Kevin Barksdale’s new book, The Lost State of Franklin: America’s First Secession, describes the trials and many tribulations of a handful of settlers in the Tennessee Valley who bumbled through a short-lived effort to become America’s fourteenth state. Perhaps “bumbled” is unfair. The ambitions and deep convictions of those who forged the state of Franklin out of the North Carolina backcountry fueled fierce conflicts, both rhetorical and physical, that seared long-lasting legacies into the local history of east Tennessee.

But sometimes, the Franklinites’ desperate quest for legitimacy led to episodes that were downright funny. Throughout the Franklinites brief claim to statehood between 1784 and 1788, nobody gave them much respect. North Carolina would not recognize them. Congress did not support them. When the Franklinites sent a delegate to New York to lobby Congress for recognition, Patrick Henry observed that the “mission was fruitless” (67). At one low point, the Franklinites decided that the only person who might lend them some credibility was Franklin himself—Benjamin, that is—so they wrote the aging founder to see if he might back them up. Franklin never replied. Meanwhile, in east Tennessee, infighting over statehood ripped the region apart, at one point bringing the two partisan leaders, John Sevier and John Tipton, to fisticuffs in open court. Desperate to hang on to their dream, the Franklin lobby appealed to the state of Georgia for recognition. They toyed with the idea of annexing themselves to Spain. They carried on in their seemingly quixotic quest for statehood until, finally, Franklin was “lost.”

The Franklin statehood movement emerged out of a context in which meanings of statehood and sovereignty were profoundly unclear and dangerously fragile. In elaborate detail, Barksdale documents the ways that Franklin’s leadership navigated such ambiguity to claim political legitimacy. North Carolina legislators initially claimed sovereignty over the Tennessee Valley but ceded their western lands to Congress in 1784. The state of Franklin emerged out of this cession, its leaders asserting that local sovereignty was the only way to protect the interests of backcountry settlers. Almost immediately, North Carolina legislators changed their minds and took back the land they had just ceded to Congress. The result was overlapping claims that created, as one observer noted, a “strange spectacle of two empires exercising at one and the same time over one and the same people” (73). Add to this mix resident Cherokee and Creek people who were, in turn, also struggling to redefine Indian sovereignty amidst internal dissent. The result was a volatile set of competing claims, each as legitimate (or ephemeral, depending on perspective) as the next. 

The Lost State of Franklin presents a fascinating portrait of Franklin’s history, but remains largely local in focus. Barksdale closely documents negotiations within the state, yet rarely steps outside of regional conflicts to explain the broader consequences of backcountry instability. To the detriment of his overall argument, Barksdale’s narrative remains bounded by long-standing historiographical debates over the nature of the Franklin enterprise: were the Franklinites loyal patriots, following in the revolutionary tradition, or were they disloyal opportunists scheming against the new republic? Barksdale charts out a path between these two positions, pointing out that Franklin’s leadership was all of these things at once.

But Franklin’s significance was really far bigger than that. In the late eighteenth century, the Franklinites’ claims to sovereignty compounded pressures emerging along the western borders of New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. As Patrick Griffin has powerfully argued in American Leviathan, the ambiguity of sovereignty in the early national West granted backcountry settlers enormous license to invent and re-invent structures of authority and legitimacy. The sovereign vacuum created by the inability of any power to serve the needs of backcountry settlers politicized the early national West. The state of Franklin was but one of many movements for self-sovereignty to emerge in the wake of war. Taken together, the reality and variety of creative self-sovereignty forced early national leadership to take note and to seek remedies against the increasingly real possibilities of fragmentation and disunion in the backcountry.

Questions about the broader implications of Franklin’s claims to sovereignty loom large in Barksdale’s analysis but seldom take center stage. Instead, the author delves deep into the personal and financial motivations of Franklin’s leaders and argues that Franklin emerged out of the “regional influence [of the ruling class], their shared wartime and frontier experiences, and their collective political and financial interests” (15). Local politics and regional demands fueled the Franklin movement. Yet, while such local motivations were certainly central, they tell only part of the story. Barksdale could have granted Franklin a much greater significance by placing it within the larger framework of political experimentation and creative invention that characterized the post-war frontier. Doing so would have positioned Franklin within a much broader context to explain how the collective pressures of backcountry claims to sovereignty forced early national leaders to recognize the fragility of their hold on western populations.

In many ways, the most interesting part of Barksdale’s analysis lies in his descriptions of what has happened to the state of Franklin since the eighteenth century. In the two hundred plus years since the Franklin experiment, historians have interpreted the episode in ways that reflect variously noble, patriotic, ruthless, insidious, and downright shady motives. One of the most compelling aspects of Barksdale’s work is his description of Franklin’s historiographic malleability. The conflicts that emerged in east Tennessee persisted in memory as “the continued evolution of the meaning of Franklin allowed several prominent American figures to recast the movement for their own political purposes” (163). The very title of his book points to the loaded historiographical baggage that weighs on the Franklin story. Franklin was not always “lost,” but became so during the 1880s when historians looked to the episode as east Tennessee’s own version of the “Lost Cause.” Only after the Civil War did southern historians champion Franklin as “America’s first secession” movement, vindicating the ambitions of backcountry separatists against the invasive claims of North Carolina.

Of course, there is deep irony in claiming Franklin as “lost” as a means to vindicate states’ rights ideology. The Franklinites’ whole crusade emerged during a moment when the very idea of statehood was profoundly vague. Their creative attempts to carve a new state out of the Tennessee Valley amid the chaos that followed the American Revolution raised the very questions from which the meaning of statehood emerged. The state of Franklin forced early national leadership to face core questions about what a state should be and how it should be constituted. Labeling the Franklin movement as “America’s First Secession,” therefore, grants early national concepts of statehood a level of coherence and stability possible only in hindsight.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4 (July, 2009).

Honor Sachs teaches at Southern Connecticut State University. Her book, Chosen Land: The Legal Creation of White Manhood on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier, is forthcoming. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her dog, Blue.

In this wonderful snapshot of the relationship between economic systems and social hierarchies in eighteenth-century New York, Serena Zabin offers an exciting view of life on the margins in the imperial city. For starters, Zabin views New York not as a colonial frontier but rather as an imperial outpost, and she suggests that this vantage is key to understanding how New Yorkers understood themselves and their world at the time—on the margins of empire. Life on the margins of empire was filled with characters generally thought to be marginal to the real elites, politicians, and power brokers in England. But Zabin persuasively demonstrates that work done by poor and middling white women, slaves, servants, sailors, and dance masters was much more central to the imperial struggle for status and authority than previously thought.

Imperial New Yorkers were obsessed with appearance and representation, as traditional markers of class status were no longer reliable.

Central to women’s economic authority were their relationships with others—mostly men who had the legal standing necessary to conduct business or access to wealth and markets, but also women in the form of family networks. Expanding efforts to understand the significance of marriage and family in women’s lives, Zabin finds agency where most historians see only oppression: the law of coverture. Zabin writes, “Coverture reveals not the ways in which women’s participation in the market was limited but the ways in which it was channeled” (35). Women navigated the market through their relationships. Though legally erased through the laws of coverture, married women used their marital status for social and economic leverage in order to acquire credit, information, respect, and access to markets, goods, and services. Such astute observations substantiate the book’s arguments. Still, the bigger story is how women’s work gets hidden in the archives. Historians well know that commonly referenced “court records and city directories” only list occupations of men, but Zabin points out that even when women had the chance to testify about their work in court trials, they neglected to identify their occupations and rather “defined themselves by their husbands’ occupation” (39).

The author is a master storyteller whose clear prose and arresting plot lines never betray her thesis. The story of shopkeeper Elizabeth Anderson stands as a perfect example. This compelling, horrific account demonstrates in small part the antagonism that business women were subject to and the centrality of economics to every level of social interaction and authority. When Anderson pursued a group of men who had attempted to rape her daughter Mary, the accused took revenge by trying to destroy her business and reputation. While the case went to trial, it had the unseemly outcome of the public whipping of Elizabeth (you’ll have to read the book to find out why). Yet the trial itself is secondary to what the incident reveals about the importance of economics and status.

Zabin’s treatment of the alleged 1741 slave conspiracy further emphasizes the tight fit between social and economic forces. While many historians have embraced the evidence suggesting a planned slave insurrection, Zabin relegates most of the conspiracy story to a footnote and shows instead how economic roles shaped the hearings, ruling, and outcome of the trials. Most people involved, aside from Justice Daniel Horsmanden, distanced themselves from the event and moved on. Zabin concludes that “this failed attempt to violently re-inscribe social order through courtroom drama exemplifies the enduring power of New York’s economic culture over the simple ideology of white over black often associated with colonial America” (132).

The remainder of the book examines the use of credit, the role of consumer goods, and the treatment of prisoners of war. Here, Zabin offers us stories of social, cultural, and economic fluidity. Social hierarchies were weakened and appearance mattered. Zabin details the different forms of currency available in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the way that access to credit was linked to “cultural assumptions of trustworthiness”—assumptions increasingly threatened by con artists who “used commercial markers of gentlemanly status, such as fashionable clothes and letters of introduction, in order to exploit the modes of commercial exchange that depended on both personal interactions and long-distance exchange” (31).

Imperial New Yorkers were obsessed with appearance and representation, as traditional markers of class status were no longer reliable. How else could people determine their social betters and inferiors? To whom should credit be extended? Dancing masters were a crucial site of enactment of this drama concerning status, highlighting both the importance of appearance and the fluidity of social standing. It was no longer enough to simply be rich or successful. One had to be able to project this persona, as well. Ironically, those charged with training elites in the ways of refinement were far from elite themselves (103).

The unreliability of appearance also shaped race relations. White New Yorkers relied on race to determine slave status, but they found the visible markers of race increasingly unreliable. Spanish prisoners of war challenged the longstanding notion that dark skin constituted eligibility for enslavement. Spanish sailors captured by the British refused to accept being sold into slavery when their captors would not see beyond their dark skin and recognize their status as freemen and prisoners of war. For black sailors living on the margins of competing empires, war and commerce became vehicles for enslavement (113). These accounts provide important windows into the dynamic struggle to codify racial categories as well as the centrality of labor to such debates (117, 122).

Zabin mentions the importance of ballroom heterosociability as well as the significance of “mixed sex” sociability in defining proper social interactions for elites (97). This reader was left wanting to know more about how the concept of heterosociability shaped other economic interactions between men and women. Did a failure to successfully demonstrate heterosociability affect one’s ability to navigate the gendered world of the market? While several scholars of early America have documented the relationship between economic and gendered identities (failures at the market have led to crises of masculinity in more than one study) few have extended this analysis to monetary relationships between men and women.

As a scholar of women’s crime, I was most taken by the detailed descriptions in Zabin’s chapter on the underground, extralegal, and (in her terms) “informal” economies run predominantly by poor white women and black men. The market in used and often stolen goods threatened elites for two distinct reasons: the informal economy undermined the value and “status implications” of luxury goods, and it encouraged interracial economic partnerships between black men and white women (8). While married middle- and upper-class white women were encouraged in their financial transactions, poor women were ridiculed and frequently charged, convicted, and imprisoned. Stealing, receiving, or selling stolen goods were the most common crimes women were charged with during the period, and yet participation in this economy was liberating for slaves and poor white women (80). Historians have long argued that petty theft, particularly of cloth and clothing, was motivated by necessity. Zabin notes that there was an overall increase in the value and significance of consumer goods throughout the period, and argues that we should see slaves, servants, and other poor people involved in the informal economy as consumers who were also aware of the increasing value of luxury goods on the market (66).

