Ammunition,
Or Sarah Winchester, 23 Years Dead, and My Grandmother, Newly Widowed, Speak

The men were paid extra: danger money.
No metal buttons on their clothes, no cigarettes,

In his letters from the South Pacific, he always
called me Honey, made me promise not to forget

no matches. No hairpins for the women—
So many precautions: fire brigades waiting,

to smile for him in the beveled mirror
he’d bought that Christmas—home on leave—

deep wells, until there were hydrants.
Around the factories, even the horses wore

bells everywhere like the sound of ice cracking
when he drove the lake. I’d hold my door open—

brass instead of steel underfoot. Less chance
of sparks. The men worked overtime—

frightened. The months he was gone were
like that. The children in the back of the car,

gearing up for each new war, or maybe
war. Their shirts couldn’t have pockets.

holding the shells he’d sent them: speckled around
a tiny curve of breath. Until the telegram,

No stray bits of metal. And still—each year—
explosions, fires spreading until

I kept my promise: smiled as if he could see
my reflection in the bevel of the South Pacific.

they couldn’t count the bodies.

Before his ship was only splinters, smoke

As a child, I thought guncotton sounded

soft—like the cloth for a veil.

Sarah Winchester Remembers: Artizan Street, New Haven, 1850s

There was always something being built
in my father’s shop and sawdust tracked
onto our floors: a shimmer like the boards
were becoming mist, like on the Quinnipiac
where my parents met. You could walk into
rivers then and come out with new beliefs.

In the clock shops, time divided, shifting
us forward notch by tiny notch. People
crowded the Public Bathhouse—vapors
and lye and seawater. Small salvations.
From my French tutor: pere and bois.
What paid for my lessons: fine houses
ornamented by my father’s careful hands.

Carriage works, mills, the boarding houses
spilling into the streets. We lived comfortably
then. My sister, the only one buried. I carried
her name, like the rail tracks carrying Hartford
outside its skins: the elm-lined, sooty Green,
the custom house. Factories for shirts and guns.

In their rooms, new girls from Ireland
cut stacks of pieces—collar and breast, left
right, back—then stitch by stitch, created
a more perfect wholeness. The country
was coming apart. Rumors. Repeating
guns. But also beauty. New planed maple.

Everyone wanted spindles and tracery,
moldings copied from Queen Victoria
and The Crystal Palace. History turned against
its lathe, shaving us loose. On my father’s
floor: pedals for organs waiting for the music
to be built around them. No one told me
to want a more solid world.

Stereoscope: Annie Oakley and Sarah Winchester

It began with necessity:
hunting rabbits behind
that mortgaged house, then word spread out:     
snow on the fields, glinting off
sky, and everything
narrowed to hard wood and steel,
and me the small miracle
at the trigger men bet against:

How can I explain
windows designed from guns:
levers and latches aimed at
the gazing ball in the garden,
not for safety but because that’s how I
knew to build. Not a spider,
silking out her body’s web,
but a woman standing

cards riddled like windows
on a train that will take you
over oceans if you want it to;
the prince of Senegal sending
offers of tigers, and the German
kaiser sitting rigid as a portrait: ash
of his cigarette streaking the bullet
as it crumbled that one speck

where the wind’s eye watches
without sleeping—safe as houses
they say, but what is safe about
this world with holes shot through,
with empty safes and chairs—this
dust and light on the piano, the smoke
and no one else to warm at the hearth
now: only my own body

of fire. Such trust in common
stranger’s (woman’s) hands;
the legends made them safe
the way they do: the little sure
shot, dressed to kill, meaning
dressed to shoot at nothing
alive now. I became
something to be braved, boasted

glass—between me and the day:
not ghosts, but not the living either.
The legends grew like hedges
tangled and vined around me; words,
the spirits I started to believe in
because what else is a house but
something that holds time,
something to forgive us,

as any woman should—
holding her gun naturally as a baby
slung from her body. Love
has nothing to do with that
or it does, but also
wanting to trust something—
also our bodies bare as skinned
rabbits, and the floor cold

sleepless walks through rooms
held in some other world
we’ve built board by board; the window
open or closed and us still standing
waiting
wanting someone to see us
wanting—something soft as
silk, so maybe we are spiders

where the bed isn’t, and all
the pretty ways later we sell
to the world what began
with necessity

after all—this web around us,
plums in the orchards, morning
filling up the glass: something beautiful
in every corner. How can I explain it?

Sarah Winchester Visits The California Midwinter Exposition,
Golden Gate Park, 1894

Surely you did not see the woman dancing
nude at the new aquarium—a thin black veil over
her face, not so unlike your own. The cracking

of chairs as the police came to carry her off—
like a spider in a cup—to somewhere proper.
Were there even fish yet? Were there seals caught

beneath Cliff House—so thick, the papers wrote,
you could shoot them from the veranda if it weren’t illegal.
They wrote everything then: back at your farm

you named a hill Strawberry for here—invited
the neighborhood girls to its slope to eat
real French ice cream. That woman, surely,

nude by those glass walls, danced tarantella,
trying to survive the bite of her own skin:
just that veil between the gawkers and

grief. At the grand Egyptian revival pavilions,
a ferris wheel of oranges turned by electric
motor. You could stand underneath—watch

a hundred suns revolve at once: an eccentric
belief that the world stood still here, one room
could hold everywhere. The Court of Honor.

The Prune Knight with his armor: a bloom
of produce bristling from his chest. Sphinxes
with soft plaster noses. Germans—painted

and dressed like Japanese (who refused to be
servants)—running with rickshaws by Dante’s
Inferno, House of Horrors, where you could
pay—for a short forever—for your past.

“I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.”
—Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”

Four decades ago, Bernard Bailyn suggested that histories of the American Revolution were entering their “tragic” phase: that is, the era in which both sides in the conflict—winners and losers, patriots and loyalists—could be depicted in a fair and even-handed way. From his biography of Thomas Hutchinson and Carol Berkin’s contemporaneous treatment of Jonathan Sewall to the recent appearance of books by Thomas B. Allen, Maya Jasanoff, and Ruma Chopra, it appears that the loyalists of eighteenth-century British North America have finally begun to get their due.

The same cannot be said of the men who led Britain’s effort to defeat the independence movement. Historians have expended little energy to validate the judgments of King George III or the ministers—Lord North, Lord Germain, the Earl of Sandwich—who crafted policy in those years. More attention has been given to the military commanders who led the war effort, but the Howe brothers, Burgoyne, Clinton, and Cornwallis have been criticized for their failures of judgment much more often than they have been dealt with sympathetically.

Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s marvelous new book, The Men Who Lost America, redresses this failing and, in the process, gives us the kind of three-dimensional treatment of Britain’s role in the American Revolution that we have long needed. At least since the era of the Vietnam War, most historians have treated the military outcome of the American Revolution as a foregone conclusion: if Vietnam taught Americans the lesson that an invading army cannot suppress a homegrown insurgency, no matter how disproportionate the combatants’ resources appear to be, U.S. historians have come to view the American Revolution as the first and greatest demonstration of that principle.

Paradoxically, O’Shaughnessy argues that Britain lost the war for America in a four-week period in 1776 (86-87), yet he nevertheless succeeds in restoring a profound sense of contingency to his narrative and analysis of events. His book takes the form of nine biographical chapters, each of which considers a key architect of British policy or strategy (one chapter treats both of the Howe brothers, so ten individuals are profiled). Beginning with chapters on George III and Lord North, and thereby offering a political overview of the war effort, he proceeds to depict five commanding officers and three more political figures whose choices did much to shape British action during the era of the American Revolution. While O’Shaughnessy is always willing to criticize the men he profiles and to highlight the ways in which their personalities shaped their choices for better and worse, his treatments are consistently generous. He succeeds brilliantly in humanizing his cast of characters and allowing the reader to see the constraints under which they worked. The biographical structure means that the book’s chapters overlap chronologically, but instead of redundancy we get an increasingly complex and layered perspective on a set of linked problems.

One kind of payoff this book offers is a reassessment of crucial political and strategic questions that many previous historians have puzzled over. Though Americans tend to think of George III as a tyrant, intransigent in his unwillingness to mediate the conflict between Parliament and the colonies, O’Shaughnessy restores the mood of optimism that attended his ascension to the throne and highlights the ways in which he sought to restrain the Parliamentary impulse to take a hard line with the colonies. Yet in the wake of the Boston Tea Party, George III “strongly endorsed” the Coercive Acts, and once committed to the use of force he was unwavering in his resolve (22). The instrument of his policy, Lord North, was as ineffectual a war leader as one could possibly imagine—yet since he never accepted the title of prime minister, and from 1777 onward tried to persuade the king that the war was unwinnable, this is perhaps unsurprising. George refused to listen to North, but wouldn’t replace him either, and North’s ambivalent leadership created a weak and divided cabinet. The British war effort was often confused and sometimes in disarray, and O’Shaughnessy makes clear that this was a problem that began at the top.

The Howe brothers embodied the problem. General William Howe and Admiral Richard Howe were both members of Parliament who were sympathetic to the colonies and unsure about American policy before the war. Once the fighting began, they were sent to North America with dual roles, simultaneously holding military commands and appointments as peace commissioners. General Howe was an extremely capable commander-in-chief, yet his judgments were repeatedly clouded by miscalculations about both the strength of the colonies’ military forces, which he tended to underestimate, and the attitudes of its civilian population, which he assumed ran much more strongly toward loyalism than they did.

Nowhere was this fatal combination more evident than in Howe’s decision, in the summer of 1777, to march on Philadelphia rather than assisting Burgoyne’s attempt to capture the strategic corridor that ran from the St. Lawrence Valley up the Richelieu River and through Lakes Champlain and George into the Hudson Valley. No objective in the northern colonies was more vital than this corridor, control of which would have cut New England off from the colonies to the south and assured Britain of a secure line of communication between Canada and New York. Instead, Howe marched on Philadelphia and left Burgoyne to his own devices. He captured the city in late September, only a few weeks before Burgoyne was forced to surrender at Saratoga.

Burgoyne’s defeat made Howe’s decision appear tantamount to malfeasance and led to a Parliamentary inquiry into his conduct. But O’Shaughnessy contends that the lack of coordination between Howe and Burgoyne was the result of neither willful disregard of duty nor a breakdown in communication, so much as it derived from Howe’s unrealistic expectation that the two initiatives could succeed independent of each other.

