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).

A few years ago, during an afternoon’s exploration of Salem, Massachusetts, I stopped by the Orientation Center of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site to ask for a map and a recommendation of what to see. Despite the center’s location at the base of historic Derby Wharf where Salem ships once launched for Asia, South America, and most places in between, the staff member pointed me back up the street for a walking tour of the city’s infamous witch trials. At that moment I pondered the same question that struck author Robert Booth and encouraged his new book: Why do we care so much about Salem’s witchcraft trials and know so little about Salem’s rich maritime past? Booth attempts to answer this question by following two generations of the White, Story, and Crowninshield families in Salem as he traces the port’s commercial history from the closing years of the War of 1812 to the 1840s. This is the story of the lamentable decline of Salem, once one of the richest towns in the United States, under the weight of immense commercial wealth and amidst the growth of a nation whose interests by the mid-nineteenth century seemed to be at odds with Salem’s maritime trade.

At the start of the nineteenth century, Salem had a global empire, as Booth puts it, in which Salem ships traded peaceably and lucratively in distant markets, particularly those in the Indian Ocean and in South Asia. The term empire obscures the more complex and interregional trading networks of which Salem was a part, but nonetheless the port’s trade did spread successfully to points across the globe. But as the United States expanded westward and embraced manufacturing, Salem merchants and seamen found diminishing opportunities to get ahead in maritime commerce, and the wealth from foreign trade that had once “raised up all classes in Salem” (25) gave way to growing poverty and criminality in this port town. As trade faltered, many leading businessmen left Salem to invest in new manufacturing, shipbuilding, and neighborhood development projects in Boston, New York, and points west. At sea, opium trafficking and increased violence toward foreign trading partners replaced the honorable commerce of Salem’s past. Booth recounts the resulting degradation of Salem society that culminated in the 1830 murder of Joseph White, a preeminent Salem merchant of the old guard, whose death came at the hands of a devious group of former ship captains and a wayward son of the famed Crowninshield family in search of a dark thrill and financial gain. Salem was so embarrassed by this internal collapse, Booth concludes, that it suppressed the memory of its former commercial greatness.

Death of an Empire follows in the historical true-crime style of author Erik Larson and presents a vivid description of life in early nineteenth-century Salem and aboard Salem vessels as they traded in distant markets. Using primarily newspaper accounts, published memoirs, and court records, Booth does impressive work to illuminate Salem tableaus that don’t often get recreated in such detail, from the bustle of life along Union Wharf to the seedy rooms of the Mumford bar and brothel on the edge of town. Booth writes with the same ease discussing Salem local politics as he does describing the intricate process of trade between Salem merchants and the rajah Po Adam on the coast of Sumatra. Familiar American characters like Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, Joseph Story, and Nathaniel Hawthorn circulate through the narrative as they move into and out of Salem, and they help flesh out the breadth of Salem life, from law to politics and from business to literature.

Booth’s efforts to bring to life the social and economic networks of Salem residents pay off in the book. When many of Salem’s leading families depart the dwindling port for Josiah Quincy’s Boston, the process of smaller, specialized ports getting subsumed into the commercial orbit of larger ports like Boston that unfolded throughout the nation in the nineteenth century becomes for the reader more than just a statistic of tonnage or ship clearances. Booth shows how a port’s commercial advantage could be significantly diminished with the loss of maritime expertise, political connections, and business that went with every family defection. In spite of Booth’s emphasis on the role of shame in suppressing Salem’s memory of its commercial greatness, the most compelling explanation for how so much first-hand memory of Salem’s commercial past was lost is this migration of trade and merchant families out of Salem by the 1830s and the subsequent loss of community. In a town that as late as 1836 chose the motto “To the farthest port of the rich Indies” (from the Latin DivitisIndiae, usque ad ultimum sinum) for its new city seal, the memory of Salem’s commercial glory was still strong among the remaining community.

Booth has a clear talent for descriptive and captivating writing. Still, Death of an Empire at times reads more as a series of short, engaging stories than as a coherent narrative. The family trees at the beginning of the book become essential tools for reminding the reader how each character fits into the arc of Booth’s story and into Salem’s history, though new characters and episodes still pop up without clear introduction or explanation. Further, although the claims that Booth makes about Salem’s commercial rise may make for a more dramatic fall in this narrative, in glorifying Salem’s commercial success in the early 1800s he also obscures historical reality. Booth characterizes Salem men and merchants of the early nineteenth century as honorable and adventurous, and attributes much of their success to these traits. He writes that Salem “had few resources other than confidence, aggressiveness, and intelligence” (xi) and that the port achieved commercial success “without the arrogance and exploitation that were typical of Europeans” (xii). At other times, Booth contrasts honorable Salem merchants of the early 1800s who helped create “friendship around the globe” (268) with Andrew Jackson, who lived among his slaves and led an administration of “racist militarists” (xv). But the implication that virtue and self-reliance had a causal role in Salem’s early economic success is specious, and this claim is undermined by the fact that the same Salem merchants that Booth praises made large profits carrying and selling the products of slave economies around the world. Elias Hasket Derby, the 18th-century Salem merchant whose story begins Booth’s Preface, owned a slave.

Death of an Empire adds to a growing volume of historical work on early American trade that examines American commerce beyond the Atlantic Ocean, and Booth’s book will have appeal for both the general public and for historical researchers. Booth claims that Salem was without comparison in its connections to overseas trade in the early United States, but his book will nonetheless bring readers to wonder how Salem’s dynamics of downsizing compared to other smaller ports of the early republic. Death of an Empire is a welcome addition to the history of Salem for its detailed synthesis of this important transition period in the port’s life, and his engaging book should suggest many further avenues for others to tap the rich historical resources of Salem’s commercial past and recapture this forgotten history.

Randall Lewis is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation examines the expansion of American maritime commerce after the American Revolution with a focus on Salem, Massachusetts.

