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.

 

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[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.

Alexis de Tocqueville had a bad experience at Niagara Falls. Crawling onto a ledge behind the cataract, pressing his face against the cliff as the river fell from above, it was hard to breathe. The wind blew hard in the narrow passage between the sheet of water and the cliff. Sometimes “the blinding torrent of water” hit his face and the air felt thin. It was night and the darkness was “deep and terrifying” and meant that he couldn’t see the bottom of the chasm below him. The flickering moonlight was just enough, he said, to illuminate the “vast chaos that surrounds you” (when an entire river passes over your head) before leaving you again “to the darkness and din of the falls.” On his spit of rock, the iridescence of the falls and also the steam rising in a cloud from the abyss “envelop[ed] everything in a suspect white light.” A nocturnal rainbow above the mist looked like any other rainbow except that it was perfectly white. I know of one other vision of a nocturnal rainbow from the 1830s and it is equally frightening: the narrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s story “Berenice” becomes obsessed with his beloved’s teeth which appear to him, even in her absence, as a “white and ghastly spectrum,” overreaching “the wide horizon as the rainbow.” They are not unlike the all-consuming white spectrum that Tocqueville sees across the maw of the Niagara cataract.

“I assure you,” Tocqueville writes home to a friend, “that there was nothing at all amusing about the spectacle before us.” Needless to say, most travelers to America in the nineteenth century responded differently to Niagara Falls. The Irish poet Thomas Moore said the sublime view from below produced a sense of “delicious absorption” in nature that brought him closer to God, but it is just the feeling of absorption that Tocqueville feared. It is not hard to see that Tocqueville’s experience behind the “torrent” of the falls recalled to him his darkest feelings about the “democratic torrent” of the times that seemed to be “[sweeping] everything along in its course” in ways that aristocrats like himself could no longer resist. It was too hard to hold one’s ground when the progress of democracy was “universal” in its sway and when a “single current” of public opinion and thought “command[ed] the human spirit.” “Immersed in a rapidly flowing stream,” he writes in Democracy in America, “we stubbornly fix our eyes on the few pieces of debris still visible from the shore, while the current carries us away and propels us backward into the abyss.” In a democratic culture, claims to social or political distinctions are left behind as the landmarks of a shattered past while the individuals that survive it are “beaten onwards by the heady current which rolls all things in its course.” In America, the culture of sameness and “common obscurity” could seem as suffocating to Tocqueville as the “humid obscurity” that scared him from within the enveloping mist of the falls.

Tocqueville’s visit to Niagara inspires the climactic scene in Peter Carey’s remarkable novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, modeled on Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont’s travels in America in 1831. Like Tocqueville, Olivier de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont goes first to Albany for a Fourth of July celebration and then to see the falls, except here they are Kaaterskill Falls in the Catskills, if only because they give Olivier the chance to remark, too, on the artist Thomas Cole who painted them around that time. Carey’s novel is deeply concerned with the possibilities for art in a democracy and also with the visual expressions of democracy that emerged within the new markets for art that supported them (but more on this in a moment). In Albany, Olivier finds, as Tocqueville might say, the “image of democracy itself” in the Independence Day parade of printers, mechanics, carpenters and other members of the trades and associations of the city bearing the badges of their professions. It lacks the martial “splendor, imperium,gloire” that would distinguish a procession in France and, to be honest, for an aristocrat, a float as big as an opera stage with a printing press turning off copies of theDeclaration—an eagle soaring on top of the whole insipid business—finally seems unthinkable. But, in the public reading of the Declaration and the return of a nation to the moment of its birth, “there was something deeply felt and truly great” and Olivier wonders if it might be possible to live his life “completely careless of how democracy might harm [him]”—to give way, that is, to the progress the parade represents and just be “one of the rivulets—nay, streams—that make the river of the people roar” (349-350). If only, Olivier says, the celebrations had stopped there: a lawyer steps up to deliver a Fourth of July oration and Olivier’s response is just the same as Tocqueville’s in Albany, since Carey takes his language directly from Tocqueville’s letters as they appear in George Wilson Pierson’s 1938 Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. The lawyer’s boorish, bombastic “harangue,” rehearsing the history of every single country in the world (which he names) in order to place America at the center of the world, makes clear that the revolution and “ascent of the majority” the day marks also marked, maybe most of all, an aesthetic revolution in the history of taste. “What makes democracy bearable?” Olivier asks (351)—and then travels on to the falls.

Olivier de Garmont is born in 1805 into a family of Norman nobles who manage to survive the French Revolution, though with varying degrees of depression and perversity after the Terror; the guillotine “cast[s] its diamond light” on the superannuated scenes of Olivier’s childhood at the Château de Barfleur (16). His mother keeps the desiccated corpses of family pigeons killed by peasants and sings laments for her lost king; Olivier, hearing them, gains a primal sickening knowledge of his mother’s attachments and the obscenity of the Revolution (which exasperates his asthma). When the Bourbons are restored to the throne, the family recovers some of its status, but after the July Revolution of 1830, Olivier, now a young lawyer at Versailles, is caught between loyalty to his family and to King Louis-Philippe, who has bourgeois sympathies and tenuous claims to the throne. The kings who follow upon Napoleon’s 1815 defeat are pitiable in the novel; royalty becomes showy and flagrant as it becomes merely symbolic. Charles X is “pigheaded,” believing that he can secure his power by restricting the rights of his citizens. But when he is overthrown in 1830, he sneaks past Olivier and the royalists who are defending his palace and slinks out of Paris “mud-smeared like so much shameful shit across the royal escutcheons” (84). Olivier, now under suspicion by the liberal government, leaves for the United States to conduct an official study of its famous penal system, just as Tocqueville and Beaumont did. Drawn to the lectures of François Guizot, who argued that the progress of democracy was irresistible and could not be turned back, Olivier wonders whether he will “drown swimming against the tide of history” or whether an aristocrat’s distinctive forms of understanding and belief can be made relevant to the present age (71). Could a democracy tolerate him?

In America, Olivier falls in love with Amelia Godefroy, the daughter of a governor of the Wethersfield Penitentiary in Connecticut, and it is at the insistence of Amelia’s father that he goes to Kaaterskill Falls. Neither Tocqueville nor Beaumont fell in love in 1831 (frustrated by the chastity of American women, they had no love affairs either), so Amelia is one of Carey’s many inventions. But Tocqueville does love Connecticut as much as Olivier because, for both—historical actor and character—the towns of the state represent model units of local self-governance. Run by their town meetings and voluntary associations, they show Tocqueville democracy at its most vital and quaint, perhaps because the stakes remain small enough to be particular, and aristocrats like to be particular. In the novel, the people of Wethersfield move to build roads and raise taxes for the school, but they also deliberate on whether to patent a Wethersfield onion, and the participatory nature of it all (or else the onion) brings tears to Olivier’s eyes. If “the great lava flow of democracy came inexorably toward us,” and if we went with the flow, then maybe the future could feel as careless as the Godefroy onion fields growing half-wildly in the deep alluvial soil of the Connecticut valley. “Your town meeting rather shook me to my bones,” Olivier tells Amelia. “I am still reverberating” (262). But he blushes and knows when he says it that he is talking as much about her effect on him as the meeting’s. It becomes increasingly obvious that the irresistible power of democracy—even the unsettling way it creates a “restlessness of spirit” and social activity and a craving for continual excitement—feels a lot like falling in love. “I thought, Miss Godefroy. Restlessness of spirit” (215).

