Nazera Sadiq Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century is an exemplar of well-researched and innovative scholarship, an exciting book for scholars of early African American literature and beyond. This ambitious project is reflective of the field of early African American studies, built over decades of scholarship that has laid a foundation for continued and ever more exhilarating research. Wright positions her own work atop this strong foundation, also creating a new foundation of her own, on which future black girlhood scholarship might be built.

Wright’s work is interdisciplinary, situated at several methodological and historical intersections: the burgeoning field of black girlhood studies; print culture studies; childhood studies and children’s literary studies; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; nineteenth-century American studies; African American studies, and American studies more broadly. Wright’s research is as meticulous as her prose. Her careful presentation of historical facts, close readings, and analysis is accessible even to readers outside nineteenth-century African American studies, as she lays open the historical and cultural contexts for understanding the myriad texts she discusses. This accessibility and precision will be useful for those interested in both the content and method of Wright’s scholarship.

Black girlhood, Wright argues, is an overlooked but resonant category in American literary studies. While much attention has been given to the most widely circulated racist caricature of black girlhood, Topsy from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, actual black girls have been woefully under-studied. As Wright shows, black girls are fully present and diverse in their representation in nineteenth-century African American literature, where they were recognized as holding a prime political position in larger narratives of black activism and uplift. Recognizing the politicized position of black girlhood during this period will surely “prove useful to the black girls of today and the people who care about them” (22).   

In Black Girlhood, we see ideas about racial progress and black futures. Although age is an often overlooked site for discourses of intersectional identity, work in childhood studies has necessarily addressed childhood’s intersections with race and gender. Adding further nuance to theories of how childhood fits into intersectionality, Wright discusses the various “stages” of black girlhood writers have marked. Characterizations of “youthful” and “prematurely knowing” girlhood appear as age-markers and also markers of experience (10). Further, these reveal intersectional positionalities of girls as fluid rather than static. Attending to age markers not only adds another layer to these intersectional identities, but also allows us to see “the unique diversity of black girls’ experience” (14).  

Importantly recognizing the phenomenon of black girls’ victimization (and particularly their sexual victimization), Wright also shows how black girls were represented in other ways. Black girls, she demonstrates, were empowered within their communities. Moreover, black girlhood stories did not always focus on their sexuality or even their reproductive potential. African American women writers, for instance, imagined black girlhood’s trajectories beyond wifehood and motherhood. Wright also acknowledges gendered differences in how black men and black women wrote about black girls and whether their representations leaned toward ideals or interiorities of black girlhood. Not mere reflections of white ideals and representations of childhood, however, both black men and black women approached black girls as having inherent cultural and historical value.

Wright’s book traces a genealogy of black girlhood from the 1820s through the early 1900s and spans a variety of genres including newspaper editorials, autobiographical accounts, advice columns, novels, and short fiction. Each of Wright’s chapters takes up a particular historical moment for theorizing black girlhood, but her progression avoids reduction to a simple narrative of racial progress.

Wright’s first chapter shows how the editors of black newspapers like Freedom’s Journal (1827-1829) and the Colored American (1837-1841) recognized black girls’ importance to family and community. Still, black male editors overwhelmingly idealized black girls as two-dimensional models of “respectability” poised to help uplift the race. Black girls’ vulnerability presented a problem that both reflected and reproduced the economic difficulties of many black households. In this, the relationship between black girls and black mothers (both as role models and as their own future selves) was key. This focus on black girls’ relations to family resulted in less-nuanced depictions than those produced by black women themselves.

Chapter two turns to black women’s antebellum writing and authors including Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and Maria Stewart, who explored black girls’ development and complex trajectories. In this, they represented black girls’ interiority as they formed strategies for navigating the world and its perils. By necessity, these girls departed from earlier, “respectable” domestic representations. Wright shows that these imagined futures were varied, reading “prematurely knowing” girls not only as burdened by knowledge of their own sexual vulnerability, but also as possessing a precocious understanding of their own resilience.

Reading Gertrude Bustill Mossell’s late-century advice writing for black girls in the New York Freeman (1884-1887) in her third chapter, Wright shows how precocious black girlhood was directed toward civic engagement. Following the failure of Reconstruction, the futures imagined by African Americans necessitated careful strategizing. Mossell presented black girls as contributing to both the push for national structural change and the creation of survival strategies within the black community. In these columns, the breadth of black girls’ everyday concerns and interests come into view.

In her fourth chapter, Wright takes up Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Trial and Triumph (1888-1889), a magnificent and under-read contribution to Reconstruction-era African American literature. This serialized novel offers hope and encouragement for black girls’ possible futures. In this “uplift” novel, Harper foregoes important markers of “respectability” for her girlhood protagonist, Annette—including marriage. Importantly, Harper represents black girls not only as workers for the larger benefit of the race, but as valuable in their own right, offering a model of what they might need to thrive.

Wright’s final chapter reads early twentieth-century black conduct books, which would make the difficulties of black girlhood apparent as they shouldered these burdens of racial advancement. Recognizing black girls’ importance to uplift resulted in the promotion of burdensome behavioral guidelines. In Silas X. Floyd’s Floyd’s Flowers: Or, Duty and Beauty for Colored Children (1905), sketches and photographs illustrated models of racial performance that responded to prejudice by departing from earlier caricatures of black people. The rigidity of such models for black girlhood speaks to pessimism in the nadir of America’s racist history, evidenced by other responses to anti-black violence in the work of Ida B. Wells and the anti-lynching plays of early twentieth-century African American women writers. Wright reads this pessimism with a mind toward the specific experiences of black girls in this historical moment.

As is the case with the most compelling scholarly work, Wright invites further research to meet and engage her own. She suggests studies on nineteenth-century black boyhoods as one such avenue. By offering careful readings and analysis of recently recovered and understudied texts, including Maria Stewart’s “The First Stage of Life” (1861) and Frances Harper’s Trial and Triumph, Wright contributes to the continued reimagining of early African American literature as a body of work. Wright also projects her study into later moments for imagining black girlhood, in the writing of twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors that fall outside the scope of her project, such as Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Morrison. This extension marks how Wright’s work anticipates and sets the stage for scholarship in twentieth- and twenty-first-century girlhood studies and for childhood studies more broadly.

Wright’s analysis further reveals the complex nexuses of the print public sphere. African American newspapers’ connections to “uplift” activism and education as well as their support for black literary publication demonstrate the great potential for interdisciplinary work between print culture and literary studies. Wright’s addition of girlhood studies to this interdisciplinary mix shows how girls were not divorced from this print public sphere but instead constitute a prominent subject within it. Her contribution is also methodological: “Mapping black girlhood as a representational strategy in early African American literature … advances understandings of the black female experience in the nineteenth century and reshapes the social relationship between African Americans and the culture of print” (17). Throughout her project, Wright instructs in reading methodologies that have long been necessary for scholarship on African American and women writers, particularly in learning to read “aright,” to consider both what is and what is not written, and to read each text “within and even against its social, political, and economic context” (9).

Wright’s epilogue extends her discussion forward, with the knowledge that girls who grew up during the first decade of the twentieth century—like Zora Neale Hurston, Angelina Weld Grimké, and Nella Larsen—went on to participate in the Harlem Renaissance. Looking to later periods, we might understand how the tropes of black girlhood that Wright outlines here helped to frame later literary attention to black girls, by writers like Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison. This influence becomes clear as Wright ends her work with a discussion of contemporary critiques of black girl figures such as Malia and Sasha Obama, Gabby Douglas, and Quvenzhané Wallis, and the African American Policy Forum’s 2015 study, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. Wright’s study shows the roots of contemporary attacks on black girlhood. In a world in which black girls continue to be overlooked, underserved, and undervalued, Black Girlhood is both groundbreaking and refreshing in its attention to the complexity with which black girlhood was lived, represented, discussed, and shaped in nineteenth-century African American literature. 

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

Brigitte Fielder is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is writing two books, one on racial formation and interracial kinship in nineteenth-century U.S. literatures and one on overlapping discourses of race and species in the long nineteenth century.

The logical starting point for a book historian’s investigation into Native American communications systems, one assumes, would be the Cherokee Phoenixeditors’ adoption of Sequoyah’s syllabary to print the first Native American newspaper in 1828, which appeared just as “Indians” were being deemed “domestic dependent nations” by the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, Matt Cohen’s The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (2009) focuses on the era before the first printing press arrived in New England. Common-place asked Cohen: What do we learn by examining this earlier moment?

Sequoyah is a perfect place to begin! That history, like most, will carry you backwards, not just forwards; east, and not just west. The adoption into print of Sequoyah’s syllabary changed things, not merely because of its role in its political moment and its persistence down to the present, but in its philosophical riposte to claims, made long before the 1820s and long after, for the superiority of alphabetic literacy. The syllabary is sonic, not alphabetical, in its epistemology; it was adopted and learned rapidly; and it has played an important role in intercultural politics ever since it was accepted by Cherokee people. But did the print that ensued create a “culture” of print? And if so, was it, or has it become, truly “independent,” escaping the structure of domination that Justice Marshall’s declaration of Indian tribes as “domestic dependent nations” helped impose? The alternative to assumptions about a dependent print culture may not be to imagine independence, but rather to embrace the complex ways our worlds are built upon webs of communicative habits and protocols. A step in counteracting the logic of dependency is to shift the analytical lens away from what has gone under the label of “print culture.” By mindfully bypassing narratives in which print is the pivot point, we get to ask questions that wind up telling us more and more interesting things, both about Early Americans (be they Native or English) and about how communication actually works in historically specific contexts.

One answer, then, to the question “Why turn to the early moment?” is simple: It alienates us from our own systems, allowing us to see things about communications technologies we didn’t notice before, and to see them as historically specific. But at the same time, it shows hidden genealogies or, just as importantly, resurgences, folds in time, rather than a linear forward march, in the ways humans have handled confrontations with radically new communications technologies and protocols. The old story was that human communications systems kept improving with time, and civilization was knowable in part by its progression through ever more “advanced” stages, marked by “better” media technologies. We think, for example, that we are certain that information is power—but just when we seem to have figured out what counts as “information,” the definition slips through our fingers. To take a recent example, the very speed and vastness of today’s networks of financial information exchange helped bring down the world’s economy almost overnight. The medium seems to be the message—until content resurges in the form of an online image or two, and Facebook photos ruin a politician just as effectively as newspapers and rumors could in the early nineteenth century. Is the cell phone the best or the worst thing that has happened to us? When, during King Philip’s War, an Algonquian warrior cut open Goodman Wright’s body and stuffed a Bible into him, an earlier answer to a similar question was horrifically, eloquently transmitted.

Print has had great power, and not just for colonial domination, yet one doesn’t want to reduce all minority communications history to the same story: print came and its European carriers dominated, while minorities adapted it to their own ends and persisted. And crucially, the strategic use by Native people of “orality” in distinction to writing as a culturally definitive property has in some cases produced a certain autonomy, a unique set of aesthetic innovations, and a sense of agency that cannot be underestimated. What I have tried to do, then, is suggest a reading practice, rooted in a problematic. How should we go about telling colonial history, as Harold Innis did with the history of empire-building, as a contest over communication systems, if we analyze print as part of a spectrum of interrelated media, rather than a marker of modernity, an axis of a change in consciousness, or a hegemonic lever?

When we yoke “print” to “culture,” we run risks. Chief among them is the misperception of the role of print in ethnic, racial, and religious boundary-making in the history of North America. In part this is an epistemological reflection, spurred by the way in which indigenous folks, even when they adopted print, continued to articulate it together with other media—and with things we today wouldn’t think of as media—in making meaning. Some northeastern Algonquians of the seventeenth century, for example, dug holes in the ground to commemorate events. The holes were located on paths nearest the location of the event. When travelers passed by and saw the hole, the custom was for someone to tell the history of what happened there, and then to round out the hole again to keep it clean and clear. Landscape, a network of paths, storytelling, and digging are all linked in the formal protocols for this way of recording history. We learn about this practice from the Pilgrim Edward Winslow, who wrote down and then published it not merely out of ethnographic curiosity, but as part of broader effort to learn indigenous systems in order to gain leverage in a world that, in the 1620s, still very much belonged to the Indians. What happens, such episodes call us to ask, when we think about information systems in a broad way, as sites for contests over social and economic control, rather than searching for specific technologies (or even regimes) of representation through which philosophical or ideological or historiographical claims might be made? Such an approach would not deprecate print, but would recover its complex relationships to the other options for conversing and contesting in a given place and time—relationships sometimes more similar than different across what have been called, partly because of perceived differences, cultures.

Focusing on the early period, with its evidentiary challenges and distance in time, can encourage close analysis of media in the context of larger, interrelated systems. Different sorts of senders and receivers can be communicating even if they seem not to be operating by the same rules or means, the same media or formats. This approach has plenty of risks. “Communication” can come to seem to mean almost anything (in my book, from bowel movements to wolf traps), but the case-by-case approach that would counter that expansive tendency can lead to the depiction of a series of interesting but non-exemplary episodes in media history. One way to address that problem is to focus on episodes in which the control over information flow was recognized as a source of power. Consider another moment in Edward Winslow’s account of interactions with Indians, in this case the Wampanoag: In the spring of 1622, the local sachem Ousemaquin got sick. Fearing he would die, and knowing that it was the practice of the Wampanoag to gather the entire kinship network around a leader who was about to perish, Winslow rushed to the sachem’s side. Discovering that Ousemaquin was constipated, Winslow drew on one of his own information networks in order to produce a cure: the world of domestic medicine (largely a female domain, about which Winslow disavowed any competence, despite his likely having printed at least one domestic manual as a younger man). When the cure worked, Winslow tells us, the sachem favored him with the revelation that there was a plot afoot among other local Indian groups to destroy Plymouth Plantation. Peaceful as it may seem, this exchange did not necessarily involve cultural understanding. The Wampanoag regarded Winslow’s cure (to his discomfort) as proceeding from supernatural sources, not natural ones; the Pilgrims used Ousemaquin’s revelation to justify their violent reaction to the alleged plot, killing several Indians at Wessagusset and, in a mode of communication that they shared with the area’s Natives, displaying Wituwamat’s head on a pole. But relations between the Wampanoag and Plymouth were maintained, for a time, in this as in other events, by linking a heterogeneous series of communications networks. Sometimes, to get a sense of the role of media in colonization, we must pull the lens back to consider how people in the past thought about the circulation of information itself, and how it figured in contests for power.