Burgoyne has been one of the principal scapegoats for Britain’s military failure in North America for more than 200 years, but O’Shaughnessy rescues him from derision and allows us to see events unfold from the general’s perspective. Often caricatured as a vain aristocrat whose personal baggage nearly outweighed his regiment’s ordnance, Burgoyne, “the least aristocratic of the British commanders in America,” is shown by O’Shaughnessy to have been an enlightened and ambitious military reformer, progressive in his attitudes, insightful in his judgments, and successful in the field (124). Like Howe, his greatest mistake was to underestimate the popularity of the Revolutionary cause.

Another strength of the book is to illuminate forgotten or underappreciated dimensions of the Revolution. Thus, for example, O’Shaughnessy’s account of Germain’s attempt in 1779 to shift the theatre of the war to the Caribbean basin and to conquer Spain’s American colonies through a Central American campaign. Conceived and led by Major General John Dalling, the governor of Jamaica, the plan relied on the support of Miskito Indians and the deployment of irregular forces. Plagued by bad leadership and—literally—by tropical disease, the expedition collapsed and came to nothing, while diverting badly needed manpower and attention from the Gulf Coast, where Britain eventually surrendered West Florida to the Spanish (yellow fever and malaria crippled every European army that attempted to fight in the American tropics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as J. R. McNeill has brilliantly argued in Mosquito Empires).

In the end, O’Shaughnessy demonstrates that weak political leadership in London hamstrung British military leadership across the Atlantic, but also that the war effort failed “not as a result of incompetence and blundering, but because of insufficient resources, the unanticipated lack of loyalist support, and the popularity of the Revolution” (353). And he emphasizes that the war was far from a total loss: “The men who lost America were also the men who saved Canada, India, Gibraltar, and the British Caribbean” (361). Most of the men O’Shaughnessy profiles continued to play important roles in the army, in Parliament, and in imperial administration after the American war. None was more noteworthy than Cornwallis, who—after surrendering to Washington at Yorktown—succeeded Warren Hastings as governor general of Bengal, where he led an army of 20,000 to victory in the Third Mysore War. Then he served as lord lieutenant of Ireland and defeated an invading French army during the great rebellion of 1798.

Readers often have to choose between two unsatisfactory approaches to the military history of the American Revolution. Non-military historians tend to skate over the surface of events, providing too little detail to make the subject interesting or meaningful. Military historians are prone to err in the opposite direction while, with the aid of hindsight, criticizing every false step a war leader makes. The genius of this book lies in O’Shaughnessy’s sympathetic engagement with the experiences, aspirations, and shortcomings of his characters. He evinces no desire either to second-guess the decisions they made or to re-fight the battles of the Revolution to produce a different outcome. This is tragic history in the truest sense, an act of recovery and restoration that seeks to humanize an extraordinary cast of characters and do justice to the vast, complex, doomed effort to prevent American independence.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

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Eric Hinderaker is professor of history at the University of Utah. He is currently working on a history of the Boston Massacre.

Taking up the scurrilous charge—”ours has been a notably sermon-ridden literature from the beginning”—as a judicious assessment, Meredith Marie Neuman’s book Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England argues that all Puritan literature is a subset of the sermon. To understand Puritan literature requires a firm sense of sermon culture. This demands not so much a search for accurate content—what did ministers actually say given that we have no word for word transcriptions?—but a realignment of our scholarly questions to accord with the Puritan’s concern—how effectual were their words? Reorienting the study of the Puritan sermon around efficacy rather than accuracy shifts the axis of interpretation away from the print sermon as the gold standard and toward a nonlinear amalgam of manuscript, print, and oral practices that make up sermon culture. In so doing, ministerial control morphs into dispersed authorship, exegetical habits become genre conventions, and linguistic and spiritual fallibility break open into a promising debility.

Harry Stout first argued in his groundbreaking study The New England Soul (1986) that manuscript rather than print sermons provided a more accurate representation of the information ingested by the everyday Puritan (who clocked about 15,000 hours of sermon time in her lifetime). He reoriented a whole swath of scholarship that had relied on print sermons, which represented only a fraction of the sermons preached, by basing his arguments on the thematic content of an impressive assortment of manuscript sermons. Neuman returns to Stout’s insight to instigate another fundamental shift: hearing sermons helped create them. If we simply need to rely on more manuscript sermons after Stout, after Neuman we need to read them as part of an interactive sermon culture that includes an array of aural, textual, and material practices, in order to grasp, not the content, but the experience of the sermon as it circulated in New England and abroad. Neuman assembles a rich archive that she nimbly collates to approximate this sermon encounter at the moment of delivery and in its multiple afterlives. By situating herself firmly within the now-established approach to religion as lived experience, she naturally bridges book history and—what is the central contribution of her monograph—the study of Puritan aurality.

The book progresses through two main stages. The first reorients our sense of what sermons are and how we might read them, while the second investigates how the logic of the sermon undergirds all of Puritan literature. Chapter one destabilizes the sermon as a single-author genre that neither disappeared as it was spoken nor crystalized in print. Relying on what has been for some time a common understanding of authorship in studies of early modern England, Neuman establishes the eclectic and communal life of the American Puritan sermon as it moved through the nonlinear and permeable forms of oral, print, and manuscript. To read these texts that developed communally along circuitous routes one must recognize, Neuman argues, that the various forms are dialogically engaged.

But understanding, for instance, that the notes taken while listening to sermons are in conversation with the original delivery and with the eventual print version is one thing; figuring out how to read these documents is quite another. Anyone who has looked at these strange manuscripts knows (and there is a wonderful assortment of images within the book), auditor notes do not yield up their secrets easily. The primary strength of Neuman’s book lies in her perceptive and witty analysis of this common, yet largely unread, genre of manuscripts. She fleshes out a range of highly individualized notetaking practices and strategies and identifies three general paradigms for ease of classification: the structural auditor (the person who produces outlines according to sermon heads); the content auditor (the notetaker who focuses on units of meaning rather than relational logic); and the aural auditor (the listener who strives to transcribe the minister’s words verbatim). In doing so, she stresses both the subjective experience of hearing and the shared practices of aurality, which enables her to cull a wealth of information about the creation of the notes (for instance, most auditors wrote their notes in the meetinghouse and continued to work on them at home) and the sermon event (such as common changes in recording style at the end of sermons indicate that most sermons sped up at the end).

This balance of the individual and communal forms extends into the material analysis of the notebooks themselves. Neuman finds both distinct personalities (even in unsigned notes) and shared writing practices that engage both the spoken sermon and print. For example, an anonymous auditor, whom Neuman dubs “Voracious Auditor,” is an aural notetaker who captures the cadence and emotion of the sermon. For the skilled Harvard student John Chickering, content seems most important, which he highlights not only through his notetaking style but also in his meticulous index. The less skilled content auditor, the layman Michael Metcalfe, records sermons in a handmade book carefully crafted to resemble the oblong notebooks popular for auditing sermons. Though he appears to have had no formal training, he nonetheless proudly announces “my 2 vollum that I made of this Sort of Works,” a moment Neuman marks as his declaration that he is “a record keeper of self and community” (90). Most importantly for her argument, the taxonomy of auditor types remains flexible enough to demonstrate a common sermon culture while also claiming that each notetaker “authors his or her own aural experience” in a material book envisioned as a “unique, personal creation” (30).

But auditors not only produced their own books, they also crafted the notes that became the basis for the print version of the sermon. And, because the primary hope of the Puritan sermon was efficacy rather than accuracy, the aural experience they recorded transferred easily to the print form. Neuman’s third chapter traces the ways that aurality and its accompanying subjectivity became part of the formal structure of print sermons. The printed Puritan sermon is notoriously difficult for modern readers because of its unbalanced structure in which some points seem to branch out endlessly (typical of the Ramist style that the Puritans followed). Rather than a flaw, Neuman reads this as “a tacit grammar of strategic imperfection” produced by the energy of the structure—which she characterizes as a centrifugal force that sweeps up the minister, auditors, and readers in a dialogic form (114). It is this messy interplay between the words of the minister and the experience of the hearer that produces the lived truth or application of the sermon.

This productive in-between space becomes central for understanding Puritan literature and its most distinctive feature: bringing experience in line with revelation. Neuman explains in chapter four that, contrary to what we might expect, the belief in the fallibility of humans and their language enabled a flood of textual production. The excesses of plain style exegesis that everyday Puritans habituated, like scriptural collation, figurative reading, and, my favorite, text crumbling (a technique that broke the scriptural text into tiny parts—a word, a comma—for minute analysis), point not toward an unwavering literal reading of Scripture, but toward the creative work of the minister and lay person as they sought the divine word not just at the moment of delivery, but “in linguistic acts of enabled debility” that permeated all of sermon culture (172).

Neuman’s book concludes by moving outward from the specific practices of sermon culture to the multiple literary genres that it enabled. She finds poetry, for instance, the genre most conducive for the Puritan writer to explore linguistic failure and spiritual ability. Her last chapter, though, focuses on the conversion narrative, which she argues should not be understood as a burgeoning form of early autobiography, but as a subgenre of the sermon. Laity applied the habits of exegetical thought learned through listening to sermons to the narration of the soul. In Neuman’s hands, the secret experience of conversion (implicated in all the problems of scriptural exegesis and verging on antinomianism) lies at the center of the conversion narrative that “adapts the methodology of the sermon in order to narrate the unnarratable” (32). But, rather than celebrate Puritan individualism at the expense of community, Neuman’s methodology casts us right back into the interpenetrating forms of sermon literature and culture. It is not that the individual triumphs in salvation morphology (as a late evangelicalism might be described to do), but that the very instability of the language of the soul enables the believer to continue on an expanding exegetical project that cannot exist apart from this shared sermon culture.

Neuman’s book does not overstate its scope or its centrality to a matrix of intersecting disciplines. If anything, it undersells its importance to the history of the sermon, the book, the senses, studies of sentimentality, affect, aesthetics, and religious and American culture more broadly. This is in part because the book, though it fundamentally alters how we understand the genre of the sermon in relation to all other Puritan literature, does not take time to specifically engage these other conversations. Its tightly focused purpose keeps the textured archival materials at the center. Yet, at every turn, the materials Neuman elucidates unfold in multiple directions that will surely inspire conversation from a host of disciplinary perspectives. Like the metaphors Neuman uses for the sermon—a jazz riff, a centrifugal experience regulated by form—her book cannot help but continually push the reader beyond it. If the sermon as permeable, communal, and experiential text is the logic of Puritan literature, for which she makes a compelling case, Neuman’s book is necessary reading not only for every student of Puritanism but, given the longue durée of Puritan forms, every student of American literatures and religious cultures.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

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Wendy Raphael Roberts is an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany. She is working on a post-secular account of early American evangelical poetry.