Social order is dynamic, unstable, and largely defined by economic rather than political forces. This take on imperial New York is refreshing—not only for its disassociation from the (not yet) pending revolution, but also for its skillful weaving of racial and gendered analysis within a larger, compelling narrative. Zabin sums up her argument, “The primacy of commerce in the British Empire, particularly within the context of a diverse and competitive Atlantic world, worked against any stiff adherence to an abstract social order” (158). The author’s writing style and deft turns of phrase make this an excellent choice for the general public and undergraduates. Its substantial archive and careful analysis make it essential for Early Americanists and feminist historians alike.

Imagine yourself seated around the table at a séance. Imagine having already committed to an ethereal mechanics of sympathy and spirit communication. Imagine the promise of darkness and the desire to sense something beyond the shadow play of candlelight. Imagine an artist like James McNeil Whistler breathing in the scene in which silence, concentration, and spirit-seeing were requisite for success, a scene he sought to recreate in the experience of his own portraits, most strikingly in his Arrangement in Black series. In the shimmering spaces between light and dark there is, for a lack of a better phrase, a profound depth.

Artistic creation as a form of mediumship.

Now imagine standing in front of Jackson Pollack’s White Light (1954). Standing inrather than at attention. Longing to see beyond the buoyed splats and hardened rivulets of paint, into the dense measures of Pollack’s being and the very rhythm of his mid-century milieu.

The work of art as mystic portal.

Colbert seeks to illuminate an invisible depth for his readers.

There is a relationship between these experiences, argues Charles Colbert in Haunted Visions—between a century of American art, between artistic creation, spectatorship, and a tradition of appreciation in which the critic becomes a kind of psychic interpreter, expert in discerning the hidden lines of influence.

In asking how spiritualism influences a visual romanticism in nineteenth-century America, Colbert explores the precursors to a distinctly American modernism. Colbert’s understanding of spiritualism is sufficiently broad to include a host of other metaphysical schemes that inflected how a wide range of Americans assumed their position at a trance lecture or séance table—mesmerism, psychometry, phrenology, psychical research, and the radical empiricism of William James that would seek to explain such schemes or situations. There is, of course, a transcendentalist hue to all of this, but Colbert succeeds in distinguishing a tradition of nineteenth-century aesthetics from an Emersonian orbit and its afterglow.

Colbert offers a compelling catalogue of odd American artists who “advocate[d] the virtues of enchantment” (61). With an emphasis on the ideological impact of Andrew Jackson Davis and Emanuel Swedenborg, Haunted Visions offers a breezy yet fine-grained portrait of the myriad artists and critics swept up in the metaphysical flowerings of the nineteenth century. Colbert is at his best when he writes of the way in which orientations to psychic energies and magnetic powers make their way into stone, marble, and canvas.

The narrative is roughly chronological. It begins with a consideration of the “spiritualist theme” in the work of four sculptors (Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story, Henry Dexter, and Harriet Hosmer, the latter drawing upon the principles of perpetual spirit motion for the design of a Ferris wheel that would expose riders to the possibilities of interplanetary travel). After looking into how painters William Sidney Mount and Fitz Henry Lane strove to paint the metaphysics of light in the antebellum era, Colbert moves onto postbellum tonalism and the tendency among its practitioners (James McNeil Whistler and George Inness among others) to aggressively paint the auratic energies that pervaded the natural world. The book concludes with discussions of the critic and collector James Jackson Jarves and the early twentieth-century artist Robert Henri, whose interest in clairvoyance, Colbert argues, was part of a long nineteenth-century run-up to the revolution that was American Modernism.

The gist of Colbert’s argument is that this limned tradition was integral in setting the stage for the emergence of modernist art and spectatorship. Modernist works were self-consciously dependent upon and invested in promoting higher levels of consciousness. The surfaces of these works were intended as portals to somewhere else precisely because they had captured the depth that clings to all surfaces—a macrocosmic economy of forces that was ever present but visible only to the properly initiated. “The psychic content of late nineteenth-century art,” writes Colbert, “resides beneath the surface and implies an existence that usually operates beyond the threshold of the senses. An observer attuned to the possibility enters a meditative state at the behest of these intimations and resonates sympathetically with them” (19).

Interestingly, Colbert adopts such a critical gaze when explicating the spiritualist content that underlies the works he surveys. In other words, Colbert seeks to illuminate an invisible depth for his readers, which is tantamount to his argument that spiritualism mattered, intensely mattered, for artists and audience alike.

In Colbert’s telling, spiritualism comes across as primarily about beliefs, principles, what might be called doctrine-effects. Questions of artistic practice are engaged pointedly at times and there is much to be admired in such a line of inquiry, for it reveals the presence of spiritualist proclivities in arenas not often seen as wrapped up in occult sympathies. Yet in Colbert’s rendering of spiritualism as largely a reaction against the anti-intellectualism and sensational excess of evangelical revivalism, the non-ideological life-world of spiritualism (i.e., the bat-shit crazy wonder of it all) does not often come to the fore.

Given the discursive reach of spiritualism, it would have been helpful if Colbert attended to questions of desire, affect, and how individual historical figures theorized their interiority. This would have allowed him to broach how people live out and through a metaphysics of correspondence in addition to living by it. For example, what else is going on with George Inness’s “desire to impress himself unequivocally into his compositions” other than his “belief” in the occult? What to make of how his paintings actively deny the inevitability of urbanization? How does the occult revival relate to other kinds of revival and other political registers beyond questions of religious freedom, belief, and cognition (166)?

Colbert argues that the significance of spiritualism, in general, and of spiritualist art in particular, is that both call into question theses of secularization. The persistence of spiritualism in the nineteenth century and beyond, then, demonstrates that religion, and by extension, enchantment, did not recede within the frame of modernity but existed alongside all manner of profanations. Colbert maintains that the presence of religion he unearths should surprise theorists of secularization, challenge the “secularizing bias of historians” (15), and upend Max Weber’s lament over iron-clad disenchantment.

On its face, this argument is convincing enough. Indeed, within histories of American religion, spiritualism has often been figured as a formation of rebellion—against religio-political orthodoxies, against gender hierarchies, against death itself. And while traffic in ghost-stories may always signal epistemic eccentricity, I am still left wondering what, exactly, is surprising about the cultivation of a reasoned attention that trades in concepts of creativity and genius and eternal value? What is necessarily surprising about Jarves’s notion of the “special gift” of art-seeing (rather than spirit-seeing) in which the “mysterious test of feeling . . . takes cognizance of the sentiment of the artist, his absolute individuality, by which he is himself, and none other; that which cannot be exchanged or imitated” (217)?

Colbert emphasizes the creative individualism of spiritualist practice rather than viewing it in light of cultural consolidations and incorporation. He does not ignore themes of industrialization and urbanization. Nor does he overlook artistic responses to demographic forces. But the reader yearns for a fuller discussion of how and why the artists Colbert surveys were generative of and complicit in the culture at-large. Might the kind of authentic self that Jarves celebrates become less authentic, or better yet, something else entirely, when considered in light of market directives, technological incentives, conceptual conflations of religion and freedom, and other forces that exceed the frames of cognition and intentionality? How might the language of magnetism, for example, be bound up in an encounter with an increasingly capitalized and networked society—one that allows for a robust recognition of self precisely by occluding its powers of ontological diffusion? How does one come to picture (literally and figuratively) a vibrant aura or diagnose the process of re-enchantment? What categories feed into such activities? What are the mechanics? Is enchantment merely a cognitive matter?

In my reading of Haunted Visions there is a lament coursing between the lines of Colbert’s narrative—the decline of what he calls the “tempular museum.” This lament is precipitated by the golden-age-quality of the era Colbert considers and culminates in the “awed reverence” demanded by the auratics of Mark Rothko’s No. 14 (1960) or Pollack’s White Light. There is an implicit figuration of decline in Colbert’s narrative—the spiritualist flowering of the long nineteenth century followed by an increasing numbness to spiritual depth. After Pollack and Rothko the deluge of pop art. Andy Warhol as the cynical embrace of the secular surface of things.

But I am not entirely convinced that enchantments lie only behind the screens of history and/or canvas. Indeed, surface and depth may be entirely inadequate for understanding enchantment or anything at all for that matter (the depth ever there to domesticate the unruliness above, to give some semblance of order). For in facing White Light one may hear the sounds of Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (1961), its gatefold album cover so perfectly capturing the synaesthetic promise of White Light and Pollock’s method of spontaneous composition. Harmonies converge ever so intensely as Pollack’s world bleeds into the Warhol world of irony and so-called detachment and, of course, into the sonic space of the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat (1968), inspired, in part, by Coleman’s extended riffs and asymmetrical phrasing in Free Jazz. There is a density and compulsion to all this signal static. The surface becoming the depth and vice versa in a continuous shimmering implosion—the audience at home, longing to clarify, to collect, to own a copy (paintings being long out of reach, original vinyl pressings now do the trick).

It is this contemporary experience of vibrant matter that Colbert addresses through his pre-history of an American art. As Colbert writes of the spiritualist will to domesticate—”By taking possession of paintings, one raised the prospect of being possessed by those same paintings” (227). Indeed, this central claim is spot-on. The shadow play of spiritualism persists in our contemporary moment, suffusing our desire for objects that are really real, things anchored, forever, in a world that goes beyond, so far beyond, those flat schemes of representation. Such schemes must, to their detriment, still the circulation and distinguish art from experience, life from death. The end result, one surmises, is the contemporary art market with its blend of bourgeois frivolity, Victorian fetishism, and bewilderment in the face of such a dense cultural ecology. So that when you walk into a room in which White Light hangs, you may be peppered with a palpable spirit of the age—burnt metal circulations of money and sex, feedback, and all manner of spectral splatter.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4.5 (September, 2012).

John Lardas Modern teaches in the Religious Studies Department at Franklin & Marshall College. He is the author of Secularism in Antebellum America (2011), The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (2001), and co-curator of Frequencies: A Collaborative Genealogy of Spirituality.

In 1789, when Virginia held its first congressional election under the recently ratified Constitution, residents of the state’s Fifth Congressional District experienced what may still be the greatest contest for a seat in the House of Representatives in American history. James Monroe, a distinguished veteran of the Revolutionary War and an accomplished politician, faced off against James Madison, chief author of the Constitution and a political powerhouse in his own right. The election did more than pit two renowned and eminently qualified candidates against one another. The candidates also offered two competing visions of America’s future. Madison supported a vigorous federal government, while Monroe represented the Anti-Federalist cause of decentralization. The voters had to decide which direction they thought the nation should go.

Madison faced an uphill climb. Anti-Federalists dominated the statehouse in Virginia, and they wanted to keep Madison out of Congress. They drew the Fifth District with just that purpose in mind. They made sure that Madison’s congressional district contained a particularly large Anti-Federalist contingent including James Monroe, a popular figure who had recently allied with the Anti-Federalists and who could give Madison a strong challenge. The shy and socially awkward Madison remained undaunted, however, and engaged in a protracted political campaign that taxed his abilities. Both men traveled throughout the district in the midst of a particularly bad winter trying to stir up support for their respective causes. They also engaged in long public debates in churches and public squares. The power of the new federal government to levy a direct tax on states seemed to be the key issue that divided the men. In the end, Madison prevailed by 336 votes, thanks to Baptists and other dissenters who rewarded him for his earlier support for religious freedom.

Later in life, Madison joked that he was lucky to win. Poor weather on Election Day had deterred a large contingent of his opponents from traveling to the polls, he said. The story may be apocryphal. Although 336 votes implies a razor-close margin to our modern senses, in reality, Madison received 57 percent of the total vote—meaning that the election was not quite as close as it might appear. True, Madison remained uncertain of the election’s outcome until the very end, and many believed he might lose. Historians have largely affirmed his anxieties in their retelling of the race, but the results suggest he enjoyed a decisive victory, perhaps more than he recognized at the time or historians have since. Indeed, as Monroe reported to Thomas Jefferson after the election, Madison “prevail’d by a large majority of about 300.”

