The Fabrication of American Literature is a long-overdue examination of the antebellum practice of “puffing” books, or shamelessly promoting them for profit, politics, and other interested motives. Cohen exposes the mechanics and machinations behind the “genuine” literature that was supposed to prove the United States’ artistic and cultural maturity to the Old World—as well as behind more marginal publications like “ersatz backwoodsman’s tales” and “false slave narratives,” which could have suggested just the opposite to cosmopolitans on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, she is careful to avoid imagining an entirely disinterested literature and literary criticism as the ideal state from which the antebellum period fell into a world of petty deceit, relentless competition, and utter confusion. Cohen does so by starting from “a paradox at the heart of American literary history: at the very moment when a national literature began to take shape, many observers worried that it amounted to nothing more than what Edgar Allan Poe described as ‘one vast perambulating humbug'” (1). She argues that this paradox disrupts not only critical narratives of the flourishing of a representative national literature after its difficult birth and awkward adolescence, but also counter-narratives of the “cultural work” done by popular and political—and not just refined and removed—literature.

Antebellum Americans looked to literature to settle the most complicated and important questions of the day—questions about nationhood, democracy, race, gender, class, and region among them.

By assembling and working from an archive of concerns about “subterfuge, impostures, and plagiarism” in print, Cohen situates mid-nineteenth-century literature within, rather than apart from, the rest of antebellum American culture. As a result, unnoticed family resemblances become more prominent. The practices of publishing and reviewing books of all kinds begin to look a lot like promotions for quack medicine, land bubbles, and worthless shares of stock. Even Poe—best known to us as a poet and gothic fiction writer, but notorious in his own time as a critic who reviewed and promoted his own writings—makes himself heard among the many voices cautioning that the “indiscriminate laudation of American books” is “a system which, more than any other one thing in the world, has tended to the depression of that ‘American Literature’ whose elevation it was designed to effect” (34).

Again, it is worth emphasizing that Cohen insists on the seamier side of the fabrication of American literature not to expose the idea of American literature itself as a fraud, but rather to show how antebellum literature did and did not work. In making her much more nuanced and responsible argument, she is careful to distinguish between fraud—cases of intentional hoaxing, forgery, and plagiarism—and fraudulence—what she defines as “the hopelessness of distinguishing impostures, forgeries, plagiarisms, and hoaxes from literature proper” (2). This impossibility of distinguishing fact from fiction, real from fake, true from false in the messy world of antebellum print made significant trouble not just for latter-day critics, but for the public at the time. As Cohen observes, antebellum Americans looked to literature to settle the most complicated and important questions of the day—questions about nationhood, democracy, race, gender, class, and region among them. “The expedients readers, writers, critics, and editors devised to fulfill these impossible tasks, the accusations of fraudulence that inevitably resulted, and the attempts some writers made to turn this fraudulence to account,” Cohen explains in her introduction, “are the subject of this book” (2).

The first chapter examines the literary nationalist movement of the 1830s and ’40s and the puffery that dominated literary criticism at the time. In the same moment that authors and critics were working to establish a mature literature they hoped would place the United States on equal footing with Europe, many of them were also writing wildly enthusiastic reviews that had less basis in the works themselves than in favoritism, financial interest, and partisan politics. As Cohen argues, these decidedly undemocratic practices significantly compromised the democratic promise that a representative American literature was supposed to hold for the young country and the rest of the world. And antebellum American readers noticed, as we see in the range of anxious responses that Cohen summons to make her case. A memorable example comes from poet and journalist Lambert Wilmer, who warned in 1841 via verse that

‘Twould seem no less than destiny’s decree
That we the victims of all frauds should be:
Our literature and currency are both
Curs’d with the evil of an overgrowth; (42)

Cohen deftly turns these shaky foundations of a national literature into solid ground on which to build the rest of the book. Following chapter one, Cohen shifts her attention to the periphery that the central literary culture established only to challenge. Doing so, she explains, allowed the center to shore up its legitimacy by making marginal writers’ works—and not their own equally vulnerable writings—the suspect examples of the kind of literature that America was capable of producing. The second, third, and fourth chapters of The Fabrication of American Literature are case studies of these dynamics in action.

Chapter 2 pairs Davy Crockett and Jim Crow, examining not just the commonalities but also the deliberate linkages of their strange careers as cultural others. They were manufactured as “our ONLY TRUE NATIONAL POETS,” as one reviewer put it, to fabricate an idea of authenticity that mainstream American literature would both borrow from and attack to establish its own. Jim Crow and Davy Crockett regularly appeared not only separately but together in numerous “songsheets, almanacs, plays, and fictitious autobiographies” circulating in the antebellum period. Fraudulence was at the center of both figures’ public personae, with “minstrelsy laugh[ing] at the trickery and pretensions of Jim Crow” and the “Crockett literary industry mak[ing] wild tall tales the frontiersman’s stock in trade” (67). At the same time, “Jim Crow’s shams were acted out by white men themselves shamming as black, while Davy Crockett and the host of semiliterate ‘backwoods’ characters he inspired were largely manufactured out of northeastern publishing centers” (67). Working from this double layering of apparent deceit, the rest of the chapter surveys the print culture of Crow and Crockett to illustrate how these figures “achieved the remarkable feat of parlaying a fake authenticity into authentic fakeness” in “a culture preoccupied with the problem of fraudulence” (67-68).

The third chapter focuses on neglected pseudo-slave narratives by white writers that circulated alongside now well-known narratives written by blacks who had actually experienced slavery. The pseudo-slave narratives allow Cohen to continue her examination of what she calls the “racialization of fraudulence”—or the transformation of “fraud from a national problem” into a characteristic specifically associated with blackness—and how it worked both to legitimize and threaten the center’s authority (102). The popular newspaper columnist and novelist Fanny Fern is at the center of the fourth chapter, in which Cohen shows how Fern both exploited and was made vulnerable by the questions raised for readers and professional critics by her pseudonymity and the deliberate artifice of her writing style. The conclusion succinctly reads Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence Man as the ultimate case study for the book’s overall point: “that antebellum fraudulence cannot be embodied in individual acts and persons,” and that such fraudulence and the effort to establish a national literature are impossible to distinguish from each other (22).

While The Fabrication of American Literature is one of the most innovative works to be produced in the ongoing scholarly effort to rethink what came in the twentieth century to be designated as the “American Renaissance,” it doesn’t break entirely from its critical forebears who were just as interested in the relationship between literature and nationalism as antebellum Americans were. What is in many ways a radical view of American literature is also a rather traditional one, focused on works produced in the United States from the 1830s through the 1850s. It does not take the “spatial turn” that many scholars have in recent years, looking not just nationally but transnationally, hemispherically, and beyond. Nor does it attempt to bridge the gap between early American and antebellum American studies, as other scholars have encouraged us to do. But of the work that is still to be done in American literature, surely revisiting twice-told tales to retell them in a way that analyzes, synthesizes, and adds new dimensions to those tellings—as Cohen’s book does by balancing subtlety with complexity, serious history and theory with humor—is work well worth doing.

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

Marcy J. Dinius is assistant professor of English at DePaul University and the author of The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (2012).

I loved novels and short stories long before I loved the study of history. As a child, history came to me through textbooks. In contrast to my other reading, it presented two problems: I couldn’t lose myself, and I couldn’t find the author. The way I liked my history best was in fiction. Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremaine, Elizabeth George Speare’s Witch of Blackbird Pond, Rosemary Sutcliff’s Eagle of the Ninth: these were my beloved doorways to an imaginary past. I didn’t like these books better because they weren’t true. I liked them better because you could dream your way into them. As I learned to recognize the writer’s craft in setting a scene or penning a line of dialogue, I didn’t lose my connection to the fictional world. Instead, I felt another connection to the authors who had made those worlds. I wanted to be like them almost as much as I wanted to be like brave Johnny Tremaine or gentle Mercy Wood.

Like all authors of historical fiction, Bryson has to make not one kind of reality, but two.

None of that came to pass, of course. Not only am I neither particularly brave nor gentle, I’m also completely incapable of writing fiction. The latter realization arrived in college. Around the same time, I began reading really good works of history—the kind with authors. The combination sent me to graduate school in history. There I learned to think rather than to dream my way into the past, and to admire the historian’s crafts of fact-based analysis, reconstruction, and detection. But I still loved biographies—they had characters and plots, even though I knew better than to call them that. I also loved those moments in monographs when the author’s power seemed to go beyond accuracy to connection, and even to mystery, to that shock of simultaneous intimacy and difference, that sense of knowing without quite understanding, which thrilled me as fiction always had. I slowly learned to cultivate an historian’s imagination, one that steered between the Scylla of no invention (Plagiarism) and the Charybdis of too much invention (Making Things Up). I kept reading novels, but swore off historical fiction for years. I believe I was afraid that if I indulged even a little, I might throw aside my copy of Jack Greene and curl up in my office with the American Girl series. In the end, though, I couldn’t sustain my ban. I slipped first with Iain Pears’ Instance of the Fingerpost, then his Dream of Scipio, and on it went, down to Kathleen Kent’s Heretic’s Daughter. When Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky wrote their own novel, Blindspot, I purchased it head held high. And now, Common-place has decided to review historical fiction such as Ellen Bryson’s The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno, set in P.T. Barnum’s American Museum. Let the revels begin.