Every Early American historian must determine the appropriate perspective to frame the story of European settlement of the Americas. For decades, Frederick Turner’s choice of viewing American history by looking west from the Appalachian Mountains dominated the historiography. More recently, Daniel Richter provided a different frame to tell the story of early America by facing east from the Jefferson Memorial Arch in St. Louis. Michael Jarvis’s magisterial In the Eye of All Trade does not place the reader on the solidity of a mountain range or atop a national monument. Nor does he urge us to look in one direction. Instead, readers of In the Eye of All Trade are asked to consider the myriad connections Bermudians created within the Atlantic history from the unsteady wooden deck of a Bermudian sloop. While this may strike some as unorthodox, Jarvis’s choice of perspective is truly inspired. It ensures that even as readers are taken into uncharted waters, they are moored by the book’s two central ideas: that the Atlantic world’s “defining characteristic” was motion, and that Bermuda’s maritime economy was “at the center of England’s emerging Atlantic system” (9, 11).

Jarvis observes that while Bermuda occupies less than twenty-one square miles, its location “along a continuous curving arc of islands and coastline stretching from Newfoundland to Tobago” placed it within relatively short sailing voyages from all points in the western British Atlantic (4-5). When combined with the prevailing currents and trade winds, Bermuda’s location resulted in nine out of every ten ships sailing between the West Indies and Europe or North America to pass the island, placing it “in the eye of all trade.” In emphasizing the centrality of Bermuda in the British Atlantic, Jarvis provides a detailed maritime social history that considers both how the ocean shaped Bermuda and how Bermudian connections throughout the Atlantic basin influenced life on the island.

Jarvis proceeds to use this new perspective to explore six key characteristics of Bermudian life: its transition from a tobacco society to a maritime society; the island’s unique system of slavery; the emphasis placed on kinship connections and communal activities; Bermudian exploitation of the Atlantic’s natural resources; the effect of Bermuda’s maritime economy on its residents; and the impact of the American Revolution on Bermudian society.

In the book’s first two chapters Jarvis considers the initial development of Bermuda, documenting its operation by the Somers Company and transition to a royal colony. Although initially successful as a tobacco colony, Jarvis demonstrates that the collapse of the tobacco market in the 1620s and 1630s was a blessing in disguise that caused Bermudians to diversify their economy. Doing so fostered maritime connections with North American and other West Indies colonies. And because of limited land, many Bermudians moved to other colonies, forming networks of maritime trade that would sustain Bermuda to the end of the eighteenth century. In telling the story of a transition away from tobacco to the sea, Jarvis emphasizes that this took place without “direction, promotion, or supervision” from London (73).

With an increased emphasis on maritime activities, agriculture became marginal, as short trips to North American ports enabled Bermuda to regularly obtain provisions. The switch to a maritime economy also resulted in Bermudians imposing strict conservation measures and cultivating cedar trees for use in the island’s shipbuilding industry. By building distinctive, fast sloops, honing navigational and piloting skills, and keeping costs low by using slave labor aboard their ships, Bermudians flourished and made their island into what Jarvis terms a “great paradox”—an “island that was a vibrant commercial and communications hub and yet virtually invisible and easily missed within Great Britain’s sprawling empire” (183).

In Bermuda’s new maritime economy it was labor, not land, that was key. As the island’s fleet increased, slaves became increasingly critical to the island’s shipbuilding industry and came to comprise a majority of many Bermudian ship crews. Slave hiring was key to the success of this new maritime economy as it provided elasticity to seasonal shifts. Hiring out led many whites to depend upon slave labor for much of their household income, particularly those who did not own land. Smuggling, an important component of the island’s economy, was assisted by the use of all-black crews who could not testify against their ship captain or owner. Thus, Bermuda’s non-agricultural, mobile slave system more closely resembled slavery in ports such as New York than slave societies in the Caribbean.

Jarvis demonstrates that Bermuda’s rise as a maritime hub depended upon extensive kinship networks. Groups of family members built and bought sloops and schooners, raised capital, recruited ship crews and gathered goods to be shipped. In the era before widespread use of insurance by the island’s fleet, these kinship networks helped spread the risk of maritime endeavors. The kinship connections also extended to the ships themselves. Jarvis, through a precise and careful detailing that characterizes his scholarship, provides rich evidence of how almost every Bermudian ship crew came from the same neighborhoods and kinship groups, and frequently from the same households. These connections crossed racial lines as slaves frequently worked alongside their white masters on board Bermudian sloops. Jarvis even shows how kinship networks extended to other colonies, tracing how Bermudians emigrated to the Bahamas, South Carolina, Virginia and St. Eustatius. These commercial and kinship connections enabled this small island to flourish as a maritime economy.

With their maritime skills, unique slave system and extensive kinship connections Bermudians were, as Jarvis convincingly demonstrates, able to exploit maritime hinterlands to supplement their intercolonial trade and shipbuilding. They did so by raking salt from the Turks and Caicos Islands, salvaging shipwrecks, harvesting timber in Central and North America, turtling in the Cayman Islands, as well as privateering and whaling. Such activities, while marginal to many colonial economies, were “absolutely vital” to Bermuda’s maritime economy (250). These Atlantic maritime hinterlands drew large numbers of people together and linked regional economies from which Bermudians greatly benefited.

Jarvis illustrates this well through his discussion of the Bermuda sloop. No single item illustrates so well the importance of the Atlantic Commons to Bermuda’s economy. A critical component of Bermuda’s maritime economy that carried everything from salt to turtles to blubber, these fast and durable sloops contained a variety of elements from Bermuda’s extensive exploitation of the Atlantic: though based on Dutch design, they were built with North American cypress and pine as well as Bermudian cedar, and often contained rigging from shipwrecks, sails made from smuggled Dutch or Russian canvas, and iron from North American furnaces.

In chapters five and six, Jarvis ties together his history of Bermuda by analyzing how its maritime economy shaped its society on shore. Most eighteenth-century ports had skewed gender ratios, but Bermuda’s was particularly high: one-third of its households were headed by women in 1727. With many of the island’s men away at sea, Bermudian women took on considerable responsibilities, creating goods for export that tied them into the Atlantic economies that their husbands knew firsthand. While assuming a number of traditional male roles, Bermudian women, white and black, came to rely upon each other. The irony of this situation was, as Jarvis notes, that maritime activities led the island’s men to neglect traditional male social duties; they did not “protect, regularly provide for, [nor] personally govern their ‘dependent’ wives, children and slaves” (303). At the same time, the connections Bermudians had throughout the Atlantic enabled many islanders to own consumer goods that others in the Atlantic of similar wealth did not.