Still, the story of this election is compelling in its own right, and its significance to the early national period makes it even more so. In Philadelphia, Madison became a leading figure in the first Congress. He played a central role in establishing the protocols and procedures by which the new government and its branches would operate. He began as a close confidante of Washington before spearheading the formation of the first party system in opposition to the policies of the Washington administration.

It is fair to say that had the election in Virginia’s Fifth District gone the other way, the nation’s early political history would have been considerably altered. Many assumed that if Madison lost the congressional election, Washington would have appointed him to an office within the executive branch. That would have made for a substantially changed Madison and First Congress. Serving in Congress freed Madison to chart his own political path, to help pass the Bill of Rights, and to organize an opposition to Washington. Madison would have been in a far different political position had he served directly under Washington, and Congress would have operated much differently without Madison among its leaders.

Chris DeRose sets out to tell the story of this pivotal election in Founding Rivals: The Bill of Rights and the Election that Saved a Nation. DeRose, a political consultant and attorney, brings his professional background to bear in his analysis of the Madison-Monroe congressional contest. The book, however, devotes remarkably little time to the election or to the personal rivalry between Madison and Monroe. The election and its aftermath, ostensibly the subjects of the book, receive only about fifty pages of attention in the book’s strongest two chapters. Given DeRose’s insider experience with partisan politics, one imagines he could have provided much insight on how early party machinations shaped the growing rivalry between Madison and Monroe in the years that followed 1789. Unfortunately, the full story of this rivalry and its reconciliation remains untold. Instead, DeRose spends over half the book tracing out the family and personal histories of both men and detailing their activities in the Revolutionary era. DeRose never delves deeply into the minds or personalities of either man, and his analysis lacks the sophistication of similarly themed books like Stuart Leibiger’s Founding Friendships and Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers. That is unfortunate, because the Madison and Monroe relationship is complicated, important, and overlooked.

The bulk of DeRose’s analysis focuses on the minutia of their correspondence, providing what seems to be an almost letter-by-letter account of what each man said to the other. Although DeRose argues that this correspondence reveals a deep personal friendship, his evidence suggests that their connection before 1789 stemmed from political expediency. They wrote to one another with regularity, but they rarely, if ever, met. Their correspondence often relayed important political information, but it seldom turned personal.

Indeed, what is most remarkable about their early relationship is how their paths diverged. Monroe served as a lieutenant during the Revolutionary War; Madison served in the Continental Congress. Monroe studied law and traveled to France after he left the service, while Madison served in the first session of the Confederation Congress. When Madison left Congress because of term limits and returned to the Virginia House of Delegates, Monroe left the House of Delegates and headed off to Congress. Madison attended the Constitutional Convention, while Monroe stewed in the Virginia summer heat. Although DeRose speculates on when the two men may have met for the first time, the only time he actually puts them in the same room was when they campaigned against one another in 1789.

Though DeRose tends to treat the two as equals, his evidence often makes Madison appear the more powerful of the two before 1789, and Monroe seems to try to use Madison’s greater stature for his personal benefit. Monroe initiated their correspondence in 1784, when Madison was in Congress and Monroe was just entering the world of politics as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. Monroe doubtless knew that such a connection would help ingratiate him in more elite circles. Monroe’s sense of the relationship as one of political opportunism comes through in a letter he wrote to Thomas Jefferson after learning that Virginia’s governor, Edmund Randolph, excluded Monroe from the state’s delegation to the Constitutional Convention. He confided to Jefferson that he held Madison at least partly responsible for the snub: “Madison, upon whose friendship I have calculated, whose views I have favored, and with whom I have held the most confidential correspondence since you left the continent, is in strict league with him [Randolph]” (147).

DeRose ends his book with the First Congress. Unfortunately, this choice omits the most interesting part of the Madison-Monroe relationship, which became more profound and complicated as early national politics increasingly drew them together. For instance, after Monroe lost the congressional election, Virginia’s legislature sent him to Congress as their senator in 1790 when a vacancy occurred. There, he worked with Madison to help form an opposition to Washington and his Federalists backers. In Jefferson’s administration, Madison served as secretary of state, while Monroe served as a diplomat. The rivalry first forged in the congressional election reemerged at moments throughout these years, even though (or perhaps because) they often worked toward common political ends. The rivalry reached a new height in 1808 when Monroe supporters in Virginia tried once again to foil Madison’s rise by asking Monroe to run for president against him. Only in 1810, at Jefferson’s behest, did the two men reconcile. Monroe then served under Madison as the secretary of state and became Madison’s heir apparent. In other words, the real rivalry—and better story—comes after the 1789 election, not before.

In the end, this book’s enormous potential is unrealized. DeRose reveals a limited knowledge of the era and indeed of his two subjects. He offers scant analysis of events. We learn little of the inner workings of Madison and Monroe. DeRose’s narrative too often consists of paragraphs containing a single introductory sentence followed by a long quotation. His footnotes do not cite many of the major recent works on the era. Lance Banning, Drew McCoy, Stanley Elkins and Erick McKitrick, all specialists in this era who have published extensively on its political culture, are not mentioned. As Richard Labunski has pointed out elsewhere, though, DeRose may have relied on some recent books without proper citation. Instead, the sources DeRose does cite are mostly an odd assortment of older books. There are also occasional incorrect transcriptions; for instance, DeRose quotes a “country” when it is in fact “county.” (241) In matters large and small, then, there is room for improvement.

As I came to terms with the shortcomings of this book, I found that I thought less about America’s founding and more about the current state of the discipline. Regnery History, a new publishing venture of the prominent conservative publishing house Regnery, produced this book. To its credit, the book does not carry any overt agenda. It aims, instead, to tell a good story, which seems to be Regnery’s main purpose with this new venture. Regnery’s investment in this imprint (at a time when most university presses are cutting back) and DeRose’s relative success suggests that there is an audience hungry for books on this subject matter. And, as someone who teaches political history, I can attest to the need for such books.

Even if this book will never find its way into my curriculum (I had hoped that it might), there are nonetheless important lessons learned from reading it. DeRose shows a passion for storytelling and a desire to find and share largely overlooked stories that will appeal to general readers. But he comes up short in his execution. Perhaps in his next book DeRose can integrate more recent scholarship to realize his work’s full potential.

If DeRose would benefit from learning the methods of and knowledge produced by scholars, then perhaps some professional historians can embrace DeRose’s ambition to reach wider audiences. Professional historians often ignore, if not outright dismiss, such works of popular history. In the process, we, as a discipline, have essentially outsourced such storytelling to non-professionals. This is unfortunate, because compelling stories deserve to be told well, and poorly sourced history is not really history at all.

On August 7, 1864, William Sherman sent the following instruction to George Thomas during the Union army’s march to Atlanta: “Telegraph to Chattanooga and have two 30-pounder Parrotts sent down on the cars, with 1,000 shells and ammunition. Put them into your best position, and knock down the buildings of the town.” This brief directive incorporated three technologies which pointed to the modern character of the Civil War: railroads, telegraphs, and Parrotts were all unknown when Sherman was born in 1820. Sherman was not starry-eyed about technology; as Robert Angevine notes in his 2004 book The Railroad and the State, Sherman complained in the first year of the war that “these railroads are the weakest things in war.” Yet, as William Thomas shows in this fascinating new book, railroads played a critical role in the conflict and in so doing forced Americans to confront the meaning of modern technologies which in peacetime had brought so much benefit.

Scholars have long debated how different the North and South were from each other prior to the Civil War. A wealth of recent work on antebellum Southern economy and culture has demonstrated that southerners were hardly afraid of material acquisitiveness or new technology; rather, they intended to pursue modernity on their own terms (which included, of course, slavery). Thomas embraces this historiographical vision of the South, and presents evidence demonstrating that southerners did not see railroads as antithetical to their way of life. In the North, conversely, railroads were increasingly associated with free labor. Thomas’s sketch of the ideological function of railroads in the two sections of the country is a wonderful illustration of the argument that technologies accrue different meanings when they are used by different groups of people. The presence of railroads in the North and South did not determine social relationships in either region. Instead, both sections of the country used the same technology for their own ends.

Thomas argues that railroads played a key role in the strategy of how the Civil War was fought. When the war began, the Union military leadership realized that the South could defend itself via the rail network, and thus pored over maps in order to find deficiencies in the network. As they fought in the South, the Union military had to contend with not only the natural Confederate landscape, but the geography created by the “second nature” of communications and transportation linkages. Thomas goes further to say that “increasingly after 1862, the American Civil War became structured around the railroad network” (82, 105). Thomas presents some compelling evidence in this regard, such as the details of Sherman’s Atlanta campaign. But at other times the evidence is less robust. Thomas links Philip Sheridan into his concept of “railroad generalship,” but concedes that Sheridan paid little attention to the railroads during the Valley campaign. Likewise, Thomas argues that Robert E. Lee “sought more than anything to position the fighting away from the principal Confederate railroad zones,” but it is unclear if this was Lee’s explicit intention or simply a fortunate byproduct of his strategy (150-151, 107).

If Thomas’s specific claim about the impact of railroads on overall Civil War strategy are not entirely compelling, his broader claims about the place of railroads in the war and their symbolic status are thoroughly convincing. Thomas posits that railroads were “one of the most obvious, and the most prevalent, forms of symbolic technology in nineteenth-century society,” a finding he then traces in detail (10). Most northern soldiers traveled on railroads to reach their unit, and many continued on the railroads into the South. Thus, they were not just soldiers but travelers, and as such recorded their thoughts about the railroads, the landscape, and the people. Thomas also does a fine job of exploring the racial history of these railroads, particularly the growth of the U.S. Military Railroad, which he terms “the longest, and possibly the largest, most comprehensive experiment in black free labor employment in the occupied South” (121).

Although southern railroads are necessarily the focus of the book since the war was mostly fought in the South, Thomas spends some time on wartime northern railroads, including how the United States Sanitary Commission canvassed communities to raise funds and deliver aid to soldiers. I would have been interested to learn more about the effect of the war on northern railroads, and was particularly curious to know if service in the army or the need to run southern railroads in the war deprived northern lines of skilled labor. Importantly, Thomas also realizes that railroads did not operate in a vacuum, and while the book remains focused on that technology, allied technologies such as the telegraph and steamboats are also brought into the story when appropriate.

A normal book review would stop here, but Thomas has given us something more. As he points out in the introduction, The Iron Way is a work of digital history as well as a published book. I am not a practitioner of digital history, so I make these comments as an interested observer. Just as oral historians, cliometricians, and others have expanded the tools available to the historian, digital historians bring the power of computers to help answer particular historical questions. Thomas exposes some of this work in the book itself, as when he uses word clouds to analyze the Peninsular campaign (word clouds are a method of visually representing the prevalence of words in a given body of text). This is a fascinating exercise, although I wish Thomas had taken a bit more time to explain the process by which the word clouds were generated, the methodology by which common words are assessed and eliminated, and so on. However, the result is an ingenious way to see how different types of transportation rose and fell in correspondence over time, and is a clear demonstration of the superiority of digital methods in answering questions of this type (one shudders to think of counting the words by hand).