The period before the printing press was established in English North America—before the rise of nationalism and the spread of what we call racism today—offers other advantages for thinking about media in colonial history. Native America is filled with other-than-national histories and overlapping or unstable legal domains. The Pilgrims were surprised to be greeted by an English-speaking Indian, Tisquantum, at Patuxet; he might also have been able to speak Spanish, and one or more pidgin tongues, having traveled in slavery through the Atlantic world. Samson Occom’s speaking tour of England in the eighteenth century drew raves; his publications, like his Presbyterian colleagues’, were often directed at a global Christian audience, and he was integral to the establishment of the intertribal religious community, Brotherton.

In the fourth chapter of my book, I examine the Pequot tribe’s history of relations with its neighbors, and the role of multimedia representations in that history. The Pequots were the subjects of one of the worst massacres by the English, during a war in 1637-1638. Since the late 1970s, however, the Mashantucket branch of the tribe has made a comeback, having established a successful casino. Their massive tribal museum exhibits a complex relationship to, and depiction of, the early colonial era, constituting a different commentary on the Pequot War than that found in history books. The museum itself, part of which is an architectural riff on a famous seventeenth-century engraving of the massacre, and part of which uses techniques of deception that are eerily similar to tactics Pequots used in the 1637-8 war, exemplifies the way tribal histories can resurge, not just rise or fall. Indeed, even public accusations that the Pequots are an “invented” tribe, assembled merely out of greed for untaxed gambling income, overlook not just the complexity of tribal affiliation under colonialism, but the way in which the tribe’s success has been a function of the relationships it has built with a host of outside entities: the federal government, the State of Connecticut, more recently the State of Pennsylvania, and the original Malaysian investors in the casino and resort. Such a pattern of international interrelation, even at the cost of antagonism, was precisely what fueled the fears underlying the Pequot War in the seventeenth century. Tribes are complex, interrelated phenomena that tend to become less clearly bounded the closer you look at them. Indians both shared and fought with each other over ideas about the relationship between kinship networks and the American landscape in which those networks developed; these collaborations and debates happened at the junctions of international contests for power.

Native modes of communication took formal cues from landscape features, animal behavior, climatological patterns, and kinship structures. Whether embodied in storytelling, wampum, painting, or basket and textile designs, these orienting features together reinforced a certain way of understanding human placement within, and responsibility to, the non-human world. When we turn to such media—when we try to understand the formal properties of indigenous communication systems of the past—we lose our evidentiary bearings as scholars of literature, or law, or art. In studying other cultures, that disorientation is important; necessary, I would argue, to fold into what we imagine our histories will help our readers see and do in the world. Recent decades of scholarship in anthropology and postcolonialism have taught us about the importance of studying misunderstanding as a historical factor—but we can also learn from past scenes of simple disorientation, surprise, and even failed humor.

We often hear it suggested that print became the dominant mode of communication sometime in the late nineteenth century, or that a print mentality is one of the signatures of modernity. But it seems to me that print never became more common than speech, and that other modes of communication were continuously threaded together in people’s daily experience. Since the eighteenth century, there has been in North America a sustained, contested world of Native print, one of the many realms that have characterized the print world of North America. The Networked Wilderness suggests that story is rooted in older media contests, predating the expansion of print that seems to have made it an exemplary story of modernity. But the early period can help us appreciate the more recent media histories of indigenous nations, kinship networks, and individuals, and guide us all as we reshape our world digitally. The arrival of digital communication heralds transformations more than radical breaks. Once again, the Cherokees offer instructive challenges, so perhaps that is where to leave things. On the one hand, in recent years, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma has struggled over the inclusion of descendants of freedmen in the polity—a contest very much about race, but equally about sovereignty, as the federal government has opposed such exclusion. Much of this contest has happened in print, but much of it in other media, including multimedia digital formats, which the Cherokee Nation as a political entity has been using for years for public relations, but which is also used by the tribe’s factions to tell their stories. As we think about the relationship between communications technologies and social power among the Cherokee in the colonial period, 1492 to the present, we may both draw from and try to think beyond the conceptual equipment afforded by “print culture” or a “print public.”

Further reading:

Foundational scholarly studies emphasizing the importance of communication systems in colonial American contexts include Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (Oxford, 1991); Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford, 1950); Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York, 1991); and Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, 1995). On New England in particular, see Karen Kupperman,Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America(Ithaca, 2000); and Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (New York, 1983).

On American Indian communications technologies, protocols, and politics, as well as Native uses of print in the early colonial era, see especially Joanna Brooks,American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African American and Native American Literatures (New York, 2004); Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis, 2008); Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000); Gordon Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997); Nancy Shoemaker,A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York, 2006); Robert Warrior, The People and The Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (Minneapolis, 2005); Hilary Wyss,Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst, Mass., 2003); and Wyss and Kristina Bross’s anthology of both textual and non-textual media, Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology(Amherst, Mass., 2008). On the Cherokee in particular, see the work of Circe Sturm, especially Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley, 2002).

Influential related work in the history of the book includes David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (Philadelphia, 2008); Jill Lepore’s widely influential The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1999); and two major series, the American Antiquarian Society’s five-volume series The History of the Book in America (New York and Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000-2009) and the three-volume History of the Book in Canada (Toronto, 2004-2007), which is more attentive to indigenous societies. The first in-depth history of the book in Native North America, recently published, is Phillip Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880(Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010).

Few of us who teach early American history can be unfamiliar with the monumental transatlantic slave trade database. Research on this scale is hard to imagine, most especially at the outset of such a daunting project, and also at the conclusion when one examines the results. It is based upon the work of dozens of scholars, made possible by a series of large research grants (from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Board, the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard, the Mellon Foundation, and Emory University), and it exists only because a small group of inspired scholars were able to see beyond dusty ledgers and records books in such libraries as the National Archives in Kew, and imagine the potential of the information on the pages before them.

The physical beauty of this book seems at odds with the brutality that it records, the full scale and savagery of the transatlantic slave trade reduced to attractive cartography.

The transatlantic slave trade database is founded upon one of the greatest collective historical research efforts of our age. Beginning with works such as Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census(1969), a widely disbursed group of scholars has spent almost half a century collecting and coding the records of the transatlantic slave voyages that brought tens of millions of Africans to the New World. David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt and David Richardson played leading roles in amalgamating this data, and then producing software that would make it accessible to students and researchers across the world. The CD-ROM was published in 1999, with details of some 27,233 slaving voyages. Although a remarkable achievement, the creators of this resource were already at work seeking to remedy its deficiencies. Voyages to Latin America were seriously under-represented, and new data from Spain, Portugal, and indeed all of the slave-trading nations continued to accumulate, much of it donated by individual scholars rather than grant-funded researchers associated with the project. Launched in 2009, Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org) is an online, freely available database encompassing records of almost 35,000 slaving voyages to the Americas.

I am humbled by this database, by the scholarly imagination that inspired it, by the scale of the work involved, and by the ways in which it substantiates one of the greatest human tragedies in modern history. I am also daunted by it. I bought the CD-ROM soon after it was issued, loaded it on my computer and perused the manual, but was never quite sure how best to employ it, either in teaching or research. I have been somewhat more adventurous with the online database, and I have begun to use some of my own calculations in research and publications. Yet it continues to overwhelm me. There is simply so much information, so many different kinds of information: ship construction, the recorded names of the enslaved, the ethnicity of ships’ captains and crews, the prevalence of ship-board rebellions, mortality rates on the Middle Passage, African ethnicity—all these and much, much more can be found in the database. Where does one begin?

One begins with this book. Already it has received numerous prizes, including the Anisfield-Wolf Award: previously won by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this prize honors written works that contribute to the understanding of race and human culture. At first glance, the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade appears to be a coffee table book, lavishly illustrated with nearly two hundred maps and many contemporary engravings and paintings, virtually all of them in full color. The physical beauty of this book seems at odds with the brutality that it records, the full scale and savagery of the transatlantic slave trade reduced to attractive cartography. But the maps work, and even the most casual browser is likely to be astounded by the impressionistic power of these representations to inform one’s understanding of the scale of this forced migration. For me, this book has been invaluable in helping me to understand the entire database, and all that it contains.

The authors have more data at their disposal than historians a generation ago could imagine, and they believe that the database of just under 35,000 documented slave voyages constitute just over 80 percent of all of the slaving voyages that set out for Africa. Often the data is incomplete: the intended destination of a slaving voyage may be recorded, but whether or not it arrived there-or anywhere else-may not be known. The number of slaves purchased and loaded onto a ship in West Africa may be known, but the number who survived the voyage and stepped ashore on the other side of the ocean may not. Based on their growing knowledge of the nefarious trade, the authors have added a dimension to the online database that was not present in the original CD-ROM, including their highly informed calculations of the data that is missing from extant records, but also compiling a new function that seeks to estimate the contours and character of the entire transatlantic slave trade, including the 20 percent of voyages for which no records survive.

The maps and the calculations included in the book are based on the database as it existed one year before it went online, comprising some 34,934 voyages. Surviving data for these voyages varies widely, with complete and detailed records for some and less information for others. In some cases we do not know, for example, all the ports of call for all of these voyages (both in Africa, taking on slaves, and in the New World where the enslaved disembarked). In other cases we do not know how many slaves were on board, or we might not have information about survival rates. Using the patterns that have emerged in the huge amount of surviving data, the project authors have inferred places and imputed numbers, filling in the gaps in the records. A major gap remained, however, as the authors considered the question of what proportion of the total number of transatlantic slaving voyages is reflected in the records that have survived. The answer to this question is vital in any attempt to come to grips with the overall scale of the trade. The authors have been very creative in testing the data they have accumulated: for example, the summaries of French captains’ reports of having spotted other French slave ships provided a random sampling of such voyages, and the authors concluded that over 95 percent of the ships mentioned in these reports appear in the database.

As new datasets appear and are processed, fewer and fewer previously unknown voyages have been discovered. Slave-trading voyages in the seventeenth century are, not surprisingly, less well documented, and so a somewhat higher proportion are missing, but less than 20 percent of all such voyages took place before 1700. The authors believe that the 34,934 voyages covered in this volume constitute “just over 80 percent of all the slave ventures that ever set out for Africa to obtain slaves from all locations around the Atlantic” (xxv). The online database and the vast majority of the maps in this volume are based not simply on the fleshed out records of these voyages, but on an “estimates” database which utilizes a compelling methodology to attempt to sketch out the shape and form of the likely total of all transatlantic slave voyages.

The maps in this volume are therefore intended to visually represent the scale and direction of the transatlantic slave trade in its entirety. The tables that accompany maps are very clear in showing whether they are based on surviving data, inferred data, or the relative proportions of documented and estimated Africans. Absolute precision is an impossible goal, but there are very good reasons to conclude that these maps, and the data upon which they rest, provide a more accurate portrayal of this great forced migration than most historians would have thought possible. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has described this atlas as the Rosetta Stone of the entire database, rendering a huge collection of information accessible and immediately, compellingly comprehensible. Virtually all aspects of the transatlantic slave trade are represented here: from the nationality of slave vessels; to the West African and New World regions of trade for slave voyages outfitted in Rhode Island; the harrowing maps of slave mortality and voyage length; the gender and age of slaves, and their political and ethno-linguistic regions of origin; and the representations of the size of the slave populations arriving in New World locations.

Interspersed between the maps are a series of tables, pertinent extracts from seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century writers, and contemporary maps, illustrations, paintings and engravings. At first the reader who scans this volume may look upon it as definitive, the fruits of a half-century of collaborative research undertaken in many countries. The transatlantic slave trade appears to have been done, but the more I read, and the more I thought about the information presented in the maps and tables, the more eager I was to get back to the online database for my own research and teaching. Rather than depersonalizing this sad and savage history, these maps and this data allow us to consider the scale of the human experience of the trade. This is not the last word on the subject, and it was not the authors’ intention that it should be. Their remarkable achievement has been to give us the data that enables us to ask more informed questions than it was possible to ask before. And most importantly of all, they have given us the means to answer the questions that we ask.

The Royal children have been sent a gift—
A map of Europe from 1766
Complete with longitude, painted onto wood,
Like any other map in brown and green and red,
But then disfigured: cut up into parts,
A disassembly of tiny courts
Strewn across the table. There is a key
To help the children slot, country by country,
The known traversable world in place:
Little Tartary, Swedish Lapland, France,
The Government of Archangel. The sea
Has been divided into squares, crudely,
As though the cast-iron sides of nations
Still applied (but with more attention
To geometry) while the engraver’s signature
—A circle, his name, a folded flower—
Has been deftly sawn in half. If successful,
The three young princes and the oldest girl
(This is not, after all, a lesson in diplomacy
So she can play too) will, ironically,
Undo the puzzle’s title and its claim:
Europe Divided in its Kingdoms
Shall be Europe reconfigured, whole.
They start in the top left corner with the scale
Then fill the other corners in: ‘Part of Africa’,
A scroll, the blank of simply ‘Asia’
Rolling off to hordes and steppes and snow
Beyond the boundary. Outlines follow,
Aided by exquisite lettering:
‘The Frozen Ocean’ solidifies across the map’s ceiling.
And so the Royal children spend an hour
Staring and exclaiming, clicking together
(What joy!) the angled buttress of a continent—
Their own unlikely island on a slant
By its farthest edge, and in their trance ignore
What will no longer fit: Aotearoa, America.

Statement of Poetic Research

More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colours

           —Elizabeth Bishop

Maps are aspirational documents. Flat, two-dimensional, odd, we need to learn how to read them, like alphabets. We need to be tutored in their signs. Maps signal, loudly, the differences between their own small selves and the enormous things they claim to represent, be it mountain-range, territory, country, or empire, and into this gap rushes desire. Let no Irish be spoken in this parish, declares an early English-language map of Ireland, with its badly translated place-names, and eventually it shall be so. For maps are also weapons. They have consequences. They are conduits of power. They are so freighted with internal and external paradox they are already, all by themselves, difficult to resist as poetic subjects. And then in England, in 1766, as tensions were beginning to build toward the American Revolutionary War, John Spilsbury, wood engraver and map-maker extraordinaire, hit on a bizarre idea. He drew a map of Europe on a wooden base and then cut it up into pieces so that it could be put back together again, over and over again, as a game, and the world’s first jigsaw puzzle was born.