With the American Revolution significant changes came to Bermuda. The island’s reliance upon trade with North American colonies was disrupted. With the influx of British military forces and Loyalist privateers using the island as a base for operations, the nature of Bermuda’s economy changed dramatically. Jarvis meticulously describes the divisions among the island’s residents, many of whom favored the American cause. As they had earlier in the century in creatively using the Atlantic Commons to craft a dynamic maritime economy, Bermudians responded to the war with inventiveness. They used privateering and sale of goods to the British military to reconstruct their economy. In the years after the Revolution, shipbuilding, military provisioning, cod fishing, and whaling sustained the island.

In the Eye of All Trade is a welcome complement to Dan Vickers’s work in demonstrating the central role small ports on the geographic periphery of the Atlantic had in the development of British America. As Jarvis demonstrates so well, for most Bermudians, and for many other British colonists, the ocean was where they sought sustenance, identity, and a way of life. Having spent twenty years painstakingly researching colonial Bermuda, Jarvis has produced a wonderfully written narrative history worthy of its lengthy gestation. His emphasis on Bermudians’ adaptability to their isolated location stands as a useful reminder of how many early British settlers saw areas often referred to as “frontiers” or “borderlands” as central to their lives and economic well-being.

The African Burial Ground in New York City was the final resting place for both free and enslaved African Americans from the 1690s to 1790s. Since the site’s rediscovery in 1991, the American public has slowly started to question the assumption that slavery in the United States existed only below the Mason-Dixon Line. In Ten Hills Farm, C.S. Manegold elaborates on the “forgotten history” of Northern slavery and argues that Americans need to move faster to “close this gap” in their understandings of slavery. Manegold hopes her work will narrow this void and ensure that textbooks can no longer dismiss “references to slavery in the North with parenthetical acknowledgement” (269).

Manegold is not alone in studying this topic. The last twenty years have seen a significant push toward understanding the role of slavery in the North. Gary Nash, Jean Soderlund, Shane White, Joanne Pope Melish, Graham Hodges, Leslie Harris, Jill Lepore, Ira Berlin, and others have all sought to revive this forgotten history, one that New Englanders, as Joanne Pope Melish argues, rewrote in a fit of historical amnesia in the nineteenth century.

As an awarding-winning journalist, Manegold crafts a narrative not stuffed with jargon but filled with lively prose that not only links the reader to past events but illustrates their connection to modern-day issues. The book follows the story of Ten Hills Farm, a tract of land along the Mystic River near Medford, Massachusetts, from its first European owner, the famous John Winthrop, in 1631 up to the American Revolution. Although the farm plays a role in her narrative, Manegold is far more interested in the dynamic characters who owned, lived on, or otherwise came in contact with the property. Through an exploration of these people, Manegold argues that slavery in the North (though she solely focuses on New England) did not exist as a benign institution. Rather, those who supported slavery in Massachusetts had the same traits and values as those who supported it in the seemingly “harsher” Caribbean; they were one and the same.

Manegold divides her text chronologically into five parts. The first tells how John Winthrop came to Massachusetts, rose to power as governor, and purchased Ten Hills as a country retreat. Only three years after Winthrop acquired his estate, the Pequot War introduced slavery to New England in the form of Indian captives. While some remained as slaves in Massachusetts, the colonists also exported many to the Caribbean. This early link between New England and the Caribbean created an enduring connection that, as Manegold argues, allowed for the importation of the first African slaves to Massachusetts in 1638. This link serves as an important fixture (and rightly so) throughout her narrative (43).

The second part describes the transfer of Ten Hills from an indebted John Winthrop to his son, John Winthrop Jr. Manegold constantly reminds the reader in this section that all actions in New England took place with slavery as a backdrop. For example, John Jr.’s rise to the governorship of Connecticut occurred at the same time he held at least one African slave at Ten Hills. In this section, Manegold also introduces William Ryall who immigrated to Massachusetts in 1629 and eventually settled with his family along the Maine coast. Ryall becomes increasingly important as his grandson Isaac Royall altered the spelling of the family name and bought Ten Hills in 1732.

In the third part, Isaac Royall, like many other New Englanders, established trade links with the larger Atlantic world and in 1700 left Massachusetts for Antigua, where he created a successful sugar plantation. While in Antigua, Royall continued to maintain familial and trade connections in New England and eventually purchased Ten Hills with the intent to become, like most other Antigua sugar planters, an absentee landlord. Royall brought twenty-seven of his slaves from the island to Massachusetts when he and his family finally left Antigua in 1738.

The most powerful link between slavery and Ten Hills Farm came during the years of Isaac Royall Jr.’s ownership. As Manegold argues, Isaac Jr. participated in the slave trade and expanded his land holdings throughout New England. Isaac Jr. sought to replicate his childhood home in the Caribbean and built his fortune on the backs of his slaves in the same way that his family had done in Antigua. At his height, Royall owned as many as 138 slaves on his combined New England holdings (192), which he used to partially endow the Royall Professorship of Law at Harvard Law School.

The penultimate part of Manegold’s narrative begins in the years after the French and Indian War when colonists began to protest the “slavery” the British imposed through such regulations as the Stamp Act. Manegold argues that slaves in Massachusetts picked up on the colonists’ rhetorical use of slavery and freedom and used this revolutionary ideology to question their own enslavement. She retells the story of Crispus Attucks as well as the dozens of slaves who filed freedom suits in Massachusetts courts.

While blacks petitioned for freedom in the years before the American Revolution, Isaac Royall Jr. wanted nothing to do with war. By 1775 he had decided to leave Massachusetts and return to Antigua. Before he could leave, the war began and he and his family escaped to Canada and eventually England, where he died in 1781. After the war had displaced the Royalls, Ten Hills Farm became a military camp which hosted New Hampshire troops led by John Stark, George Washington, and others. Although Manegold cannot accurately track the disposition of many of the slaves who worked for Isaac Jr., she does discuss perhaps his most remembered slave, Belinda. An elderly slave manumitted by Royall and promised support in her old age, she successfully forced the state to guarantee that pension from the profits of the confiscated Royall estate.