It is only when Olivier stands on a bridge of rock behind Kaaterskill Falls, where Amelia’s father had brought him (crying into his ear, “Now you are American”), that falling in love, with democracy or Amelia, seems more like a self-annihilating plunge—a falling away into “a terrifying and foreign obscurity” (354). Olivier’s asthma returns: “There was no air in America,” he says, “only this great suffocating mass which would wash me clear away. I pressed my mouth against the rock behind me, and so could almost breathe” (354). At the falls, he remembers the July Revolution, just as Tocqueville did at Niagara Falls, when visions of the civil war at home seemed to slide, as Tocqueville writes, “between me and my surroundings,” so that only his attachments to an aristocracy that has outlived its use seem to save him from giving way to the “mass.” Olivier tells us that the trip to Kaaterskill Falls gives Mr. Godefroy a new excuse to praise the artist Thomas Cole, who had painted them, and whose picture Autumn on the Hudson hangs ostentatiously in the Godefroy foyer. So we come to picture the waterfall that sickens Olivier as if it were a Thomas Cole painting and then wonder whether—in the face of such a garish picture—we should be horrified too. Kaaterskill Falls are the beginning of the end of Olivier’s engagement to Amelia. He couldn’t bring her home to his mother. She loves “innovation” too much. She incorrectly uses the dewhen she addresses him as “de Garmont.”

So who, in Parrot and Olivier in America, is Parrot? Olivier’s friend Thomas Blacqueville, another Norman aristocrat, is set to travel with him to America, but the great ingenuity of Carey’s novel is to kill off his Beaumont before they set sail. Instead, Olivier (really a composite of Tocqueville and Beaumont) is accompanied by John Larrit, a.k.a. Parrot, an irreverent English engraver twenty-four years his senior whose first-person narration of the journey alternates with Olivier’s own. Olivier has bad handwriting, as Tocqueville did—Leo Damrosch tells us that Tocqueville called his illegible scrawl crottes de lapin (“rabbit turds”)—so Parrot acts as Olivier’s secretary, but also spies on him and reports back to the Comtesse, his Maman. Parrot has a history we learn slowly: when his father, a journeyman printer, is arrested for forging banknotes, Parrot (then orphaned at twelve) finds himself in the hands of a counter-revolutionary Frenchman (and the Comtesse’s lover), the Marquis de Tilbot, who abandons him on board a ship of convicts bound for Australia. Years later Tilbot returns for Parrot, who joins him on an expedition to engrave Australian plants for the Empress Josephine, and then follows him to Paris where he lives as his servant and trades in botanicals. By the time Parrot leaves for America with Olivier, we know that this bawdy, cocky mimic (“Parrot”), with his broguey idiom, is capable of illustrating whatever he sees as he sees it and will give us a fair account of the aristocrat he serves.

For Parrot, Olivier is Lord Migraine and Little Pintle d’Pantedly, who is fatefully unadapted to the energies of America, where people can start over as quickly as they can burn their homes and collect insurance on them. For Olivier, Parrot is a presumptuous copyist who thinks his time is his own (“His time? This was a very modern concept he had learned” [319].) Coming to terms with America is also Olivier’s way of learning to live with Parrot, who he comes to love a little too, and with a new set of relations defined by what we do, not what we are. There are no masters in America, just “bosses,” and sometimes they and their “help” shoot the breeze. If all this “malodorous égalité” depresses Olivier “awfully,” it is because he believes it is the opposite of his liberty to resist it and also because the restless, agitated society around him feels always, tyrannically, the same (199). “Variety is vanishing from the human species,” Tocqueville writes; he also means that democracy takes us beyond a political society, defined by its differences in opinion and thought, toward a commercial society that acknowledges only the differences a market can make. But, in the novel, Parrot finds his freedom in the market, where he eventually sells his engravings to great success and buys a house with his mistress on the Hudson. An undiscriminating public is less threatening for the artist who aims to please it.

Often Olivier and Parrot clash for aesthetic reasons; they can never agree on what constitutes art when they see it, since Olivier is never convinced that a democracy can produce it. Art in a democracy, says Olivier, “suit[s] the tastes of the market, which is filled with its own doubt and self-importance and ignorance, its own ability to be tricked and titillated by every bauble” (379). By the end of the novel, Parrot shows us how easily art in America accommodates itself to commercialism; art becomes a way of living, but its professionalism is never far from hucksterism and debasing forms of trade. Scenes of his mistress, Mathilde, painting portraits are also scenes of prostitution (her clients “ask her price” and then she sets out to “do” them). In New York, Parrot becomes the business partner of Algernon Watkins, an English artist who was also a forger during the French Revolution, by printing and marketing the pictures he engraves. Watkins is a fictionalized John James Audubon and his goal is to make the greatest book of life-size colored bird prints the world has ever seen. But really, Carey has divided the historical figure of Audubon between Watkins and Parrot, the artist and entrepreneur, since Audubon was both. Audubon’s The Birds of America was as much a marketing phenomenon as an event in the history of engraving, and Parrot’s prospectus for Watkins’ book of the same name reproduces Audubon’s pitch and secures his same subscriptions from European royalty. Audubon applied glazes to his birds to intensify the brilliance of the variegated colors of paint which he densely layered for a dazzling, animating effect. Parrot’s birds have a similar gloss, and the sample he proudly shows Olivier reminds the aristocrat of the surface splendor and glare of Thomas Cole’s painting. “It was nothing much more than a circus bird,” Olivier says, “but [Parrot] stood before me full of hope, like a boy in a fairy story, off to make his fortune in the world” (327).

But it is finally Mathilde’s later pictures that baffle Olivier most: abstracted landscapes made of colors and glazes she paints for pleasure, not business, and that experiment with the “luminous mystery of New York light” (376). “The paintings are awful,” Olivier says (377). Like luminist paintings of the mid-nineteenth century (by John Frederick Kensett or Sanford Robinson Gifford), Mathilde’s effort to “[paint] only the light” of a broad open space (246)—to create, that is, the effect of a diffused atmosphere—may feel to Olivier like being bathed in the all-enveloping iridescent haze of Kaaterskill Falls. The abstract paintings, which depict nothing in particular (“They are not exactly paintings”), may be the aesthetic correlative of the generalizing potential of democracy to softly permeate the total world around you (377). For Parrot they are the sign of the future of art, a lustrous, radiant vision of the New York horizon Mathilde sees from her house on the Hudson; but Olivier is near-sighted and can’t make them out. His myopia is a constant source of slapstick ridicule in the novel—he really can’tsee—and modeled on (what else?) Tocqueville’s own legendary near-sightedness that Beaumont describes during their travels in America: “He is very nearsighted, so when he came to what he thought was quite a narrow river, he did not hesitate to swim across. But he was wrong: in fact, the river was so wide that he was dead tired by the time he made it to the other bank.” The horizon is always receding and because Tocqueville misjudges the distance he would have to go to get there, he comes “close to drowning.”

