In the eighteenth century, writers such as A.-R.-J. Turgot and Adam Smith took what had been invidious distinctions about proper land use and the rationality of dispossession found in the work of John Locke, among others, and transformed them into a theory about how societies developed over time. So-called savages hunted, barbarians tended flocks, the civilized farmed, and at the apex of this sociocultural progression—or evolution—came European commercial society. Each stage was defined by modes of obtaining food and transforming the environment, increasing size and complexity, and different ways of thinking and speaking. That it was women who farmed in eastern North America disqualified them from practicing true agriculture in the minds of interested categorizers. What began as a justification of colonization and philosophical conjecture became the basis of more scientific hypotheses as scholars sought empirical evidence through excavation or collection to confirm evolutionary theories. The discarding of older labels and substitution of other, still pejorative, terms such as “modern” and “developing” did little to change the story. The invention of agriculture in most versions of this conventional narrative was a trap, one that multiplied the number of calories human beings could produce and allowed for the growth of urban settlements and specialization of labor, but which yoked human beings to longer and harder work under new hierarchies of rulers. 

Graeber and Wengrow, however, insist that human beings are not trapped. Inequality is not a necessary price of “civilization.” This insistence pits them against the long line of writers, including Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—whose very different arguments about human beings’ natural condition and the effects of society and government formed another layer on which theories of sociocultural evolution rested—to contemporary writers of sweeping histories such as Jared Diamond, Stephen Pinker, and Yuval Noah Harari. The Dawn of Everything argues that some of the most important archaeology of the last several decades reveals monuments and cities arising without agriculture or apparent hierarchy. Different forms of subsistence and exchange existed alongside one another for millennia. Zones of cultural influence based on ritual knowledge existed without states, as at Poverty Point in today’s Louisiana some 3,600 years ago or the more recent Hopewell sites of the Ohio Valley, and some societies established hierarchies confined to particular places or times. The archaeological record, in Graeber and Wengrow’s telling, shows that human beings have experimented with social-political-ritual orders throughout their history. 

The Americas occupy a particularly important place in the authors’ argument, an “independent point of comparison” with societies in Eurasia (451). They provide evidence that the development of agriculture did not foreordain the rise of monarchical states or highly stratified societies. When hierarchical and warlike societies did develop, Graeber and Wengrow stress, peoples across the Americas rejected the models they offered.

It is an old tradition in Euro-American literature to use Indigenous societies as mirrors to evaluate their own societies’ shortcomings; but Graeber and Wengrow avoid romanticization and stress historical change, driven by human choices, in their interpretations of archaeological evidence. At times, they point to “schismogenesis,” a process in which rival societies continually formulated social practices, cultural forms, and values in opposition to one another. The authors devote a chapter to contrasting the Indigenous societies of the Northwest Coast and California in these terms. The theory presents an alternative to models that presume some seemingly natural process of fission and divergence, presenting “culture areas” as the products of political debates and decisions. In other societies—Tlaxcaltecs in central Mexico, southeastern peoples who turned their back on the Mississippian chiefdoms, and the Haudenosaunee, among others—the authors see varieties of an Indigenous republican tradition. In her essay below, Robbie Ethridge questions an aspect of this argument. Even as such claims risk distorting Indigenous categories of meaning, they complement work that has centered Indigenous politics, borders, and sovereignty.

Not only were the Native societies that colonizers encountered the “products of centuries of political conflict and self-conscious debate” (452), Indigenous people engaged Europeans in this debate. The template for sociocultural evolution, Graeber and Wengrow argue, was first formulated in rebuttal to what they call “the Indigenous Critique.” They refer to the record, especially pronounced in French missionary and literary sources, of Native speakers criticizing European societies for their inequality and lack of freedom. The form their argument takes opens it to criticism. They claim the Indigenous Critique propelled the Enlightenment, but the authors have not read as deeply in Euro-American cultural and intellectual history as they have in archaeology. They substitute a typology of liberty in place of historical analysis. Scholars will also continue to debate—as do Barbara Alice Mann and Gordon Sayre in their essays below—whether they place undue weight on the words of the literary character Adario as a faithful transcription of the words of the Wendat traveler and statesman Kandiaronk.

As for any ambitious synthesis, specialists will find fodder for objection—the several essays below articulate some of these. Regardless of the persuasiveness of any of Graeber and Wengrow’s particular interpretations, The Dawn of Everything provides a framework that engages with “big history” or “deep history” while avoiding explanations that flirt with biological, demographic, environmental, or technological determinism. It provides, instead, archaeological (and some ethnographic) evidence of sociopolitical experimentation, and thus of human decisions, and perhaps of human ideals. It is a point that both Daniel K. Richter and Keith Pluymers make in their essays below. Even in the absence of many identifiable individuals, it is a framework that scholars and readers should welcome, and debate, as they think about a deeper history of early America.

Sean P. Harvey

 

But What About the Modern World?

The first thing one notices about The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow is that it is literally a “big book.” It comes in at a dense 526 pages, with an additional 83 pages of endnotes, and an 81-page bibliography. It is also a “big book” in the figurative sense in that Graeber and Wengrow propose to not only dismantle a social theory that has been foundational to Western thought for centuries, but also to offer an original and wholly new perspective on the history of humankind. Their central argument is that the social hierarchies, inequalities, and uneven development that characterize the modern world is not a preordained, inevitable outcome of human history. Rather, they argue that humans have always had social choices and political consciousness, from our Paleolithic hunter and gatherer days to the early agricultural communities that dotted the globe soon after the end of the Ice Age, to the teeming social orders of Mesopotamia, the Inca, the Aztecs, the Shang Chinese dynasty, and so on. In short, humans have always experimented with social formations.

Why is this such a revelation? Because, as recounted by Graeber and Wengrow, modern Western thought is rooted in an origin myth derived from social evolution theory. With teleological aplomb, social evolution posits an orderly progression of humanity through time, and for any modern peoples left out of the benefits of the modern world, well, social evolution theory has an elegant, if wrongheaded, explanation—those people have simply not progressed as fast as others. It is a self-serving and comfortable theory for the Western world, and it relieves Western nations and peoples from facing our own culpability in the uneven development and the stark inequalities of the modern world.

Anthropologists jettisoned social evolution theory decades ago, recognizing that the social types were inaccurate and too categorical, that there was no place for history in the process, and that it was deterministic, ethnocentric, racist, and just plain wrong. Even so, one can occasionally detect remnants of the theory in modern anthropological, archaeological, and historical scholarship. Above all, it is still deeply embedded in popular thought. It is to the latter audience that Graeber and Wengrow address the book. Collecting evidence to the contrary from an awesome temporal and spatial reach, Graeber and Wengrow administer a massive and much needed slap in our collective face. It remains to be seen, however, if the blow will steer us away from social evolution theory once and for all.

Given the gargantuan nature of their evidence, it is almost inevitable that experts in various fields will take exceptions to the use of some of it. I, for one, take exception to a specific claim related to indigenous North America. Graeber and Wengrow use the ancient city and archaeological site known as Cahokia to make a point about political choices and human agency. They argue that social hierarchy, political centralization, violence, and the loss of some basic freedoms were integral to Cahokia’s political and social order, and that when Cahokia declined in the fourteenth century, people did not inevitably reorganize themselves into hierarchically ordered political and social systems. Rather, they posit that former Cahokians and descendants of Cahokia, assessing their options, reorganized themselves into “tribal republics,” with governing bodies consisting of councils rather than centralized authority.

Cahokia arose on the banks of the Mississippi River, near present-day St. Louis, and inaugurated an era known as the Mississippi Period (900 CE to 1700 CE). At its peak, Cahokia’s influence emanated far and wide, with its greatest impact emerging in the American South. However, after offering only a brief history of the Native South from the rise of Cahokia to the end of the Mississippi Period in the seventeenth century, Graeber and Wengrow cinch their argument with an ethnographic analysis of clan assemblies among nineteenth-century Osage of the Plains, whom archaeologists believe were some of the descendants of Cahokians, and the political experiments of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Haudenosaunnee (Iroquois), who had little, if any, connection to Cahokia. They conclude that the Haudenosaunee and Osage transformed into tribal republics because they consciously eschewed the authoritarianism of fourteenth-century Cahokia. This jump in time (over three to four hundred years) and space (into the northeast region) results in a muddled case study and, for experts in the field, an unconvincing and quizzical argument.

A better fit, then, would be to examine what happened in the Native South after the fall of Cahokia. It is true that with the decline of Cahokia, people of the Native South reorganized their lives, but for the next 250 years after Cahokia their lives still resembled much about the chiefly order of Cahokia. Inherited authority was still the order of the day, only on a smaller scale. Rather, the transformation from hierarchically organized polities to tribal republics in the Native South occurred almost three-hundred years after Cahokia with the European invasion and the incorporation of Native people into capitalism and the global market system. The indigenous republics of the Native South were not a response to the fall of Cahokia but rather to living in a world of modern nation states. Those economic forces, and the attendant social, cultural, and political historical forces, resulted in the transformation of the small-scale, sixteenth-century hierarchical polities into the large Native nations of the American South—the Muscogees, Cherokees, Catawbas, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and so on. Not incidentally, I also would rather call these formidable polities Native “nations,” rather than “tribal republics” since they held the balance of power in the American South for the next 150 years.

Graeber and Wengrow cannot fully explain this transformation of the Native South because they, more or less, end their history of humankind in the early seventeenth century, before sustained European colonization in the Americas. They neither discuss how, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European colonialism bound the world within the structures of the capitalist world economic system, nor how those structures blended with and transformed everyday life for both Western and non-Western peoples, nor how those structures trend toward (if not actually mandate) uneven development. Graeber was an ardent critic of modern capitalism, and one is left wondering why they stopped their history when they did. I’ll take a stab at answering this question. Throughout The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow emphasize human agency and choice and, although not completely ignoring the structures of history, they minimize materialist structures such as ecology, economy, biology, demography, technology, geography, and so on. Moving their history into the capitalist era would not only undermine their arguments about agency and choice, but it also would raise the question: are the inequalities of today due to people making bad choices or are they part and parcel of the structures of capitalism? (I understand this book was to be one of a trilogy, and perhaps they intended to grapple with modern capitalism in a subsequent volume. But with Graeber’s untimely death, Wengrow, understandably, may not desire to see the other volumes to completion.)

The Dawn of Everything asks us to imagine a new kind of history, a history in which humans have been experimenting with social and political orders for thousands (if not millions) of years. It insists that we have choices and that, despite a deeply held and flawed Western origin myth, we are not stuck with the inequalities and inhumanities of the modern world. What is does not give us, however, is a way forward, a way to contemplate and be change agents in the modern world, a way to challenge and rectify the massive structural inequalities and uneven development of modern capitalism.

Robbie Ethridge

 

Hoc Tempore

Anthropology and its subdiscipline, archaeology, have a lot of repair work to do worldwide, at least with Indigenous peoples. Since the eighteenth century, myths about racial differences and evolutionary stages were precisely what Europeans wanted to hear, so they transmuted them into Unassailable Facts. Albeit transparently self-serving, at least in Western minds, these myths justified the 500-year crime spree called colonialism.

David Graeber and David Wengrow begin some repair work in their Dawn of Everything, showing that Rousseau’s ideas about the “noble savage” and Hobbes’s concept of “war of all on all” are not, in fact, polar opposites, but are both conservative, European-excusing cover stories. They illustrate what the eighteenth-century Ohio Lenape called Europe’s “scissors strategy” of conquest. The two, sharp blades of a pair of scissors look like enemies aiming to “destroy each other’s edges” in closing, but all they wind up cutting is “whatever comes between them.” Regardless of how they are dressed up, as modern Shawnee-Lenape scholar Steven Newcomb notes, all European philosophies cooperate to serve the “domination code.”

Citing the recorded discourses of Wendat Speaker Kandiaronk (ca. 1649−1701), Graeber and Wengrow present Indigenous American Woodlanders as the real initiators of European “Enlightenment” thought, which Indigenous Americans pretty clearly were. Still, while quite eloquent, Kandiaronk—who as I have argued in another essay likely visited France—was neither unique nor first. Disdain for oppression with recommendations for freeing the self from servility was pretty much the Indigenous position from the beginning. In one of the earliest recorded instances I know of, the 1539 cacique of Acuera in Florida demanded to know why the Spanish adventurers before him put themselves under some distant bully, when they could just as easily walk free in a faraway place? Such Indigenous refuseniks are traditionally called “walkaways.” Walking away was, and is, a regular thing.

Graeber and Wengrow also question the “teleology” inherent in Western schemas of culture, which follow the linear, Aristotelian requirements that all stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that stories run at breakneck speed from the starting gate to the finish line. Interestingly, linearity is not primarily a Greek proposition, but an overall monotheistic proposition birthed on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. It stems from what I call One-Thinking (or what Laguna Pueblo scholar Paula Gunn Allen termed “Euro-Think”). Western One-Thinking is why Euro-scholars act as if they are oblivious of the existence of Other epistemologies, despite their clear, documented existence, of which many Euro-scholars are entirely aware. For instance, the Twinned Cosmos of the Americas has been relentlessly documented since at least 1724 when Joseph-François Lafitau recorded the two spirits (âmes, “souls”) possessed by every person: the erienta (Sky) of the uki half and the ganigonrha (Earth) of the otgon half. As unsettling as this multiplicity of sophisticated worldviews may be to Westerners accustomed to monotheism, they are stable and ancient approaches to understanding the world, consisting neither of “primitive” nor of partially evolved ideas, as Graeber and Wengrow rightly insist.

I was happy to see Graeber and Wengrow mention Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994), the Lithuanian archaeologist who posited ancient Eurasian matriarchy as the dominant cultural form, noting that her findings turned out to be more accurate than her male counterparts. However, even today, talk of Gimbutas is suppressed in Euro-male archaeological circles, making Dawn’s mention of her sound daring. Alas, Graeber and Wengrow also accepted that matriarchal studies offer a crude theory stuck in nineteenth-century propositions, starting with Johann Bachofen (1815−1887) and ending anachronistically with Gimbutas. Au contraire, mes amis: matriarchal studies is today a burgeoning field, with extensive work being done in it, as matriarchal cultures can be found around the world, including the Kerala of India, the Lahu of western China, the Minangkabau of Indonesia, the Iroquois of the American Woodlands, and the Igbo of Central Africa.

I was glad to see Graeber and Wengrow call out the mistaken formulations of Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and others, who essentially still push the old evolutionary explanation of culture, while desperately pretending not to do so by tinkering with its diction. I was less thrilled by the habit, which is becoming fairly common in some Euro-circles, of calling Indigenous Americans, Africans, Asians, Australians, etc “our ancestors,” as though we were all in this together, just one big ol’ undifferentiated lump. I know that a standing Euro-dodge around histories of genocide and enslavement of Others is just such “we” talk, but as a friend of mine quipped to me a while back, “We, wii, oui—what are they? French?” Before the “we” stage can be honestly reached, some contrite acknowledgements, public apologies, and yes, reparations and land return must be forthcoming. Modern Euros might not be responsible for historical crime, but as long as they continue living high off the hog on the proceeds of historical crime, they bear some responsibility for it.

One of the most important insights offered by Graeber and Wengrow is that decentralization is a cultural choice rather than an evolutionary step on the inexorable path to statehood, the predetermined “end” of an Aristotelian tale. Graeber and Wengrow are correct that agriculture did not energize centralization or tyranny, but again, they are not the first to make this observation. Indigenous American Woodlanders deliberately kept their towns small, splitting into twinned sister towns whenever the population outgrew its britches. Typically missed by Euro-scholars is the deliberate de-gendering that accompanies decentralization. Gender play is anything but unusual in decentralized matriarchal cultures, where it is the job that is gendered, not the human being doing the job. 

Working from the concept of illo tempore (back then) to come forward into hoc tempore (nowadays), Graeber and Wengrow propose a multiplicity of ideas that cannot possibly be broached in this one, short essay. However, I will say that, all in all, anyone who comes out of The Dawn of Everything continuing to believe that stages guide the cultural history of “progress” was simply not paying attention.

Barbara Alice Mann

 

“Croy-moi; fais-toy Huron” (Trust me, make yourself a Huron) – From the Dialogues Curieux

The Dawn of Everything stands apart from other popular “Big History” books such as Sapiens and Guns, Germs, and Steel in part because it was written by anthropologists. David Wengrow studied archaeology at Oxford, while David Graeber studied with Marshall Sahlins at the University of Chicago. Their collaboration sets out to refute the stage theory of social development that has shaped anthropology since the eighteenth century, and to debunk the ideology of progress sacred to both capitalists and Marxists. A key weapon in their polemic is “the indigenous critique” of European imperialism and modernity.

The primary example is from the Dialogues Curieux avec un Sauvage, written by the Baron de Lahontan as the third part of his Nouveaux Voyages dans l’Amérique Septentrionale (1703). Lahontan was a military officer gone AWOL, and an anti-clerical skeptic of imperialism. I was also inspired by this text in my dissertation and first book, but my initial reaction when I read The Dawn of Everything was to disagree with Graeber and Wengrow’s interpretation. I reviewed what I had written of how “the deism and primitivism” and critique of Europe that Lahontan was “placing in the mouth of the Huron character Adario in the philosophical dialogue . . . were in fact learned from the Indians.” The Dawn of Everything makes a very similar argument, but the way it cites other scholars of Lahontan’s text conflates the rhetorical construction of Adario with the historical individual on whom he was based. 

Barbara A. Mann’s chapter in a collection she edited, Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands (2001) was a key source for Graeber, who I believe wrote the section about “the Wendat Philosopher-Statesman Kandiaronk” in The Dawn of Everything (48-59). Mann is a scholar of Iroquois ethnohistory who celebrates the speech of “Adario” in Lahontan’s dialogue and attributes it directly to the Wendat leader. The chapter is a study of Kandiaronk’s career as a savvy negotiator, and as a Huron (also known as Wendat or Wyandot) allied with the French against the Iroquois. Mann defends the Iroquois cause and writes: “French bigotry was obvious in the word ‘Huron,’ their term for the Canadian Iroquois. ‘Huron’ is a slur compounded of the French word ‘hure’ which indicates the spiky hair on a wild boar’s head” (37). The chapter concludes with the text of “On Religion,” the first of four sections in Lahontan’s Dialogues. Mann edited the translation, her headnote explains, so as to eliminate archaic spellings and typography and to give the speeches a more modern vernacular style. The Dawn of Everything quotes from Mann’s version of the dialogue (53; Mann 67-68), but where Mann attributes the speeches to “Adario” as Lahontan did, Graeber begins each speech “Kandiaronk” (the spelling Mann used, rather than the “Kondiaronk” in Lahontan), and refers him a dozen more times in the book as an indigenous critic of European modernity.

However, the Adario who speaks in Lahontan’s dialogue is not Kondiaronk the Wendat leader. Contrary to Mann’s and Graeber’s claims, there’s no evidence Kondiaronk voyaged to France and back in the 1680s or 1690s, whereas Adario did, so as to authenticate his satire on the poverty of French peasants, the hypocrisy of Jesuit missionaries, and the sycophancy of the Sun King’s courtiers. Graeber was aware of the genre of philosophical dialogues, but uses a straw-man rhetorical claim: “arguments attributed to figures like Kandiaronk could be written off as simple projections of Western ‘noble savage’ fantasies” (94-95). In fact, scholars such as Réal Ouellet and Gilbert Chinard who studied and edited Lahontan’s Dialogues showed how “Lahontan” shifted his positions and contradicted himself. There are in effect four voices, not two, in the Dialogues, for Lahontan and Adario each play Devil’s (or God’s) advocate as they parry one another’s claims.

Another key scholar of Lahontan is Georges Sioui, a Wendat from Wendake, Québec. In Pour une Autohistoire Amerindienne, based on his doctoral thesis in History at Université Laval in the 1980s, Sioui wrote a chapter entitled “Lahontan: Discoverer of Americity.” “Americity” is a kind of continental gospel of freedom: “Lahontan . . . had simply discovered another truth. Indeed, he was like so many Europeans (particularly the French) who, after simply breathing the free air of America, had repudiated old truths.”

Whereas Graeber follows Mann’s lead by conflating Kandiaronk and Adario into a single historical person, Sioui claimed Lahontan himself as a kind of polymorphic avatar of Native consciousness because in the Dialogues the critique of imperialism fuses Lahontan and his Huron/Wendat surrogate. “Adario’s message . . . through his interpreter, Lahontan, has echoed so profoundly in the hearts of other peoples” (68), Sioui asserts, but then switches directions: “Lahontan, through Adario’s voice, declares that he [Lahontan] is convinced” that the French have been “brought to this Land by Providence so that you may correct yourselves through our example” (70). The problems of cultural appropriation or rhetorical sovereignty, so potent today, did not trouble Sioui, who saw a hybrid, tricksterish critique in the Dialogues.

