Death and dying in American culture

In Awaiting the Heavenly Country (2008), Mark S. Schantz takes account of “the Civil War and America’s culture of death.” Common-place asked him what the “death-denying” culture of the contemporary United States might learn from the “death-embracing culture” of our nineteenth-century forebears?

Are American attitudes toward death and dying on the move again? Ever since the publication of Philippe Ariès’s highly influential Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (1974), it has been canonical to see much of the West, and particularly the United States, as engaged in an effort to make the presence of death “forbidden” in public discourse and practice. Despite the work of historians such as Gary Laderman (see particularly his work Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth Century America [2003]), it is still possible to imbibe deeply the notion that we Americans are death-deniers without peer. We embalm our dead to make them appear alive. We cloak the language of death with terms such as “passed away,” the “loved one,” or “the departed”—conducting funerals as though we could have a “memory picture” of the deceased without the end of life. There are developments afoot, however, that might suggest a more complicated dance with death is emerging in contemporary America.

A few weeks ago my wife and I saw the 2009 HBO film Taking Chance. Based on the reflections of United States Marine Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl (played brilliantly and painfully by Kevin Bacon), the film is both restrained and enormously powerful, a reflection on soldierly death for a modern age. It follows Lieutenant Colonel Strobl as he accompanies the body of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps home to the majestic landscape of Wyoming from the desert warfare of Iraq. This is a modest film, tightly constructed and narrowly focused. But it works because it captures so many small details with accuracy. A body packed in black ice bags before being nestled in a metallic transfer case that is flown home to Dover Air Force base in Delaware. The work of compassionate military mortuary technicians who scrub each finger nail; who clean with a jeweler’s precision a watch, dog tags, and a Saint Christopher’s medal; and who dress the dead soldier in crisp dress blues. At each stage of the prepared body and its casket’s flight home, we catch a glimpse of the honor the corpse receives and of the psychological cost paid by Lieutenant Colonel Strobl who tenders it. Here is a film that insists on a reality many Americans continue to ignore: our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan necessitate that soldiers die.

Until a recent policy shift signaled by the Obama administration, it was a matter of Defense Department policy (upheld by administrations Democratic and Republican alike) that the public be shielded from this obvious fact. Implemented on February 2, 1991, in the context of the first Gulf War, the Department of Defense issued what has since become known as the Dover Ban: “Media coverage of the arrival of remains at the port of entry or at the interim stops will not be permitted …” (Public Affairs Guidance—Operation Desert Storm, Casualty and Mortuary Affairs, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Arlington, Virginia, February 2, 1991). Fearing massive numbers of American casualties during Desert Storm and the fallout this might wreak on home-front morale, the Defense Department was understandably concerned to keep the dead soldiers from public view. The history of the Dover Ban itself is a tortured affair, subject to deep misunderstanding (including the notion that the ban itself was an executive order issued by President George H. W. Bush, which it apparently was not), dotted with peculiar exceptions (such as the Defense Department’s decision to distribute to the press photos showing the caskets bearing the remains of those killed on the USS Cole in 2000), and punctuated by legal actions challenging its legitimacy. Often these debates hinge on issues of family privacy, government expediency, and the language of individual or constitutional rights: we have a First Amendment right to see these caskets—so the arguments run—the right to report on military families, the right to understand. This is mostly an abstract conversation about the rights of individuals understood in relationship to the rights of nation states. It is not primarily a discussion about the certainty of death in warfare, nor does it consider the proper way to treat “the honored dead.” Ironically, even the debate on the Dover Ban skirts the fundamental issue that drives it—the reality that warfare kills.

Given what I have learned in the process of researching and writing Awaiting the Heavenly Country, I suspect that our Civil War ancestors would have been profoundly perplexed by the Dover Ban and its attendant debate, and they would be even more puzzled by our modern skittishness about death. While our own culture shields itself from the prospect of death, our nineteenth-century forebearers embraced it. They lived in a world afflicted by high infant mortality rates and by life expectancies closer to those of medieval Europe than to our own day. The scourges of smallpox, yellow fever, and consumption demanded that antebellum Americans confront their own mortality. The Civil War generation engaged, too, in serious and learned speculation on the heavenly realms that would await them—filled with friends, family, awe, wonder, and transcendent beauty. The rural cemeteries they built ensured that posterity would remember the great deeds of their lives, as their descendents strolled with “melancholy pleasure” (as Justice Joseph Story phrased it) along meandering and romantic paths. Death percolated as the major subject of interest in the arts as well, celebrated in poetry and literature, painting, and of course, postmortem photography. Aspiring folk of means, both Northern and Southern, posed with their deceased relatives (particularly their children), marking the first large-scale use of commercial photography in American culture.

The techniques and tropes of antebellum postmortem photography followed artists onto Civil War battlefields. Here the celebrated works of Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Thomas C. Roche, and others portrayed American battle deaths in no uncertain terms. Of course, the Civil War photographers meticulously posed their subjects for aesthetic and moral effects, helping their audiences to cope with mass death by creating the visual legerdemain that, in most cases, men died as whole and recognizable human beings. Such practices might lead one to argue that even our Civil War ancestors needed some assurance that the war was not as terrible as they knew it to be. Is it possible to trace our modern urge to camouflage the reality of warfare to the generation that fought the Civil War?

But the bodies captured by Mathew Brady and his colleagues, however manipulated, are indeed dead. The message is clear: men die in warfare. And it was precisely these images of the battlefield dead that were the subject of great popular interest as evidenced by Brady’s famous “Dead of Antietam” exhibit in New York City in the fall of 1862. The dead bodies taught lessons to the living. As the New York Times observed, the fallen soldiers served “to teach the world that there are truths dearer than life, wrongs and shames more to be dreaded than death.”

The Civil War public’s consumption of images of dead soldiers puts them at arm’s length from us. Is it even remotely possible for us to imagine an exhibit opening in a major gallery in New York City titled the “Dead of Fallujah” consisting of portraits of dead Americans troops? The nimbleness of our technology, the sweep of the Internet, makes this option immediately available. Compared to the clunky and time-consuming process needed to create photographs during the Civil War, our own abilities trump time and space in an instant. For all of our prodigious means, though, it is utterly impossible to think our way into such an exhibit. Displaying the images of dead bodies in Iraq would, I suspect, be deemed a violation of privacy, disrespectful, and unpatriotic—to list only a few of the many probable objections. One imagines street protestors, highly charged Congressional hearings, shrill exclamations from the media (including the New York Times), arrests, and worse. For us, glimpsing the quiet dignity of a flag-draped casket is deemed an unspeakable violation, much less the artful rendering of a soldier’s corpse.

Let’s look again. Is there something that we might profitably learn from the generation that fought the American Civil War? Can we restrain ourselves from thinking them ghoulish, immature, or pandering, long enough to gain some critical distance on our own attitudes and practices? Put simply, is there anything to be gained from reflecting on the nineteenth century’s embrace of death?

Were we to consider our Civil War ancestors anew, we would be reminded that war is indeed hell. There is no way to paper over its consequences. The 620,000 troops who died in that conflict (out of a population of just over 30 million) would amount to some 6 million deaths if reckoned as a proportion of today’s population (just over 300 million). One might conclude that the Civil War generation had no other option than to account for and interpret the meaning of death on such an enormous scale. But the testimony of the Civil War, if there is one, is that war of any scope means suffering, death, and loss. Maimed at Antietam, blinded at Chickamauga, hobbled at Atlanta, gone mad at Cold Harbor—men returned home bearing physical witness to the carnage they had endured. Their wounds were public injuries as well as private tragedies, terrible consequences with which the body politic had to wrestle. Ultimately, the Civil War generation would remind us, war leaves no room for denial. The Obama administration’s questioning of the “Dover Ban” may well be a step toward public recognition of that fact.

But there is more. It may well be easy for armchair pundits to cast our “enemies” in the so-called war on terror as death-seeking fanatics, to see in Iraq and Afghanistan the unassailable evidence for a “clash of civilizations,” to categorize our adversaries as the unrecognizable “other.” Animated by visions of paradise beyond the grave, our opponents consider earthly death merely a passage to a more glorious eternal life. The Civil War reminds us that Americans across this evangelical nation, too, have celebrated death as the road to celestial bliss. Think of little Eva’s passing in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Or think of Sarah Gould of Boston, whose 1857 treatise The Guardian Angel insisted that “we believe Paradise to be our fatherland” complete with the “innumerable company of martyrs, crowned on account of their victories in the conflict of suffering” and populated with “pure virgins” and the “blessed poor.” (Are these not the words of an Islamic extremist?) Or consider Stonewall Jackson’s comments that he did not expect to outlive the Civil War, nor did he have any particular wish to do so. Or Robert E. Lee’s own flirtations with death during the fighting in 1864 around Spotsylvania Courthouse. If we listen closely to the voices of the Civil War, we may learn a terrible and discomfiting truth—that the Civil War was so bloody, so damaging, and so destructive precisely because we wanted it to be.

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

Mark S. Schantz is the author of Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (2008). Prior to this, he published Piety in Providence: Class Dimensions of Religious Experience in Antebellum Rhode Island (2000). For eighteen years, he has served as professor of American history at Hendrix College, and as of July 1, he will be assuming the role of provost at Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama.

In The Afterlives of Specimens, literary critic and poet Lindsay Tuggle excavates Whitman’s Civil War writing to animate new readings of mourning and preservation in mid nineteenth-century America. In beautifully dense and multi-layered prose, she attends to the “specimen” (a term used in Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, one year prior to its first appearance in Leaves of Grass) as a compelling category through which Whitman intimately observes death, uniting body with spirit. Tuggle is compelled by “specimen” not only because it is a term that frequents Whitman’s writing but because it “encompass[es] nineteenth-century desires to collect and preserve rare, strange, or revered objects, both human and inhuman.”^[1] In a cultural moment marked by the dismemberment of the nation and its bodies, the “specimen” merges “scientific exploration” with “melancholic attachment.”^[2] Tuggle shows how an attention to body snatching, the human cadaver, and embalming practices reveals the making and unmaking of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Memoranda during the War (1875), and Specimen Days, and Collect (1882).

Reviews of The Afterlives of Specimens have praised its interdisciplinary focus, specifically its attempt to place scientific discourse and authorship in conversation. Tuggle also moves effortlessly between psychoanalytic and queer theories—from Sigmund Freud to Judith Butler to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Given the focus of this special issue, I believe we can also position Tuggle’s argument within a disability studies framework. From phantom limb syndrome to bodily and psychological traumas, her book offers a comprehensive account of Whitman’s multi-varied relationship to disability. While the term “disability” does not appear in her book’s chapters, Tuggle emphasizes Whitman’s observance of wounds and illness as a volunteer at war hospitals as well as his firsthand experience with “war paralysis” and “hospital fatigue.” While Whitman claims that “[d]uring the war [he] possess’d the perfection of physical health,” he reveals the porosity of the body as the illnesses of his “comrades” reshape his sense of self and larger positioning within the U.S. body politic.^[3]

Tuggle depicts a moment in U.S. history when disability became a fairly unremarkable phenomenon. Disability historian Kim Nielsen remarks that the Civil War “forced a rethinking of disability in the United States,” in part because of the growth in photography, which visually depicted disabled soldiers in newspapers and other print publications.^[4] In addition, the Invalid (or “one-armed”) Corps, established in 1863 under President Lincoln, assigned disabled veterans to new labor tasks and gave even greater national visibility to the disabled veteran. Nielsen continues: “The war and its consequences generated new adaptive devices and medical advances—from the first wheelchair patent in 1869 to improved prostheses—that improved the lives of many, not just disabled veterans.”^[5]

The war was an event that disabled people, which—in turn—demanded innovation, not just at the level of early assistive technologies but also through literary forms. As the quintessential “poet of the body,” Whitman aimed to depict these changing embodiments in his poems, notebooks, and letters.