Like all authors of historical fiction, Bryson has to make not one kind of reality, but two. She must create the reality of the historical moment she has chosen as her setting, and she must create the reality of her own fictional world within that setting. That this is no easy task is clear in the first few pages. Bryson’s fact-ridden portrayal of New York in 1865—its size, its street plan, its class divisions, its mourning bunting hung for Abraham Lincoln—shines the light of historical reality so brightly that it dissipates the mist of the fictional world. You can think, but you cannot dream your way in. But then Bryson brings us inside the museum. And there, her fictional world—the real world of her characters—stirs to life. The title character is the book’s narrator, “Bartholomew Fortuno: The World’s Thinnest Man since 1855.” Living with him in the museum are Matina, sweet, calm, and immense; Ricardo the Rubber Man; Emma the Giantess; Alley the Strongman; and an African-American named Zippy (more on him later). All of them live, eat (with spectacular variability), and work in the museum, competing with each other for the approval of Barnum, his wife, and the crowds who pass through every day. Bartholomew classifies them into groups: at the top, “the highest among us,” were the True Prodigies, “men with flippers, armless girls, parasitic twins.” Below them “were the regular Prodigies,” whose “special gifts emphasized different aspects of human beings—their hunger, their strength, their purity.” Next came the Exotics, and lowest on the list were “the Gaffs, self-made Curiosities who faked what came to the rest of us naturally” (20). Barnum’s museum consists mainly of “regular Prodigies;” their constrained but peaceful existence is disrupted by the nighttime arrival of a beautiful, red-haired woman wrapped in a veil. Bartholomew is desperately curious: who is this competitor? Why is Barnum so solicitous of her? And then the World’s Thinnest Man, long devoid of desire for anything but abstinence in all its forms, is suddenly besotted. The woman, Iell Adams, is revealed to have a beautiful, flowing beard. The transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno has begun.

What follows is a coming of age story. Bartholomew, traumatized in childhood, had never accepted his man’s body or assumed a man’s role in the world. By starving himself, he had found his way to the fantastical nursery garden of Barnum’s freaks. And by imagining his self-starvation as art, he finds a way to believe that his sheltered existence transcends the mundane world of the crowds who stare and gasp. Iell, for her part, is glamorous, sorrowful, and cultured; in one of the mock advertisements Bryson cleverly inserts in the text (along with handwritten notes and museum orders for the day) Iell is described as “a woman of great beauty with a man’s beard and of figure so beautiful and comely, she was previously Mistress to kings and arbiter of high fashion” (83). Iell encourages Bartholomew’s attentions, partly due to his kindness, and partly due to his willingness to brave the streets of lower Manhattan to bring her little packages of opium from a mysterious shop in Chinatown. Once past the awkwardness of her initial pages, Bryson draws those streets deftly and subtly, so that the sights and smells of Civil War-era New York and the emotions of her characters augment rather than diminish each other’s realities. 

Inspired by his attraction to Iell, Bartholomew eventually reconsiders whether his shocking thinness expresses his true nature. As he does so, he becomes an immensely more sympathetic character. Before this transformation, Bryson risks alienating the reader by making her central character flatly uninsightful about himself and those around him. But it’s a risk that pays off. Eating his three daily lima beans and treasuring his isolation, Bartholomew at the start of the story is indeed the Thinnest Man in the World. There is almost nothing to him. And then, after a while, there is. 

Does this book specifically appeal to—or repel—readers who are also historians? Two characters resonate differently, I suspect, for historians than they would for lay people. The first is the “son of former slaves,” Zippy, whom Barnum exhibits as “the missing link,” and whom Bartholomew describes as possessing an “elongated head and simian propensities” (20). Who is this man? Is he mentally retarded, is he traumatized, is he, or Barnum, manipulating racial expectations in a dangerous marketplace? Bryson hints at each possibility, but offers no real portrait of the character. So Zippy seems unreal in Bryson’s fictional world, and unreal in 1865 New York. I couldn’t help but lament that it was Zippy who remains thus opaque and distant. Must a work of fiction, whose author can roam the archive of the imagination, fail to create the same kind of person that history so often fails to document? The second character who left me uneasy is none other than the bearded beauty herself, Iell. There is, it turns out, a very unmysterious mystery at the heart of this book: Iell is literally hiding something, and no one who’s read any cultural history in the last twenty years should fail to guess what it is. 

My slight impatience with Iell stemmed not from the lack of suspense, but from the fact that Bryson seems to limn her as the tragic mulatto, inevitably victimized by her betwixt and betweenness (although race is not, in fact, her secret). This reaction left me aware of my own nature—half historian, half novel lover. Does that make me a True Prodigy, uniquely able to resist the suspect trope, or a Gaff, a creature of “no inherent worth whatsoever” (20), desperate to conjure a complication where none exists? Neither, of course: just a reader, suddenly feeling the reality of the fictional world wear thin. As Iell blurs into an archetype, there’s less and less sense of an author’s distinctive vision, less shock of the alien melding with the familiar. Instead, the alien begins simply to feel familiar, and the specific to feel general. And that may be a failing in both history and literature.

The virtues of this book, however, far outweigh such imperfections. Iell, despite her scene-stealing beauty and oddness, is not the center of the book. Nor is the center the carefully drawn scenes from historic Manhattan or the American Museum. Instead, the center is Bartholomew, in all his prideful, self-delusional, kind, and, at last, hungry glory. I can’t say I wanted to become him, like the characters of my beloved childhood fictions. But I do want to make him dinner. And I’d love to raise a toast to his creator.

On March 3, 1853, little-known British artist Eyre Crowe entered an auction room in Richmond and saw nine slaves sitting on benches, waiting to be sold. Crowe took out his pencil and paper and began to sketch. Eight years later, he turned this sketch into a painting. As the Civil War began, viewers at the ninety-third annual exhibition of the Royal Academy of the Arts in London first gazed upon Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia (1861).

Crowe’s painting pictured nine of the more than two million slaves sold in the domestic slave trade in antebellum America. Over the past three decades, historians have made this vast network of human commodification central to any understanding of antebellum bondage. They have produced numerous studies that illuminate the quantitative dimensions of the trade and explore the meanings of individual sales for masters and bondspeople. Visual culture scholars have separately explored visions of slavery, paying particular attention to depictions of the southern plantation and the moment of emancipation. But the question of how artists visualized the domestic slave trade has awaited a fuller answer.

Art historian Maurie D. McInnis takes up this question in her richly textured book Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade. Examining how Eyre Crowe made the domestic slave trade visible, McInnis makes an important contribution to the visual history of antebellum slavery. Crowe’s simple act of eyewitness artistry, McInnis compellingly argues, produced an “exceptional” and “unique” painting of American bondage (10). It largely eschewed the conventional uses of stock characters and stereotypes for African Americans and the characteristic emphasis on the theatrical drama of the slave market. In the spring of 1861, Crowe’s painting invited viewers in London to ponder the perspectives of individual slaves, rather than the overall action of the auction.

McInnis structures her book as an archeology of this 1861 painting. In the first six chapters, the heart of the book, McInnis assesses Crowe’s work within a longer history of slave trade imagery, connects Crowe’s artistry to his actual journey in 1850s America, and contextualizes this story of image-making within the broader social contexts of the slave trade. In the seventh and last chapter, McInnis moves from America to London to explore the display of Crowe’s image.

Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia broke in significant ways from past antislavery visions of the trade, McInnis asserts. In the late eighteenth century, British abolitionists began targeting the slave trade by widely circulating the Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship. McInnis suggests how this vision of bodies packed into a Middle Passage vessel pictured slaves as anonymous commodities rather than Crowe’s individual subjects. In the antebellum era, well after the fall of the international slave trade, American abolitionists consistently turned to the domestic auction block for propaganda. In publications such as the American Anti-Slavery Almanac, abolitionists decried the tragic separation of enslaved families. Images cast the sale as spectacle, such as an illustration in George Bourne’s Picture of Slavery in the United States of America: a raised stage; an auctioneer commanding attention with his arm in the air; a group of whites hovering and measuring a slave’s body. McInnis notes how Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia also suggested that family separations had likely happened, picturing a lone man in the corner, and that they might happen again, showing women with their children. She briefly notes the distortions of the young boy’s facial features. But McInnis stresses how Crowe refrained from racial caricature in depicting most other subjects. She emphasizes the ambiguous facial expressions of many of the women, and the unusually defiant look of the crossed-armed man. For McInnis, Crowe’s painting extends certain themes of past slave trade depictions, but distances itself by largely picturing individuality and uncertainty rather than anonymity and theatricality.

How could Crowe’s painting depart so considerably from past visions? McInnis sheds light on this question with a detailed history of image production. To understand Crowe’s painting, McInnis suggests that we focus not simply on pictorial conventions but also on eyewitness documentation. She suggests, in other words, that we follow Crowe on his trip through the United States. Crowe did not initially travel to America to depict slave markets. Rather, he came to America as the secretary for the lecture tour of family friend and famous author William Makepeace Thackeray. From the fall of 1852 to the spring of 1853, they traversed the eastern seaboard. They stopped for Thackeray to speak in cities such as Boston, New York, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. En route from Boston to New York, Crowe purchased a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He later remarked that Stowe’s depiction of American bondage “properly harrowed” him (19). McInnis suggests that Stowe’s novel likely fueled Crowe’s desire to see the trade in person.