In addition to enlarging the historian’s toolbox, digital historians are also interested in new forms of representing scholarship. Thomas’s work does this as well; he and a team of others have placed a large quantity of material on an associated Website. In the introduction to the book, Thomas notes that the purpose of the Website is not “to reach ‘conclusions,’ ” but instead to “creat[e] models of humanistic inquiry for readers” (12). The Website includes some of the collections Thomas used in his own research, such as a concordance of references to “railroad” from the Atlanta and Peninsular campaigns in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, the comprehensive documentary collection of war records published by the government (popularly known as the “OR”). I searched Sherman’s 1864 Atlanta campaign correspondence for “cars” (a common nineteenth-century term for railroads), which is how I discovered the quotation that opens this review. Doing a search also exposes the problem of uncorrected optical character recognition, which yields text such as “MiLITARY I)IvIsloN OF TilE MI8SISSrPPI,” thereby complicating word searches. The Website also includes a map of guerrilla activity on the railroads and a map charting the use of African American labor, with links to relevant OR documents.

The Website also features a tranche of material (called “case studies”) focused on broader railroad topics. Each case study links to original documents appropriate to the individual study. The case studies include more interpretation, although they lack the robustness of the interpretive material in the book. I enjoyed browsing the material and there is certainly plenty to see, but some more structure would greatly assist the user. For example, it is not always clear why certain objects were chosen for study, nor is it clear if the evidence selected is always fully representative for the topic—perhaps more detailed introductions to these studies would help. Nevertheless, seeing railroad networks expand over time on maps and being able to see the original documents is an excellent demonstration of the advantages of this type of representation. As historians look to an uncertain future in book publishing, we may find that projects such as this Website are more and more the norm. If so, I hope that such digital history resources can rise to the same level of analytical vigor that characterizes Thomas’s monographic work.

Thomas has written an important book that deserves careful consideration by scholars of the Civil War and the history of technology during this time period, and his use of the Internet to expand his work’s reach is admirable. Despite my misgivings about his arguments for the place of the railroad in Civil War strategy, his broader points about modernity and technology are compelling. By taking southern railroad advocates and railroad developments seriously, he underlines the fact that technology does not automatically bring with it democracy or freedom. The North’s victory in the Civil War helped erase our country’s memory of the South’s technological accomplishments and in so doing created an assumed link between technology and freedom. Thomas’s work helps correct this national forgetting.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4 (July, 2012).

Aaron W. Marrs is a historian at the U.S. Department of State. He is the author of Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society (2009) and blogs about the nineteenth century at Frederick Jackson Turner Overdrive.

In American popular culture, the Revolution is usually depicted as a moment of rupture, a violent rejection of the British empire in favor of a new democratic social, political, and economic order. Even professional historians have often emphasized the “radicalism” of the American Revolution, lending academic legitimacy to a national mythology of Promethean rebellion and invention. How surprising, then, to find the grandchildren of the Revolutionary generation in love with all things English. This international love affair is the subject of Elisa Tamarkin’s revelatory Anglophilia. In an exhaustively researched, densely detailed study, Tamarkin demonstrates convincingly the extent to which Americans in the antebellum period preoccupied themselves with English manners, food, dress, history, politics, and, of course, royalty. In so doing, Tamarkin illuminates American nationalism in the decades following the Revolution through the lens of transnational affect, an abiding but difficult love born of internecine conflict.

Tamarkin begins with the story of the 1860 American tour of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. On the eve of the Civil War, Albert Edward’s movements and activities dominated the American press. As Tamarkin puts it, “on November 3, 1860, South Carolina had committed to secede if Lincoln won, other states planned to follow, Lincoln’s winning was assured, Wall Street was in a panic, and the Prince of Wales was on the cover of Harper’s for the fifth time in six weeks” (5). During the months of the prince’s tour, public holidays were declared in Boston, New York, and St. Louis, as thousands of citizens of the first modern democracy thronged the streets for a glimpse of royalty. Regional differences were momentarily bridged, as papers from Richmond, Baltimore, New York and Boston carried reports from the other cities describing the remarkably similar manifestations of public adulation for the prince. As Tamarkin explains, commentary on these public expressions of affection emphasized their voluntary and, hence, democratic character. The American people, it was said, were differentiated from European subjects and bonded into union through their “wholly improvised symmetry of affection,” a spontaneous national outpouring revealing how “America is functionally classless” because “all classes are equal in their love of the prince” (12, 15). Thus, the worship of royalty became a paradoxical expression of democratic union among diverse Americans.

Americans were especially intrigued by the possibility of Albert Edward himself falling in love, in turn, with an American girl. Periodicals speculated over the “months of matrimonial buzz” that accompanied the prince through the balls, jubilees, and receptions staged for him in every city on his tour (4). Such speculations elicit the eros of the transatlantic relationship. While the dream of an “American princess” never came to fruition, this common expression of desire counterbalanced the crisis of American union in the months leading up to the Civil War. If America’s own “system of representation” had ceased to hold the nation together, at least there was a nostalgic recourse in the traditions of an older, once spurned political order (7). The libidinal energies that came to a head in the pre-war years had coalesced throughout the antebellum decades; indeed, they had manifested themselves with equal urgency in 1838, when Americans went “Queen mad” (as the New York Mirrorput it) over the coronation of Victoria (30). American painter Thomas Sully’s portrait of Victoria “gingerly approaches the temporality of a striptease” (45), and Tamarkin borrows a phrase from Tom Nairn to describe the American public as engaging in an “enjoyable mode of psychic bondage” in relation to the monarchy (44). Such permutations of transatlantic desire reflected a longing for England “as a fetish and nostalgia that is just as much a politics and aspiration,” an expression of a felt need for deference to authority, “a new patriotism that linked national preservation to the sentiments of obedience and reverence that a monarchy inspires” (xxiv, xxvii). The pleasure of submission to English royalty was less an evasion of the bleak realities of American disunion than it was a rechanneling of the same libidinal energies of patriotism that other scholars such as Lauren Berlant have located in icons such as the Statue of Liberty.

The longing to refashion identity and genealogy that underlies such expressions of deference provides the focus for Tamarkin’s analysis of the curiously reverential treatment of the British in antebellum representations of the Revolution. Again and again, American novelists, historians, and painters dwelt upon scenes of deferential respect paid by American officers to their British opponents. Tamarkin connects these scenes of imagined deference to a rethinking of the politics of nationhood as they had developed in America since the Revolution. Transforming the conflict with England from a national triumph to a sentimental tale of loss, these representations dwelt with nostalgic reverence upon the bonds of affection and shared cultural identity that had once linked England to America. Tamarkin deftly links the eros of America’s monarchophilia to this programmatic reimagining of the Revolution as a familial melodrama punctuated by moments of extravagant sentimentality on both sides. In both cases, Tamarkin persuasively argues, Americans expressed remorse for their lost place in the British empire and their dissatisfaction with the new political order of an independent democracy wrought by economic and moral conflict.

These conflicts were of course most pressing in the lives of African Americans, and Tamarkin’s extended exploration of how black political leaders and writers embraced the language of Anglophilia is perhaps the most fascinating part of her study. Connecting the “material conditions of antislavery politics” (179) to the imaginative power of an England free of slavery, Tamarkin shows how English money, organization, and ideals helped to shape the American antislavery movement. While Britain of course was hardly blameless in the history of the slave trade, by the middle of the nineteenth century Britain was viewed by American abolitionist leaders, white and black alike, as a “country worth emulating,” not only for having abolished the slave trade but, intriguingly, for its cultural traditions and social rituals, for Shakespeare and for Victoria. Tamarkin finds Alexander Crummell paying homage to the excellence of English universities, and an article inFrederick Douglass’ Paper longing for “the white cliffs of old Albion” (181). Tamarkin concludes that abolitionists found in Britain an image of the world they wished to inhabit, characterized by gentility, sociability, and aesthetic pleasure. Of course, such imaginings anticipate Du Bois’s “kingdom of culture,” even as they ignore the fact that life was nothing like this ideal for most of the actual inhabitants of Britain. As did the historical novelists and the crowds thronging Broadway to see the prince, American abolitionists created an imaginary England that reflected their ideals and their critique of the world they inhabited.

Throughout the book, Tamarkin makes an important distinction between feelings such as these and more overtly theorized expressions of political ideology. Borrowing from Raymond Williams, Tamarkin describes a “fugitive structure of political feeling” (175) that operates alongside more overtly partisan positions, articulating itself through languages of aesthetics and domestic love. Tamarkin’s study is most fundamentally concerned with the complexity of the relationship between a nationalist ideology founded on a mythology of revolutionary separation and a countervailing affective longing for reunion. Small wonder that such an incoherent drama would play itself out through the tropes of romantic love and domestic turmoil. Tamarkin brilliantly untangles the interplay between nationalist rhetoric and feelings of deference, between official discourse and those other, less direct but no less important, channels of belonging.

The nature of the subject matter has allowed Tamarkin to produce a study that is, despite its sophistication and complexity, always lively, entertaining, and accessible. Indeed, a review of this book would not be complete without mentioning that it is beautifully written and a pleasure to read. While it will quickly establish itself as required reading for scholars, it is also easy to imagineAnglophilia’s appeal to non-academic readers. This is salutary, for in contrast to the multiplying and derivative hagiographies of founding fathers that fill the bestseller lists these days, Anglophilia has much to say about American national development that is new, important, and topical. While Tamarkin could not have anticipated, at the time she was writing, the extent to which contemporary politics would turn back to the tropes and idioms of early American nationalism, Anglophilia should provide a welcome antidote to such cartoonish historiography for an audience much wider than academia. The fact that the book is entertaining, funny, and incisively witty (without ever trying too hard to be so), makes it a model for public scholarship.

Thomas Allen is associate professor of English at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of A Republic in Time (2008) and is currently engaged in a study of religion, time, and secularism in American literature.

Americans love stories of the Revolutionary era, even if, as recent comments by leading politicians about Paul Revere, the geographic location of Lexington and Concord, and the precise wording of the Constitution suggest, a lack of understanding of the founders often supports that reverence. The Liberty Bell is a case in point. On any given day, a long line of visitors snakes through Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell Center, waiting to see and touch the bell that rang out news of independence on July 4, 1776.

Except that it did not. Yet long before school children sang “The Star Spangled Banner” or recited one of the several versions of the pledge of allegiance, Americans flocked to see the bell. On occasion, the London-manufactured bell traveled about America, but it first hung in Pennsylvania’s colonial State House, and so it was natural that the editors of Yale University Press’s Icons of America series asked historian Gary B. Nash, the author of a number of volumes about Philadelphia, to explain the bell’s cultural significance. In a brisk, fascinating volume sure to irritate those politicians who prefer their history neat and clean, Nash explores the complicated story of symbol that became as cracked and imperfect as the nation it represented.

As the break with Britain approached, the bell pealed even more frequently.

The bell’s story began in the 1750s, several decades before the Revolution. For most of the city’s history, a small bell strung from a branch behind the State House was enough to call the assembly to meeting or warn Philadelphia’s inhabitants of war or fire. But in 1751, legislative speaker Isaac Norris II decided the growing port deserved a bell grand enough to rival “Great Tom” in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. Curiously, Norris opted for a phrase from Leviticus—”Proclaim Liberty Thro’ all the Land to all the Inhabitants Thereof”—to encircle the bell. Trouble with Parliament was not yet on the horizon, and Nash speculates that Norris was aware that just the year before, John Woolman and Anthony Benezet had called upon Quakers to cleanse themselves of the sin of slaveholding. Benezet was openly teaching black children, most of them slaves, to read in his home each evening, and so it was appropriate that in later years, northern abolitionists embraced the bell’s words as symbolic of their crusade to liberate their nation’s inhabitants.

The bell arrived in 1752, but either the stormy passage at sea or inferior packing damaged the bell, which had been tested in London. In its first trial in Philadelphia, the bell cracked. Norris complained to London, but the Whitechapel Foundry—still in business today—insisted the product was sound when it left their office. Philadelphia craftsmen made a mold of the bell before smashing the original into pieces small enough to melt down into a second bell. Although beautiful in appearance, the new bell gave out a dull thud when rung. The third casting was ready by June of 1753, and at long last the largest bell in North America tolled the hours, welcomed the accession of King George III, and marked the end of the Seven Years’ War.