While Whitman was intent on ensuring his afterlife with detailed postmortem instructions—regarding his autopsy, for instance—he was equally committed to preserving his own and soldiers’ stories in the form of a book. Drum-Taps (Whitman’s collection of Civil War poems, which would later be stitched into Leaves of Grass) thus becomes a “surrogate tomb” that incorporates now unnamed bodies, giving them space for circulation.^[6] In one of her most virtuosic close readings of these poems, Tuggle shows how they encode nineteenth-century embalming practices—establishing a link between the preservation of bodies and of poems. Tuggle demonstrates how this “preservation compulsion” facilitates scenes of desire across the living and the dead.^[7]

The Afterlives of Specimens compellingly reframes disability not as loss but as presence. From phantom limb syndrome, in which a missing arm or leg haunts its subject, to the preservation of dead bodies in the Army Medical Museum, Tuggle undermines the harsh distinctions established between ability and disability, life and death. Foregrounding the messy overlap between them, she presents impairment as life-affirming. At key moments, her analysis adopts a disability ethics, claiming the “specimen” not as a passive object but as a lively subject. Tuggle writes, “From his earliest war entries, Whitman insists that the body need not be whole, or even alive, in order to be adored.”^[8]  She notes, for instance, that Whitman’s poor health gave rise to Leaves of Grass, what he called his “consummated book.” In the poet’s own words, “I had to give up my health for it—my body—the vitality of my physical self.” While Tuggle’s argument suggests Whitman’s sacrificial offering of his body for his poems, she indicates that authorship is dependent upon disability. For the text to surface—or live beyond the moment of its composition—the body must, in other words, be impaired.

Elsewhere in the book, Tuggle directs readers to Whitman’s paralysis following a series of strokes, which he experienced after leaving his work at the hospitals during the war. Even as Tuggle insists on Whitman’s strength and optimism in the final decades of his paralysis, she distinguishes “regeneration” and “preservation” from the overcoming of disability.^[9]  Early scholarship in disability studies takes issue with so-called “overcoming narratives” because they privilege able bodies over disabled ones (the person who “overcomes” his or her disability is praised). However, as Tuggle notes, Whitman’s insistence on “the afterlives of specimens” gives tribute to disabled people’s experiences in the form of his writing. Rather than emphasize ability, Whitman’s poems address what Robert Leigh Davis calls “partial recovery.” Through the poet’s effort to preserve the traces of men’s impairment (most startlingly through the bloodstains that mark the pages of his hospital notebooks), Whitman is less intent on regenerating one’s health than he is on preserving the presence of disability—or the body’s partiality and halfness. Tuggle thus refutes the notion that disability is equated with loss. Both Whitman’s own impairments and the impairments of those closest to him should not be mourned but given space and even celebrated.

In one of her most significant turns, Tuggle recasts the disabled soldier as an erotic subject. For instance, she argues that Whitman’s Memoranda frames caretaking as a mode of queer desire. Pointing us towards the eroticization of impairment, she deprivileges the objectifying gaze ( “specimen” is derived from the Latin verb conveying voyeurism, specere) to focus on the erotics of touch as an alternative—and more thoughtful—mode of engagement between bodies.

We might liken Tuggle’s investment in the specimen with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s account of the politics of looking. While disabled bodies have been historically subject to staring as a mode of objectification, pity, and derision, Garland-Thomson makes an argument for recuperating visual recognition as an ethical act. When we foreground the perspective of the “staree” (that is, the individual being stared at) over the able-bodied “starer,” an ethical stare emerges, which—in her words—“is a state of being arrested by and in thrall to the extraordinary.”^[10] In drawing on work by Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Garland-Thomson notes “that staring between humans can be an ethically productive relationship only if the arrested stare transforms into an engaged rather than separated stare. Whether we are viewing human suffering or terrible human beauty, intense looking is a good thing when it promotes attentive identification between viewer and viewed.”^[11] She continues, “We might conclude then that ethical staring is a matter of beholding, of an arrested stare transforming into identification instead of differentiation.”^[12] Similarly, one senses in Tuggle’s investment in the visual valences of the specimen a call “to behold.” Tuggle extends Garland-Thomson’s framework by attending to the relationship between human and object or “specimen and collector.”^[13] The subjugated position of the object, or stare, assumes a place of power when we privilege the specimen alongside its observer.

Beyond its contribution to Whitman studies and the history of both science and medicine, Tuggle’s book makes a profound contribution at the intersection of Whitman and disability studies. Rather than relying on contemporary definitions of disability, she offers readers a compelling portrait of what impairment looked like in the mid nineteenth-century U.S., both informed by and apart from medical discourse. In framing disability as a cultural (and not just scientific) phenomenon, she presents the injured and sick body as occasioning varied social experiences, which bring able-bodied and disabled figures into conversation. Given the field’s more recent attempts to historicize disability prior to the Civil Rights Movement, it will behoove scholars of disability to turn to the rich pages of Tuggle’s monograph to rethink and complexify the ways we define disability, both in Whitman’s time and ours.

________________

[1] Tuggle, 1.

[2] Tuggle, 9.

[3] Tuggle, 105.

[4] Kim Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2013).

[5] Nielsen, 80.

[6] Tuggle, 150.

[7] Tuggle, 133.

[8] Tuggle, 71.

[9] Tuggle, 21, 45, 11.

[10] Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford, 2009): 189.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Tuggle, 17.

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

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

About the Author

Clare Mullaney is a visiting assistant professor of English at Hamilton College. She earned her Ph.D. in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her dissertation, “American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text, 1858-1932,” considers how bodily and mental impairments—from eyestrain and word-blindness (the late nineteenth-century term for dyslexia) to war wounds, melancholy, and old age—transformed everyday practices of reading and writing.

Clearcut, tenure, snow
where the reservoir is.
In the hall of photos, each man

alone on his slope,
smiling up from the muddy question.

*

Here the logjam broke in the ’96 flood. Scientists filmed the churning of rock on rock. Tall cedars along the bank ground into shards. When the fragments are a particular size, when they are small enough, they rise to the surface and float out to sea.

*

In the lost and found, a box of notebooks. One asked about fire. One asked about the weight of birds. One asked if all were lost and a record kept.

The first to arrive were the trees. Second, the wood wreck of an Asian fishing boat: 1,700 years ago the slick black prow. 600 years ago a Spanish galleon. Its metal bent into fish hooks, joiners. Its metal all that remains (the placard says) of the tribe who found it.

*

Lewis and Clark survived on what they named arrow-root while building the winter fort. Locked it against what ran wild. If to speak is to call up what lies buried, who can blame Lewis for his silence? In the rain, in the wilderness of his own mind, Lewis named everything. Green green green: these lives bending and dividing. Multiplying.

*

green of fir green of cedar
green of yew green of hemlock
green of the vine green of the air
through moss green scarf waving
from each tree green to the river
green that falls across it
green that everywhere has fallen
green like a fishing net
green our hands upon it

The pristine wilderness, the untouched plains, the thousand thousand buffalo, the countless bears that Lewis and Clark saw: what looked like abundance was actually absence. Decades before the explorers set out, the smallpox virus swept ahead of them, back and forth across the land until many tribes had been reduced to a small band of survivors. The animals they’d hunted roamed free and multiplied, the land grew thick around them, and passing through, you could be forgiven for saying you had found Eden. Were not those survivors now your guides.

*

Copper and salt: the poor winter
I stretch again and again over me.

*

A grid of short trails unfurling. Tiny flags and hoods nearly touching. Within each frame a scattering of metal boxes. Stuck foil. Tape. So your poems, said the British geologist, there are no people in them?

In one part of the forest, cedars, dying, breathe through tubes. I had tried to find the waterfalls, tried to speak to the woman at the country store, tried to watch the light on the river. Where the cedars lay was a carpet. All on the carpet 

was slowly becoming carpet. I was afraid to remain in one place. I walked a thin path around the cedars, past and up a slight hill where there was still only silence. Two cut logs: a desk and a chair. I sat and nothing in the forest moved. 

Even my life vanished.

Last night, reading, I heard the geologist tapping on my window. For your poem, he said. Outside, the moon near full. As my eyes adjusted I saw a faint white circle etched in the sky, so wide the cedars nearly hid it. A hoop for the moon, a saucer. Spill of its yellow milk. Or say it happened

this way instead, without the geologist: I was bringing toilet paper from the car when the night sky lightened. Arms of white, I saw where the moon, like a leashed dog, had paced its dark yard bare.

I walked in the body of the whale, up-curved branches ribbing over me, exhalations of small spores, steam. The river a long way down. All held still and seemed free of other lives. Here a yellow coral, there a charcoal trunk. Nothing rolled down the hill. The river and the sky were equally far and often I mistook spiraling leaves for birds. 

Where the path turned to shale I turned back. For my son I pocketed a green translucent snail-shell, for my daughter a knuckle of cedar. No bones, no bones. Just the careful green lives.

*

I can no longer hold the explorers’ days inside my own. Terrible rain at the center of their November is, this year, just sun. Burn piles. Small brown birds I can’t name, frost-weighted leaves falling like stones. Traps and jugs and flags: the work goes on while the scientists sleep, or while I do. This morning frost silvered our little clearing, and as morning went on our roofs gave off steam. A van of college students studying epiphytes idles in the lot. Later, the kids fill ice trays from the river. Whatever they are called swims.

NOTE: The stanzagraph form in which this piece was composed cannot be reliably conveyed on a web-based platform due to the variety of browsers with which readers view the site. In print, you can determine the geography of your page, leading to concrete poetry and other shaped, typographically experimental forms. The Web assumes that the same data will be viewed by an unpredictable array of devices—in some cases, not even viewed, but described by devices for speaking aloud. Recognizing that it would be near-impossible to lineate these stanzagraphs into the justified text blocks within which they were composed and in which they appear in the author’s book’s printed form, we instead present them here as loose paragraphs, leaning into the flexibility of the Web rather than struggling against it.

Poetic Research Statement

Lewis and Clark arrived at the Pacific Ocean in November 1805, exhausted, hungry and cold. They spent the winter in Fort Clatsop, a fort they built by hand from giant northwest cedar and hemlock. Their construction was complete on Christmas Day. The password to their fort was “No Chinook,” in reference to one of the Northwest tribal nations who were their neighbors that winter. After they left to return back east, the fort disappeared into this active forest, and successive replicas have burnt down. Our main evidence regarding the location of the fort is based on traces of mercury in the soil, hints of the mercury-laced medicines the explorers carried with them. By all accounts, the explorers had a soggy, unhappy winter here. I was first drawn into researching this winter of theirs out of curiosity about the oddly sad place-names scattered along the northwest coast. Sites like “Dismal Nitch” stood out to me in a landscape that was, to my mind, the opposite of dismal. I was a new mother at the time, and in my newly fragmented, soggy, exhilarating and yet at times dismal days, I approached this research as if it were a rope I could hold onto while venturing into my own new world.