One morning in Richmond, Crowe read the newspaper over breakfast. He noticed advertisements for local slave sales, and set out to see them in action. Crowe made multiple sketches in different auction rooms, including the picture he would later turn into Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia. Later that day, Crowe stumbled upon a different scene at the Petersburg-Richmond railroad depot: a group of slaves, recently sold, boarding a train. Crowe returned to Britain and soon painted that event in Going South: A Sketch from Life in America (1854). McInnis stresses how Crowe produced distinctive work precisely because of his presence in Richmond: he based many of his subjects on first-hand encounters with the slave trade. She further points to how Crowe’s on-the-ground experiences shaped his aesthetic choices, noting, for example, reportorial details in Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, such as the stove near the women and the man’s forgotten hat on the floor. McInnis reveals the particularity of Crowe’s visual work through an attention to eyewitness artistry.

McInnis situates Crowe’s actual journey and his art within a broader web of the people, practices, and places that constituted the slave trade. Using historical studies alongside her own work with slave narratives, travel accounts, and traders’ account books, McInnis discusses trade routes and business practices as well as the everyday meanings of sales for traders, masters, and slaves. Readers will benefit from her spatial analyses, which use detailed maps to show how auctions were integrated into the broader landscapes of cities such as Richmond. By encircling Crowe in the multiple contexts of the trade, McInnis demonstrates how he and other artists only conveyed certain aspects of this human tragedy. Crowe pictured auction rooms but did not visualize the Richmond slave jails of Robert Lumpkin and Solomon Davis. McInnis illuminates how Crowe’s painting showed emotional tension but not the cruel conditions of these other waiting places.

In the final chapter of the book, McInnis follows Crowe back to England. She focuses on the display and reception of Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia. In doing so, McInnis advances our understanding of how outsiders experienced the domestic slave trade and shaped perceptions of it. Historians have stressed how actual encounters with the slave trade sharpened abolitionist agendas:William Lloyd Garrison, for example, increasingly assailed the trade in print after he saw it in action in Baltimore. McInnis shifts our attention. She takes us from the pages of northern print culture to the walls of a London museum, from American radicalism to British high culture, from the written to the visual. Moreover, she offers strong evidence for Crowe’s artistic breakthrough. Reviewers lauded the reportorial qualities of Crowe’s work and the different emotions expressed by the waiting slaves. One critic claimed that the painting “secures sympathy.” For this reviewer, the work offered a “literal and faithful transcript from the life it represents” (209). Meanwhile, a writer for the Art Journal praised Crowe’s painting for “successfully and discriminately representing the inward actuality and outward expression of phases of mental thought and human passion” (211). McInnis persuasively reveals how Crowe’s transatlantic image-making stoked sympathy amidst this elite crowd as the Civil War began.

While McInnis offers a welcome addition to the study of visual culture in the Civil War era, her book also raises questions about the historical significance of Crowe’s painting. Readers might wonder how Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia lingered in British (and perhaps American) politics and culture, or why it failed to do so. McInnis ends her narrative with art reviews. She turns in her epilogue to examine postbellum representations of the American slave trade. A broader analysis of “reception” would explore the question of whether antislavery proponents thought about and used Crowe’s painting during the Civil War. Did British activists discuss Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia as, McInnis notes, they had done for Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave? If not, why? As it stands, McInnis’s use of “Abolitionist Art” in the subtitle describes Crowe’s politics in the mid- to late 1850s, and the painting he created. We are left to wonder whether this image offered too radical a vision for the radicals of their time to effectively politicize in words and images.

In this lively little book, Steven Wilf, the Joel Barlow Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut, encourages Americans to re-imagine a time when legal discourse was not just confined to the courts. Since the nineteenth century, most ideas about the legal legacy of the American Revolution have put the Constitution front and center, privileged the story of the rise of court-based jurisprudence, and especially the importance of constitutional interpretation through judicial review. The Revolution, the story goes, created a nation dedicated to the rule of law. Yet in a provocative cultural and literary analysis, Wilf compels us to look closely at the proliferation of “law talk” across the colonies in the era of the American Revolution—a legal language that was both elite and popular, spanned different forms of expression from words to rituals, and drew on fictive and real ideas of law. And, because this law talk emerged simultaneously with the imperial crisis, a “revolutionary legal language became intimately intertwined with politics” and transformed America’s legal institutions. While we may now remember a less contentious outcome, Wilf makes a compelling case that we would do well to recall the “untidy” origins of American law in an era when the Constitution is America’s “most important export” (195).

To make his case, Wilf zeroes in on the intersection of criminal law, politics, and language and takes a refreshingly creative approach in thinking about the law as an act of storytelling as much as it is about constitutionalism, statutes, and sociohistorical understandings of compliance with laws and legal norms. In an entertaining, rich, and wide-ranging chapter named after Tocqueville’s later assertion that “the language of law is a vulgar tongue” (56), for example, Wilf explores popular commentaries on criminal cases found in hanging ballads, bits and pieces of iconography, pardon petitions, diaries, and accounts of punishments, mock punishments, and execution narratives and juxtaposes them against court documents and legal treatises. These criminal legal narratives could and did create new forms of law, and such stories were created by non-professionals as much as professionals as they engaged in contested imaginings of what the law ought to be. Wilf does an admirable job in teasing out and showing how ordinary people imagined how the laws might work or should work as they staged mock executions, dreamed up punishments, proposed reforms, read execution narratives, created their own real and fictive criminal narratives, and hanged and burned effigies.

In their law talk, Americans had to grapple with difficult questions such as the purpose of punishment, the right to judge, and the authority of lawgivers. When, in turn, colonists began to question political authority, this law talk laid the basis for a much more radical re-imagining of what the law could be. Indeed, as colonial protests grew over imperial reforms after 1763, Americans drew upon this repertoire of legal language in their political protests. The two mutually reinforced each other as both argued for what today we would call greater transparency, and the participation of common people in deciding right and wrong. Law talk energised Revolutionary resistance. As Wilf concludes, in a Revolutionary moment, suddenly “interpreting doctrine, judging cases and controversies, and inflicting punishment must be seen as a radical assertion of sovereign powers” (8). In making this argument, Wilf is keen to close the gap between constitutional scholars, who focus on constitutional issues and (elite) patriot theories of rights in the lead-up to independence, and those who emphasize extralegal actions on the street. The two were intimately related.

Wilf then fast-forwards to the 1780s and 1790s. Here, he switches tack and focuses less on popular law talk and more on the efforts of different states to reform their criminal codes. Wounded by British publicists’ taunts that slaveholders were hardly in a position to claim the mantle of liberty, many Americans pointed to English reliance on capital punishment to delegitimize English authority and claims to liberty. Yet if legal reformers sought to curb capital punishment and reform the penal system in the new republic, they did so in tension with more popular calls for public participation in the implementation of criminal justice. Reformers and legislators brushed aside popular execution rituals and ensured interpretive power lay increasingly in the hands of the legislatures and courts. In part, Wilf argues, this was in reaction to stories of popular violence emanating from the French Revolution: “Images of the guillotine from the French Revolution … underscored the dangers of involving the common people in questions of criminal justice” (11). Wilf thus describes a waning of vernacular law talk, participatory justice, and the mingling of law and politics in the 1790s—and the rise of court-based jurisprudence with which we are now more familiar. Yet curiously, he hesitates to describe this “waning” as a conscious repression of the radicalism of the 1760s and 1770s; rather, it is a “recasting” in light of events in France (10-11).

Such is the main argument advanced over chapters two and four. The other chapters zoom in to moments when particular communities wrestled with these broad issues. Indeed, chapters one, three, and five are micro-histories designed to capture the richness, complexity, and immediacy of legal imagining—and how particular cases and controversies were coupled with politics. These are delightful case studies. The first juxtaposes popular uproar in Boston over the freeing of Ebenezer Richardson, a customs officer who accidentally shot a rioter in 1770, with that over the execution of career criminal Levi Ames for burglary in 1773. Imagining and inventing a new and more criminal biography of Richardson, Bostonians critiqued English justice and contrasted Richardson’s pardon for the more serious crime of murder with the execution of Ames for burglary, and turned official law upside down. The second micro-history looks at the execution narratives of two post-Revolutionary Connecticut felons, a rapist and a murderer, and shows how local communities could turn self-justifying explanations of crimes against their authors to create alternate readings and demand punishment. The final story looks at the creation of a reform statute in New York that mandated post-mortem dissection of executed felons.

Though this short review cannot do justice to the details of these micro-histories, they are in fact wonderful stand-alone pieces that tell us much about the particular stories that Americans told themselves about the law. They also show us in rich detail the way that different kinds of narratives about the law might and did come together in changing the way that the law worked. At the same time, though, they also point to one of the major weaknesses of the book. These are very specific—but separate—case studies. They give us suggestive glimpses into the local worlds of law talk in different communities at different times. Yet they are too episodic and disconnected to make a compelling and convincing argument about change over time, particularly across Revolutionary America. Nor does Wilf help us connect the dots in the more wide-ranging chapters on pre- and post-Revolutionary law talk. Wilf jumps from the early 1770s to the late 1780s and we are suddenly confronted with a different set of sources, a different approach, and perhaps not surprisingly, a changed view of the political and legal landscape.