As America wrenched itself free of British control, Spilsbury (who drew a beautiful “New Map of North America from the Latest Discoveries” in 1761, before the outbreak of war) turned his attention east, to Continental Europe, away from British controlled territory altogether, and invented an activity for obsessives, obsessively focused on the breaking and re-making of national boundaries. His “Europe Divided into its Kingdoms etc.” is exquisite, and he signed it in the middle of the sea, where no country could claim him, before carefully dismembering it. Was this a subversive act? Was it therapeutic? Was it an act of looking at what was happening to the British Empire by looking away? Is the world’s first jigsaw puzzle an objective correlative for imperial loss?

I did two contradictory things with Spilsbury’s jigsaw as I wrote about it. First, I exaggerated the complicated power dynamics intrinsic to both maps and maps-cum-jigsaws by making the solvers of the jigsaw children of the British royal family, for whom nation-building and nation-breaking may well become actual activities, later in life, and especially in the context of a Europe set on fire, in turn, by revolutionary fervor. One of these children is a girl, throwing a whole other massive and unstable element into the mix. In my head these children piece a broken continent back together again over the course of a firelit afternoon, in an airy dayroom with a high ceiling and a polished floor, and it brings them joy.

The second thing I did was to put my—by now totally overwhelmingly meaningful—subject in a box by setting the poem out as a single block of text in rhyming couplets. Poetic form is a possible way through confusion. To paraphrase Auden, adherence to form saves us from the tyranny of what we were going to say next. But form also multiplies meaning through its own formidable articulacy; it is, in itself (and rather like a map, or a jigsaw, or worse, a jigsaw of a map) profoundly paradoxical.

I wanted my poem to click down the right hand side, like the jigsaw being clicked into place, piece by piece, and I wanted it to echo an Augustan poetic sensibility: rhyming couplets, the preferred form of Dryden and Pope, suggested both of these things. Reserve is the poem’s formal hallmark: it keeps tidying itself away as it goes. It works methodically through its line-by-line description to give us the map of Europe back whole, just as solving the jigsaw eventually does too. The rhyming couplets of the poem and its subject, the map, enact, therefore, a doubled fantasy of control over language and over territory, both of which are always threatening to rebel. Content and form not only complement each other; they also work to highlight the inherent inadequacies of both maps and couplets, for the underbelly of control is always fear, and our consolations, which are both unnatural and dishonest, fraught with further difficulties.

America is free by the poem’s end and is given, delightfully, the final word. Aotearoa is the Maori word for New Zealand and means “the land of the long white cloud,” ironically transcribed of course in the letters of the English alphabet, but a word so far outside the world-view of my royal children as to act as a radical interloper in the poem. I can only gesture briefly toward “what will no longer fit.” But “what will no longer fit” is the poem’s real subject all along: my homage to revolution and to pattern-breaking, squeezed into its Augustan box.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2.5 (Spring, 2016).

Sinéad Morrissey has published five collections and is the recipient of numerous awards for her work, including a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the T S Eliot Prize. Her most recent collection, Parallax and Selected Poems, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2015, was a finalist in this year’s National Book Circle Critics Award for poetry.

“Fitter, happier / More productive”—a cybernated voice famously intones in Radiohead’s 1997 gem Ok Computer.^[1] Seeking an antidote to the post-Fordist dystopia condensed in these lines, one may easily conjure up Walt Whitman. Doing so would entail upholding the poet’s fleshliness over Radiohead’s disembodied speaker, his outpouring of vibrant free verse over the song’s automated string of decontextualized phrases, a leisurely stroll around Manhattan over thirty minutes of treadmill, nation over corporation, pleasure over efficiency. Manly Health and Training, Whitman’s lost and recovered fitness guide, troubles this approach and, with it, certain ingrained protocols for reading and teaching the Gray Bard as a sempiternal bohemian.^[2] This breakthrough addition to Whitman’s corpus refocuses his personal, poetic, and political vision while enriching current debates over masculinity, disability, affect, and the medical-industrial complex. It opens up new engagements with Leaves of Grass, helping us chart the influence, during the 1840s and 50s, of what Paul Starr has described as a battle among quacks, advertisers, folk doctors, and accredited physicians over “the right to practice medicine as an inalienable liberty” in the United States.^[3] Whitman wanted in. No less importantly, his contributions to pivotal debates over the meaning of health did not vanish with the nineteenth century. Manly Health predicts and propels neoliberal fantasies of the good life that have rendered health a performative site of capitalist consumption.

Signing as Mose Velsor (his mother’s surname), Whitman delivered this treatise on male self-improvement in thirteen installments, published in the New York Atlas between September 12 and December 26, 1858. In 2016 Zachary Turpin located the series in an obscure microfilm. It appeared shortly after in a special issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. In 2017, Turpin published a neatly edited volume of the series, enlivened by a prologue as well as an array of photographs, advertisements, and illustrations from 1850s printscapes. Although not a full-fledged critical edition in the manner of Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler’s take on Franklin Evans, this book will entice critics and readers alike.^[4] Those unfamiliar with antebellum print cultures may sample Manly Health’s original media environment, while literary scholars and historians will no doubt be spurred to connect the dots between these articles and antebellum health cultures, other works by Whitman, and pretty much everything in Barnes & Noble’s “Diet, Health & Fitness” alley.

To start with the obvious: given the centrality of bodies in Leaves of Grass, a newly discovered guide to health by Whitman feels nothing short of providential. Here is the quintessential poet of the body weighing in on power walks, emetics, dumbbells, and oatmeal, seemingly lifting the curtain over his grappling with the corporeal and venturing into the nitty-gritty of daily self-care. Truth is, Manly Health oscillates between a supplement and a counterweight to Whitman’s magnum opus. If “Song of Myself” wonders “How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?”, Manly Health reminds us that beef indeed we should eat—“cooked rare, without grease.” This and similar specifications configure a practical—not exegetical—interplay between both texts. Whereas the miracle of human deglutition and nourishment inspires both, the latter’s repertoire of dietary restrictions, training tactics, and ergonomic tips further illuminates the scientific and popular discourses informing Whitman’s views on health and, by extension, his poems’ bodily inflections. Consequently, Whitman’s “health manifesto,” as it has been called, best reenergizes our analyses of his poetry indirectly, by suggesting additional sources and influences.

This is not to say that those invested in Leaves of Grass’s textual genealogy will not find new leads here. Case in point: the line “I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,” from the Calamus poem later titled “For You O Democracy” (1860 edition), signifies differently once traced back to Whitman’s rant against indigestion, an American pandemic without which “we should probably see the most splendid and majestic nation of men, in their physique, that ever trod the earth!” Other times, occasional outbursts of homoeroticism resonate with Whitman’s trademark anatomies: “Look at the brawny muscles attached to the arms of that young man . . . Look at the spread of his manly chest, on which also are flakes of muscle.”

Similar moments of catalogic and sensual excess defy Whitman’s self-restraint ethos, advancing a key paradox: he rarely wrote the way he worked out. Whitman’s prose, unlike the systematic training plan it articulates, is highly digressive, with themes and motifs vanishing and returning through a logic of contiguity, opposition, and free association bound to test readers’ patience. He was too busy—an excuse that personal trainers today love to hate. As Turpin explains, 1858 found the poet scrambling over endless journalistic assignments in order to support himself toward Leaves of Grass’s third edition. Whitman himself makes no secret of the fact that he churned out these articles on the go: “[W]e only throw out our views, as the Tartar shoots his arrow, passing along at full speed.” Manly Health surely bears the marks of a hasty, bill-paying job; however, there may be something of a method in its hurry. For starters, its impromptu quality echoes what we encounter in “Song of Myself” or Democratic Vistas. More interestingly, Whitman seems overinvested in explaining and legitimating his principle of composition: “Disconnected as our mode of writing has been… the reader who peruses one article only, will not see the drift of our writing.” Like Leaves of Grass, Manly Health is meant as a fluid whole, which Whitman can only achieve through endless loops and iterations. Whitman scholars and Leaves of Grass variorum experts will then have the final say on whether the scatteredness of Manly Health results from the pressures of newspaper publication or if, on the contrary, this work embodies (and expands) Whitman’s organicism.

Inconsistencies do not end at the structural level. A yin to Leaves of Grass’ “disorderly fleshy” yang, Manly Health’s emphasis on chastity, frugality, and self-discipline counters the absorptive, appetite-driven persona often associated with Whitman. He who once loafed at ease now scolds “the idler, without object, without direction … apt to brood himself into some moral or physical fever.” He who told readers to surrender to “the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life” now defends harsher routines: rise at dawn, bathe in cold water, rub your skin with a coarse towel. The tension between askesis in Manly Health and indulgence elsewhere in Whitman’s oeuvre is indeed generative and worthy of commentary; nonetheless, it also risks obscuring fascinating internal contradictions, along with the new questions and complications they bring to Whitman studies.

For example, if this is a case study in antebellum pseudoscience, as Turpin contends, where does science end and the “pseudo” begin? Differently put, why does Whitman dispel medical authority (“technical nonsense”) while remaining conversant with scientific publications? A detailed look reveals that Manly Health strives to democratize, rather than boycott, the medical profession. Health, for Whitman, deserved a shared lexicon to which every American man should be able to contribute. In his original advertisement for the series, Whitman assured prospective readers: “These articles are for the People . . . Technical and medical terms are avoided.” An “outsider” to the medical establishment, Whitman situates himself closer to the masses than a “medical man—for who ever knew one of the latter to write a treatise, except its main direction were to the medical fraternity more than any others?” The problem, then, was not praxis as much as rhetoric, since physicians’ increasingly arcane communications had started to alienate the beneficiaries of their efforts.

Through an exuberant yet personable prose, Whitman builds a charismatic persona capable of bridging this gap. To err on a presentist analogy: he speaks in full influencer mode. Unlike medical researchers, snake-oil entrepreneurs, and gym owners, he is neither a creator nor a producer. Influencers influence. Mediation is their product. In Whitman’s case, this means selecting bits and pieces from an amalgam of health-related discourses and claiming the right to organize them into a medical pedagogy of his own. Seen thus as an effort to harmonize institutional and popular science, Manly Health and Training offers one evocative example of what Sari Altschuler has described as a nineteenth-century “medical imagination,” characterized by a synthesis of empirical and humanistic epistemologies.^[5]

This line of inquiry evinces that, against what has already been claimed, Manly Health should be taken as more than a mere coda for Leaves of Grass. Hoping to reorient this reception, I enumerate here a few additional paradoxes calling for further analysis: is not Whitman’s “rational and elevated system of MANLY TRAINING” (italics in the original) at odds with his goal of arousing “the animal part of a man”? Is not his admonition of “putting on airs” at odds with his pervasive alpha-maleness? How does he negotiate his intensely nationalistic project with a global frame of comparison in which the United States often lags behind healthier nations? How do we balance his praise for the Scandinavian stock of “the English race” with his recognition of South Sea Islanders, on the opposite end of the Earth, as the “finest and best developed forms to be found in any portion of the human race”? And what about women, who only enter these pages as prostitutes threatening—and yet indispensable to—the reproduction of national health?

At the center of this wheel of opposites sits Whitman’s plea for “a revolution of habits,” an oxymoronic phrase that encapsulates the irony of pursuing health in structurally unhealthy times. Of course, habits can be revolutionized, but are they also revolutionary? Is not a habit, by the sheer nature of its repetition, doomed to lose its world-shattering force? Take Whitman’s (nonrevolutionary) advice to clerks and other office workers. Even though he regrets the injuries sedentary labor had started to inflict in their bodies and minds, his measures are always palliative, never oppositional: “Early rising, early to bed, exercise, plain food, thorough and persevering continuance in gently-commenced training, the cultivation with resolute will of a cheerful temper.” Whitman’s “cheerfulness” prophesies our adherence to a world of New Year’s resolutions, power naps, and laughter-inducing salads, a world of consumerist solutions to consumerism-derived problems. In this world, as in Whitman’s, self-discipline begets social discipline; popular discourses of health and productivity fuel illusions of sovereign agency that distract us from conditions of exploitation and privation. For all its utopian projections and postponements of gratification, Manly Health presents health as a mechanism whose mastery imbues individuals with the illusion of shaping aesthetic, political, moral, literary, and economic life in the United States. Good health wins friends and influences people—to riff on Dale Carnegie’s classic proposition. Magnetism, as conceptualized in a key entry, derives not from innate charm or the lucky end of the gene pool, but from sustained behaviors and privations central to Whitman’s notion of self-fulfillment. These privations are also monetary. When Whitman labels health “an investment that pays better than any other,” he is not being metaphorical. Health is never only about itself; it allegedly modulates every other domain in social life.

Pondering Whitman’s advice, one wonders: what fantasies do these habits nurture? And why are these fantasies endlessly protracted by the habits that buttressed them in the first place? These questions render Manly Health presciently relevant to post-WWII affective attachments to capitalist success, especially as theorized by Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Jasbir Puar, among others.^[6] Indeed, the confluence of affect theory, new materialisms, and transnational critiques of neoliberalism in recent disability studies work makes this an optimal moment for Manly Health to arrive. For all the historicization it elicits, Whitman’s text also adumbrates a present-day “neoliberal biopolitics” that, according to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “references all bodies as deficient and in need of product supplementations to treat the in-built inferiority within.”^[7] As neoliberalism gradually replaces the disability of a minority with the “debility” of the majority via regimes of compulsory consumption, indebtedness, and technologization, one productive strategy toward Manly Health is to see Whitman pioneering contemporary fantasies of the good life.^[8] Tita Chico, in her study of eighteenth-century civil society, claims that what we call “good life” today, in the face of postindustrial capitalism and the nation-state’s diminished hegemony, already constituted “a compensatory image for all it excludes” during the Enlightenment and after.^[9] In Manly Health, Whitman subjects antebellum Americans to analogous patterns of promise and negation.