Mathilde’s paintings are also a sign of American exceptionalism, since she tries to paint “New York” light; but Olivier says, “the same sun shines on everything” (377). Parrot believes that America is a place of progress that has superseded the antiquated world of France they left behind and that Olivier will retreat to in the end. Parrot has the last words of the novel, and they are canny because we learn, finally, that this story of democracy and progress is merely his own since he has written the whole of it (of course! Olivier doesn’t write because his handwriting is bad). Parrot looks into the future and says, in his final dedication to Olivier, that his fears have been “phantoms”: “Look,” he says, “it is daylight . . . There is no tyranny in America, nor ever could be. The great ignoramus will not be elected. The illiterate will never rule” (381). Still, as readers living now in the future he prognosticates, we are not so sure that the “great ignoramus” has not been elected, or won’t be, and anyway, Parrot is just a parrot. Parrot’s insistence on America’s democracy can never be final, because we know we’ve lost the sense of difference that Olivier made.

Further Reading:

Peter Carey draws on George Wilson Pierson’sTocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York, 1938). For more on Tocqueville and Beaumont’s American travels, including their letters, travel notebooks and sketches from 1831, see Olivier Zunz, ed., Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Charlottesville, 2010). Tocqueville famously describes his experience of democracy in Democracy in America(1835-1840); for critical views, see Sheldon S. Wolin,Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, 2001) and Leo Damrosch, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America (New York, 2010). On John James Audubon as an engraver and entrepreneur, see Annette Blaugrund and Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., eds., John James Audubon: The Watercolors for The Birds of America (New York, 1993) and Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York, 2004).

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Elisa Tamarkin is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author ofAnglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (2008).

 

Kyle Roberts’s Evangelical Gotham persuasively demonstrates that American evangelicals shaped the development of New York City, even as New York City shaped the development of American evangelicalism. Arguing against an older body of literature that Roberts claims focuses too much on the rural—think open-air camp meetings, portable pulpits, and people fainting under the stars—Roberts contends that New York City was at least as important as Cane Ridge in the growth of American evangelicalism.

What Roberts understands by “evangelicalism” is a distinctly modern form of religion, at the “heart of [which]… is an inherent tension between individual-focused conversion and community-based activism” (4). Roberts downplays differences between evangelicals, suggesting instead that New Yorkers were united by the “basic principles of individual conversion and community activism” rather than fixated on “the theological distinctions that divided them” (116). It is the tension between individualism and communalism that Roberts connects to the city itself, as he argues that the dislocations faced by many New Yorkers (the crossings and dwellings, in Thomas Tweed’s conception) made them long for a faith that could help them to both find “community amid overwhelming anonymity” as well as navigate the demands of an individualistic culture that seemed to reward self-directed strivers. Says Roberts, “Evangelicalism provided a very useful religion for New Yorkers…. [It] served as a resource for the dislocated, provided a moral code, and drove community and city growth” (7).

Roberts plays out this argument about the usefulness of evangelicalism chronologically, in three parts bookended by the Revolution and Civil War. He explains that this periodization corresponds to three modes of being evangelical: 1) an inward mode, focused on one’s own conversion, as a post-revolutionary generation crossed into the city and sought to dwell within it; 2) an outward mode after the War of 1812, focused on others’ conversions, as reformers ventured into hospitals, almshouses, brothels, and tenements, and then wrote and published voluminously about their experiences; and 3) a renewed withdrawal after the Panic of 1837, when New York evangelicals, like the rest of the nation, felt unsettled and ill at ease, retreating into antebellum domesticity rather than acknowledge their complicity in the sin of slavery. The chronological division is clear, though it could have used more engagement with the turning points themselves—what were evangelicals’ lives like during the War of 1812, for instance?—and a bit more messiness than the periodization allows.

Roberts takes care to show the spatial transformations occurring alongside this chronology. He shows how evangelicals made sacred space in the city out of old rigging lofts and schoolhouses, barns and grocery stores, docks and ships. Over the course of the book, we see these ad hoc worship spaces transform into grander venues as evangelicals gain influence and money, such as in the consecration of the Broadway Tabernacle out of a large theater. Roberts also shows how evangelical churches, including Broadway Tabernacle, were undone by disagreements over slavery, and how Manhattan’s sacred landscape exhibited its own form of (genteel, white) flight in the years leading up to the Civil War, when a number of evangelical churches moved uptown as the downtown population of Jews, Catholics, and African Americans surged.

Roberts supports his chronology with images and maps throughout, showing the location and changing building style of churches over time. (To take just one example, the incongruously enormous steeple of St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church perfectly proves his point about the increasing influence and monetary means of evangelicals over the period under study [245].) Roberts also provides rich quantitative data, particularly in the appendix, showing rates of congregational growth relative to population growth that illustrates his claim that “evangelical congregations emerged from the margins to the center of the urban spiritual marketplace in the generation following the American Revolution” (264). Roberts concludes the appendix with a statement that will resonate with readers familiar with the work of Jon Butler, Nathan Hatch, and John Wigger: “Much like the rest of the country, New Yorkers were more fully churched on the eve of the Civil War than they were on the eve of the American Revolution” (277).

Roberts not only gives us maps and numbers; vibrant characters also populate the pages of Evangelical Gotham. Readers will not easily forget Michael Floy Jr. and his coat with three pockets (for different kinds of reading material), who published only one evangelical tract in his lifetime, but whose lifetime of reading Roberts analyzes to great effect. Roberts also engages with the lives of reformers like Ezra Stiles Ely and Phoebe Palmer. Their stories parallel those of the churches that moved uptown; Roberts notes how Ely ended up in a “plush” pulpit after laboring among the impoverished, sick, and dying at the almshouse and hospital, and how Palmer retreated into genteel domesticity and the promise of perfectibility rather than engage with the pressing issues of slavery and mass immigration.

Roberts’s argument that evangelical religion was useful to New Yorkers like Floy, Ely, and Palmer, all of whom sought communal bonds in an individualistic world, emphasizes rational choice and voluntary commitment. Throughout, he draws on a “spiritual marketplace” model, emphasizing the voluntary nature of evangelicalism, and the active and free decisions that ordinary New Yorkers made to convert and to order their own and their neighbors’ lives around a reforming faith.

But other scholars are pushing back against the spiritual marketplace model as insufficiently attuned to power dynamics and constraints. In Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation, for instance, Amanda Porterfield emphasizes Americans’ fear, doubt, and uncertainty after they decided to cast off the monarchy, which made them skittish about deistic and freethinking ideas that seemed to threaten social chaos. Evangelicals stepped into the breach with a message of order and control. In Secularism in Antebellum America, meanwhile, John Lardas Modern explores how evangelicals, through control of print media and saturation of the market, so profoundly—and often invisibly—shaped the conditions of the choices individuals made that they were never unmediated or entirely free.