Equally importantly, perhaps, Wilf wants to make a case about revolutionary change, yet the Revolution—and especially the long and formative years of the war—is conspicuously absent in this account. Perhaps it was too messy to include, but in some sense that’s what his story and initial methodology are driven by. The absence is more curious since closer attention to the Revolution, and more recent historiography on the Revolution, would have bolstered Wilf’s case. The premise of the book, though Wilf might not phrase it as such, is a kind of lament that the unruly imagined republic, born in the political upheaval of the 1760s and 1770s, was contained in the post-Revolutionary settlement. Wilf attributes this to the violence of the French Revolution. Yet elite legislators and lawmakers throughout the states could more easily point to the violence of their own Revolution to justify new exclusionary legal forms. And they did so—they complained about popular resistance to conscription laws, militia laws, impressment laws, and new taxes imposed by the states. They were horrified at extra-judicial action taken against loyalists, or suspected loyalists. They complained vociferously when extra-legal action of the kind Wilf finds in the pre-Revolutionary period was turned upon them in the dramatic lead-up to Shays’ Rebellion. Many looked to the new Constitution to solve the problem of popular participation in the legal and political process. And it worked. As Wilf notes, it was only after the passage of the Constitution that law talk was confined to the courts: “Americans stepped back from the mingling of law and politics,” he concludes. Though Wilf uses the French Revolution as the terror that made America pause, not all Americans agreed about the “dangers of involving the common people in questions of criminal justice” (11). Some continued to imagine a role for themselves in a real—if perhaps increasingly distantly imagined—democracy.

Still, if Wilf’s provocative book does not convince, it does suggest a great deal. And we would do well to talk less and perhaps listen more to the vulgar tongue of the language of law in eighteenth-century America.

Panic over the United States’ decline has become a cornerstone of the twenty-four hour news cycle and the pithy op-ed, not to mention the apocalyptic disaster movie. The sources of this alleged decline are numerous, from income inequality to trod-upon freedoms to the obsession with Kim and Kanye. In her original and timely study, Patricia Roylance argues that the anxiety over the nation’s decline is not only an old one, but one spurred by the nineteenth-century production of early modern histories of imperial eclipse. At the very moment when domestic histories would presumably be the privileged site of study and interest, nineteenth-century U.S. writers turned to global historical examples to study imperial decline and, in turn, spur “nationalist self-scrutiny” (2). Roylance’s study engages neglected texts by familiar literary authors, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and brings them into conversation with lesser-known histories by William Hickling Prescott and John Lothrop Motley. By linking the rise and fall of past empires with the unfolding story of the U.S., all of these writers offered a sobering corrective to the “ideology of triumphant national exceptionalism” (3).

Marked by “morbid anxiety” rather than unbridled optimism, the texts that anchor Roylance’s book presume that the United States’ trajectory differs little from that of other empires; rather than an exceptional new experiment, the U.S. shared the same vulnerabilities of past civilizations, especially intranational conflicts. For Roylance, eclipse narratives “treat international history as intranational prognosis” by identifying trends in the global past that had domestic implications in the nineteenth century (5). As writers and readers came to better understand the intricacies of global history, they became “sensitized … to the great variety of internal weaknesses undermining the soundness of the United States” (13). To broaden her readers’ understanding of how early modern global history was put to use in contemporary domestic contexts, Roylance deploys Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of “contact zones” and Wai Chee Dimock’s theory of “deep time.” The history books featured in her study, both as material objects traveling across space and time and as studies of space and time, create what Roylance calls “a spatiotemporal form of the contact zone,” obscuring the borders between past and present, Europe and the U.S., the foreign and the familiar (6). For Roylance, nineteenth-century imperial eclipse narratives did not serve as purely cautionary tales nor as negative examples. Rather, they functioned to draw out the “radically dissimilar and yet eerily, uncomfortably similar” social, political, and economic situations of the antebellum U.S. and the world’s failed empires. These uncanny encounters (though not Roylance’s term, it seems appropriate here) made the eventual eclipse of the United States seem at once inevitable and avoidable. Roylance centers her compelling analysis on these points of friction.

In chapter one, Roylance examines the ascendency and eventual decay of Italy in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Water-Witch (1830) and The Bravo (1831). Roylance’s reading of The Water-Witch, set in the area around New York Harbor, highlights the cyclical view of history to which many nineteenth-century thinkers ascribed by affiliating the enterprising Americans with the once-great Italian empire. Throughout the novel, Cooper compares Italy’s “fading fortunes” with the United States’ “youthful vigor” (in Cooper’s words), particularly in commercial enterprise (26). The Bravo, on the other hand, sets up the self-scrutinizing work Roylance describes in her introduction. By setting the novel in the heyday of the Venetian republic, Cooper invites comparison with the thriving United States, though always emphasizing the crucial differences—such as geographic size—that would protect the U.S. from a similar decline. Roylance’s most compelling discussion in this set of readings relates to Cooper’s location of “American principles” outside the country’s borders and the public’s skepticism of such a dislocation. Coupling the novels with Cooper’s pamphlet, A Letter to His Countrymen (1834), Roylance points to tension between Cooper’s advocacy for a truly republican and American literary tradition and his critics’ accusations of “anti-populist elitism” (41). In the chapter’s conclusion, Roylance raises the crucial question of whether Cooper’s imperial eclipse narratives were cautionary tales of political self-destruction or gripes about his own “personal, socio-economic eclipse” (44).

Chapter two shifts toward conquest, rather than gradual decline, in a consideration of William Hickling Prescott’s 1847 History of the Conquest of Peru. Roylance’s reading of this under-studied history reveals that Prescott “identifies the United States as much with the conquered Incas as he does with the Spanish conquerors” even if, ultimately, he laments the resemblances to both cultures (48). Prescott saw the Incan decline as the natural result of their rejection of private property, although he decried the Spaniards’ enslavement of the vanquished Incas, and compared their “lust of gold” to the unbridled capitalism that characterized the antebellum U.S. In the end, Prescott’s desire to protect personal property rights exceeded his disgust for slavery, a point borne out in his description of Bartolomé de las Casas and others’ efforts to emancipate Incan slaves from Spanish captivity as “illusory schemes of benevolence” (67). Ultimately, Prescott’s specious logic points to the difficulties of maintaining a middle ground in nineteenth-century matters of property rights and laissez-faire capitalism.

In chapter three, Roylance takes up John Lothrop Motley’s 1856 Rise of the Dutch Republic, emphasizing the nation’s struggle for independence from Spain. Reading the Dutch revolt and the Glorious Revolution in England as direct ideological precursors of both the Puritan migration to New England and the American Revolution, Motley traces “an august lineage of Anglo-Saxon struggles devoted to the ideals of freedom and progress” (79). This teleology is not terribly unusual in nineteenth-century histories, but what sets Motley’s case apart is the way it was received by reviewers as a “deeply anti-Catholic text” (88). In reviews of Motley, writers focused on the resemblance between the U.S. and the oppressive Spanish, rather than the rising Dutch, fostering what Roylance describes as an “anxiety-producing type of contact zone” between early modern Europe and the antebellum U.S. (76). Thus, Motley’s text inadvertently spurred debate over religious liberties in the nineteenth century and invited criticism of the United States’ treatment of religious minorities.

In chapters four and five, Roylance shifts her focus toward narratives of empires being eclipsed through cultural erasure. Rather than global histories foreshadowing national possibilities, these histories demonstrate how the U.S. attempted to secure its imperial strength through forced assimilation. Chapter four centers on Irving’s A History of New York (1809), offering a fresh analysis of Irving’s satire by focusing on the ethnic Dutch residents’ “stubborn resistance to assimilation” and their choice to remain “foreign” even after nationhood is achieved (103). Irving characterizes such resistance as not only futile but foolish, and in so doing he “contains the threat of the failed imperial past by quarantining its likeness among the ethnic Dutch” rather than expanding its application to the nation as a whole, as Cooper, Prescott, and Motley had done (115). The source of the Dutch’s cultural decline, though, has more to do with the Anglicizing of the colonies and eventually the nation rather than any corruption within Dutch culture. Likewise, Roylance asserts that Longfellow’s use of Ojibwe language and place-names in The Song of Hiawatha—the focus of chapter five—serves to keep the Ojibwe “presence in the landscape alive” rather than to criticize or romanticize their “vanishing” (120). But Roylance points to another, more unexpected, version of cultural erasure in her consideration of the poem’s reception and its affiliation with the Finnish epic poem Kalevala (first collected and published in 1835). The affiliation stems from the popular “Vinland” hypothesis that gave Viking claims to the New World priority over Native American ones and “helped validate the racial ideology of Anglo-Saxonism that fueled U.S. manifest destiny” (120). Thus, rather than romantically solemnizing the eclipse of the Ojibwe, Longfellow sought to preserve their presence amidst the cultural eclipsing of Native American history by Viking history in the nineteenth century. By creating a “complicated linguistic and territorial picture” of the Ojibwe (135) and narrating an intricate tale of inter-tribal conflict, Longfellow, Roylance contends, attempted to rescue Native American history from oversimplification and homogenization.