The final part of Manegold’s work, called “The Legacy,” describes how the Daughters of the American Revolution acquired Ten Hills Farm in 1898, and its eventual transfer to the Royall House Association in 1907. More importantly, Manegold argues that in the future, Americans should remember that Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” was built with slave labor. Just as she hopes to do throughout her book, she argues that Americans must recognize the importance of slavery to colonial New England. Some have begun to do this, such as the current holder of the Royall Professorship at Harvard, Janet Halley, who read all of the names of the Royall’s slaves as part of her acceptance speech to acknowledge this part of New England’s past.

Manegold sets out to show the relationship New England had with slavery and in doing so readily admits that she is not a historian and will “leave the more pointillist detailing to scholars with more training in the field than I, and perhaps more patience for the minutiae upon which the finest scholarship is built” (xv). Although one does not need to be a historian to accomplish this task, Manegold’s lack of engagement with the larger historiography of race and slavery leaves what could be an even more powerful book flat in many places.

For example, she attributes the solidification of slavery in New England to an interest in trade, wealth, and an engagement with the larger Atlantic slave economy. While this is of course true, Manegold’s explanation largely ignores the larger racialized struggles over land, community, and power that whites and Indians fought over for the first eighty years of settlement, which directly related to slavery. While she does acknowledge that Indians became the first New England slaves, her discussion of Indians showcases not a negotiated relationship which evolved over time but one where whites victimized the unsuspecting Indians. Even when she does show Indians as actors in their own right, for instance in King Philip’s War, she portrays a stereotypical portrait of them with “faces painted (and) bodies greased” where they aimed to impose “suffering and chaos” upon the whites in retribution for years of persecution (91). The intertwined and often volatile relationship whites and Indians formed could have been more powerfully developed, allowing the reader to truly understand why both African and Indian slavery became a part of New England life (45-48).

Manegold’s work could have also dealt far more with New England slaves instead of those who owned them. Indeed, the first serious mention of slaves does not appear until page forty-one with the preceding pages devoted almost solely to John Winthrop. Although Manegold runs into some serious source issues in determining how the slaves functioned at Ten Hills, the slaves themselves seemed largely overshadowed by the lives of the white men and women who lived alongside them. Just as the Royall House Association recently received a grant to incorporate more of the African American story into their interpretative mission, it would have served Manegold’s argument well to have tried to more centrally incorporate the slave’s story. In the fourth part of her work, where she does accomplish this to a greater extent, her narrative becomes both more powerful and more applicable to the study of slavery.

In the end, Manegold produces a vivid and compelling case which highlights the need for both academics and the general public to understand not only the role slavery played in the North but its relationship to other American colonies as well as the larger Atlantic world.

In Wandering Souls, S. Scott Rohrer seeks to understand the relationship between Protestantism and migration in America over the course of almost two and a half centuries. His ambitious project spans place as well as time, as he ranges from Puritans in New England, to Anglicans in the South, to Inspirationists and Mormons in the West, among others. In covering such broad swathes of time and space, Rohrer hopes to answer one fundamental question: “what was it about Protestantism and America’s dissenting culture that made Protestants so restless?” (14)

To answer this question, Rohrer uses eight Protestant groups as case studies. His first chapter introduces Thomas Hooker and the Puritans, whose story he uses to illuminate key themes he will return to in later chapters. He divides the other seven Protestant groups into two categories. First, he claims to focus primarily on individuals and families looking for “some kind of spiritual and economic fulfillment” (9). In this section he includes Anglicans, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Moravians, and Methodists. The second category he classifies as group migrations led by a church, congregation, or minister. This section covers Baptists, Inspirationists, and Mormons.

While these categories seem clear in the introduction, in reality there is much overlap. In the section on families and individuals, for example, Rohrer includes the movement of groups of Presbyterians to Maine and Virginia, and a family migration of Moravians that occurred within the context of the establishment of a large new Moravian community in North Carolina. These would, it appears, fit as well in the second category as the first.

It seems that motivations for migration mark the real difference between the two categories in Rohrer’s new migration “model.” The first type of migrants moved for a variety of reasons relating to personal fulfillment: some sought a “new birth,” others wanted to raise their children in godly communities, and still others sought societies bound together by ethnicity as well as religion.

The second type of migration occurred when people moved as part of a group seeking a better environment to practice their religion. Some escaped persecution, as in the case of the Mormons, while others hoped to create godly societies or to mitigate internal conflict, as in the case of Inspirationists and Baptists. All three groups moved for unique reasons, but in a broad sense all three groups sought better living conditions for the religious group as a whole.

Rohrer hopes his book will challenge the traditional migration narrative in which “secularly motivated migrants are lured to the frontier by the promise of cheap and plentiful land” (247). Wandering Souls certainly adds a layer of complexity to this traditional narrative. Some of Rohrer’s wandering souls undoubtedly chose to move for religious reasons. Yet, as Rohrer himself concedes at several points, the lure of land tempted Protestants as much as it did secular settlers. While Protestantism might have informed migrants’ decisions to move, the availability of relatively cheap and fertile land determined where and when they went. In this sense, Rohrer’s new model of migration complements, but does not replace, older ones that emphasize the importance of land.

If all the migrants shared a desire for more or better or cheaper land (or at least expanded economic opportunities promised by the frontier), Rohrer also sees similarities in the otherwise diverse religious motivations for migration. According to Rohrer, the eight case studies in his book provide four related answers to his core question about the relationship between Protestantism and migration. Protestants were “so restless” because they were “searching for salvation, Christian community, or reform—and sometimes for all three” (244). He also argues that America’s “dissenting culture” encouraged Protestant wanderings.

Yet of these four factors, the search for personal salvation through a “new birth” is the only one unique to Protestantism. Jews and Catholics, for example, also sought community and reform. Ethnic groups settled together for the sake of community, and moved together as well. Members of wagon trains heading west often shared language, culture, ethnicity, or religion, all of which undoubtedly enhanced a sense of community. Similarly, Protestants would not have been the only Americans “[i]mbued with republican notions of freedom” (168). The search for community or reform and the influence of a dissenting tradition did not distinguish Protestants from other groups during the period covered by Wandering Souls.