The Dawn of Everything cites Lahontan and other eighteenth-century French texts, such as Françoise de Graffigny’s epistolary novel Lettres d’une Peruvienne (1747), as indigenous critiques of hierarchy and modernity. But other French colonial authors wrote quite different arguments. Natchez tribal leaders, whom they called Suns, were seen by French colonists as resembling the French Roi de S. In a section of The Dawn of Everything borrowed from Graeber and Sahlins’ book On Kings, the Natchez are called “the only genuinely unambiguous example of divine kingship north of the Rio Grande” (On Kings, 390; Dawn of Everything 391-96). These indigenous Americans become a model for despotic sovereignty, defined as a control of violence, instead of an inspiration for Enlightenment egalitarianism. The story is abridged in The Dawn of Everything and it leaves out the most important source on the Natchez Grand Soleil, Antoine Simon Le Page du Pratz. There’s a hidden irony here. Le Page du Pratz in fact wrote a colonial history like Lahontan’s. He was critiquing European imperial politics and using the voices of Natchez leaders to do so. Other scholars have excerpted Natchez speeches that Le Page du Pratz published as anti-imperial oratory, in the same mode as Mann did Kandiaronk/Adario. The Natchez rose up and attacked the French in one of the strongest indigenous rebellions in American history, but the revolt was not a rejection of despotic authority. As Gilles Havard argues in a recent article, the Natchez performed a sacrifice of French men whom they saw as part of their own caste system. 

The Dawn of Everything is persuasive, and the authors’ rhetorical style wins the trust of the casual reader. Graeber and Wengrow accuse other scholars of failing to take seriously “ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers” and of dismissing them as “sock puppets.” However, closer study shows that many indigenous critiques arose from hybridized sources.

Gordon Sayre

 

Determinedly Indeterminant

According to David Graeber and David Wengrow, all of our common assumptions about the deep human past are wrong. There was no primitive childhood of humanity, no Garden of Eden, no originary state of nature, in either its nightmarish Hobbesian or paradisaical Rousseauian guise. There was no vast undifferentiated stretch of time when all humans lived in small egalitarian foraging bands, and so there also was no inevitable development from foraging, to agriculture, to cities and states, determined by forces such as population growth, ecological change, or technological inventions. Graeber and Wengrow amass examples from across the globe and calendar to demonstrate that the story was far more complex, far less unilinear, and far more diverse than the standard narrative permits.

As a result, they conclude, the questions usually posed about the sources of inequality or the origin of the state are meaningless; in some way, humans have always been unequal, in multitudinous and shifting ways. During the past 20,000, or even 200,000 years, people moved in and out of a dizzying array of political arrangements, some of which looked like states, many of which did not. Allegedly epochal inventions such as pottery or even farming seem to have started as part-time activities that may have had little to do with why people decided to live in cities, how they stored and acquired most of their food, or how they came to consider that food and the ground on which it grew private property. The real question, then, “is not ‘What are the origins of social inequality’ but ‘How did we get stuck’” in one particular form of economic, social, and political organization—so stuck that we have convinced ourselves that no other way is possible (112)?

Western Europeans got stuck long before the modern era, but they got stuck intellectually because of a set of deterministic fictions created during the Enlightenment. Turgot, Smith, and all the rest insisted that their own way of life, with its many inequities and power differentials, was the product of natural, inevitable, processes. Their insistence on inevitability, Graeber and Wengrow argue, was a deliberate response to an “indigenous critique” from Native Americans whose ways of life proved otherwise. During the era of imperial expansion, this indigenous critique entered European discourse in many ways, but it did so most profoundly in 1703, with the publication of the widely read set of Dialogues between a down-at-the-heels French aristocrat named the Baron Lahontan and a Wendat statesman-intellectual named Kandiaronk. If indigenous people could thrive without private property, massive inequality, authoritarian government, Kanadiaronk asked Lahontan, why couldn’t we all? The Enlightenment answer was that “we” had once lived that way. But that was then, and this was now. Kandiaronk and his ilk were not viable present-day alternatives but instead living relics of the distant past, before hunting gave way to herding, then to agriculture, and finally to commerce. Inevitably, the same process would engulf indigenous people too, as superior Europeans colonized the globe. Thus, for Enlightenment philosophes and all who followed in their footsteps, “modes of subsistence and division of labour,” or, more crudely, a people’s “primary mode of acquiring food,” became the sole determinants of an inexorable process that justified imperial domination (61).

For Graeber and Wengrow, how we see the past is also how we see the future. If we truly are deterministically stuck, there is no way out for us in the twenty-first century. Necessarily, then, their “New History of Humanity” rejects any form of determinism—economic, ecological, biological, technological, or sociological—in favor of an emphasis on conscious choice. In essence, we decided to get stuck, and so we can also decide to get unstuck.

A book of such audacious reach provides easy targets for crotchety or just lazy reviewers. It is not hard to charge authors who set out to sweep away sweeping generalizations with introducing sweeping new ones. The authors proclaim, for instance, that, “when sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship” (402). Nor is it difficult to construct straw-people criticisms when authors assert that “intellectual historians have never really abandoned the Great Man theory of history” (27)—particularly when they go on to set up Kandiaronk as a Great Man. And specialists on any given topic can easily identify subtleties overlooked, historiographical contexts lost, or borrowed ideas inadequately credited (for an example of the latter, see p. 511). “Had we tried to outline or refute every existing interpretation of the material we covered,” Graeber and Wengrow confess, “this book would have been two or three times the size, and likely would have left the reader with a sense that the authors are engaged in a constant battle with demons who were in fact two inches tall” (515).

Still, some of those diminutive demons must use their squeaky little voices to yelp “Wrong!” I squeaked myself when Graeber and Wengrow repeated the long-discredited notion about “settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies . . . almost invariably choosing to stay” (19). I did so again when I read that the fifty-some diverse Haudenosaunee prisoners that the French governor Denonville perfidiously sent into slavery in Louis XIV’s galleys included “all the permanent officers of the confederation and many from the women’s councils as well” (490–91). And I chuckled when the book’s bibliography credited a fine 1972 article, “Lahontan dans l’Enclopédie et ses suites,” not to its actual author, Maurice Roelens, but instead to “Richter, Daniel K.,” who in that year was just graduating from high school having never studied French (655). Other early Americanists may squeal more approvingly, if skeptically, at Graeber’s and Wengrow’s speculations about the shape of Indigenous North American history after 1000 CE  (463–73), even as they wince at the authors’ oversimplified account of how the indigenous critique influenced the Enlightenment.

But in the end, none of this really matters. The Dawn of Everything is a book to think with, and boy does it make you think. The authors present not so much an argument as a way of framing better, or at least more complicated, questions. I set out to try to create a map of those questions and the historiographical epistemology they embody. But I quickly blew past the word limit for this essay while fearing that I would lose readers in a swamp of my own devising. So instead, I’ll just allude briefly, even cryptically, to three key insights. The first is about freedom, which, Graeber and Wengrow posit, exists in three dimensions: “the freedom to move away,” “the freedom to ignore or disobey commands,” and “the freedom to shape entirely new social realities” (503). Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, anyone? The second is about restraints on freedom: “control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma” constitute “the three possible bases of social power” (365). Nathaniel Bacon, anyone? The third is harder to summarize, but is about the centrality of emotions to the choices humans make about freedom and control. By a chain of reasoning too complicated to trace here, Graeber and Wengrow make a remarkable generalization. “Perhaps this is what a state actually is,” they write, “a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion” (408). Politics in 1776 or 2022 anyone?

Daniel K. Richter

 

Ecologies of Freedom and the Challenge for Environmental History

David Graeber and David Wengrow wrote The Dawn of Everything, they claim, “to lay down foundations for a new world history” (25), one emphasizing freedom and creativity, while simultaneously attempting to synthesize decades of work in archaeology and anthropology that has challenged longstanding notions of exactly how “prehistory” looked. Rather than offering a complete picture, they describe their task as “to start putting some of the pieces of the puzzle together” and note that they hope their work will set off a process of “years of research and debate” (4). In taking on that challenge, they have produced an exciting and provocative work that should be read as the beginning of a conversation rather than the final word.

For historians of early America and the Atlantic World, The Dawn of Everything should be particularly useful to prompt new questions and discussion about relatively well-known sources. Indeed, their concept of the “Indigenous Critique” promises to spark new debates about how to distinguish between acts of ventriloquism and the presence of pointed commentary in early modern European sources purporting to record the words of Native people. Even beyond these obviously relevant sections, however, Graeber and Wengrow’s work offers useful challenges, particularly to early modern environmental historians.

Recently, historians have increasingly turned their attention to the impact of climate on human history, and early modernists have been at the forefront of this work. The presence of new, more detailed paleoclimate data and the pressing imperatives of our own climate crisis have prompted a series of books investigating the Little Ice Age and its impacts, including on moments of contact and early European colonial efforts in the Americas. For environmental historians working on this period, the challenge has often been how to navigate questions of determinism—how do we show that specific environmental conditions shaped human history without appearing to claim that societies fell or wars began, necessarily, because of them?

Graeber and Wengrow offer a complete reorientation to this problem. They are firmly opposed to any sense of environmental or ecological determinism, so much so that anthropologists Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale argue that Graeber and Wengrow wind up with an “allergy to ecological thinking.” That aversion, Lindisfarne and Neale claim, leads them to abandon any sort of materialist explanation because “thinking about ecology and technology threatens to make the choices and revolution they want impossible.”

But that charge is not quite right. Graeber and Wengrow acknowledge that “the intersection of environment and technology does make a difference, often a huge difference” (205), and warn against “ridiculous extremes” in rejecting Marx’s dictum that we do not make history under conditions of our own choosing (206). Rather, they attack environmental determinists for failing to fully consider environmental conditions in their explanations—for claiming that environmental limits required a set of behaviors when, in fact, other options were ecologically possible.

This focus on choice animates their treatment of the environment throughout the book and is developed most explicitly in Chapters 6 and 7, “Gardens of Adonis” and “The Ecology of Freedom.” Here Graeber and Wengrow take on the idea of an “Agricultural Revolution,” arguing instead that the process by which farming was adopted was far slower, more intermittent, and more limited than the phrase “revolution” implies. They reject claims that environmental catastrophe or the changing climate of the early Holocene necessarily prompted the adoption of agriculture, but rejecting environmental causation does not mean abandoning attention to the environment. Instead, Graeber and Wengrow argue that closer attention to the diverse ecosystems in which neolithic peoples lived reveals that they were often spaces for play.

For example, Graeber and Wengrow challenge the idea of the “Fertile Crescent,” noting that “in ecological terms, it’s really not one crescent but two—or no doubt even more, depending how closely one chooses to look” (226). The sheer diversity of environmental conditions enabled diverse Neolithic experiments with subsistence practices, but “experiments” is the key word here. Early cultivation “was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature” (239). Environmental knowledge—specifically women’s environmental knowledge, lay at the heart of these practices, which took place in ecological niches in areas that might otherwise hold importance as sites of trading, hunting, fishing, or foraging—activities that often remained culturally central even as subsistence shifted towards domesticated plants or animals.

The types of “fluid ecological arrangements” that characterized early farming in the Fertile Crescent also frequently defined cultivation elsewhere in Eurasia, Oceania, and the Americas. There was a strong preference for what Graeber and Wengrow call “an ecology of freedom” (a term they adapt from the social ecologist Murray Bookchin), which they define as “the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one’s existence to the logistical rigors of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death” (260). The desire to maintain this ecology of freedom animated site selection for some of the first cities, they argue, allowing a wide variety of resources from foraging, fishing, and hunting and ensuring that agricultural practices retained their flexibility even as they scaled up. Such arrangements also structured environments in early America. As historian Anya Zilberstein has shown, Native peoples across North America cultivated multiple species of Zizania (wild rice) in ways that led consistently-confused European observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to label the plants as wild or naturally occurring and in need of “improvement.”

Focusing on flexibility, freedom, and play, as they do, would re-orient early modern and early American environmental history (and the field of environmental history more broadly). Concepts like adaptation and resilience/vulnerability have become increasingly important in climate history to provide more nuanced explanations for the effects of climate and weather. Graeber and Wengrow push us to go further, to ask how the desire for freedom shaped engagement with the other-than-human world, to treat our subjects as creative rather than reactive. We need not always “set the dial between freedom and determinism” (206) where they do; acknowledging that it can turn that way and asking questions accordingly can transform our field.

Keith Pluymers

 

Further Reading

Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Charles R. Cobb, The Archaeology of Southeastern Native American Landscapes of the Colonial Era. Gainesville:University Press of Florida, 2019.

Christine DeLucia, “Terrapolitics in the Dawnland: Relationality, Resistance, and Indigenous Futures in the Native and Colonial Northeast,” New England Quarterly 92 (November 2019): 548–83.

Robbie Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1716. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Mairja Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe: Myths and Cult Images, 6,500−3,500 BC, Myths and Cult Images. 1982. Reprint. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.  

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021.

Gilles Havard, “Le Grand Soleil et la Mort: Anthropologie du coup natchez de 1729,” Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec 50 (no. 2, 2021): 71-91.

Vernon James Knight, Jr., Mound Excavations at Moundville: Architecture, Elites, and Social Order. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010.

Louis de Lom Darce, Baron de Lahontan, Dialogues curieux entre l‘auteur et un sauvage de bons sens qui a voyagé, et Mémoires de l’Amerique septentrionale. Edited by Gilbert Chinard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1931.

Barbara Alice Mann, “‘Are You Delusional?’: Kandiaronk on Christianity,” in Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands: Selected Speeches and Critical Analysis. Edited by Barbara Alice Mann. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Barbara Alice Mann, Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 

Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Georges Sioui, For an Amerindian Autohistory: An Essay on the Foundations of a Social Ethic. Translated by Sheila Fischman. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.

Sam White, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Cambridge, MassachuMAsetts: Harvard University Press, 2017).

Anya Zilberstein, “Inured to Empire: Wild Rice and Climate Change,” William and Mary Quarterly 72 (no. 1, 2015): 127.

 

This article originally appeared in October 2022.

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Robbie Ethridge is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Mississippi. In addition to editing four anthologies, writing numerous articles and book chapters on the history and ethnography of Native peoples of the American South, she is the author of Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World, 1796-1816 (2003), the Mooney Award-winning book From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715 (2010), and co-author with Robert J. Miller of A Promise Kept: The Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the End of the Trail of Tears (forthcoming 2023). Her current research reconstructs the 700-year history of the pre-colonial Mississippian world.

Sean P. Harvey is associate professor of history at Seton Hall University and a member of the editorial board of Commonplace. His publications include Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation (Harvard University Press, 2015) and articles that have appeared in Journal of the Early Republic and William and Mary Quarterly. His current research examines Albert Gallatin, colonialism, and capital in the Atlantic world from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

Barbara Alice Mann, Ph.D., is Professor in the Jesup Scott Honors College at the University of Toledo, in Toledo, Ohio, USA. She has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous books, most recently including The Woman Who Married the Bear (forthcoming from Oxford, 2022); President by Massacre (2019, ABC-CLIO), and Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath (Oxford, 2016).

Keith Pluymers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Illinois State University, where he teaches early modern environmental history. His first book No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania, 2021) examines how fears of wood scarcity shaped early modern English colonialism.

Daniel K. Richter is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania and the former Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. He is the author of Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Harvard University Press, 2011).

Gordon M. Sayre is Professor of English and Folklore at the University of Oregon. In addition to his book Les Sauvages Américains (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), he is Academic advisor for the entry on Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de Lahontan in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, vol. 280.

What made you want to write your first book? What drew you to your topic initially? Did your thinking about it change over time?

Cassie: I entered my PhD program knowing that I wanted to write about friendships between men and women in the early American republic. I had done a master’s degree already, and in researching my MA thesis (on etiquette in early Washington, D.C.), I came across this amazing letter by a female friend of Thomas Jefferson talking about how much she cared for him. I thought I had discovered an affair, but my advisor explained that people described emotions differently then and I couldn’t make that leap. I wondered how people in the early American republic, when gender roles were much more strictly constrained, could have had male/female friendships when I personally found it tricky in the twenty-first century. Starting out, I had no idea what kind of arguments I was going to make, so that really did evolve over time. I’m guessing that, given the topic of your book, you had less of a personal connection to it. What brought you to writing about missionaries?

Emily: I came into grad school planning on writing about missionaries, but with a very different focus. I had initially wanted to write about missionary marriages in the early republic. Who were these men and women who had picked up their whole lives to marry someone they hardly knew and move to a whole other part of the world? But then, like you, I came across something in a source that really surprised me and had me thinking about doing something a little different. Ann Judson’s memoir has these amazing scenes in India during the War of 1812 as the Americans were trying to figure out where they should go to avoid being arrested—reading that had me asking why this group of missionaries had imagined that this was a good time for foreign mission work in the first place. It got me started down the path of thinking about missions and empire and I set aside the questions I had about marriage for a little bit.

 

What did you anticipate the criticisms of your book would be? Is that what reviewers actually critiqued?

Emily: I was sure that I would hear a lot of criticism about my reliance on English-language archives. Given Christian Imperialism’s globe-trotting scope, I think a very fair critique of the book is that I did not make use of many sources from the people the missionaries sought to convert (with the exception of a few in translation). Surprisingly, this was not the major critique I heard, which I hope means that readers accepted the ways that I limited the scope of the book to focus on American understandings of empire and mission. How about you, Cassie? What were the critiques that you were worried about?

Cassie: I expected particular criticisms about what I truly thought were weaknesses in the book, but those weren’t actually the criticisms reviewers had. Most of their critiques had to do with the degree of equality and political power women gained from these friendships. I was surprised that only one reviewer brought up something I found problematic: that I had limited my project’s scope, just focusing on elite white people. But I just couldn’t figure out how to get at this story for lower class people; I tried a few different avenues and hit dead ends. The other thing I could never quite wrap my head around was what these friendships meant for masculinity and men; I spent a lot more time on women and norms of femininity, but no reviewers brought this up. In both of these cases, I hope future scholars will be able to move this topic in new directions.

 

Is there anything readers or reviewers brought up that made you rethink your arguments?

Cassie: Absolutely. One of my readers pre-publication noted that the book focused almost entirely on challenges to male/female friendships rather than providing a picture of the actual experience of individual friendships. As a result, I added a new first chapter that examines three different friendships in detail, and it was a lot of fun to write. The most common critique from reviewers was that saying there was equality in these friendships was an overstatement. That’s a fair point, and one I usually qualified—but I went bolder in the introduction. One reviewer referred to my take on these friendships as “optimistic” and I think that helps explain why I emphasized how much power women had in these friendships. It’s interesting to think that coming at the same sources with a different mindset would have changed my argument. How about you, Emily?

Emily: I love that first chapter in your book. It’s such a powerful way to start the book—what a great example of the peer review process at work! I added a chapter at the suggestion of one of my initial readers, too. They had commented that I could and should expect critique for my English-language sources and might try to speak more directly to what I can and cannot say about the experience of those the missionaries were trying to convert. The chapter on schools and the meaning of conversion was my attempt to do that. After the book was published, one reviewer commented that it would be impossible to write the full history of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), given the size of its archive (1,261 linear feet). Their point was that my broad scope meant that I missed some key details in some locations. I wouldn’t say that this made me rethink my larger argument, but it is a point well taken. When I set out to write the book, I knew that I should either go deep on one particular place or broad and try to capture the movement as a whole. There are definitely costs to either approach.

 

Who did you think your book would be in conversation with and who ended up taking up your work?

Emily: When did you start thinking about this, Cassie? For me, it was something I was really conscious of as I was talking to potential editors because I really wanted some help in reaching out to US in the World scholars. During grad school, my major conference had been SHEAR and, to a lesser degree, the American Society for Church History, so I felt pretty sure that I was already in conversation with those scholars. But I wanted to be sure to find ways to make my work resonate with folks thinking about empire and American foreign relations in different time periods. It was a big part of the reason why I ended up publishing with Cornell in their US in the World Series.

Cassie: I also had a really specific audience in mind. I essentially saw my work as an ethnographic study of a particular form of relationship in the past, and my hope was that other gender scholars would start looking for male/female friendships in other settings. That’s why I published the article drawn from the book in the journal Gender History rather than an early US history journal. Apparently, the Library of Congress cataloguers thought my book went with books on the psychology of emotion, even though I (intentionally) don’t cite a single psychologist in the book! Nonetheless, it does seem like mostly historians of early America have been citing the book. There have been scholars looking at male/female friendships in other times and places—including non-historians—who have used the book, and that is really encouraging. Emily, who ended up citing your book? I hear people in our field talking about it all the time!

Emily: It’s mostly landed where I expected—religious studies, foreign relations, early US and the world. It gets cited sometimes as the “early” example in work focusing on later periods, which is something I’ve really enjoyed.

 

What might you change if you were to rewrite the book?

Cassie: I have thought about this a lot over the past seven years. There is one key omission that just feels so glaring to me now: in writing about Thomas Jefferson’s friendships in Paris with women, I failed to note that he likely began his sexually exploitative relationship with Sally Hemings during his time there. I was working from the correspondence, and of course Hemings isn’t there; I needed to widen the frame and bring her in.