As the break with Britain approached, the bell pealed even more frequently. In rang across the harbor in October 1773 in protest of the Tea Act, and again in 1775 to welcome rider Paul Revere into the city. (Perhaps that is what Governor Sarah Palin meant when mentioning “those warning shots and bells.”) It was silent on July 4, 1776, but four days later it rang to summon residents to hear Colonel John Nixon read the Declaration of Independence. Soon, however, British troops occupied the city. Worried that Redcoats would melt it into musket balls, patriots hid the enormous bell beneath the floor of the Zion German Reformed Church. It saw the sun again when victorious soldiers tried to ring it following news of the Yorktown victory, but by then the State House steeple had rotted to the point that it could not support the one-ton bell.

Despite the fact that the endless recastings left the bell susceptible to cracking, it remained intact until the 1843 celebration of Washington’s birthday (not, contrary to popular belief, the 1835 funeral procession of Justice John Marshall). By then, the bell had already become a national icon, thanks to journalist George Lippard’s assertion that it had announced independence on that first Fourth of July. Moved to the first floor of what was now known as Independence Hall, the bell became a rallying cry for those who hoped the republic would practice what the words on the bell promised. When thirty-five blacks and five whites were put to trial for the so-called Christiana riot, abolitionists gathered outside the hall to protest that “those colored men were only following the example of Washington and the American heroes of ’76” (49). And while on his way to Washington from Springfield, President-elect Abraham Lincoln stopped at Independence Hall to raise the flag and promise a devotion to the principles enshrined there. Just more than four years later, Lincoln’s body lay in state in the hall, the liberty bell pushed to the corner.

In 1885, the bell took to the road. It traveled first to the New Orleans World and Industrial Cotton Exposition in 1885. Along the way, crowds turned out to touch the bell and even sing it serenades. When it passed through Biloxi, the aged Jefferson Davis was called upon to give a speech. Wisely, the former Confederate president chose only to speak of his father’s Revolutionary service, rather than his breakaway country’s attempts to eradicate the bell’s pledge of liberty. Visits to Chicago, Charleston, and Boston followed, and as one of the many photographs in the book suggests, countless children touched and kissed the bell. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I confess I took a photograph of my youngest daughter, Hannah, touching the bell.)

Like any important symbol, the bell continued to be appropriated by various groups. In 1915, the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association printed posters featuring the bell and its words, while evangelist Billy Sunday visited the icon during its travels and promised to use its power “to aid in driving Satan from the Western shore” (125). During the Great War, President Woodrow Wilson used its image to sell war bonds, and to emphasize its connection to earlier conflicts, grizzled Civil War veterans donned tattered uniforms and marched past the bell.

Mostly, however, the bell remained an icon of liberty and resistance. In 1965, civil rights activists staged a protest around the bell, and two years later war protesters staged a “be-in” near the bell while they smoked what Nash drolly describes as “distinctively pungent cigarettes” (169). Appropriately, therefore, when planning for a new home for the bell began in the early 1990s, the National Park Service considered a spot near what had been the rented home of President George Washington, whose household staff included nine slaves brought from Mount Vernon. Having made this courageous decision to reveal the complicated interplay between slavery and freedom in the early years of the republic, local authorities promptly cooled on the idea until Nash and historian Randall Miller launched a public relations campaign designed to force planners to tell the richer story. When Philadelphia’s black community staged a rally on the site in 2002, the Park Service gave way, and the subsequent Liberty Bell Center included not only material on slavery at that cite but featured statues of Hercules and Oney Judge, two of Washington’s slaves who fled his Philadelphia home before he could return them to Virginia at the end of his second term.

On occasion, Nash’s discussion of the bell instead becomes a history of Independence Hall and events that took place outside its doors, but since the saga of the two icons were so intertwined, that is probably unavoidable. Nash’s prose has always been clear and vigorous, but rarely as lively and bright as it is here, perhaps because this story is ultimately happier than those previously told by this prolific scholar.

In her important study of Walt Whitman’s Memoranda as well as the war poems Whitman included in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass, Lindsay Tuggle identifies Whitman’s experience with veteran amputees as a touchstone for his “attachment to the process of loss,” focusing especially upon his understanding of the ways in which a lost body part can manifest more acute sensations than still-living attachments.^[1] Tuggle connects Whitman’s interest in the felt absence of phantom limbs with his awareness of another sort of lack—namely, that of the nonexistence of a language for designating same-sex desire. (The word “homosexual,” as Tuggle reminds us, only appeared in print in English in Charles Gilbert Chaddock’s translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis in 1892, the year of Whitman’s death.) That missing lexis by which Whitman might otherwise name so much of his erotic experience, Tuggle argues, permeates another nostalgic process of Whitman’s that takes the form of a mental stroll at the end of “The Dresser,” included in Drum-Taps and then the 1867 edition:

Thus in silence, in dream’s projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night—some are so young;
Some suffer so much—I recall the experience sweet and sad;
(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)^[2]

“Like the ghostly pains of the amputee,” Tuggle notes, “Whitman inevitably returns, ‘in dreams’ projections,’ to the hospital corridors.”^[3] It is an exquisite reading. For Tuggle, Whitman’s sensitivity to the plight of soldiers who lived with the pain of phantom limbs speaks to the absences that perforate his own arrangements of desire. It is not simply that Whitman cannot “revivify” the absent kisses of the men he cared for; Whitman lacks a way properly to name all of what transacted between such men and himself. Even well after he nursed these men and their devastated bodies, his process of recollection became a way for Whitman to negotiate if not precisely signify his own experience of loss.

Which is to say that what is true of lost limbs can be true of lost others. Indeed, from the first edition of Leaves of Grass Whitman not only exults over his own conjoinings with other bodies; he mourns the departure of those bodies from his own. First appearing as the ninth canto of the “Children of Adam” cluster within the third, 1860-61 edition of Leaves of Grass (figs. 1-3), the poem Whitman would eventually title “Once I Pass’d Through A Populous City” mulls over the unfastening of an erotic connection even as it twins the activities of remembering and wandering:

Once I passed through a populous city, imprinting my brain, for future use, with
            its shows, architecture, customs, and traditions;
Yet now, of all that city, I remember only a woman I casually met there, who
            detained me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together,— All else has long been
            forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me,
Again we wander—we love—we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand—I must not go!
I see her close beside me, with silent lips, sad and tremulous.^[4]

A repetitive, invasive mental experience of the past—instanced in the passage’s mention of the woman who once held and in a way still holds Whitman’s hand, whose departure seems in that way primarily an interruption of tactile sensation—is thus for Whitman an experience of a touch now absent. Haunted by the memory of a lover’s departure, her vanishing leaves Whitman both bereft and tingling with the recollection of past experience. Indeed his way of imagining the objects of memory as if suddenly to hand produces Whitman’s shift to present tense in the passage, through which he moves from apprehending a temporally distant past to re-living that past as if it were always currently recurring. That temporal re-visitation also perpetuates Whitman’s break from the woman he describes, causing their moment of parting to loop again and again in his memory. The passionate lover now dominates his memory so fully as to make him experience the past as if it were a constant presence he might now transact differently—“I must not leave her!”—or more particularly to experience in permanent replay the moment of separation. It is a reversal of the related question Whitman put in the first, 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, which also shifts between present and past as it considers variously the sensation of contact and the resultant pang when contact ceases. “You villain touch!” he exclaims there. “Did it make you ache so leaving me?”^[5] A touch now absent but that yet aches is a phantom touch, like an amputated limb, or like a phantom lover. For like phantom limb syndrome, which tends to be taken as a condition following from physical amputation, sensations of interpersonal and physical loss are just as much a negotiation of memory.

I am convinced that Whitman’s style of remembering by wandering shares conceptual space with his tendency to experience memory as intensely embodied. Unlike Emerson, for example, who categorizes as “Not-Me” “my own body” in the 1836 Nature, Whitman regards his corporeal experience as integral to his experience of self.^[6] We know that already, of course. But I want to explore the extent to which Whitman’s embodied subjectivity in “Children of Adam”—which fixates on bodies that are ambulatory as well as paragons of wellness or healthfulness, of which more shortly—situates those embodiments as a problem of memory for Whitman, who in the canto I quote above is so woebegone over his loss of the passionate lover. The poem’s heartsick conflation of erotic memory with the activity of wandering transacts a merger of past and present that conditions the trauma of separation, abandonment, disavowal. She once clung to him but has disappeared, and so re-treading their shared ground is an imaginative act freighted with such stakes that may cause us to consider whether there is also something in the nature of wandering to make it properly an activity of the detached. I mean detachment not in the sense that describes an aloofness or a lack of commitment or interest, but in the sense delineated by psychologists such as John Bowlby or Mary Ainsworth, who use the word to theorize what happens when people whose relations have been formative or re-formative disconnect. For such theorists, detachment attenuates particularly when the attachment (or “attunement,” when the connection has been transacted over mutual perception of a powerful term or event) has been transacted through the body, through an intersubjective process that transacts across tactile experience. And so it is important that Whitman remembers the lover he has abandoned through his remembered sensations of his body, the body she or he once clung to, as he tells us. It means that Whitman himself is real to the extent that his body recollects a touch now missing. Which means that his looping, fixated memory is not only mental, not simply brain-bound; it is a form of cognition that takes place upon his skin, within the somatic phenomena of his bodily sensation.^[7]

I want to think about both these facets of Whitman’s process of recollection here: his interest in recurring memory as if analogous to wandering along with his focus on the moment of separation as something he undergoes not only through cognition but as a corporeal event. But first I’ll note that during the 1860s, such a preoccupied, wandering memory as Whitman relays in this portion of the third edition of Leaves of Grass might well have been thought of as a form of disablement. In his volume Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity (translated from French and published in Philadelphia in 1845), Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol defined as “erotomania” “a mental affection, in which the amorous sentiments are fixed and dominant, like religious ideas in theomania, or in religious lypemania.”^[8] “Like all monomaniacs,” Esquirol continues, “those suffering from erotomania are pursued both night and day, by the same thoughts and affections, which are the more disordered as they are concentrated or exasperated by opposition.”^[9] Esquirol’s descriptions of erotomania didn’t achieve a longstanding purchase among nineteenth-century psychological researchers, but something approximate to his idea does seem articulated in the later principle of perseveration, which emerged after the turn of the century to describe the repetition of an individual’s mental associations even in the absence of an originary stimulus. In his 1906 volume Days With Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter took particular interest in Whitman’s poem “Hours Continuing Long,” which transmits this fixated, melancholic aspect of Whitman’s sexual experience: “Hours discouraged, distracted—for the one I cannot content myself without, soon I saw him content himself without me; / Hours when I am forgotten, / […] Is there even one other like me—distracted—his friend, his lover, lost to him? / Is he too as I am now? Does he still rise in the morning, dejected, thinking who is lost to him? and at night, awaking, think who is lost?”^[10]