Early Americanists have long acknowledged the contingent and mediated nature of our archives, and yet we cannot avoid producing truth claims based upon “proof” of past events. In early American Indian or Native Studies in particular, both our longing for authentic Native voices and our frequent reliance upon interpretations, translations, and transcriptions of oral or written speech amplify questions about access to the past. Perhaps this is why early Native Studies scholarship has recently turned toward the concrete object of the Native-authored book, the material evidence of the Native-authored manuscript, the traceable processes of print production and reproduction, the quantifiable indicators of Native literacy. Such scholarship has helped revise long-held assumptions that American Indians did not write, did not have histories, or did not contribute to the creation, distribution, and consumption of print materials. But in On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory, Andrew Newman reminds us that written records are only one piece of the evidentiary puzzle, and that historical consciousness does not require writing. Of course, Newman cannot abandon documentary evidence. But he explores the limits and possibilities of annals, archives, and histories by thinking through what such media as oral histories, anachronistic paintings, and dubious documents tell us about past communities. In the process, he offers a timely reminder about the desires tied up in scholarly approaches to records and representations.

Newman’s subject is memory practices among Delaware Indian and colonial European communities. He seeks to initiate dialogue between memory studies, a field usually focused on twentieth-century Europe, and Native Studies. He analyzes the recording, reception, and reproduction of four stories about the Lenni Lenape (Delaware Indians) told by various communities: colonial Delawares and their descendants, colonists, early historians, and contemporary scholars. At times, he calls his claims “farfetched.” But therein lies the power of the book: by focusing on memory rather than writing, Newman refreshingly embraces the uncertainty of all evidence and indulges in a sustained meditation on what that uncertainty means.

Newman begins with stories that raise questions about origins and time, citing two Lenape origin stories recorded by European settlers. The first story claims that the original man and woman sprouted from a tree on a turtle’s back. It takes place in what we might call “deep time,” the term literary scholar Wai Chee Dimock employs to describe a “cumulative history” of the world’s existence that exceeds the confines of nations, periods, and modern taxonomies. The second story, in contrast, indicates that the Lenape migrated to their current location in historical time. In chapter 1, “Lenape Annals,” Newman focuses on this contested second story that Moravian missionary John Heckewelder recorded and published in 1819 and that James Fenimore Cooper incorporated into The Last of the Mohicans (1826). During Cooper’s era some white Americans used the story to justify the displacement of Native communities: they claimed that Native Americans were in fact not native, but rather were recent arrivals to North America and, like Europeans, conquerors of an indigenous race.

This migration story also appears intriguingly in the Walam Olum, a manuscript that antiquarian and naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque claimed in 1833 to have “translated word for word” from etched Lenape cedar sticks. Newman is interested in “the fantasy of the Walam Olum,” the desires wrapped up in the reception of this controversial text from the early nineteenth century to the present (54). Although in 1994 David M. Oestreicher convincingly demonstrated the Walam Olum‘s inauthenticity as a Lenape document, Newman analyzes why it “has been repeatedly brought back from the brink of obscurity, retranslated, and republished” (27). The rejection of the Walam Olum, according to one of Newman’s Delaware sources, corresponds to a widespread “skepticism about native literacy,” while claims for the text’s credibility reveal a longing for authentic Native voices in writing (50).

Chapter 2, “An Account of a Tradition,” treats a Delaware oral tradition concerning the first Dutch colonists’ land acquisition in the New York area. According to the narrative, the colonists asked the Delawares for only as much land as a bull or an ox hide could cover. They then cut the hide into strips and claimed as much land as the strips could encircle, where they built a fort. This story, which corresponds to the classical tradition of Queen Dido’s acquisition of land for her citadel at Carthage, does not appear in primary source documents authored by Dutch colonists. Because of this lack of written evidence, scholars have omitted the story from “the history of New Netherland and early modern imperialism” (56). Yet the story appears in a number of sources from imperial contexts across the globe. Newman studies the story’s pattern of distribution and, by treating the oral tradition as history rather than folklore, argues that the hide trick became a “ceremony of possession” the Dutch employed to create imperial outposts. Newman repeatedly cautions that he has hardly “cinched” his case, and yet this chapter makes one of the book’s most compelling claims: that Native oral traditions tell us not only about Native histories but also about global imperial conquest and can be interpreted as literal accounts of colonial interaction. Newman’s hesitancy to solidify his claim ironically bespeaks a scholarly distrust of oral traditions, even as his book refutes this assumption and joins a host of Native Studies scholars who have demonstrated the crucial place of oral history in recovering the past.

Chapter 3, “The Most Valuable Record,” continues to think through the significance of oral tradition as it deals with Pennsylvania’s “civic myth”: the memory of William Penn’s treaty with the Delawares that supposedly took place underneath a “Great Elm” tree at the Indian village Shackamaxon in 1682 (20). Written records indicate that a treaty meeting occurred around that time, and no evidence contradicts the story. Yet because no treaty document exists, historians since the colonial era have doubted the popular tradition. Less conventional evidence of the treaty meeting includes paintings, wampum belts (Native communicative belts made of purple and white shell beads), and Delaware hunting practices. Newman’s approach to such evidence is invigorating. For instance, Benjamin West’s painting William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians When He Founded the Province of Pennsylvania in North America (1771-72) elevated the treaty story to mythical status with numerous embellishments and anachronisms. But Newman wants to consider the painting not as an inaccurate representation of a past event but as a “visual expression of an oral tradition” that flattens time, “making the past simultaneous with the present” (104). Indeed, both a Pennsylvanian and a Delaware oral tradition come under scrutiny in Newman’s analysis and contribute to the history of memory surrounding the Great Elm treaty. This methodological focus on the communicative traditions of various discourse communities offers a valuable alternative to simplistic Indian/white and oral/written dichotomies.

Chapter 4, “Writings and Deeds,” moves from the famous Elm treaty to the “infamous” Walking Purchase of 1737 (133). Pennsylvania Proprietors and Delawares agreed that the Delawares would grant William Penn a tract of land measured by a day and a half’s walk. The Proprietors liberally interpreted the terms of the treaty: they hired athletic walkers who, pushed to their limits, gained approximately 500,000 acres for Pennsylvania. Newman explores conflicts over memory between the Proprietors, Quakers, and Delawares that resulted from the Walking Purchase. For instance, during the French and Indian War, Delaware spokesman Teedyuscung used the volatile relationship between Quakers and Proprietors to contest the Walking Purchase in a series of treaty meetings. Teedyuscung chose Quakers for allies and suggested two “innovations in treaty protocol”: that his messages be composed in writing and read aloud, and that he have a clerk of his own “as a check against the official minutes and a proxy in the examination of documents” (168). Colonial leaders and Teedyuscung remained skeptical about one another’s sources throughout the meetings, not least because Teedyuscung’s insistence on literacy defied stereotypes of Indian oral communication. Today, documents surrounding the treaty meetings continue to present a puzzling combination of records.

As the previous paragraphs indicate, On Records amasses a startling number of exciting, under-studied records. Discussing stories of Lenapehoking, the traditional homeland of the Delaware, in his “Afterword,” Newman observes, “When memory, as opposed to the past, is the object of study, one cannot simply peel off layers to arrive at a primeval green” (187). Newman accumulates, rather than peels back, layers of memory; at times, however, one seeks a bit more “green” in the form of robust claims about the stakes of Newman’s analysis. For instance, in Chapter 1, why does Newman leave behind the Lenape origin story to focus on the Lenape migration story? These stories’ competing (or intriguingly cumulative) temporal registers raise important questions about periodization, a thorough discussion of which would surely contribute much to early American studies and to Native Studies. Moreover, although Newman deftly interweaves theoretical concepts from memory studies with the particularity of colonial history, I am not sure that memory studies offers Native Studies something new. Concepts like “language ideology,” the “insight that linguistic practices … are attended by value judgments and implications for the social order,” are certainly relevant to Native Studies but have long been taken for granted by Native Studies scholars, for whom language has always been a colonizing or liberating force (8). That said, the memory studies approach productively unsettles commonplace scholarly assumptions about colonial documents. If sifting through On Records‘ layers of memory for a glimpse of “green” can become dizzying, the value of doing so lies in Newman’s fresh approach to records that embraces both the missing past and the process of remembering as history.

In Founders and Finance, the late Thomas McCraw provides biographies of the first U.S. Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and of Albert Gallatin, the first Jeffersonian-Republican to hold the post. The two biographies also narrate the political history of the United States during the quarter-century from September 11, 1789, when Hamilton became treasury secretary, to February 8, 1814, when Gallatin, who had served under Jefferson and Madison, stepped down en route to Europe to help negotiate the treaty ending the War of 1812. In fourteen chapters on Hamilton and thirteen on Gallatin (and in four somewhat-redundant concluding chapters), McCraw makes two principal arguments: (1) that Hamiltonian finance saved the country from the recession that followed the Revolutionary War and then paved the way for the economic boom of the nineteenth century, and (2) that much of the credit for the early republic’s financial success is owed to immigrants: not just Hamilton (who grew up on St. Croix) and Gallatin (who was born in Geneva), but Robert Morris (the Liverpool native who was in effect secretary of the treasury during the first four years of the Articles of Confederation, 1781 to 1784) and two of Gallatin’s antebellum successors.

McCraw’s claim that immigrants were somehow uniquely poised to instruct the native-born in the mysteries of finance is sure to encounter skepticism. Hamilton certainly did not come to America from some sophisticated financial hub, and McCraw found no evidence that Gallatin learned anything about finance in Geneva before striking out for America in 1780. Moreover, if Atlantic history has taught us anything, it is that ideas and even know-how can cross oceans and continents with or without human hosts. Still, some of McCraw’s statistics give one pause:

During the first fifty years under the Constitution, only six cabinet secretaries were immigrants—and five of these six served as Secretary of the Treasury (2).

Whereas “four of the first six secretaries of the treasury were born overseas” (3), only two of the next sixty-seven (now seventy) were.

Maybe there is something to McCraw’s assertion that American immigrants tend to identify with their nation rather than their state. Certainly Hamilton and Gallatin were not as devoted to New York and Pennsylvania as, say, Adams was to Massachusetts or Jefferson was to Virginia. But of course Washington, who never left the British empire before 1776 or the United States afterwards, was as nationalist as his treasury secretary, and Franklin prided himself on being a citizen of the world.