To brand Whitman an uncritical champion of the good life does not constitute an end in itself as much as a way of tracking down the antagonisms and exclusions sustaining this construct. Of special interest here is the convergence of health and aesthetics. If “[b]eauty is simply health and a sound physique,” ugliness brands the unhealthy, those who fail to exert self-control and shape individual and collective destiny through their bodies. And so, Whitman flirts with eugenics—“Life without a sound body. What is it good for?”—by deliberately mixing looks and abilities: “no blotched and disfigured complexion—no prematurely lame and halting gait—no tremulous shaking of the hand, unable to carry a glass of water to the mouth without spilling it.” Ardently as the Whitman of 1858 appears to envision an impairment-free America, though, it would be more accurate to say he celebrates the body-in-flux over the fantasy of herculean immunity. In his apologia for prize fighting, in which he exults in the body’s capacity to endure a harsh beating, and in his glorification of working-class children, who man up without being “killed by kindness,” Whitman dreams of suffering rather than infallible bodies. Human mutability—not perfection—focalizes his project. The resultant tension between a projected utopia of health and a future in which American bodies still get visibly hurt unsettles the evident ableism of the text and poses a suggestive conundrum to scholars in disability studies and the medical humanities.

In sum, because it operates as a repository of antebellum medical practices and a glimpse toward the meanings health accrues in our neoliberal moment, Manly Health is best approached as a product of its era that also wishes to produce our own. For every preposterous suggestion (e.g. ban shaving), Whitman foresees a current health crisis. References to food safety, anti-vaxxers, and sports-related concussions insinuate potential connections with twenty-first-century cable news, lifestyle vlogs, and Men’s Health editorials. At a time when education institutions aim to teach “the whole person,” we notice Whitman already summoning teachers to tend to “bodily, mental, and moral developments . . . the only way, indeed, in which training can be just to the whole man.” Discussions of customized shoes, fitting garments, and skincare reveal Whitman’s proto-metrosexualism, partly understood as his awareness that health was becoming increasingly performative, a trait legible by one’s access to commodities and services. The book’s exuberant use of images underscores this point. Nonetheless, if one were to signal a flaw in this edition, these images are ornamental at best, confusing at worst. Lack of immediate contextualization for the volume’s visual apparatus matters because Whitman’s stance regarding these graphic materials—be they advertisements, calisthenics manuals, or sketches of New York City life—remains unstable, shifting from endorsement to ferocious renunciation. 

This latest incorporation into the Whitman canon constitutes a complex aesthetic and political intervention, both in and of itself and in relation to Leaves of Grass. For anyone in the practice of extending and refining the substantial scholarship on Whitman’s conceptions of the body, Manly Health represents an obliged stop. Given its proto-neoliberal framing of medicine, this text should also matter to anyone interested in the historical entwinement of U.S. cultures of self-care, health, and capitalism. The strategic parallelism in “no pain, no gain,” a motto popularized by Jane Fonda in her epochal aerobics videos, famously presents a Reaganite economy otherwise premised on the unequal social distribution of pains and gains as optimal and intrinsically fair. Manly Health and Training espouses a similar ethos, but it does so with less balance. Its chaotic mode of presentation, unsolved paradoxes, and key omissions ultimately enable a critique of the normative compulsion to be fitter, happier, and more productive then and now.

 ________________

[1] “Fitter Happier,” compact disc, track 7 on Radiohead, Ok Computer, Parlophone, 1997.

[2] Manly Health and Training thus substantiates Edward Whitley and Joanna Levin’s insinuation that, despite Whitman’s immersion in New York City’s bohemian scene during the late 1850s, the poet never gave up his desire to connect with bourgeois America. See Edward Whitley and Joanna Levin, “Introduction,” in Whitman among the Bohemians, ed. Edward Whitley and Joanna Levin (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2014), xi-xiv.

[3] Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine. The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 31.

[4] See Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler, “Introduction,” in Walt Whitman, Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate. A Tale of the Times, ed. Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), ix-lvii. An extended version of Turpin’s introduction is available at the WWQR Website. See Zachary Turpin, “Introduction to Walt Whitman’s ‘Manly Health and Training.’” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 33 (2016), 147-183. 

[5] Sari Altschuler, The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 2-5.

[6] A minimal bibliography on this front includes Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011); Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010); Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017); and José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

[7] David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 39-40.

[8] On the question of debility as a reframing of disability in neoliberal times, see Puar, 16-17; and Mitchell and Snyder, 12.

 [9] Tita Chico, “Civil Society and Its Discontents: The Good Life.” Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation, 55, no. 1 (Spring 2014), 99.

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

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

About the Author

Manuel Herrero-Puertas is assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures at National Taiwan University. He writes on the intersection of American literature, discourses of disability, and political fantasy. His work has appeared in American Quarterly and ATLANTIS.

Governor Riggins, a leader of Boston’s nineteenth-century black community, once publicly admonished a fellow person of color, William Patterson, and took the opportunity to offer a lesson to the community at large. Patterson had purchased unlicensed liquor for some fellow African Americans, and the authorities in Boston caught him red-handed. In the midst of dressing Patterson down, Riggins expressed the hope that the “law will make you smart.” His proclamation to his fellow Afro-Bostonians—the law could be a source of empowerment for African Americans—may have been lost on Patterson, but it was a message that blacks across the United States heard loud and clear. Half a continent away in St. Louis, Missouri, the mixed-race grandsons of Jacques Clamorgan geared up to file suit and lay claim to their grandfather’s extensive lands. For them, Riggins’s message carried special resonance and an additional caveat. For the Clamorgan men, the law not only made them smart, but could also make them rich.

Did the Clamorgans have a legitimate chance to win their legal battles? In her wonderful The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America, Julie Winch answers this question by offering readers a thorough examination of the family’s past, especially their relationship with the law. She starts by examining the patriarch, the wily Jacques Clamorgan, and ends with his great-great grandchildren in the 1950s. While not much is known about Jacques’ early life, we know he was French and settled in Spanish Louisiana sometime in the 1770s, arriving in St. Louis in 1781. Over the next two and half decades, Clamorgan became a prominent businessman, funding exploration, selling goods brought north from New Orleans, buying and selling slaves, and most importantly for his heirs, acquiring huge tracts of land in present-day Missouri and South Dakota. Clamorgan’s ownership of this land was a legal fiction, as it was based on (possibly) dubious grants from the king of Spain. Clamorgan could not adequately populate or “improve” the land, and he constantly used it to pay off debts or as collateral. Nevertheless, these land grants were too valuable for his heirs not to lay claim.

Winch’s narrative focuses on Jacques’ descendants. Clamorgan never married, and instead kept at least four black mistresses: Ester, Hélène, Susanne, and Julie. While Clamorgan did not have any children with Ester—although Winch documents their contentious relationship—he did with the latter three. In all, Jacques Clamorgan had four mixed-race children, three boys and a girl, all of whom he legitimized on his deathbed. Only the daughter, named Apoline, lived long enough to have children of her own and lay claim to her father’s land. A strikingly beautiful woman, Apoline never married, and instead was a mistress to several white men. These relationships produced three sons: Louis, Henry, and Cyprian. In their attempts to be compensated for their grandfather’s land, they faced numerous obstacles, including encounters with shifty lawyers looking to steal the claims and even an act by the United States Congress barring title to some of Jacques’ patrimony. While the grandsons met with some success, most of the cases ended in failure. Instead, the two older brothers, Louis and Henry, opened a successful barbershop and bathhouse, appropriately called Clamorgans. The brothers built a reputation as having one of the finest bathhouses in the West, complete with marble tubs and serving such illustrious patrons as Edward, Prince of Wales. The light-skinned youngest brother, Cyprian, had a more transient life, eventually publishing a history of free blacks in St. Louis and getting involved in Reconstruction politics.

All these men married and had children, and it was left to the next generation to fight for the family land. By the early twentieth century, their appeal had reached Congress, which heard the matter and even started to move on it before the coming of World War I thwarted the family’s attempts. The land claims never again gained traction, but the Clamorgans, now passing as white, became embroiled in scandal and the racial politics of 1910s St. Louis. Jacques’ great-great-granddaughter Cora Clamorgan married a prominent white man, only to be accused of having African ancestry. As a result of this and other tribulations, almost an entire branch of the Clamorgan clan moved to Los Angeles, changed their name to the more Anglophone “Morgan,” and lived out the rest of their days in California.

Winch’s detailed reconstruction of the Clamorgan family could not have been easy. Not only is the study of race and family a historiographical minefield fraught with contention, disagreement, and hearty debate, but Winch draws upon primary sources in three different languages (French, Spanish, and English). As a narrative, Winch’s book does not go deeply into historiographical debates, and most of the secondary sources she uses are to provide context. Nevertheless, readers—especially those concerned with the intersection of race and the law in nineteenth-century America—will find this book fits nicely with the work of Scott Hancock, Leslie Alexander, Shane White, Joanne Pope Melish, and Melvin Ely, who examine similar themes in the same period. As for primary sources, she examines charters, land grants, newspapers, and court records. But most important for recovering the lives of the Clamorgans are probate records, which not only detail the family’s wealth and property, but also draw the outlines of the communities and networks they belonged to.

This book has many strong points. It is beautifully written and serves as model of how to write a narrative history using non-literary sources such as estate inventories, land grants, and legislation. Winch’s thesis concerning the law as a source of empowerment for the Clamorgans—not just as an avenue through which to receive their just due from Grandpa Jacques’ claims, but to navigate the precarious and ambiguous racial world they inhabited—is original and well argued. The case of the Clamorgans illustrates the hardening of racial lines over the course of American history. When Jacques Clamorgan legitimated his mixed-race children, like so many of his fellow French settlers, nobody thought twice. Less than a century later when Cora Clamorgan, who was one-sixteenth black, married a white man, it scandalized the city of St. Louis. But Cora’s case was an exception in the Clamorgan family’s history. Rarely did race prove to be an impediment to living the lives they wanted to live. They did this by successfully navigating the legal quandaries of being multiracial in America. In fact, Winch argues that to truly “understand their story,” one has to “follow them through the thickets of the law as, for generation after generation, they sought justice and vindication” (4). By using legal knowledge as the central theme of the book, the author not only gives the reader guideposts that are easy to follow and remember, but also provides a blueprint for how some African Americans resisted racial degradation.

Nevertheless, there are a few problems with the book. Winch misses some opportunities to analyze and challenge racial paradigms. Even though the book is a work of narrative history, I wish she had stopped telling the story long enough to address some of these points. Jacques Clamorgan’s estranged mistress Ester provides one of those missed moments. In order to protect his lands from being seized by creditors, Clamorgan purchased some land in Ester’s name. Ester later claimed the lands as her own, defending them from her former lover and his creditors. For help, she turned to Alexander McNair, a close friend and later the first governor of Missouri. What makes this interesting is McNair’s later career. He was vociferously pro-slavery and adamant that Missouri be admitted to the Union as a slave state, making him one of the leading provocateurs of the Missouri Crisis. Yet, not a decade before that struggle, he befriended and supported a free black woman in her legal battles. Why? What does this mean? What does it say about race in early nineteenth-century Missouri and America? Unfortunately, Winch does not address these questions.

Winch also never examines whether the Clamorgans considered themselves African American or something else. They may have been people of color, but they were also the descendants of the first settlers, white and black, of St. Louis. These “creoles” may have considered themselves something different, especially as their willingness to pass as white, marry whites, live in white neighborhoods, and describe themselves as “Spanish” suggests. Being African American means embracing black identity, which the Clamorgans did only when it served their interests. The behavior of the Clamorgans seems to suggest a different racial history of the United States, one that is not dichotomous and static, but fluid and dynamic. It is a racial story much more in line with other parts of the Americas, and, much closer to home, New Orleans. Nevertheless, Winch places the history of the Clamorgans within a national, “American” framework. In certain situations, it may have been better to use a comparative lens.

Aside from occasional lapses in interpretive rigor, this is a great book. Winch tells the story of a unique American family with grace and erudition. Given its chronological scope, it would be hard to assign the text in an American or African American history survey. It is nevertheless an important book for scholars studying race and family in the United States or those interested in the conglomeration of people inhabiting the West before U.S. annexation, their social mores, and lasting legacy. Most fascinating, Winch reminds us that there are still potentially billions of dollars worth of Jacques Clamorgan’s land grants looking to be claimed. If you can trace your lineage back to that crafty patriarch and have the legal expertise, the law could make you rich.

It probably never entered Reverend Henry McNeal Turner’s mind that, more than a century after his Christian Recorder publication of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Sowing and Reaping, readers would have only a fragmented version of that fascinating novel.

On July 13, 1876—only a few weeks into his new role as Publications Manager for the African Methodist Episcopal Church and only four years away from his rise to a bishopric—Turner excitedly took to the columns of the church’s weekly newspaper, the Christian Recorder. He bragged that “arrangements have been made with Mrs. F. E. W. Harper for the publication of one of her inimitably written Stories.” Turner not only pronounced the tale “superb” but emphasized that it was “a Temperance Story” and was so “thoroughly religious” that “our brethren need not fear to make this announcement even from the pulpit.”

Turner and editor Benjamin Tucker Tanner hoped such announcements—made a month before serialization began—would give “time to those who may wish to subscribe and get the first chapters.” While Turner was undoubtedly enthusiastic about the content of Sowing and Reaping, its author’s name recognition also served as “evidence of the new Manager’s intention to strengthen the columns of the RECORDER” and might, in itself, garner new subscribers.

At age 50, Harper was already one of the best-known African American writers in the nation. Born free in Baltimore, she gained prominence well before the Civil War among both white and black abolitionists for her lectures and for her poetry, which graced reform periodicals from Frederick Douglass’ Paper to the Liberator and was partially collected in her book Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854; expanded in 1857).

During and after the war, her reputation and activity only increased. Her deep concern for her fellow African Americans—so crucial to many of her early works—led her to crisscross the nation lecturing for black rights, but also for other moral reform efforts including women’s rights, education, and temperance. African Americans and progressive whites from Detroit to New Orleans also heard her powerful readings from a growing poetic oeuvre that included a new Poems as well as Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869), which retold the biblical story in wondrous blank verse with regular allusions to the current state of black America, and Sketches of Southern Life (1872), which captured some of the voices of the newly freed people Harper heard on her trips to the South.

Harper had become, as scholar Frances Smith Foster says, “an unofficial African American poet laureate.” She also experimented with fiction, producing what many scholars recognize as one of the earliest black short stories—”The Two Offers,” which was published in 1859 in the Anglo-African Magazine—as well as an early serialized novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice, which the Recorder ran in 1869 and of which Turner said “nothing that we ever printed took so well.”