In supposing that erotomania, or even melancholic fixation, could be considered a form of disability, I am mindful that I may seem to risk elevating a nineteenth-century pseudodiagnosis (like drapetomania, an alleged mental illness Samuel A. Cartwright applied in 1851 to runaway slaves, other wanderers^[11]) to a form of neuroatypicality on par with those attended by personal, social, and institutional hardships to which disability theorists and activists draw our attention: bipolar disorder, autism, or Alzheimer’s, for example. Or, I might be bringing a more mundane mental experience to the space of more particular idiosyncratic affliction. I take those items seriously, and yet I am thinking also of Margaret Price’s astute critique of the rhetoric according to which mental or cognitive difference is always conceived as a departure from various fictions of normality rather than “in terms of variety and difference.”^[12] (I am particularly appreciative of Price’s portrayal of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM] for the reading experience it offers leading any thoughtful student of the prolific DSM to conclude that we are all mentally ill.) Rejecting the mind/body split that goes back to Descartes, and the model of personhood that places rationality at the center since Aristotle, Price refers to her self at one point as her “bodymind.”^[13] In doing so she reminds us that none of us live as Aristotelian abstractions of rationality, free from the material constraints and effects of the body; and in doing so she unsettles the same way of distancing the mind from its corporealization that informed Esquirol. For the “thoughts and affections” Esquirol delineates as typical of erotomania comprise “a lesion of the imagination only,” he explains. “In erotomania,” he continues, “the sentiment which characterizes it, is in the head.”^[14]

 Yet as a meditation on sexual experience and erotic memory, the 1860-61 edition of Leaves of Grass foregrounds Whitman’s contrary supposition of a self whose perseverating consciousness is invested in corporeal experience. So much else of “Children of Adam” renders thematic Whitman’s view that the self is in the body—not only the “brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,” the “all-baffling brain” “[i]n this head”—but in the limbs of the body, in its blood, within “the thin red jellies within you, or within me—the bones, and the marrow in the bones, / The exquisite realization of health.” This last point of emphasis upon the healthfulness of the bodies over which Whitman lingers is just as thematic throughout “Children of Adam,” reiterated through Whitman’s many paeans to “a clean, strong, firm-fibred body”—what Whitman considers “beautiful as the most beautiful face.” Of the organs, limbs, joints, sinews, musculatures, and various internal and external surfaces that constitute these bodies, Whitman finds avenues for ecstatic contact with something essential and universal, exclaiming “O I say these are the Soul!” “O my body!” he writes, “I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you; / I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the Soul, (and that they are the Soul).” And again, Whitman adumbrates these “parts of you” as examples of an ideal corporeality, describing “[s]trong shoulders, manly beard, scapula […] [b]road breast-front, […] [h]ips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root, / Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above […]” “And who possesses a perfect and enamoured body?” he asks in Canto 15 of “Chants Democratic,” in the same edition of 1860-61: “For I do not believe any one possesses a more perfect or enamoured body than mine.”

More so than thus imbuing these bodies’ contingent parts, he locates human life in the motor activities that animate them, as in the last line above where the roving and desirous gaze of Leaves of Grass moves from shoulders past chest, hips, and genitals to the thighs that are in motion carrying the trunk. So here again, a self realized through his striding, meandering, or wandering. In “Children of Adam,” after the ninth canto depicting the woman who clung passionately to Whitman as once they wandered together, Whitman begins the eleventh by bringing that recollection into a present wherein he now wanders alone: “In cities now, modern, I wander.” And earlier, in the third canto, he imagines that “the expression of a well made man appears not only in his face, / It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, / It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees.” Indeed, “[t]o see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,” which is why a page later Whitman considers “[t]he march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trousers and waist-straps” even as he resolves to “[s]wim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, and count.”

Constitutional and pedestrian in multiple senses, these acts of ambulation tousle Whitman’s desires, which is why he also places their movements along a continuum with physical expressions of longing. In the second canto he imagines “the soft sliding of hands over me, and thrusting of fingers through my hair and beard, / […] the long-sustained kiss upon the mouth or bosom, / […] the close pressure that makes me or any man drunk, fainting with excess.” The motor activities of desire—kissing, caressing, thrusting—like the wandering to which he devotes so much other language in “Children of Adam,” are under the control of what cognitive neuroscientists now refer to as the somatic nervous system, corridors of neuromuscular activity within an individual’s conscious control. But other forms of corporeal activity augment Whitman’s catalogues of arousing embodiments by presenting sensory corporeal experience—especially sexual corporeal experience—along a range of embodied subjectivities. Whitman repeatedly twins descriptions of somatic motor activity with those of what neurologists designate as the autonomic nervous system, corporeal functions not under an individual’s conscious control—for example, in the male experience of arousal and erection. “The female form approaching,” he writes in the second canto: “I, pensive, love-flesh tremulous, aching.” As it would happen, later, in the fifth canto, Whitman depicts such autonomic activity as another form of wandering or roaming:

The curious roamer, the hand, roaming all over the body—the bashful
            withdrawing of flesh where the fingers soothingly pause and edge
            themselves,
The limpid liquid within the young man,
The vexed corrosion, so pensive and so painful,
The torment—the irritable tide that will not be at rest,
The like of the same I feel—the like of the same in others,
The young woman that flushes and flushes, and the young man that flushes and
            flushes,
The young man that wakes, deep at night, the hot hand seeking to repress what
            would master him—the strange half-welcome pangs, visions, sweats,
The pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingers—the young
            man all colored, red, ashamed, angry […]

The roaming, wandering hand, experienced both by the one giving touch and the one taking, gives rise to “flushes”—autonomic responses and therefore corporeal experiences beyond the individual’s cognitive control. Whitman also stages a tension in this sequence between both neural/corporeal experiences in masturbation, the young man who awakens at night “seeking to repress what would master him,” undergoing “pangs” even as the autonomic “pulse” throbs through somatically directed “palms” and “fingers” that are nevertheless autonomically “trembling.” This is what it means to edge in Whitman, who transforms the noun into a verb: the passage locates a place “where the fingers soothing pause and edge themselves” and that constitutes a borderland of autonomic and somatic, mental prepossession and involuntary spasm. “Ebb stung by the flow, and flow stung by the ebb,” he writes in Canto 3, as he again describes the autonomic/somatic nature of arousal.

Conscious experience such as that which we undergo when remembering, in other words, is not only a neural event in “Children of Adam.” In this sense Whitman wanders in the 1860-61 edition toward more recent contentions in cognitive neuroscientific research locating consciousness both within and beyond the cortex. Evan Thompson and Francisco J. Varela, for example, describe “processes crucial for consciousness” that “cut across the brain-body-world divisions” that have stratified a “causal-explanatory relationship [that] is one-way, from internal neural events to conscious experience.”[15] Writing in 2001 and challenging then-prevailing consensus in the field that “a scientific theory of consciousness is to discover the ‘neural coordinates of consciousness,’” Thompson and Varela offered a contrary account describing consciousness as a form of “radical embodiment” that enmeshes organic processes of the body with somatic activity through which individuals interact with the environment and with others.[16] “The relationship between neural dynamics and conscious situated agents,” they explain, “can be described in the ‘cycles of operation’ that constitute the agent’s life,” cycles that include autonomic “homeostatic processes of the internal organs and viscera,” “the sensorimotor pathways of the body,” and the “recognition of the intentional meaning of actions in others.”[17]

The embodied account scientists like Thompson and Varela adduce should be of interest to disability activists who seek similarly to supplant models of personhood that abstract selves from embodied circumstance, for an effect of their work is to unsettle what they call the “brain in a vat” paradigm of conscious experience. One such model of consciousness as brain-bound event extends from a theory known among cognitive neuroscientists as “symbolic description.” According to this model, interior mental life comes about as a result of a mental transcription of input from the external world accessed through perceptual faculties. That transcription concocts a sort of internal cinema within which self-awareness occurs. But embodied subjectivity maintains that, as Lotte Meteyard, Sara Rodriguez Cuadrado, Bahador Bahrami, and Gabriella Vigliocco put it, “there is only limited modeling of the external world and cognition is about real-world action rather than symbolic representation.”^[18] Meteyard and her colleagues go on to ask, “How can a system which is intimately tied to real-world action and dynamic, on-line, processes have stable representations?” Working from the findings of computational and neural researcher Matthew Wilson, who suggests that “the function of these sensory-motor resources is to run a simulation of some aspect of the physical world, as a means of representing information or drawing inferences,” they describe not an elaborate and internal flickering theater of consciousness but rather a constant somatic processing of internal and external environments that relies upon both sensory and motor activity:

On experiencing a thing, like a cup of coffee, we have various sensory (taste, smell, touch) and motor (drinking) experiences. When we hear the words, “cup of coffee,” embodiment states that we re-construct in some form that sensory and motor information. Embodiment focuses on the content of cognitive representations and from that derives organizational principles. So, the environment has to be internalised somehow, but instead of transducing the signal into a symbolic format, the signal is recreated. This claim is the most relevant for our purposes, since it directly links to semantic representation and it translates into a simple statement:

The content of semantic representation is sensory and motor information.^[19]

“The signal is recreated,” repeatedly, at the level of “sensory and motor information.” Has there ever been a more apt description of the process Whitman puts to work through his many catalogues of sensory corporeal experience, those present-participle sense-impressions that make up so much of Leaves of Grass since the first edition, but which in “Children of Adam” locate what Whitman calls “the life of bodies […] meaning and being […] My limbs, and the quivering fire that ever plays through them”? “Is this then a touch?” he asks in the 1855 edition, before that touch leaves him: “Quivering me to a new identity.” This and other moments of Leaves of Grass present visual, tactile, aural, and other phenomena that Meteyard and other cognitive neuroscientists would identify as sensory inputs, imbuing them with that “fire” Whitman also calls, in the third edition, “Soul”: “And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?”

And his recollection of the lover from the populous city is just as dispersed across such iterations of somatic and autonomic experience as Meteyard, Rodriguez Cuadrado, Bahrami, and Vigliocco describe as the “recreation” of sensory “signals” that constitutes a self. Well before the more complete episodic recollection that comprises Canto 9, Canto 2 mentions “the faithful one, the prostitute, who detained me when I went to the city.” He may well be referring to her when in the same canto he regards “The oath of the inseparableness of two together—of the woman that loves me, and whom I love more than my life—That oath swearing”; he is almost certainly doing so when a page later he describes “the one so unwilling to have me leave—and me just as unwilling to leave, / (Yet a moment, O tender waiter, and I return,).” Much later, in Canto 8, he seems to gather variously gendered identities—the woman named as a prostitute in the first mention of Canto 2 and now someone else—as he explains,  “I take for my love some prostitute—I pick out some low person for my dearest friend, / He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate […]” Seemingly determined to undergo his pangs over and over, Whitman may well refer to her again in Canto 2: “From sex—From the warp and the woof, / (To talk to the perfect girl who understands me—the girl of The States, / To waft to her these from my own lips—to effuse them from my own body;).” And for that matter, the central metaphor of “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City” may have wandered into “Children of Adam” from the sequence of the 1855 edition that would eventually become “The Sleepers,” which begins, “I wander all night in my vision.”