Emily: That’s a really interesting point. Do you think widening the frame would have changed the argument at all? How is that helping you think about how to approach your current book?

Cassie: Certainly, when it comes to what I was arguing about Jefferson as a friend to women, juxtaposing that with his sexual exploitation of Hemings puts his behavior in a different and more complex light. Many of the very men—and women—who could have such emotionally rich friendships were at the very same time exploiting enslaved people. I’ve been much more cognizant in this second book of placing the people I’m writing about in the context of events going on in all aspects of their lives and in the country. My writing style is also very different for this book; because it’s for a popular audience, there is a clear chronological narrative and more accessible language. Focusing on storytelling rather than solely analysis is, for me, just so much more enjoyable. What is your approach to structuring your second book?

Emily: Like you, I’ve been writing my new book differently—though I’m not writing for a trade press, I’m thinking more about narrative and hoping to reach a broader audience this time around. Missionary Diplomacy explores the relationship between the mission movement and the US government over the course of the nineteenth century (and a bit into the twentieth), with chapters comparing experiences in different regions. I’ve had to work through the same kind of structural questions about how to tell a story about Americans moving all around the globe in a manageable kind of way. The new book is organized chronologically and thematically, with some chapters that globe-hop and others that zoom in on particular case studies. Each chapter is more character-driven and narrative than I’ve written in the past. It’s been a lot of fun to play around with writing in a different style and voice. 

Cassie: I’ve often thought about how Founding Friendships would look if I had written it in the style of my current book, although I still have never figured out how I could write it chronologically rather than thematically. I didn’t have a clear thread of how friendships changed over time in the early republic, but I did have sets of themes that my evidence cohered around. How did you structure Christian Imperialism?

Emily: The structure I ended up with really reflects the argument I was making in the book and was a big revision from the dissertation. The dissertation actually took on more of a narrative arc—maybe that’s why I really wouldn’t rewrite the book as a narrative now! The dissertation had more of a narrative arc as a religious history and focused a lot on the question of how missionaries and their supporters defined what was “morality” and what was “politics” as they evangelized in a world of empire. When I thought about how to turn the dissertation into a book, I wanted to do a better job of centering the questions about empire that had gotten me so excited. To do that, I restructured the chapter outline a bit to allow each chapter to be more of a case study of different types of imperialism. This meant that I dropped one chapter in the dissertation about slavery that I need to come back to one of these days, but I don’t think I could have made the argument I wanted to make in a more narrative style. I still really like the structure I used there, and I couldn’t change it without having to really change the heart of the book.

 

How did working on this book lead you to your second book? What did you learn through that process that has influenced what you’re doing now?

Emily: I love talking to folks about this question, because there are so many different journeys from the first book to the next. Some folks really seem to want to do something completely different; others have a very clear progression from one to the next. It took me some time to decide on which route I wanted to go in. I had actually received a warning from one mentor that I might not want to do the next book on missions—lest I get stuck in a “missionary ghetto.” But I ended up taking the advice of another mentor that it could make a lot of sense to build on what I already knew to position myself as one of the experts in this field. And I’m still finding lots to say about missionaries and American foreign relations, so I’m okay continuing to work on them for a bit longer. In the end, I wanted to answer some questions that I had received at conferences about missions and policy, which I didn’t get to at all in the first book. That was the springboard for Missionary Diplomacy, the book I’m finishing up now.

Cassie: I definitely had a different journey to my second book, because I have shifted to writing a biography of a family. I’m still focused on early America and the intertwining of relationships and power, but otherwise this is a very different book. Nonetheless, I came to it from the first book; I read some correspondence of the people I’m now writing about, George Washington’s step-grandchildren, in the research for Founding Friendships. I really enjoyed digging deep into the stories of some of the people I wrote about in the first book, and I wanted to immerse myself in just a few individuals’ stories. First Family tells the story of four rather eccentric but at the time very famous siblings from the American Revolution to the Civil War, and while the research for it took a decade, it’s been so much fun.

 

Ultimately, books are static, material things. As historians and writers, we’re always changing, and so is the field of history. We can shift approaches and apply lessons learned to the next book, but only in the rare cases of a second edition of a book does the author get to add later reflections to the physical text. We hope this conversation spurs more authors to find ways to remain in dialogue with their books and critics.

 

This article was originally published in September 2022.

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Cassandra Good is associate professor of history at Marymount University in Arlington, VA. She writes and researches on politics, gender, and culture in the early American republic. Her first book, Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic, won the Organization of American Historians’ Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize in U.S. women’s and/or gender history in 2016. Her next book, First Family: George Washington’s Heirs and the Making of America, is forthcoming from Hanover Square Press (an imprint of Harper Collins) in 2023.

Emily Conroy-Krutz is associate professor of history at Michigan State University and the author of Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (2015). Her writings on religion, reform, empire, and gender can be found in the Journal of the Early Republic, Early American Studies, Diplomatic History, and several edited volumes. Her next book, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and American Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

The desk, dated to the 1690s, has seen the homes of several New England ministers. Curators speculate that it may have first belonged to the minister Edward Taylor (1640s-1729) before it came to reside in the home of Nehemiah Bull (1701-1740) of Westfield, Massachusetts. While Taylor’s ownership remains speculative, Bull made his ownership known by signing his name to the bottom of one of the drawers in a large but neat script that has been confirmed as a match with his signature in a surviving daybook. Today, both desk and daybook are owned by Historic Deerfield and the desk sits on display in the study of the eighteenth-century Ashley home, the residence of the Reverend Jonathan Ashley (1712-1780). Although we do not know what Bull’s house looked like, we can presume that the desk sat in a study like Ashley’s, or in a chamber that served at least part time as a study for the minister. In this space, the desk would have served practical functions while also acting as a status symbol, shoring up Bull’s authority as a household head, minister, and prominent figure in the community. Its design—especially its turned legs—suggest it was intended with outward display in mind. While Bull was likely the desk’s primary sitter, it would have had meaning as well for all those who lived in and visited the home.

Bull’s house, where the desk lived for several years, was bustling. There was his wife Elizabeth and their three children as well as many non-kin members of the household that came and went. Nehemiah and his wife were enslavers, and there were at least three enslaved people who lived in their home, three women named Tanner, Phillis, and Dido, who were all included in Bull’s inventory at his death in 1740. Additionally, the couple regularly hired white women who served as maids for various and sometimes overlapping periods of time ranging from a few months to multiple years. Others came as laborers, boarders, and students. For example, there was Benjamin Collam’s son who came to board, Hannah Dewey who came for “service,” Jacob (“a young Indian”) to board, Edward Coats to “live,” and Tim Woodbridge who came “to board with me and to be instructed.” Others came to “school” but may not have necessarily boarded in the house. At times, the house was so full that Bull was forced to board laborers in his neighbors’ homes. As we imagine the life of this desk, we must place it within this lively space.

For Bull, the desk may have symbolized a retreat from the noise of the home, a place to carve out relative privacy. This was often how Bull’s contemporaries described their time in their studies. The minister Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), for example, was known to have spent up to thirteen hours a day in his study. Bull’s slightly earlier contemporary, the minister Peter Thacher (1651-1727) of Milton, Massachusetts, was perhaps less extreme, but habitually wrote of working independently in his study, sometimes to little avail, as when he wrote in November 1684: “I did little in my study tho I did something.” Thacher’s seclusion in his study rested on a system of racial and class-based unfreedom that his diary laid bare, a reality that was true for Bull as well, who was ordained as a minister in 1726. In the above entry, immediately after indicating that he had worked in his study, Thacher added a note “Ebed and Ephraim plowed.” By this, he referred to the labor of his enslaved and indentured laborers that made his studying possible. The same was almost certainly true of Bull’s household; the labor of his enslaved laborers, Tanner, Phillis, and Dido, as well as his many hired and indentured workers allowed Bull the occasional quiet time in his study to read, write, and think at the desk.

In part, the study—and the desk itself—may have demarcated spiritual space in the minister’s home. Ministers like Bull, Thacher, and Edwards retreated to their studies in attempts to gain distance not only from other members of their household but also from temporal concerns. Bull would have read and written sermons at the desk, prepared for the Sabbath, and carried out spiritual work and reflection in this space. While many of these activities were solitary, the desk may have symbolized a spiritual space for others who entered the chamber, whether to receive religious instruction or to engage in theological discussions with Bull. This was the case for Peter Thacher, who described how his maid Lidea would approach him in his study to discuss her spiritual state. At the desk, Bull may have conducted much of his inner religious life, just as he may have communed with other members of the household and community about spiritual affairs. We might ask how members of his household—especially those who were enslaved or otherwise unfree—might have seen and interacted with the desk, given its association with Bull’s religious duties. It is quite possible that members of Bull’s household would have regarded the desk as an anchor of spiritual space within the home.

Even as the desk may have been a space for spiritual work, Bull would have struggled to keep this fully separate from his temporal affairs, these multiple demands converging on the writing surface of the desk, where Bull brought quill to parchment. The varied nature of writings produced at this desk are reflective of this, as they covered both worldly and religious concerns, some public and others private. Surviving records offer a glimpse of the types of materials that crossed his desk. In addition to sermons, Bull wrote letters to fellow theologians like Solomon Williams, some of which survive today at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA) Library, just up the road from the Ashley house. Bull likewise may have been sitting at this very desk when he opened and read a 1734/5 letter from Konkapot and Umpachenee, which alerted him that members of their tribe had been poisoned. Presuming he followed Konkapot and Umpachenee’s instructions, after breaking the letter open and reading it, he sealed it up again and sent it along to Reverend Stephen Williams of Longmeadow. To this end, we might imagine that Bull used this desk to read and draft correspondence concerning his affairs in establishing a mission at Stockbridge in the 1730s. Although only a small fragment of Bull’s incoming and outgoing correspondence survives, the desk offers a reminder of Bull’s assorted affairs from family matters to theological concerns to his interest in the Stockbridge mission.

In addition to writing and receiving letters, Nehemiah Bull likely sat at this desk with his daybook, which also survives at the PVMA library. As Bull recorded on the title page, this book was an “account of my dealings with men.” The book—kept throughout the 1720s and 30s—gives a sense of Bull’s personality and perhaps how he interacted with members of his household, as he inscribed on the title page his motto: “Honesty is the best policy! Let this be my motto forever.” The bulk of the pages included notes about debts due to friends and neighbors as well as those owed to Bull. He also used the space to record the dates when various laborers came into his home and their accounts with him. The book was large enough that Bull probably did not carry it with him on daily errands but instead may have stored it on the desk where he could lay open its pages and mark his accounts.

Although Bull would have spent much independent time in his study, his accounting practice occasionally required the collaboration of those in his household. For example, his wife, Elizabeth may have kept her own accounts—either in a book of her own, or in some other style like the many women who recorded accounts with chalk tally marks. She may have joined him at the desk, perhaps standing alongside it or sitting close by as he confirmed with her these accounts. In other cases, she may have made her own marks in his book, a collaborative accounting practice that comes across in other account books of this era.

The pair hired several maids, who would have likely fallen under Elizabeth’s purview, and Bull may have turned to Elizabeth for clarification about their accounts. Likewise, he may have called some of these women—Patience Stockwell, Esther Lyon, or Ruth Trumble, just to name a few—to the desk when it was time to settle accounts, as when Peter Thacher described calling his maid Lidea into his study where he “discoursed her concerning her going home . . . and paid her what I owed her.” More regularly, though, Bull may have relied on enslaved, indentured, and hired members of his household to assist with his accounts. In their aprons, Tanner, Phillis, and Dido may have stuffed receipts from local merchants like Samuel Barnard after returning from his shop, presenting these to their enslavers as proof of their errands. In cases like these, we can imagine the daybook sitting open on Bull’s desk, its contents shaping his interactions with various members of the household.

Just as Bull may have called members of the household to assist him at his desk, this too may have served as a place where Bull conducted affairs with friends, neighbors, members of the church, and various others. When he filed a suit with his congregation for his salary, for example, the sheriff or other legal officials may have brought their paperwork to this space. When he met with relatives or members of the town to bring in apprentices, their indentures may have been signed on this very surface. And when he signed deeds for land at Stockbridge, or other bills of credit, he and others may have gathered around this desk space.  

Some of these transactions would have pulled in members of his household to sign as witnesses. In many cases, they may have stood on the side of the desk when they signed, their marks and signatures appearing sideways on the page as some of these surviving papers show. Even when they did not officially witness and sign documents, diverse members of Bull’s household listened in and watched on as these activities were carried out. Perhaps they were busy sweeping the room, polishing the silver, or spinning wool, but in the multifunctional rooms of an eighteenth-century house it was common for laboring people to inadvertently act as witnesses to the household head’s dealings. We might ask what they would have taken from these interactions? Might such affairs have shaped their ability to navigate the courts or to plot potential routes out of bondage? What words and practices did they glean from the public affairs in this space?

In addition to a space for carrying out business, Bull’s study—and his desk—were spaces of instruction and may have been occupied by Bull’s various students. Several young men in Deerfield came to Bull’s house for schooling, often boarding in the house while they received instruction. While his students were mostly white men and boys, Bull too has been recognized as an early teacher for Jupiter Hammon, who became one of the earliest known Black writers in America. Although the story goes that Bull carried out this training in the library of the Lloyd Manor Estate in New York, it is possible that Bull may have taken on other African American students, enslaved or free, in the Deerfield area. Tanner, Phillis, and Dido, or any other enslaved people who lived in his household may too have received some schooling from Bull, perhaps using the desk’s writing surface during their lessons. Bull’s daybook provides some evidence of this type of instruction, as there are several pages that appear to have been used for practice writing—possibly by Bull but just as likely by some of his children and students.

The desk may have been a curiosity to his household, not only for what activities happened on and around it, but for the things stored within its drawers. The desk has four drawers, but only two are immediately visible when facing the desk; the other two have been somewhat ingeniously built into the sides of the desk, allowing for significantly more storage space. Notably, none of these drawers ever held locks, providing easy access to those interested in peeking at the contents. Unlike the somewhat ubiquitous chests of this period which opened from the top and would have required rifling through miscellaneous storage items like linens to find any stored papers, this desk left papers rather accessible.

These papers may have been objects of fascination to members of Bull’s household, especially since enslaved and unfree people in New England—even those who were illiterate—were likely familiar with the power of writing. Papers could lead to pain and separation as with a bill of sale, just as they could lead to relative freedoms in daily life as with passes and currency notes. For indentured members of the household, indenture papers offer another example of the power of the written word, as indentures could provide important proof of freedom dues or of service terms. Of course, Bull may have taken this into consideration with what he stored in this desk and what he kept elsewhere, perhaps in a locked box or drawer, just as he may have placed more confidential items in the side drawers, which may have been slightly less visible to onlookers, depending on how the desk was positioned in his home. The desk’s deep drawers, now empty, invite many questions about what was stored there but also about how members of Bull’s household may have interacted with them. Might they have slid the drawers open when Bull was out of the home carrying out social and business affairs? Would the papers inside have made any sense to those who viewed them? What types of information did they provide?

When we encounter this desk as visitors, it is easy to see Nehemiah Bull sitting alone at it. This is perhaps for good reason as the desk was a symbol of his position in the church and in colonial society as well as his authority as male household head. It would also have been a space that he sometimes went for solitude. But while visitors today enter empty homes and are met with a static world, the eighteenth century was far from this. When we repopulate the room, we must consider additional interactions around the desk. Artifacts like the Bull desk recall all types of stories of the diverse people who made these objects and interacted with them. When we bring this world into motion again, we are greeted with a much richer and more diverse view of colonial America.

 

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was carried out thanks to a New England Regional Consortium Fellowship, with special thanks to Dan Sousa, furniture curator at Historic Deerfield, for showing me the desk and the drawer with Bull’s signature. Thank you as well to Karin Wulf, Kristen Beales, and Alison Bazylinski for reading early drafts of this article.

 

Further Reading

On desks and colonial storage furniture, see Wilson H. Kimnach and Kenneth P. Minkema, “The Material and Social Practices of Intellectual Work: Jonathan Edward’s Study,” William and Mary Quarterly 69 (Oct. 2012): 684; Gerald W. R. Ward, “The Merchants’ Real Friend and Companion” in Boston Furniture, 1700-1900, ed. Brock Jobe and Gerald W.R. Ward (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2016), 166-179; A Place for Everything: Chests and Boxes in Early Colonial America (Winterthur, Delaware: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1986); Brock Jobe and Myrna Kate, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984).

On the Nehemiah Bull desk, see Katherine Fecteau, “It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s … a table-desk” Past@present blog, Umass Amherst Department of History, https://umasshistory.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/historic-deerfield-internship/; “An Historic Desk from Before Desks Were Desks” The Appraisal Group, https://appraisalgroupusa.com/an-historic-desk-from-before-desks-were-desks/; Robert Rober, “Besides historic desk, Rev. Bull owned people,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, April 25, 2016 https://www.gazettenet.com/Romer-letter-1612543.

On Nehemiah Bull’s involvement in Stockbridge, see Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). On Bull as teacher to Jupiter Hammon see Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1683 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 66.

On manuscript culture in early America, see Catherine La Courreye Blecki, “Reading Moore’s Book: Manuscripts vs. Print Culture and the Development of Early American Literature,” in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America, ed. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 59-106.

On slavery in Deerfield and western Massachusetts, see Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved out of Slavery and Into Legend (New York: Harper Collins, 2008); C.S. Manegold, Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Robert H. Robert, Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts (Florence, Massachusetts: Levellers Press, 2009); Marla R. Miller, Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2020).

On enslaved people and space, see Dell Upton, “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Places 2 (no. 2, 1984): 59-72; Bernard L. Herman, Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2012; 1999); Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2006).

 

This article originally appeared in September, 2022.

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Caylin Carbonell is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture. She is a historian of race, gender, and power with a focus on the lived experiences of unfreedom in early New England. Her book project, Laboring Lives: Households, Dependence, and Power in Colonial New England, uses innovative archival practices to reveal stories of the everyday lives of diverse New Englanders.  

This surprising exchange in the Missouri Republican sent me searching for traces of the play on American stages, where I discovered its enduring popularity for at least a half century following its 1835 debut in New York. I found no other evidence of controversy, in St. Louis or elsewhere, which surprised me given that the play first appeared in Boston the spring after the Ursuline Convent riot in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In America, Pet would have resonated with the bestselling convent captivity narratives Six Month in a Convent, Or, the Narrative of Rebecca Theresa Reed (1835) and Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), which cast the convent as a danger to Protestant womanhood and domesticity, exciting prurient interest and controversy. What was the relationship, I wondered, between this “revolt of the convent” and the intensifying anti-Catholicism of the 1830s that scholars have found across Anglo-American print culture? Pet offers a tantalizing glimpse at the way comedy translated these themes as light fare. 

Pet of the Petticoats extends the reach of Anglo-Atlantic anti-Catholicism to the stage, illustrating the ways its tropes and anxieties moved across genres and into sentimental stage comedy. The 1832 opera dispenses with villainous priests and nuns of the Gothic drama, instead using the convent setting to dramatize gender gone wrong when women are kept from men and boys are raised in a world of women. Paul’s case highlights the dangers of over-feminization for boys and men, exemplifying how ambivalence about aspects of Protestant culture was often worked out through anti-Catholic imagery, as Susan Griffin and Jenny Franchot have shown in their analyses of nineteenth-century literature. If much anti-Catholic literature of the period presented the priest and the convent as a dark mirror reflecting Anglo-Protestant anxieties, this farce mined those anxieties for comedic effect while offering audiences a reassuring moral conclusion.

Anti-Catholic literature, which crested in the 1830s and 1850s in relation to expanding Catholic communities, mobilized views of Catholicism to grapple with questions about Anglo-Protestant culture, particularly the status of women and the family. A turning point was the 1834 Charlestown riot, when a working-class mob attacked the Ursuline convent, founded in 1827, that was home to student boarders from elite Boston families. The fate of a disaffected nun, who had left and then returned, inspired the attack. Rebecca Reed’s unpublished account of her years as a charity student also fueled suspicion of the convent and its role in the community. An estimated two-thousand spectators watched the rioters systematically destroy convent property. In the trial that followed, only one man was found guilty. The victims received no damages, and the convent was never rebuilt.

These events mobilized competing views of new Catholic institutions and communities, but the convent also became a target because it symbolized how America’s democratic promise was being corrupted by elites, as Jenny Franchot has argued. The convent represented a danger to American purity in the guise of elite education, an anti-democratic force in America’s competitive market society, and a threat to the patriarchal family. The fixation on the tyrannical masculine figure of the Mother Superior found in trial testimony and Reed’s account policed the boundaries of female authority, which were at the time being reshaped by the Protestant cult of domestic femininity. The year after Reed’s account appeared, ghostwriters published Maria Monk’s more sensationalistic (and false) account of a Montreal nunnery where priests prostituted novitiates and illegitimate infants were buried in quicklime. This narrative engaged the politics of sexual virtue catalyzed by the moral reform movements of 1830s, asking how women might protect their virtue and secure class stability. Pet of the Petticoats spoke to these themes in the form of an English breeches comedy.