Though Roylance intermittently addresses the subject, especially in her first three chapters, the reader wonders to what extent these writers’ positions of privilege inform their fears of an eventual eclipse of the United States. What Roylance describes as a diffuse “anxiety” over the nation’s decline is clearly also rooted in the authors’ impulse to protect the old guard. How did other writers in less privileged positions interpret the rise and fall of empires, and how might these interpretations compare with those Roylance has identified? Stephen G. Hall’s study A Faithful Account of the Race (2009) gives some revelatory examples from writers like Hosea Easton, Henry Highland Garnet, and James W.C. Pennington, who cast Anglo-Saxon history as barbarous rather than progressive. These writers foregrounded African history from ancient times to the present to “combat the idea of alleged black inferiority caused by the supposed backwardness of Africa” (76). For the authors Roylance studies, personal hardships became harbingers of national decline, while the same were used by African American historians, in Hall’s examples, as indicators of cultural and racial fortitude and longevity. Thus, while Roylance admits in her introduction that eclipse narratives were often authored by white men of privilege, in part because of the funds and education required to conduct long-term archival research in the period, writers of diverse backgrounds also turned to world historical events to make sense of the present and predict (or warn against) the future.

Roylance concludes with a look at the role of the “present” in imperial eclipse narratives. She begins with Francis Parkman’s Montcalm and Wolfe, which carries readers up to Parkman’s “present” (1884), looking at the swiftness with which historical narrative collides with contemporary fears and how quickly rise turns to decline in the “relentless cyclical pattern of imperial eclipse” (150). In a somewhat awkward pairing, Roylance then discusses Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto (2006), which casts Mayan decline as inevitable in the face of Spanish conquest, while simultaneously valorizing segments of Mayan society. In discussing Apocalypto, Roylance suggests that the form of the imperial eclipse narrative has remained relatively unchanged in modern times and still performs similar political work. Roylance’s last line is sobering as she looks toward “various empires poised to eclipse us.” In this, she sounds a bit like the authors she cites. Yet, even while conceding to the “rise of the rest” (as Fareed Zakaria put it), pundits have recently suggested that the very language of rise and fall may now be defunct. For example, the title of a New Yorker review of Ian Bremmer’s 2012 book Every Nation for Itself posed, “Is the End of American Dominance the Same as American Decline?” The answer is up for debate, of course, but what Bremmer and others have begun to envisage, in the tradition of the authors Roylance studies, is not just a U.S. eclipse, but the eclipse of empires altogether.

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

Lindsay DiCuirci is an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is working on a book about the collection, preservation, and printing of colonial books and manuscripts in the nineteenth century.

In early America, everything was empire, and empire was everything. The great European imperial powers of the eighteenth century—Britain, Spain, and France—made competing claims to the Americas, and the health of those colonial ventures figured prominently in how those empires viewed their positions in the world. To control the New World was to control the whole world, and each nation had its own reasons for establishing a presence in the Americas, from the religious to the economic. However, for both day-to-day operational value and long-term imperial planning, the most valuable commodity for these imperial powers was information. In The Elusive West, Paul W. Mapp considers how geographical information about the American West shaped imperial policy and relations between 1713 and 1763. This period, between the Treaty of Utrecht and the Peace of Paris, was marked by dramatic shifts in power. France went from dominating the fur trade and holding a significant amount of land in its possession to being effectively removed from the continent; Britain grew from a handful of small colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America to the dominant power on the continent. At the heart of Mapp’s book is a reconsideration of the origins of the Seven Years’ War. That great imperial battle has traditionally been seen as originating from British encroachments on French territory in the Ohio River Valley, but Mapp convincingly argues that scholars need to look farther west for a clearer picture of what was really happening between the imperial powers.

Mapp begins his book with the Spanish empire of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The Spanish were the consummate world explorers, who in the 1500s “threaded the Straits of Magellan, circumnavigated the globe, traversed the Isthmus of Panama, crisscrossed the Andes, strode the causeway to Tenochtitlán, descended the Amazon, and ascended the Paraná. Yet Idaho remained elusive” (41). Spanish experiences in Mexico and South America, where the Incan and Aztec empires had already done much of the groundwork needed to understand the physical and human geography, were not mirrored in the western regions of North America. The landscape was often unforgiving, making exploration difficult, and when the Spanish attempted to get help from the many Native groups in the region they were often met with silence or hostility. Even when Natives were willing to help out, their own ignorance of the land and the language barrier meant that they yielded little useful information for Spanish explorers. This ignorance about the geography of the West was a continual roadblock for the Spanish, keeping them from settling the area as rapidly or completely as they did in other regions of their American empire.

After his thorough description of the problems faced by the Spanish, Mapp turns to the French. While he touches on far more than could be reasonably covered in this review, one of the standout segments of the chapters on the French concerns the experiences of French cartographers in Russia and China. He uses the wealth of information obtained in these areas as a contrasting backdrop for the paucity of knowledge the French were able to acquire about the American West. He describes Jesuit missionaries who surveyed China in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and French cartographers who traipsed across Russia gathering mounds of accurate geographical information. The ease with which this information was obtained was not mirrored in North America; as Mapp details in several chapters, the French blundered about in the American West, rarely acquiring useful or accurate information from the indigenous inhabitants, and their mental and physical maps remained muddied and useless for much of the eighteenth century. It is during his discussion of the challenges the French faced in North America that an organizational issue becomes apparent, as Mapp begins to retread ground from earlier in the book. Because he takes on each imperial power sequentially, some of the common problems faced by explorers, such as the difficulty of communicating accurate geographical information with Indians, are restated in detail, essentially replacing the name of one power for another. “In a manner reminiscent of Spanish scouts in the Southwest” (212), is how one sentence starts, and similar ones are peppered throughout the chapter. While his thoroughness is impressive, it makes an already long book even longer, and bogs down his argument in content he’d already covered earlier in the book.

Much of the Spanish and French sections of the book deal with the many indigenous peoples that inhabited the land the Europeans coveted. Thoughtfully analyzing indigenous historical actors has long been a serious problem for histories of early America, but Mapp’s book is a wonderful example of how that continues to change. When possible, he is careful to delineate whichindigenous group was involved with the European imperialists—Pimas, Apaches, Assinboines, and Crees, among others, are the actors throughout the book, not simply the generally unhelpful and historically inaccurate “Indians.” Furthermore, the indigenous actors in the book, like those Europeans seeking their help, were not all-knowing when it came to geographical information. The most important parts of their world were local, and “after hundreds of miles, southwestern Indians, too, would likely have been following unfamiliar trails, encountering outlandish peoples, and hearing strange tongues” (84). The Americas were peopled by myriad different groups of people—linguistically, politically, and culturally diverse—and the reader is lucky to have a researcher as skilled as Mapp to help navigate the complexities of European-Native interactions.

Much of the last third of the book is spent analyzing how British designs on Spain’s Pacific holdings and their encroachment on French territory created tension between the three imperial powers that finally boiled over in the 1750s, resulting in the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. Mapp convincingly shows that there was much more to the start of the war than the French trying to expel British traders and settlers from the Ohio River Valley. The search for a Northwest Passage from Hudson’s Bay, George Anson’s actions in the Pacific, which included attacking a Spanish galleon and sacking a port town in Peru, and other British machinations worried both the Spanish and French. The French were willing to go to war over British actions throughout the continent and in the Pacific, but the Spanish pursued a policy of neutrality for as long as possible, fearful that allying with the French would be seen as an open invitation for French explorers to continue pushing westward. Given that the Spanish in the 1750s still weren’t entirely sure what the western half of North America looked like and what it contained, they were hesitant to let other empires freely poke about. This neutrality ultimately benefitted Britain, who was able to fight against only the French for most of the war. In a sense, Spain unwittingly played the anvil to Britain’s hammer, and French imperial designs for North America were effectively flattened by the time the war ended. For Mapp, uneasiness and confusion about what the potentially valuable lands in the American West held not only led to the start of the war, but also continually influenced imperial policy throughout it.

Mapp’s book is heavily argument-driven, with narrative threads being spun out briefly to illustrate points, but rarely followed for more than a paragraph or two. While it would be unlikely to captivate those looking for a good yarn, Mapp’s fluid, clear prose is a pleasure to take in and the overall organization of the book makes it compelling in a way that doesn’t depend on narrative. It is certainly a long, dense book—the first line frames it primarily as a study of the Seven Years’ War, but it takes more than 300 pages to get to that conflict. It takes nearly 200 pages before the reader gets to the Treaty of Utrecht, which ostensibly starts Mapp’s story. That being said, it’s ultimately a treat to read and his larger arguments do hinge on a particular understanding of how three very different empires operated in the New World, and the first half of the book is indeed necessary for a full understanding of the second. Thoroughly researched, clearly written, and forcefully argued, Mapp’s book is a major contribution to the history of eighteenth-century European imperialism, and a novel refiguring of the history of the Seven Years’ War.

During the summer of 1763, warriors from the Ottawa, Objibwa, Potawatomi, Wyandot, Miami, Delaware, Shawnee, and Seneca nations attacked British forts and homesteads in an arc stretching from the tip of the Michigan peninsula to the Greenbriar Valley of Virginia. Whether their attacks represented a purposeful, coordinated offensive is open to question, but their mutual grievances against the British Empire are not.