The search for a “new birth” as the path to salvation was a Protestant longing, but Rohrer fails to convincingly link this search to migration. Devereaux Jarratt, the Virginia Anglican Rohrer profiles in chapter two, comes closest to fitting this model, but even his story doesn’t clearly indicate that a desire for salvation led to Protestant migration. In Jarratt’s case, in fact, his desire for salvation was an effect, rather than a cause, of his peregrinations. A relatively poor teenager living in colonial Virginia with his brother, Jarratt first moved in 1752 because he was offered a position as a schoolmaster. In the course of his search for a stable job, he eventually landed in the home of an evangelical Christian and began pondering matters of the soul. After several years of contemplation mixed with backsliding, Jarratt experienced the “new birth” that led him to become an itinerant Anglican preacher. Had he not wandered, he might never have been saved, but he wasn’t searching for salvation when he started. Rohrer also cites the Methodist Alfred Brunson as an example of this motivation. Yet for Brunson as for Devereaux Jarratt, material concerns mixed with spiritual ones in the decision to move. His desire for salvation in Ohio after the War of 1812 was combined with a hope that he could make a better living there as a lawyer or minister because of the opportunities presented by the frontier.

Rohrer does not establish a convincing causal link between a shared set of motives and Protestant “restlessness.” Yet Wandering Souls still achieves a great deal. In particular, Rohrer argues that “religion’s role in migration and the settlement process was far more important than has been recognized” (247). His case studies of Protestant migrants reveal the importance of religion on many levels to people who migrated in the two and a half centuries covered by his book. The availability of land factored into the decision to move but religious motives clearly influenced migrations as well. Rohrer’s serious treatment of religion is a refreshing addition to a body of scholarship that often ignores its powerful psychological and social power.

In a story that covers so much time and space, perhaps it is unfair to ask for more. But Rohrer does leave one wondering how the Indians fit into his story of migration. He mentions Indians at several points—they threaten the Connecticut settlements of Thomas Hooker, for example, and their defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers opens up Ohio territory for eager Methodists. But in a story about migration, where so much depends upon available land, the Indians who lived on much of that land seem unusually absent.

In particular, what role did Protestant Indians play? The literal and figurative migration of the Conestogas in colonial Pennsylvania to a new land and a new culture, for example, failed to protect them from Rohrer’s wandering white Protestants, despite a shared faith. Anglican Joseph Brant also remained true to his Protestant faith in his extensive wanderings as he attempted to form an independent Indian nation in Canada after the Revolution.

Or for that matter, what about Protestant black Americans, who also wandered—some as preachers, some as escaped slaves, others as abolitionists arguing for freedom and equality?

No book can do everything, but Rohrer’s provocative study might have been enriched by including the perspective of other Protestants who also wandered, albeit for very different reasons. Perhaps future studies can take up where Rohrer left off to examine the place of religion in the movements of a more diverse set of individuals and groups. As it stands, Wandering Souls makes an important contribution to the scholarly narrative on migration by insisting that religion plays a role in understanding why people moved so much in America during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

When people in the twenty-first century hear the word “pirate” many immediately conjure up images of motley, unruly, ferocious, yet happy-go-lucky, ne’er-do-wells cruising the Spanish Main in search of trouble and adventure. Author Peter T. Leeson looks beyond the rum swilling, keelhauling, and hell raising to show readers a criminal underworld shaped by economic self-interest. The author operates on the principle that economics, rather than history, can bring us closer to the “truth” about pirates and piracy. In this book, covering piracy in the Caribbean from 1670 to 1730, the author argues that pirates were “highly rational” (5) individuals who used cooperation, democratic government, torture, and intimidation in their pursuit of economic gain. An economist by training, Leeson attempts to find order and meaning in the actions of individuals with a wide reputation for lawlessness and impulsiveness. The book contains chapters dealing with “pirate democracy,” pirate codes, the meaning behind the use of the Jolly Roger, the rationale of torture, the conscription and recruitment of pirate crews, and pirate tolerance. Although Leeson perhaps leans too heavily upon the notion of economic self-interest as a way to explain pirate actions, The Invisible Hook raises good questions about a topic worthy of further historical investigation.

Leeson cleverly tweaks Adam Smith’s economic theories in order to demonstrate that piracy was indeed a business, albeit an illegitimate one. Smith argued that humans are rational creatures, intent on doing what is best for themselves; self-interest is the engine driving the capitalist machine. Pirates, the author argues, were rational creatures, intent on serving their self-interest. However, Leeson sees pirate economics directed by an “Invisible Hook,” rather than an “Invisible Hand.” The Invisible Hook guided the ways in which criminal self-interest worked, while the Invisible Hand guided the course of legitimate market transactions. Unlike legitimate businesspeople, pirates sold nothing, and their version of self-interest contributed nothing useful to society. Regardless, Leeson’s pirates are thoroughgoing entrepreneurs, just a bit rougher and swarthier than those who conducted their business from the counting houses of London and Port Royal.

In order to function smoothly and maximize profits, pirate ships needed some semblance of political organization. The author argues that pirate crews did have a rough form of government, characterized by checks and balances and the separation of powers. He goes so far as to imply that “pirate democracy” was superior to that of classical Greece or New England—at least on board a pirate ship everyone could vote. He even writes that, “To look at it, one could easily believe America’s Founding Fathers used the pirates’ system of democratic checks and balances in framing the United States government” (34). Pirates needed effective leadership in order to function efficiently; but the pirate captain could not be a dictator. In effect, a pirate captain was really only “first among equals.” His lodging, provisions, and pay were roughly similar to that of an ordinary crewmember. Furthermore, the captain could not afford to punish arbitrarily. Unfair or excessive punishment could result in his removal from command, either by vote or by mutiny.