It also remains unclear how Hamilton’s and Gallatin’s status as immigrants made them better financiers. McCraw’s notion that “Being rootless themselves, they were better able to appreciate the intrinsic rootlessness of money” (6) ignores their many contemporaries who understood the fluidity of money without traveling very far (and the many migrants whom money mystified). One thing McCraw does prove is that these two immigrants were perceived as different by many of their contemporaries, especially by their political enemies, who tried to use their foreign birth against them. For example, Henry Clay insisted that Gallatin was “at heart an alien” (321), and John Adams once called Hamilton “a bastard and as much a foreigner as Gallatin” (217). Perhaps all those years of being treated differently eventually caused Hamilton and Gallatin to act differently, if only to confound their adoptive countrymen’s expectations.

After the remarkable migration claims in McCraw’s introduction, Part I, his biography of Hamilton, comes as something of an anti-climax. Little additional evidence is offered for the immigrant-financiers thesis. Nor does McCraw supply much in the way of other original claims. On the other hand, his 165-page version of the Hamilton story is beautifully crafted and a real pleasure to read. If you are not sure you will ever make it through Ron Chernow’s acclaimed but 800-page Hamilton biography, you will find most of the highlights here.

Part I of Founders and Finance may be most significant as yet another milepost on the road to Hamilton’s rehabilitation—and, it would seem, his impending apotheosis. No one is more devoted to Hamilton than Robert E. Wright, the Nef Family Chair of Political Economy at Augustana College, who wrote “Alexander Hamilton Was” on his first-born son’s birth certificate so that his full name would be Alexander Hamilton Was Wright. But Wright is by no means alone in believing that Hamilton saved the country with his unique grasp of high finance, and that perspective permeates every page of Founders and Finance.

Like other modern-day Hamiltonians, McCraw assumes that James Madison’s 1790 proposal to make bond speculators split Congress’s largesse with the original holders of their bonds—the soldiers and suppliers whose sacrifices had won the war—would have done irreparable harm to the federal government’s credit rating (even though Congress did essentially repudiate the Continental currency, without ill effects). In true neo-Hamiltonian fashion, McCraw suggests that the notorious Funding Act of 1790 paid bond speculators less than they deserved—only two-thirds of the value of their bonds. Actually, Congress replaced the principal of each investor’s war bonds with two new bonds—one, in the amount of two-thirds of the original bond, paying 6 percent interest immediately, and another, equal to one third of the original bond, on which the 6 percent interest would kick in ten years later. (A third security compensated the bondholder for back interest.)

McCraw mentions his hero’s affair with Maria Reynolds, but he cannot resist the temptation to ascribe it, in part, to “[t]he extreme pressure” on Hamilton “from continuous opposition by figures as formidable as Jefferson and Madison” (119). Is this any different from Newt Gingrich’s famous declaration that his own adultery was partly “driven by how passionately I felt about this country”?

My one big beef with the Hamilton devotees (and I am not just talking here about Professor McCraw—who, sadly, did not live to participate in the ongoing debate over his book—but about the whole congregation) is their blithe assumption that Hamilton’s economic principles can be divorced from his elitism. Aren’t they actually two halves of the same walnut? By 1789, when he took over the treasury, Hamilton was convinced that the major problem confronting the nation was that the state assemblies had defrauded the holders of government securities—those issued by Congress as well as those given out by the state governments. (Before the Constitution gave Congress the power to levy taxes, federal bondholders could be paid only out of congressionally requisitioned state funds.) The new treasury secretary was sure he knew why the state governments had left bondholders in the lurch: they were too susceptible to pressure from their farmer constituents. That explains why Hamilton had famously advocated for an elective king and for life terms for members of the upper house of Congress at the Constitutional Convention in 1787: he did not trust ordinary American voters.

Perhaps if the Hamilton biographers devoted more scrutiny to his elitism, they would end up explicitly arguing what they implicitly assume: that the secretary’s depiction of American farmers as selfish and irresponsible was spot-on accurate. But maybe they would at least be willing to acknowledge that there was an alternative explanation for the terrible recession that (by all accounts) afflicted the United States between the Peace of Paris in 1783 and the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. Anti-Hamilton economists blamed the post-war downturn not on the thirteen state governments’ eagerness to relieve the distress of debtors and taxpayers, but on something like the opposite of that: state legislators’ initial determination to lay heavy taxes—on average three or four times higher than what their colonial counterparts had levied—primarily for the benefit of government bondholders. These high taxes were accompanied by deflationary monetary policies, and the thirteen state assemblies were widely accused of having taxed the economy into recession. If this alternative analysis is correct, then Hamilton had things exactly backwards: local legislators had wrecked the economy not through slavish devotion to their farmer constituents, but by ignoring them.

The most eloquent modern explication of this alternative perspective on the economic crisis that led to the Constitution is Terry Bouton’s 2007 Taming Democracy, but at least one bit of evidence in support of this populist rejoinder comes from a surprising source: Hamilton himself. Economic and political elitists such as Hamilton viewed paper currency as the classic device by which state assemblymen allowed taxpayers as well as debtors to escape their obligations. So it comes as no surprise that as a New York state representative, he fought doggedly against a 1786 proposal to ease the state’s monetary crisis with an emission of paper money. The currency was nonetheless printed, amid warnings from Hamilton and others that it was sure to depreciate. In February 1787, Hamilton acknowledged that “The event has, however, turned out otherwise.” New York’s paper money had held its value. Hamilton’s gracious acknowledgement that he had been wrong about the New York currency emission did not cause him to reconsider his elitist economic and political worldview, but I wish it would provoke some reevaluation from his modern-day fans.

Early in Founders and Finance, McCraw sets up an interesting bit of tension that kept me turning pages. He makes it clear that he admires both Hamilton and Gallatin. But how can he, given that they were, respectively, the first treasury secretaries of the bitterly opposed Federalist and Jeffersonian-Republican parties? The tension is resolved in the second part of the book, where we learn that while Gallatin was of course much more Jeffersonian than the first treasury secretary, he was a lot more Hamiltonian than his fellow Jeffersonians. McCraw repeatedly shows Gallatin schooling Jefferson and then Madison in Hamiltonian economics. For instance, Gallatin surpassed both of the presidents he served in his willingness to spend money developing the West, notably with internal improvements. Jefferson thought he needed a constitutional amendment to build national roads—and also to buy New Orleans (and then all of Louisiana) from Napoleon. But in both cases, Gallatin provided the Hamiltonian advice (to which Jefferson eventually acceded, at least in these two arenas) that the president should just interpret the existing Constitution loosely. Gallatin once informed “a disappointed Jefferson” that Hamilton “did nothing wrong” (232). When McCraw is forced to choose between his two subjects—say, when Gallatin criticizes Hamilton’s Report on Public Credit (1790)—he almost always sides with Hamilton.

For many readers, the most significant difference between these two figures is that Gallatin is much less well known, and I suspect the second part of Founders and Finance will likely acquire more dog-ears and yellow highlighting than the first. I for one did not know that Gallatin had composed a Table of Indian Languages of the United States in 1826. And I was astonished to learn that he once proposed to Thomas Jefferson that he fill some positions in his administration with women. (“The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I,” the president of course replied [230].) Founders and Finance is unlikely to provoke a wholesale reevaluation of either Hamilton or Gallatin, but it brims with surprising facts such as these.

 

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly.

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British Virginia blog: http://wp.vcu.edu/britishvirginia/

British Virginia digital editions: https://digarchive.library.vcu.edu/handle/10156/3585

In 1775, on the eve of the American War of Independence, Patrick Henry delivered his famous “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia. Henry’s speech, reenacted at St. John’s every Sunday afternoon in the summer months, has long been remembered as a central event in the narrative of Virginia’s role in the founding of a new nation. However, at Virginia Commonwealth University, a scant two and a half miles from St. John’s Church, the British Virginia series seeks to complicate this history by drawing renewed attention to the literary connections which bound Virginia to Great Britain before, during, and even after the transition from colony to state in an independent nation.

Launched this past spring by general editors Joshua Eckhardt and Sarah Hand Meacham, both of Virginia Commonwealth University, British Virginia is an open-access, digital, academic publisher dedicated to documents relating to the colony. As a “born-digital” press, British Virginia is able to publish smaller texts which would not otherwise be issued as traditional, paper-bound scholarly editions. In this respect, the project of British Virginia is similar to initiatives such as Scholarly Editing‘s series of “small-scale” digital editions. In both cases, the editors use digital publication platforms to draw attention to important texts which were heretofore available only in archival collections or on microfilm.

Although British Virginia is a digital resource, it has chosen to follow a traditional textual model in terms of how it presents its editions. Where Scholarly Editing focuses on publishing online editions which provide access to multiple versions and editions of a single text, British Virginia provides its users with free, downloadable scholarly editions of its texts complete with ISBN numbers. While the former, and many current digital humanities publishing projects, is meant to be viewed online, British Virginia‘s editions are intended to be downloaded to the user’s computer and read offline, or even printed—a welcome feature for those of us who compulsively annotate, underline, and highlight our texts as we read.

There are two parts to the British Virginia project. The “front door” of the project, as it were, is the British Virginia blog. Authored by Joshua Eckhardt, the blog is fashioned as a source of information broadly related to the project. So, in addition to the expected information on the series editors and forthcoming publications, the blog contains notices of upcoming conferences (“Place and Preaching, 6-7 September 2013) and contemporary art installations (Xu Bing’s Tobacco Project) related to the series. The project blog also contains a prominent link soliciting proposals for future contributions to the British Virginia series. As this is a young series, it is to be assumed that the project editors are eager to expand their offerings, and the proposal page casts a wide net by encouraging proposals “for scholarly editions related to colonial Virginia.”

As the project just launched, there are still some rough edges to the British Virginia blog. While the “People” link lists the editor and advisors of the series, it provides no information about who these people are, a curious omission in a digital publishing enterprise. Also, while the blog seems to feature some interesting images of colonial Virginia documents (hosted by Flickr), the site lacks an easy way for users to navigate to the images as the link for the photo stream is at the bottom of the page next to the ubiquitous “like” button for Facebook. These tiny glitches seem to be natural hiccups in the launching of any major academic or institutional blog and will, no doubt, be addressed in the weeks to come.

Once past the front door, the home of the documents published in the series is the British Virginia collection in the Virginia Commonwealth University Digital Archive. Here, you can find the initial editions published by British Virginia. As British Virginia launched only this past spring, right now this consists of William Symonds’s 1609 text Virginia, “a sermon preached at White-Chappel in the presence of many, Honorable and Worshipful, the Adventurers and Planters for Virginia.” The Symonds sermon, edited by Joshua Eckhardt, is the first in the British Virginia‘s sub-series “Virginia Company Sermons,” a collection of sermons preached to and printed for the Virginia Company of London during the initial years of the colony.