Historians have always had a hard time deciding how to describe this paroxysm of intercultural violence. Was it the epilogue of the Seven Years’ War in North America, a last ditch effort by Indians formerly allied with the French to restore the balance of power between natives and newcomers they had known in their homelands previous to 1760? Or, was it the opening act of the American Revolution, an episode of administrative and military incompetence that presaged Great Britain’s mismanagement of its North American colonies between 1765 and 1775? Was this conflict a war, similar in scale to the destruction and panic King Philip’s War unleashed in New England nearly a century earlier, or was it a brief, futile rebellion by Indians against their new British overlords? And what of the figure whose name has ever since been attached to this conflict: was Ottawa leader Pontiac the conspiratorial mastermind behind the most significant pan-Indian resistance movement of the colonial era, or was he simply the most notorious of many war chiefs who acted autonomously in venting their rage against the British?

Among historians of early America, the consensus in recent years has been to underplay Pontiac’s role as a visionary patriot chief but at the same time to elevate the conflict that bears his name from a “rebellion” to an all-out war that stopped British imperial expansion in its tracks, at least temporarily. Gregory Evans Dowd provides a thoughtful, expertly researched articulation of that consensus in his new book, which is certain to supplant Howard Peckham’s Pontiac and the Indian Uprising (Princeton, 1947) as the definitive scholarly account of the conflict. While Dowd artfully dodges the juxtaposition of “Pontiac” and “War” in his title, he clearly considers this conflict much more than an ill-fated rebellion, and he accords Pontiac a central role in its making. For Dowd, Pontiac’s War created an irreparable rift between Indians and colonizers in North America that would color all subsequent encounters between these groups. It is to this conflict that we can trace both the Euro-American impulse to wipe the frontier clear of Indians and the Indians’ reliance on nativist spiritual movements to resist that effort.

Like historians before him, Dowd finds the origins of this conflict in the failure of British military officers to assume the diplomatic responsibilities they inherited from the French at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War. Following the lead of commander-in-chief Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the British expressed disdain for Indian diplomatic customs and cut off the supply of presents to Indians formerly allied with the French. Dowd correctly points out that this disregard cannot be attributed to British unfamiliarity with Indian custom, for they had been engaged in such diplomacy with eastern Indians since the seventeenth century. Rather, it was a product of the hubris born from their conquest of Canada. Convinced of their superior might, the British decided they could do as they pleased. After all, with the French gone, they were now the only game in town. It was time for the Indians to bend to their rules.

That hubris pushed Pontiac and his allies to go to war against the British in 1763. While they attacked Detroit, Indians in the Ohio Country laid siege to Fort Pitt and destroyed several smaller posts west of the Allegheny Mountains. The Indians also raided some colonial homesteads in areas of disputed possession, but Dowd emphasizes that the Indians’ grievances had less to do with land grabbing by squatters than with the British officers and agents who had ceased to treat them with the respect and generosity that allies deserved. Inspired by the Delaware prophet Neolin, these Indians revived traditional methods of appealing to sacred power, such as the black drink ceremony, to spread their message of resistance to the new imperial order.

Dowd’s depiction of the British and Anglo-Americans involved in this conflict is less nuanced than his depiction of the Indians, but not without merit. He bucks a recent trend among historians to distinguish between racist colonists anxious to exterminate all Indians and British officials more inclined to incorporate Indians into the empire as subjects and trading partners. Military officers revealed their genocidal tendencies when they authorized executing Indian prisoners and using smallpox as a biological weapon. When a colonial mob known as the Paxton Boys murdered the peaceful Conestoga Indians of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, British officials condemned their lawlessness, but not out of any sympathy for their victims. In Dowd’s opinion, the line between “a sober imperial and colonial elite willing to protect Indians and a wild colonial frontier ready to kill all . . . breaks against hard facts” (211).

Much like the conflict it describes, this book’s narrative never reaches a definitive conclusion. Amherst’s successor as commander-in-chief, General Thomas Gage, declared the war over in December 1764, after a punitive expedition against the Ohio Country Indians, but intrigues and negotiations continued well into the following year, especially in the Illinois Country, where Pontiac continued to lead an anti-British resistance. The British never solved the problems that had caused the war, nor did they develop a consistent Indian policy for North America. According to Dowd, the British did not end the war so much as give up on it, their attention diverted by the growing political crisis east of the Appalachians. Likewise, the Indians’ war against the new order never really ended because their grievances went unanswered. Intercultural violence on the Ohio frontier may have ebbed after 1765, but it flared up again during the Revolutionary Era and continued until the defeat of Tecumseh’s pan-Indian movement in the War of 1812.

Francis Parkman’s Pontiac was a tragic figure, a doomed but cunning conspirator who embodied the treachery Parkman considered ingrained in the Indians’ character. Dowd’s version of the story is much more sympathetic to Pontiac, and one of this book’s strengths is the attention it pays to the Indians’ spiritual motivations for engaging in this war (readers familiar with Dowd’s earlier book, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 [Baltimore, 1992] will recognize his approach here). A case may still be made for referring to this conflict as a “rebellion,” at least from the British perspective. Reading about the British officers’ high-handedness in dealing with the Indians, their merciless approach to eliminating resistance, and their desire to replace diplomacy with intimidation calls to mind earlier English experiences with rebellions in Ireland and Scotland. Since their earliest encounters with North America, the English were fond of comparing Indians to Scottish Highlanders and the “wild Irish,” and when Indians failed to cooperate with the imperial project, they did not hesitate to treat them in the same manner as those other groups. Historians have been inclined to heap the blame for Pontiac’s War on Amherst’s shoulders, but we should not let one man’s incompetence distract us from the wider cultural context that spawned his approach to Indian relations. This fine book raises important questions about how we should situate Pontiac’s War (or Rebellion, if you like) in the larger story of Britain’s eighteenth-century imperial expansion and U.S. empire building to this day. At a time when U.S. allies are decrying the current administration’s penchant for acting unilaterally abroad, this book reminds us that “cowboy diplomacy” has a long, albeit undistinguished, heritage right here in North America.

Further Reading: Fred Anderson’s The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York, 2000) places Pontiac’s War among the events that put the British Empire on the road toward the American Revolution. Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York, 1991) emphasizes the British failure to fill French shoes in intercultural diplomacy after 1760. Dowd’s argument that the British officers’ approach to Indian relations was indistinguishable from that of American colonists challenges conclusions reached by Eric Hinderaker in Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley (New York, 1997), and J. Russell Snapp, John Stuart and the Struggle for Empire on the Southern Frontier (Baton Rouge, 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

Timothy J. Shannon is an associate professor at Gettysburg College, where he teaches early American, Native American, and British history. He is the author of Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Ithaca, 2000). His current research is focused on the material culture of European-Indian diplomacy between 1750 and 1820.

In two new books about the landscape of war, some of the most memorable sources are images of people, not of places. A verbal portrait captures Ezra Buel in 1819, as he removes his shirt to show his impressive battle scar to visitors to the Saratoga battleground. A bone medallion, now filed away in university archives, testifies to David Steele’s eagerness to show off the piece of his skull that he lost at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. A Civil War-era family portrait captures likenesses not only of family members but also of the shot that took off their father’s arms. These are just a few of the sources that Thomas A. Chambers and Megan Kate Nelson use to reconsider the ways that nineteenth-century Americans gave meaning to the effects of war on the world around them. In some ways, their conclusions are familiar: they look to battlegrounds as sites of national identity formation, where Americans forged a sense of who they are by contemplating and shaping the landscape that they had torn apart in battle. Yet, as the aforementioned portraits suggest, the undercurrents of these books carry readers in an unexpected direction. A number of rich visual and written sources reveal the intimate, if sometimes understated, connections between bodies and landscapes in Chambers’ and Nelson’s works. War, both studies suggest, intermingled bodies and environments in especially provocative ways.

As Thomas A. Chambers reveals in the opening pages of Memories of War: Visiting Battlegrounds and Bonefields in the Early American Republic, he embarked on his study because of his own long-standing love of visiting battlefields. In order to understand the historical development of this compelling relationship between place and memory, he “sought evidence of the kind of highly personal, vivid responses to battlefields” that he himself possessed (xi). After gathering evidence from a variety of battlefield archives, as well as more widely accessible print culture, he offers an interesting, though sometimes meandering, look at what he calls battleground tourism in the early republic. Chambers describes battlefields as overlooked, neglected, and forgotten in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, American Revolution, and War of 1812. Only in the 1820s, he argues, did Americans begin to view battlegrounds as edifying places that could evoke worthy memories of the past.