These repetitions do not salve the experience of loss at the center of “Children of Adam”—on the contrary, they seem to accentuate it. Whitman’s repetitions place the third edition on footing that is distinct, for instance, from Wordsworth, who constantly understood his own experience in terms of the memories it would become, in terms of an eventual retrospective worth that overwrites what could otherwise become a fixedly bereft state. Most famously, Wordsworth’s “I wander’d lonely as a cloud” describes its speaker’s vivid sensory experience—his discovery of  “a host, of golden daffodils”—and registers such bemusement over his own failure at the tingling moment of apprehension to have foreseen “What wealth the show to me had brought.” The instant of sensory experience occurs for Wordsworth within a future-anterior experience of time. There is pleasure in the moment of apprehension, but more still in the anticipation of a future “wealth” invested in memory, a value that supplants the prior experience. It’s that future anteriority that also conditions Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” where the “forms of beauty” surrounding the poet reclining in nature are less edifying in themselves than for the “sensations sweet” they will surely provide during “hours of weariness.” And so even as Wordsworth gazes at the picturesque River Wye he does so “not only with the sense / Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts / That in this moment there is life and food / For future years.” His perception is conditioned by his envisioning of a future remembering self who will be thus nourished by the as-yet unformed memory of this present.^[20]

If for both poets, wandering—whether lonely as a cloud or within a populous city—is the locutionary act and the feckless intransitive verb that articulates memory itself, the variance between Wordsworth and Whitman pits future edification against present-tense experience. The touch Whitman describes in the 1855 edition is both unbearable for having ceased and overwhelming to him while underway—Whitman’s language conditions it as if something like an assault, but also a formative event that Whitman imagines as if “quivering me to a new identity.” The touch he writes about in 1855 is constitutional even as it is unmindful, disregarding of its own traumatic effects, “[i]mmodestly sliding the fellow-senses away, / […] No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger […]” In other words, Whitman does not like Wordsworth experience memory as unproblematically nourishing. His spiraling, infatuated memory would be akin to the erotomania Dominique Esquirol describes in its tendency to flood the consciousness of the afflicted “both night and day, by the same thoughts and affections” were it not for the shifts Whitman introduces into each iteration of the memory. For even as she instills the loss over which Whitman wants to ponder—and to fix in time as he brings his past with her into present tense—the passionate lover also transforms in small ways as she re-appears over the course of “The Children of Adam.” This is because her appearance in the poem already deflects a more massive loss than she can quite carry on her own.

In this light a final aspect I want to point up about “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City” is the way in which the loss it narrates surreptitiously forecloses another fallen object—not the feminine other Whitman opines. For the lover Whitman describes in the passage, the woman “with silent lips, sad and tremulous” with whom he wanders the city, is already the phantom of another loss whose identity Whitman withholds. This is to say that as he recalls this nameless woman Whitman also falsifies her: for one thing, he reassigns her sex. In manuscript, the poem remains in present tense as Whitman remembers the “one” who “wandered with me, for love of me” and with whom he lingered “day by day, and night by night,” “together.” But there in his own hand, Whitman also indicates that while “All else has long been forgotten by me—But I remember well only that youth one rude and ignorant man who, when I departed, long and long held me long by the hand, with silent lip, pale sad and tremulous” (fig. 1).

I’m mindful here of the lessons Peter Coviello offers concerning how Whitman and others wrote in a space that permitted them to rethink possibilities for sexual being that existed prior to the point at which sexual identity became more codified.^[21] Without assuming a more rigidly defined account of gender than Whitman may have experienced or in which he may have been interested, I’ll still suggest that his transformation of his remembered companion from male to female is important for the questions it raises concerning his willingness to abide a compulsory heterosexuality that permeated many mid-nineteenth-century American publics.^[22] Especially appearing as it does within a cluster that seems so unregarding of the interpellations of straight culture, Whitman’s revision seems out of keeping with the forthright polyamity of the larger “Children of Adam” sequence. But more importantly, I want to suggest that the transformation also points to Whitman’s way of transacting detachment in “Children of Adam.” For even before he verses the loss of his feminine other of Canto 9, she already hides a more massive dimension of loss—she is in a way constructed in order to keep that other loss at bay, crafted so as to form the façade behind which Whitman might push that other, more difficult to name, loss. As he wanders toward her so repetitively, he wanders away from the “rude and ignorant man,” the figure of the poem in manuscript—although that figure does make some fleeting appearances. I’ve already mentioned one, in Canto 8, where Whitman juxtaposes the two figures, declaring that “I take for my love some prostitute—I pick out some low person for my dearest friend, / He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate […]” Elsewhere, in Canto 2, he may address that youth as he asks, “O you and I—what is it to us what the rest do or think?” just as afterward he again brings the temporally distant separation once again into the present, where perhaps some resolution or restoration might become immanent: “From the one so unwilling to have me leave—and me just as unwilling to leave, / (Yet a moment, tender waiter, and I return).”

This is to say that the lover with whom Whitman claims to have wandered is also a construction whose purpose is to maintain access to a third figure of loss while also keeping that third and the loss he represents at remove. Earlier in “The Dresser,” from which Tuggle draws such intriguing insights about Whitman’s understanding of the implications of phantom limbs for his own erotic lexis, Whitman describes his own ministrations of an amputee as well as that amputee’s gaze averted from the site of his wound. “From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand, / I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and the blood,” he reports. His own unstinting gaze upon the wound, his watchfulness over the soldiers themselves, juxtaposes with the inability of the wounded to look upon their own injuries. “His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump, / And has not yet looked on it,” he explains.^[23] A refusal to take in visually one’s own amputation, as Tuggle points out, is one of the most certain ways of ensuring the continuation of phantom sensations.

Wandering too is a technique of not looking, a practice of studied indirection. In that way it’s like revising—whether a poem or an entire collection—which is also a way of denying one’s loss of a past through an attempt to re-experience the sensations that accompany originary composition. The pleasure of revision owes to its technique of bringing prior writerly experience forward into the present moment, freshly alive. Over his lifelong process of revising Leaves of Grass, Whitman also pondered shifts in the phrasing that makes up “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City” (for example, in the so-called “Blue Book” copy of the 1860-61 edition in which Whitman recorded hundreds of possible emendations, he added the line, “years, years have elaps’ed” to the reminiscence as if to memorialize the extent of his own process of perseveration [fig. 2]), but in the end he changed little about this poem except some of its punctuation and the added title through to the final, 1891-92 “deathbed” edition. With its particular way of embodying memory, the encounter this poem records and concocts seems to have become settled for him. Which is to say it became still; it did not continue to evolve or live along with so much else of Leaves of Grass. Isn’t that the way of these things? One day, we’re determinedly attached, fixated, yearningly retrospective, connected by invisible ligatures all the more taut by the pretenses under which once they formed and most of all the power of what they permit us to avoid. Then, one day—at a moment equal parts painful, beautiful, and necessary—we let go.

________________

[1] Lindsay Tuggle, The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning, and Whitman’s Civil War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 117.

[2] Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps (New York, 1865), 33-34.

[3] Tuggle, 117.

[4] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860). Except for where I have specified otherwise, all quotes from Leaves of Grass in this essay are taken from the 1860-1 edition.

[5] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1855), 32. Further reference to this edition made parenthetically in the text.

[6] Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. Eds. Joseph Slater et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971-2004), 8. This view of Whitman (and Emerson) goes back at least to F. O. Matthiessen, who describes Whitman’s corporeality and sexuality as a part of his strategy of bridging what Toqueville thought of as a “void” between the material and the ideal. For Matthiessen, the distinction between Emerson and Whitman can be discerned in Whitman’s language: his love of slang, of onomatopoeia, his tendency toward coinage: “Whitman’s language is more earthy,” he writes, “because he was aware, in a way that distinguished him not merely from Emerson but from every other writer of his day, of the power of sex.” See F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London, Toronto, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 523.

[7] Peter Coviello has considered Whitman as “a poet of attachment” who conceives of the nation—and the poetry he addresses to it—as a welter of abidingly affectionate and erotic ties: between individual Americans; between Whitman and his reader, though in some sense unbeknownst to each other; between Whitman and generations that survive him. Coviello explains that “For Whitman, nationality consists not in legal compulsion or geographical happenstance but in the specifically affective attachments that somehow tie together people who have never seen one another […]” See Peter Coviello, “Anonymity and Attachment in Whitman,” American Literature 73: 1 (March 2001): 87. But Whitman is also plainly interested in attachments that form at the locus of people who have shared intimate bodily contact, along with the sensations that attend the end of that contact, just as he is often preoccupied with the severing of such relations.

[8] Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity. Trans. E.K. Hunt. (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 335.

[9] Esquirol, 336.

[10] Edward Carpenter, Days With Walt Whitman: With Some Notes on his Life and Work (London: George Allen, Ruskin House, 1906), 56-57. The poem appeared in the third, 1860-61 edition though Whitman removed it in further editions, “perhaps as being too personal,” Carpenter hypothesizes (56).

[11] Samuel A. Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” DeBow’s Review 11: 3  (September 1851): 331-36.

[12] Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 4.

[13] Price 3, 11.

[14] Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 335.

[15] Evan Thompson and Francisco J. Varela, “Radical embodiment: neural dynamics and consciousness.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5: 10 (October 2001): 422, 418. Further references made parenthetically.

[16] Thompson and Varela, 418.

[17] Thompson and Varela, 424.

[18] Lotte Meteyard, Sara Rodriguez Cuadrado, Bahador Bahrami, and Gabriella Vigliocco, “Coming of age: A review of embodiment and the neuroscience of semantics.” Cortex 48 (2012): 789. Further references made parenthetically.

[19] Meteyard et. al., 790.

[20] Picturesque thinkers such as Wordsworth and other late-eighteenth-century aesthetes thought of intense sensory experience precisely in view of such prospects for future edification through memory. William Gilpin, foremost eighteenth-century theorist of the picturesque aesthetic, suggested that his readers compose visual or written renditions of nature all the better to remember later on. “There may be more pleasure in recollecting, and recording from a few transient lines, the scenes we have admired than in the present enjoyment of them,” he supposed. See William Gilpin, “On Picturesque Travel,” Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape. 2^nd edition (London: Blamires, 1794), 51. For Wordsworth that prospective dimension of memory offers the promise of respite from what he calls “the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world / [that] Have hung upon the beatings of my heart.” There is something in the recollection of natural beauty that for Wordsworth transcends the “aching joys” of first-person, present-tense experience with all its “dizzy raptures.” Not so for Whitman—not exactly, anyway—who as he recalls sexual experience also laments. His revisitations through his memory of the departed lover are calibrated to suspend the loss, to hold it, to refuse to relinquish loss.

[21] See Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and London: New York UP, 2013), 4. Ed Folsom has recently pointed out that Whitman’s postbellum reputation sometimes formed around the notion that while in New Orleans in 1848, he had a romance with a Creole woman that served “multiple purposes”: “it kept Whitman safely straight, while also radicalizing him in that the slippery term Creole allowed for the possibility that he had sexual relations with one of New Orleans’s famous and exotic mixed-race young women.” See Ed Folsom, “A Yet More Terrible and More Deeply Complicated Problem: Walt Whitman, Race, Reconstruction, and American Democracy,” American Literary History 30: 3 (Summer 2018): 535.

[22] In his Crip Theory, Robert McRuer points out that “[c]ompulsory heterosexuality  is intertwined with compulsory ablebodiedness,” and it may be that something in Whitman’s straightening of his connection with the “rude and ignorant man,” occurring along the trajectory of his wandering ambulations, enacts a connection between some notion of spectacular corporeal and sexual typicality. See Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 31.

[23] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: William E. Chapin, 1867), 33-34.

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

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

About the Author

Chris Hanlon is Professor of U.S. Literature at Arizona State University and the author of America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism (Oxford, 2013) and Emerson’s Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style (Oxford, 2018). His essays about U.S. literary culture have appeared in American Literary History, American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, J19, and the New York Times, among other outlets.

It may be bad form to invoke dust jacket blurbs in a critical review, but I’ll take the risk. Jay Fliegelman calls The Republic in Print “refreshingly polemical.” Trish Loughran’s book earns that description, although my use of that phrase may not be quite as approving as the late, great scholar intended.

Loughran argues that historians, literary scholars, and cultural critics have put far too much emphasis on the symbiotic relationship between American nationhood, national identity, and print culture in the eighteenth century. Loughran asserts that for the republic’s first several decades the capacity to deliver print throughout mainland North America was insufficient. That material feebleness was essential, though, because without it independence and the union would have been stillborn. The founding was only possible because the “very localness of U.S. print cultures” provided the revolutionaries in 1776 and Federalists in 1788 enough rhetorical cover to satisfy disparate American audiences (xx). But, because of lacking institutions or infrastructure, neither of these dates really matter; neither was the nation’s true birthday. For Loughran, Lincoln’s math at Gettysburg was way off; rather than 1776, the “real” founding was more like one score and perhaps a dozen years before the Civil War.