Pet exemplifies the transatlantic character of early U.S. theater (and print culture more broadly). It debuted in 1832 as a vehicle for London-based actress-manager Fanny Fitzwilliam adapted by John Baldwin Buckstone. Like many of Buckstone’s comedies, Pet derived from a continental European source, a French vaudeville based on Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset’s poem “Vert-Vert,” about a bird who disrupts a convent with the blasphemy he learns from sailors. The bird learns reform, as does the boy protagonist at the center of the French original, in Buckstone’s version an actress-boy role. In England as in America, the piece was popular, enjoyed for its “wit” and “excellent moral lesson,” according to the London Theatrical Observer. Pet was initially marketed as “The Convent of St. Eloi, or the Pet of the Petticoats,” though by the time it reached the United States in 1835, it was usually billed simply as “Pet of the Petticoats,” which highlighted the problem of the protagonist’s upbringing in a world of women.

In the absence of dramatic copyright law in the U.S., English plays were regularly imported, adapted, and produced by American theater companies. Pet first began appearing in U.S. theaters in 1835, usually selected by leading actresses for their benefit night, when performers could decide the repertoire and take a cut of the house. Benefit nights gave actresses an opportunity to try new roles and were often used to debut a new piece, like the English comic opera recently published in London. Pet was deemed the “sensation of the season” in Boston and New York in the spring of 1835, but it received little critical attention as it was not literary drama. This is unfortunate given the ways it surely resonated in the aftermath of the Ursuline riot and American convent captivity narratives, which might have been a factor in its selection.

Pet is representative of comic opera and breeches drama in this period, mobilizing essentialist gender roles in a plot celebrating sentimental domestic ideals. The setting is a vaguely foreign, vaguely historical past. Though adapted from a French original, in the American context it spoke directly to concerns of Anglo-American Protestant culture with legitimate family structure, courtship, and sexual virtue. In this play as in broader anti-Catholic literature, the convent represents a threat to the institution of marriage and raises questions about legitimate female authority. Its boarders have been separated from their husbands and must live behind high walls and locked gates under control of the Mother Superior. The “under governess,” Sister Vinaigre, whose name evokes the dried-up spinster deprived of marital sexuality, “does nothing but watch and torment the poor young girls from morning till night.” All is not as it seems: Vinaigre is carrying on a clandestine romance with the dancing instructor, Monsieur Zephyr.

By casting the protagonist, Paul, as a breeches role, the piece highlights the convent as a site of gendered disorder: wives kept from husbands, and a boy raised as a girl and infantilized by the convent borders. Paul’s mother has sent him to the convent to be “educated in innocence, and brought up as pure and as virtuous as a girl” because “his father was a sad rake.” The result, the convent gardener jokes, is that “he don’t know whether he is a boy or girl.” Paul evokes the androgyne prominent in anti-Catholic imagery but also in Protestant writing concerned with the proper way to raise sons. Alas for his mother’s intentions, he tries to emulate the arts of seduction, producing a comedy of gendered errors where the actress likewise tries but ultimately fails at manhood. Actress Charlotte Watson was praised for her chaste performance as Paul, an indication that she conveyed innocence rather than knowingness, enhancing Paul’s feminine youth.

 The allure and humor of actress-as-boy roles like Paul relied on the association of youth and immaturity with femininity. Though Pet is unusual in following Paul through a coming-of-age tale and hints at his burgeoning manhood, the character fails in his approximation of adult masculinity. For the audience at least, Paul’s essential femininity is never in doubt. (Some dramatic actresses did take on adult male leads like Hamlet, Romeo, and Ion to critical acclaim, roles otherwise intended for actors.) While breeches acting had a clear heterosexist allure, resting on fixed notions of gender difference and infantilization of women, these roles gave actresses new realms of expression and stage business, like combat. And while male theatergoers were avid fans of actresses who played roles like Paul, the excitement of watching a young women wear the breeches and, in the case of Paul, satirize male libertinage also entertained women in the audience. Roles like Paul were innocuous, if somewhat racy fun, because their morals reinforced contemporary gendered order. Pet reassured viewers of the natural desire for domesticity even as it titillated audiences with a ribald celebration of male libertinage.

Paul’s failed attempt at sexual conquest shows the consequences of his innocence, a product of over-feminization. Paul arrives at an inn, where he discovers the soldiers entertained by opera star Madame Bravura. Paul has no context for the world of adult sexual vice and cannot even explain his attraction to Bravura. He overhears the soldiers discussing the arts of seduction and decides to win Bravura by attempting “love a la militaire.” He follows the advice of Chevalier St. Pierre: “the cooler she may appear, the warmth of your fervor should increase; if she repulses you, charge again—hem her in—take her round the wait—kiss her—she’ll scream—never heed that—but call for a delicate dinner and a dozen of Champagne” and “the victory is yours.” When Paul tries to caress and kiss Bravura, she is “repulsed.” The scene made light of seduction techniques practiced by male libertines yet gave its actresses a rare opportunity to satirize male sexual aggression. (In one of the French versions, Paul’s love interest Mimi finds and intercepts him in successful pursuit of the opera singer. He becomes the caged parrot rather than an innocent cupid reuniting lovers.) 

Pet pokes fun at efforts to discipline urban sexual culture. Soldiers separated from their wives by the convent’s “squadron of governesses”—note the masculinization—were expected to pursue illicit romance. The play assured audiences that while male libertinage could not be prevented, neither was it a threat to domesticity. The play concludes with a tidy moral: Paul offers to help the soldiers liberate their wives but only if they agree to “no more assignations with ladies.” The bonds of marriage to a virtuous woman will properly channel male sexual desire. Paul asks for forgiveness from the Mother Superior by affirming the natural order disrupted by the convent: “I have but restored husbands to their wives, and wives to their husbands; and those who have been once united in Hymen’s bonds, we are instructed never to put asunder.” The play also resolves the problem of Paul’s “feminine education.” He promises himself to the boarder Mimi but asks her to wait for him while he joins the army. With Paul destined to a proper masculine education prior to marriage, all sing “the conqueror love smiles on us now.”

The convent as a site of mystery, seduction, and illicit authority are present in Pet but rendered ineffectual rather than sinister, like the bumbling gardener or the repressed Sister Vinaigre. For audiences steeped in the dark salaciousness of convent captivity literature, Pet represented a lighter fantasy of revolt against elite conspiracies that threatened men’s legitimate access to American women. With actress-as-boy Paul at the center, the play also spoke to anxieties about over-feminization in middle-class Protestant culture. Paul is a failed boy in a world of cloistered girls and a failed seducer among worldly men. His character both celebrates youthful innocence and satirizes the feminization of American culture, but the revolt of the convent promises to restore him to his proper role.

Pet of the Petticoats was titillating but not offensive, prescient enough to excite laughs of recognition without inciting outrage or scandal. It celebrated a sexual double standard associated with American theater culture that was being challenged by Protestant reform, while still delivering a satisfactory moral lesson. If few found offense, this was because so much of its themes were so familiar to Americans steeped in anti-Catholic tropes, convents as sites that disrupted the natural order of things, where women exercised a masculine authority, and men were emasculated androgynes. Pet made ridiculous what convent captivity literature cast as dangerous, while assuring Americans that marital domesticity “conquers all.”

 

Further Reading

After first learning about Pet of the Petticoats in Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), I rediscovered the play through the discussion in the Missouri Republican in March 1838 while I was researching theater culture in St. Louis, Missouri.

Unfortunately, many of the pieces appearing on American stages from the 1810s to the 1850s, especially short comic afterpieces, never found their way to print. John Baldwin Buckstone’s The Pet of the Petticoats was unusual in this regard, first published in London in 1834 because of its popularity and then anthologized in Popular dramas by John Baldwin Buckstone as performed at the Metropolitan theatres, vol. 1 (London: William Strange, 1835), available through the Internet Archive.

Understanding the play in relation to contemporary anti-Catholicism led me to the following key works: Susan Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Marie Anne Pagliarini, “The Pure American Woman and the Wicket Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 9, no. 1 (Winter, 1999); Timothy Verhoeven, Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism: France and the United States in the nineteenth century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Thank you to Kara French for encouraging me to write about this play for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Annual Meeting.

 

This article originally appeared in September, 2022.

 

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Sara E. Lampert is an Associate Professor of History at the University of South Dakota and coordinator of the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies program. She is the author of Starring Women: Celebrity, Patriarchy, and American Theater, 1790-1850 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020). Learn more at Saraelampert.com and follow @slampie2. 

Few of the nineteenth-century stories on Ferguson failed to mention that the “sainted Isabella Graham” had regularly invited Ferguson’s “scholars to her house, to say their catechism, and receive religious instruction.” Graham, likewise devout, was a groundbreaking philanthropist. At a time when some clergymen railed against the women beginning to found and run charities, Graham led the creation of New York’s first female-led charity, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children. And that was just the beginning of her charitable leadership in New York. When she died in 1814, she was eulogized for “awaken[ing] the charities of a populous city, and giv[ing] to them an impulse, a direction, and an efficacy, unknown before.”

Recognized in their day as leaders thanks to their piety and benevolence, these women shared an evangelical faith that enabled them to work together. Yet their cooperation was unlikely in their time. It has been remembered or ignored by their biographers according to the racial politics of the era.

Ferguson and Graham’s paths crossed in the 1790s through their church. Graham had only just moved to New York. Two decades earlier, her husband died while they were living in Antigua, leaving her with three young girls and another child on the way and not much by means of support. She returned to her native Scotland and struggled to provide for her family. In 1789, hoping to get out from under “the debt hang[ing] over [her] head],” she reluctantly left Edinburgh to open a school for girls in New York. Soon George and Martha Washington, John Jay, and other prominent families were sending their girls to “Mrs. Grahams boarding school.” 

Meanwhile, Catherine was determined to be free. Around age fifteen, she was born again and sought out the Rev. John Mason, a white Presbyterian minister whose church she attended, for spiritual counsel. When she “found [herself] in the minister’s presence, [she] trembled] from head to foot. One harsh word would have crushed me.” But Mason welcomed the conversation and accepted her in the congregation. Within a couple of years, the girl, now in her mid-teens and at growing risk to possible sexual abuse, forged a deal to buy her freedom with the help of her church members. A woman, evidently Graham, purchased Ferguson for $200 with the understanding that Ferguson would labor, likely at domestic work, for six years to pay off the cost of her freedom. In time, though, Graham’s new son-in-law, Divie Bethune, raised $100 to discharge the debt while Graham herself reduced the time Ferguson owed her to eleven months.

Around this time, with “no less than four new boarding schools” opening and Graham’s business “at a stand,” she retired, and in 1797, she and other white women in her circle launched the Widows Society. Most charities at the time gave aid based on religious or ethnic affinity. The Widows Society innovated by helping white women without ties to sectarian charities, though it excluded Black women. Graham had been a mover and shaker in charities in Edinburgh in the 1780s so with her experience, as well as her stature as an older, respected woman, she was a natural choice as leader. That didn’t mean the path was easy. Initially, the Widows Society was “the jest of most, the ridicule of man, and it met the opposition of not a few,” she explained to a group of young women volunteering to teach at a new school for poor children. “The men could not allow our sex the steadiness and perseverance to establish such an undertaking.” But she had stood up to sexism before, even having excoriated a man behind in paying his daughter’s school bill, for not treating her the same as he would “any ordinary correspondent in the mercantile line.” Facing the challenges to establishing charities to aid needy women and children didn’t daunt her. 

Meanwhile, Ferguson had begun taking vulnerable children into her home. She had married at eighteen and had two children, but the children had died (contemporaries were silent on her husband’s fate). In the Black community, it wasn’t unusual for others to care for children when their parents couldn’t, though forty-eight kids, both white and black, was a lot. And expensive! So generous was she that when asked if she’d managed to save up any money from her successful career as a cakebaker, Ferguson replied that “I gave away all I earned.” Ferguson was the wedding cakebaker of choice for New Yorkers’ nuptials and, similar to other Black women who vended foodstuffs at street markets, she also sold her “small, delicious” “pound and sponge” cakes around the city from a market basket, according to the recollections of a city resident. Producing baked goods that were “past belief in toothsomeness” for both special occasions and everyday treats, she did well enough that her monetary donations amounted to “much money,” as an observer put it. In addition to succoring children in the here and now, Ferguson cared about their fates in the hereafter. She prayed for her charges and brought them into Graham’s home weekly. On Sundays, she “regularly collected the children in the neighborhood, who were accustomed to run in the street on the Lord’s day, into her house,” where she arranged for “suitable persons” to teach them the fundamentals of Christianity. Sometime around this point, Ferguson began holding weekly prayer meetings for adults with African Americans and whites attending. Ever politic, Ferguson “always secured the aid of some good man to conduct these meetings,” and that was how a former enslaved woman gave Isaac Ferris, a future chancellor of New York University, his start in public preaching. 

As a Black woman, Ferguson faced even greater obstacles to public leadership than Graham did. African Americans in New York, as in other cities, worked to establish institutions free of white control. Ferguson had created an endeavor that involved whites, but she ran it. Until, that is, sometime in the 1810s when her pastor folded it into the church. “We must not leave you to do all this,” he told her when he learned of the effort. Concerned about her workload though he may have been, the end result was that the school was now under his control.

Willingly or not, she must have acquiesced to her pastor taking over her school, just as she’d turned to Graham to help instruct her students and to white male ministers to lead her prayer meetings. All those decisions were either savvy moves or reluctant bows to reality. Graham had used her evangelical networks to launch her boarding school and her charities. Ferguson did the same with her endeavors.

So maybe the women’s cooperation was born of pragmatism, yet it was still notable. Not only was women’s and African Americans’ public leadership new and controversial, but also, well into the 1800s, Black and white women didn’t typically cooperate in charitable activity or reform efforts.

Back in the 1760s and early 1770s, when Graham, her husband, and their little girls had been living at Fort Niagara, the family had two enslaved Native girls, Diana and Susy. Graham taught them reading, sewing, and Christianity, so teaching children of color wasn’t new to her. But this was different. These children weren’t her chattel. They were “scholars” coming to her under the supervision of a Black woman of some standing in their community.

White evangelical antislavery writers writing in the mid-1800s about Ferguson loved to remember the connection between the women. Here was a story about a Black woman leader that could be told in a way that highlighted the cruelty of enslavers in separating Black families while assuring white Americans that racial harmony was possible—on their terms. 

Ferguson played the game she knew she had to. But there was another, more assertive side, one that harked back to the young girl who tried to bargain for her freedom. When the city directory writers came calling, she defined herself by her skilled occupation—first as a silk dyer, then, emphasizing expertise with a specialty textile, as a merino shawl washer, and finally, in the field she would be best known, as a cakebaker. She made sure her name appeared in the newspaper when she brokered a donation to the prominent American Bible Society on behalf of her prayer group. And when a group of well-to-do white men in the city took up a collection to buy the freedom of an imprisoned fugitive enslaved man, Jack, she donated too. Newspapers publicized the effort and the donors: hers was the only female name listed. Public memory of Ferguson never referred to her donation for Jack. Maybe Tappan or other writers didn’t know about it or maybe the incident didn’t fit the story of the influential but nonthreatening Black woman of faith. Either way, her contribution lets us know that she gave independently in the cause of Black freedom. 

For their part, Graham’s son-in-law and daughter didn’t mention the women’s relationship in the biographies they crafted of Graham at all. One reason for the silence may be because the family told a selective story about Graham and slavery, presenting her as a slaveholder with moral qualms about slavery. New research in original documents has turned up more enslaved people in Graham’s life than the family revealed and likewise raises questions—possibly irresolvable—about the story her daughter Joanna Bethune, who was firmly antislavery, told about her mother’s views. Graham’s son-in-law also had a nephew who was a “colored lad.” Perhaps sensitivity about that relationship was another reason the family avoided a story about an interracial partnership, even one involving religious friendship. As sectional tensions over slavery rose, newer editions of Graham’s biographies cut out references to Graham’s reported opposition to slavery. Critics of the change charged Graham’s grandson, the Rev. George Bethune, with trying to “conciliat[e] slaveholders with silence upon the evils of slavery. By 1860, when George Bethune came to write a memoir of his mother, Joanna Bethune, he credited her with being “The Mother of Sabbath-schools in America.” “[T]he facts and dates,” he insisted, “show that Providence intended for Mrs. Bethune the distinction” birthing the Sunday school movement in the United States. Joanna Bethune, an influential philanthropist in her own right and indeed a key leader of the Sunday school movement, had long been in her mother’s shadow and now her son wanted to put her in the limelight. There was no room in this origins story for a formerly enslaved Black woman.

Hailed by some and ignored by others, in both cases because of the politics of race, Ferguson and Graham’s unlikely cooperation to spiritually educate underserved children was one dimension of each woman’s role as a founding philanthropist.

The Widows Society was fading by the mid-1900s. But one of its spinoffs, a child welfare agency originally known as the Orphan Asylum Society of the City of New York and now known as Graham Windham, remains in operation today and has been supported by the cast and crew of Hamilton: An American Musical. Over two centuries after Ferguson and Graham, separately and to some degree together, cared for New York’s vulnerable children, Graham Windham has a Black women president, Kimberly Watson, an ordained minister.

 

Further Reading

Anne M. Boylan, “Benevolence and Antislavery Activity among African American Women in New York and Boston, 1820-1840,” in Jean Fagan Yellin and John Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

Anne M. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (New York: Knopf, 2010).

Jane E. Dabel, “‘I Have Gone Quietly to Work for the Support of My Three Children’: African-American Mothers in New York City, 1827-1877,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 27 (no. 2, 2003).

Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Allen Hartvik, “Catherine Ferguson: Black Founder of a Sunday School,” Negro History Bulletin 35 (no. 8, 1972): 176-77.

Robert J. Swan, “John Teasman: African-American Educator and the Emergence of Community in Early Black New York City, 1787-1815,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (no. 3, 1992): 331-56.

Kyle B. Roberts, Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Margaret Washington, “Going ‘Where They Dare Not Follow’: Race, Religion, and Sojourner Truth’s Early Interracial Reform,” Journal of African American History 98 (no. 1, 2013): 48-71.

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts of Ferguson and Graham include:

[Divie Bethune], The Power of Faith Exemplified in the Life and Writings of the Late Mrs. Isabella Graham (New York: J. Seymour, 1816).

[Joanna Bethune], The Power of Faith, Exemplified in the Life and Writings of the Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. A New Edition. Enriched by Her Narrative of Her Husband’s Death and Other Select Correspondence (New York: American Tract Society, 1843).

Joanna Bethune, The Unpublished Letters and Correspondence of Mrs. Isabella Graham: From the Year 1767 to 1814; Exhibiting Her Religious Character in the Different Relations of Life (New York: Theological and Sunday School Bookseller, 1838).

Memoirs of Mrs. Joanna Bethune, by her Son, the Rev. George W. Bethune, D.D. With an Appendix, Containing Extracts from the Writings of Mrs. Bethune (New York: Harper Brothers, 1863).

“Catherine Ferguson” in “City Items” section, New-York Daily Tribune, July 20, 1854. This obituary was republished, in modified form, in various antislavery and evangelical periodicals. Later in the century, writers retold the story in religious periodicals. See, for example, “Katy Ferguson,” New York Evangelist 62:5 (January 29, 1891).

Mrs. John W. Olcott, “Recollections of Katy Ferguson” in The Southern Workman 52 (1923): 463.

Primary sources on Ferguson include:

“For the Commercial Advertiser,” New-York Spectator, July 14, 1821.

“The donations for the slave Jack, amount to $937 50,” New York Journal of Commerce, August 27, 1835.

See also listings for Catherine Ferguson in the Longworth’s New York City Directories from 1814-1850 (available digitally from the New York Public Library).

 

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Modupe Labode, Crystal Moten, Kyle Roberts, and Sarah Jones Weicksel for helpful conversations about Ferguson and Graham.

 

This article was originally published in August 2022.

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Amanda B. Moniz, Ph.D., is the David M. Rubenstein Curator of Philanthropy at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Her book, From Empire to Humanity: The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism, was awarded ARNOVA’S inaugural Peter Dobkin Hall History of Philanthropy Book Prize. She is currently working on a biography of Isabella Graham.