In addition to placing effective checks on the power of the captain, pirate government also provided harmony amongst the crewmembers. Harmony was essential to the business of piracy; pirates who got along with one another stood a better chance of success in their ventures. The author writes that, “Contrary to popular wisdom, pirate life was orderly and honest” (45). In order to maintain order and ensure honesty, pirates drew up “Codes,” which outlined shipboard rules and regulations, and provided incentives to maximize individual effort. Each crew drew up its own constitution and ratified it by unanimous consent. Among other things, the Pirate Codes mandated an equal distribution of plunder, prohibited theft, laid out punishments for code breakers including keelhauling and marooning, gave extra incentives for effective job performance, and provided a form of worker’s compensation for “on-the-job injuries.” By eliminating the specter of economic inequality and rewarding good work, the Codes helped create an environment that was better organized and more harmonious than that of the Royal Navy or merchant marine.

Because they were rational, self-interested people intent on maximizing their profits, pirates had little interest in provoking armed confrontation. Rather, Leeson points out, they used intimidation and their bloody reputation to minimize conflict. Piracy was difficult enough without fighting an armed merchantman. The business required not only technical skills such as navigation and gunnery, but also cunning and subterfuge. Pirates used trickery and intimidation in order to avoid conflict. Fighting could mean the loss of crewmembers, damage to the pirate ship, and, perhaps most importantly, damage to the prize. Pirate torture, the author writes, was both heinous and completely rational. Pirates tortured prisoners in order to reveal the location of loot, to punish law enforcement officials for killing or arresting other pirates, and to punish abusive merchant marine captains. By torturing a few people in gruesomely imaginative ways, pirate crews “institutionalized their reputation for ferocity and insanity” (111). Stories of pirate barbarism spread far and wide. By flying the skull-and-bones, pirates identified themselves unmistakably, and woe to the captain and crew that tried to outrun or outfight them. Torture and intimidation, judiciously applied, allowed pirate crews to minimize losses and maximize their profits.

In addition to being cunning and politically savvy, the author writes that pirates were also good employers and quite tolerant folk. Rather than relying on conscription to fill out their crews, pirates often had to choose from a large pool of applicants. Many sailors, Leeson argues, wanted to join pirate crews in order to secure better pay and escape the wretched conditions aboard merchant or naval vessels. Although not always above impressing seamen, pirates generally accepted only skilled sailors into their crews. Furthermore, while not all pirates had enlightened views on race and race-relations, some blacks sailed the Caribbean with all the rights and privileges that pirate “citizenship” provided.

Historians may find Leeson’s economic interpretation too deterministic, his prose too chatty, and his research shoddy. The author does not attempt to hide his view that only the use of economics can truly explain why pirates acted the way they did. He writes, “The power of economics isn’t just that it can be applied so widely. It’s that only with economics can we make sense of a great deal of otherwise unintelligible individual behavior. Without economics, pirates, for example, are a veritable ball of contradictions” (194). Leeson starts with a preexisting interpretation of human behavior and works back into the sources to find support for his thesis; rather than letting the sources guide him to a conclusion, he reads the sources with the conclusion already in mind. Some readers may find the author’s writing style exasperatingly informal and colloquial. At various points, he compares pirate ships to frat houses and condominium associations. Many historians may find Leeson’s research spotty. He relies heavily on only a few published sources. Finally, tracking down sources and documentation in this work is frustrating—there are no numeric notes within the text, nor is there a bibliography or recommended reading list.

Economic models and stylistic quibbles aside, the author offers a fine reevaluation of a group of people too often caricatured in popular culture and overlooked by the academic community. Pirates, Leeson demonstrates, are worthy of study. Although they might not have been as completely rational as the author claims—after all, human beings are contradictory and paradoxical creatures—they were certainly not as irrational as legend would have us believe. Leeson also does an excellent job explaining in non-technical language the economic concepts that inform his interpretation. The Invisible Hook is a fresh, clever, and thought-provoking approach to an old topic that should prompt further scholarly research in the future.

Christian G. Fritz’s American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War poses a series of challenges for historians. Its claims are sweeping and it includes just about every major constitutional controversy in the 150 years from the Glorious Revolution in England to the American Civil War (save one, about which more shortly). It incorporates literature from history, political theory, and law. It is bold, creative, and cannot be ignored, yet its overall methodology is problematic. How can historians trained to analyze texts in their actual historical context and to find the contemporary meanings of terms make sense of an essay filled with such free-floating concepts as “the people” or “American constitutionalism”? How can historians, even those willing to engage such an essay on its own terms, appreciate the leaps and bounds in Fritz’s book?

American Sovereigns is divided into three parts. In the first part, which covers the Revolutionary period, Fritz says that he wants to see the American philosophy of governance in a new light. Fair enough. Historians are not fazed by revisionism. To accomplish his aim, he borrows liberally from more recent law professors’ forays into constitutional history, coming away with a handful of neo-populist and proto-democratic interpretations. If the framers were conservative by our lights (or so the conventional history tells us), one nevertheless can read their words and see in them the seeds of robust democratic egalitarianism. Fritz calls this “American constitutionalism.” Prior studies tie that term to the very scholarship he wants to jettison, but Fritz is undaunted by the conventional accounts of the framers and their work in 1787. His answer to conventional accounts is bold: coin terminology. Dump moldy old language like federalism and concurrent powers and replace it with a shiny new one, “collective sovereignty.”

In a regime of collective sovereignty, power lies with the people, not with officers or royalty. The people rule because they are, together as a group, the sole source for power. New coinage, however, no matter how bravely and insistently introduced, cannot conceal the debates that raged from 1787 to 1860 over the meaning of a sovereign people. Fritz thus finds himself attempting to argue two mutually opposing theses: the triumph of the principle of the people’s collective sovereignty and the persistence of confusion on what those terms meant. If he is right, if he has found the underlying principle in the political thought of the new nation’s leaders, he should also have found evidence of consensus. If there was no consensus, then there were competing principles abroad. It is possible to argue, contrariwise, that pre-Civil War constitutionalism was both more fluid and open, especially considering how easily the sovereign people could change their basic laws; and at the same time more restrictive (than Fritz concedes) regarding who “the people” were and what role they were to play in self-government.