For all of this excitement and success, much of Harper’s work—especially her serialized fiction—was buried under layers of neglect. White American culture’s broad dismissal of black intellect and artistry fed into aesthetic and scholarly judgments but also radically limited publication opportunities for nineteenth-century African Americans. Thus, like many texts by black writers of the period, much of Harper’s work appeared first and sometimes only in black newspapers. Newspapers of the period, of course, were much more likely to become insulation or kindling than cherished relics, and the libraries, colleges, and literary societies that might save select periodicals were often white-dominated and doubly dismissive of black periodical literature. In short, in choosing to write, black writers like Harper entered a majority print culture that generally considered both African American subjects and most periodicals ephemeral.

Harper’s reputation fared better than that of many of her colleagues. Her massive nineteenth-century standing meant that, well after her death in 1911, she was regularly mentioned within the black community, that some of her poems continued to be reprinted in the black press and recited in black schoolrooms and churches, and that select black scholars kept her memory alive. Still, her work was de-emphasized in the first waves of broader recovery of nineteenth-century African American literature because of her gender, her faith-centered approach to literature, her aesthetics, and some of her subjects. (That initial literary recovery work focused heavily on book-length texts and saw scholars create bumpy genealogies that jumped from slave narratives to the various modernisms of the Harlem Renaissance.)

Harper’s memory thus languished until late in the twentieth century. Only then did several critical studies—often by African American women in the academy—push for deeper consideration of Harper’s efforts. Her 1892 novel Iola Leroy, which had seen some limited republication, and a compilation volume titled Complete Poems were both included in the 1988 Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers; Foster’s edited A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader joined these texts on shelves in 1990. Finally, in 1994, Harper’s three serialized Recorder novels—Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, and Trial and Triumph—became widely available in a collection edited by Foster.

Still, the recovery of Harper’s work and especially of her periodical publications remains incomplete. In preparing her edition of Harper’s serialized novels, Foster combed through widely scattered individual issues of the Recorder—at a time before many current cataloging and digitization projects. Though she was able to find all of Trial and Triumph (which appeared in 1888 and 1889), she could gather only incomplete runs of the issues that included Minnie’s Sacrifice and Sowing and Reaping. She thus prayed that “the few remaining missing pages” might be found, “the complete texts” see publication, and “the final chapter of the search” someday reach “a happy ending” (xlii).

What appears below is not that happy ending, but it is a small step toward a fuller recovery of Sowing and Reaping, Harper’s oeuvre, and a richer sense of nineteenth-century African American literature. Foster lists the September 14, 1876, Recorder among the missing and/or partial issues she speculated might contain missing chapters. The copy of this issue now held by the American Antiquarian Society does indeed contain, on page one, Sowing and Reaping‘s fifth chapter, which is reproduced below for the first time since its original publication.

Like the rest of Sowing and Reaping, this “lost” chapter demonstrates Harper’s skill at manipulating the temperance novel’s standard trajectory—in which characters who drink suffer and characters who don’t (or who stop drinking) are rewarded. As Foster has observed, both the novel’s plot and its themes center on contrasting the choices made by pairs of characters. Friends Paul Clifford and John Anderson open the novel, and cousins Belle Gordon and Jeanette Roland are introduced soon after. Paul and Belle advocate not just temperance but total abstinence. Belle’s stand is especially brave, as her values lead her to reject the hand of promising lawyer Charles Romaine and to be ostracized by Romaine’s social circle. John and Jeanette, on the other hand, not only drink but encourage “an appetite for liquor” in others. John grows rich through owning a popular saloon; in one stunning scene, he carefully mixes a drink for a child whose “parents are very rich” and who will one day “be one of my customers.” Jeanette drifts “along the tide of circumstances” unwilling to stand for God and abstinence and offers the drink that eventually leads Romaine to “a drunkard’s grave.” While Romaine is on his way to ruin, drunkard Joe Gough—likely named to invoke white temperance activist John B. Gough—is redeemed directly through Belle’s agency.

In a skillful twist, Harper pairs this multi-faceted temperance plot with stories of love and family: Paul and Belle “court” through temperance work and end up happily married, Gough’s marriage is saved by his conversion to temperance, Jeanette and Romaine marry only to suffer the death of a child and Romaine’s own fall, and John Anderson realizes on his deathbed that he “is a pauper in his soul”—a realization made as his drunkard son is in the midst of delirium tremens.

Foster recognizes that “while temperance is the subject most consistently discussed and most critical to the sequence of actions, the central theme” of the novel is “the importance of doing the right thing.” This is emphasized by the fact that John and Jeanette’s evil is not the simple drunkenness of Romaine but an unwillingness to—in Jeanette’s words—answer the call “to turn this great world ‘right side up with care.'” Such themes have broad application, in part because Harper deemphasizes the racial labeling of her characters; as Carla Peterson argues, “discipline is at the center of Sowing and Reaping, which perceives intemperance as a breakdown of discipline that pervades the nation” at a key moment in Reconstruction.

The newly recovered fifth chapter is critical to the development of both the novel’s plot and its themes. Most immediately, it emphasizes the growing gap between Belle and Jeanette and so foregrounds their differing choices. The chapter offers the fullest account of Belle’s social exclusion in the novel. The fictional town “A.P.,” our narrator tells us, is composed of people whose “wealth had advanced” while “their culture stood still,” and they judge Belle to be, in Romaine’s words later in the novel, not just good but “distressingly good.” Jeanette’s Uncle Follard is more blunt: Belle finds herself “socially ignored,” he says, because A.P.’s society has no “dignity of manner” and “is too uncultivated to know what to do with its best mind.” Jeanette and Romaine’s multiply-intemperate social circle is also, simply, afraid of Belle’s moral power. In contrast to Belle’s strong stand, Jeanette spends much of this missing chapter engaged in a flirtatious exchange with Charles Romaine, who is already sinking and still fresh from Belle’s temperance-centered dismissal of his suit. Chapter five thus highlights the novel’s sense of an aristocracy of morals rather than funds, suggests important distinctions between “education” and “cultivation,” and, again, emphasizes the need to make the right choices.

The single choice Belle makes in this “lost” chapter—the event that causes her to be “socially ignored”—is especially striking within the novel’s larger contexts. Belle politely refuses to write the obituary of “one of the wealthiest members of that social circle,” a man whose life, she feels, “had not been ennobled by any lofty purpose.” Convinced that his table, which offered “an abundance of wine,” was a “snare” to the community’s young men, Belle asserts that he placed the youth in his charge in the clutches of “sensuality and materialism.” Belle realizes that she cannot “laud such a man”; such false laurels would “help lower the moral tone of society.” Nor can she write anything “of the dead but truth.”

Readers of the black press, of course, were intimately familiar with the theory and practice of the obituary; papers like the Recorder published obituaries in each and every issue and often discussed such in depth. (Given the grasp of white power on much of American print culture and American memory, for many black subjects, such obituaries often offered their only printed remembrance.) A negative obituary—or no obituary at all—could be a frightening legacy to contemplate. Belle’s choice centers on these options, and while she stands silently condemning in the missing chapter, the narrator actually writes the kind of obituary Belle contemplates into the final chapter of Sowing and Reaping—when we see John Anderson’s deathbed recognition of a wrecked life and the narrator’s account of Romaine’s final trip to “a drunkard’s grave.” This “lost” chapter thus means that the novel not only tells readers that their choices will shape their lives but also tacitly asks them to consider what heroine Belle or the novel’s narrator might say—or not be able to say—about those choices.

The rediscovery of this missing chapter thus certainly enriches our reading of Harper’s novel. It also reminds us that the archival work of nineteenth-century African Americanists and Americanists writ broadly is far from over—that with each advance in accessibility, with each new opportunity, we need to return to the previous generations’ unanswered questions.

At its most basic, this means that we need to remember that there are still potentially recoverable chapters of both Minnie’s Sacrifice and Sowing and Reaping—to say nothing of Julia Collins’s The Curse of Caste, which was serialized in the Recorder in 1865 and recovered to much excitement in 2006, and Martin Delany’s Blake, which was serialized in both the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African. We have barely begun to talk about Recorder serials like William Steward’s John Blye (1878), which appeared only a year and a half after Sowing and Reaping, and neither King D. Patton’s Silas Craig (1889, immediately following Trial and Triumph) nor Ada A. Newton’s shorter serials—”The Taylor House” (1881) and “Olive Averill; or As A Man Soweth So Shall He Reap” (1882)—are even included in most of our bibliographies, let alone our literary histories. More broadly, we have not yet fully grappled with the place of serialization in African American print culture—a crucial question, given the comparative dearth of non-periodical outlets for many black writers of the period.

The list could go on: we need a much fuller sense of Harper’s life, real engagement with the nexus of African American literature and faith structures, analytical histories of key nineteenth-century black periodicals, stronger discussion of distribution and reception, and deeper attention to a host of other facets of African American literature and culture. The recovery of this chapter reminds us that we have much work to do—and the real potential, building on the rich work of pioneers like Foster and Peterson, to do it.

Editorial Note: I have corrected obvious errors in the chapter below that are tied to the printing process—a “t” added to the word “feeling” in the chapter’s first paragraph, for example, as well as a comma that should be an apostrophe, missing periods, mixing of single and double quotation marks, etc. I have retained the original’s nineteenth-century spelling, marking only the alternate spellings of character’s names and the word “irrevelent,” which could be either “irrelevant” or “irreverent.”

Sowing and Reaping.

A Temperance Story.

By Mrs. F. E. W. Harper.

Chapter V.

The society in which Mrs. Roland moved had in it a large infusion of the “shoddy” element; it was principally composed of men and women whose wealth had outgrown their culture; or rather while their wealth had advanced their culture stood still. In the aggregate it possessed more wealth than many of the old families of the place, but it lacked their refinement and social culture. Mrs. Gordon and her daughter Belle were new-comers in the city of A. P., and their habits and principles were not in unison with the society which visited at her sister’s Mrs. Roland. Belle Gordon in her native town had been the centre of an intellectual and refined society, but here she was entirely out of her element; and the Mrs. Grundy of that circle soon found it out, and decreed that she was odd and queer. Society immediately took the cue and Belle was voted an outsider. Mrs. Grundy permitted her coteri to drink wine at her parties, and to carry their small flasks of liquor to her pic nics, and to seek enjoyment in that sensuous form. Belle shrank with almost instinctive horror from the wine-cup, and its fatal allurements, and nothing could tempt her to give the least countenance to the convivial habits of society. Soon after Belle had moved to A. P., one of the wealthiest members of that social circle died. He had been a free and easy liver, but perhaps had never done any more harm to society than Dives did, but his life had not been ennobled by any lofty purpose, nor distinguished by any deeds of high and holy worth. He had been hospitable and pleasant to his equals, and his home had been a place where many of the young men of the place found an abundance of wine and good cheer. Belle had often thought that his table was a snare to those young men and that his influences was [sic] on the side of sensuality and materialism. After his death, Belle was requested to write an obituary, but feeling that to laud such a man was to help lower the moral tone of society, she firmly but politely refused to do so. She could speak nothing of the dead but truth, and the whole truth in this case was a very unpalatable thing. After this, Belle found herself socially ignored. She was a fine conversationalist, bright, genial and entertaining, and among people of genuine culture was always welcome, but here she was made to feel the influence of social exclusions, and missing the stimulous of the pleasant circle in which she had moved, for a while she keenly felt the want of genial companionship. But when she saw how little value there was in that social life—that ignorance and even vice were petted, if they presented themselves in the trappings of wealth [and] that the glitter of gold atoned for the tinsel of character, she was content to stand alone; considering it far more complimentary to be forgotten than remembered in a social circle that worshipped wealth and hated culture. Life was to her a thing of too sublime importance to be flittered away in petty ambitions and social rivalries. And she often saw with intense pain that the stimulous was thrown on the side of weakness and frivolity, and not on that of worth and character.

“Are you going to Mrs. Glossip’s [sic] entertainment to-morrow evening?” said Charles Romaine to Jeanette Roland.

“I don’t know; who is to be there?”

“You are to be there.”

“Who else?”

“My worthy self.”

“Is that all?”

“Why, is not that enough? am I not a host within myself?”

“A very small host,” said Jeanette laughing, “but do tell me, for I am very anxious to know.”

“Have you seen the list?”

“Yes.”

“Now Charlie don’t tease me; tell me who is to be there.”

“Well, in a word every body and his wife; it is to be the finest event of the season.”

“Has my cousin Belle been invited?”

“No, I spoke to Mrs. Glossop about her, but she said she was so queer and odd, and different from every body else.”

“I know Belle is not popular; still I am sorry she is not invited. I hardly ever meet her any place now a days.”

“That,” said Mr. Follard, Jeanette’s uncle, who was quietly wiping his spectacles, “is because your society is too uncultivated to know what to do with its best mind.”

“You are very much mistaken,” said Jeanette slightly nettled, “if you think society ignores Bell[e] because of her superior intelligence. There are the two Miss Gladstones, who are graduates from one of the best colleges in the country and I see them everywhere, and I know they are better educated than Belle.”

“I don’t think so.”

“How you talk, uncle, Bell[e] never went to any higher school than the Thorntown academy, and these girls are just from college, and know a great deal more than Belle.”

“And yet Jeanette, notwithstanding all that, I hold that Belle is the best educated woman.”

“I don’t see how you make that out.”

“Belle knows how to behave herself and that is more than the Miss Gladstones know. They may be fresher in the knowledge derived from school books and problems worked out on [a] black board; but I think their memories have been cultivated at the expense of their reason and common sense. Last week when I was at my sister’s, Mrs. Gladstone and her daughter called. When the bell rang, instead of letting them wait for the servant, I opened the door. Mrs. Gladstone spoke very politely but her eldest daughter marched past without even nodding her head, with as much supreme indifference as if I had been a door post. On the same day, my sister introduced her younger sister to a friend of hers who is stopping with her. At present her friend was in rather reduced circumstances, but my sister is very careful of her feelings, and as a mere matter of politeness, introduced her guest to Miss Mary Gladstone. She looked a moment at the humble dress of my sister’s friend, made some irrevelent [sic] reply, and never deigned to notice the introduction. My sister colored with mortification, but, said nothing and Miss Gladstone seemed perfectly unconscious that she had given the least pain or been guilty of the most shameful rudeness. Immediately I thought if you are a graduate from every college in the land, your education is unfinished until you learn good manners.”