Chambers contends that this appreciation did not arise solely from the convergence of the fiftieth anniversary of the War for Independence, Lafayette’s Grand Tour of the United States, and the dying off of the Revolutionary generation, as many scholars of historical memory of the Revolution have asserted. Instead, he argues, American tourists appreciated battlegrounds in the 1820s primarily as picturesque landscapes. In the late eighteenth century, “accidental tourists” remembered colonial battles when they encountered bonefields in places such as Braddock’s Field and Ticonderoga (17). But it was not until the advent of the “Northern Tour” in upstate New York, Chambers argues, that travelers “created a new form of memory dependent on interaction with place, romantic scenery, and sentiment” (35). Individual responses to the landscape and popular guidebooks promoted historical memory of the Revolution and the War of 1812 according to principles of picturesque scenery rather than overt political or nationalistic agendas. Many battlegrounds in southern states offered visitors the same opportunities to appreciate picturesque landscapes but failed to attract visitors, Chambers asserts, because the South lacked a tourist infrastructure to accommodate travelers’ needs. Though Americans proposed commemorative monuments at a number of these battle sites in northern and southern states, Chambers argues that their reluctance to actually build these memorials reveals a continued ambivalence toward marking the past in place throughout the second quarter of the nineteenth century (66). Only in the 1850s, when sectional politics surpassed picturesque tourism as the impetus for visiting battlegrounds, did the “larger American public”—presumably individuals other than tourists—begin to commemorate battlefields (4).

Chambers’ attention to the ways that Americans in the early republic viewed the landscape is a valuable intervention in a field that often relies on politics to explain shifts in historical memory. By paying attention to the ways that Americans engaged transatlantic picturesque theory in new ways of traveling and looking at the landscape, he offers a new explanation about why transitions in historical memory and commemoration occurred. Still, the narrative that Chambers presents about the development of memory, place, and the American Revolution is a familiar one. Americans cared little for evidence of the past on the landscape before the 1820s. Even when they began to visit and study historic places in the second quarter of the century, few wanted to preserve or commemorate these sites with permanent memorials. The South lagged behind the North in developing both its historical consciousness and its landscape. Only in the 1850s, amid sectional crisis, did Americans turn to commemoration of historic sites as a popular, nationalist project. In all, Chambers seems to constrain his interpretations by sticking close to this narrative, set out by the very studies of historical memory that he seeks to reinterpret.

A fuller orientation toward landscape studies might have helped him to challenge the conventional narrative of early national historical memory altogether. After all, Chambers himself presents sources that seem to challenge his arguments about the primary importance of picturesque landscape over historical association. Chambers quotes Timothy Dwight, for example, pointing to two different ways of evaluating the landscape of northern New York during a trip in 1802. Dwight reported that he “had two principal objects in view. One was to examine the scenery of Lake George; the beauty of which had always been mentioned to me in strong terms of admiration: the other, to explore the grounds, on which the military events of former times had taken place, at its two extremities” (quoted on 43). In 1837, as Chambers points out, one U.S. senator emphasized history over landscape at Yorktown, Virginia, saying that “the mere lover of the picturesque” could find better landscapes to appreciate, but the battleground itself provided contemporary Americans with a direct link to the previous generation of men who had fought there (97). In this case, the original ground mattered, not picturesque scenic beauty. At one point, Chambers writes, “Most Southern battlefields lacked the physical landmarks that acted as narrative links and punctuation marks in people’s interpretation of the scene” (117). Yet throughout the same chapter he quotes many travelers saying that houses, sites, and features of the landscape linked them directly to past experiences, even though they did not find the landscape to be aesthetically pleasing. At the end of his study, Chambers is certainly right to point out that the desire for monuments grew in the 1850s, yet he also quotes travelers praising historic landscapes “unmarred by monuments” during that era (104).

Chambers might have resolved some of these seeming contradictions by exploring a question that resounded in my mind while reading the book: what exactly was a battleground in the early republic? At the beginning of his study, Chambers is careful to qualify the scope of his study by explaining that he “deliberately avoided extensive discussion of well-studied locations such as Bunker Hill or Lexington and Concord in favor of lesser known and, in some cases, more militarily significant battlefields in rural areas and especially in the South” (xiv). He later suggests that urban sites were atypical battlefields because they did not elicit “the melancholy responses tourists experienced at barren battlefield sites often situated in magnificent landscapes” (4). Yet Chambers’ sources reveal that early Americans themselves did not necessarily draw a line between urban and rural sites or even northern and southern ones. Instead, they show early Americans appraising battle sites according to distinct elements of their landscapes: scenes, grounds, and monuments. Each evoked the past in a different way. How did travelers conjure the past from scenes as opposed to grounds? Did few Americans build monuments because they felt that grounds themselves conveyed enough information about the past? Chambers would have done well to explore the relationship between these various features and the ways that early Americans used them to create historical memories, much as Kirk Savage did in his book Monument Wars (2009). In this way, Chambers might have embarked on a deeper conversation about the influence of picturesque landscape theory, and its cousin association theory, to challenge the chronological and sectional truisms of the historical memory of the Revolution.

Megan Kate Nelson offers a different view of a common feature of picturesque landscapes: ruins. In Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War, Nelson expands readers’ view of the field of battle by considering the ways that Americans enacted and understood destruction of nature, the built environment, and people during the Civil War. In so doing, Nelson offers “the first book to consider the evocative power of wartime ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change” (9). By participating in the act of ruination, Nelson argues, both northerners and southerners “created a new national narrative” grounded in the common experience of the destruction of the Union, not just its reconstruction.

Early Americans were long familiar with ruins as landscape features whose material fragmentation evoked an emotional response to the passage of time. But, as Nelson explains, Civil War ruins were something new—”sudden and shocking”—because Americans had inflicted this damage on themselves (2). Commanders burned cities to destroy the commercial centers of their enemies and leveled houses in the field to clear lines of sight. Soldiers broke into homes and rifled through personal belongings to invade and destroy the most intimate spaces of their enemies. Residents sometimes destroyed their own property as a defensive measure, not wanting the enemy to profit from looting or self-satisfaction. Armies mowed down forests and troops alike, in combat and in pursuit of resources. The ruins of living beings provoked a twinned awe and horror at the transformative power of new technologies. This destruction fragmented the American landscape into a constellation of shelled cities, ransacked houses, splintered trees, and amputated bodies that stood as evidence of the ways that “the violent technologies of war,” rather than incremental decay, natural disaster, or accidental catastrophe, had ushered the United States into a new era (2). Ruins were so evocative, in fact, that even as Americans cleared them from the landscape by demolition and reconstruction, they made ruins into portable relics that preserved not simply personal mementoes of experience but also material evidence of epochal change.

Nelson’s highly original, deeply researched book exemplifies how rethinking the meaning of the physical world itself can lead to new insights in a wide array of scholarly fields. By an astute pairing of quantitative analysis of property claims with a cultural and tactical explanation of their high numbers, she makes a convincing case that military historians have underestimated Civil War destruction. She also excels in defining ruination as a multi-faceted, yet coherent, martial strategy by showing how the multiple meanings of destruction depended on each other, as acts of geophysical and emotional assault, offensive and defensive strategy, and material and symbolic expressions of identity. Nelson also shows the value of reconstructing conversations that crossed the Mason-Dixon line. Rather than falling into a familiar discussion of how northerners and southerners differed, Nelson offers a more valuable assessment of the common ways in which Americans on both sides of the conflict thought about destruction. As a result, she is able to make compelling arguments about the ways that Americans used ruination to create different narratives during the Civil War. Even more interestingly, she successfully challenges the literature about historical memory that focuses on monument building and battlefield preservation as a source of national identity. Instead, she points to ruination itself as a process of building, and reconstructing, national identity in nineteenth-century America. Finally, in her chapter on bodies, Nelson provides a counterweight to studies of masculinity that emphasize the cultural construction of gender when she reminds readers that “actual bodies mattered” (175). Battle scars could garner respect for sacrifice and the authority of eyewitness. But dismemberment threatened the ability of 45,000 surviving amputees to earn a living, reproduce, and defend themselves. In an age when Americans rooted masculinity in self-determination, evidence of bravery in war could relegate evidence of masculinity to the past.

Throughout the book, Nelson does an excellent job of explaining the very ambiguities that ruins posed to their observers rather than letting her own interpretations get mired in their multiple meanings. She explains how northerners celebrated the burning of Hampton, Virginia, for instance, as a defining act of modern war tactics while Confederate residents of the town celebrated their sacrifice of personal property to their national cause. The ambiguity of ruins could be risky as well as opportunistic. After the burning of Chambersburg, residents found themselves on the defensive when onlookers questioned their commitment to defending the Union. The ruins, residents insisted, evinced their sacrifice for that very cause. Nelson skillfully shows how the same contestations for meaning occurred over broken bodies, forests, and houses. On one hand, Nelson says, “rubble was eloquent, speaking of the tremendous and sudden violence of war, of shells fired and exploding against walls, of fires started and spread by the wind” (60). On the other, ruins were ephemeral and highly ambiguous, so the explanatory power of their visual eloquence was limited. Images of and arguments about the destruction of many sites lasted much longer than physical reminders of those acts, and Nelson frequently points out that ruin narratives “were clearly much more powerful than the ruins themselves” (59).