Over the course of my research, my focus narrowed to incidents of scholarly erasure or elision—to moments in the journey, or in the journey’s wake, that could be seen as failures, but that had largely been spun, in historical accounts, as success, or which had been left out of most retellings, such as Lewis’s murder, on his way back east, of the Blackfeet Indian man, and the peace medal he hung around the dead man’s neck, and the fate of the “Indian vocabularies,” several dozen detailed word lists taken by the explorers as they met with indigenous people from different nations along the way—critical linguistic records that for the most part were never published. I understood these failures through the lens of racism and white privilege, and I was also learning to examine my own research and writing through that lens. As a white writer, it felt awkward and potentially embarrassing to try to talk about my racism and privilege. But the alternative—to plow forward in my work without having to speak of such urgent matters, without having to make myself vulnerable—felt like a continued infliction of my privilege. So I resolved to “fail better,” to expand the scope of my poetry, and the research I was doing, in a way that tried to make visible some of these sites of silence, erasure, and failure.  

So much had already been written about the explorers, and about Thomas Jefferson’s intentions in sending them on their journey, that I did not anticipate finding any “new” information in my research. But three years in, during the November after I had composed “At the Experimental Forest,” I traveled to the east coast to visit the archives at the American Philosophical Society, Jefferson’s library at Monticello, the Library of Virginia, and the National Museum of the American Indian. I was trying to gain a clearer understanding of what had happened to the “Indian vocabularies” that the explorers had collected along their route, which according to many scholars had been destroyed by a thief who had stolen them from a riverboat. The sources I read never spent more than a glancing sentence or two on this historical anecdote. At the Library of Virginia, I located as-yet-unpublished court records that offered the identity of the man convicted of the theft and also indicated that the conviction was quick and light on evidence. At the American Philosophical Society, I accessed Jefferson’s late correspondence, in which he admitted that the vocabularies destroyed in the river did not include the ones collected by Lewis and Clark. Wanting to share what I had come across with contemporary indigenous linguists and historians, who might find a fuller history of the vocabularies useful, I published these findings as a separate paper in Wíčazo Ša Review: A Journal of Native American Studies. A version of this paper appears at the close of Wintering.

My research placed formal demands on my poetry. The importance of clarity—of, as a white writer, being crystal clear about what I was saying, particularly in regard to indigenous languages and history—led me toward prose. There were things I needed to explain, things that I knew needed to be included within the work, which was quite different from my previous approach as a poet of sitting down to a blank page and letting inspiration, or mental flight, lead me. This contextual demand led me toward sentences and paragraphs, away from the white space and ambiguity that lineated poetry can often brush up against.

At the same time, I’m not a historian, or a scholarly writer, and wasn’t interested in becoming one. I particularly wanted to resist the sort of scholarly tone I often encountered, one that assumed authority and certainty. While I wanted to be clear, I also wanted to avoid overstepping. One day I picked up a copy of Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior, and in its haibun form found the perfect formal constraint for my work. Haibun is a sort of travelogue, tracking both inner (emotional/mental) and outer (observed) journeys, shuttling between the two. The form avoids imposed conclusions, preferring instead to lean fragments of prose and poetry against each other. My adaptation of the form includes what I call “stanzagraphs,” roughly six lines long, block-justified. I edited the content of each stanzagraph as a whole, paying particular attention to the turns between stanzagraphs. A stanzagraph is meant to read faster than lineated poetry but slower than a paragraph. This fit the demands of my research perfectly.

“At the Experimental Forest” is formally the loosest section of the book, but I think a shadow of the haibun and stanzagraph forms can still be seen. It is the middle section of the book, composed during a two-week residency at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, near Eugene, Oregon. With its thick canopy of cedar, fir, and hemlock and its mossy understory of nurse logs, all wrapped in northwest winter fog and rain, this forest is similar in many ways to the forest in which Lewis and Clark wintered. As in the other years of my research, I arrived in November, so that my dates would overlap with theirs.

The HJ Andrews Experimental Forest is one of twenty-six sites in the nation designated by the National Science Foundation for Long-Term Ecological Research. By design, all research projects conducted in the forest span hundreds of years, as generations of scientists record data and insight in logbooks that stretch far beyond any one scientist’s lifetime. Two hundred years is the minimum.

While the majority of the work conducted in the forest is scientific, there are writers and artists there too. Writers in residence compose new work at specific sites within the forest, recording in their creative work aspects of each site’s changes over the years. This program is called Long-Term Ecological Reflections, and is meant as a continuation of the forest’s mission. Over many decades, writers compose site-specific work and record it in open-ended logbooks, in the same fashion that the scientists record their data.

At Andrews the writers also stay in dorms with the scientists. I arrived in November 2011, carrying a box of books on ethnobotany, indigenous American history, translation theory, and the scientific and creative work that was produced in the explorers’ wake. My roommate was a young British geologist, who was very friendly and who gathered his data along a creek bed in the middle of the night—hourly—through raging storms. It sounded miserable, there was a little shack along the shore, but he was perfectly gung-ho. He politely tried to understand what I meant when I talked about the “failures” of both Lewis and Clark’s journey and the historical tales that have spun from it.

My curiosity came to be about the weight of looking on who/what is being observed. Some of the scientists I tried to explain this to heard my question, and my use of their good clear words—weight, who/what—as encroachment, a literary muddying. Uppity, though they did not use that word.

In my mind as I worked on this sequence were the nineteenth-century large-scale western landscape paintings showing that fall at the Seattle Art Museum in an exhibit called Beauty and Bounty in an Age of Exploration. These paintings, with their shimmering promise of beautiful land for the taking, lured more settlers westward.

Meanwhile I could feel my own looking, my own research and the scholarly tunneling I was getting increasingly deft at, weighing down the story I was trying to convey. Delete, delete, delete—I snipped down a lot of this sequence. But to what end?

I wanted to know what the weight of 200 years—the accumulation of time between Lewis and Clark’s arrival and now—felt like. But, like the scientists there focused on their corner of the work, I couldn’t see it. The forest was thick, and run through with very short trails that were built for scientific access, not meditative walks. I took walks there anyway, amid the numerous bits of colored tape and foil and measuring tubes. There was a cedar whose respiratory rate they were trying to measure as it died. And while most of the sites were marked by number, a few had names that referenced earlier use. “Gypsy Camp” was one whose name had been carefully changed.

As I read about translation theory and wilderness theory, I thought about the early American painters facing the problem of people walking through the scenes they were trying to portray as virgin, unpeopled, purely wild. I was trying to pretend that these woods were the same ones Lewis and Clark were in (close enough! a couple hundred miles!), trying to whittle my days into kismet and epiphany. In some ways this experimental forest sequence is about failure, about the privilege, and the cost, of my noodling. But it’s also about trying to undo erasure, to widen the frame to include what is uncomfortable or painful to see. To admit: to let in.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2 (Winter, 2017).

Megan Snyder-Camp is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Wintering (2016) and The Gunnywolf (2016). She lives in Seattle.

In Abolitionist Geographies Martha Schoolman challenges the dominant maps of nineteenth-century American literary studies. These maps often register along two axes—a North-South axis of slavery and an East-West axis of U.S. expansionism and manifest destiny—but Schoolman’s book challenges the common landmarks and roadways that often characterize these two mappings, arguing that neither adequately depicts antebellum thinkers’ understandings of abolitionism or the project of U.S. empire. Instead, she insists that writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Delany, William Wells Brown, and Ralph Waldo Emerson imagined cartographies of power and resistance that registered “ground-level contingency” more often than they did hardened lines of sectional difference (15). Schoolman concentrates on abolitionist geographies’ simultaneous negotiation of the local, the national, and the transnational. To put it another way, the writers in her study imagined abolitionist projects that were locally specific and part of a broader hemispheric struggle, including the 1834 emancipation of the British West Indies, which provoked markedly different responses to its potential impact on antislavery tactics in the U.S. Of particular interest to her project is how antislavery writers acknowledged their own complicity with an economy of violence, even as they experienced differing proximities to the U.S. and hemispheric South. In making such an argument, Schoolman does not jettison previous scholarly mappings of antislavery and U.S. empire; rather, she invites a multiscalar reading that places ideology and embodied experience on an equal footing.

Ohio becomes the microcosm that allows Stowe to stage broader national debates about colonization and emancipation, referencing the states’ legal debates about emancipation and citizenship to reveal the relevance of regional discussion to federal policy.

In her first chapter, Schoolman argues that nineteenth-century abolitionist projects throughout the hemisphere were in conversation with one another, but not always in tactical or theoretical agreement. She characterizes these hemispheric affinities as marked both by “temporal dislocations” and “spatial repetitions” in that they demonstrate consistency across various hemispheric antislavery efforts but also a localized unevenness in their struggles. Focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s embodied notion of illness as a way to understand the physical and psychic effects of slave economies, Schoolman unpacks New England responses to 1834 abolition in the British Caribbean and its effect on antislavery discussions in the U.S. (21). For Schoolman, Emerson’s pathbreaking book Nature (1836) was, in many ways, an extended rumination on health and place. Nature was published shortly after both Emerson and his brother Edward embarked on rest cures—while Ralph Waldo visited England in 1833, Edward spent time in the British Caribbean. In their travels, the brothers physically circulated through key hubs of Britain’s slave economy at precisely the moment Parliament debated abolition. Schoolman argues that for Emerson, “health was indeed a location as well as a status,” informing both his philosophical ideals and antislavery politics (26). Paradoxically, while it was illness that pulled Emerson into hemispheric reform debates, he advocated most fervently for the act of staying put in Nature. In other words, Emerson grounded his theory on the benefits of stasis, a stasis Schoolman connects both to the body and to the nation in his writings. By physically distancing oneself from the practice of slavery through what Schoolman terms “spatial dissent,” New Englanders such as Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, and William Ellery Channing argued for a particular brand of reform that strategically deployed a sense of hemispheric alliance (25). She describes this reform as one of “disunion” by which the hemispheric is imagined as one tactic to weaken a U.S. North-South bond forged through federalism, replacing a sense of national unity with hemispheric affinity. Disunion functions as a politics of “refusal,” to use one of Schoolman’s terms, attempting to free the individual from the transnational constellation of labor and commodity that tethered antislavery New Englanders to a slave economy via “luxury consumption” and “consumptives like the Emerson brothers” who sought health cures (25).

In chapter 2 Schoolman turns to August First celebrations to map hemispheric responses to West Indian emancipation and its aftermath. August First celebrations commemorated the abolition of British slavery, but they were not uniform; rather, they manifested themselves in complex socio-spatial ways throughout the U.S. She argues that Northern abolitionists did not simply distance themselves from British emancipation or avoid engaging its impact on the hemisphere. To the contrary, the material events in the West Indies became reworked in conceptual terms. As such, the logistical details of emancipation became overshadowed by its symbolic import—that is, the actual quotidian details were superseded by a narrative of moral epiphany through which British subjects realized slavery was untenable and immoral. Schoolman turns again to the writings of William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson in this chapter to demonstrate the “symbolic performance of disunion,” her term for Northern abolitionists’ belief that political nonparticipation was, itself, a form of radical activism bettering the abolitionist cause. She then demonstrates how both men discursively endorsed a logic by which white New Englanders aligned themselves with British emancipation and slave resistance and productively distanced themselves from proslavery sympathizers as a form of political (in)action (79).

While Emerson argued for the necessity of the bodily and the local, according to Abolitionist Geographies, William Wells Brown embraced cosmopolitanism and the promise offered African Americans by traveling abroad, away from the nation’s racially rigid social structures. In her third chapter, Schoolman describes Brown’s second autobiography, Three Years in Europe: Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852), in which he recounts his travels across Europe. While Brown’s text begins as a celebration of cosmopolitanism, it becomes ambivalent about the actual emancipatory power of mobility for global Black subjects. His travel, Schoolman explains, led him to a “critical cosmopolitanism.” He was unwilling to give up on the radical potential of cosmopolitanism as a way to escape institutional and national forms of oppression, but he likewise realized that such possibility was not viable in the European present (102).

Schoolman frames the final two chapters of Abolitionist Geographies with a discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s two best-known novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Dred (1856). In her fourth chapter, Schoolman overturns readings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) that argue for the novel as a geographically expansive text pushing toward the edges of U.S. empire. Instead, she reads Stowe’s novel as one of “spatial conservatism,” very much situated in the local and regional of Cincinnati, Ohio (132). More importantly, it is a regionalism that challenges sectional divides, embracing Cincinnati’s spatial position as a river town lipping the border between North and South, slave and free. Ohio becomes the microcosm that allows Stowe to stage broader national debates about colonization and emancipation, referencing the states’ legal debates about emancipation and citizenship to reveal the relevance of regional discussion to federal policy. It is in her later novel Dred that Stowe turns to the national as a scale for imagined radical political transformation. Schoolman argues that the potential for intranational resistance is symbolically rendered by Stowe’s Dred, a maroon who lives in the Great Dismal Swamp and therefore challenges Southern slavocracy from within. Stowe’s novel embraces the swamp as a space for the active refusal of slavery and for interracial organizing, one where white abolitionist radicalism and marronage can discursively meet. Schoolman argues that this literary trope of swamp-as-spatial-resistance connects seemingly disparate strains of antislavery activism and imagines a geographic locale wherein white Northern abolitionists and African American Southern resistance can spatially convene. Using this logic, she traces the unlikely connections between Stowe’s novel, James Redpath’s travel writings, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s memoir to explain how marronage became a way for white radicals to imagine more extreme antislavery tactics, ones that include greater advocacy of black violence.

Abolitionist Geographies journeys across many familiar landscapes of nineteenth-century intellectual thought, overturning prevailing analyses of antislavery movements in the Americas, but perhaps its most compelling contribution is its claims about temporality and abolitionist spatial thinking. Schoolman’s abolitionist map argues for new abolitionist spatialities, but also highlights how various radical antislavery projects functioned out of sync temporally with one another, even when temporally contemporaneous or geographically contiguous. Schoolman’s abolitionist geographies are not just about the maps people make, but about how maps and people move through time. These maps both imagine radical futures and demonstrate strategically synchronic and diachronic understandings of social change. Thus, they demonstrate how both provincial time and ahistorical affinities between peoples, spaces, or sociocultural objectives influenced antislavery spatialities and disrupted teleologies of social progress. There is great generative potential in such a model, challenging other prominent assumptions about space and time in the field. For example, while the West, U.S. colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples are largely absent from Schoolman’s project, one can imagine how this dialectic method of understanding both space and time might be further deployed to rework logics of U.S. imperial expansion and settler colonialism. What Schoolman’s text does depict, however, is a nuanced topography that highlights the contradictory, the quotidian, and the contextual strategies ever present in nineteenth-century abolitionist geographies.

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

Kathryn Walkiewicz is an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Kennesaw State University. She is a coeditor of the anthology The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (2010).

Richard Nixon’s removal of the U.S. dollar from the gold standard in August 1971 has not been front-page news for some time, yet the recent economic downturn has brought so-called goldbugs and their fellow devotees of specie out of the woodwork yet again. Whenever the U.S. economy hits the skids, one can rely on a chorus of voices advocating a withdrawal from the vaporous promises of financial instruments that exist only on paper (or, as is more often the case, in the ether of electronic trading systems) and a return to precious metals as the only true standard of value. These critics often hearken back to America’s past as an exemplar, where people knew the value of a dollar because those dollars were made out of silver or gold. These claims persist in the face of an increasing body of scholarship that shows that the early American economy was, if anything, reliant on just as many enabling financial fictions as we are.

Money is seemingly everywhere in early American studies these days. Not real money, of course (as many readers of Common-place likely know all too well). Rather, the vexed question of money in the early American republic—its many forms, its instability, its scarcity, its centrality as a political issue—is the focus of a new wave of scholarship in the field. Ranging from Scott Sandage’s Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (2006) to Stephen Mihm’s A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (2007) to Jane Kamensky’s The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (2008) to Wendy Woloson’s In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (2010), historians have taken a renewed interest in the fraught transition from specie to paper currency in the early republic and the varied ways in which citizens of the new nation sought to make their way in a rapidly changing economy.

But scholars of early American literature have been relatively slow to join this trend, with the exception of Jennifer Baker’s Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (2005). David Anthony’s new book Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America is a welcome addition to this emerging field of inquiry, addressing the challenges to masculinity that were posed by the shift from an early American economy grounded in specie transactions to the antebellum economic free-for-all, where hundreds of banks issued their own (often worthless) paper money, and the Panic of 1837 in particular cast some of the nation’s most prominent merchants and bankers into bankruptcy. Focusing on a concise set of texts, some canonical and some less familiar, Anthony aims to outline “the inequity between hard money and the speculatory economy that drives much of antebellum sensationalism, and the form of manhood it so often depicts” (3). In his readings of texts ranging from Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and American versions of “Jack and the Beanstalk” to George Lippard’s The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk-Hall and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Anthony charts the trajectory of what he labels “paper money manhood,” a mode of being adopted by “professional” men in order to cope with anxieties regarding challenges posed to established gender categories by the increasingly unstable paper economy. (It should be noted that, in addition to readings of literary texts, Paper Money Men includes apt readings of twenty-two well chosen figures. These rare archival images are far more than mere illustrations; they are treated as texts in their own right, and serve to illuminate Anthony’s argument.)

Paper Money Men is a somewhat oddly shaped book. Of relatively compact length (186 pages of text), over 20 percent of the book—40 pages—is dedicated to an introduction that lays the theoretical and methodological groundwork for what follows. Of the five chapters that make up the rest of the book, portions of four have previously appeared as articles; the main points of interest for readers already familiar with this scholarship will be the introduction and Chapter 5, which primarily deals with race and The House of the Seven Gables, although it also includes a provocative reading of John Beauchamp Jones’ 1851 novel The City Merchant; or, The Mysterious Failure, an understudied novel that would have benefited from more attention here.

Anthony’s introduction situates the texts he examines in what he refers to as “the sensational public sphere,” a representational space made up of texts ranging from penny newspapers to cheap city-mysteries novels to political cartoons to theatrical melodramas. This sensational public sphere “offered a space in which an emergent professional class of men was able to see itself reflected in a whole range of narratives, virtually all of which were located at the fraught moment of transition … from an older form of mercantile capitalism to the new and much less stable world of the emergent paper economy” (21). Suggesting that the sensational public sphere is the antithesis to the bourgeois, rational-critical public sphere as described by Jürgen Habermas, Anthony identifies it as an alternative space for articulating the concerns of the white, professional male—precisely the subject that is supposed to be engaged in disinterested, rational political discussion in the Habermasian framework.

Anthony pinpoints the origin of the sensational public sphere in 1836, with the surge in penny press newspaper sales in New York City in the wake of the murder of Helen Jewett, a prostitute who was killed with a hatchet and then partially burned in a high-class brothel in lower Manhattan. The newspaper coverage of the murder trial, according to Anthony, sparked the widespread adoption of a “titillating and affecting mix of gothic horror and sentimentality,” while also modeling an “obsessive interest in the career of the professional male” (Jewett’s accused murderer, Richard Robinson, was one of New York’s ever growing army of mercantile clerks) (26). The central claim of the book—one that is played out in the five chapters of close readings that follow the introduction—is that the texts that constituted the sensational public sphere were popular because they offered a “kind of psychic trade-off, wherein the absence of American gold … is countered with other, compensatory forms of currency and value” that provide a “fantasy redress for the failed or imperiled manhood of the new paper economy” (27).

Anthony’s readings, then, focus on texts where professional male figures (although “professional” is interpreted sufficiently loosely to include everyone from Ichabod Crane to Lippard’s urban con man Algernon Fitz-Cowles to Hawthorne’s daguerreotypist Holgrave) seek some form of psychological compensation for the threats to their manhood posed by the potential for financial instability. Anthony’s first chapter focuses on Washington Irving and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” gothic masculinity, and the Panic of 1819, taking Irving’s writing in The Sketch Book as a “crucial barometer for understanding the increasingly ‘nervous’ and ‘anxious’ form of masculinity” that was emerging in the period surrounding the panic (42). Viewing Ichabod Crane as the embodiment of modern, paper-based commerce, Anthony situates Crane at the beginning of a long lineage of sensational, anxiety-ridden characters through antebellum literature, although the Headless Horseman is also invoked as the “embodiment of the period’s speculative economy” (61), and his threat of masculine (and sexual) humiliation is linked to Ichabod’s (and Irving’s) parlous financial circumstances.

The second chapter focuses on the Shylock figure in antebellum literature, arguing that Jewish money men are frequently depicted as responsible for the “theft of enjoyment” of Gentile characters (and, by extension, the theft of the gold bullion that was thought to have gone missing from the Bank of the United States, thus destabilizing the U.S. economy). The book offers a convincing reading of a variety of sensational texts in which the grasping merchant Jew serves as a constantly present specter of excessive capitalist desire. In describing what he calls the “Jessica complex”—a focus on the romantic life of the Shylock character’s daughter—Anthony convincingly argues that marriage to the daughter of the Jewish merchant can serve as a form of compensation in these narratives for the financial humiliations imposed by indebtedness to the Jew, and his mortifying demands for a pound of flesh. Readers of this chapter will be able to draw productive comparisons with Wendy Woloson’s examination of the development and persistence of anti-Semitic stereotypes associated with pawnbrokers in the nineteenth century in her book mentioned above.

Paper Money Men’s third chapter addresses “debt and male submission” in the more sensational realm of urban gothic literature, offering readings of the popular literature surrounding the 1849 murder of the Harvard professor George Parkman by his colleague John Webster and of Lippard’s phenomenally successful exposé of corruption in Philadelphia, The Quaker City. Positing a gender formation that he calls “debtor masculinity”—characterized by “excessive affective states of panic and hysteria and by postures of humiliation and submission” (106)—Anthony posits that, paradoxically, it is through the loss of bodily and affective control brought about by indebtedness that professional men are able to achieve self-possession, arguing that displays of affect (as in Webster’s confession, or in the mercantile clerk Luke Harvey’s forgiveness of his former lover Dora Livingstone in The Quaker City) become a form of capital that stand in for a vanished sense of financial security.

The fourth chapter deals with James Gordon Bennett’s coverage in the New York Herald of the 1836 murder of Helen Jewett, arguing that Bennett’s hostile response to Jewett’s sexual empowerment and seemingly elevated class status was a form of compensation for his own financial insecurity and the emasculating humiliation he suffered as a result of several public beatings at the hands of rival newspaper editors William Leggett and James Watson Webb (Anthony writes that Jewett, “by virtue of her cultural capital,” posed a particular threat to Bennett, and that Bennett saw in her “the very corruption and capriciousness that he saw in the credit economy itself” [142-43]). While Anthony’s larger point—that Bennett’s mode of covering the Jewett murder offered something different in the realm of cultural production that initiated what he refers to as the sensational public sphere—is compellingly argued, this analysis of the specifics of Bennett’s coverage of the Jewett case is less convincing. Anthony glosses over the fact that Bennett performed a 180-degree turnabout in his stance toward the case, first strenuously defending the accused clerk, Richard Robinson, then later turning on him (this shift is outlined well in Andie Tucher’s Froth and Scum [1994]). It is also not at all clear that Bennett suffered from any form of financial insecurity, whether real or perceived. Indeed, at the time of the Jewett affair, he was already a reasonably affluent man, and the explosion of penny press readership that the case would spark led to his becoming one of the most successful newspapermen of the nineteenth century. Unless he possessed a remarkable degree of clairvoyance and knew that the Panic of 1837 was around the corner, there would have been little reason for Bennett to suffer from any level of fiscal anxiety. It is more likely that Bennett’s lavish but variable coverage of the Jewett murder (much like his perhaps exaggerated descriptions of his physical confrontations with rival editors) were the product of a mind profoundly gifted at calculating what the public would be willing to pay to read.

As mentioned above, Chapter 5 uses J.B. Jones’ The City Merchant and Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables to address the role that race plays in the compensatory fictions of antebellum sensationalism. Arguing that “narratives about race and racial purity act as a kind of fantasy bribe,” whereby anxieties about financial instability are displaced onto fears of the blurring of racial categories, Anthony traverses ground covered in different ways by David Roediger, Alexander Saxton, and Eric Lott in his discussion of the ways in which blackness serves as a means of negotiating white manhood in the nineteenth century. Showing how, in The House of the Seven Gables, market transactions often carry the taint of racial mixture, Anthony argues that Holgrave’s marriage to Phoebe Pyncheon demonstrates the suppression of racial difference in favor of middle-class financial stability.

The writing in Paper Money Men is admirably free of jargon. However, some readers may find themselves distracted by the book’s too-frequent explicit invocation of the tools of Freudian criticism: there are “primal scenes” of men with gold/excrement, castration is an omnipresent anxiety, and the repressed returns, repeatedly. This theoretical orientation perhaps does not allow space for an analysis of these texts that might pay closer attention to their stance regarding class, but that is simply an opportunity for another scholar. There are also some questions of chronology. Anthony quite plausibly argues that the Panics of 1819 and 1837 produced severe anxieties in the minds of men of somewhat uncertain professional status (particularly acutely felt by authors and editors) regarding their financial stability. Yet, in the cases of the two figures whose biographies he relies on most heavily for evidence—Washington Irving and James Gordon Bennett—both are found to be expressing concerns about their fiscal standing several years before the respective panics. If Irving is writing to his friend Henry Brevoort in 1816 comparing his hopes for financial security to “the dream of fairy-land” (60), how much of the mindset encompassed in the term “paper money manhood” is the product of specific economic upheavals, and how much might be due instead to much longer processes of historical and economic transformation? After all, paper currency had been in circulation long before the texts addressed here were written, and it has long been unclear how much specie the average person in North America ever came in contact with over the course of an economic life. Nevertheless, Paper Money Men offers a provocative set of readings of some key texts of antebellum literature, both canonical and popular, and represents a welcome example of the impact that instability in the antebellum economy had on America’s literary as well as commercial production.

Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein on Washington Irving, Aaron Burr, and the lost political and literary world of early New York City

Professors Isenberg and Burstein sat down for a dialogue about the convergence of their research in one of the early republic’s least-understood political corners.

How does one speak of Aaron Burr and Washington Irving in the same breath?

Burstein: First of all, they shared the island of Manhattan for a good many years. Washington Irving was the youngest in a large family of merchants with both literary and political ambitions. The brother with whom he was closest, Peter, ran as a Burrite for the New York Assembly and was the editor of the Burrite newspaper, the Morning Chronicle. The oldest Irving brother, William, served two terms in the House of Representatives as a Republican. John Irving, a lawyer and later a judge, hung out his shingle at the Wall Street address that Burr had recently occupied. Washington Irving, trained in the law, briefly worked there, too. Just before his first voyage to Europe, in 1803, twenty-year-old Washington had breakfast with Burr and absorbed his advice on how to profit from his time abroad.

Isenberg: Burr’s appeal to the Irvings was the same as his appeal to other young New Yorkers looking to rise in society by attaching themselves to a politician sympathetic to their ambitions. Burr was a patron of the arts—the patron, for instance, of the well-known artist John Vanderlyn; Washington Irving was an incurable theatergoer and theater critic in his New York years and would pal around with painters and poets all his life. His brother William, the congressman, belonged to a literary society and wrote doggerel poems that formed companion pieces to his soon-to-be-famous brother’s occasional pieces. In a letter to his daughter Theodosia, who was Irving’s age, Burr, when vice president, eagerly praised the young writer’s satirical essays about Manhattan society.

How did Burr figure in Irving’s writing?

Isenberg: During Burr’s 1807 treason trial, Irving traveled to Richmond, ostensibly to aid in Burr’s legal defense (though Irving had little confidence in his legal skills and no experience trying cases). He was really in Richmond to observe and report back to Burr’s New York crowd; Sam Swartwout, Burr’s companion who was threatened with prosecution, had been Washington Irving’s staunch friend for years. Present in the courtroom, Irving wrote deliciously about how Burr watched his accuser, the notoriously self-important deceiver General James Wilkinson, enter the chamber: “He stood for a moment swelling like a turkey cock, and bracing himself for the encounter with Burr’s eye.” Burr, in complete control of the moment, briefly took in the whole girth of the man and then with perfect poise returned to the conversation he was having with his counsel—it was thoroughgoing contempt without a hint of concern, and for Irving it encapsulated the entire injudicious trial. Irving’s description of Burr is that of a man of audacity, poise, meticulous self-control—the height of masculinity in this period and the same qualities modern Americans came to admire in Humphrey Bogart and Clint Eastwood.

Burstein: In 1809, the work that established Irving’s national reputation, his History of New York (also known as Knickerbocker’s History) featured a demeaning portrait of President Jefferson (“William the Testy”) as an inept dreamer, whose embargo was toothless and who believed that frothy proclamations could replace the defense establishment; it also included a brilliant send-up of the pompous Wilkinson, “William the Testy’s” favorite commander, whom Irving named Jacobus Von Poffenburgh in the mock-history. Irving appreciated Burr’s political skills and wrote feelingly about the scandalized vice president’s confinement in a dank cell during one part of the trial. The writer was incensed that the government had put Burr in an “abode of Thieves—Cut throats & incendiaries” simply to “save the United States a couple of hundred dollars.” Irving’s short story about an unfairly ostracized stranger, “The Little Man in Black,” published shortly after the trial, also reflected the treatment of Burr by those who had turned on him. Short in stature, he was familiarly known as “Little Burr.”

How did Burr’s rise in New York politics establish him as a possible candidate for national office? 

Isenberg: Burr established his own faction, which offered a different message than that espoused by the other factions in New York politics—the Schuylers (Hamilton’s supporters, who were also associated with his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler), Livingstons, and Clintons. Rather than Jeffersonian agrarianism, he promoted commercial republicanism. After Burr served in the U.S. Senate in the 1790s, he returned to New York and ran for the state assembly at the end of that decade. Here he established an important network of supporters and advanced legislation promoting his brand of republicanism. In 1799, he backed internal improvements and fairer taxes, protested against the Alien Acts, backed debt reform, and sought to enact more democratic suffrage laws. He also created the Manhattan Company, forerunner to the Chase Manhattan Bank. The Manhattan Company, which was initially controversial, was the first New York bank to give banking privileges to the middling and even lower classes. Burr’s reforms were progressive and drew merchants and mechanics into the Jeffersonian party. One Virginian wrote James Madison that the very existence of this bank would serve to make Jefferson president.

What makes the folk tale “Rip Van Winkle” political?

Burstein: The story, so popular that it was translated for the stage and performed across the country from 1829 until the end of the century, addressed matters of nostalgia and identity, personal and collective. While Rip starts out ignorant of the larger world as an inattentive subject of the king, at the end of his time-bending journey he gets to enjoy life as “a free citizen of the United States.” His shrewish wife, who dies shortly before his return from the mountains, can be seen to symbolize the persecution of Britannia; his daughter, who rediscovers him after his twenty-year sleep and compassionately takes him in, is a symbol of the American republic at peace. Rip, a good-for-nothing before the Revolution, is transformed into a popular village storyteller, making eyes light up when he invokes the magic of a dreamlike past; similarly, Americans of the 1820s (the decade following the 1819 publication of “Rip Van Winkle”) write storied pieces in their newspapers, celebrating democracy’s universal appeal. Steeped in nostalgia for the Revolution, they are full of praise for dying veterans and dying founders, as they near the jubilee commemoration of the Declaration of Independence. They cast the American past in comfortable terms, progressive terms, even terms of moral perfectibility. Irving’s writings from this point forward, like those of his fellow New Yorker James Fenimore Cooper, chart historical progress by heralding the courtesy and affability of the nature-taming characters who best symbolize the republic.

How does Burr challenge the “founders chic” tradition?

Isenberg: Many who write books about the founders focus on mythic “character” rather than the real political environment, the nasty manner of politics. Much of what has been written about Burr has been taken from unreliable sources, which include accounts fabricated by his political enemies. Few scholars have scrutinized the sources they use when they portray Burr as a villain. As the Judas of the founding generation, he has been reduced to a two-dimensional character, a foil, in contrast to his supposedly more virtuous peers. I discovered that his reputation cannot be adequately explained in terms of character—history is never that simple. Remarkably, many have accepted Hamilton’s views of Burr, ignoring the fact that Burr was his principal rival in New York politics. “Founders chic” tends to ignore the viciousness of partisan activities. For example, the role played by anonymous newspaper editors, such as James Cheetham of the American Citizen, has been completely ignored: Cheetham spent three years filling the pages of his newspaper with personal attacks against Burr. Sexual slurs were his favorite weapon. He compared Burr to a libertine, and his young male followers were called “strolling players”—a euphemism for male prostitutes. He accused Burr of having sex parties in his home to lure black male voters to his ticket and compared Burr’s home to a bordello, with mirrors on the ceiling, for lavish orgies. Cheetham had first supported Burr and later switched sides, giving his support to Burr’s rival within the Republican Party, DeWitt Clinton. Clinton wanted to be governor of New York (and eventually was), while maneuvering to have his uncle, George Clinton, elevated to the vice presidency (which he eventually was, as well).

Burstein: It is worth noting that DeWitt Clinton, lauded in history for his promotion of the Erie Canal, was also small-minded and petty. He published a pamphlet, a self-serving tirade, in the wake of Washington Irving’s success with Knickerbocker’s History, in which he sneered at the modest origins of Irving’s upstart literary set and called Irving’s satirical masterpiece “intolerable.” He wrote of his own literary abilities in the third person: “Mr. Clinton, amidst his other great qualifications, is distinguished for a marked devotion to science—few men have read more.” Irving, he wrote, “cannot read any of the classics in their original language…I find him barren in conversation.” What this proves, at bare minimum, is the stinging effect and enduring power of political satire.