Coining entailed producing metallic currency that would pass at face value despite lacking the full amount of silver or gold in favor of some combination of base metals such as copper, brass, or lead. “Bad Money,” as the sheriff called it. Coining differed from other eighteenth-century monetary crime, such as clipping or shaving, because it resulted in a new coin rather than altering a preexisting one. In this case, the coiners endeavored to make Spanish gold and silver coins in a range of values rather than any British silver coins. Given the scarcity of coin across the British North American colonies those pistoles and pesos would have been just as useful, if not more so, than any pounds or shillings. North Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century experienced an acute specie shortage (meaning of both paper and metallic currency) adding further incentive and opportunity to pass bad money. Credit and barter systems helped facilitate trade in the absence of specie, but cash was still needed for some tasks including inter-imperial trade, settling debts, or paying taxes. In such cases, colonists lacking British coin relied on Spanish, Portuguese, French, and other foreign coin in addition to the paper legal tender issued by colonial governments. Perhaps the coiners set out to produce something familiar enough in the Spanish coins but not so familiar as shillings or pounds that might have been more easily identified as spurious. Either way, their enterprise offered the prospect of profiting from the variability, complexity, and scarcity of colonial currency. 

Depending on one’s relationship to the monetary regime, coining could either appear a heinous offense that threatened the ruling order by undermining public trust in its currency, or a creative solution to the shortage of specie across much of the Atlantic world. Capital statutes passed in England from the 1690s to 1742 made many monetary crimes, including coining, punishable by death. In 1749, only three years before Johnson was apprehended, the North Carolina Assembly enacted three statutes from England that classified coining and clipping as capital offenses. Previous punishments for counterfeiting, forging, altering, defacing, or knowingly passing counterfeit bills in the colony had included two hours in the pillory followed by having one’s ears cut off. At the same time, counterfeit coins became integral to day-to-day economic life, sometimes in blatant violation of British law following Parliamentary statues passed in 1751 and 1764 prohibiting further issues of legal tender paper money in the continental colonies.

The common problem of currency in the British Atlantic world led to creative workarounds such as paper currencies, the plugging and holing of existing foreign coin, new theories of value, and counterfeiting as other historians have shown so well. Individuals could choose to accept underweight coins at face value or deal in suspect coins. Colonial responses to the shortage of specie provoked Parliamentary legislation, notably the Currency Act of 1764, and local insurgencies like the North Carolina Regulators, whose grievances included tax policy and the lack of currency, little more than a decade after the example discussed here. The case of Johnson, Moore, and Jillet also shows that the condition of scarcity could catalyze a vernacular substrate of chemical know-how to appear in the historical record.

At the most basic level this example expands the range of characters, motivations, and skills included in studies of the shadowy practice of coining. It adds the coiners’ work of making coins to the kinds of labor understood to have contributed to knowledge and value production in histories of medicine, science, and money. Over the past decade artisans and tradespeople have reappeared in scholarship as knowledge makers, eroding extant divisions between philosophers and mechanics, and recovering the connections between the head and the hands in histories of innovation or industrialization. For Johnson, making coins was a matter of chemistry that would ultimately determine the success or failure of their enterprise. Such an idea raises questions of who detected coins and thereby enforced monetary policy, as well as the role of subjective, seemingly irrational things like the senses in that enforcement. At its broadest, considering coining as a chemical act suggests the many interactions between productive arts and knowledges in the science of everyday life and points to the potential of examining together the realms of medicine and money.

William Jillet’s trade as a blacksmith would clearly have been helpful to the metallic work that constituted the early stages of making coins. Perhaps less obvious, though no less crucial, were Daniel Johnson’s contributions to the coining process as a chemist. The later stages involved pastes and mineral acids that were standard features of any apothecary’s or chemist’s practice. His training would likely have included hands-on experience with silver’s chemical properties and familiarity with mineral acids, such as aqua fortis and vitriol, that dissolve metals (which was exactly the technique used by coiners to bring small amounts of silver to the surface of the coins they made to make them appear entirely silver). Johnson also probably would have known the steps to produce such reagents with his own equipment. The laboratories and warehouses of London’s merchants of medicines brimmed with these chemicals because they were frequently used in the production of popular medicines and were exported to colonial medical practitioners in significant quantities. 

The dense forests and nearly impassable swamps of the mid-Atlantic and upper South were favorites of counterfeiters because, in essence, they provided natural laboratories outside of colonial authority. More generally, swamps offered liminal space for marginalized or illicit groups to establish communities and pursue their own goals. The Great Dismal Swamp to the north, for example, supported a multigenerational maroon settlement dating to the early 1600s based on recent archaeological evidence. Others seeking freedom or survival, such as indigenous people or indentured servants, drew upon the natural resources of the region’s swamps, while self-emancipated people used the Neuse River to reach New Bern and the coast from plantations in the Carolina Piedmont. Johnson, Moore, and Jillet ferried their materials and equipment (including hammers, molds, and chemicals) south from Virginia, up the Neuse River, and into the swamp that would have masked the fumes and smoke from the coiners’ fires while offering supplies of water and wood fuel for the metalwork. With the proper setup coining could become quite efficient, as one printed account suggested that a team of two could finish upwards of 500 shillings in two days’ time. 

Though counterfeiting cases involving medical practitioners like Johnson are difficult to find, contemporary accounts of tradespeople supporting coining operations and what we know from Carl Wennerlind’s work about who was charged, tried, and ultimately punished for monetary crimes suggests that there existed a broader infrastructure for counterfeiting in Britain and its Atlantic colonies. The exploits of Seth Hudson, a coiner and forger who had worked as a doctor, captivated Boston during the early 1760s. In Rhode Island, Samuel Casey sold medicines before his inventory burned in a fire, likely prompting him to begin coining in the 1760s. 

Other medical practitioners in New England, such as Benjamin Stockbridge (1704-1788), tried their hand at making gold and silver legally by conducting alchemical experiments alongside their medical practices. In another case, Gershom Bulkeley (1635-1713) took notes about medico-alchemical experiments in his home laboratory in Connecticut. Bulkeley possessed a Harvard education and owned copies of European medical and alchemical texts to aid his pursuits, while Stockbridge had received formal medical training and also read European texts. In general, however, we know little about the development, circulation, and adaptation of early modern chemistry practices, but the presence of the key techniques for coining—coloring base metals like copper, iron, and brass—in widely available printed texts suggests that those methods were not particularly esoteric or secret. For example, Godfrey Smith’s The Laboratory, or School of Arts included directions “to silver all sorts of metals” using aqua fortis, a key mineral acid for chemical remedies and coining alike.

Far from extraordinary, many eighteenth-century ideas about credit, value, and medicine could trace their roots to prior strains of European alchemical thought. More practically, many of the chemicals used in making medicines and coins had attracted the attention of tradespeople for centuries and were already associated, at least tangentially, with ideas of value and money creation before they entered mainstream medical practice in the form of chemical remedies that required practices that could be categorized as metallic transmutation or pharmaceutical production depending on one’s interpretation. The takeaway being that for a long time there existed little practical distinction between the alchemical, medical, and industrial arts.

We don’t know if Johnson, by comparison, had access to any such texts or if he could even read. Had he apprenticed or learned from someone in a port city with connections to the wider Atlantic world? Regardless of his training, he believed he possessed sufficient chemical skill to attempt to make coins that would pass as legitimate, a level of experience acknowledged by the Virginia Gazette and several other newspapers when they described him as “a Chymist, or Doctor.” This convergence of titles at once reflects the fuzziness of pre-professional occupational categories but also the integration of chemical techniques and remedies into accepted pharmacology by the eighteenth century. There had emerged a vibrant trade in chemical remedies and, importantly for our purposes here, the substrates required to make them that had its roots in alchemical experiments of previous centuries. Mineral acids and other chemicals filled the official pharmacopoeias and dispensaries that nominally structured medicine manufacturing during this period.

The early modern Americas feature less prominently in studies of chemical knowledge production given their perceived distance, both physically and intellectually, from Europe’s hubs of formal experimentation, but they still boasted robust interaction with chemistry in a variety of applied guises in response to common problems of labor and scarcity. Perhaps the most obvious example is in the silver mines at Potosí in New Spain where metallurgical techniques drew upon a long tradition of Paracelsian chemistry that combined aspects of alchemy, pharmacy, and medicine. By the close of the eighteenth century, sugar production too began to be described in chemical terms, often to “improve” production and discredit the experiential knowledge of enslaved laborers. Chemical techniques, such as distillation, saw everyday use in homes and kitchens across North America, while medical practitioners crossing the Atlantic carried chemical training into new contexts. Specie and health were both in short supply across the British Atlantic world.

From one perspective, we can interpret these chemical activities as responses to scarcity (of money or labor, for example) and precarity (of health, for example) seeking to solve common problems. The chemical approach to money in the Americas illustrates the circulation of experiential knowledges across the Atlantic world as well as local configurations of those knowledges that arose out of necessity both in accordance with imperial law and not. A range of approaches emerged because though the eighteenth century was a period of quickening transatlantic commerce and increased commercial value placed on accurate descriptions of nature, it lacked widespread forms of verification that made truth-claims tricky and embodied despite assertions to the contrary. In the cases of medicine and money, the possibility of counterfeits shaped specific routines of detection and credibility that could have life-or-death consequences.

While some counterfeit coins deceived the eyes, ears, fingers, and tongues of even the most experienced evaluators, most of the cases that remain for us today are of those that were detected. In other words, they likely failed a physical test as Johnson’s did. Contrary to the assumption by historians that many colonists, and Londoners even, would have lacked sufficient familiarity with genuine coins to recognize fraudulent ones, extant examples suggest a wider fluency in coinage and the sensory indicators of their veracity.

When the sheriff found the coins at the forge in the North Carolina swamp, he noted they were “so badly done as not to be easily imposed upon any Body; which may be owing to the timely Discovery of the Plot, which prevented their finishing them in the Manner they intended.” The finishing process he refers to included achieving a realistic silver or gold coloring on the coin’s surface that would have been Johnson’s job as the chemist. After the metallic disc was removed from its mold, it had to be brought to the color of a silver coin even though in actuality it was not entirely silver. To do so, the coiner would first apply vitriol (sulfuric acid) or aqua fortis (nitric acid) that dissolved whatever silver was in the new coin (often filed off another coin) and forced it to the surface. Mineral acids like vitriol and aqua fortis were used broadly to dissolve metals in various manufacturing processes and make spirituous tinctures for stomach ailments, for example. Next, tartar was added to the silver and acid mixture to form a paste that could be rubbed into the coin’s surface to give it the color of a true peso or pistareen. Forms of tartar were commonly used to make the pastes and mashes that were rolled into pills using similar hand motions to the process of coloring a coin.

Any number of physical characteristics related to the finishing process could suggest that a coin was bogus, besides being found near a forge set up in a swamp, of course. The sheriff who uncovered Johnson’s cache noted that the coins appeared to be of correct size but were “wanting in Colour.” Perhaps Johnson’s coins showed some of the brass underneath the silver coating like the counterfeit pesos mentioned in the October 6, 1760, issue of the Boston Gazette that “if rubbed they will look brassy.” Other bogus coins appeared coppery or bluish rather than silvery white, the surface providing physical clues to their internal composition akin to the role of the skin in medical diagnosis as a screen showing what occurred underneath. Or maybe they still felt wet or smelled of the tartar paste like several counterfeits reported from New Hampshire in 1774 that emitted a chemical odor giving away their recent production. People bit their coins to determine if they seemed too soft (indicating lead content) or rang them against a hard surface to evaluate the metal’s resonance against how they thought silver should sound.

Without standardized testing, except in certain circumstances, identifying coins remained a form of artifice requiring experience and embodied knowledge of using the senses to evaluate a coin’s characteristics. The references evoked to determine genuine appearance, texture, smell, sound, and taste remained flexible and quite local, such as the example of the blue hue of the local slate used in grave markers. Combined with the usefulness of circulating coin, whether suspicious or not, this meant that counterfeiters often avoided punishment due to acquittal or escape, though many others across the Anglo-Atlantic world suffered physical injuries and death for their actions, including Daniel Johnson.

News about the coiners caught outside New Bern spread quickly along the Atlantic coast during the autumn of 1752. There remains no record of what defense they offered, though alleged coiners in London pointed to their trades in related fields, including as apothecaries and belt buckle makers, as reasons for possessing suspicious equipment or materials. Still others claimed the difficulties of telling good coin from bad as the reason for their working with coins to learn the distinctions. Whatever their assertions, North Carolina’s General Court sentenced William Jillet and Daniel Johnson to death for treason after one of their group, Patrick Moore, the tailor, turned evidence against them to avoid a similar fate. Despite several attempts to escape the jail in New Bern, which quite a few seem to have been able to do, Johnson and Jillet arrived at gallows erected outside New Bern in October 1752 where they both died by hanging according to accounts.

The case of Johnson, Moore, and Jillet at once reflects the patchwork enforcement of imperial monetary law in British North America and the conditions of scarcity underpinning it, but their failure underscores the complexity of the ideas and practices involved in making veracious coins at the time. Success involved craft skill, chemical knowledge, sufficient materials, a suitable place to work, and quite a bit of luck—not all of which the men ended up having. The remaining traces of their story help us reframe currency as a chemical art in addition to a political project and to think about it in terms of work at the margins of the law at a time when concerns about money occupied the minds of so many across the Atlantic world. By pairing the study of medicine and money, the labor of artisans, including those experienced in the vernacular chemical arts, can be made a bigger part of histories of knowledge and value production, especially in spaces or by people usually invisible in narratives of monetary development or scientific innovation. The embodied components of detection, likewise, encourage us to consider the role subjective qualities played in practices of enforcement that have been made to appear more objective or standardized over time.

 

Further Reading

Newspaper accounts of the New Bern coiners can be found in the Virginia Gazette, October 12, 1752, and the Boston Post-Boy, December 5, 1752, as well as in other regional newspapers from around that time. Kenneth Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957) and Philip Mossman, From Crime to Punishment (New York: American Numismatic Society, 2013) offer detailed background on the histories of counterfeiting and coining in British North America, while articles including Carl Wennerlind, “The Death Penalty as Monetary Policy: The Practice and Punishment of Monetary Crime, 1690-1830,” History of Political Economy 36 (no. 1, 2004) and Katherine Smoak, “The Weight of Necessity: Counterfeit Coins in the British Atlantic World, Circa 1760-1800,” William and Mary Quarterly 74 (no. 3, 2017) give nuanced analyses of the enforcement, hierarchies, and variability of money across the British Atlantic world. On chemistry in the Americas, see Annals of Science 77 (no. 2, 2020); and for the connection between alchemy and medicine, see William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). The move toward uniting the head and the hands in studies of science is exemplified by Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear, eds., The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the late Renaissance to Early Industrialization (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007). The New Dispensatory (London: 1753) offers examples of the practical overlap between making medicines and making coins, while the broader context of merchants of medicines in this period can be found in my book, Zachary Dorner, Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp has been the subject of renewed interested over the past decade, including Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York University Press, 2014) and Daniel O. Sayers, A Desolate Place for Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014).

 

This article originally appeared in August 2022.

 

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Zachary Dorner is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His work blending histories of health and commerce has appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of British Studies, and Boston Review; while his first book, Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020.

Cathcart kept a diary during his ordeal and, many years later, adapted the diary into a narrative entitled The Captives: Eleven Years a Prisoner in Algiers. This narrative is also remarkable. In addition to relaying the details of Cathcart’s experience and his transformation from young captive to influential leader, the narrative demonstrates the power of words to change and even to create reality, not only through the story it tells but also through the public personality it forms. For the James Cathcart evoked in its pages is at odds with other historical evidence, demonstrating Cathcart’s ability with and belief in the power of words.

The Mediterranean practice of seizing ships and holding the crews for ransom or hard labor was common. In fact, the practice dated back centuries, and went in multiple directions. In the heyday of galley ships, European nations captured North Africans to work the oars; and the Catholic Church engineered an entire enterprise of “redemption” for Catholics seized by the ships of Barbary. By the late eighteenth century, European nations signed treaties with the Barbary States to protect their shipping, and these treaties were renegotiated frequently. After the American Revolution, American ships were no longer protected by British treaties, and Cathcart and his shipmates quickly learned the consequences.

The Dey (or governor) of Algiers demanded ransom for the American sailors, but the U.S. was far too poor to meet the demands, so, despite occasional attempts to free the American sailors, Cathcart, his fellow crew members, and the crews of several additional ships, were held captive until 1796. During this time, the sailors endured neglect, forced labor, abuse, and the plague. Many died.

Despite this harrowing situation, Cathcart managed to find extraordinary success. He rose from the position of a menial slave to become the “Christian clerk” of the Dey, the highest position a captive could attain, in which position he was also allowed to operate “taverns” that were apparently quite profitable. Because of his position as clerk and a remarkable facility with languages, Cathcart was instrumental in assisting the envoy from the U.S. who finally negotiated the release of the remaining captives in 1796. At that point, Cathcart himself sailed with the articles of peace back to the U.S. for ratification. 

Cathcart later adapted the diary that he managed to keep during his experience in Algiers he into a narrative that his daughter subsequently saw into publication. The Captives is a complex, detailed narrative. It is part captivity narrative and part travel narrative, and also part immediate experience, shared through excerpts from his diary, and part reflective observations, filtered through the vantage points of time and later experiences in Barbary. While most Barbary captivity narratives are short and were hastily compiled when the captives returned to the U.S., Cathcart’s account is different. It was edited over several years and is longer and more well-developed than most. The text occasionally states that “Words are insufficient to describe my sensations” or that “Silence describes our feelings better than the greatest eloquence” (269), but Cathcart actually used many, many words in deliberate ways. And both the text and the events it relates demonstrate the power of words. 

Cathcart’s moves through the slave hierarchy to a position of relative comfort and prosperity were accomplished partly through his ability to navigate—or manipulate—complex relationships and partly through the power of literacy. He mentions early on in his account that he read Spanish and French, later adding Portuguese to the list, and he acquired proficiency in Turkish. These abilities, as well as his acquaintance with the Dey’s clerk, led to his move from physical labor to working as the clerk’s assistant and later the chief clerk. His linguistic ability then positioned him to serve as interpreter when Joseph Donaldson arrived from the U.S. to settle a treaty and secure the captives’ release. 

Cathcart’s depiction of the negotiations demonstrates his abilities both to translate between languages and to navigate relationships. While waiting for Donaldson to arrive, Cathcart asked the Dey for a written document to secure Donaldson’s safe passage. The Dey was reluctant to provide such a document for appearance’s sake, but Cathcart convinced him “that it need not be made out in Turkish, that [Cathcart] would write one in English which . . . [they] would keep . . . a profound secret from every person but those immediately concerned” (160-61). Cathcart found a way to ensure Donaldson’s safety while allowing the Dey to save face. During the negotiations, Cathcart’s role as interpreter gave him some power over the proceedings, and he occasionally took liberties to smooth the relationship between the two men. According to his telling of the event, the negotiations succeeded because of Cathcart’s understanding of Turkish and his understanding of the personalities involved.

In addition to his spoken words, Cathcart makes it clear that he considered his written words of concrete value to others. After depicting how he narrowly avoided being “converted” to Islam “accidentally,” Cathcart insists that his experience “ought to serve as a warning to all who read this journal and travel in those countries” (150). More immediately, Cathcart describes how he offered his “journal . . . and that part of [his] correspondence which would be useful” to Donaldson to assist him in his work (171). Cathcart, other captives, and some allies among the Europeans in Algiers told Donaldson everything that occurred in earlier attempts to free the American captives, but Cathcart insisted that his written account was necessary as well. 

Thus, in the experiences depicted, The Captives demonstrates its author’s belief in the power of words to accomplish things. Similarly, in its construction, the narrative reveals Cathcart’s belief in the power of words to create something.

Early Americans understood and were deeply invested in the power of words. The new nation was literally created by a written document, the Declaration of Independence being a “performative utterance” that didn’t just describe a desire but established a new reality. When coining the phrase “performative utterance,” J. L. Austin indicated that this kind of speech or writing, in contrast to description, is itself an action that does something. The treaty that Cathcart translated from Turkish into English and then delivered to the U.S. government, for instance, was a “performative utterance.” By declaring “From the date of the Present Treaty there shall subsist a firm and sincere Peace and Amity between the President and Citizens of the United States of North America and Hassan Bashaw Dey of Algiers his Divan and Subjects,” this document created the “Peace and Amity” between the two nations more than it described them. 

Cathcart’s narrative is, likewise, a written document that creates something: specifically, it creates a public James Leander Cathcart. As should be clear already, The Captives paints Cathcart as intelligent, even scholarly. It shows his command of many languages, shares his understanding of European-Barbary relations, and relates how he debated the tenets of Islam with a Muslim leader! Despite the title, Cathcart often comes across less as a captive and more as a world traveler, interested in learning about his unfamiliar environment and bringing his considerable knowledge to bear in making the best of unusual circumstances. 

In demonstrating how he made the best of things, the narrative also relates Cathcart’s generosity. According to The Captives, he used his success to help his fellow Americans: “I believe those who survived will do me the justice to acknowledge, that they never wanted a good meal while I had it in my power to give it to them; that they were attended in the hospital when sick, and that those who died were buried in a decent coffin at my expense” (136). Looking back, the author goes so far as to “thank God that He used me a captive under a despot who many times have risked my life for the enslaved and welfare of my country” (219).