While I initially thought that there were currently two Symonds sermons in the British Virginia collection, the VCU Digital Archive contains separate entries for two versions of the same sermon: a digital type facsimile and a searchable, photographic facsimile. The type facsimiles, while using a modern type (no long s, greater readability), reproduce original spelling, line breaks, page numbers, signatures, and overall page layout. While the digital type facsimile will meet the needs of the vast majority of the edition’s users, specialists and highly motivated readers can consult the photographic facsimile to verify the accuracy of the type edition (fig 1).

As you can see in figure 1, the type facsimile does an excellent job of reproducing the look and feel of the original sermon, even including the idiosyncratic spacing surrounding punctuation marks in the original text. While both versions are keyword searchable, in practice I think even specialist users will spend most of their time with the type facsimiles due to their greater readability (and, in particular, the heightened contrast provided by black text on a white background).

The use of PDF format as opposed to some sort of embedded viewer may rankle some due to file sizes (the photographic facsimile clocked in at 58 MB) and the limitations of the format (no comparing versions of a text as would be the case with a dynamic web site). But the reliance on PDF documents seems appropriate given that the texts contained in British Virginia are presented as digital editions of these works, and the PDF files here mimic the finiteness of traditional paper editions. Moreover, the choice to present these documents in PDF format eliminates the need to install browser plug-ins and ensures that the editions in British Virginia can be read on a wide variety of platforms including iPads and tablet PCs.

A very welcome feature of the project is the decision to copyright British Virginia editions under a Creative Commons (CC) “Attribution-ShareAlike” license. As opposed to the “all rights reserved” model of traditional copyright, CC licenses are “some rights reserved.” In the case of British Virginia, users are free to republish and even to modify the texts in the series as long as they attribute the source text to British Virginia and license the results under the same CC “Attribution-ShareAlike” license. Moreover, in the introduction, the editors explicitly encourage libraries to catalogue and to download their editions: “[We] simply ask that you help us widen and preserve access to these important sources by re-producing and storing them, whether on hard drives, other discs, or acid-free paper.” This is open-access scholarship at its best and is a model that will hopefully be adopted by more university presses and scholarly journals in the future.

As the documents in British Virginia are at their core scholarly editions, each is prefaced by an editor’s introduction. In the case of the Symonds sermon, both the type and the facsimile editions contain Joshua Eckhardt’s thorough introduction to the British Virginia project as a whole, the “Virginia Company Sermons” sub-series, and the Symonds sermon in particular. This is a traditional scholarly introduction: well-researched, heavily footnoted, and concluding with a technical bibliographic description of the documents consulted in the preparation of the edition.

The British Virginia series represents an ideal venue for re-examining the tangled ties between England and one of its most important colonies. In addition to the Virginia Company sermons, forthcoming editions will include the letters of Elizabeth Jacqueline Ambler (1765-1847), edited by Sarah Hand Meacham, and a collection of Virginia slave narratives, edited by Katherine Clay Bassard. That this series of well-edited, scholarly editions is licensed under a Creative Commons license and made freely available to any and all users will serve, we can hope, as a model to future digital presses. British Virginia promises to be a useful resource for researchers and students of Virginia, colonial history, and transatlantic relations during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

Decades of scholarship on liberalism and the legacy of the American Revolution have made two things clear about the liberal state. First, the liberty, individual rights, rights to property, and equality under the law theoretically guaranteed by the liberal state were not distributed evenly throughout its population. A combination of historically specific circumstances and inequalities inherent to the way liberal thinkers conceived of rights functioned to ensure that white men, especially propertied white men, were the primary beneficiaries of liberalism in America. Second, even for the people whose rights the liberal state recognized and protected, liberalism could be a profoundly coercive system. Coercion, far from being antithetical to the liberal conception of freedom, was often necessary to secure it.

Mark Kann’s impressive new work on the policing of sex in the early republic highlights both of these facets of American liberalism. Kann’s central contention is that the liberal legacy of the American Revolution did not displace older forms of patriarchal authority. On the contrary, patriarchal authority adapted itself to liberalism, becoming a central means of preserving and protecting the new liberal state. Using the policing of sexuality as his lens, Kann analyzes the ways in which the liberal state and its (male) agents continued to exercise police powers that originated in the right of men to maintain order in their households.

Kann’s first two chapters analyze the sources of civic leaders’ and state officials’ authority to police sex. Drawing on Markus Dubber’s argument regarding police power’s origins in privileges granted to the Roman pater familias, Kann argues that the colonial notion that all sovereignty originated in the rights of fathers paved the way for the state to exercise police powers similar to those reserved for heads of household. Just as fathers had a nearly unchecked authority to discipline their subordinates in order to preserve the welfare of their households, the state had far-ranging authority to discipline its subjects to preserve the public welfare. While Lockean liberalism rejected a unified origin of sovereignty and the American Revolution fostered a sense of distrust in patriarchal order, neither eliminated the use of metaphors of fatherhood to explain and legitimize political authority. Kann argues that the persistence of such metaphors, combined with Lockean philosophy’s allowances for the state to supersede individual rights to preserve the public good, allowed for the preservation of police powers under the liberal state. So long as patriarchal authority was “packaged with sufficiently large infusions of paternalistic caring for the public welfare,” it continued to be acceptable and even appealing to post-Revolutionary generations (33).

Why did authorities feel the need to apply police powers to sex? Kann argues in his third chapter that American liberal thought emphasized the need to restrain passions, not just for the sake of avoiding individual enslavement to desire, but also for the sake of the public good. Kann posits that failure to control sexual desire or to express it through proper (marital) channels was dangerous in the context of post-revolutionary America because patriarchal order was foundational to liberalism. Patriarchal families shaped men into self-regulating citizens of the republic who had a stake in the political system: “If traditional patriarchal family order were secured, fathers and sons would be more likely to invest liberty in virtue” (61). Behavior that destabilized the patriarchal family order threatened the young nation’s political order and, indeed, its very existence. As such, Kann argues, patriarchs at the household and state level had the duty to utilize coercive and arbitrary authority to police sex for the sake of preserving liberty.

Chapters four and five examine how authorities exercised that power. Covering ground that will be familiar to readers of his previous work, Kann draws heavily on the contrasting experiences of men and women in prisons to highlight the relationship of the sexes to the state. Kann’s analysis suggests that prison was a microcosm of broader trends in sexual regulation. When men’s familiar indoctrination into self-restraint failed, prisons overseen by (ideally) paternalistic guards stepped in to forcibly instill sexual restraint as a means of restoring prisoners to liberty. When women strayed from the path of virtue, the situation was trickier. The duty and authority to police women generally fell to family patriarchs rather than the state, which intervened only when the patriarchal household order failed. When such a breakdown occurred, however, penitentiaries designed to restore liberal citizenship were at a loss in terms of how to deal with female inmates, who had no citizenship to restore and no men to legitimately assert sex-right over them.

The complications involved in regulating women’s sexuality informs Kann’s penultimate chapter on the policing of prostitution. For Kann, the state’s anemic efforts to police prostitution were emblematic of the low priority it placed on actually applying its police powers to sex. Kann, echoing William Novak, argues that the state made explicit and largely uncontested claims regarding its right to regulate morality. Yet, Kann argues, the state exercised that right sparingly, and largely tolerated commercial sex despite the problems it posed. Kann speculates on a number of explanations for this, but the most compelling is that the degree to which male sex-right and financial interests were interwoven with the sex trade made it a risky target of sustained attack. The liberal state, after all, relied on consent to legitimize its nascent authority. Kann argues convincingly that this led the state to be pragmatic in its approach to regulating sex, lest police power come under sustained challenge.

Kann’s book will be of interest to historians of sexuality, though at times Kann’s conception of what constituted the regulation of sex and how that regulation was carried out is reminiscent of the repressive hypothesis. Because he is primarily concerned with patriarchal and state authority, Kann’s analysis focuses more on—to borrow language from Foucault—power with the king than power without. There is nothing inherently problematic in this approach, but it is somewhat limited in that it provides a much clearer view of negative forms of sexual regulation (e.g. “You mustn’t do X“) than positive ones (e.g. “Doing Y is healthy and fulfilling”). Kann does acknowledge at many points in his text that non-state authorities—patriarchal, medical, or otherwise—deployed discourses of normative sexuality in an attempt to shape men’s and women’s sexual behaviors. Yet, his attempts to gauge the extent of sexual regulation in the nineteenth-century seldom acknowledge these figures (Kann claims at one point that “elites showed considerable circumspection when actually applying the power of culture and the power of the state to monitor and regulate people’s sex lives” [5]). That Kann does not devote more attention to positive attempts to regulate sex is something of a missed opportunity, as it would have allowed him to acknowledge more fully that policing sex was the project of a broader array of people than elites and patriarchs. Positive regulation could and did take place in everyday interactions, among those who lacked the formal political authority or right to punish that negative regulation required. Conceiving of the regulation of sex as an activity that diverse groups of people participated and invested in might have helped Kann in his attempts to grapple with why Americans generally consented to the state’s policing of sex. It also may have pointed to why the state so rarely deployed its police power in matters of sex—namely, that it was not the central or primary agent in the diffuse process of regulating sexuality.

This issue aside, however, Kann’s work is provocative and compelling in its take on the relationship between sex and the liberal state. Kann begins his book by asserting that citizens in an emergent liberal society might have expected a “wall of separation” guarding something so “very personal, private, and meaningful” as their sexual experimentation and sexual lives (21). What his analysis makes clear, however, is not only how unlikely it would have been for the post-revolutionary generations to hold or sustain that view, but also how difficult it remains to do so now. Kann argues in his final chapter that the American state continues to exercise nearly unchallenged patriarchal authority to police sex. Whether or not one agrees with this characterization, Kann’s analysis vividly illustrates how complicated issues of sexual regulation remain. Even if Americans deny that the state has the right to regulate sex, sex is so interwoven with issues of interest to the state—crime, reproduction, family, and economy—that it is difficult to imagine that its de facto regulation could ever be eliminated without a profound reevaluation of the foundations of liberal governmentality.