Though Roberts certainly shows the ambivalences at play in New Yorkers’ evangelicalism, one misses some of the power dynamics that are so visible in Porterfield’s and Modern’s work. To be sure, we see class tensions in Evangelical Gotham, particularly in the often snarky responses Ely gets to his mission and the ways in which the woman he tries to reform, Caroline, manipulates his attentions to her own ends. We also see New York evangelicals gaining control of print media, though unlike Modern, Roberts does not theorize what this dominance means as New York publishers essentially become the advertising agencies of nineteenth-century evangelicalism. In a section on the imposition of a grid structure on the city, Roberts also nods to scholarship on how grids enabled surveillance. Nevertheless, he explains that although “Evangelicalism has rightly been critiqued for incorporating elements of social control within its practices,” it is “important to remember that evangelicals held themselves to these standards” (90 and 297n29).

Roberts is right to reject too-simplistic social control arguments, but there remains to be explored the differences between New York City evangelicals holding themselves to these standards, holding others to them, and being held to them. Though Roberts discusses the creation of African American evangelical churches and the appeal of evangelicalism to the socially marginalized, his narrative is primarily about the growth of white middle class evangelicalism in New York City. Might evangelicalism have been a “useful religion” for these New Yorkers not just because it helped the dislocated to feel located, but also because it empowered them as key actors in the creation of a national white Protestant power structure seeking to impose moral order in the face of disorder that was read in both religious and racialized terms?

More explicitly addressing this question would help Roberts’s book connect not only to Porterfield’s and Modern’s work, but also to literature on religion and whiteness, such as Edward Blum and Paul Harvey’s The Color of Christ, which argues that the proliferation of tracts and other publications—many originating from the New York publishing houses Roberts writes about—helped to spread the white Christ far and wide, even as the white man was becoming empowered as a voting citizen. 

But “race” is treated, in Evangelical Gotham, as belonging primarily to African Americans; in the section on “Race and Gender” in the appendix, those terms refer to “African American women and men and white women” (272). Yet white men are raced and gendered people too, and white Protestant evangelicals, in particular, constructed their racial and gender identities against the disorderly people they were trying to save—Catholic immigrants of questionable whiteness (the familiar nineteenth-century images of the Irish as barely human come to mind), Jews (also of questionable whiteness in the nineteenth century), African Americans, and Chinese. Descriptions of the “dark underbelly” of New York in the penny press racialize gamblers and prostitutes, dancers and opium smokers, who appear in lurid light as dark or reddened shadows writhing in the flames of their hellish reveries. Evangelicals themselves also contributed to the construction of urban spaces as antithetical to religion. In his popular Life in New York, editor of the New York Observer Samuel Irenaeus Prime, an Old School Presbyterian trained at Princeton Theological Seminary, tried to persuade young people to stay on their farms and villages rather than seek their fortunes in the city. Even as New York was becoming an evangelical power center, it nevertheless also remained a foil against which ministers committed to the New England ideal of village life—homogenously white and Protestant—could rant and rail. Thus Gotham both spread white evangelical power through the proliferation of tracts and support of urban reform and mission societies, and also served as a foil in the construction of the white evangelical as one who remained pure despite the temptations of the mixed city.

All of this is to simply suggest how many rich avenues of inquiry Evangelical Gotham raises.  Roberts convinces that without Gotham, evangelicalism in America would not have developed into the powerhouse it became over the course of the nineteenth century; putting his work in deeper conversation with this other literature would help us to better understand the nature of its power, even as Roberts’s careful excavation helps us to better understand its primary home in Gotham.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

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Kathryn Gin Lum is assistant professor of Religious Studies, in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and History (by courtesy), at Stanford University. She is the author of Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (2014) and co-editor, with Paul Harvey, of the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2018). She is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Heathen World and America’s Humanitarian Impulse (under contract with Harvard University Press).

[The Historical Cast]

Reverend John Eliot (1604-1690)—Known as the Apostle to the Indians, Eliot helped found thirteen towns for “Praying Indians” and printed the Indian Bible. The conversion and protection of the Indians near Massachusetts Bay became his life’s work.

John Sassamon (c.1625-1675)—Massachusett Indian and translator for Eliot. He served as an interpreter and soldier for the puritan colonists in the Pequot War, attended Harvard, translated the entire Bible into Algonquian with Eliot, and became a Christian minister. His murder, allegedly at the order of the Indian Sachem Philip, precipitated King Philip’s War.

Robert Boyle (1627-1691)—Considered by many to be the founder of modern chemistry, he is best known today for Boyle’s Law of Gasses. A wealthy and influential man who helped found The Royal Society, Boyle was also a devoted Christian who became president of The Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, which funded Eliot’s mission.

[Eliot, of Sassamon]

‘God first put into my heart a compassion over their poor Souls, and a desire to teach them to know Christ, and to bring them into his Kingdom. Then presently I found out (by God’s wise providence) a pregnant witted young man, who had been a Servant in an English house, who pretty well understood our Language, better than he could speak it, and well understood his own Language, and hath a clear pronunciation: Him I made my Interpreter. By his help I translated the Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and many Texts of Scripture. Also I compiled both Exhortations and Prayers by his help.’ He is well-used— he sees words
in the air of it. To change one or some is simple, he says: breathe
words in, to the meaning (keeping that inside lungs)
and the tune another language likes
(keeping that simply singing)
—this divergent mix enters unto
some obscure process
of organic formation—
and press that out his mouth! This air
then fills the air. You will notice Sassamon’s position,
in interpreting, is always upwind. This air, these two languages in two forms moves toward a third. By example, as I understand it, a body mass of understood English words (approaches unto in the air) a larger more firm (though airie) space of Massachusett “understanding” (itself as a form). All this, he sees within his visual consciousness.

The known words drift toward the understanding and, as tide to a shore, form to its shape. This formation appears to him as the words interpreted. The sounds interpreted. Though in a way other than letters. More, I deduce, like an air-made landscape or map of meaning.

Thus, many scenes of desired interpretation have been given over for bad weather, winds, etc. He likes nothing better than a most gentle and constant zephyr. A still day tends to infuriate as a stubborn mule would. Airy tempests (as can sometimes favor our new coast) put a cold stop to any adventure, even within a good wigwam. These acting, I deduce, like a disappearing of ink or rather a constant hand scraping the slate. Firesmoke is not unpleasant to this miraculous conversation of currents.

As I have my Light Appearing More and More Towards the Perfect Day, he says, so he can hope for air appearing more and more towards the perfect translation of that, the Bible of our Massachusett language.

He looks to books because they affect not the air, but also they have none. A thing he desires and fears.

I am working to proceed with his ideas, being as they are a cause or by-product of his particular genius, and only know to start here: Breath indeed is the prayer of a new creature.

[Logic Primer]

[Eliot]

And these Indians, ‘musical sounds they also have, and perfect Harmony, but they differ from us in sound.

There be four several sorts of Sounds or Tones uttered by Mankind.
1. Articulation in Speech.
2. Laughter.
3. Laetation and Joy: of which kind of sounds our Music and Song is made.
4. Ululation, Howling, Yelling, or Mourning: and of that kind of sound is their Music and Song made.’

And I only mourn. As we work, my children,
my wife and children, die.
One by one they fall, they go, they rise.
I see them like trees. In their absence
from the field around me,
the field of vision
I labor in, I set my mind
to a new frame: making the firebrand

God’s own hand from hip to toe
showing me to know Him in this burning
numb forerunner of heaven. A missive

only into mine own mind—the seal
inward for no man to see
or them to feel though I am struck

to the ground by it, such is His call
that our eyes cannot look upon Him.
This feeble wheel of mine feels

afire from His mere token & reminder: ‘Up,
and be doing, and the Lord will be with thee.’

To take that next step & taste the light
wrought across my very eyes
by the Lord’s electric storm

down my right side shaking even
my teeth. My comings & goings
secretly mapped—a geography

of sensation I inwardly diagram
by loving attention—grown of
a sort of metallic hum of empty

 

what is not as once there. The new clear space
hardly innominate. Gone. But what was that space
before their passed presences? Any blank
is God. They were all there once. One by one until but Anne and the one boy. Gone. Space, their presence in it, their absence from it, Godspace. Until but the one boy—Joseph, like a holy but half-used father to me. Oh Anne. She will not return to me, but I will go unto her. ‘My desire was that they should serve God on earth; but if God will choose rather to have them serve him in heaven, I have nothing to object against it, his will be done
to take my family to himself’ and I
will bear the metal tooth
gnashing time about me, the work
unfinished, the field wide open and white
but a want of workers.
We must finish.

[Sassamon]

One word becomes another by suffocation across whatever is the virgin, inviolable concept. One wallowing becomes another wallowing—the way men will die the same but make different noises to do it. Guttural resistant clicks or that nice rounded resignation, blood and meaning pool in the throat
to push out pure air. We take
one step back
and lay a little word
to each thing. Suffocating.
When summer runs long
I hide on the island for days to gather distance
and then swim into it crying out like an English woman dying just to live in one real moment of silence. Finding great relief each year in my surprise that this simple and deliberate mechanism remains effective.
I swim ashore and return to work. The work.

[Eliot, to the Corporation
for the Propagation of the Gospel]

I have sent the commissioners of the colony ‘my requests for some help of some great charges this year; but they are pleased to answer me with silence, as it is wont to be … and my humble request is that it may be paid, and then I shall be out of debt; but if it should be refused, than my hands are tied, I can do little; yet I am resolved through the grace of Christ, I will never give over the work so long as I have legs to go. I am at a dead lift in the work; if the Lord stir up the hearts of men to help me, blessed be his name, and blessed be they that help me; if no man help me. … There be many things lie before me, wherein I might promote the work, and fix the hearts of the Indians, but I cannot come at them for want of means. … Messengers and instruments look for their pay, and if that fail, the whole moves very heavily and will quickly stand still. … My humble request unto yourselves the honorable corporation is, that you would put me into such an order or way, that I may know where to pay such instruments as I set on work. If instruments fail, the work will fail. Instruments are the wheels of our motion, and if they want oil they will soon want power of motion. I could employ a great revenue in promoting the work.’

[Robert Boyle,
scientist and president of the Corporation,
a personal note to Eliot]

Honorable Reverend in Christ— As we both seek the improvement of souls by our clear faculties I fear lest our conversation become dull mortal money matters. Your work is the only answer of truth—and by that I proceed. You shall be supported. I enclose humble notes toward my latest work, A General History of Air, building from and toward fresh experiments, as I know our godly educated ministers of New England to be interested what experience and experiment can deduce of God’s many gifts to us… I hope these notes may also serve the learned notions of your once savage translator…

[Sassamon]

I swim toward the point, which is to remain underwater. The point is to remain. To remain separate from my self: if you find heaven under there, you will first experience it in fleeting only ached moments. But you can train yourself slow to remain longer without which keeps you out of heaven. And, like the grampus, you need only rise briefly into hell for a breath. And with keeping the ears out of the air. Just lungs lifting upward, eyes closed.

[Boyle]

‘Wherefore the Air, being a Body so important in our Speculations of Nature, and so necessary to the Continuance of our Lives, I could not but think it deserv’d, that we should solicitously inquire, whether it may or may not be produc’d by Art; for if it can be so by any, not very uneasily practicable ways, the Discovery may not only help us to explicate some difficult Phenomena of Nature, but may afford us, among several other Uses, that of enabling us to supply diverse, if not also submarine Navigators with fresh Air produced under Water, and thereby lengthen their staying in Places, where the Continuance of it may be of great Use both speculative and practical.’ ‘I shall offer to your Consideration the Accidents that often happen to Men, by the mere Air, as Convulsions, Cramps, Blastings, Lameness, Colds, many of which indure a Man’s Life-time; and which (with many bitter Infirmities that sometimes seize upon a Man, while standing, walking, or lying in the Air) are rarely or never felt or discerned at the Instant of their Approach or Insults upon a Man.’

[Logic Primer]

[Sassamon, of Printing the Bible]

These pages indeed require a new attempt at binding by us.
We have not made something
this big, never yet everything.
The binding inlightens the Word
into word order, His order, Ordo Salutis. The Old Testament three years in the press my arm forcing the devil’s arm over and down pressing paper ink metal for three years. We have smoothed over the imposing stone with our endless literal sweat. Our bled letter’d fingertips. The inkballs making ink seemingly from their swinging through air I see the entire Bible writ there in reversed letters.

At night my eyes close backward
on verse I sleep
outside myself for looking back
down upon p & q
upon me as I hope the Lord
reads what’s impressed
into my very vision.

Hand-justified, writ out from one pen each letter set after getting clean in my ear air eye as Eliot reads aloud.

I dream: inside shut covers the volume of it is His eternal void & ocean the words swim meaning endlessly and then—we open it—and His divine direction falls the words to our senses.

To see the tongue done and bound like this as in billable columns—one two three four to find it thus arranged four frozen waterfalls of eternally.

Imagine our earth thus pressed
if each holy page contains eternities
is the book shut then
rejoicing or otherwise?
Ink sewing itself into the rag’d paper, pulped
from what people have worn about
are these imprints a worldly making
of the inbetween subterraneal and heavenly—
type form, tympan—
the captured air words of just above
our heads grabbed down and pressed
to paper—as retrieved
saints to the gravestone,
what limited immortalization
we are capable of with this press
taking language of all God’s intermediaries
we have deduced
and designed to our own designs
this bookblock as the
compressed aviary for captured
prophets— yet most sense not
the tension in binding these pages.

Like a native tongue (to your mouth)
laid out babbling from God’s beginning of time
even running past you to Revelation—such a totality of noise.
And where do we stand?
Between the last page of Jude and the first of Revelation!
We are right now two inches of un-inked paper. Good luck and God bide you.

We do indeed need two praying hands to hold it—such divine design.

It looks lovely.
I want to breathe it.

[Boyle, to John Eliot]

‘I waited this day upon the King with your translation of the Bible.’

 

---

Statement of Poetic Research

My first book of poems, Puritan Spectacle, used the language and oomph of puritan conversion narratives to write “American common prayers” for Big Macs, cheerleaders, mall food courts, interstate highways, etc. The idea was to find real meaning in our factual (not imagined) landscape. I picture my works of poetry and history as think tanks on America: get all the brightest voices and minds together (in the case of Bright Advent, from seventeenth-century Massachusetts), give them some excellent materials to interact with, and stand back. Then jump in and edit them. Then stand back again.

I completed the research for Bright Advent during a creative research fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. I’d been working for some time on a book-length treatment of the events and people involved in the lead-up to King Philip’s War: the seventeenth-century translation of the entire Bible into Algonquian; the Reverend John Eliot and his Indian translator John Sassamon; the Praying Indian towns; and the puritan (and Indian) conversion narrative. The rough “plot” of this book of poetry was in place when I began my formal research; however, the project was full of gaps, both historical and literary.

For example, Sassamon’s apparent genius as a linguist and translator had emerged, in the imaginative space of my pages, as a sort of gift for visualizing language that occurs in the very air around his head. I enjoyed this conceit, and it was generating great “scenes,” but it remained unconnected to anything in the larger book. One of the great discoveries for my research, then, was that scientist Robert Boyle served as the president of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (the main funding agency for Eliot’s mission and translation work). Among Boyle’s many works (we know him best for his Law of Gases) is the posthumous collection of his ongoing investigation, A General History of Air. We also have—and I read in the archives—some of his communications with Eliot during the time period on which I was focusing.

This connection between a historical fact—Boyle’s experiments on the properties of air—and my imagined cause for another historical fact—John Sassamon’s gift for translating “in the air”—illustrates the serendipity of creative research. Poets often find that historical and imagined material stitch together with uncanny, synergistic ease to reveal “truths,” in sum, that are greater than their parts.

In addition to my introduction to Boyle’s work on air, my research also introduced me to many of the items that appear in the pages presented here: the mechanisms of colonial printing (which I was able to both read about and observe); the feel and heft of an actual copy of the “Indian Bible”; the fact that Eliot suffered from paralyzing bouts of sciatic pain; and, of course, a wealth of stunning source material that I use in this manuscript as part of the “voice” of my “characters.” Readers will note how the source material from my research influenced the look of my work on the page as lyric verse lines mingle with prose chunks. This pressure on formal arrangement, in many ways, was the most profound effect of the historical source on this manuscript: to coax my pages away from being verse that happened to have history in it; to permit the historical record to build a version of its own truth with poetry.

 

AFRICA from the beſt AUTHORITIES

Where Africa’s coast slips into oceans
And seas, its outline is lightly shadowed.
From there words bristle, rough stubble, no,

More like a halo radiating names—Thomas,
Lucia, Christopher, Stephens—saints
And people some thought important

Enough to warrant namesakes along
That shore. Researching the American
Colonization of Liberia

In the American Antiquarian
Society’s reading room, looking
For western views of the continent

For context, I’ve been looking at old maps
Of Africa all day. This map keeps drawing
Me back with its claim of “AFRICA

From the beſt AUTHORITIES” and all
Those names—less divine light and more
Like a ruff, the fashionable starched collar

Of Queen Elizabeth’s time, circumscribing
Africa. The hinterland, the interior, wasn’t
Safe from the cartographer’s hand—hardly

A blank spot on the continent—borders drawn,
Rivers traced and lakes laid down. Clumps of neat
Lollipop trees with shade under them represent

Forests while snaking rows of comma strokes
Denote mountains. The names of peoples and kingdoms
Crisscross the land (I’m loath to say like welts left

Across a slave’s back by an overseer’s whip because
It’s too easy, though I see the damage done
By each hand) and words almost get lost—

MOROCCO, EGYPT, NUBIA, ABYSSINIA,
ZAHARA or the DESART, Tombuctoo,
N  E  G  R  O  L  A  N  D, DAHOMY, B E N I N,

Biafara, LOWER ETHIOPIA, A Savage People,
CAFFRARIA, Men Eaters, Gold Mines, Hottentots,
And places and peoples I don’t know. Commodities

Line the coast past Sierra Leone: Grain Coaft, Ivory Coaft,
And on this map the cartographer wrote Gold Coast as Goad Coaft,
Next to its neighbor, Slave Coaft. All of this ringed by

Those names in English and Arabic and various Romance
Languages like a wedding band from an ill-intentioned man.

Schieffelin Bros. Exports & Imports

2010 [1]

My dusky ear hears a similarity between Schieffelin
and shuffling, the sound of steam engines
and many wings rustling when a murmuration
of starlings takes flight all together

like a coffle—that word came to English in the eighteenth century
from the Arabic word for “caravan” and even though it rhymes
with “awful” it seems a euphemistic way to describe stolen
manpower, muscle and motor skills mustered (in a coffle)

to usher in the prosperity of a nation.
In the nineteenth century, before starlings arrived,
the proliferation of steam engines and mechanization
precedes the rising wave of industrialization.

1851 [2]

Henry, the older Schieffelin brother, entered the business first
—moved commodities and goods from one place

to another, across waters and borders—helped
the American Colonization Society export American-born

negroes to Liberia. And for his efforts and money Henry
has a namesake town—Schieffelinville—in Liberia still on the maps.

1890 [3]

As the story goes, younger brother Eugene, a charter member
of the American Acclimatization Society, got the bright idea to import
every bird that left Shakespeare’s quill to fill this land with their songs
and perhaps cultivate another great bard.

And as for Eugene’s legacy, for plaguing this land
with starlings, his name has lately come up
in environmentalist circles—a newer movement
more concerned with impact than importing.

1957 [4]

Besides being prolific, starlings are proficient mimics
of other birds’ songs. The sounds of starlings like a fog of hornets
or a stinging cloud of starlings, say, or swarm of negroes

like those dreaded Africanized bees that threaten
the Americas; you hear about them on the news
when there’s no blood to lead and scant terrorists’ chatter.

1816 [5]

The society saw the Americo-Africans,
good Christians, as a civilizing force
to make the “blighted dark continent” brighter.

1847 [6]

When independence came the Liberians based their constitution
on the founding fathers’ frame—a likeness similar
to daguerreotypes like the ones Augustus Washington,
a black daguerreotypist, made in his Hartford, Connecticut studio.

1859 [7]

Washington mastered this mid-century art
and made a living and name for himself
producing framed likenesses “correct and beautiful.”

Rich and poor sat for this working artist;—
he even photographed John Brown
before immigrating to Liberia in 1853.

Nineteenth Century [8]

The Schieffelin brothers, apropos
of their urges, made their fortunes
in shipping and pharmaceuticals
(exporting negroes and importing

starlings only hobbies) while all
around them the Second Great
Awakening and improvement
movements changed the face of the nation.

1872 [9]

Folks like Allen Yancy and Sandy Gannoway,
recently freed negroes from Milledgeville, Georgia,
and thereabouts decided that one morning they
would awaken in Philadelphia, Liberia

—just four degrees off the equator,
so no twilight before the sun broke
the darkness like a lightning bolt
or liberty in their new home.

2002 [10]

Though not necessarily in daguerreotypes,
in some art fish represent sex and birds freedom.

And who don’t love catfish like Black men love
their cars: Firebirds and Thunderbirds, even Skylarks,

Impulses, and Pulsars—myths, birds, urges, and stars.

1849 [11]

This world we traverse
slowly wobbles under stars
on its axis like a top,

and polaris hangs marking always
celestial north dropping a plumb line
for us to follow making our movements

if not our positions true.

circa 450 BCE [12]

One of Zeno’s paradoxes wrangles with only ever
making it halfway because of halving
all the way and never quite
getting there.

This brings to mind, as paradoxes will,
never being met halfway and not making half an effort
or maybe the effort’s half-assed
or half-hearted and half-headed.

2011 [13]

I wonder how long
you have to claim a home
before you can comfortably feel
xenophobic.

November 16, 1872 [1]

A baby stretches
out of sleep, dawn
unfurls slowly. The sun
rises, a sigh you’re not
surprised by when you
hear it from your lips.
Dawn is different
everywhere. Allen
Yancy, Sandy Gannoway
and their families are in
Savannah this fall morning
boarding a boat
while their kinfolk
and old neighbors
wake to the rooster’s crow
back in Milledgeville.

On the steamer San Salvador,
they’re heading north—what
used to be freedom, heading
to New York, farther north
than they’ve ever gone,
and the Atlantic Ocean,
as far as they can see
on their right, nestles its
breath in their nostrils
till they can’t smell
Georgia anymore.

A Freedman Speaks of His Fellow, or From Milledgeville to New Philadelphia, 1872

Sandy Gannoway gone away from here.
That old negro headed across the water
with his old lady, son, and daughter-

in-law. This his home near seventy-two years;
—now he going off to Liberia, Land
of the Free? But he been free since Sherman

came through trailing a crowd of us contraband,
us negroes now freedmen—free to stay or wander.
Guess this place more than Sandy could bear.

Thinks he’ll realize the promise of freedom over there.
Sandy Gannoway gone away from here
leaving this freedom to us new freedmen

back here to work and fight, to make a stand or falter.
That new freedman’s headed across the water
to go be free in what they call our fatherland.

---

 

 

 

Sean Hill
Statement of Poetic Research
Daylight Breaks Again Suddenly Upon the Darkness: Revelations in the Library

As a child I was curious about objects of the past, those things put aside, the tools no longer used. My great-grandfather’s Polaroid model 95A with bellows that collapsed like an accordion, my great-grandmother’s treadle Singer sewing machine and my great-uncle’s rusty anvil and plough first drew me into wondering how they worked and then into wondering about how they were used and how the people who used them lived—what we now call material culture. This was the kind of history that interested me.

But when it came to poetry, like many young poets, my first poems focused on myself. It was this exploration of my personal identity that ultimately led me to an exploration of the past. I’d brought several poems about my relationship with my father to a creative writing workshop, and a female classmate challenged me to write about the women in my family. That challenge and my response led to a sea change in my poetry. After an informal interview with my grandmother, I used her oral history to craft a sonnet sequence based on her life. Those sonnets whetted my appetite for history and using historical material—the details that had fascinated me as a child—in poetry. I began to focus on not only my family’s stories but also the stories and history of the black community in Milledgeville, Georgia, my hometown. This led me to invent a character, Silas Wright, in order to explore the history of Milledgeville in persona poems—poems in which Silas or one of his contemporaries is the speaker. I intentionally made Silas a generation older than my grandmother so that I would have to dig deeper into the history. In addition to talking to older members of my community, I read local history books and local newspaper articles from the 1800s and early 1900s. I continued to hone my craft, experimenting with poetic forms, voice, and associative imagery. As a result of learning more about Milledgeville and about craft, I wrote my first book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor.

While reading James Bonner’s Milledgeville: Georgia’s Antebellum Capitalfor Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, I came across mention of two black men who snagged my imagination. They were Sandy Gannoway, an elderly man from Milledgeville, and Allen Yancy, a young man from the neighboring town of Sparta, Georgia. In late 1872 each of them, along with their families, became part of the 150 people from central Georgia immigrating to Liberia. I wondered about their motivations to emigrate after Emancipation and during Reconstruction. And I wondered about Sandy Gannoway’s decision to return to Milledgeville so quickly, in early 1874. But that wasn’t a part of Silas Wright’s story or my vision for Blood Ties & Brown Liquor.

It was also around this time that I was introduced to the poetry of C.P. Cavafy. His poem “Kaisarion” affirmed my belief in the possibilities of exploring history with poetry. In “Kaisarion” the speaker, whom I closely identified with, gives the reader his motivation for reading a history text late one night. “Partly to throw light on a certain period, / partly to kill an hour or two,” is the insouciantly ambivalent reason given for opening the book. But it is the speaker’s serendipitous finding of “a brief / insignificant mention of King Kaisarion” which commands his attention, as Cavafy writes in the third stanza:

And there you were with your indefinable charm.
Because we know
so little about you from history,
I could fashion you more freely in my mind.
I made you good-looking and sensitive.
My art gives your face
a dreamy, an appealing beauty.
And so completely did I imagine you
that late last night,
as my lamp went out—I let it go out on purpose—
it seemed you came into my room,
it seemed you stood there in front of me, looking just as you would have
in conquered Alexandria,
pale and weary, ideal in your grief,
still hoping they might take pity on you,
those scum who whispered: “Too many Caesars.”

The scant historical information he has about Kaisarion grants the speaker liberty to flesh out the skeletal image he gets from history. The speaker experiences an epiphanic moment when the lamp goes out and Kaisarion appears. In the dim history and the darkness of his room the poet’s imagination can throw light on and evoke this historical figure. The poet’s revelation about who Kaisarion is brings this ancient royal personage of minor status to life again. I consider this poem a found ars poetica that applies to my own poetic projects. It articulates my process, at least in part. When I’m writing and revivifying history with my poetry, I feel like a conduit between the past and the present.

I carried Sandy Gannoway and Allen Yancy around with me for a number of years with the intention of someday researching Liberia, the American Colonization Society, and these men’s experiences. After Blood Ties & Brown Liquor found a home at the University of Georgia Press, I took stock of the poems that I’d written outside of the project and found the beginnings of my second manuscript, Dangerous Goods. Between starting Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and getting it published I’d moved from the Deep South to the Upper Midwest. The poems that I’d written exploring my new home, Bemidji, Minnesota, formed the germ of this new book. I began to wonder more about Allen Yancy and Sandy Gannoway; I thought that their leaving the South for a new country might be similar, in a way, to my move to Minnesota, which felt like a different country to me. Their story and the story of Liberia fit in well with the themes of my new manuscript.