In addition to being intelligent, philosophical, and philanthropic, the Cathcart in the narrative is deeply patriotic. He recounts how he declined an offer of ransom from a British acquaintance, which would have meant freedom but would have required leaving the other Americans and living in Britain. He claims he never “once doubted the liberality of the country whose cause I voluntarily espoused when at large, but am firmly resolved to wait with fortitude becoming a Christian and an American, until my captivity expires by an honorable redemption” (153). The patriotic and long-suffering Cathcart preferred imprisonment to treason. 

Finally, in this attachment to his country and the frequent comingling of the fates of the American sailors with the fate of the United States, Cathcart’s words turn his personal misfortune into a national tragedy and make Cathcart into a national hero. He refers to himself and the other captives as “the only victims of American independence” (145). While their capture did result from the new nation having no treaty with Algiers, Cathcart’s wording suggests the merchant sailors were prisoners of war, rather than victims of circumstance. In the story of leaving Algiers in 1796 to bring the articles of peace to the U.S., Cathcart claims, “From this day I date my freedom” (271), and the image of Cathcart commanding his own ship in the interests of his nation suggests he is freeing his country all over again.

All of this self-presentation in the narrative would not be especially noteworthy were it not for the different picture of Cathcart painted through other historical records; in the contrast, it becomes clear just how cleverly Cathcart crafted his image through this account. Other documents—such as letters written by or about Cathcart and descriptions of events by other witnesses—suggest Cathcart the man was argumentative, stubborn, manipulative, and pompous.

Joel Barlow, who took Donaldson’s place to implement the treaty with Algiers, wrote to the U.S. Secretary of State: “I am told that Mr. Cathcart has hopes of obtaining the consulate to this place. He has neither the talent nor the dignity of character necessary for the purpose.” It’s interesting that Barlow denounces his “talent” and “character,” while Cathcart’s narrative is at great pains to demonstrate both. Several years later, when Cathcart was again hoping to be named U.S. Consul General to Algiers, the Dey (not the same ruler for whom Cathcart worked as a captive) refused to accept his appointment, writing to President Thomas Jefferson that Cathcart’s “character does not suit us as we know wherever he has remained that he has created difficulties.” 

Cathcart’s claims to patriotism are also problematic. At one point, he sought freedom by writing to Member of Parliament William Wilberforce, claiming, on the basis of his Irish birth, that he wanted to return to Britain, his “long lamented Patria.” For Cathcart was born in Ireland, though he was raised in the British Colonies by an uncle. During the Revolutionary War, he served on a frigate captained by his uncle. In his narrative, Cathcart claims the frigate was seized and the sailors held on a prison ship in New York harbor, from which he and a friend escaped. This striking and adventurous story cannot be corroborated, and it’s at least equally possible that Cathcart claimed his British citizenship when he was seized and then served in the British Navy in order to escape being a prisoner of war. Naturally, neither of these events shows up in The Captives, in which any hint of split loyalty is hidden behind stirring claims to American patriotism.

Cathcart’s abilities to understand and manipulate people, his capabilities with words, and his belief in the power of words are all clear in his experiences in Algiers in the late eighteenth century. And those same beliefs and capabilities influenced the creation of The Captives: Eleven Years a Prisoner in Algiers and of the hero at its center. Though Cathcart’s contemporaries dismissed him as, at best, a mediocre diplomat, the use of words in his personal narrative suggests a political understanding we still see today—if I write or speak something, it just might make it “real.”

 

Note on Sources:

Cathcart’s narrative was brought into print by his daughter, J. B. Newkirk, in 1899, and is available in online archives. It is also available through reprint services; the reprint referenced here is the unedited 2017 printing by Andesite Press. Some of Cathcart’s letters and original journal were also consulted, by way of the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 64 (April-October 1954), pages 303-436, and additional letters were accessed through Naval Documents Related to the United States Wars with the Barbary Powers (1939-1944).

This essay was informed by the theoretical work related to the concept of “performative utterance” of J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977); and Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). It was also informed by the reading of sea narratives in Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). And finally this essay built upon several scholars’ treatments of the historical Cathcart: Lawrence A. Peskin, Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785-1816 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Richard B. Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); and Martha Elena Rojas, “‘Insults Unpunished’: Barbary Captives, American Slaves, and the Negotiation of Liberty,” Early American Studies 1 (Fall 2003): 159-86.

 

This article originally appeared in August, 2022.

 

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Julie R. Voss is Professor of English and coordinator of the English and American Studies Programs at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky, where she first encountered Barbary captives while researching her dissertation on Islam in early national American texts. In addition to this topic, she writes and speaks on women writers and on pedagogy.

She ushered me into her office, and I ticked off the clues I had assembled. Lanah was a seventeen-year-old from a modest New York family who worked as a seamstress. She had dressed to go for stroll with a “fine beau” on a mild late summer evening in 1793. Later that night, according to Lanah’s trial testimony, Bedlow dragged her into a brothel, “threw off her hat, tore the pins out of her gown, and placing her before him, drew it off her shoulders.” Then, she went on, “he tore the strings of her petticoats, and kicked them off with his feet.”

Other details about her dress appear in an editorial note: “In the course of the testimony, the gown of the Witness was produced, (a calico, made with drawn frill round the neck;) two or three strings were torn off—-a few places were torn in the gown, but mended, which the Prosecutrix did the next day, to walk in the streets decently.” Later in the trial, Mother Carey, in whose brothel the assault took place, testified that she “could not recollect the dress of the Prosecutrix, but the gown had a frill round the neck.” 

From another reference in the trial Report, we know that Lanah was wearing gloves that evening. And she was likely wearing a shawl, too. From a subsequent newspaper account, we know she had one.

Having laid out what I knew, I paused.

Baumgarten sighed.

1793, she explained, is difficult.

Five years earlier—or five years later—Lanah’s gown would be much easier to imagine. But 1793 fell in the midst of a major transition in women’s fashion. In the years after the American Revolution, women typically wore highly structured gowns with fitted bodices, funnel shaped torsos, low waistlines, and voluminous skirts. By the turn of the century, women—especially young women—were turning toward the high-waisted, loosely draped, neoclassical gowns familiar from Bridgerton or Jane Austen productions. Even the term “calico” came with caveats. In his Compendious Dictionary (1806), Noah Webster defined calico as a “printed” cotton cloth—but plain white was increasingly fashionable.

Still, Baumgarten went on, there are some things we can safely assume about how a seventeen-year-old sewing girl would have dressed for an evening stroll with a gentleman. And the mention of pins and multiple strings helped narrow down the possibilities.

Foundations

In the early 1790s, any gown would have been worn over several basic undergarments.

First, was a shift: a long, loose, plain, white linen or cotton garment rather like a modern night shirt. The chemise dress (or, in English, shift dress) made fashionable—and notorious—by the French queen Marie Antoinette, took its basic form and color from these humble undergarments. In a portrait from the mid-1790s, the young New Yorker Frances Harison (who was married to one of Henry Bedlow’s lawyers) wears a billowing white chemise dress ornamented with a drawn frill at the neckline and given shape by a ribbon tied under the bust. For rich women like Harison, a white shift dress represented a daring break with the conventions of the past—and the life of leisure that allowed them to wear such delicate, easily marred garments. 

For ordinary women, a traditional shift had far more practical purposes—among them to absorb sweat and other body fluid that might otherwise stain her gown. Thus, when Lanah was sleeping the night after the assault—and her cousin pulled up her skirts to examine her “linens”—it would have been her shift that was stained with blood.

Over the shift, a woman wore garments designed to support the gown, shape her body, and give the finished outfit the desired silhouette. That was one of the primary purposes of the petticoats women tied around their waists with “strings”—typically sturdy cloth tabs or tape. Multiple petticoats were often worn to support a gown’s voluminous skirts. To this end, a woman might also strap on a pair of pillow-like bum rolls to pouf her skirts out even further in the rear and create a distinct cleft. 

Around her torso, a woman wore stays—a sturdy corset reinforced with baleen or wood that, when laced tight, created a smooth cone shape from her waist to her breasts.

Over this foundation came the gown—which was typically tailored (with high armholes and a tight waist) in such a way that it had to be partially dismantled to get it on and off.

The bodice usually opened down the front. And because of the support provided by the stays, it could be both closely fitted around the torso and also held in place with nothing more than straight pins. Sometimes other fasteners—and sometimes drawstrings—were used to fit the bodice around the neckline. In any case, necklines were generally cut low; the exposed décolletage was covered with a kerchief or fichu, often a fine white cloth tucked into the bodice.

The gown’s skirts were generally sewn to the bodice around the waist at the back and sides and secured in front with strings. In 1793, this was typically done in one of two basic ways. 

An “open” gown—or a “round” gown?

Baumgarten reached for a pencil and in a series of swift, smooth strokes sketched out one option: an open gown or robe a la anglaise. A few years before 1793, she said, this would have been the obvious choice.

Open gowns echoed the traditional look for women’s gowns: the skirts wrapped around the back and sides but were open at the front to reveal a coordinating petticoat. The gown could thus be slipped off the shoulders like a bathrobe once the pins securing the bodice were pulled out and the strings securing the skirts were untied. 

Reaching for another Post-it, Baumgarten explained that the main alternative in 1793 would have been a “round gown.”

This style of dress was called “round” because the skirt wrapped all the way around the body and was stitched closed with vertical seams, entirely covering the petticoats underneath. The skirt was generally constructed with a drop panel in front, secured at the waist with strings. This was necessary to get the whole thing on or off because the gown’s waist was typically fitted so closely around a woman’s waist that it couldn’t just be pulled down over her hips. To get a round gown off, you released the bodice and slipped it over your shoulders, untied the drop panel, and stepped out of the skirts. 

This, Baumgarten said, was the more likely option in 1793—especially for a young seamstress who, presumably, had a sense of changing fashions. Cotton calico was both less expensive than silk and more durable. When it got dirty, cotton could be laundered––especially if it were printed. A working woman needed a gown that could withstand the routines of her daily life and not show every stain and speck of dirt.

Laura Johnson

A few years later, when the time came to find a surviving gown from Lanah Sawyer’s day to use as an illustration in The Sewing Girl’s Tale, I knew what I wanted: a round gown made of printed cotton. To examine a particularly compelling example, I made an appointment at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware.

On a crisp September day, textile curator Laura Johnson ushered me through a warren of offices, work rooms, and galleries into a textile storage area lined with cabinets, shelves, and drawers. On a big table, in a big box, was the gown.

It was, Johnson observed, a late eighteenth-century round gown fastened, like Lanah’s gown, with a combination of straight pins and drawstring. The fitted bodice pinned together down the front. The voluminous skirts featured a drop panel at the waist secured by a drawstring and partly covered up by the points of the bodice.

The gown had likely been made around 1785, Johnson noted, but there were signs that it had been refashioned twice. First, probably around 1795, the bodice had been partially dismantled and the skirts reattached to give the gown a newly fashionable high-waisted silhouette. Then, around 1900, it had been hastily, indeed somewhat crudely, returned to its original appearance—probably for a woman looking for a “colonial” costume. That’s probably when the gown acquired the sweat stains apparent under the armholes, Johnson observed. Whoever had been playing dress-up hadn’t worn the kind of undergarments that had protected the gown in its early days. 

The drawstring holding up the skirt’s drop front was a modern replacement, she noted; the original would have been a length of sturdy tape.

These strings, Johnson pointed out, represented the puzzle of Lanah’s gown. A round gown could be constructed with a single drawstring at the waist; but, according to the trial report “two or three strings” had been ripped out. Perhaps there were additional strings at the neckline. Or, perhaps Lanah was actually wearing a robe a la anglaise—which might well have had two separate strings at the waist.

Repair

Mention of the gown’s torn-out strings brought the conversation to the various accessories Lanah Sawyer probably took with her for that walk on the Battery. The gloves. The hat. The shawl she likely wore. And, most significantly, her sewing case. 

The fact that Lanah repaired her damaged gown the next morning indicates that she was carrying some kind of sewing kit with basic tools, including a needle and thread. Perhaps she carried it in a reticule hanging from her wrist or in a pocket under her skirts.

Pulling open a drawer, Johnson showed me half a dozen sewing cases from the period—long narrow rolls fastened with strings, many of them made by carefully piecing together scraps of cotton. They are both signs of thrift and of the pride women took in their needlework. 

 

The story the gown told

Finally, I asked Johnson about the two most surprising things Linda Baumgarten had told me. Neither had much to do with what Lanah’s outfit looked like. But both cast disturbing new light on the nature of Henry Bedlow’s assault.

First, Baumgarten had told me that Bedlow didn’t need to remove Lanah’s gown in order to rape her. In that period, Baumgarten explained, almost nobody wore drawers. Beneath her gown, Lanah would have been wearing petticoats and stays over a long, plain night shirt-like shift. 

Bedlow could have simply pulled up the skirts of her gown and her petticoats. The fact that he didn’t—and this aspect of Lanah’s testimony was not disputed—indicates that his sexual aim involved removing her clothing, seeing her naked, making her feel exposed. Perhaps he felt this would add to his sense of possession, increase her sense of vulnerability, or simply make it harder for her to escape. In any case, it was not about her outfit; it was about his emotional needs and desires.

Second, Baumgarten went on, the fact that the gown was damaged—the fabric torn in places and more than one “string” ripped loose—indicates that Bedlow’s assault had been forceful and that Lanah resisted physically.

For a young woman like Lanah Sawyer, clothing was expensive and labor-intensive. She probably didn’t own more than a few dresses—which she may very well have bought used or received as hand-me-downs and remade to fit her form and suit the current fashions. Lanah had likely worn her best gown that evening: a garment not only too costly for her to damage casually but also, quite possibly, an object of pride—a demonstration of her skill with a needle and her eye for fashion.

The prosecutor had been right, Baumgarten concluded. The damaged gown was strong evidence of a sexual assault.

It remains a haunting image. It has returned to me many times over the years as I’ve worked on Lanah Sawyer’s story: her calico gown with the frill about its neckline, hanging limp and disembodied as it was held up in court, its usually private interior exposed for the inspection of the jurors, so that they could look, under carefully stitched repairs, for evidence of violence and damage.

I asked Laura Johnson if she agreed with Baumgarten’s analysis. Actually, I asked that question every time I spoke with an expert on eighteenth-century clothing and needlework. And they all responded the same way.

Yes, Johnson said, all of that is true.

In fact, that’s exactly why the gown was relevant to the trial: it showed that Lanah had endured, and resisted, a violent assault that met even the unreasonable legal standards for rape proposed by the defendant’s attorneys.

But that didn’t mean that the all-male jury—who took only fifteen minutes to return a verdict of not guilty—actually had ears to hear the story the ripped, torn, and imperfectly repaired dress had to tell.

Further reading

For more on Lanah Sawyer, see John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2022).  Quotations in this essay are from William Wyche’s Report of the Trial of Henry Bedlow (New York: n.p., 1793), the first published report of an American rape trial; the two surviving copies are at the American Antiquarian Society and the New-York Historical Society; a modern edition is available at www.johnwoodsweet.com. On sexual assault in Early America, a good place to start is Sharon Block, “Bringing Rapes to Court,” Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life (April 2003), http://commonplace.online/article/bringing-rapes-to-court/. See also, Marybeth Hamilton Arnold, “‘The Life of a Citizen in the Hands of a Woman’: Sexual Assault in New York City, 1790-1820,” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989, 35-56); Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).

The most authoritative work on eighteenth-century American clothing is Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (New Haven: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in association with Yale University Press, 2002). A terrific resource on changing fashions and the practical construction of garments is Lauren Stowell and Abby Cox, The American Dutchess Guide to 18th Century Dressmaking: How to Hand Sew Georgian Gowns and Wear Them with Style (Salem, Mass.: Page Street Publishing Co., 2017). On sewing as work, see Marla Miller, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006) and Susan Burrows Swan, Plain & Fancy: American Women and Their Needlework, 1700-1850 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1977). Eye-opening analyses of eighteenth-century clothing include Kimberly Alexander, Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Mary C. Beaudry, Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); and Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

 

This article originally appeared in July, 2022.

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John Wood Sweet is a professor of Early American history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the former director of UNC’s interdisciplinary Program in Sexuality Studies. His books include Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) and The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2022).

Only it wasn’t. While the apparatus of the book declared it to be an edited historical document, it was actually an elaborate ruse that served a particular purpose—to bolster the character of a man Tom McEnery intended to be the historical mascot for a revitalized San Jose. Fallon’s was an American story, inspiring in much the same way that the Broadway smash hit Hamilton is inspiring: an immigrant makes good. Fallon emigrated from Ireland as a child. Embracing his new nationality, he Americanized his name from O’Fallon to Fallon. He traveled west, worked as a fur trader, joined John C. Fremont’s second expedition, arrived in California just in time to raise the American flag over the Juzgado in San Jose, befriended leading Latino citizens and business leaders, and married and raised a family with Carmel Castro Lodge, daughter of a prominent Californio landowner. To McEnery, Fallon appeared to be the perfect unifying symbol for the multicultural city of San Jose. Under his direction, Fallon’s historical monuments in San Jose would grow to include the restored mansion, a proposed educational curriculum, and a heroic-sized bronze sculpture of Fallon on horseback, carrying the American flag. (Figure 2 side)

But not everyone shared McEnery’s conviction that Fallon was an apt mascot for the town. Between 1987 and 2022, controversy over Thomas Fallon roiled San Jose repeatedly, twice leading the city council to banish the statue to storage. McEnery’s concocted journal, based on historical research and meant to flesh out the story of Fallon, helped spark this controversy, providing a modern fable about the uses—and abuses—of history.

McEnery pulled his readers into the deception from the book’s cover onward.  Beneath the title “The Journal of Captain Thomas Fallon” was the attribution “edited by Thomas McEnery.” In the preface, the “editor” detailed the discovery of the manuscript, commented on the condition of its pages (smudges obscured the left edge of the manuscript, and some entries were “damaged” by water and time), and recounted McEnery’s growing realization of the “immense value of the document I held in my now dusty hands.” The preface also laid out McEnery’s editorial choices (“I have not taken any liberty, nor would I desire to, with the actual text”), and the authoritative “Ed.” preceded his emendations and speculations throughout the book.

Few casual readers would guess that the journal was an invention, but there were hints throughout, some subtle and some playfully overt. In McEnery’s preface, he noted the tedium of plowing through the manuscript: “Boredom quickly turned to skepticism, and for a moment the idea of a ruse casually crossed my mind.” Later, McEnery (as Fallon) bemoaned the death of his mother-in-law’s third husband, writing an entry tantalizingly similar to a line from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: “To lose one husband is a misfortune. To lose two a tragedy. But to lose three seems to be a case of pure carelessness.” Then, with tongue firmly in cheek, McEnery (as editor) noted the fact that Oscar Wilde was touring the Bay Area at the very time Fallon wrote the journal entry and was likely the “British lad” of a “ready wit and a good knowledge of Dublin” who Fallon mentioned chatting with in his next entry. Thus, McEnery claimed that the source of the famous line Wilde would pen a decade later was Thomas Fallon himself. The broadest hint McEnery left was in the book’s Afterword, page 106 of the 112-page publication, where he wrote, “All of the major events both local and national actually happened just as this Journal has recorded it. Perhaps there might be a question as to whether the lost leather-bound Journal actually fell from its hidden compartment early in the summer of 1978. This is quite normal. And to those skeptics I can only say that if it did not—it certainly should have.” 

By and large, McEnery’s ruse seems to have been successful. Research and public libraries responded to the book’s 1978 publication with immediate orders, shelving it beside other primary sources of early Californiana, even securing it in their Special Collections. No one seemed to have suspected it was not genuine until 1987. In that year, according to one newspaper report, an opponent of the plan to erect a statue of Fallon challenged McEnery to produce the manuscript. Soon afterward, a second edition of California Cavalier was published with “by Thomas McEnery” on the cover and title page rather than “Edited by Thomas McEnery.” This edition also included a small text box on page 106 stating, “Although as firmly based on an exploration of Thomas Fallon’s life and personal letters as possible, this Journal is a work of fiction.” Even then the ruse showed remarkable staying power. According to WorldCat, only twelve libraries purchased the second edition published by the San Jose Historical Museum Association. The remaining fifty-eight libraries owning the book had the first edition, which lacked the acknowledgement. As late as 2022, despite the fact that WorldCat cataloged the book as fiction, many research institutions, including the Huntington Library, Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley, continued to list it as a historical document on their own library websites. It is hard to keep a good forgery down.

It is no surprise, then, that some of my own relatives were taken in. In 2002, my cousins found the first edition of the published journal in their local library. Thomas Fallon was a name they recognized. He was the man who killed Baptiste Exervier, our fourth-great grandfather. The murder was no secret to anyone who knew anything about Fallon. Three witnesses—Rufus Sage, John C. Fremont, and Theodore Talbot—mentioned it in their journals, and it was described in my third-great-grandmother’s obituary. But I’d never heard of a Thomas Fallon diary before. My relatives made copies of the first few pages of the journal and gave them to my grandmother, who showed them to me. The journal’s very first entry described the murder:

4th July 1843  Fort Lancaster

Xervier was nearly turned completely around by the bullet as it tore into his back. He was lifted off the ground and crashed into a chair smashing it into several pieces. As he lay flat staring up at me I felt a strange exhilaration—I was breathing heavily and my heart pounded against my chest. I knew it was right to kill him and I had killed before but never at so close a range. The shirt he wore was steaming with powder burns.