Before the Industrial Revolution, there was not enough paper or presses, the delivery systems (from roads to riders) were unreliable, and for much of the year, the weather was terrible. As much as Hamilton, Madison, and their fellow framers may have fantasized about an integrated nation and done their best to erect that frame (the Constitution) based on a theory of an extended yet consolidated republic, their dreams could not be realized until telegraphs, turnpikes, railroads, steam-powered printing presses, and increased literacy made all things possible. Only then could print penetrate all corners of the nation and tie it together. When that transformation finally occurred, however, Americans did not like what they saw with their new, national, industrial-strength eyes. Abolitionists were the first to put this industrialized print culture to use, flooding the South with thousands of tracts and writing novels that conceived of slavery as a national problem. This was the culmination of federalism and the real birth of America. “The golden age of U.S. nation building,” though, “did not in fact lead to a golden age of U.S. nationalism but instead ushered in the era of high sectionalism” and civil war (304).

This is quite a big, startling argument. It challenges sacred theorists in current scholarship, most prominently Michael Warner and Benedict Anderson. Likewise, Loughran’s take on The Federalist, federalism, and Federalists circa 1787-89 is just as striking, calling into question some of the best chapters Gordon Wood ever wrote. But her biggest target is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. She argues that—given the material limitations of paper, ink, and presses, the places where the pamphlet was and was not published, and the sheer lack of reliable informational infrastructure in 1776—Paine’s claims of more than one hundred thousand copies selling by the end of its first year were simply impossible. Fair enough. Historians have indeed gone a little overboard in attributing causative power to Paine’s pamphlet. But Loughran takes this a step further, suggesting that these limitations “dampen[ed] the impact” of Common Sense, at least outside the North (55). This is more difficult to sustain given the unprecedented references to people reading the pamphlet, sending it to one another, and general notes in the newspapers like that in two Virginia papers telling how “a favorite toast in the best companies [in the Continental Army] is ‘May the INDEPENDENT principles of COMMON SENSE be confirmed throughout the United Colonies.’” At places she stretches evidence on this score.

Loughran contends that “none” of the “first generation of historians of the Revolution (including David Ramsey, Jonathan Boucher, and Mercy Otis Warren) … mentions Common Sense as a decisive factor in the decision to separate” (43). The inclusion of Ramsey in that list surprised me enough to pull his History of the American Revolution off the shelf. In the middle of a two-page exposition of the power of Paine’s pamphlet, Ramsey concludes that because of Common Sense “many thousands were convinced and were led to approve and long for a separation from the Mother Country. Though that measure, a few months before, was not only foreign from their wishes, but the object of their abhorrence, the current suddenly became so strong in its favor, that it bore down all opposition. The multitude was hurried down the stream …” (315-316).

This problem is larger than Common Sense. Loughran claims that, by interrogating the material context of Paine’s pamphlet—the “exemplary text of Revolutionary print culture”—she is really exposing the “circulatory spine of the American Revolution” (305-6). And, for her, the vital signs of that system are barely detectable: it is plagued by “provincial custom or colonial cunning, a muddy road or lame horse, a damaged portmanteau or dead postal inspector” (14). To be sure, these factors were all impediments to information flows in the eighteenth century. They are excellent reminders that should be kept in mind when thinking about how different their worlds were from ours. But the revolutionaries’ communication networks were not as anemic as Loughran’s revisionism would like us to believe.

The same could be said for the early republic.

My dedicating the bulk of this review to the Revolutionary era mirrors the book. Loughran’s interpretation does not move past 1790 until the last quarter of the text. That is not to say there is nothing of merit in the last chapters. Indeed, they are stuffed with thought-provoking interpretations across a wide spectrum of the nineteenth century, especially on how abolitionists were the first to recognize the truly national print culture and on the influence that expanding markets played in bringing about calls for immediate abolition. Her conclusions about the Fugitive Slave Act as a turning point in American theories of identity and citizenship are compelling.

To return to the dust jacket, the cover image of Republic in Print is an 1861 photograph of the building of the U.S. Capitol, which Loughran suggests is the book’s central theme. For her, the construction project of nation building was an industrial one of recent origin in the 1860s. Perhaps it might be better to view this building project as one marked by fits and starts, in which some work was accomplished in the eighteenth century, set aside, and returned to in later decades. Although the blueprints and building codes might have been revised in later decades, the earlier work was hardly razed and construction restarted from scratch. The Republic in Print is indeed “refreshingly polemical.” It does address very valuable questions about the relationships between a host of topics: nation, print, race, identity, region, culture, citizenship, and foundings. It is an exceptional, well-written book that combats the reader (in a good way) at many turns. But it should not be seen as the last word on this subject. It should instead spark further debate and open new avenues of research, especially on mobilization, print, and the Revolutionary era.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.2 (January, 2009).

Robert G. Parkinson is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. He is revising a book manuscript entitled “The Common Cause: Race, Nation, and the Consequences of Unity in the Revolutionary War.”

In Licentious Gotham, Donna Dennis provides a seductive view into nineteenth-century New York’s erotica trade, from the gleaming courthouse down into the city’s shadowy depths. Dennis—a professor at Rutgers School of Law-Newark—peels back pseudonyms and unwinds stratagems, moving from newsboys and Nassau Street booksellers along a subterranean network of publishers, printers, and distributors in far-flung warehouses. These are her “protagonists”: producers and sellers of sexually explicit prints who, despite the best efforts of purity crusaders, would not be reformed (11).

Dennis argues that attempts to suppress sexual writing only pushed pornographers toward unintended heights. New York’s first significant wave of obscenity prosecutions—the Whig district attorney James R. Whiting’s 1842 offensive against several racy Democratic “flash press” editors—utterly failed to quash licentiousness in print. Instead, the threat of indictment provoked some calculating participants in the world of underground print to develop a “sweeping, nationwide market for pornography” (6). In an effort to evade local officials, mid-century publishers like George Akarman launched postal schemes that shifted the market from below-the-counter exchanges in seedy shops to mail-order mass distribution.

What began as a protective subterfuge soon spiraled into one of the classic ironies of nineteenth-century America’s sexual history. Whiting’s municipal crusade prompted Akarman and others to “exploit the limitations of federalism”; the new postal cohort in turn “created” Anthony Comstock, the voice of a new and equally cunning generation of anti-obscenity crusaders (273, 9). Comstock’s comic-book-worthy heroics—sting operations as juicy in their details as the prints he sought and destroyed—would produce graver outcomes when he attained unprecedented powers of search and seizure in 1873. Yet for pornographers and their public, Dennis’s story ends almost happily.

Over the century the shape of erotica shifted: from “flash weeklies” to “fancy books” to “more ephemeral commodities” like photographs and playing cards in an era of heightened risk (280). A few brilliant technological appropriations (e.g., the stylograph) also aided licentious publishers in circumventing each new law. But at no point were the presses still.

Some readers may wonder whether Dennis is a little too blithe about the dangers of “Comstockery.” But many others will thank her for shifting our focus from the censors to their infinitely more interesting nemeses. Her cast of characters may frustrate libertarians as much as they irked moral reformers, since obscenity defendants almost never fought their indictments on lofty First Amendment principles. Most preferred to plead guilty, jump bail, bribe officials, and slip through loopholes—all the while learning how to better lubricate their future operations. Yet given the continued efflorescence of erotic writing, people like George Akarman and his more prolific contemporary, William Haines, should be acknowledged as equally influential in the culture at large. And besides, who doesn’t want to know more about The Secret Habits of the Female Sex?

Licentious Gotham tells all sorts of new stories, contributing in the process to a promising historiographical trend that foregrounds sexual dissent and “conversation” even amidst vigorous efforts to achieve conformity and control. The main tale is a cautionary one, although it turns not on the dire consequences of legislating morality but instead on the futility of such attempts. Actually, “counter-productive” may more accurately describe nineteenth-century anti-obscenity prosecutions than “futile,” since as Dennis so artfully shows, they impelled behaviors—and even desires—completely counter to moralists’ intentions.

Here the book especially shines for its subtle, archive-driven application of key theories. The wave of complaints that too many references to Foucault and Butler take all the fun out of studying sex has crested at such a height that it almost threatens to take all the fun out of reviewing books about sex. All that needs to be said on this score is that Licentious Gotham kills no joy. Its stories—sparkling with details gathered from exhaustive, original research—just breathe incitement.

Dennis carefully avoids caricaturing reformers as the bumbling neurotics and shrewd hypocrites we might find in a T. C. Boyle novel; she portrays Comstock as ingenious as he was earnest. But throughout the book she relies on what has become a piece of too-tidy shorthand—“bourgeois respectability”—to describe the ethos of sexual restraint and female passionlessness that the erotic publishers resisted. Meanwhile, her evidence paints a far more intriguing picture. While editors of the 1840s flash press catered explicitly to laboring male Democrats, the following decade saw middle-class consumers paying two or more dollars per cloth-bound “fancy book” (some now illustrated by an ardent Whig lithographer named Henry R. Robinson).

One of the most amazing contributions of Licentious Gotham is the clear view it offers into the forbidden fantasies that defined the obscene. Dennis unearths this content by reading indictments for obscenity in New York’s Court of General Sessions, which include some of the only surviving excerpts of books that were destroyed in anti-obscenity campaigns. We know that Europeans devoured gamey tales of flagellation, fetishes, and orgies. So what was the single most widespread fantasy circulated by New York publishers and loathed by national censors? The idea that women—married women no less—desired, pursued, and enjoyed sex.

Axiomatically, “female purity” rated highest among the criteria of “bourgeois respectability.” Yet New Yorkers across the class continuum apparently shared a love for reading narratives by men writing as voracious women. Had “middle-class standards” of sexuality really gelled? And did representations of passionate women necessarily imply a critique of the bourgeoisie?

Rich depictions of what Dennis generously calls “female erotic subjectivity” (100)—women-on-top scenarios, sex between women, and voyeuristic onanistas—raise other questions. What did it mean to fetishize women’s sexual agency? Historians such as Clare Lyons, Patricia Cline Cohen, Helen Horowitz, and Timothy Gilfoyle have argued that representations of female pleasure often coexisted in the vernacular and sporting male sexual cultures with violence against women who behaved as “autonomous subjects” (176).

Dennis makes an especially interesting case by suggesting that substantial numbers of women may have read the most explicitly pro-female-passion periodical of the century, Venus’ Miscellany. But the images of desirous women in this journal were embedded in George Akarman’s advice to women—framed as that of a female narrator—to cultivate the art of “pleasurism” in order to keep their husbands interested. Could female sexuality have been disciplined even when women participated in a forbidden medium? Celebrating companionate marriages, even sexually adventurous ones, could constrain while appearing to liberate. Women who thrilled to discover the lusty Maria’s “lesbian affair” with a neighbor might have heard the other shoe drop when they read that Maria’s husband soon got in on the action (178).

Overall, Licentious Gotham convincingly demonstrates the ways in which obscenity regulations backfired by creating “the conditions for new forms of sexual titillation” (7). Besides being a fabulous read, it is a handy antidote to the hard-dying stereotype of the nineteenth century as a dismal reign of prudery. But its importance transcends the history of sexuality by disturbing old claims about middle-class hegemony and the nature of state power.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4.5 (September, 2009).

April Rose Haynes is currently an NEH fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where she is revising her dissertation, “Riotous Flesh: Gender, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice, 1830-1860” (UC Santa Barbara, 2009) for publication. She will spend the coming academic year at the American Antiquarian Society as the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow.