People keep buying him beers and he slides
a few my way

a mexican and an indian start a fight over a toothless
babe with nice legs
guns and knives everywhere

the barman shouts a beer for everyone
the fight stops
i see him staring at the whirling ceiling fan

i have owned this bar for 56 years he says to me

i smile and descend into a dark winged price
already paid
drinking warm beer with these bruised eyes and souls

entering the backside of a song
another beer sliding in front of me

denver
jan10.04

soule street,name for the army capt silas soule who testified against col.

chivington,the officer who ordered the massacre of cheyennes at sand creek,1864

merle haggard..country music singer

At the military cemetery hamm
   In luxembourg

For jack whiteshield and roy larney

In a slow snow storm last december
I found your graves

The white landscape
Undulating in breaking sunlight

The crunching snow beneath our footsteps
The sloping shadows of headstones weaving a
Breathless pattern of goodbye

In beauty i pray for you
In peace i place this cigarette
my relations

In a circling sage wind

I speak your names….

January05

jack whiteshield,my uncle, and roy larney,arapaho
served and died in general george patton’ tank corps,1944

Toni Jensen

Fracture and Song

Of the nearly 200 Arapaho and Cheyenne killed at the Sand Creek Massacre, two-thirds were women and children. I use the preposition “at,” not “in” because those women and children were not “in” battle—they were at home; they were invaded at home. I say “at,” not “in” because location matters. This location—Sand Creek—has become a contested space. Its history is as contested as it is important. To memorialize correctly, language matters. To remember the place of lineage, both of people and of place, language and image matter. To place Sand Creek in a line of people and space that connects to today’s people, today’s spaces, language and image together must matter for us to work toward survivance.

The Sand Creek massacre occurred at the edge of the geologic formation now best known as the Niobrara Shale Play. At the time of the massacre, November 29, 1864, the Niobrara Shale was laid down between 82 and 87 million years past. The formation sometimes also is called the Niobrara Chalk.

The image most associated with the Sand Creek Massacre, most familiar is not chalk but is oil on canvas, Robert Lindneaux’s 1936 “History Colorado #46619.” The image is displayed in the Wall Street Journal’s article on Sand Creek and on the National Park Service website, for example, which is the where the New York Times article leads readers for more information on the massacre and the 150^th anniversary.

Lindneaux’s painting offers a landscape that stuns: panoramic, row on row of teepee in taupe and tan against the brown of the ground, with the light blue water of the creek winding through the scene like ribbons, the clouding sky above a mix of both palettes. The details, though, the people. Soldiers in blue ride roans and chestnuts. The soldiers have their guns drawn, long, thin barrels out front—this seems like it might have been. But they’re shooting, most often, at men. At Arapaho and Cheyenne men. Some hold guns back to the soldiers, some lay fallen to the ground by the teepees or in the creek, face down. Image and language—they matter.

Two-thirds of the Arapaho and Cheyenne killed that day were women and children. In the painting, the women and children are few, not many, and they are standing or walking. They hold their children’s hands or carry them on their backs. It is easy to find them; they wear green and so are bright among the tans and blues.

Green is the color of growth, of spring, of hope. Two-thirds of the Arapaho and Cheyenne killed that day were women and children. Words matter. Images matter.

The women and children that day—wearing green, wearing brown, wearing blue, wearing all the colors—were not left to stand, were not left to play or work or see the beauty of their homes, their panoramic vistas, their land.

A “shale play” is a formation of similar geologic and geographic properties that also contains a notable amount of natural gas. In oil and gas terms, the Niobrara Shale Play is most often called “an emerging play” or “an exciting, new play” or “a young play.” It is an active play, producing natural gas through hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Water and sand and chemicals, millions of gallons, are forced down into the shale, the rock, to break it apart, to release the gas, which is then taken.

In October 1865, the Treaty of the Little Arkansas acknowledged the government’s blame for the Sand Creek Massacre. But the treaty also took Cheyenne and Arapaho rights to land titles in the state of Colorado. The language matters, and the actions do not speak, they shout.

What has happened since fracking began in June 1998 in the Barnett Shale of Texas, what is happening today across the country is this continued shouting. The degradation and exploitation of Indigenous women and children continue through the force and power of history, through the force and power of this fracking industry.

Indigenous women and children are sold for sex to fracking camp workers; they are exchanged, they are bartered, they are trafficked; they are supply meeting demand. They are made to be goods on the land their families once inhabited, their own lands.

The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies, of our most vulnerable bodies—our women, our children.

In the Bakken Shale Play in the Dakotas, there has been a 30 percent increase of sex trafficking cases filed in the last three years. In April 2015, a coalition of Indigenous women filed a formal request for the United Nations to intercede on behalf of Indigenous women who are being sex trafficked near fracking sites across the Great Plains.

The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies.

In rural, northern Pennsylvania, along the New York State border, sex trafficking around Marcellus Shale sites has grown so great, a local YWCA received a $500,000 federal grant to provide help to trafficked women and children, many of whom come from nearby reservations in New York. The organization Sing Our Rivers Red has taken its art exhibit to New York and to North Dakota and to most states across the country. They collect single earrings and display them on red backdrops to memorialize the missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies.

History is lived, in our lands and in our bodies. In this country, we bear the repetition of the words—the times “battle” is chosen over “massacre”—and the images, those women in green still whole, still standing. We repeat them whether they are true or false. We spin them until we are dizzy, until we fall to the ground.

But the ground receives us. Always. We practice survivance through language and image and memory. We protest, we draft petitions, we make art, we memorialize.

The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies. Images matter. Words matter. These lives matter. We understand that alongside every creek, every rock formation, every piece of land that was once and still is ours, there is crying, yes, there is blood on the bright green of the women’s dresses, but there also are our images, our words, ringing out like song.

Brent Learned