Bonner’s brief mention of Allen Yancy and Sandy Gannoway in the context of what was happening in Milledgeville after the Civil War led me to articles in the Milledgeville newspaper, The Union Recorder. But I didn’t know very much about Liberia, the American Colonization Society, or immigration, particularly during the Reconstruction era. These were the things I was interested in researching when I went to the American Antiquarian Society in March 2010. I learned from my experience doing research for Blood Ties & Brown Liquor that period newspapers give one a window into the everyday world of an era—from the things found to be newsworthy to what was on sale at the local dry goods store. Primary documents are also invaluable sources of language and textural details for poems.

Part of what I do is attempt to imagine the physical reality of places in the past; those details help me understand and imagine people’s experience. For example, since I’ve moved to northern Minnesota, I’ve noticed the atmospheric differences ten or fifteen degrees in latitude make not just in temperature but in the quality and amount of sunlight. But I hadn’t thought about the simple and obvious fact of light in Liberia until one day in my AAS reading, I came across this passage about the equatorial sunlight and twilight in Liberia: The Americo-African Republic by Thomas McCants Stewart:

The Americo-African Republic lies wholly within the tropics, and is very near the equator. Its southern extremity is only four degrees north of that great belt, and its northern limit seven degrees. The days and nights are practically equal. There is no twilight. Darkness follows fast behind the setting sun; and the daylight breaks again suddenly upon the darkness.

Stewart, an African American lawyer from South Carolina, immigrated to Liberia in 1883 where he taught at Liberia College for a couple of years before returning to the United States. His observations will help me imagine my way into Gannoway’s and Yancy’s reality.

I also spent time simply looking at all of the maps of Africa in the AAS holdings in an attempt to better understand the world in which Gannoway and Yancy lived. When I was working on Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, I found a large map of Milledgeville from 1908 at the Milledgeville courthouse, a copy of which I hung on my wall. I looked at it every day, several times a day. It was invaluable not only in showing me how the reality of Milledgeville had changed and grown since 1908, but it also revealed what the cartographer of the time perceived as relevant to this representation of Milledgeville. It made me rethink Milledgeville and the past a little more. With this experience in mind, I looked at those maps of Africa to see what cartographers and explorers and would-be explorers saw and represented and expected to see. The poem “AFRICA from the beftAUTHORITIES” is based on my encounter with one of those maps.

While “AFRICA from the beft AUTHORITIES” came out of poring over maps, another poem was sparked by one of those serendipitous finds that sometimes occur with research. I stumbled onto the mention in an acknowledgments page of a Henry M. Schieffelin, a benefactor of Liberia and member of the American Colonization Society. I immediately wondered if he was connected to another minor historic figure I had written about in another poem—Eugene Schieffelin. This other Schieffelin, a charter member of the American Acclimatization Society, was responsible for introducing the European Starling to this continent. That bird is now considered by many to be a pest—a non-native invasive species. The AAS staff was able to track down the Schieffelin family tree and confirm that Henry was Eugene’s older brother. I was fascinated by their involvements with, in the case of Eugene, bringing starlings to the United States, and in the case of Henry, colonizing Africa with American-born folks of African descent. Their motivations, the ways they supposed they were improving the United States with their actions, inspired the meditative poem “Schieffelin Bros. Exports & Imports.”

I spent some time digging into issues of the American Colonization Society’s publication The African Repository and found the narrative of Sandy Gannoway and Allen Yancy’s trip to Liberia. Reading that account, I felt I’d found my people—my ancestors, in a way. Though as far as I know I’m not related to any of the folks that left Georgia on that “expedition,” I did feel an affinity for them. I have a sense of what leaving could mean—the feelings and emotions tangled up with putting distance between yourself and what you’ve known as home.

I went to the AAS interested in immigration to Liberia during the Reconstruction era—curious about the choice between the recent freedom of most Black Americans here or the different freedom there. I was also looking for a broader historical context, startling images, texture, details, and language—delicious, chewy language—all of which I found. But my findings kindled a desire for more. This is an ongoing project; I’ve taken what I have found and crafted some poems, but I’m still learning how to use this particular historical material. And there is so much more. While I was at the AAS, Professor Ezra Greenspan, Ph.D., a fellow, introduced me to a successful African American daguerreotypist named Augustus Washington, who immigrated to Liberia in 1853. Given my fondness for photography and framing the world, Washington is definitely a figure of interest. Poetry is an empathic art. And the leaps of empathy and understanding necessary to render the psychologically plausible in a poem require me to know more and more clearly the motivations of the figures and characters I write about. I need to do my best to comprehend their circumstances and the decisions they made in those circumstances. My current manuscript, Dangerous Goods, includes the poems published here in Common-place. But I’ll continue to write poems about Liberia, and those future poems will find a place in my next project.

Further reading:

For a brief discussion of the “emigration pattern of blacks” from Milledgeville following the Civil War and mentions of Sandy Gannoway and Allen Yancy, see James Bonner, Milledgeville: Georgia’s Antebellum Capital(Athens, Ga., 1978). See also The Union Recorder, June 11, 1873 for “Letter from Liberia by Allen Yancy” and February 18, 1874, for “Sandy Gannoway, a freedman, of this county … ” an announcement of Sandy Gannoway’s return from Liberia.

The translation of C.P. Cavafy’s poem, “Kaisarion” used above can be found in its entirety in C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, trans. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, ed. George Savidis (Princeton, 1992).

The December 1872 issue of the American Colonization Society publication,The African Repository, features the narrative of the Society’s fall expedition—the one that conveyed Sandy Gannoway, Allen Yancy, and their fellow central Georgians to Liberia.

Liberia: The Americo-African Republic by Thomas McCants Stewart provides a fascinating firsthand account of Liberia in the 1880s.

Find a discussion of Augustus Washington and his works as well as examples at the National Portrait Gallery Website devoted to him: “A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist.”

Information About Going to Liberia, with Things Every Emigrant Ought to Know (Washington, 1852), published by the American Colonization Society, provides a helpful perspective on Liberia and the emigrant experience.

For discussions of the establishment of the American Colonization Society and the founding of Liberia, see Eric Burin’s Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville, Fla., 2005) and The American Colonization Society and the Creation of the Liberian State: A Historical Perspective, 1822-1900 by Amos J. Beyan (Lanham, Md., 1991) and Allan Yarema’s The American Colonization Society: An Avenue to Freedom? (Lanham, Md., 2006). See also Slaves No More: Letters from Liberia 1833 – 1869, edited by Bell I. Wiley (Lexington, Ky., 1980).

The preface to Peter J. Murdza Jr.’s Immigrants to Liberia 1865 to 1904: An Alphabetical Listing (Newark, Del., 1975) provided interesting statistical and demographic insight into ACS-sponsored immigration to Liberia after the Civil War and on into the early twentieth century. The listing also proved to be a useful tool for locating specific individual emigrants and emigrant families.

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