For collective sovereignty is not what Americans sought. They wanted a rule of law that was consistent and fair. That is, they wanted their rulers to play by the rules. Because he insists that collective sovereignty was always democratic in its instincts, Fritz gets basic historical facts wrong. For example, he argues that the American Revolution replaced the idea of the sovereignty of the crown with the sovereignty of the people. Both counts are controversial. Many historians have contended that English constitutionalism had arrived at this conclusion four generations before the Patriots. The settlement of William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 in England was accompanied by the notion that parliament was sovereign and that the people’s rights were the bedrock of all government. While the Revolutionaries cast off imperial rule, they did not throw off the sovereignty of the crown; they rejected a corrupt parliament and an insensitive king. Even the most liberal of the new state constitutions limited the franchise and protected the property of the better sort. Law remained the real measure of collective sovereignty.

Fritz is having none of this. He raises protests, mob action, and contrary-to-law jury findings to the level of law; the more popular the protest, the more it fits his version of the constitutional law canon. Even the people observing these activities at the time did not describe them as altering the fundamental law. They knew better.

But Fritz’s work is not without value. In the second part of the book on the early national period, he does a fine job of problematizing the consensus narrative of constitutional history that dominates law school libraries and curricula. Considered as expressions of American constitutionalism, extra-legal movements like the Regulators in North Carolina and Shays’ rebellion in Massachusetts show how rural folks contested the constitutional arrangements of eastern propertied elites. Experiments with constitutionalism in the trans-Appalachian region and in Vermont pre-figured the democratic constitutional reforms of the pre-Civil War era. Though one may quibble with Fritz’s use of Jefferson’s tolerance for a little revolution now and again as a representative thought when it was a minority view, the portrayal of a contentious early national period is evocative of a more open time in American political life.

In subsequent chapters on the Whiskey Rebellion, the contest between the Federalists and the Republicans in the 1790s, and other key passages on conflicts in the story of American constitutional thought, Fritz makes clear that early national Americans advanced two very different, if not quite evenly matched understandings of collective sovereignty. On the one side were those whom we might label as republicans. They believed that the people were sovereign, but had delegated their powers to state and federal elected representatives. On the other side were the democrats who subscribed to a more open form of politics with more opportunities for popular participation. While the democrats eventually predominated, a triumph registered in the rise of the Jacksonian Democratic Party, both sides adopted the language of American constitutionalism.

In this manner Fritz ties the story of American constitutionalism to the nation’s political history. It is good to remember that law and politics then, as now, were bedfellows. Yet even here, one vital aspect of American constitutional life is absent from Fritz’s republican/democrat contest. Slavery does not appear in the book’s index, and that with good reason. Slavery plays no role in his discussion of the debates over the Constitution (either in the Constitutional Convention or during ratification) or over the Bill of Rights in the first Congresses. How can one explain these controversies without ever mentioning slavery? A book aimed at placing “the people” at the center of constitutionalism should come to terms with slavery, not least because African-American slaves constituted approximately nineteen percent of the overall population of the United States according to the first census in 1790.

In the next chapters in part two, Fritz explains the differences and similarities between the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the Hartford Convention, and the Nullification Crisis in terms of the doctrine of American constitutionalism known as “interposition,” namely that the people as sovereigns within their states could interpose themselves between their government and themselves. Thus, the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures and the Hartford Convention were not acts of rebellion, but constitutional expression of the people’s sovereignty. In contrast, people like James Madison argued that South Carolina’s reaction to the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were an improper exercise of this authority.

In his final substantive chapter, which constitutes the whole of part three of the book, Fritz examines how the sovereign people exercised their authority over state, and by implication federal, constitutions. Specifically, he reinterprets the Dorr War that fractured Rhode Island during the 1840s and led to the U.S. Supreme Court case of Luther v. Borden (1848). Although the original dispute over representation in the state legislature and the extent of the franchise was nothing new, the People’s Convention that formed a constitution for Rhode Island and elected Thomas Dorr to the governorship without the state legislature’s permission was. The dispute turned violent and sparked a national debate over whether or not unauthorized individuals could meet and form a new government or alter the provisions of a currently existing one. Though Chief Justice Roger B. Taney upheld the governor’s imposition of martial law, and the convictions of Dorr and others, both he and the sole dissenter argued for the doctrine of the people’s sovereignty. But even this apparent triumph of his argument presents a dilemma for Fritz: Everyone may have agreed on the principle of collective sovereignty, but there was no consensus on its enactment or enforcement.

In the epilogue, Fritz reminds the reader of his overall purpose: rewriting the history of Americans’ understanding of their constitutional law into a story that prefigures modern constitutionalism. Here he joins Akhil Reed Amar, Larry Kramer, and other advocates (for this is advocacy as well as analysis) of a “people’s constitution.” This perspective contrasts sharply with a court-centered view, an institutional perspective, and what we may term a more conservative approach, a law and order rendering. From the perspective of Fritz and his allies, Daniel Shays and Thomas Dorr were not rebels, but seers, insofar as they stood for a robust understanding that the people had taken the place of the king after the American Revolution. This reworking of American constitutional history has much to teach us even if its narrow focus misses such substantial issues as the effect of the Glorious Revolution and slavery on American constitutional discourse.

In recent years scholars of cultural history have focused significant attention on a seemingly unlikely protagonist: the nineteenth-century clerk. Readers unfamiliar with this literature might be forgiven for wondering what could be so interesting. After all, the occupational category of clerking evokes neither the swashbuckling boardroom excesses of Gilded Age robber barons nor the heroic physical sufferings of industrial laborers. Yet clerks of the nineteenth century are intriguing not so much for what they did on the job as for the space they occupied in their contemporaries’ thoughts and writings. At the vanguard of social change, the nineteenth-century clerk, like today’s hipster, was a figure equally maligned and emulated.

Brian Luskey adds fresh insight to the existing literature in On the Make, which explores the lives of New York City’s clerks in the mid-1800s. As Luskey nicely puts it in the introduction, it is easy to understand contemporary interest in the figure of the clerk when one recalls that—whether retailing to fashionable ladies or wholesaling to country merchants, frequenting oyster bars or promenading in broadcloth finery—”clerks truly were the faces of capitalist transformation” (2). Contemporaries, therefore, came to describe clerks in a number of ways—mostly negative: as indulgent consumers of fashionable clothing, rowdies frequenting bars and brothels, and obsequious salesmen derided as “counter jumpers.”