“Yes, Mary Gladstone is rather proud.”

“Proud! She is not simply proud, but she is foolish and stuck up, and mistakes a haughty supercilious bearing for a dignity of manner. There is a graciousness in true dignity that she does [not] even know how to imitate.”

“Oh, uncle you are too severe.”

“I am no severer than the truth, and what you young people need is truth; more truth than flattery.”

“Well uncle, I think you have given us a drastic dose of it this morning.”

“And I hope it will do you good and I wish Miss Gladstone could have a portion of it. She ought to know how she mortified my sister and pained her guest. I always admired the beautiful courtesy of a writer who once said, ‘I will not boast of my superior eyesight before the blind, I will moderate my steps before the lame.’ Jeanette, I am heartily sick of this shoddy [element] in your social life: are you not tired out with it?”

“No indeed, uncle, I feel as much at home in our set as a fish does in its native waters; but uncle do not be too severe on us young folks, or,

‘You really persuade us soon
You are growing cross and old.'[“]

“No Jeanette, I am not cross, if I am growing old; but I cannot see that contempt for our common humanity, that vulgar worship of wealth and popularity, which is acting as a dry rot in your social life, without a feeling too deep for anger and profound enough for tears.”

Further Reading

Jeanette’s brief concluding quote is a paraphrase of the popular nineteenth-century song “Fanny Gray”; of note, the song features a character named “Mrs. Gossip” who is rendered “Mrs. Glossip” in some versions of the lyrics.

Foster’s assessment of Harper’s reputation can be found in A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York, 1990). Her comments on Sowing and Reaping appear in Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper (Boston, 1994). These sources offer the best biographical and bibliographical work on Harper. See also Melba Joyce Boyd’s Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper (Detroit, 1994).

Peterson’s assessment of Sowing and Reaping appears in “Frances Harper, Charlotte Forten, and African American Literary Reconstruction” in Joyce Warren and Margaret Dickie’s edited collection Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization (Athens, 2000). Other important critical work on the novel includes Debra J. Rosenthal’s “Deracialized Discourse: Temperance and Racial Ambiguity in Harper’s ‘The Two Offers’ and Sowing and Reaping” in Rosenthal and David Reynolds’s edited collection The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature (Amherst, 1997) as well as DoVeanna Fulton’s “Sowing Seeds in an Untilled Field: Temperance and Race, Indeterminacy and Recovery in Frances E. W. Harper’s Sowing and Reaping” (Legacy, 2007). The Serpent in the Cup offers a wide-ranging introduction to temperance literature generally.

Readers interested in black women lecturers and their relationship to literature should start with Peterson’s “Doers of the Word”: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830-1880 (New York, 1995); among the several later works on related topics, P. Gabrielle Foreman’s Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, 2009) is especially useful. In addition to Foster’s germinal work, readers interested in recent scholarship on the black press can consult my Unexpected Places (Jackson, 2009) and Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Stein’s edited collection Early African American Print Culture (Philadelphia, 2012). Gilbert Anthony Williams’s The Christian Recorder, Newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Jefferson, 1996) is the only book-length study of the Recorder. Julius Bailey’s Around the Family Altar: Domesticity in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1865-1900 (Gainesville, 2005) offers context for Harper and the Recorder‘s approaches to domestic questions.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the staff of the American Antiquarian Society—especially Paul Erickson, Marie Lamoureux, and Vincent Golden—as well as Lara Langer Cohen, Jordan Stein, and Jodie Gardner for their aid in recovering this chapter.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.1 (October, 2012).

Gunning Birds

        She kept the Yankees from burning her home
by refusing to leave the bed, and when a few estates
over the gorgeous girl fainted how could even the least
gallant soldiers bear to do her harm?

Got a quarter if you bit into shot
in the Christmas goose. Maybe
a trip to the dentist. I have had

        some good and high-priced wines in my day wrote Marius but nothing
tasted finer than that cider from the carpenter’s shop on the island, fleeing
Virginia with blockade runners on a leaky boat. Left his step-grandma the only
white person on the plantation surrounded by 160 slaves, and on the ship
picked fights with Northern boys.

Columns, a chimney,
no house. Curtains of moss
but no walls. The Earl

of Marsh Mud
made them make his
living in a swamp.

       Drinking juleps on the porch pretending we own land “as far
as the eye can see” and that our neighbors work for us amuses
the out-of-town guests. He told me he couldn’t even comprehend
my mother her accent was so thick, and while I wanted to say fuck
you I just said how interesting, she travels all over and no one else
has ever had a problem.

        Huck Caines guided Bernard Baruch’s trips at Hobcaw
and told Grover Cleveland who missed an easy shot
he wasn’t worth a damn. Today a Caines-carved mallard decoy
with a snakey neck fetches over $150,000 at auction.

I’ve got a real polite horse, said June.
He always lets me go over the fence first.

At the Memphis Country Club your salad comes with a side salad of
canned fruit and another of frozen tomatoes and everything’s covered
in cream cheese towers or mayonnaise florets. Scraped the smokehouse
floor for salt. Said I’ve never seen her house but my housekeeper taught
me about shortening in pie crust and we understand each other, I love
how she says “the mens.” In the backwoods scared of being attacked
they lived in a pen. Don’t care what they wear so long as it’s fancy—
feathers, lace, beads. For Fetchit, Stepin, see Perry, Lincoln.

The State With the Prettiest Name

William B. Hooker, Cattle King of Tampa, built
a second staircase for his second wife’s children
so they all could ascend their own ways. Picking

blackberries won’t save us from long-term
concerns, swapping the monocle for opera glasses
to gasp at the duchess’s decolletage in a golden

box while downstage someone’s dying, last year’s
preserves staining jars in the pantry. I put on
the past as a record spins a golden thread

beat thin, sons and stepsons bumping shoulders
in the hallway of the mansion turned
Orange Grove Hotel, named for land made

plantable when Hooker fought the second
the third Seminole Wars, desiring he wrote
for his children to sit under their own vine

and fig tree, unmolested, and none to make
them afraid. A plaque by the courthouse annex
where the hotel stood and in Tallahassee

FSU fans do the tomahawk chop though Seminoles
preferred flint spears, bows and arrows flying
as Sam Cooke sings what you sing to me, Cupid

draw back your bow and stay with me
here in our rented apartment. Older arias
drift up the stairs and will keep drifting

long after I’ve plucked what facts I will
like stitches from an appliqué, like the two
guitar strings William B. Hooker bought in Sept.

1860, the year James Butterfield
boarded, before the war ended and he set
George Washington Johnson’s poem for his

dead wife to music: When You and I
Were Young Maggie, when you and I grow old
but Leonard Warren collapsed before

Morir tremenda cosa, the first Mrs. Hooker
had cancer, Sam Cooke shot, Billy Bowlegs
King of the Everglades real name Halbutta Mico

Halpatter-Mico or Olactomico which mean
alligator chief, died in exile in Oklahoma
so Hooker could plant Triumph Grapefruits

and potatoes while his cattle grazed through
larger swathes of swamp with cracker cowboys
branded H with a heart around the H.

At least that’s how I picture “Heart H brand”
Valentine’s Day 2012 though it could’ve been
an H next to the heart or seared upon it

like Billy Bowlegs’s image on a photographic
plate, taken once he’d seen Generals
Taylor Scott and Harney in wax at a

museum in New Orleans en route by force
to Arkansas, stopping to arrange
his daughter’s marriage with a Yankee.

Purlow Party

Enough mosquitoes clustered on the screen
that you don’t know when it’s night and sleep
for three days, can’t tell the color
of your horse, wheelbarrows cart piles

of them away and cigar smoke staves off fever. I am of good stock, wrote
Marius, descended from men who occupied prominent and respectable
positions in their country. We roamed free as birds having
as playmates
the slave boys.

Poured molasses
on her ham and eggs.

Coats in winter
make a man weak.

My grandmother bounced my niece on her knee
singing Jump Jim Crow. The children

of the wilderness moan
for bread. Marius loved his wife

       and bought her so many jewels you’d confuse her with an electric
light display at the St. Louis Exposition. Keep clocks on a gallop, pretend
your food is fancier than it is so it’ll taste better.

Or worse. Could grow potatoes in their ears.
Left the jail open so the mob
could get him. Our shoes were made

from leather tanned on the farm but the cloth for our shirts came from Richmond.
The traveler said they danced as if they did not know they were in bondage.

Shirley Temple, the little militant, charms the whole plantation,
sings I feed my pigs molasses yams/They should be sweeter than
they really am.

Find a patch of forlorn corn
Rub two kernels on a knot
Bury those two kernels
The knot will disappear

We peel the meat/They give us skin.

He don’t know my mind.

Collecting scuppernongs that pooled on the sides of the river. Sang
Meet me dear little Lindy by the watermelon vine. He sat in a spare
and bottomless chair, his knees up by his chin, and in his hunger
for bacon and cornbread cared not. They named their dog Teddy
but after Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White
House they changed the dog’s name. We wanted to smell magnolias
but we smelled sulfur. They say it quenches your thirst but I don’t
intend to try it.

Statement of Poetic Research

Whipsawing

As Huck Finn found out after telling Jim they’d ride a raft to freedom, the Mississippi only flows in one direction: south. If a flatboatman sailed all the way to New Orleans in the early nineteenth-century, he’d need a new way to reach the rest of America. And if he’d blown most of his money on wine, women, and the sporting life, his best option might be to go in on the cost of a horse with a couple of friends and whipsaw his way home.

Whipsawers, named for the same two-manned handtool that must’ve cut the lumber for many a flatboat, made their way across the backroads of the South in a jagged collective. One man would ride a horse for a few hours, tie it to a tree, and start walking. When the second man walked his way to the horse, he’d climb on, ride a while, bypass the first man, and tie the horse to a tree for the third man. Barring selfishness or attacks by bandits, they kept on taking turns.

Robert Frost gave American poets license to think of themselves as manual laborers—writing is like chopping wood and making hay!—but I like the idea of turning the hand tool of poetry into travel. Traveling alone can be isolating, but whipsawing guarantees companionship. Of course, your journeys won’t quite match up: the field through which you amble may be one through which your buddy gallops. When you pass by a gnarled live oak and think of pinning sonnets to your beloved on its trunk, he might be wondering whether he can stomach another supper of spit-roasted squirrel.

In these poems, I try to get at something like those divergent but overlapping experiences of place, though if I really want the metaphor to hold, I should add something about the centuries of folks who have walked down the same Southern roads or who walked down similar roads in other places or down roads they wished were similar, or who wished they were walking down roads when they were actually sitting on a couch in California listening to mp3s of Caetano Veloso when they should probably be listening to 78s of Jimmie Rodgers yodeling so they could figure out how to emulate, in writing, his quick switches between somber chest-singing and high-flung notes from the throat, which, by the way, Sly and the Family Stone also do, in the song “Spaced Cowboy,” with an odd, jaunty ghostliness.

My poems—which, like that parade of pedestrians, would-be pedestrians, and singers, yoke together different experiences, times, locations, and voices—have to do with how history builds up in place. They’re set primarily in the South, both because it’s the place I know best and because people generally think of it as the country’s most “placed” place. Fifty years ago, C. Vann Woodward, in his essay “The Search for Southern Identity,” argued that in spite of industrialization’s homogenizing force, the South remained a distinct region—not necessarily because of its present particularities (though there were, and are, plenty of those) but because of its unchangeable history. This history, Woodward wrote, provided a vital counterweight to the myth of American exceptionalism: Southerners, who generally have less money and less education than the rest of the country, understand defeat. And beneath a ham and biscuit-scented haze of moonlight and magnolias, Southerners know, too intimately, America’s great sins of slavery and racial violence.

Any place is a story people make up, sometimes together, and sometimes in spite of each other. But that doesn’t make our experiences of place, or our stories, less powerful. Woodward also described a set of anxieties that may be even more familiar now than they were in 1960: “Has the Southern heritage become an old hunting jacket that one slips on comfortably while at home but discards when he ventures abroad in favor of some more conventional or modish garb? Or is it perhaps an attic full of ancestral wardrobes useful only in connection with costume balls and play acting—staged primarily in Washington, D.C.?” I’ve kept these concerns in mind too, though I’m less concerned than Woodward is with the authenticity of performance. Faux-backwoods politicians drive me crazy, but sometimes the pap on pop-country radio makes me homesick.

I rummaged around my own ancestral attic (a filing cabinet in my San Francisco apartment) to find fodder for poems: unpublished memoirs by my great-uncle and great-great-grandfather, nineteenth-century legal documents, my grandparents’ letters and diaries. I’ve also turned to travel narratives, history books both scholarly and chatty, broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry, WPA oral histories, songs, films, and gossip from my life, the lives of people I know, and the lives of people I’ll never meet. The poems proceed largely by association. It’s how the mind works, and how cultural history, at some stage, gets written: you comb through the archive, looking for patterns.

History and poetry both provide records of experience, but they have different conventions. Prose promises causes, effects, plots and explanations, while poetry can thrive on gaps, cuts, and suggestion. I cull from both genres here, flirting with narrative and relying heavily on parataxis, which helps us see different pieces of place and time before they’ve been shaped into an orderly story. I’m interested in how the past feels—sometimes close, comforting, and explanatory, and sometimes alien, estranging, or altogether lost.

Ezra Pound famously called “a poem including history” an epic, but these poems, encountering history, are closer to lyric. Instead of trying to account for the grand march of time, I’ve explored how history haunts us. After all, poetry is a haunted genre. A sonnet can be about anything, but it can’t help being about love, because of all the sonnets that came before it. Thanks to Dante, any set of tercets could make you think about journeying into the afterlife. And couplets, no matter your intention, will call attention to rhymes, doubling, correspondence, or a lack thereof. Haunting can be more literal, too: these poems are largely peopled by the dead. While some of them make repeat appearances, I’ve also included floating actions, ideas, and artifacts, because even a past that’s been neglected or expunged can have an echo.

I feel a great debt to, and identification with, record-keepers and hoarders. I’ve tried to play the part of a hostess who has occasional access to a séance table or time machine, though I might be more like the old woman my father saw in his early days of social work who plastered her walls with society pages from the newspaper and talked about the Country Club set as if they were her closest friends, though she’d never met them. Some of these people had attended my parents’ wedding.