As I read the pages, reason and emotion played tug-of-war in my mind. Fallon’s words were so self-consciously literary, even stagey, that I immediately questioned whether the journal was a legitimate historical document. At the same time, I was horrified by the account, which not only described the killing but justified it. Fallon wrote, “It is well known to all the character of Xervier and the size of the welts on the Shoshoni woman’s back attest to it. I would do it again.”

The Shoshone woman, Exervier’s wife, was my fourth-great grandmother, Sally Exervier Ward.

Distance is an important tool in a historian’s study of the past. We are trained to remember that our worldview, preconceptions, and values are not shared by our subjects, who are distant from us in time, geographic space, and culture. But distance is also a barrier to a historian’s study. While we strive to approach our discipline objectively—to maintain distance—we also want to bridge the gap between ourselves and the past. We want to understand it, to feel it, and distance makes that empathy difficult. Being biologically, culturally, or sympathetically connected to people we study in the past intensifies the desire to bridge the distance, but that sense of connection—of identification—can threaten objectivity. I am a historian; I strive to be objective, but it is not surprising that my first reading of the entries in Fallon’s journal hit me like a slug in the gut. 

Even now, knowing that the journal is a fake, I feel sick when I read “the size of the welts on the Shoshoni woman’s back.” I suspect that the reason for my visceral reaction to the fictional beating is that it is plausible. A generation of scholarship, including Karen Anderson’s evocatively titled Chain Her By One Foot, made it clear that many Native women suffered abuse at the hands of their Euro-American husbands. Indeed, that history is what made McEnery’s literary choice believable. It created a possible past painful for me to contemplate because of my family connection to Sally and to Exervier.

I never found any corroboration of that fictional claim. Over the years, I tried several times to reach Tom McEnery through email, with no success. Finally, in 2016, I located a business address for him and sent an old-fashioned letter in an envelope asking if I could interview him about his work on Fallon. A week or so later a message appeared on my answering machine: “Tom McEnery in San Jose, you know, Capt. Fallon’s last disciple out here in the Far West.” He invited me to call and left a phone number.

Among a number of questions I asked McEnery when I called him back was the one that had been gnawing at me for years: Had he uncovered any evidence that Baptiste Exervier abused his Shoshone wife?

No, he replied. That was just literary license. In what sounded like a rueful voice, McEnery said he never imagined he would be speaking to a descendant of Exervier.

For Tom McEnery, the choice to depict Exervier as abusive was not about Exervier, but about Fallon, a man for whom he had developed a self-confessed “obsession.” Both men shared Irish heritage, both were charismatic mayors of San Jose, and both had a strong commitment to civic improvement. It didn’t make sense to McEnery that such a man would kill someone in cold blood.

All of us construct narratives, whether we are writing history or fiction. As historians we select the details that help us make sense of the past. McEnery was convinced, from his reading of history and of letters provided by Fallon’s grandson, that Fallon was an honorable man. The trope of the abused fur trade wife offered a compelling explanation for the violence that, not coincidentally, placed Thomas Fallon in a heroic light. He had killed Exervier to protect a Native American woman. Given the prevalence of the abused Native wife trope, this certainly could be true, and it was decidedly more heroic than the explanation fur trapper Rufus Sage gave, that Fallon had shot Exervier “in a drunken frolic on the 4th [of July].” 

The journal placed Fallon’s killing of Exervier, and his justification of the deed, front and center. It appeared in the first entry and the final one (“Did I kill Xervier and start this journal for this moment?”). In McEnery’s hands the murder in defense of Exervier’s wife operated as a pivot point in Fallon’s life, turning him from the casual violence of the fur trade to his purposeful new life in California. Fallon’s entries thereafter display a sense of compassion and fair play, especially toward oppressed people. Passing Pike’s Peak on his westward journey, Fallon wrote, “Indians have used this land as a crossing for years and years—the center of the world, they call it, Crow, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Sioux and others. Perhaps we should have left it so.” When a white boy’s head was shaved as punishment for cutting off the tail of a horse, Fallon opined, “I find this judgement more to my liking than the twelve lashes . . . laid on the Mexican last week for fighting. Few friends are made with a whip.” And when he witnessed protests against Chinese laborers in San Jose, Fallon lamented, “out with the Chinese! There are any number of people I would rather have out than those poor souls.” Fallon was admirably—even anachronistically—tolerant.

He was also deeply respectful of the Californios who lost power when he raised the American flag over the Juzgado. Repeatedly, the journal references his relationship with the Californio leader whose humble adobe house sat across from Fallon’s Italianate mansion: “Don Luis Peralta, my friend.” At one point, Fallon recorded a conversation with Peralta that reads like a patriarchal transfer of birthright from the Californios to the Americans: “Don Luis took me aside and in a moment of confidence told me not to put my faith in gold but in the land. Of his sons and his Rancho San Antonio he expresses great fears. Keep the land, Don Tomas . . . keep it always.” Here Peralta honors Fallon (“Don Tomas”) as a more wise and worthy steward of the land than his own sons. McEnery included these reflections as examples of Fallon’s “true” character: “It is by what one creates and what one writes that we best know them.” The journal would allow readers “to view him not as history or contemporary prejudices would have us do, but as he really was.”

Notwithstanding the sympathetic depiction in the journal, both the stubborn facts of Fallon’s personal story and a growing demand for the untold stories of early California became major obstacles for Tom McEnery’s project to make Fallon a unifying symbol for San Jose. By the time McEnery became mayor in 1983, he had already participated in the restoration of Thomas Fallon’s and Luis Peralta’s houses. McEnery’s next plan was to restore the plaza at the heart of San Jose, and its centerpiece was to be a bronze statue of Thomas Fallon on a horse, carrying the American flag that he had raised over the Juzgado. The statue was commissioned in 1987 and was scheduled to be erected in 1990 in the central plaza of the city. It was to be the first in a series of three statues celebrating San Jose’s multicultural history, one of Thomas Fallon, the next of Luis Peralta, and the last of Saint Joseph, the city’s namesake. McEnery envisioned an educational curriculum centered on these figures that would teach San Jose students about their local history.

If McEnery had chosen Peralta as the first subject of his sculptural troika, things might have turned out differently. When news broke that the $711,000-dollar statue of Fallon was completed and on its way from an Italian foundry to San Jose, all hell broke loose. Latinx residents of the city, many of them descendants of the Californios or more recent immigrants from Mexico, saw the Fallon statue as an insult, deeply disrespectful to the cultural heritage of half of the city’s population. In response to the plan, they packed City Council meetings with protesters, picketed the proposed site of the statue, and lined up support for blocking the statue from teachers’ associations, labor organizations, and the Pueblo Unido de San Jose. Protesters’ objections to the statue were both general—the statue celebrated an “immoral war of conquest” that privileged a “white supremacist” narrative—and specific—Thomas Fallon was peculiarly undeserving of immortalization in bronze.

It hadn’t taken much research for opponents of the statue to uncover the unsavory aspects of Fallon’s character that McEnery had tried to explain away in the journal. Not only had Fallon shot my grandfather Exervier in the back, but he had cheated on and abused his own wife, resulting in divorce proceedings reported in lurid detail in the newspapers. These stories included accusations of habitual drunkenness, deceitful land dealings, and verbal and physical abuse.

It is hard to miss the irony of the last charge: Fallon had been abusive to his own wife, a woman of color. That was precisely what the fictional Fallon of the journal accused Exervier of doing. Fallon’s murder of the fur trader—“I would do it again”—was presented in the journal as an honorable act in defense of an Indigenous woman. By placing that rescue on the front page of the journal, McEnery anticipated and rebutted the charge that Fallon himself was abusive to women of color.

McEnery and San Jose historian Clyde Arbuckle did their best to counter the charges against Fallon. Arbuckle downplayed the reports of Fallon’s abusive behavior, fraudulent land dealings, and drunkenness, claiming that nineteenth-century newspaper reports had been “magnified.” McEnery insisted that his “one objective regarding Fallon and the other planned commemorative statues was to achieve an accurate portrayal of past history.” How, he asked, could Fallon represent oppressive white conquerors when he didn’t even arrive in San Jose until after Mexican troops withdrew from the city? McEnery also emphasized Fallon’s strong friendships with Luis Peralta and other Californios, declaring that “opposition to the statue . . . was fomented by opportunists who ignored the fact that Fallon was a positive symbol of the joining of the American and Californio communities.”

For opponents, “accuracy” was not the point. Once Fallon had been enshrined in bronze, he stood for all settler colonialists and was accountable for their acts of dispossession, violence, and oppression.

Contentious council meetings, protests, and letters to the editor continued for months, forcing City Hall to delay erecting the statue. In a conciliatory move, Mayor McEnery appointed a Historic Art Advisory Council to come up with a plan of action. The council decided that before the Fallon statue could be displayed, the city would commission and erect four other pieces of art that better reflected the city’s diversity. One by one over the next decade these works of art appeared throughout San Jose. During all that time, Fallon and his horse were moldering in an Oakland storage facility, at a cost exceeding $200,000.

In 1999, after the last of the four art-committee-planned sculptures was erected, modern San Jose’s first Latino mayor, Ron Gonzalez, decided to end Fallon’s exile. Removing the statue from storage, he placed it in an obscure pocket park in a run-down section of town. Picketers still appeared at the dedication, but it was a relatively tame affair. In acknowledgment of the controversy, the art council placed a plaque alongside the statue that briefly summarized the views of both supporters and opponents, concluding with the bland understatement: “This artwork is a reminder that a community’s historic events can be interpreted in many ways, depending upon one’s perspective.” Fallon’s statue was on display, but so were the four more diverse sculptures, providing a balance in artistic representations of the past that city leaders hoped would mollify protesters.

The approach worked for a time; the statue attracted neither protests nor much attention from 1999 to 2020. Then two developments reignited the controversy: the revitalization of the area around the statue, making it much more visible; and the nationwide reckoning with police brutality and white supremacy in the aftermath of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd. Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other groups with histories of oppression identified with the revitalized Black Lives Matter movement, and Fallon’s statue became a target once again. Every week protesters doused it with red paint symbolizing “the blood on Fallon’s hands during the Mexican American War,” spray painted words like “genocide” across it, or attempted to burn it. While most protests focused on the statue as “a deeply offensive example of systemic racism,” some of the more personal charges also resurfaced: Fallon was a murderer, a wife-beater, a land swindler, the very worst sort of white settler colonialist.

Costs for cleaning and protecting the statue piled up along with protests. By 2021, San Jose’s government had become much more representative of its diverse population; when Latina City Council members Maya Esparza and Sylvia Arenas joined those in the community calling for the statue’s removal, they met little opposition. After two traumatic years of isolation, political division, and reckoning with racism, city leaders wanted a more unifying message. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo wrote, “Since this is a public work of art, in a prominent, public place, we should ask ourselves whether it’s really worth tormenting our neighbors with a daily reminder of an image that they view as oppressive.” In November of 2021, the City Council voted unanimously to remove the statue and return it to storage.

*          *          *

The Fallon statue controversy revolved around competing ways of remembering the history of San Jose and clashing versions of Thomas Fallon’s life. The history of San Jose that Tom McEnery promoted was a “master narrative,” which, as Daniel Richter defines it, is a story that explains “who a people are, where they have been, and what they hope to be.” It is “a serious, essentially mythic business of defining group identity.” 

For McEnery, San Jose’s identity, and his own, was linked to the myth of the great American melting pot, in which diverse peoples came together to form something new and better. In his view, the historical events that supported this myth included a peaceful transfer of power from Mexican to American governments and cooperation between Californios and Americans afterward. Such a story laid a firm foundation for modern San Jose’s vibrant multicultural community.

Of course, that narrative, like all master narratives, was selective. Supporting details were chosen by people with the power to impose their version of history, leaving out details that would, if told, support different stories and different identities.

The selective process of historical mythmaking is universal. It is vividly illustrated in the Confederate monuments dotting the South, which represent white Southerners’ power to impose a master narrative—the “Lost Cause”—and to exclude other narratives, such as the suffering of enslaved people and their efforts to free themselves. The nation’s reckoning with the continuing violence against and untold stories of Black Americans is now shifting that master narrative. About a tenth of the more than 700 Confederate monuments in existence have recently been or are in the process of being taken down.

That same process of historical reckoning led to Fallon’s statue being removed. For descendants of Californios and more recent Latinx immigrants, the Fallon myth whitewashed the violence of the Mexican-American War and a century and a half of exclusion from political power. The majority of San Jose’s citizens wanted a different narrative, one that acknowledged that painful history and included Latinx stories. It is entirely appropriate that communities get to decide which aspects of history they will embrace at particular times and what their master narratives will be. 

But what about the real individual behind the heroic bronze? Let’s face it, had Fallon’s story not been put in service of a myth, no one but his descendants and the descendants of those he wronged would remember him. For such people—people like me—the accuracy of the story does matter. When the narrative clashes with the memories of family and community members, whether because of selection bias or outright invention, we owe it to them to listen and revise.

Tom McEnery seems to have had good intentions. His Fallon, had he existed, would have been an admirable figure to include in a multi-cultural curriculum. But McEnery’s characterization of Fallon collapsed under the weight of the personal and community stories that made it unbelievable, for good historical reasons. Triumphalist tales of white heroes on horseback deserve to be complicated, and there are few better ways to do it than telling the long-overlooked stories of people who lost their power, land, and lives. People like the Californios and Indigenous people of early California, and like my grandparents, Baptiste and Sally Exervier.

 

Further reading

The first version of the “journal” of Thomas Fallon was published in 1978: Thomas McEnery, editor, California Cavalier: The Journal of Captain Thomas Fallon (San Jose, CA: Inishfallen Enterprises, 1978). The second was published nine years later: Thomas McEnery, California Cavalier: The Journal of Captain Thomas Fallon (San Jose, CA: San Jose Historical Museum Association, 1987). The second version lacks a publication date, but it can be inferred from information on the book jacket, contemporary news accounts, and WorldCat.

Numerous articles on the Thomas Fallon statue controversy appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other news outlets in 1990, 1999, and 2020-2022. Thomas McEnery’s daughter Erin McEnery produced a documentary film about the controversy in 2004: “The Search for the Captain,” Impulse Films, San Jose, CA, 2004. Sam Liccardo, the current mayor of San Jose, published an overview and commentary on the controversy on his blog in 2021: Sam Liccardo, “Viewing Yesterday’s Symbols with Today’s Eyes,” Feb. 1, 2021.

On historical forgeries and the culture surrounding them, see Alea Henle, “Theodore Dwight and the Publication of Sarah Kemble Knight’s Journal: Establishing Historical Authenticity in the Early United States,” Early American Studies (Winter 2022): 152-84; and Mary Beth Norton, “Hetty Shepard, Dorothy Dudley, and Other Fictional Colonial Women I Have Come to Know Altogether Too Well,” Journal of Women’s History, 10 (Autumn 1998): 141-54.

On history, memory, and cultural identity, see Daniel K. Richter, “Whose Indian History?”  William and Mary Quarterly 50 (April 1992): 379-93; Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Carol Gluck, “Memory in Hypernationalist Times: The Comfort Women as Traveling Trope,” Global-e: A Global Studies Journal, 12 (May 2, 2019): 1; and Lisa Blee and Jean O’Brien, Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

On Indigenous women and their white fur trader husbands, see Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980); Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983 [1980]); Karen Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (New York: Routledge, 1991); Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); and Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).

Primary accounts of Thomas Fallon’s murder of Baptiste Exervier appear in Leroy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, eds., Rufus B. Sage: His Letters and Papers, 1836-1847, vol. 5 of The Far West and the Rockies Historical Series, 1820-1875 (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1956), 268; John Charles Fremont, Report of the exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the years 1843-‘44 (Readex Microprint, 1966), 120-21; and Charles H. Carey, ed., The Journals of Theodore Talbot, 1843 and 1849-52: With the Fremont Expedition of 1843 and with the First Military Company in Oregon Territory, 1849-52 (Portland, OR:  Metropolitan Press, 1931), 24.

 

This article originally appeared in July 2022.

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Jenny Hale Pulsipher is Professor of History at Brigham Young University. The author of Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest of Authority in Colonial New England (2005) and Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England (2018), she is currently working on a biography of her Shoshone foremothers, Sally Exervier Ward and Adelaide Exervier Brown.

This chest wound up playing a role in “The Afterlives of Objects,” a course I regularly teach about early American material culture and its ongoing meanings. Working with original items—furniture, clothing, personal adornments, cookware, the built environment, and much more—opens different windows onto social histories, including the lives, aspirations, and actions of people who may not have left behind many, or any, written documents in conventional archival formats. As generations of scholars and communities have attested, these items are not distant or isolated “artifacts,” or static entities suspended in the past. They are materials intimately woven into the experiences and emotions of real individuals and collectivities. 

The course, as I teach it, also consistently grapples with matters of power, ownership, stewardship, and knowledge production, prioritizing non-Eurocentric topics and methodologies. I have offered this course several times before coming to Williams College as a faculty member in history. In the Kwinitekw River Valley of western Massachusetts, my experiences at Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst made apparent how many interventions are happening across different institutions about “campus collections.” Almost every institution is now grappling with and needs to foundationally re-assess how to frame and handle belongings that have been amassed within college and university walls over the centuries, through channels ranging from voluntary donations to coercion and outright theft. 

Running this course entails special considerations around colleagues’ labor. It is logistically complex and time intensive for museum staff members to retrieve bulky items like furniture from a remote storage space, pack them in protective materials so they don’t become scuffed, dinged, or torn, and arrange their transport to the main campus museum. Then staff must situate them in a busy building so that students and faculty can view them. The items pulled for the “Object Lab” installation developed in conjunction with this course in spring 2020 required a high level of planning and coordination. The one furnishing present—a wooden chair with woven seat—was included partly because of its relative lightness and portability. Items’ very materiality helps shape what is visible and accessible. 

With these labor matters foremost in mind, in very early 2020 I decided my class should instead visit additional furniture pieces that are already more accessible outside the walls of WCMA. I learned that the chest at hand presently resides in the house of the college president.  Indeed, multiple early American furnishings are in this location rather than being neatly contained within art museum galleries or storage.  

The house is itself a material culture trace. Perched at the crest of a hill in a highly visible campus location, it dates to the early 1800s. It was built for Samuel Sloan, a white settler colonizer, general in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, and tavern owner. This Federal-style building features elaborate woodwork said to have been imported from Boston, making it an expression of aspirational genteel architecture in rural western Massachusetts. The college acquired the structure in the nineteenth century and transformed it into a formal residence for the president, and it has since been expanded and renovated. Having taken my seminar members on a walking tour of the local vicinity in a prior week, for which we read essays on counter-tours and other critical vantages on memory-in-place, we were inclined to go deeper into this site and its contents. We had also delved into documentary and visual records about the house and its surroundings in the Library’s Special Collections/Archives—such as picture postcards and photographs—which attest to its iconic presence in the local built environment. 

Can you invite yourself over to someone’s house? Under the aegis of “experiential learning,” certain doors do open. The college’s current president, Maud Mandel, is a historian and Jewish Studies scholar by profession who is interested in memory, and she was receptive to the prospect of a class visit. Even with a generous invitation to bring my class over, entering this space involved other kinds of social maneuvering. While a campus art museum at a liberal arts college is expressly understood to be a learning space open to inquiry, the president’s house is, well, a private residence. It’s a place of retreat and respite for a family, set apart from the fishbowl of campus offices and outdoor greens. 

Yet it does have a semi-public face as a place that hosts events for members of the campus community and visitors. Adding to these complexities, such houses can be viewed by campus members and town residents as architectural embodiments of institutional authority and privilege. For these reasons—as at many colleges and universities—presidential dwellings and other key campus structures (like the administration building) have been focal sites for student-led demonstrations, protest, and activism. Campus communities frequently engage with matters of power, equity, and justice through the highly articulated, symbolically rich terrain of the wider physical campus itself. When tangible belongings like a chest of drawers are situated inside these charged spaces, they’re inevitably interwoven with these larger spatial dynamics.

Being inside this house thus created a specific environment for critically approaching early American material culture. Our visit in early March 2020 (note the date) gravitated around a constellation of furnishings: several late eighteenth or early nineteenth-century chests and tables, a tall case clock, a multi-sectioned desk. The group’s energy centered not on a rarified colonial connoisseurship conversation, but on using these items to probe wide-ranging social and cultural experiences. 