What do your biographies of Burr and Irving add to our understanding of the conduct of politics in early America?

Isenberg: Burr demonstrates that you can’t understand the founders unless you understand state politics. The founders were not national figures who transcended state politics; rather they were attached to their states, and their rise to power came through the support they received in their states. Politics was never just about high-minded ideas but was also about newspapers, where harsh battles were waged on a daily basis. Mudslinging in the newspapers exceeded what we experience in today’s media. Democratic politics from the very beginning relied on scandal. Newspaper editors like Cheetham brought the Grub Street tradition of scandalmongering over from Great Britain, and it quickly adapted to the American party system.

Burr’s story also reminds us of the importance of rivalries within parties. Early American politics was not simply a contest among a handful of “great men”: Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison. Nor was it only a partisan struggle. The election of 1800—in which Jefferson and Burr received the same number of votes, creating a tie and havoc in Washington—revealed a deeper tension. A profound sectional divide existed between Jeffersonian Republicans in New York and Virginia; each group, with jealous determination, sought to defend and broaden its power. The New Yorkers did not trust the Virginians, and vice versa; their alliance was precarious and tentative.

Burr’s success was owing to his role as a mediator. In 1799, he united the squabbling Republican factions in New York to support the Manhattan Bank and then again to secure the election of Jefferson. President Jefferson realized he could secretly align with George and DeWitt Clinton, to play off the New York factions against each other. Burr was expendable, and his mediating role was no longer necessary. By 1802, Jefferson was already thinking about preparing his trusted political lieutenant, fellow Virginian James Madison, to be his successor. Jefferson kept control of the Republican Party and kept the presidency in the hands of the Virginia dynasty for twenty-four years, while New Yorkers fought among themselves. Though Dewitt Clinton set up his uncle to run against Madison in 1808, the maneuver failed—it did, however, demonstrate the continuing sectional rivalry within the party.

Neither George nor Dewitt Clinton possessed the political finesse to unite New York Democratic Republicans, let alone build a winning northern coalition. Clinton lacked Burr’s qualities. Burr had a national reputation and strong support in New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and the western states—he was the only serious candidate who might have challenged Madison. Jefferson’s break with Burr cannot be explained by character or merely personal distrust—it had to do with sectional politics.

Recovering Burr’s role in politics also forces us to concede that the founders lived in a larger social world. Virtually every one of them engaged in risky speculative ventures—even Abigail Adams was a bond speculator. George Washington made much of his wealth as a land jobber, Madison speculated in lands in New York, and Monroe invested in land in France after the French Revolution. Hamilton’s close friend, William Duer, whom he appointed as assistant secretary of the treasury, concocted a grand speculative scheme in government securities—only to be carted off to debtor’s prison in 1792. Though Burr’s bad investments have been reduced to a character flaw, the truth was that he was minor player compared to Duer and others.

For fairly obvious reasons, filibustering and land speculation went hand-in-hand. In 1805, Burr began thinking about the possibility of organizing a filibuster into Spanish territory. A filibuster was a private army without government sanction. Burr and many of his supporters, including several prominent senators and ex-senators like Andrew Jackson, avidly endorsed toppling the Spanish “Dons” and claiming the land for the United States. Burr was not alone in this dream. In 1798, Hamilton thought of leading an army into Mexico as part of Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda’s filibuster. As secretary of state, Jefferson did nothing to stop his friend George Rogers Clark from mounting a filibuster in Louisiana in the early 1790s. President Madison looked the other way when Americans invaded western Florida during the War of 1812. Monroe, as secretary of war, believed the United States should invade Canada and Florida during the War of 1812. Lest we forget, Texas independence in 1836 was also the result of a filibuster.

Burr’s activities are treated as anomalous, his so-called conspiracy a mystery to be solved rather than a reflection of the nation’s ongoing struggle with European powers in North America. From the Revolution forward, America had Canada in its sights and used the language of liberty (freeing oppressed colonized people) to justify conquest. Expansionist aims within a global perspective are missing from portraits of the founders.

Burstein: Politics was the most alluring forum for literature in the postrevolutionary era. Irving exemplifies the type who made his name by writing his way out of obscurity. His clever newspaper essays in the Morning Chronicle, under the invented pseudonym of Jonathan Oldstyle, were succeeded by the social satire of Will Wizard and Anthony Evergreen in the serialized Salmagundi and then, in 1809, the renowned Dutch pseudo-historian Diedrich Knickerbocker. Pseudonyms were used routinely in political writing: Greek and Latin names were meant to suggest grandeur and credibility on the part of the ostensibly unknown author.

What the brash young Irving did was to attach a comic name to an absurd perspective and show how democracy was becoming unruly and America’s political leaders, hypocritical panderers. “An election is the grand trial of strength,” he wrote in a Salmagundi essay, in which candidates come out in force, bringing along their army of “tatterdemalians, buffoons, dependents, parasites, toad-eaters, scrubs, vagrants, mumpers, ragamuffins, bravoes, and beggars.” Buffeted by these and “puffed up by his bellows-blowing slang-whangers,” the candidate “waves gallantly the banners of faction, and presses forward TO OFFICE AND IMMORTALITY!”

Though his older brothers were Burrites and then Jeffersonians, Irving was a moderate Federalist in his critical commentary, until joining his brothers in support of Madison and a new nationalism when the War of 1812 began. Irving went on to become an unofficial aide to Andrew Jackson, much in the way other former Federalists did—even Alexander Hamilton’s son, who was a neighbor of Irving’s on the banks of the Hudson, and whose son was a favorite of Irving’s and his top aide when Irving was America’s ambassador to Spain in the 1840s. As a Jacksonian Democrat, Irving promoted a Jacksonian vision of the West; in A Tour on the Prairies (1835) and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), he painted chivalric portraits of earthy army rangers and fur trappers, and in a slight twist from Horace Greeley’s more quotable “Go west, young man,” Irving asserted that young American men should turn away from the European grand tour and mark their passage to manhood on the western prairies.

Refusing drafts to serve as New York City mayor or run for Congress (“I would have to run mad first”), Irving ended his writing career in the 1850s with a worshipful five-volume biography of George Washington and a final return to the moderate Federalism of his young adulthood. He is only remembered as the genial author of romantic short stories, which is why I decided to incorporate into my biography of him the curious, winding political path he traveled.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein—former coholders of the Mary Frances Barnard Chair in Nineteenth-Century U.S. History at the University of Tulsa and now professor of history and Manship Professor of History, respectively, at Louisiana State University—are presently coauthoring a book on Madison, Jefferson, and the conduct of politics in postrevolutionary America. Individually, they recently completed biographies of historical actors from further north whose reputations have been badly distorted by historians and political enemies alike. Isenberg’s Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (2007) demonstrates how Burr’s historical reputation has been shaped by his political enemies without consideration of his Enlightenment political ideas and open-mindedness, which appealed to a host of New Yorkers and others. Burstein’s The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving (2007), the first substantial biography of the New York author since 1935 and the first by a historian, situates Irving in Burr-era politics and shows that he achieved his height as a writer not in the way most believe, as a benign romantic, but as a political satirist, lampooning Thomas Jefferson.

The struggle for freedom was a perilous one for enslaved Virginians. Once gained, freedom was precarious, both for newly freed people and for their families. Beginning in 1645, Emanuel Driggus began a forty-year journey to free himself, his six natural children, and two foster daughters. Driggus was adept at courting the patronage of great planters and at negotiating deals with them to protect himself and his family. Driggus arranged fixed-term indentures for some of his dependents and outright purchased the freedom of others. He gained his own freedom in 1652. Driggus’s strategy revolved around his growing livestock operation; he raised horses, sheep, cattle, hogs, and chickens, and he used the courts to ensure that his neighbors, white and black, recognized his ownership of his stock. By the 1660s, Driggus was married to an English woman named Elizabeth and had leased a plantation where he bred horses and grew tobacco. Though some of his children remained enslaved, Driggus’s future looked bright. He continued his efforts to secure the freedom of his remaining enslaved progeny.

I. Two summers ago, we drove up the driveway of the Bennington Museum. The museum welcomed visitors with its new portico and greeted them with advertisements for its Grandma Moses collection. I wasn’t interested in Grandma Moses that day. I had come to Vermont looking for archival gems, a taste my family and friends sometimes find hard to understand. I remembered that Kenneth Zogry, the Bennington Museum’s curator, had organized a wonderful exhibit in 1995: “The Best the Country Affords: Vermont Furniture, 1765-1820.” His catalogue’s fascinating documentary references suggested that I might find an abundance of information on furniture makers and furniture owners in the museum’s archives: file folders stuffed with clippings, stories to fill out my case studies of provincial craftsmen and consumers after the Revolution. As often happens, the files were disappointing. The black loose-leaf binders held a wealth of material on the furniture that Zogry had found on his travels to private homes and local historical societies. Zogry’s files document the universe of furniture made in Vermont and, perhaps, let him make new attributions, but they did not contain the stories of craftsmen and their customers I was looking for that day. Only when I finally wandered out into the sunlit main gallery where the museum’s treasures were displayed–its objects from Vermont’s early history–did I begin to see the kinds of things that would help me understand how artisans and consumers imagined their worlds. The first thing that caught my eye was a large neoclassical sideboard, looking for all the world like a sophisticated Boston bowfront, but made in Windsor, Vermont. But the beautiful bowfront, even with its sleek lines, could not compare with the massive desk and encyclopedia-filled bookcase that dominated an entire corner of the room, where the museum staff had recreated the interior of an early-nineteenth-century Vermont home (fig. 1).

The desk, I learned, belonged to James Wilson of Bradford, Vermont. More interesting, the label stated Wilson was the United State’s first globe maker, and indeed, one of Wilson’s early globes sat in a plexiglass case in front of the display. It seemed strange to me then that a man in this out-of-the-way place had taken to making globes (fig. 2).

Or perhaps it is the people of the provinces who best understand the need for assuring a good local source for things like maps. We know nineteenth-century Vermonters were intellectually sophisticated cosmopolitans of a sort. At the other end of the room stood a marvelous musical tall clock built by a Rutland clock-making partnership. The timepiece boasted a calendar wheel and a moon dial, and it played seven tunes, one for each day of the week, and added a psalm for Sunday. Between the globe and the clock, museum curators had hung a 1795 landscape of Bennington painted by Ralph Earl, a well-known Connecticut portraitist. Earl was likely the first painter to visit the town, where he produced this very early example of an American landscape. The museum’s local treasures preserved Vermont’s contribution to the new nation’s commercial and cultural history. The objects on display were connected by their visual power and by their local historical significance, but they also recorded the curiosity and intellectual ambitions of men and women of rural New England. I left the Bennington Museum that day enthralled with the discovery of James Wilson, wanting to know more about how a globe maker could have come out of the upper Connecticut River Valley in the 1790s. As I later learned, others in the hinterlands also tried to make globes; New Hampshire shoemaker, surveyor, and farmer Samuel Lane, for example, made his own idiosyncratic version of a terrestrial globe around 1760. Lane turned a seven-inch oak sphere on his lathe, scored the painted surface, and cut degrees and continental boundaries into the painted surface, while pinning it into a pine table made in the form of a milking stool so it could revolve. I was also vaguely aware of the new scholarly history of cartography, but I had little idea how the four corners of that gallery would come together into my fascination with the Village Enlightenment. Wilson was not the only New Englander to fashion a career out of his own curiosity; in the 1790s many Americans made money satisfying country folks’ interest in the latest mechanical marvels, like the complex musical clock, or their desire to own the maps that let them see the shape and extent of their new nation.