Overall, Kann’s work is a must-read for both specialists and those looking for an introduction to issues of sex, law, and the state. Kann’s analysis of the theoretical and legal basis upon which the state policed sex is sophisticated and nuanced in a way that rewards close reading. His thesis is convincing, and Kann draws from an impressive array of secondary works on philosophy, political science, and social, cultural, and legal history to make his claims. The synthesis of such a diverse array of scholarship is a feat, and Kann accomplishes it in a way that powerfully asserts the importance of scholarship on sexuality, gender, and family to our understanding of law and the American state.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 14.1.5 (November, 2013).

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Katie Hemphill is a PhD candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University, and is completing a dissertation on commercial sex and regulation in nineteenth-century Baltimore.

 

Read Statement on Poetic Research for Two Pieces

 

Cape Cod 1837 [found document: obituary]

Jan 19, 1837, Barnstable County Archives

Died at the Almshouse in this town, Mr. Thomas GREENOUGH, aged 90. The last of the tribe of Indians which in this town have been struggling to keep alive the ashes of their nationality since the first withering influence of the white man was felt upon these shores.

In noticing the death of this venerable specimen of aboriginal simplicity, we are reminded once more of the painful and melancholy fate of that race of men, whose freedom once was boundless as their forests, and whose harmless pride towered aloft in haughty resolution of importance and power.

The few miserable natives who have survived till the present time are the diminutive samples of nations once mighty in battle, sage in the counsel of whatever permeated to the administration of uncivilized governments, and cunning in all the wiles of savage diplomacy.

There are specimens of other nations among whom once was found all that was known or can be conceived of intelligence, of refinement, of honor, and of grandeur in this half of the world. As relics, then, of time past, as living records of our country’s history, they are interesting to us; and well may we exercise our feelings of sympathy, as we witness their council fires fading and being put out, one after another, leaving us to grope about in the uncertain twilight of traditions, or in the utter darkness of song.

But aside from the fact of being the last of his race, Mr. GREENOUGH was a curious and in many respects, a wonderful man. We doubt if many, or even any, of our citizens laboring under the same disadvantages would have displayed more wisdom and good sense than he evinced on many occasions. Endowed with an uncommon share of penetration and capable of a just appreciation of rights, he wore, through the last year of his life, the title of “Lawyer.”

He displayed in the management of the business, such tact and skill as few of more pretentions or statesmanship would have blushed to own. He read much, thought more; and though always supplying himself with such wild productions as he found upon what he called and believed to be his own territory, but the legal seizing of which unfortunately was the home of his white neighbors—he has gone, we hope, where he has free course in those hunting grounds where “the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.”

Farris Windmill, South Yarmouth, Massachusetts

He painted his initials in black inside the windmill,
my great grandfather times five,
Thomas Greenough, who would come
to be known as the last surviving Indian in this town,
hand on the inner wall beside the winding
staircase, the beams and tower, overlook:
“T.G.” and the date “1782,”
on one of its massive oak posts,
though the windmill was sold,
collected, and now stands next
to the oldest post office, vanes
raised like arms, canvas hooked in a shroud.
Thomas helped to lift the windmill
with forty yoke of oxen,
move it from West to South
years before it was given to the father
of modern assembly on his eightieth
birthday by a group of automotive dealers,
dismantled and shipped to the Henry Ford Museum
in Dearborn, Michigan, the oldest windmill
on Cape Cod, with his name inside it like a letter.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

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Kelle Groom is a poet and memoirist. Her memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (2012) is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a Library Journal Best Memoir, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor’s Pick. She is the author of three poetry collections: Five Kingdoms, Luckily (2010), and Underwater City (2004). Her work has appeared in AGNI, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, James Merrill Writer-in-Residence Program, Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Library of Congress, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Ucross Foundation. Her awards include a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose, as well as a state of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs grant, two Florida Book Awards, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant. Recently distinguished writer-in-residence at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, she is now on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program. She is currently at work on her second memoir, The Cartographer’s Assistant, and her fourth poetry collection, Letter from Aphrodite.

In his sweeping new study of the useful rise and moral fall of the American corporation, Robert E. Wright has simultaneously provided a timely means to help us understand the corporate form and corporate behavior, a scathing account of evolving corporate ills and abuses, and a preliminary prescription for their reform. In doing so Wright demonstrates just how, in the matter of corporate governance, history can be Americans’ best teacher. Corporation Nation traces the life of the corporate form in America from colonial times to the recent financial debacles of 2007-2009 to show how American corporations have transformed from governable local enterprises into unwieldy, ungovernable entities that have reached a nadir in public opinion and confidence.

In the late eighteenth century, “[C]orporations were not merely a convenient means of improving economic efficiency and living standards,” Wright explains, “they were often indispensable to those lofty goals because they provided unique ways for people to cooperate” (7). The ratification of the Constitution in 1789 spurred an explosion of state-chartered corporations. Americans were not subject to “predatory government[s]” like the inhabitants of the world’s poorer countries, so they “eagerly sought to create wealth because they were assured that they could keep the fruits of their hard work and acumen” (25). Corporations “lifted overall living standards,” and the “poor also benefited, primarily when they purchased low cost goods,” from corporations which did not wield monopolistic market power (7). In fact, many “low income individuals also received wages from corporations” (8). As the corporate form became more ubiquitous in the new nation, however, it gave rise to an anti-corporate sentiment. Wright traces this critique to the influential writings of no less than Adam Smith himself, who despised corporations because “[T]hey skewed incentives in ways that caused or perpetuated inefficiencies” (28).

Early national American corporations typically provided or performed important local functions or services that benefitted discrete communities. Their impact on local economic growth enticed local investment and interest. When annual shareholder meetings and elections were held by these locally based corporations, attendance was high, information about corporate performance was readily evident, and shareholders were able to act as involved proprietors of the operation. This arrangement encouraged corporate accountability as elected directors (ideally heavily invested in the venture) became answerable to stockholders who could voice their opinions and enforce change on directors, or even vote them out if they felt that corporate affairs were being poorly managed. This system of corporate governance, which predominated in the antebellum era, worked best, in Wright’s opinion. In tandem with growing market competition, it forced corporations (the successful ones, at least) to do right (or at least try to do right) by their shareholders.

Scholars of the early republic (particularly those studying the Jacksonian era) cite rising anti-corporate sentiment as a motive force in America’s partisan political development. Wright insists however that “critics of corporations were in earnest but were probably not as numerous or as strident as some historians seem to believe.” Republican traditions made Americans wary of any institutions that could potentially threaten their liberties. Yet Americans recognized that properly governed corporations not only “proved incapable of reinstating tyranny [but] by strengthening the nation’s economy they helped ensure continued American independence.” Rather than prevent the rise of corporations, Americans allowed them “to proliferate and check one another through competition” (46). State governments chartered corporations in increasing numbers, securing both needed revenue streams and firepower for their economic competition with rival states. Wright emphasizes that the Jacksonians’ regulation of corporations indicates their anti-monopolism, which he believes too many scholars conflate with anti-corporatism. Public opinion, explosive economic growth, and jealous state legislatures would not countenance the abolition of corporations. Recent scholarship by John Majewski has made clear the widespread level of small-holding in corporate shares that also tied the public interest to corporate success. Competition and good internal governance were the keys to insuring that the public’s interest in corporations was served and that the interests of shareholders, large and small, were protected.

However, by the mid-nineteenth century, the most productive American corporations became larger, more powerful, and more numerous. As the national economy grew in terms of scope, integration, and GDP, American securities markets increasingly reflected these trends and shareholding became even more widespread and more geographically dispersed. A trend toward lower share prices in secondary markets and the increasing desirability of portfolio diversification resulted in greater numbers of stockholders; “the cost was weaker governance” (99). Corporate managers took advantage of the geographical diffusion of shareholding to concoct various unsavory means by which to make voting inconvenient or impossible for many shareholders, or to simply buy or rig votes. Soon enough, “the inability of stockholders to eliminate fraud and other forms of governance failure opened the way for increased state-centered regulation,” which eventually “proved itself to be more costly and less responsive than stockholder governance” (173). One of several reasons state regulation proved so ineffective, Wright argues, was that U.S. senators and state legislators could be bought just as easily as corporate directors or anyone else. Hence, railroads and other trusts proved adept at shaping the course of regulatory legislation so that its effects fell most heavily on their smaller competitors. During the years between the Civil War and World War I, the geographic diffusion of stockholding in mega-corporations made it easier for a rising class of entrenched executives to ride roughshod over corporate decision-making. Boards of directors that formerly ran businesses in trust for attentive stockholders rubber-stamped the initiatives of overpaid managers whose prime interest was personal aggrandizement. The long-developing separation of ownership and control was nearly complete as “stockholders came to be seen as annoyances rather than owners” and even “selective disclosure of corporate information slowly died” (195).

Wright concludes with a look at the recent financial meltdown and an attempt to shake modern Americans from their complacency. Wright tells us that “much of the recent debate about corporations” sees Americans in two camps debating whether corporations should focus on being more profitable for shareholders, or more socially redemptive. The ideological parameters of this debate, according to Wright, animate our culture to such a degree that we miss the central point and thereby enable uncontrollable executives because it “helps deflect attention from the real problem: their complete control of most large, publicly traded corporations” (217). Americans’ preoccupation with associating concepts such as ninety-nine percent and one percent with partisan brand names deepens the problem. Nature abhors a vacuum, and as the polity continues to divide over ideologically charged issues, power further concretizes in corporate boardrooms. Wright clearly sees these mavericks as the problem and he ends his book by proposing six steps that government, boards of directors, and stockholders must take to rehabilitate the American corporation and return it to a governable state that will restore public confidence and benefit the American economy. “U.S. corporate governance is broken,” Wright confirms, “and corporations are too economically important not to fix” (219). Academics whose retirement plans hinge upon the performance of their CREF stock would do well to take note. Historians of the early republic who have come to know Jacksonian-era bankers and their ilk as villains, may (or may not) be surprised to learn that what Wright views as the good corporate governance principles of the antebellum era, along with the earliest state-level regulatory reforms, offer the best models from which we should learn and proceed.

Corporation Nation is a fine piece of business history scholarship that acknowledges politics, ideology, and political culture, but often in a passing manner that many readers may find dissatisfying. The brand of politics with which Wright is concerned is the internal politics—or governance structure—of the corporation itself and its relationship to its constituents, or shareholders. He is well at home with his subject and ably conveys sometimes difficult economic and business concepts in very clear terms. Early republic scholars concerned with the relationships between the states and their corporations, or who work with seemingly obtuse business documents and correspondence, will find this book a valuable tool for understanding how and why corporations operated. Moreover, more than one contemporary legislator or political candidate might benefit from this volume. It is a timely scholarly exposition of how specific conditions allowed for corporate wrongdoing to arise, and what Americans might do, while there is time, to try to right the ship.