Further reading

Herbert Asbury, The French Quarter (New York, 1936); “Billy Bowlegs in New Orleans,” Harper’s Weekly Magazine, June 12, 1858; W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York, 1941); “Domestic Intelligence,” Harper’s Weekly Magazine (June 19, 1858); Marius Harrison Gunther, unpublished memoirs (1921); Clifton Johnson, Highways and Byways of the South (New York, 1904); Stetson Kennedy, Palmetto Country (New York, 1942); Alberta Morel Lachicotte, Georgetown Rice Plantations (Georgetown, S.C., 1955); The Littlest Rebel, directed by David Butler (1935); Lil McClintock, “Please Don’t Think I’m Santa Claus,” Music of the Medicine Shows, 1926-1927. Old Hat Records, CD 1005, 2005; John Muir, Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf, ed. William Frederic Badé (New York, 1916); Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom (New York, 1861); Rpt. Modern Library, 1969; John Solomon Otto, “Florida’s Cattle Ranching Frontier: Manatee and Brevard Counties (1860),” Florida Historical Quarterly 64: 1 (July 1985): 48-61; The Carolina Low-country, Society for the Preservation of Spirituals (New York, 1931); Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro, Random Shots and Southern Breezes, vol II (New York, 1842); Kyle S. VanLandingham, “Captain William B. Hooker: Florida Cattle King,” 2003, accessed February 2012; These Are Our Lives, Var. (Chapel Hill, 1939); YouTube broadcasts of June Carter performances in the 1950s.

In the Devil’s Snare, Mary Beth Norton’s new interpretation of the Salem witchcraft crisis, both enlightens and disappoints. Revising the chronology and enlarging the political and emotional context of this infamous 1692 event, the book offers the most carefully researched account to date of what-happened-when. It also provides the most thorough discussion of the links between the Salem trials and the series of violent late-seventeenth-century encounters between English settlers and their French and Native American neighbors. Norton does herself and her readers a disservice, though, in trying to force so much uncooperative evidence into a “Daemons in the Shape of Armed Indians and Frenchmen” framework—Puritan minister Cotton Mather’s claim that Salem’s troubles could be attributed to New England’s external enemies.  Witchcraft in late seventeenth-century Massachusetts, as Norton’s book otherwise attests, was more complicated than that.

Building on Bernard Rosenthal’s heroic efforts to correct the many errors that have crept into the Salem story since 1692, Norton tells her own tale with such aplomb, and with such close attention to nuance and detail, that she easily establishes In the Devil’s Snare as the best Salem narrative around. Norton offers what she calls “a dual narrative,” two histories “intricately intertwined.” One part unfolds the day-to-day day events comprising New England’s most horrific witchcraft outbreak, from the first signs of “invisible agents” assaulting young girls in the Salem parsonage sometime in early January to the governor’s official halt of the trials in late October. The other part focuses on the quite visible military attacks on farms and unprotected settlements during King Philip’s (1675-76) and King William’s (1688-99) Wars, what colonists called the First and Second Indian Wars. For Norton, the events of the second stand out. The Salem witchcraft crisis can be comprehended, she argues, only by reckoning with the terror generated by the post-1688 French and Wabanaki surprise attacks “to the eastward” in nearby Maine and New Hampshire, and the mistakes Massachusetts leaders made in their handling of these physical and psychological threats to the region.

Although most of the publicly identified witches find a place in Norton’s chronological account of the Salem events, the interpretive sections of her book lead readers away from those suspects who had few connections to the tragic events unfolding along the northeastern frontier, and away from the adult neighbors who testified against them. She draws attention instead to four groups. The first two, composed primarily of women and young girls, were the infamous “afflicted accusers” and those accused witches who confessed. The third cohort consists mainly of adult men, those Norton calls “unusual suspects”—alleged witches who had never been tarred with the witch’s brush before 1692, and some of whom had been plucked, shockingly, from the ranks of the colonial elite. The fourth is made up of those judges and other male officials who determined both Massachusetts policies during the Second Indian War and suspected witches’ fates.

In her analysis of the words and actions of each of these four groups, Norton tells a moving story of the devastating effects of the late-seventeenth-century wars on specific participants in New England’s most massive witchcraft scare. As traumatized orphans and refugees from “the eastward” who had been placed as servants in Boston- and Salem-area households after their families had been decimated, afflicted accusers complained that they were being attacked not only by the usual suspects but by many unusual suspects who had ties to the war-torn region. Norton finds that these girls and young women were expressing their own guilt and resentment of others for surviving the wrath of their families’ killers. At the same time they expanded the scope of the trials so far beyond earlier New England witchcraft cases that they made the Salem outbreak unique. Confessors, especially one fourteen-year-old girl from Maine, lent full support to the visions of these accusers, intensifying the crisis by passing on gossip about unlikely as well as likely suspects. In admitting guilt, they too expressed the fear so many settlers felt in the face of seemingly random but increasingly frequent French and Indian assaults.

Turning to the question of why the Salem outbreak created so many of what Cotton Mather identified as “Devils in the Shape of Good Men,” Norton finds in the witchcraft accusation against George Burroughs, a minister from Maine’s Casco Bay, the key to understanding why so many other men with ties to the Maine and New Hampshire frontier drew suspicion. Burroughs was no good man in Mather’s eyes, but apparently Mather came to believe that most of these other men were. For Norton, once the accusation against Burroughs stuck, the crucial line separating usual and unusual suspects had been breached and no other ministers, magistrates, military commanders—or the women in their families—could be sure that they would not be named as Satan’s agents. With the Devil impersonating such prominent “innocents,” the implications of what afflicted females and confessed witches had wrought in claiming for themselves the “official” duties of the court gradually came home to many supporters of the trials. Once reservations about the role of the afflicted in the Salem crisis reached the level of open debate, it was only a matter of time before the trials came to an end and the “strange reversal that had placed women on top was then righted.”

Prosecution of witches who treacherously allied themselves with demonic Indians and Frenchmen also assuaged the guilt of Massachusetts’s ruling elite. Looking into correspondence and other documents that previous scholars had not found germane to the Salem outbreak, Norton does much to explain why the authorities did so little for so long to stop the accusations from spinning out of control. As historians have long been aware, New England’s leaders generally agreed with their neighbors about who Satan’s instruments were. That their own stereotypes broke down so drastically during the events of 1692 suggests to Norton that invisible attacks by previously unknown witches were easier to cope with than palpable attacks by hostile forces who appeared and disappeared with such uncanny speed. Holding themselves responsible on some level for failing to muster the money, men, and munitions required to defeat the enemy and protect outlying settlers from harm, Massachusetts leaders paved the way for prosecution of the unusual witchcraft suspects in their midst.

If Norton brings together New England’s Indian wars and its most tragic witchcraft outbreak more vividly and persuasively than ever before, she also draws on a long historical and literary tradition. Contemporary public awareness of these connections go back to the two mid-twentieth-century narratives that have shaped popular opinion about the trials more generally, journalist Marion Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (New York, 1949), and playwright Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (New York, 1952). Neither Starkey nor Miller dwelt on relations between English immigrants and New England’s native population. But like many authors before and since, they saw Indian raids on isolated settlements and widespread apprehension of the wilderness as essential background to the Salem events. Like the loss of the Massachusetts charter, anxiety over land titles, smallpox epidemics, and incessant squabbling over property boundaries, Indian attacks were one more sign to Puritans that God was punishing his once chosen people for their backsliding ways. Guilt for their sins, belief that God had abandoned them, and conviction that Satan and his minions hovered nearby encouraged the good people of Salem to deal with forbidden attractions and longstanding hatreds by casting their neighbors as more evil than themselves.

Some two decades after Starkey and Miller wrote, more substantial treatments of the associations between the Salem outbreak and King William’s War began to appear. Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence (Middletown, Conn., 1973) offered a probing psychological analysis, bringing together the slaughter of Mercy Short’s family during the 1690 French and Indian attack on Salmon Falls (now Berwick), Maine, and her own captivity, redemption, and subsequent witchcraft possession in Boston. Carefully documenting New Englanders’ post-1688 intermixing of witchcraft and barbarism imagery, Slotkin observed that they had perceived Indians as devils and devil worshipers for decades. Not until the series of social crises preceding the Salem outbreak, he noted, did specters of Indians, Frenchmen, and witches begin meeting and vanishing together. By 1692, fear that some men had either aided—or indeed received supernatural assistance from—the enemy resulted in their being suspected as witches.

While Slotkin paid more attention to the Indian side of what Cotton Mather saw as a demonic alliance of “Half Indianized French, and Half Frenchified Indians,” in 1974, legal historian David Konig turned to the French. With the outbreak of King William’s War, long-term suspicions of Philip English and other Isle of Jersey immigrants to Salem came to the surface, expressing deeper anxieties about foreign loyalties, subversive plots, “papist” takeovers and, eventually, spectral attacks inflicted by Philip English, Mary English, and a few other women related to French-speaking men. Later, in Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1629-1692 (Chapel Hill, 1979), Konig joined his analysis of the French threat to a closer look at responses to the Indian-French military alliance and other “simmering tensions” plaguing Essex County and its legal system. Among them he found growing discontent with government’s unwillingness to protect its citizens from external enemies, which the court effectively deflected in its pursuit of suspected witches.

Although Paul Boyer’s and Stephen Nissenbaum’s immensely successful Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass., 1974) diverted the attention that had been paid to the association between witchcraft and King William’s War towards longstanding intra-Salem conflicts, John Demos, in Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York, 1982), drew attention back, but with a difference. He reoriented the field toward the then little-known pre-Salem cases with his compelling and richly documented argument that a single-minded focus on 1692 had distorted the story of New England witchcraft. He found the “chronic ‘guerrilla warfare'” between colonists and local Indians and the intense anxiety, fear, and hatred accompanying it vital to understanding why terror of witches was rife among colonists for decades, not just near the end of the century. But however much this sustained conflict helped explain the extraordinary depth of witch fear in the region, Demos considered it simply one among the many concerns and controversies explaining the significance of witchcraft suspicions and accusations in New England’s history.

Examining a few earlier accusations as well, James Kences returned in a 1984 article specifically to the relationship between the Salem outbreak and King Philip’s and King William’s Wars. His was the most comprehensive treatment of the subject at the time, incorporating several additional people with Maine ties into his interpretation of Salem and bringing other Essex County towns into his narrative. Recognizing that Mercy Short was not the only war refugee participating in the 1692 events, Kences probed more deeply than others into the tales told by ministers, accusers, and others of “witch militias . . . who Muster[ed] in Armes” and “bewitched” soldiers to the eastward. Mercy Lewis, a young refugee from Maine who had lived for a while in the household of George Burroughs, found an important place in Kences’s account. Like many other young accusers, Lewis articulated her fears in the biblical and martial language so familiar from Puritan teachings, suggesting to Kences how vital religious education was in fostering both hatred of Indians and the 1692 witch panic. He explored other reasons for accusers’ concerns, from the emotional trauma of witnessing and surviving violent deaths of their families to anxieties created by wartime shortages of marriageable men.

Some of my own conclusions in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England supported Kences’s. For example, I also discovered that many young, possessed accusers were refugees from the northeastern wars and argued as well that their afflictions expressed the intensity of their religious training and the war-related psychological and economic stresses they faced. But my interest in the gender dynamics of witchcraft accusations before and during the Salem outbreak led me to evidence that most young, possessed accusers in 1692 were orphans, in sharp contrast to their afflicted counterparts prior to the Salem events. While this pattern held in Salem even when the possessed were not refugees, I found the wars crucial to understanding the differences between them and nonpossessed accusers as well as the growing proportions of men and other “unlikely” witches accused in Salem. While community gossip could explain why the possessed named “likely witches” as their afflicters, the men they accused fit into two overlapping categories—survivors of the wars whom the possessed had probably known or at least heard of in their previous communities and men the possessed considered seducers or tormentors of women. Accusations against unlikely witches brought an end to witchcraft trials in New England in part because the possessed had so successfully usurped the power to name names that community leaders denied them the “spectral sight” ministers had once accorded them.

Only a few analyses of New England witchcraft published in the 1990s connected Salem witchcraft with Indian wars. One of these, Richard Godbeer’s The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (New York, 1992) integrated the work on King William’s war and views of Indians as devil worshipers into his witchcraft chapter, while bringing additional evidence to bear on Salem Village’s intense “preoccupation with invasion.” Elaine Breslaw’s Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies (New York, 1996) did not focus on the wars themselves but drew attention to the image of Indians as “other.” In constructing the history of Tituba, the Indian woman first named a witch during the Salem outbreak, Breslaw saw these wars, settlers’ growing demonization of Indians, and the witchcraft confession of a young girl previously from Maine as crucial to Tituba’s success in convincing local authorities that the witches they were after were “outsiders.” When located, a great many turned out to be men who lived well beyond Salem’s borders.

In a 1996 essay, John McWilliams revisited the Indian military threat and other late-seventeenth-century political crises. Unlike Breslaw, he found Tituba less critical to his story than her husband John Indian, in part because the “spectre-devil” that most concerned colonists was “the figure of the male Indian, who might look like the Black Man, the Red Man, or a ‘Tawny.'” If scholars had had a lot to say about devilish Indians by the time he published his essay, McWilliams provided further documentation of Satan’s dark, presumably Indian, coloration. He lent support as well to earlier reminders that more witches were accused in the towns around Salem than within it, making an effective argument that the 1692 outbreak needed to be studied as a regional rather than simply an intra-Salem or even Essex County affair. Though agreeing with the local conflict analysis put forth by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, he found that too much emphasis on Salem’s internal economic and religious struggles obscured the town’s strategic location and the chronological concurrence of Indian and witch attacks. McWilliams was unwilling to say that the wars were the cause of the witch trials, but he insisted that Salem was “historically inconceivable” without them in that they explained “why accusations took hold so firmly and spread so rapidly beyond Salem Village.”

While Mary Beth Norton builds a solid edifice on the research and insights of her predecessors, In the Devil’s Snare is more than just a sum of these parts. In her hands, the attacks on Salmon Falls, York, Casco Bay, and other outlying New England settlements are vividly recreated, in minute detail, as are the Salem outbreak’s accusations, confessions, and trials. The quality as well as the quantity of evidence she has gathered allows her to fill in formerly unknown parts of this history and to correct earlier scholars’ factual errors. Norton presents the Wabanakis and their military strategies in human rather than abstract terms, focusing some attention on the kinds of treatment that led them to strike back at colonists when, where, and how they did. Most effectively, she provides evidence that Massachusetts political and military leaders were not fundamentally different in their motivations, emotions, and responses from the rest of the English-speaking population. Because of her subtle exploration of elite men’s personal stakes in the witch trials, New England’s largest outbreak will never look quite the same again.