II. Curiosity Unleashed Globes captured James Wilson’s imagination. Few eighteenth-century American households could boast owning a globe. Those who did likely purchased their globes from London manufacturers. Instrument makers, engravers, and clock makers all produced globes in Britain. Many considered “cordwainer” William Bardin the leading late-eighteenth-century globe maker. Bardin and others relied on forms introduced with Martin Behaim’s hollow wooden Nuremburg globe of 1492. Behaim’s globe making principles were codified and transmitted in print in Diderot’s Encyclopedie, the source of information contained in Wilson’s own Encyclopedia Britannica. Globe makers who followed Behaim’s example used a solid wood mould with wire pivots at each end, which became the poles. The ball was covered with successive layers of damp papier-mâché or paper. When the paper dried, the shell was cut into two halves around the circumference of the equator, an axle shaft of wood was tacked at the poles, and the globe put back together and sealed. Thin layers of plaster were applied and guidelines drawn so that printed gores could be attached. The discovery of gores–the map of the world broken into twelve sections–solved the problem of how to fit flat paper maps over spheres. In the early sixteenth century, engravers and printers began to produce gores for eager globe makers. Globe making thus sat at the intersection of woodworking, metalworking, printing, and mapmaking, as Wilson would soon discover. In the eighteenth century, globe making caught fire. Interest was fueled by the era’s expansion of geographical knowledge, thanks to traders and explorers, especially Captain James Cook. Cook’s Pacific voyages rounded out European knowledge of the world. The information he brought back gave Enlightenment globes their marked “oceanic character,” as geographer Denis Cosgrove has reminded us. Cook’s voyages captured Americans’ imagination, too. There was a growing interest in popular science and geographic discoveries in elite and not so elite circles along with a desire to display that newfound knowledge in homes and schools. Wilson shared this interest, but how did he come to make globes? Wilson was born in Londonderry, New Hampshire, in 1763. As a boy, he learned blacksmithing from his uncle. In 1795 the young James Wilson set out west across the Connecticut River to locate land for his family in Bradford, Vermont, a town located at the scenic Coos Meadows, where the Waits and Connecticut Rivers meet. Along the way, he stopped in Hanover, New Hampshire, to see a friend at Dartmouth College. According to one family story, the young man, himself eager for knowledge but without the means for securing a formal education, saw a pair of globes when he peaked through the keyhole of a locked door in one of the college buildings. The college owned three sets of globes in the 1790s. We don’t know which globes Wilson saw, but we do know that these orbs remained inaccessible to him. Wilson could not have purchased the globes, nor could he have purchased the education that would have let him study Dartmouth’s small collection. This glimpse of globes, however, fired his curiosity and fortified his desire to construct one of these unusual objects, or so the story of James Wilson goes. Before he could take up globe making, he had to settle his family. He brought his wife and two sons to Bradford to develop his homestead, and began making axes to help pay for his land purchases. Although still working as a smith, he did not forget his interest in making a map of the world, and in 1796 he made his first globe, a large solid wooden ball covered with paper, with the continents and countries drawn in pen and ink. But Wilson would not be satisfied with his hand-drawn maps. He intended to build and market a product that could compete with the European imports, making his mark and earning his living as an American globe maker. Wilson’s first effort looked something like a globe, but it could hardly compete with the European imports. And Wilson, with his limited resources, faced formidable obstacles on his way to success as a globe maker. First, he knew very little about either geography, astronomy, or cartography. However, for a man gifted with Wilson’s capacity for curiosity, the growing number of books and newspapers in the small towns of northern New England offered many sources of information. Wilson may not have had the advantages of his friend at Dartmouth, but he did have skills and products he could exchange for knowledge. He sold off some of his farm produce and livestock and purchased for the substantial sum of $130 the eighteen volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: Or a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Miscellaneous Literature, the collection of books for which he built his imposing desk and bookcase (fig. 3).

Encyclopedias were the archetypal repository of the Enlightenment, with their compendia of all recognized knowledge; the third edition Britannica contained almost fifteen thousand pages and over five hundred plates, but Wilson would have been particularly interested in the substantial entries on globes and geography. Wilson had his encyclopedia, but how was he to translate the information he found there onto his wooden spheres? His bookcase demonstrated his skills in woodworking, and as a trained blacksmith he was a proficient metal worker. But he knew that hand-drawn globes could not compare with European imports. In order to move beyond shoemaker Lane’s effort and produce globes his neighbors would be proud to own, Wilson had to learn to engrave his maps on copper plates. Wilson knew he needed to find a teacher more skilled at engraving than his acquaintances in southern Vermont. He set out for New Haven to find Amos Doolittle, a silversmith turned engraver, who was celebrated as the man who had engraved the maps in Jedidiah Morse’s Geography Made Easy (1784), the first geography text published in the United States. After a brief stay in New Haven, Wilson returned to Vermont a blacksmith now turned geographer/engraver. But he still had much to learn about building globes. He began again with his original globe, covering it with papier-mâché, gluing several layers together, tracing continental outlines, cutting paper into hemispheres, and then gluing the hemispheres onto the sphere. He finished a first hand-drawn globe, but then spent nearly a year engraving a world map on a large copper plate, only to discover that he did not know how to project the meridians of the map, a flat plane, in their true proportion onto a spherical surface. Wilson took off once again in search of cosmopolitan training to suit his cosmopolitan imagination. This time he went to see the “Father of American Geography,” Jedidiah Morse himself, at Charlestown, Massachusetts. Morse told the globe maker that his first effort on a copper plate could not be salvaged. Wilson went back to Bradford, knowing he needed to obtain more copper but knowing too that his growing family needed the scarce resources he was spending learning to make globes. In the first years of the nineteenth century, balancing family demands and map-making aspiration, Wilson worked on his globe making. He built his own tools–lathes and presses–mixed his inks, shaped the spheres, and printed all of his own maps, probably relying on increasingly available atlases. Around 1810 he produced his first globes of paper on a paper core suspended in a birch frame with turned legs. He opened a shop to manufacture these prized items and began to sell them to his neighbors in rural Vermont. Wilson charged around fifty dollars for a pair of globes: a terrestrial and a celestial one. Vermonters were likely proud to possess one of Wilson’s impressive terrestrial globes. They measured thirteen inches in diameter, and each was signed, “A NEW TERRESTRIAL GLOBE . . . By J. WILSON, VERMONT.” Wilson’s proud signature suggests that we have entered an era that celebrated homegrown and democratized knowledge (fig. 4).

Men like Wilson made a livelihood providing useful knowledge and genteel commodities.  American globes or provincial sideboards were material manifestations of a Village Enlightenment. Clocks or globes, for example, displayed the enlightened age’s fascination with mechanical marvels and the quest for knowledge of distant explorations, while also the refined person’s desire to display symbols of gentility.

III. Curiosities for Sale Maps and globes were important products for people eager to see themselves as members of a new nation. What is surprising is that so many of the nation’s early maps came from places like Wilson’s Bradford globe manufactory. Wilson and his Windsor County neighbors formed a remarkable circle of map makers and engravers whose products graced the walls of schoolhouses and homes of Vermont and the entire nation. We sometimes picture a man like Wilson as a sort of solitary genius imagining his way into a world outside rural Vermont. But he was well supplied with coworkers. From the tiny villages of Greenbush and Feltchville a cluster of more than half a dozen rural artisans, printers, and engravers produced visual representations of Vermont, in maps, prints, and illustrated books. The men and women of this “Greenbush group,” were connected by partnerships, marriages, apprenticeships, and collaborations. Their intellectual, financial, and family connections helped spread knowledge through the countryside. They helped build a world where Enlightenment and edification were interwoven with the growing commercialization of the countryside. Maps were important components of this new world. They facilitated geographic and economic integration, but they also helped people imagine their nation. Maps have long aided political expansion and cultural consolidation. In the early Republic cartography helped establish an image of an authentically bounded nation. “After the Revolution many Americans self-consciously turned to the discourse of geography to negotiate and transform the representations of personal, regional, and political difference into material figures of national consent,” literary scholar Martin Bruckner writes. Whenever they stitched a sampler of the United States or gazed on a state map that made their homes part of a larger whole, they “enacted the nation as a participatory model of coherence.”

In fact, state maps, not globes, were the first American cartographic efforts after Independence, and Vermont was or became the first state with a map: William Blodget’s “A Topographical Map of the State of Vermont.” But Blodgett’s map did little to enhance this map maker’s finances. Scottish surveyor James Whitelaw fared far better; he succeeded Ira Allen as Vermont’s surveyor-general and kept busy securing new surveys of the state’s towns. From these surveys, he compiled his “A Correct Map of the State of Vermont,” to which he added details about the state’s commercial and manufacturing activities. The legend on Whitelaw’s map included familiar icons such as forts and meeting houses, but he added grist, saw, and fulling mills, along with grammar schools and other signs of a landscape of industrial and cultural improvement. The map’s large cartouche contained a delightful pastoral scene that featured the ongoing work of agricultural development taking place throughout the state: an improving farm with its cleared fields, a stump in foreground, and a two story farmhouse in the back (fig. 6).

Whitelaw’s publisher was New Haven’s Doolittle in 1796, but later editions (including an 1810 map engraved by James Wilson) would come from Vermont sources. About 1810, a man named Isaac Eddy established a shop in the little hamlet of Greenbush in a western corner of Weathersfield. Eddy and his son, apprentices, and business partners would turn this remote village into a significant center of early national engraving, especially cartographic work. The Eddys produced an amazing volume of maps, illustrated books, and even globes. Eddy embarked upon a modest program of imprints and engraved plates for the “First Vermont Edition” of the Bible along with a series of other local publications. His most ambitious collaboration, however, came with James Wilson on their Chronology Delineated / To Illustrate the History of Monarchical Revolutions (fig. 7).

These two rural entrepreneurs and encyclopaedists mapped the long history of the world, marrying commerce and culture together in two 36-x-21-inch sheets to be placed together, graphically representing the growth of the nations of the world from the time of Adam to the present. Eddy published this visual history to bring the allure and exoticism of its “French Historian and Chronologer” to an American audience with “the most concise and accurate system of chronology ever published,” offering the “Patrons of the Fine Arts . . . useful, amusing and ornamental” information. Eddy and Wilson obviously shared a kind of world vision. Knowledge more local sufficed for other intellectual entrepreneurs. Whitelaw’s Vermont map, for example, had a long life among other Windsor County engravers. Ebenezer Hutchinson brought out new editions in 1821 and 1824. In new editions, a vision of place transformed by enterprise and industry gradually replaced the pastoral scenes depicted in 1795 and 1810. Two cartouches graced the 1824 map; one depicted the thriving village of Montpelier from the mill point; the other was a fantastic scene looking west (fig. 8).

The wilderness with its thunderous waterfall and roving wildlife was divided by an earthen urn with the map’s title, the state seal, and an eagle above the whole, leading on to a cultivated scene with a farmer and his livestock in the foreground, a plough crossing the fields in the middle ground, and then a river with a puffing steamboat going by. Across the shore stood an urban scene. The Greenbush group innovated with new map styles and advanced production techniques. Another Eddy apprentice, George White struck out on his own with some smaller and less detailed maps of the two states straddling the Connecticut River. Lewis Robinson, yet one more product of Eddy’s workshop, pushed the manufacturing process forward, and built the first “map manufactory” in Windsor County. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Lewis Robinson became the leading purveyor of maps in northern New England, a major producer in the entire United States, all without leaving his hometown (Fig. 9).