 

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

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Richard Demirjian Jr. is instructor of history and associate director of the Rutgers Leadership Institute at Rutgers University-Camden. He is currently preparing his first book manuscript detailing the impact of liberal economic thought and Revolutionary ideology on the entrepreneurial and policy choices of citizens in smaller states and their port cities between 1783 and the 1830s.

Garments

Come closer.
Now the vast dusk recedes

toward the far reaches
of our remembrances.

This dust that I adore
was once a girl.           

Her face a haze
romanced by many a long winter.

Eyes trellised in stone,
laughingly dashed with blonde.

Mad filaments, bridled—
stucco’d with birds, all over.

 

Resurrectionists loiter as our nimble ghost
casts off her weathered garments.

The grave cannot halt her magic.

Death warrants aren’t meant to be believed.
Not entirely.    Not at first.

Such hardy animals, humans.
Blind sleepers, all the same.

Dauntless, her sylvan form descends,
bright-eyed and elastic with love.

Capture is a form of kindness,
so habit yourself to the dazzle

of her glossy limbs
                adrift in loam,

her uncut hair
                threaded with moss.

 

We are not so different, yet,
that we cannot wear each other’s clothes.

What’s left of me is only her,
                effaced.

Appalachian origin fades to ornament—

grass-stained in transference,
                a girl ago.

How wide a difference, still,                  
                we lie — beyond.

 

Glances

Hasten, throat.
Unshut, mouth.

This house is now.

Decease calls, nonchalant
             as one disembodied,
from behind a screen.

Memorials gloam as sleepers
             blink in tandem,
their breath ripe with injury.

To delay evil is a kind of cure.

The curious diastole still
thrums her cautionary tale.

She only wins, who goes far enough.
The way is suspicious, the result slow.

Wait here, until the road unbends.
Don’t look back,           only below.

 

In that violent hour,
              even the grass was sepia,
half-lived in sieve and ruin.

Greensleeved, the radium girls
incarnate runaway decorum.

An unendangered bird
still chimes with wounds.

Enlist an archivist,
a gesture to permanence.

Hold fast to uncut glass
as gaudy species dazzle

your fleeted body,
limbic with mastery,

your weighted memory,
abducted by light.

 

Limbs

Go swarms,

elate your best array
in vacant rooms, unseen.

Last summer, when grass
was our mother tongue,

shy-eyed, our laps evaded
translation, and harvest.

We shunned haircuts and wine,
spoke only in verdant carols.

Now ether glistens in open air
and marrow blooms in glass.

The slain touch my mouth
with decoyed hands,

elbows knuckled to wrists
impossible to disentangle.

A slow hoard of indifference blooms
as we become our own aftermaths.

What rare species lies beyond,
raw-minded, untethered?

Surely some cure will appear
to cut the glow of fever dreams

and call us in, farther, from the fields.

 

Rivulets

All the lost ones glide silently by
               wayward, ever-modern,

their fair reversals, postponed.

               The grave is a fable, only.

Down a narrow aisle, amid thieves,
the plague work goes on.

               Sisters sleep side by side

in ateliers of trivial breath,
lost in the float and odour of hair.

               In our dead house,

rime beards the grass, leaving
footprints with no source.

Black lines creep as fields
unfold in sibilant chorales,

               to gossip of the night.

 

Poetic Research Statement

Whitman once likened poets to spiritualist mediums, and that feels like the best place to begin.[1] My poetry has often, if not always, been the practice of listening intently to ghosts, both in a personal and a historical sense. These poems take that practice of spectral eavesdropping more than a few steps further, through the archive and into the harrows. They articulate a double history, overlaid and riddled with gaps, akin in some ways to  a “ghost print” or cognate in monotype printing (a metaphor I like to imagine Whitman the journeyman would delight in).  Monotyping produces a single, unique print.  The ink erodes after the initial pressing, rendering subsequent reproductions inchoate. These four poems began as fragments, and remain marked by tiny voids of erasure. For I believe that poetry’s blank spaces, like history’s, have manifold stories to tell, well beyond the line’s end.

In the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman borrowed from the spiritualist language of haunting to narrate an ongoing dialogue with the dead.  Over the next four decades, Leaves of Grass swelled to absorb “phantoms of countless lost” soldiers, continually evolving until the poet welcomed his own “soothing death” in 1892.[2] The first poem in the first edition, later titled “Song of Myself,” arises from Whitman’s encounters with his own and countless other unknown souls, echoing their fluency in dead tongues:[3]

 

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!

And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,

And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

 

Despite the poet’s sweeping catalogs of the living and the dead, the human soul remains enigmatic, both “fathomless” and “untranslatable.” Yet, Whitman offers us glimpses of an ecoerotic afterlife where verdant cemeteries bloom with “the beautiful uncut hair of graves” and spiritual immortality depends on regeneration: “They are alive and well somewhere / The smallest sprout shows there really is no death.” Human particles decompose and re-emerge entirely altered, dispersed throughout the earth and finally incorporated into living bodies, to “filter and fibre your blood.” Perhaps more than any other poem in Whitman’s oeuvre, “Song of Myself” epitomizes the poet’s morbid optimism, assuring us that “All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” These lines remain, for me personally, the most comforting words conceivable in the first sorrows of mourning.  I have returned to them again and again over the years, in the wake of untimely deaths.  My oldest copy of Leaves of Grass, which originally belonged to my late father, now falls open, automatically, to these pages. “Has anyone supposed it is lucky to be born? / I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.”  Though I have spent more than a decade of my life researching Whitman, the solace of this passage has never lost its sway over me.

Whitman observed the spiritualist movement with curiosity, and, at least initially, classed it as a science alongside anatomy and chemistry. In a self-authored review of the 1855 edition, the poet described himself as “the true spiritualist.  He recognizes no annihilation, or death, or loss of identity.” Bodily transcendence was a central tenet of the spiritualist faith, which promised followers the chance to escape the constraints of their material forms. Whitman’s poetics of “merging” with others echoes the medium’s claim to disembodied communication:

 

This is the press of a bashful hand . . . . this is the float and odor of hair,

This is the touch of my lips to yours . . . . this is the murmur of yearning,

This is the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,

This is the thoughtful merge of myself and the outlet again.

 

For Whitman, the aims of the poet and those of the medium were closely aligned: both act as magnetic forces for the attraction of spirits that defy death. Mediumship is, at its heart, an invitation. The medium must be willing to be occupied by the ghost.  

Like its author, Leaves of Grass endures with the tenacity of an archetypal echo, capturing something of the sense of American possibility, that uncanny duality of purpose and longing that has haunted the national consciousness. To envision Whitman’s idealized democracy alongside late capitalist reality is to experience a historical vertigo, a fall from the transcendental and ecoerotic to the hyper-violent and virtually (un)real. And yet, Whitman’s “tomb leaves” remain imprinted upon the cultural memory of the nation, as though he actually managed to conjure his own mirthful ghost, who haunts us still, somewhere just out of reach: 

 

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you

 

 

Written to mark the bicentennial of Whitman’s birth, my poems operate within that lacuna, occupying the dissonant threshold between Whitman’s optimistic vision for America, “out of hopeful green stuff woven,” and my own personal history.  I come from a rural Kentucky landscape still graced with sublime natural beauty, yet increasingly scarred by industry, agribusiness, addiction and inequality. One of the questions my poems orbit is how to widen the elegiac form to mourn geographically and culturally, and whether such collective expressions of grief could possibly be a precursor to change.  In this sense, I am profoundly curious about Whitman’s capacity to move beyond the inertia of deep mourning, into the territory of generous melancholy.

Far removed from Freud’s pathologization of melancholia as a failure to mourn, Whitman’s poetics of traumatic regeneration and his personal capacity for resilience recall the early-modern concept of generous melancholy, and foreshadow the psychological phenomenon now known as post-traumatic growth, a concept designating the unexpected benefits, now empirically measured, that often follow adverse experience.[4] In De Triplici Vita (Three Books on Life, 1480), Marsilio Ficino resurrected the Aristotelian concept of melancholy genius. As Christina Cavedon observes,”Ficino claimed that all thinkers predestined for greatness suffer from a favorable form of melancholia which has become known as “melancholia generosa.”[5]   In Ficino’s view, this generous melancholy catalyzes transcendence over the physical body and its transient experiences of suffering.  Simply put, generous melancholy calls on us to overcome “dark dejection” through action and art.[6] The parallels between Ficino’s theory and Whitman’s poetic landscape of transcendent decay are manifold. I believe that Whitman’s legacy is irrevocably linked to the “dark bequest” of his own regenerative melancholy: his ability to turn from acute suffering to empathic action, and then, finally, to writing.[7]  Whitman offers a riveting case study, both personally and poetically, of humanity’s regenerative potential.

Whitman wrote in harrowing personal and political circumstances.  He wrote through war, poverty, pain, paralysis, and depression. He wrote on scraps of recycled advertisements when paper was scarce.  He stitched handmade notebooks to carry in his pockets while tending wounded soldiers in the Civil War hospitals.  He wrote while mourning the deaths of three siblings, his beloved mother, his volatile father, and countless soldiers, collectively elegized in Leaves of Grass. Throughout the post-bellum decades, he continued to write as his body failed and his mind lost something of its clarity. 

Whitman expanded and revised Leaves of Grass for almost 40 years.  For much of that time, he attained only a modest audience. Reviews of the first edition were mostly scathing (excepting Whitman’s pseudonymous self-promotions and Emerson’s famous letter).  While the “good grey poet” began to gain global recognition in his twilight years, widespread fame, as usual, was posthumous. I find solace in Whitman’s prolific literary output and his resilience in the face of criticism, most of all in his refusal to be silenced by either personal tragedies or political crises. 

While I can’t claim to have been in dialogue with Whitman in a spiritualist sense,  I did write these poems in thrall not only to him, but also to the lesser known figures in his orbit whose archival traces I encountered in my research. The phantom limbs that haunted Whitman’s specimen soldiers recur throughout my poetry as a metaphor for the physicality of mourning and the impossibility of severing attachments to our dead beloveds. Joseph Leidy, the Civil War surgeon who bound his own anatomical treatise in the skin of a soldier whose body he autopsied, was the inflammatory catalyst for my twelve-poem suite, “An Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy.”[8] His legacy is unsettled by the arrival of a contemporary female narrator who reimagines her own body as host to a haunted palimpsest—a dialogue between male and female, body and soul, doctor and patient—that slips between their century and ours. 