Where Norton lets readers down is in her too often reductionist effort to have the frontier wars be theexplanation of the 1692 witchcraft outbreak. There is no question that French and Native American attacks were vital in increasing the accusations and intensifying their pace during the Salem crisis. Indeed, Salem was unique in any number of ways. But Norton’s conclusion—that “had the Second Indian war on the northeastern frontier somehow been avoided, the Essex County witchcraft crisis would not have occurred”—fails to persuade. Norton attempts to qualify this statement by immediately cross-arguing that the war did not “cause” the Salem crisis but rather that the conflict simply “created the conditions that allowed the crisis to develop as rapidly and as extensively as it did.” Yet the overall impression she leaves is that she has not departed much from her acknowledgment in an earlier article that, “[A]ll roads seemed to lead me to Maine.”

Take, for example, her claim that the ubiquitous presence in the Salem records of “repeated spectral sightings of the ‘black man'” . . . “establishes a crucial connection” between witches and Wabanakis. Norton admits that this imagery was not totally new in 1692. But in downplaying evidence of its widespread usage prior to the late seventeenth century, she suggests that most if not all references of this kind point to the northeast. This is simply not the case.

Whether in New England before King Philip’s War, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, or even further back in the historical or mythical past, devils were rarely any other color but black. As the “Prince of Darkness,” Satan hailed from the dark, impenetrable depths of Hell. Devils, male and female, came black-hearted, with dark impulses, clothed in black, covered with black hair, shaped like black animals, and as one early-seventeenth-century source put it, with “black ugly visages, grisly with smoke.” In early modern Europe, devils could be black like Africans, black like Native Americans, or black like “little black children with wings,” suggesting among other things the shifting shapes of imagined evil in newly and much broader colonial contexts. That New Englanders so often found their Devil in the shape of a black man “not of a Negro, but of a Tawney, or an Indian colour” is not at all surprising, given the terror accompanying the frontier wars. Still, that does not necessarily mean that all black devils in the Salem records resided in Maine.

Norton’s suggestion that the prevalence of martial imagery in the Salem testimony demonstrates the uniqueness of the 1692 outbreak also ignores colonists’ long-term understanding of Satan’s struggle to wrest human souls from God. When Puritans saw specters of witches and Indians assembled in military companies, heard trumpets mustering them to meetings, or cried out that invisible attackers were tearing them to pieces, they were articulating the beliefs of their ancestors in England as well as their own New England assumptions. In England’s witchcraft literature, for instance, a devil could appear as a centurion, a general, a colonel, a commander, even, according to one wag, a “captainess” or “Muster-meister,” any of whom might be found leading the regiments of Hell against God’s well-armed Christian forces. Even when no soldiers were arrayed for battle, early modern witches and demons might assault their victims by slashing them with knives, ripping skin from their bones, tearing them to pieces, and even devouring their flesh. Again, that colonists in northeastern New England so frequently saw Wabanakis and Frenchmen alongside Satan’s witch allies does not mean that other terrors long associated with witches had somehow disappeared. If anything, these fears magnified as the region’s tensions deepened.

Her single-minded insistence that the intertwined histories of Salem and the frontier wars made Salem more anomalous than it was leads Norton to some very convoluted recountings of who “must have” known whom and who “undoubtedly” said what. At times, her suppositions make good sense and fascinating reading. Too often, however, discussion of a particular individual’s role or a sequence of events slips from speculation to certainty over the course of the narrative. In Norton’s lengthy and at times highly perceptive attempt to make the nineteen-year-old Maine orphan Mercy Lewis play a critical role in her interpretation, for instance, she shifts from identifying Lewis as a possible source of gossip about some of the Maine accused to saying that the information “could only have come from” her. Although Boyer and Nissenbaum provided considerable documentation of other possibilities, Norton here as elsewhere minimizes important pieces of evidence and maximizes others to render her take on events more palatable. One of the reasons the Salem outbreak has such a hold on the popular and scholarly imagination today is that so much of the story cannot be pinned down. Norton’s assumption that it can, and should, pushes her to exaggerate the strength of her argument and greatly diminishes the value of her book.

Norton’s rough handling of evidence that does not fit her interpretation of Salem’s uniqueness goes beyond the outbreak itself to the pre-Salem cases. Her effort to convince readers of the relationship between the terror the wars caused and the enormity of the 1692 witchcraft outbreak need not compel her to diminish the numerical or cultural significance of pre-Salem accusations. Nor does she have to ignore patterns linking Salem’s suspects to their predecessors. For example, by not fully acknowledging the demographic, economic, and other shared experiences of Salem’s accused, Norton can easily pass over resemblances between the many women named before the Salem crisis and those women named in 1692, both those who had and those who did not have ties to the Maine or New Hampshire frontier.

Also, the vast majority of people labeled as witches during the Salem outbreak did not have any identifiable links to the northeastern frontier. Nor did most accusers. One, perhaps two, Indians can be found among the scores of suspects and only a few others had French backgrounds. Even among accused witches whom Norton lists in an appendix as having frontier ties, the number of women is so small and the ties so insubstantial that including them in this category seems to be grasping at straws. These numbers alone confirm that the connections between the wars and the witches tell only part of the Salem story.

Dividing accused witches into usual and unusual suspects—and leaving most of the usual suspects and the testimony against them out of the analytical picture—further masks the complexity of the Salem crisis. When she reduces most of the women accused of witchcraft during the Salem outbreak to usual suspects, Norton implies that the reasons for these accusations do not need to be analyzed. These presumed witches were, in her view, “quarrelsome older women, some with dubious reputations, who fit the standard seventeenth-century stereotype of the witch.” Certainly, an argument can and has been made that these women made themselves the object of witchcraft gossip, that they were inevitably caught up in the net that the Salem authorities cast, and that their plight in 1692 needs little further explanation. That argument remains highly problematic, however, if for no other reason than the evidence that has survived about them tells only one side of bitter, often quite prolonged arguments between neighbors. Norton’s marginalization of these women as “usual suspects,” I find, not only substantially detracts from In the Devil’s Snare’s accomplishments, it bespeaks another untold tale.

Surprisingly, given her long career as a pioneer in the history of women and gender in early America, Norton does not offer much of an interpretation of the social relations that she does place at the center of her narrative. She clearly agrees with those of us who have argued that possessed accusers claimed a power and authority they were never meant to have, and that they obliquely challenged the gender hierarchy even if their naming of unlikely witches eventually lost them their right to “spectral sight.” At times she seems to place confessing witches among this role-reversing group. I expected the author of Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1996) to say much more, though, about how the links between the Salem outbreak and the frontier wars illuminate the relations of gender and power and vice versa.

Even if Norton had not already contributed so much to feminist scholarship on early America, the opening pages of In the Devil’s Snare imply that gender will be one of its most salient themes. In her earlier essay on her research, she even more emphatically affirmed that “it was inconceivable that gender could have played absolutely no role in the development and outcome of [the Salem] crisis” and that a study of late-seventeenth-century gender and politics was inconceivable without confronting Salem. Speaking to the latter, she claimed that “if one is interested in that theme in America between 1670 and 1750, Salem is the 800-pound gorilla sitting there staring you in the face.” Certainly, this is a book about men accused of witchcraft in Salem—and gender studies in recent years have embraced the study of manhood. But this is not a book about men as men. Even as it offers one of the most insightful interpretations of why Salem produced so many “Devils in the Shape of Good Men,” without a gender analysis, that 800-pound gorilla is still there, staring us in the face.

Further Reading: For Mary Beth Norton’s earlier essay, see “Finding the Devil in the Details of the Salem Witchcraft Trials,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 January 2000, B4. See also Mary Beth Norton, “The Refugee’s Revenge,” Common-place 2:3 (April 2003). Other articles mentioned above include David T. Konig, “A New Look at the Essex ‘French’: Ethnic Frictions and Community Tensions in Seventeenth-Century Essex County, Massachusetts,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 110 (1974) 167-80; James E. Kences, “Some Unexplored Relationships of Essex County Witchcraft to the Indian Wars of 1675 and 1689,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 120 (1984) 179-212; and John McWilliams, “Indian John and the Northern Tawnies,” New England Quarterly 69 (1996) 580-604. Bernard Rosenthal’s identification of accuracies and inaccuracies in the Salem scholarship is in Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692 (New York, 1993). For more on Cotton Mather’s role in constructing Native Americans as demonic, see his The Life of Sir William Phips, ed. Mark Van Doren (New York, 1929) andDecennium Luctuosum: Or, The Remarkables of a Long War with Indian Savages, reprinted in Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699 (New York, 1913). European assumptions about witches and demons can be found in the witchcraft debate literature; skeptic Samuel Harsnet’s, A Declaration of Popish Impostures (London, 1603), drawn on for this review, offers some of the most vivid representations of English beliefs.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.2 (January, 2003).

Carol Karlsen is an associate professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York, 1987; 1998) and The Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692: A History in Documents, forthcoming in 2003.

Written for both general and scholarly audiences, Ray Raphael’s book is an unqualified success on one level and will provoke fruitful controversy among scholars on another. Here is a vivid account of the turbulent days in Massachusetts from the time the province received word of the Massachusetts Government Act on August 6, 1774, until battle broke out at Lexington and Concord the following April. Except in Boston itself, where British troops were stationed, crowds of thousands throughout Massachusetts shut down county courts and intimidated men appointed by the Crown to the new, mandamus council (which replaced the one elected jointly by the incoming House of Representatives and outgoing council subject to the governor’s approval under the Charter of 1691) into resigning their posts. These resignations frequently involved public humiliation: the offender had to march hat in hand between rows of militia and other inhabitants and repeat his refusal to serve as often as required. In fact, until they renounced their jobs, the councilors were totally shunned by the majority of the inhabitants, who refused to trade or even attend religious services with them.

Raphael’s good sense and scholarship appears in his balanced treatment of issues Massachusetts historians have disputed. He shows that the Bostonian “radicals” who in the early 1770s urged on the reluctant country towns were themselves left behind by rural inhabitants in 1774, when the latter pressed for resuming the Charter of 1629. Still, the Bostonians were elected to the highest positions in the new political order, suggesting that, whatever differences over tactics may have existed, the province was basically united against a minority of loyalists. And while noting there probably were distinctions between orderly assemblies of the people and crowds that got out of hand—for instance, the ones that cut off the tail of and later poisoned General Timothy Ruggles’s horse—Raphael admits that there was some overlap between the two, although no respectable person would publicly compromise the cause by taking pride in such random destruction.

Raphael does a fine job of conveying the excitement Massachusetts experienced during these months when the Provincial Congress assumed the government outside of Boston. Scholars will not debate the accuracy of his account with a couple of minor exceptions—young men did not volunteer to put down Shays’ Rebellion only because they were paid, but because they had a commitment to the government. But Raphael’s claim that Massachusetts had completed the “first” American Revolution in the latter of half of 1774 raises the perennial question as to what was the Revolution and how to periodize it. I am not one to argue with revisionist periodization, having recently written an essay “The American Civil War Did Not Take Place” [short version in Rethinking History 6: 2 (2002): 218-21; longer version in the American Journal of Semiotics 17: 2 (2001): 2-29] in which I claim that by focusing on the four years in which armies fought in a traditional way Americans can feel more comfortable with their past than if they (more usefully) made an “Era of Racial Violence,” which I arbitrarily demarked by the years 1854 and 1877, the centerpiece of the national heritage. So instead of asking the unanswerable question about when the Revolution broke out and what it was, I will therefore explore what theory of the Revolution Raphael’s periodization implies as opposed to more standard views.

Raphael claims a revolution is best understood as toppling an existing government; by the fall of 1774, Massachusetts was ruling itself without, and in opposition to, royal authority. But there was no bloodshed: crowds confronting councilors and British soldiers (at Fort William and Mary, New Hampshire, and Salem, Massachusetts) were respectively forced to vacate their posts and turn back from the assembled inhabitants. What happened throughout Massachusetts in 1774 is similar to what happened in Boston in 1765 following announcement of the Stamp Act: the courts closed and Stamp Master Andrew Oliver was repeatedly forced to resign, not by letter or in the town house, but out-of-doors in front of the people who appeared as a new authority. Thomas Hutchinson and Francis Bernard, much like Thomas Gage nine years later, claimed the people had seized all power and royal authority was at an end. So did a revolution break out in Boston in 1765, to be put down when the troops arrived in 1768?

It is reasonable to suppose from the actions of the Continental Congress in 1774-75, like that of the Stamp Act Congress and Massachusetts legislature in 1765, that both Massachusetts and its allies did not conceive of the events of late 1774 as revolutionary, but as protests similar to those which had been successful several times in the past decade by forcing the British to repeal obnoxious legislation. And none of the incidents Raphael discusses produced bloodshed or military confrontation that led to a protracted confrontation of hostile forces. Raphael’s reformulation reminds me of those who question whether Columbus first discovered America (encountered the Amerindians): in one sense of course he didn’t, since fishermen were wintering on the coast of North America for years before, not to mention the Vikings. What Columbus’s expedition did was begin a sustained process of conquest with monumental consequences for world history. Since Lexington and Concord shed the first blood and caused the other colonies to mobilize behind Massachusetts, it makes sense to argue that a quantum leap in consciousness and activity occurred at this point that may be characterized by the words “the” American Revolution.

Still, I won’t say Raphael is wrong. John Adams thought the Revolution was complete before Lexington and Concord, and others maintain that the change in American society implied by a greater political interest in politics was not completed until the Jacksonian Era. Let me just state that Raphael’s periodization is more useful for one purpose (understanding the turmoil and replacement of authority in Massachusetts in 1774) and less useful for another (understanding how thirteen colonies became involved in violent confrontation with Great Britain). But the value of, and need for, such a fine account of the months immediately preceding Lexington and Concord cannot be disputed.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.2 (January, 2003).

William Pencak, professor of history at the Pennsylvania State University, wrote two books on Revolutionary Massachusetts: War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston, 1981) and America’s Burke: The Mind of Thomas Hutchinson (Washington, D.C., 1982).