The little village of South Reading stayed the site of his map factory for thirty-eight years; his chief products maps of Vermont and New Hampshire. They ranged in price from thirty-three cents to three dollars, often marketed through a network of peddlers and traveling salesmen. Robinson sold nearly six thousand maps between 1840 and 1855 alone and made his little village “a thriving backwoods center of commercial American cartography,” as Vermont cartographic historian J. Kevin Graffagnino has written.

IV. Curiosity Completed Wilson continued to operate his backwoods shop in Bradford, but eventually success forced him to open an urban shop. Events deep in the Pacific and across the North American continent captured Wilson’s imagination, and as he gained new information, he corrected his globes. On “A NEW AMERICAN TERRESTRIAL GLOBE on which the PRINCIPAL PLACES of the KNOWN WORLD are ACCURATELY laid down with the traced attempts of CAPTAIN COOK to discover a Southern Continent by James Wilson, 1811,” Wilson filled out the continent with place names and river systems. In 1817 Wilson’s sons opened a factory in Albany, New York, to meet the increased demand for their globes and maps. Knowing there was a market for inexpensive maps, the Wilsons even produced three-inch terrestrial and celestial globes.

The three-inch globes offered less graphic detail than larger maps; citizens of the new nation eager to learn and display their knowledge of the world could easily afford these miniature maps. An 1828 broadside advertised the Wilsons’ full range of three-inch to thirteen-inch globes on mahogany pedestal stands. “THE CORRECTNESS OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL DIVISIONS &C. OF OUR OWN country, and the western hemisphere, renders these globes more useful and interesting to the American geographer, and gives them a decided preference to imported globes, on which this continent is greatly misrepresented.” Wilson’s globes were also less expensive than imported ones, “so schools and academies, even private families,” could take advantage, with the “popularity and usefulness of Geographical and Astronomical science,” facts so apparent to potential customers that it was not necessary to explain either their popularity or utility. Material objects like Wilson’s globes made the Village Enlightenment. They remind us that we sometimes too readily dismiss the backwoods as a source of information. The modern model of an urban monopoly on curiosity and sophistication fails to capture the intellectual world of James Wilson and his neighbors. Globes and other cartographic instruments served well as an exemplary archive of knowledge, quickly adding the “discoveries” of explorers such as Captain Cook, and modeling an ideal: the creation of a natural and orderly society. Commerce and culture came together in a process, really a transformation, that I have called elsewhere the Village Enlightenment, where men and women made a business of providing and using cultural commodities in the hinterlands. Entrepreneurs like Wilson took advantage of the curiosity fostered in schoolrooms and popular books and helped promote the democratization of knowledge and the commercialization of the countryside. This widespread movement made rural peoples’ homes looks very different in the decades after the War for Independence and celebrated the new nation’s maturity, making something European into something American and moving the center of that story from its familiar setting of Philadelphia or New York far into inland communities. Bradford, Vermont, a town perched along the upper Connecticut River where James Wilson set up his globe-making shop, was the unlikely station for such a story. The farmer-blacksmith’s remarkable saga offers a vision of one, only one of many, backwoods savants navigating among the arts and sciences to produce new commercial goods and cultural identities. James Wilson’s curiosity opens up all sorts of possibilities of learning from artifactual evidence: a lesson well worth sharing.

Further Reading: The study of Vermont cartography begins with J. Kevin Graffagnino, The Shaping of Vermont: From the Wilderness to the Centennial, 1749-1877 (Rutland, Vt., 1983) with its reproduction of maps, account of their makers, and the historical background. Many of the James Wilson documents appear in Leroy E. Kimball, “James Wilson of Vermont, America’s First Globe Maker,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 48 (April 1938): 29-48; Harold W. Haskins, “James Wilson–Globe Maker,” Vermont History 27 (October 1959): 319-30. Wilson also appears in recent studies of Vermont material culture such as Kenneth Zogry’s comprehensive survey of Vermont furniture: The Best the Country Affords: Vermont Furniture, 1765-1850 (Bennington, Vt., 1995) and Celebrating Vermont: Myths and Realities (Middlebury, Vt., 1991) edited by Nancy Price Graff. Upper Valley material culture gets important consideration in Gerald Ward and William Hosley, The Great River: Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635-1820(Hartford, 1985). For some keen thinking on the relation of provincial and metropolitan cultural relations in furniture and other material forms, see Kevin Sweeney’s “High Style Vernacular: Lifestyles of the Colonial Elite,” in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 1994), 1-58; or Philip Zea’s “Diversity and Regionalism in Rural New England Furniture,” in American Furniture (1995). My Village Enlightenment essay is concerned with print materials: “The Village Enlightenment in New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (July 1990): 327-46. Specific studies of the “Greenbush Group” include Windsor County Engravers, 1809-1860 (Montpelier, Vt., 1982); George R. Dalphin and Marcus A. McCorison, “Lewis Robinson–Entrepreneur,” Vermont History 30 (Oct 1962): 297-313; Carl Taylor Jr., “George White–Vermont’s ‘Unknown Artist,’” Vermont History 42 (Winter 1974): 3-11; Harold Goddard Rugg, “Isaac Eddy Printer-Engraver,” Bibliographical Essays: A Tribute to Wilberforce Eames (Cambridge, 1924): 313-29. The single most important figure in the “new history of cartography” was J.B. Harley, author of The New Nature of Maps (Baltimore, 2001); the early republic has seen some good recent work by John Rennie Short, Representing the Republic: Mapping the United States, 1600-1900 (New York, 2001) and Martin Bruckner, “Lessons in Geography: Maps, Spellers, and Other Grammars of Nationalism in the Early Republic,” American Quarterly 51 (June 1999): 311-44; Matthew Edney, “Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map Making: Reconnaissance, Mapping, Archive,” in David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago, 1999): 165-98. Denis Cosgrove has written a sweeping and imaginative study of the cartographic imagination and globes: Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore, Md., 2001). Finally, collectors and historians of maps and globes have been busy online. David Rumsey’s important map collection has thorough documentation and impressive graphics. Library of Congress collections are available in the American Memory collections. Two other useful Websites are the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine with several online exhibitions and Cartographic Curiosities at Yale.

This article originally appeared in issue 4.2 (January, 2004).

David Jaffee passed away in 2017. He previously taught history and new media pedagogy at City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

What started out as just wanting to make a few paintings of whales ultimately became an eight-year project, with still no end in sight. Whaling—or, at least, the history of American whaling—does not give up her secrets easily. And looking for reference material about one aspect of whaling often leads to other bits of whaling lore you never knew existed.

My way of thinking is circuitous to begin with, and easily waylaid. So, standing in the main entry hall of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, looking at a map that showed the global voyages of whalers over the course of several centuries, I was struck by how many boats had been lost at sea in the relentless pursuit of whales. Each of those boats had a crew of between twenty and fifty men, many of whom left behind wives, children, homes, and families.

And then off in one corner, on display almost as an afterthought, I saw a whaling logbook, and everything changed.

It took some time, but eventually I discovered that the Providence Public Library has the second-largest collection of whaling logbooks in the world. I called them up, and they invited me down for a look. Upon arrival, they pointed me in the direction of two huge bookcases, and said something along the lines of “there you go!” So I started at the beginning, and worked my way to the end, my fingers black from turning the pages. It was as though some small part of whaling was rubbing off on me, the soot from the try pots, fires that burned night and day. Melville wrote that the smoke from those fires smelled “like the left wing of the day of judgement.” The true history of American whaling is in those logbooks, and hundreds like them, written by the men who went to sea. Those pages hold the excitement of the hunt, the chase, the danger, as well as the boredom and near-constant longing for home, all of it the sum parts of whaling.  And many contained visual sketches, including studies of different whale plumes, which could be used from a distance to identify whales by type, and thus by value.

They put to sea, and hoped.

While trying to figure out what the hell I could do with the logbooks, I was painting portraits of some of the children I know on the island where we live, dressing them in period outfits and giving them harpoons or whale teeth or silhouette portraits to hold, tangible memories of their fathers, grandfathers, brothers and uncles.  Text from the logbooks also began appearing on the canvas of these portraits, further heightening the sense of these remnant sea-borne inheritances.  All those men lost at sea called themselves “The Children of Light,” because that was what they were doing: lighting the homes and streets of the new Republic with whale oil.

One day at the library, I noticed a couple of boxes on a shelf marked “scrimshaw.” Jordan, the librarian, pulled them down and opened them up. Each was packed with gray foam, and nestled into little cut-out pockets were scrimshawed teeth of sperm whales, dozens of them, carved over the long course of whaling voyages.

Of course, I had to do some scrimshaw now. Ivory, however, under which whale teeth fall, is outlawed in the United States. By chance, someone on the island needed their piano fixed, and I happened to spot a small truck with “Piano Repair” on the side while I was in line for the car ferry. I tapped on truck driver’s window.

“Excuse me, sir,” I began, “do you happen to have any old piano keys?” The man’s eyes lit up.

I found myself east of nowhere a few days later, in his “shop,” essentially a collapsing corner of a garage full of boxes and bags and old cans brimming with what might very well have been several thousand piano keys. The tails (the narrow part next to the black keys) were a dollar. The mains (the piece where the finger strikes) two dollars. “Cash Only,” of course. I went a little crazy at the ATM several miles down the road.

Wanting to make scrimshaw is one thing; figuring out how to do it is quite another. Did you know that almost nothing sticks to ivory? That, in fact, there is special Piano Key Glue available only from a company in Chicago? Did you also know that piano keys were originally bedded down with whiting, a kind of pasty nastiness that has to be soaked off, but not for too long, and then scraped away with a knife? Oh, the things I know about piano keys, and how much work it takes to make panels, prime panels, glue the keys, keep them straight, clamp them just so, then clean them up and trim the edges, fill the gaps, then—and only then—actually prepare to make a mark with a very expensive, very sharp, slightly lethal surgical needle, and hope it is a good mark, a mark that might eventually become a whale incised into dozens of small pieces of ivory.

That’s how my work gets made: in bits and pieces, one thing leading to another, then another, until the process stops.  With the whales, this hasn’t happened yet. Part of me hopes it never will. The historical materials brought an undercurrent of American narrative to this series that deeply intrigues me.  The logbooks, in particular, seeped, in many different ways, into all the work presented here.  As you can see, I even began to replicate the form of the logbooks themselves, with studies of spouts and ocean colors.

I could never have been a whaler, but would love to have been aboard a whaleship in 1856, to see how it was done, meet those men, hear their stories, somehow get it all down in my own sketchbooks and journals, my fingers black from soot, as well as ink.

To have put to sea, and hoped.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3.5 (Summer, 2017).

Scott Kelley studied at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York; the Slade School of Art, London; and was a fellow at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Kelley’s work is in collections, including the Portland Museum of Art and the Portland Public Library. He has received numerous fellowships, including a grant from the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, which sent him to Palmer Station, Antarctica. Scott Kelley lives and works on Peaks Island, Maine, with his wife, Gail, their son, Abbott, and their imaginary pig, Lunchbox.