The archive has always been a generative place for me, as a poet.  While researching The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning, and Whitman’s Civil War (2017), I spent a great deal of time in archives, particularly the Library of Congress and the Mütter Museum / College of Physicians of Philadelphia.  The collections of both these institutions were integral to Afterlives, but while I was working in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, something else happened.  I found myself haunted by artifacts (letters, ephemera, diaries, photographs) that did not fit neatly within the narrative of the book I was there to write (at least not in any tangible, linear sense).  And yet, they would not let me go. 

While undertaking these residencies, I intended to set all my other writing projects aside.  The clock ticks loudly during a research fellowship.  Especially when one lives in Australia but writes on American literature and culture: accessing the relevant archives entails a transpacific flight and months away from home.  So, I’d intended to focus my attention solely on material that would uphold the thesis I planned to lay out in The Afterlives of Specimens.  But that is not what happened.  Poems began to emerge, usually very early in the morning or late at night. In the end, I wrote both books simultaneously.  And I feel certain, with the benefit of hindsight, that I could not have written one without the other.

My first poetry collection, Calenture, came out a few months after Afterlives. The title recalls Whitman’s “grass of graves” and his lifelong fascination with shipwrecks (although, strange as it sounds, I must confess to realizing the later influence only recently). “Calenture” is an archaic medical term for a tropical fever incident to sailors who suffered from a potentially fatal hallucination: they saw the sea as green fields.  If left unrestrained, many were compelled to leap to their deaths, so great was their desire to touch the fever’s grassy mirage.

 I initially conceived of Calenture as a collection of elegies, in the broadest and most amorphous sense of the word.  The book is ossuary to my own constellation of deaths, some sudden, all strange. The loss of my sister, Amanda, is present on every page.  It is also a catalog of the medical and mercurial oddities I encountered in archives, curiosities that call forth the exquisite corpse hard at work beneath our living flesh.  The phantom limb.  The wandering womb.  The book bound in human skin.  The face that ghosts itself.  The fever dream that ends in drowning.  The writhing grace of speaking in tongues.

Continuing the practice of merging archival poetics with personal histories, these four poems began with selected fragments from Whitman. Sometimes I chose lines that have long held resonance for me. Whitman’s “beautiful uncut hair of graves” recurs in “Garments” as “her uncut hair / threaded with moss.” At other times I chose phrases that were lyrically compelling, and tried to create a new context for them.  For example, I found the line “stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over” so oddly evocative that I used it to describe the spectral sister in “Garments”:

Her face a haze
romanced by many a long winter.

Eyes trellised in stone,
laughingly dashed with blonde.

Mad filaments, bridled—
stucco’d with birds, all over.

I also made small alterations that shift meaning, slips of the tongue (that architect of speech that is so significant to Whitman).  The above passage fuses two of Whitman’s line openings from “I Sing the Body Electric” (1855): “Mad filaments” and “Bridegroom-night.” Now the groom is lost and the filaments’ madness is tethered by a bridle, embellished with birds. For anyone who wants to further disentangle Whitman’s words from mine, The Walt Whitman Archive, edited by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, is a vast online resource that hosts an excellent search engine. 

The titles arose from Whitmanian themes that I discuss in The Afterlives of Specimens.  “Glances” references Whitman’s “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” (1888). It is also a meditation on nostalgia, a diagnosis commonly used by Civil War doctors to describe symptoms that would today be attributed to traumatic stress. The Union Army’s Manual of Instructions for Enlisting and Discharging Soldiers (1863) defined nostalgia as “mental disease” within “the class of Melancholia,” characterized by an “unconquerable longing for home” that often proved fatal.[9] From its inception as a disease of the body, nostalgia was embedded within the psyche: the physical manifestation of desire for an impossible return, a longing not for a specific location, but for an interior geography that is ephemeral in its very nature.  

“Rivulets” occupies a haunted rural landscape that doubles as a field hospital.  We’ve become so used to the phrase “battlefield” that it has lost its uncanny literality, an eeriness captured in Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s photograph of Gettysburg, “A Harvest of Death.” Whitman’s Memoranda During the War (1875-76) draws on agrarian metaphors to describe the war’s carnage: “the numberless battles, camps, hospitals everywhere— the crop reap’d by the mighty reapers.”[10] “Rivulets” recalls the long rows of cots that pervade Whitman’s hospital notebooks, but they are overlaid onto the fields of my Kentucky girlhood, fraught with their own dangers.[11]

“Garments” is the most personally revelatory and specifically elegiac, and so I will say the least about it.  The title nods to  Whitman’s strange assertion, “agonies are one of my changes of garments.” To me this line embodies a startling dissonance.  There is something unsettling, perhaps even frightening, about this shapeshifting sufferer that I wanted to explore.  On the other hand, it can be read as comforting in the sense that suffering is ephemeral, because our bodies themselves are transient.

“Limbs” draws on Whitman’s accounts of amputee soldiers suffering from phantom pain. His hospital notebooks document the neural hauntings that followed amputations, such as the case history of “Thomas H. B. Geiger, co. B 63^rd Penn, wounded at Fredericksburg . . . young, bright, handsome Penn boy—tells me that for some time after his hand was off he could yet feel it—could feel the fingers open and shut.”[12]  I find phantom limb to be a powerful symbol for the physicality of grief—an attachment rendered acutely present in its absence. Contemporary neurological research confirms what Civil War soldiers intuited: the phantom is its own entity, no longer tethered to its formerly physical incarnation.  As Cassandra S. Crawford explains, “phantoms are today conceived as parts not accountable to gravity, symmetry, time, or the principles of human morphology, not answerable to the laws that had always governed the physiology of human bodies.”[13] So too it is with mourning: our love for those who are no longer alive is not beholden to gravity, symmetry, time, or human morphology.  Death does not inhibit desire.  Our kinship does not end when the beloved takes her final breath. We are bound to the dead by constellations of attachments that remain unsevered.   For me, the cultivation of such enduring love is reverential and deliberate. Melancholic, some might say.   

 

 

Author’s Note

All editions of Leaves of Grass cited below were digitally sourced from The Walt Whitman Archive, an open-access online resource that allows readers to view the various editions as they were printed in Whitman’s lifetime, alongside a vast and ever-expanding curation of scholarship, correspondence, and biography.

 

About the Author

Lindsay Tuggle is the author of The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning, and Whitman’s America (2017). Her debut poetry collection, Calenture (2018), was named one of The Australian’s “Books of the Year” and was Highly Commended in the Anne Elder Award for poetry. Lindsay lives in Sydney with her husband, Michael, and a tyrannical rescue parrot named Kato.

 

________________

[1] Between the publication of the first and second editions, Whitman became fascinated with the phenomenon of spiritualism, and attempted for an entire year to train himself as a medium, modelling his practice after the famous medium Cora Hatch.  See Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 169-170. Whitman eventually became disenchanted with spiritualism, or at least with some of its proponents. See Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 353.

[2] Leaves of Grass (New York: W. E. Chapin, 1867), 10b.

[3] All poems were originally untitled in the first edition (1855).  I have used their best-known titles for clarity. Except where indicated otherwise, all quotations I take from Leaves of Grass in this statement come from the 1855 edition, Leaves of Grass (New York: 1855).

[4] Freud’s binary division between mourning and melancholia (which he later reconsidered after his daughter’s death) is critiqued at length throughout my book, The Afterlives of Specimens. The psychological field of post-traumatic growth studies is rapidly expanding. As Ann Marie Roepke and Martin Seligman explain: “Adversity may lead to surprising benefits as well as to unsurprising damage. Philosophical and religious texts have discussed the transformative power of suffering for millennia. More recently, psychologists have examined this phenomenon through an empirical lens, measuring, describing, and predicting the positive changes that can follow adverse experiences. These changes are referred to as post-traumatic growth. . . . Such growth has been documented following sexual assault, life-threatening illness/injury, and combat.” “Doors Opening: A Mechanism for Growth after Adversity,” The Journal of Positive Psychology, 10:2 (2015): 107.  See also Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun, “Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence,” Psychological Enquiry  15:1 (2004): 1-18.

[5] Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11.  (Leiden, the Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 2015), 48-49.  

[6] Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 64.  On Kant’s virtuous melancholy, see Gregory R. Johnson “The Tree of Melancholy,” Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion, ed. Chris L. Firestone, Stephen Palmquist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 43-47.

[7] Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: McKay, 1891–92), 415.

[8] For more on Leidy and anthropodermic bookbinding, see Lindsay Tuggle, The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning, and Whitman’s Civil War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017) 87-92; and “The Autopsy Elegies,” Journal of Poetics Research 8 (2018).

[9] Roberts Bartholow, A Manual of Instructions for Enlisting and Discharging Soldiers (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1863), 21.

[10] Memoranda during the War (Camden, N.Y.: Author’s publication, 1875–76), 57.

[11] This title also references Whitman’s “Autumn Rivulets,” a section of Leaves of Grass that first appeared in 1881.

[12] Tuggle, The Afterlives of Specimens, 101-102.

[13] Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment and Prosthetic Technology (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 33.

 

Further Reading

Christina Cavedon,  Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11  (Leiden, the Netherlands, 2015).

Cassandra S. Crawford, Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment and Prosthetic Technology (New York, 2014).

Ed Folsom, “Walt Whitman and the Civil War: Making Poetry Out of Pain, Grief, and Mass Death.” Abaton 2 (Fall 2008): 12–26.

Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, eds., The Walt Whitman Archive.

Michael Ann Holly,  The Melancholy Art  (Princeton, 2013).

Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, Calif., 2008).

Kenneth M. Price, To Walt Whitman, America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004).

Jennifer Radden, ed.,  The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva  (Oxford, 2000).

David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York, 1995).

Ann Marie Roepke & Martin E.P. Seligman, “Doors opening: A Mechanism for Growth after Adversity.” The Journal of Positive Psychology, 10:2 (2015):  107-115.

Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun,  “Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence.”  Psychological Enquiry  15:1 (2004): 1-18.

Lindsay Tuggle,  The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning and Whitman’s Civil War  (Iowa City, 2017).

Lindsay Tuggle,   Calenture  (Melbourne, 2018).

 

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

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

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Lindsay Tuggle is the author of The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning, and Whitman’s America (2017). Her debut poetry collection, Calenture (2018), was named one of The Australian’s “Books of the Year” and was Highly Commended in the Anne Elder Award for poetry. Lindsay lives in Sydney with her husband, Michael, and a tyrannical rescue parrot named Kato.