The bulk of Luskey’s study concerns the antebellum era, though he reaches back into the 1700s and concludes with intriguing thoughts about the transformation of clerkship after the Civil War. In the years between, the United States experienced rapid urbanization and what many historians designate as a “market revolution,” that is, the transition from small communities defined by networks of personal obligation to a sprawling mass society governed by the impersonal forces of supply and demand. In this often disorienting change, the very visible job of clerking became a focal point of aspiration and disappointment, hope and fear.

Luskey combines the methods of cultural and social history to accomplish a tricky feat: he maps out, on the one hand, the structural impediments to clerks’ quest for “economic capital,” and on the other hand, the hazardous discursive field in which they pursued “cultural capital.” Making use of diaries, credit reports, manuscript census schedules, and a variety of print media, he skillfully documents the clerk’s many travails.

The book presents the basic structural dilemma early on. Encouraged by ideological constructions of clerking as an apprenticeship leading to mercantile proprietorship, clerks often found their hopes frustrated by obstinate realities. Luskey shows that even in the eighteenth century, the apprenticeship model was no longer a sure pathway to economic independence. As a result of the period’s consumer revolution, expanding educational opportunities, and general economic growth, demand for positions in mercantile houses rose rapidly. Indeed, according to Luskey’s figures, New York City’s clerks numbered nearly 14,000 at midcentury, constituting the city’s third largest occupational group. Yet despite the “crumbling edifice” of traditional apprenticeship, those who aspired to mercantile “power and prestige” had little choice but to grasp at apprenticeship’s still “vital ideals” (31). The diary entries of the young William Hoffman, for example, clearly show that he had internalized many of these ideals even as he, in common with his colleagues, struggled through long days that often included physical labor. The basic structural reality, then, was that clerks, ostensibly in training to be independent merchants, were in fact increasingly difficult to distinguish from the emerging proletariat.

Central to the “contradictory messages” clerks encountered was the notion of “character.” Advice manuals urged clerks to cultivate virtues such as diligence, sincerity and humility. For their parts, young clerks understood that character, or rather representations of character, formed the only capital they could muster “in an urban society populated by unknown persons and an economy defined by both thrilling boom times and enervating hard times” (22). Yet character was a concept shot through with ambiguity. Supposedly an inner light illuminating the path to wealth and independence, it paradoxically called for willing submission to low pay and unpleasant work. A similar paradox afflicted clerks whenever they sought employment. On the one hand they had to conform to a vocabulary of generic tropes they shared with employers, while on the other they desired to stand out from the multitudes.

Having thus introduced the basic trajectory of the labor market and the fundamental discourse of character, Luskey constructs the rest of his book as a series of dilemmas. Again and again his clerks attempt to cast themselves as people of consequence, only to fail because their pretensions go unsupported by actual wealth and influence. In chapters covering topics such as race, gender, fashion, leisure, work and citizenship, Luskey explores the tensions between expectation and reality, and the ways in which interested actors bridged the gap in writings both public and private. Newspaper editors, ministers, and other pundits appear on the scene to make weighty public pronouncements, while the clerks themselves offer mostly private reflections in their diaries.

Luskey is particularly compelling in his depiction of how clerks clung to the symbol of the white collar in order to distinguish themselves from both blacks and working-class whites. He notes that whereas white male laborers were increasingly able to demarcate clear racial boundaries simply by excluding blacks from their workplaces, clerks worked side-by-side with their firm’s black porters. In a fascinating discussion, Luskey shows how clerks sometimes joined their white working-class compatriots in asserting their whiteness by attending minstrel shows, yet at other times refined and even domesticated minstrelsy in order to keep themselves apart from and above white laborers. Thus they preferred Edwin Christy’s supposedly more urbane minstrel productions, performed in a theater where the rowdy “pit” had been replaced by comfortable arm chairs. At least one clerk noted in his diary that he had forsaken the theater altogether one evening in order to entertain friends with minstrel sheet music played at home on his piano, perhaps the ultimate symbol of middle-class respectability. Yet if clerks seemed to score a symbolic victory here, they soon found the cultural waters more perilous and complex than they had imagined. In a “producer’s republic,” their attempts to obscure the manual labor that might soil their white collars worked against them in the realm of gender distinctions, opening them up to charges of effeminacy and dandyism.

The book’s final chapter makes some ambitious claims about the transformation of clerkship in the latter nineteenth century. Luskey gets ahead of his evidence here, but his thoughts are intriguing. He argues that as the plausibility of advancement to the status of a merchant faded, many clerks chose to trade in their dreams of independent proprietorship for job security as salaried managers in the emerging bureaucracies of Big Business. In the process, they redefined “what it meant to be a free, respectable, white man” (210). This is a potentially important contribution to our understanding of the consolidation of the middle class. Other significant recent studies of the nineteenth century have illuminated this process for the upper reaches of the industrial bourgeoisie (Sven Beckert’s Monied Metropolis) or the intellectual realm of social theorists (Jeffrey Sklansky’s The Soul’s Economy). Luskey, however, focuses our attention squarely on the lived experiences of respectability’s lower strata.

One important aspect of that experience, Luskey makes clear, was the attempt to acquire and deploy “cultural capital,” a term that he returns to repeatedly. The idea originates, as far as I know, with Pierre Bourdieu, and is sufficiently well established to make explicit discussion of its meaning unnecessary, perhaps. But I still found it an elusive metaphor, and I think that scholars could usefully explicate it more fully. At one point, for example, Luskey refers to the “markers of cultural capital” (179). But I would tend to think that “cultural capital” is itself a marker, presumably of actual capital, or perhaps of “character,” taste or some other quality. In any case, discussion of what precisely is clarified by equating certain visible cultural accomplishments with control of economic resources might be helpful to readers who are not familiar with Bourdieu’s body of work.

Such questions aside, On the Make deserves a wide readership. It is now the go-to work on clerks in the nineteenth century and a good example of how to integrate social and cultural history.