Sitting around them in a semicircle, students examined them as entry points into a dialogue about artisan labor, natural resources, wealth and property accumulation, and the politics of collecting. Who produced a chest like this? Were the people who used their skills and hands to harvest its materials and fashion it free, enslaved, indentured, or otherwise in bondage? African American people in Portsmouth, inhabiting a wide spectrum of bondage and liberation, were integral to that town’s rise in the eighteenth century, as Valerie Cunningham and other collaborators on the community-led Black Heritage Trail public history project have powerfully demonstrated. Their lives and labors must be accounted for in discussing material production in this time and place. Where was the wood coming from, considering contexts of colonialist resource extraction from Indigenous homelands, and the violence of Atlantic World enslavement of African people and commodity trading? Portsmouth is located in the homelands of Pennacook-Abenaki communities, where intricate human-land relations were deeply disrupted by colonization starting in the seventeenth century, including Euro-colonial logging of white pines, birches, and other trees. The harvesting of mahogany, prized by furniture makers for its hardness and tight grain, occurred through the extreme suffering and exhaustion of enslaved Afro-Caribbean woodcutters and processors—men, women, children. Their knowledge and forced toil is not credited or visibly acknowledged in the finished chest, yet they constitute the essential context for its very existence.

Who purchased and owned such an item, and what did they intend its display to communicate in their houses? What do its tiny keyholes indicate about evolving concepts of privacy and security? How may gendered processes of colonial familial inheritance and property ownership have shaped the intergenerational transits of this chest? Why did this item eventually wend its way from the Piscataqua River region of the Atlantic seacoast to the comparative rurality of western Massachusetts? Comparisons with similar furnishings from the region’s workshops (some of which are sold privately at antiques auctions today or featured on the PBS Antiques Roadshow program) may provide one avenue for deepening our contexts for this particular piece and the capitalist marketplaces in which it exists. In addition, we might reflect on how individuals’ own positions and interests shape the salience of such items. I know that this chest caught my attention partly because I grew up in New Hampshire, and recognize that the northern parts of “New England” have been comparatively less well represented in many historical accountings and collections than the southern reaches.

Our close-looking session brought in many voices and perspectives on material study. Special Collections/Archives staff members shared how manuscripts and printed records held in those sites provide additional information about histories of accessioning and deaccessioning. The Charles M. Davenport Collection of furniture at the college, for example, coalesced in 1943 from the commitments that collector had to a particular vision of early America, closely focused on Anglo-American New England. The Davenport Collection illuminates how alumni networks and bequests have fed into campus collections. Davenport graduated in the class of 1901 and was an avid supporter of as well as donor to the growing college art museum. Head of Special Collections Lisa Conathan and Archivist Sylvia Brown underscored the importance of holistically researching across several types of repositories, rather than being limited by oftentimes artificially imposed boundaries of material types.

Gathering in this space also provided a vivid look at how items’ meanings shift depending on the social and cultural settings where they are situated. This private home is not an art museum, even though certain of the furnishings here inhabit a kind of liminal space of affiliation with WCMA. It’s not a house museum, either—there hasn’t been a curatorial effort to recreate a certain moment in time. There are artworks on the walls that have been selected for display for the family currently in residence, not unlike U.S. Presidents’ assembling of pieces in the White House that signify many personal, public, and political meanings. But overall, there are not pre-formulated interpretive labels to tell you what the items in it are, or to suggest how to think about them. Its contents are not sequestered in glass cases with security alarms. They are not organized chronologically, thematically, by maker or consumer, or with a specific scholarly argument in mind. It’s a living space shaped by the aesthetic tastes and identities of its twenty-first-century inhabitants, as well as the happenstance of which furnishings are available for loan. 

Inside this active home-space, residents and staff members may develop any number of relationships with the objects that populate its rooms. They may store picture frames, or flowerpots, or computer gear on the surfaces. Lauren Barenski, a presidential office staff member who oversees events at the house, described to us her regular winding of the tall clocks. This testified to a nuanced form of care-work and technical knowledge required to maintain the functionality of these historic items. Steve Simon, presidential spouse, related to us how housecats and their claws may pose challenges to the material integrity of, say, sofa upholstery. (A solution: scratching posts.) These commentaries cast the space of an art museum, with its specialized hands-off protocols and climate-controlled conditions, in a different light and helped our group consider the wider range of settings in which objects may be activated.

This up-close encounter with early American furnishings in situ also prompted a complex discussion about presence and absence. What kinds of material items are amassed, stewarded, and prominently featured in a private, wealthy institution like this? What narratives and values do they propound? What of the enormous world of objects or belongings is not represented—discarded, dismissed, built over, deemed irrelevant, relegated to storage? “Campus collections” are by their nature uneasy sites of inquiry, never innocent or neutral. As Craig Steven Wilder exposed in his pathbreaking Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (2013), North American colleges and universities have arisen through historic and ongoing processes of accumulation that are inextricably intertwined with settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Williams College, founded in 1793, is no exception. Its campus collections reflect these realities in countless ways, as multiple colleagues and students have explored over the years. Some of these inquiries have arisen through academic endeavors (ranging from American Studies to Art to History and many additional fields), while others have been propelled by activism, organizing, curatorial and creative interventions, community projects, and other forms of engagement with the past.

To put it otherwise, we cannot naturalize or uncritically center the extant assemblage of materials. We must historicize and contextualize why certain belongings, stories, and memories are visible, and others much less so. This particular institution has begun to reckon with its location in the historic, ongoing, and future homelands of the sovereign Stockbridge-Munsee Community, and to formally partner with this Native nation, which has long engaged in caretaking and stewardship of its cherished eastern homelands, as well as restoration of ancestors and belongings through repatriation. Students, faculty, and staff are also beginning to account for the colonizing Williams family as dispossessors of this nation and enslavers of African-American people, and with the legacies of college-affiliated Christian missionaries in Hawaiʻi and other Indigenous places. Such multi-faceted “memory work” has direct bearing on how a campus and communities well beyond it frame conversations and actions around “collections.” Moreover, these dialogues are never only or even primarily about the past in itself, but also about how pathways forward can and ought to be different. WCMA, for instance, has begun to formulate transformative acquisition priorities that center BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists, among others, planting seeds of change for the future form of the collection. The wooden chest thus can be a springboard for broader critical dialogues about how collections form and transform, and are rendered legible and valuable.

Having this in-person encounter with the ongoing transits of early American furnishings brought tremendous momentum to our seminar. . . and then everything shut down as the severity of COVID became evident. All classes went virtual with barely a moment’s notice, as so many educators experienced across North America and globally. From a pedagogical perspective I despaired. For a subject and methodology so intimately grounded in the tangible, the in-person, and the experiential, how could we migrate online? Is there anything in my teaching portfolio worse suited to Zoom than material culture, when all has seemingly become immaterial?

But we adapted. Through the remainder of spring 2020, and across additional classes in the following academic years, we explored virtual alternatives. Students and colleagues deserve enormous credit for improvising and inventing as we went, while I investigated alternate modes of engagement. Along the way we found that the digital domain presented unexpected opportunities for re-assessing materiality that were incisive and thought-provoking. I have no desire to transmute a horrific global crisis and intersecting social inequities into a smoothed-out lesson about COVID-era pedagogy. These impacts are devastating, ongoing, and very unequally experienced, as many have attested to with eloquence and urgency. Some forms of associated loss and social rupture remain unspeakable. With that always in mind, this experience has caused me to reflect on what we have been processing and reassessing, and what we may carry forward.

Consider the piggins. The college art museum has two of these wooden vessels in its collection (one plain, one decorated), both attributed to the late seventeenth century (whether accurately or not). They are typically considered utilitarian liquid or dry-goods storage objects—not dissimilar from firkins, wooden tankards, and other containers for household use—rather than high-art pieces, and they do not regularly come out on view inside the galleries. Two museum specialists invited me to work with them to make digital three-dimensional scans of selected objects available to students. Drawing upon her longstanding expertise in braiding together technology and the arts, Beth Fischer, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, used photogrammetry to digitally render several items, including one of the piggins, an eighteenth-century coffee grinder, and others. She then made them accessible in SketchFab, a 3D modeling platform that enables the renderings to be published online and shared. 

Under the lighting of the scanner, the piggin revealed a lively floral design that is harder to see in person. During our group Zoom sessions for the seminar, Elizabeth Gallerani, Curator of Mellon Academic Programs, adroitly walked us through exercises for close looking and interacting with this digital object. We were able to zoom in to see its hinge mechanism more clearly, and rotate it for scrutiny from multiple angles. Both actions would have been difficult as a group gathered around a table, even with a magnifying glass. 

The critical insights presented through this virtual transition were surprising. Beth explained how the photogrammetry process operates, affording insights into just how many decisions and subjective selections are made at every step to render the object. Objects that are too shiny or transparent do not make good candidates for scanning, so the very choice of materials to digitize is influenced by their physical properties. A glass flask bearing Benjamin Franklin’s visage, produced at Kensington Glass Works in the 1830s and illustrative of the popular commodification of the “Founding Fathers” in the early U.S. Republic and antebellum era, was thus regrettably off the digital table. But the piggins’ wooden surfaces worked well. This helped us understand scanning as interpretive work rather than “mere” mechanical replication. It is every bit as bound up in matters of judgment and analysis as other forms of inquiry. 

The limits of the digital also prompted discussion. In a different, pre-COVID seminar of mine a student who encountered the piggin in person approached it to smell it. That inclination opened a rich conversation about multisensory experiences and the still-overwhelming emphasis on the visual in art museum contexts. In the virtual realm that type of olfactory engagement is not possible (unless 1960s Smell-O-Vision technology comes back in vogue). In addition, working in the digital domain caused the physical campus setting in which these collections currently exist to recede substantially from our discussions. The campus did not go away entirely, but it held a less prominent place in how we approached these materials. That subsuming of institutional context may benefit certain seminar dynamics. Students may feel freer to interact with items from the comfort of their own spaces, as compared to inside a museum classroom or presidential living room. Or they may be more able to take a camera-off moment for quiet reflection in the midst of weighty topics. The digital space may constrain other aspects, including a sense of class cohesion and shared investment in dialogue, which can be difficult to cultivate across a grid of Zoom squares.

We also used the 3D replica as a springboard to discuss digital surrogates, repatriation, and sensitive ethical considerations that Indigenous and other communities have had to navigate as they work with—or contest—museums that still lay claim to ancestors, valued belongings, and cultural patrimony. Is “digital repatriation” a process that can meaningfully serve communities’ goals of caretaking for and interpreting their own belongings? There are potent examples of sovereign Indigenous nations proactively mobilizing technology and collaborations with external institutions. In other instances, this emerging practice can be yet another version of colonialist gatekeeping and an excuse for institutions to maintain possession. This, despite the requirements of federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) law to facilitate returns, bolsters what Rae Gould, a Nipmuc community member and repatriation specialist, has described as “retentive philosophies.” 

Not least of all, engagement with the digital material culture world underscored how all of this was possible because of existing human expertise and technological resources at WCMA, such as the photogrammetry studio space. The financial and personnel infrastructure required for digital humanities work of a serious kind relies on institutional capital. That in turn is interwoven with fraught histories and presents: where do college resources come from and how are they allocated? And it is entwined with the asymmetries and contingency of the employment landscape in the arts and humanities.

When I first tried to conceptualize the transition to Zoom teaching with early Americana, I imagined it as a placeless experience. We were no longer all convened in a single campus space but dispersed in some nowhere-ether. We’d lose the ability to work with the materiality of the built environment and tangible things, right? Not quite. I soon realized that the class became an emplaced experience in a very different register, with its members now immersed in multiple locations. Hastily sent away from their campus residences, students returned to their home locations, or to other sites where they could continue their studies for the remainder of the spring. These transitions have been arduous. They have thrust students into precarious situations, exposed longstanding structural inequities, exacerbated mental health crises, and removed the potentially more equalizing terrain of a seminar room. 

Faced with these tremendous challenges, students nonetheless organically reoriented themselves to connect with their own local settings. They explored commemorative landscapes (monuments, markers, cemeteries) in their midst that they knew well, or maybe explored for the first time, framing them through different interpretive lenses and methods. They entered dialogues with family members, community neighbors, and friends about their own forms of knowledge and memory related to material culture, shifting well beyond textual archives or museum collections into other modes of relating and being. They deftly handled belongings in their own lives to ask probing questions about memory, inheritance, representation. The resulting final projects that each member produced were reflective, inventive, and capacious. Many interleaved the academic and the personal in moving ways, and sought different voices and formats in which to communicate. 

For example, Isabel Cushing explored traditions of scrapbooking by weaving together items from a personal archive—ticket stubs, receipts, “I Voted” stickers, newspaper clippings—to address “the radical potential of ephemera to tell history.” In a colorful project that took the form of a collage rather than a standard academic essay, the work meditated on how tangible mementoes, which may be only partially legible to outsiders, can serve as “markers of relationships, carrying meaning and memories.” Eugene Amankwah drew upon digitized objects in collections beyond campus, like a violin covered with written inscriptions at the National Museum of American History, to investigate musicians’ roles during the U.S. Civil War. These items provided a springboard to a larger social history about how “drummer boys” and others took part in this pivotal conflict, and how these items can shape remembrances of this time.

The relations among people, materiality, and places anchored other projects. A painted, collaged tilt-top table at the Bennington Museum in Vermont became a focal point for Andrew Kensett, who had worked closely on conservation of this piece through the Graduate Art program. Examining the landscape representations that Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses created upon its surfaces, the project reconsidered how this work by a Northeastern “folk” artist and entrepreneur can be a lens for critically re-examining “origin stories” rooted in local, regional, and national forms of identity-formation, mythology, and nostalgia. Focusing on California and the homelands of Tásmam Koyóm, Dylan Syben analyzed initiatives to repatriate land to Indigenous people such as the Maidu community. This digital project embraced multimedia and interdisciplinarity, bringing together historical sources, poetry, journalism, photography, and more to contextualize how tribal nations, the PG&E power company, and the state are relating through specific places of significance. 

The local built environment of campus and the surrounding town also provided grounding for research and interpretation. Leah Rosenfeld contextualized the “1753 House” (a twentieth-century wooden replica of an early colonizer structure) to critically examine which histories this town icon lifts up, and which it erases or treats as marginal—as well as considering how future iterations of local narratives and structures may be made more inclusive and accurate. Delving into the memory terrain at Williams College that has accreted through monuments and markers, Nicholas Goldrosen traced how certain of these installations “resist the usual incorporation into the College’s collective memory.” Such features are on the college grounds but not “of” the institution, the project argued, bringing in site photographs taken just before students abruptly had to leave campus. Both projects drew readers into closer scrutiny and understanding of seemingly familiar locales.

All exceeded and expanded the definitions of “early America” and “material culture” that I had envisioned at the semester’s outset. More than anything, participants in this co-learning endeavor leaned into the concept of “afterlives” to interrogate what we do with these stories in the twenty-first century, amid powerful calls for reckoning with history’s violences and exclusions, and moving toward greater justice in the present and future.

For myself, the pandemic shutdowns pushed me out onto the land. What began as fresh air-seeking walks and hikes soon morphed into more intentional visitation of regional terrain, including historic sites, cemeteries, and small museums, many of which have been able to carry on despite unprecedented staffing and operational challenges. The shutdowns have accelerated my engagement with the very local, and deepened my understanding of the importance of growing connections with the webs of people—in museums, archives, historical societies, tribal nations, and more—who caretake and steward these resources. 

Now that our campus (like so many others) is resuming in-person living and learning, I continue to ruminate on what lessons from the sudden remote turn will we carry forward, and which elements we will gladly leave behind. I recently discarded the hand-sewn mask I clumsily fashioned from a dishtowel in the spring of 2020, using the sewing kit I inherited from my late grandmother. Others are similarly deaccessioning—or preserving—the material traces of pandemic time. And they are delving into the pedagogical implications of the transformations we have experienced. 

What this means for the future of early America, and of the meaningful materials that endure today, is a matter still unfolding. The experiences of encountering tangible items in real space, as part of an in-person community, are not interchangeable with virtual approaches. But nor is this a simple case of “less than.” Instead, there are striking possibilities for different insights and methods, and even greater attunement to the many people needed to carry forward collaborative learning. I will likely continue to incorporate digital forms of material engagement in my classes in the future because they carry us into alternate relations: with significant items, with the spaces we inhabit, and with each other.

 

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the many colleagues, students, and community members who have collaborated on these topics and offered insights into the practices, politics, and ethics of engaging materiality and the peoples linked to it. Partners at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Five College Consortium, and Williams College have been especially instrumental in the work described here. Ned Cooke, furniture historian at Yale University, taught a graduate seminar on New Haven and American material culture that helped lead me to these fields. Colleagues at American Antiquarian Society and Commonplace previously helped me think through the transits of materiality and heritage items in Indigenous-colonial contexts, and the need for continuing restorative work around repatriation to Indigenous nations in and beyond New England. The work of Akeia de Barros Gomes, Senior Curator of Maritime Social History at Mystic Seaport Museum, has also shaped my thinking.

 

I am especially grateful to members of “Afterlives of Objects” in Spring 2020 for their patience, care, and permission to reference their work. While space constraints prevent discussion of each project that seminar members created, I wish to acknowledge that every member of that collective learning space contributed insights, critiques, and creativity.

 

Further reading

These are a few resources from the “Afterlives of Objects” syllabus that shaped our in-roads into furnishings and other material items, and their contexts both inside and beyond museums: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, et al., “Introduction: Thinking with Things,” in Tangible Things: Making History through Objects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1-20; Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, “Mining the Museum,” Grand Street (no. 44, 1993): 151-72, including three page contextual explanation of the exhibition (170-72); Howard Mansfield,  “In the Memory House,” in In The Memory House (Golden CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1995), 5-20; Nina Simon, selections from The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010): “Preface: Why Participate?” and excerpts from ch. 4, “Social Objects”; D. Rae Gould, “NAGPRA, CUI and Institutional Will,” in The Routledge Companion to Cultural Property, ed. Jane Anderson and Haidy Geismar (New York: Routledge, 2017), 134-51; James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, “A Few Things Needful: Houses and Furnishings,” in James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (New York: Anchor Books, 2000); Elaine Sesma, “‘A Web of Community’: Uncovering African American Historic Sites in Deerfield MA,” Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage 2 (May 2015): 121-36; R. Eric Hollinger et al., “Tlingit-Smithsonian Collaborations with 3D digitization of Cultural Objects,” Museum Anthropology Review, 7 (Spring-Fall 2013): 201-53; Yale University Art Gallery, film clip, “Studying American Furniture in the Present,” 49 min.

On Portsmouth material culture, and the social lives of enslaved, indentured, and free people in this town, see Mark J. Sammons and Valerie Cunningham, Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004); Valerie Cunningham Papers, MC 321, University of New Hampshire Library, Milne Special Collections and Archives; Brock W. Jobe, Portsmouth Furniture: Masterworks from the New Hampshire Seacoast (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1993); Rick Russack, “Four Centuries of Portsmouth Furniture,” Portsmouth Historical Society, May 16, 2017.

Critical engagements with “campus collections” across New England, North America, and globally are wide and growing. Students, faculty, curators, and community members are doing essential interdisciplinary work to revisit, contextualize, and transform these spaces and practices. For a small sampling of initiatives just in the Northeast, at a range of private and public institutions, see Americas Research Initiative, Rhode Island School of Design Museum; “Dialogue with the Collection Program” and collaboration with Fred Wilson, University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts Amherst; The Lost Museum: The Jenks Museum of Natural History and Anthropology, Brown University; Dorothy Wang and Kevin Murphy, “Uncovering Williams” class and WMCA exhibition (2019); Sonnet Kekilia Coggins and Kailani Polzak, “‘The Field is The World’: Williams, Hawaiʻi, and Material Histories in the Making” (2018); Horace Ballard, Kevin M. Murphy, and Elizabeth Sandoval, “Remixing the Hall: WCMA’s Collection in Perpetual Transition”; Destinee Filmore, Jordan Horton, and Nicholas Liou, “Curatorial Close Looks: Remixing the Remix”; Lisa Conathan, Lori DuBois, Anne Peale, “Teaching with Primary Sources at Williams College” (2020); Places, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art, Yale University Art Gallery (2019-2021); Christine DeLucia, “Fugitive Collections in New England Indian Country: Indigenous Material Culture and Early American History Making at Ezra Stiles’s Yale Museum,” William and Mary Quarterly 75 (Jan. 2018): 109-150; Ethan W. Lasser, ed., The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766-1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

Communities and institutions are partnering in new ways, such as an innovative museum endeavor by the Tomaquag Museum in conjunction with the University of Rhode Island and RISD. Foundational ethical and human rights matters involving repatriation and restoration of belongings to communities remain major concerns at museums, despite important steps forward.

 

This article originally appeared in July, 2022.

 

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Christine DeLucia is Associate Professor of History at Williams College and the author of Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in The Journal of American History, The William and Mary Quarterly, Commonplace, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and other publications. She researches and teaches in areas including Native American and Indigenous Studies, early American history, material culture and museums, and community-engaged work.