Nelson’s skill at grappling with the various forms and meanings that ruins embodied during the Civil War, however, makes her own definition of ruins seem too rigid at times. She bookends her study with a definition of the ruin as “a material whole that has violently broken into parts; enough of these parts must remain in situ, however, that the observer can recognize what they used to be” (2). Ruination, then, was the process of change that created these sites. Were the singed chimneys evocative ruins even though they afforded no sense of Hampton, Virginia’s, former city plan, as Nelson emphasizes, or of the size or function of the buildings they once heated? Were dead bodies and mangled limbs human ruins if warfare had “rendered [them] unidentifiable as individuals and often as humans” (169)? By tying her definition both to actual material condition and observers’ assessments, Nelson undercuts her point that ruins were compelling features during the Civil War because few people defined or interpreted them the same way. Her definition also evades the issue of intent. Did it matter to nineteenth-century Americans whether ruins signified a defiance of their enemy’s attempt to annihilate? An amputated arm often signified an escape from intended death; an intact chimney could stand as a surprising survival of an obliterating blaze. The physical characteristics of these ruins and their contexts connoted a destructive intent different from the mutilated photograph of one soldier, defaced by his enemies and then carefully replaced in the drawer of his widow’s dressing table. In this case, the perpetrators engineered the maintenance of the recognizable whole to maximize the emotional devastation of enemy onlookers. Nelson is at her best when she sticks close to ruins themselves, showing her subjects grappling directly with their presence on the landscape. Steadier attention to these firsthand assessments might have helped her to show how Civil War participants turned to material evidence of ruins themselves to parse the intent of their perpetrators in their ruin narratives.

In both books, some of the most fascinating moments are the ones that highlight the connections that nineteenth-century Americans drew between bodies and landscapes. Megan Kate Nelson draws out these relationships explicitly in many of her interpretations, using images and texts to link the invasion of homes with attacks on women’s bodies and drawing parallels between the dismemberment of soldiers and trees. In contrast, Thomas Chambers devotes much less interpretative attention to bodies in his work, which is surprising given the intriguing term “bonefields” in his title. Yet many of his sources point to the ways that Americans in the early republic looked to the body as a register of individual experience in place, celebrated by the same Romantic principles that encouraged touristic appreciation of picturesque landscapes. Ezra Buel, who proudly showed his thoracic scar during tours of the Saratoga battlefield, and David Steele, who flashed his skull medallion to visitors at Guilford Courthouse, exemplify the ways that veterans used their bodies as badges of authority when defining the contested memory of a place. Dead bodies and burial sites took on a new meaning too, as Chambers points out in his too-brief discussion of memorial architecture at rural cemeteries in the 1830s.

Both authors leave readers to connect these moments, when the meanings of bodies and landscapes became inextricable. But once again, their sources suggest a way of spinning out the broader significance of these intriguing scenes. Nineteenth-century Americans most often made sense of the places where bodies and battles collided by using the language of the sacred. Chambers and Nelson often take this vocabulary for granted, relying uncritically on John Sears’ Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (1989), Pierre Nora’s essay, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire” (trans. 1989), and Edward Linenthal’s Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991) to do their interpretive work. However, in casting light on places where war collided bodies and earth, both authors have offered up new and important evidence for reconsidering the very meaning of sacred places themselves. By giving a new view of the relationship between bodies, battle sites, and the built environment, Thomas Chambers and Megan Kate Nelson have composed insightful studies of the landscape of war that also illuminate a new path for studies of the sacred in nineteenth-century America.

Further reading

Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley, Calif., 2009); Louis Nelson, ed., American Sanctuary: Understanding Sacred Spaces (Bloomington, Ind., 2006); Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883 (New Haven, Conn., 1999); Blanche Linden-Ward, Silent City on a Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter, eds., A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001); Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, Conn., 2008).

View this review in the format as originally published: http://www.common-place-archives.org/interim/reviews/martinko.shtml

In 1788, the poet, Congregationalist minister, and educator Timothy Dwight instigated a war of words against the Universalist minister Charles Chauncy. In this book, Colin Wells examines this campaign by placing Dwight’s writings—particularly his satiric poem The Triumph of Infidelity—in their theological and political contexts. Wells undertakes a literary recovery by excavating meanings probably lost on today’s readers and making Triumph of Infidelity available in a modernized, annotated edition in an appendix.

But Wells has also assembled an important argument: the controversy, he claims, was far more complicated than may seem at first glance, and the object of Dwight’s attacks was not only Chauncy’s doctrine of universal salvation but also a number of other “infidelities,” including Enlightenment progressivism, Jeffersonian democracy, and deism. In this way, Wells argues, Dwight’s work must be read in relation to debates over popular rebellion, the Constitution, interstate conflicts, and eventually the French Revolution and Jefferson’s election in 1800.

Some readers might be surprised that Dwight spent such an inordinate amount of literary and intellectual energy intervening in a local doctrinal dispute, but Wells emphasizes that much more was actually at stake. Under siege, in Dwight’s eyes, was an orthodox view of human morality, the dismantling of which could pose a serious threat to the social and political systems of the new nation. Dwight understood Universalism, as well as other progressivist religious and political movements, to be based on the ideas of Pelagius, the fifth-century divine who denied Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and deemed humans essentially innocent and perfectible through will. According to Wells, the clash between Calvinist orthodoxy and the new doctrines of Chauncy and others was a continuation of the conflict between Pelagius and Augustine. The common denominator of all that Dwight condemned as infidelity was what he termed Pelagian pride—the worship of human will in the place of God. In Dwight’s estimation, Pelagian ideas offered an easy morality for the weak.

Intellects on both sides of this Pelagian-Augustinian divide often positioned themselves as defenders of orthodoxy. Chauncy hoped Universalism could return covenant theology to a more proper course and appeal to those who had rejected all of Christianity as irrational and superstitious. He argued for a benevolent God and defended Universalism on moral grounds; however, in an attempt to distinguish his Universalism from that of discredited itinerant ministers like John Murray, he did not discard the notion of original sin and punishment. Rather, he saw hell as a temporary state that would bring about the sinner’s reform under the auspices of a benevolent deity. (One of Chauncy’s Universalist successors, Hosea Ballou, would later argue that the only punishment humans experience for sin is guilt; another, William Pitt Smith, would argue that human redemption might occur within one’s lifetime, rather than at the end of history or one’s own life.)

Dwight, on the other hand, believed Chauncy and other Universalists had reduced God to a doting parent bound by willful children. Chauncy charged that Calvinism was irrational and superstitious, but Dwight claimed instead that epistemological confidence and human-centered theology were the primary superstitions of the modern age. Dwight welcomed the scientific, material, and political progress of his age, but he denied that they could be invested with divine significance or understood as anything other than the fleeting moments of human history.

Wells makes his most intriguing claims when explaining the role that Augustan satiric tradition played in Dwight’s theological attack. While Dwight’s writings were undoubtedly shaped by Calvinist defenses of original sin (including that of his grandfather, Jonathan Edwards), he was also influenced by Alexander Pope’s mockery of the third earl of Shaftesbury in The Dunciad and Edward Young’s attack on latitudinarian and Universalist theology in England. With these models in mind, Dwight and other poets of an American-Augustan tradition would have understood satire as a vehicle fit to mediate a “grand struggle of historical forces” (24), and they would have looked to satire as an intervention that could defend tradition against the onslaught of modern values.

Dwight was particularly drawn to Augustan satire’s commitment to exposing as fallacy the reliance on human reason. While Augustan satires were primarily concerned with defending the civic virtues enshrined by classical republican ideology, rather than the doctrines of Calvinist orthodoxy, both belief systems were based on an Augustinian understanding of human nature as tending toward corruption. Thus, Dwight’s allusions to the satires of Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Dryden place Triumph of Infidelity and other works squarely in a satiric tradition that looked skeptically on the celebration of human progress (and feared as well that satire’s own potency would diminish with time).

Although Dwight believed the function of satire was to expose illusory self-satisfactions, Wells shows that the process of exposure was complicated. At the heart of Dwight’s orthodoxy was a belief in the nunc stans—an eternal present, decidedly beyond human consciousness, from which the divine could view humanity. By locating human redemption within secular human history, the Universalists, in Dwight’s opinion, had blasphemously denied the divine nunc stans perspective; and, yet, Dwight himself suggests that a partial nunc stans perspective could be available to humans through the self-examination of satire itself.

For Dwight, then, satire seems to have raised the same dilemma that Calvinist doctrine posed: namely, that self-scrutiny was essential to redemption even if epistemological confidence was ultimately an illusion. While the connections between Dwight’s vision of redemption and the logic of Augustan satire are not explicit, Wells writes, they are implicit in the genre form. Augustan satire shared Dwight’s Augustinian emphasis on self-examination and moral struggle; therefore, it accommodated his paradoxical explanation of redemption by which humans are redeemed “as a result of their own inward struggle against the very tendency of the will that causes them to believe they are deserving of regeneration” (89).

In the concluding pages of his study, Wells argues briefly that the legacy of Dwight’s skepticism is evident in works of antebellum American literature, including the abolitionist rhetoric of William Lloyd Garrison, the protest writings of Henry David Thoreau, and satiric works of fiction such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad.” The book’s primary objective, though, is to provide a detailed account of a literary and intellectual battle in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The story Wells tells is lucid, provocative, and thoroughly researched, and he offers a blend of intellectual history and literary criticism that will be accessible across the disciplines.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

Jennifer Baker is an assistant professor of English at Yale.

“We hold this truth to be self-evident, that God created all men equal.” For some American Founders, these words stopped at color, class, or creed. For others, the words held out limitless possibilities for the American nation—if made real. Though originally set down by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, on this occasion they were paraphrased by James Forten, one of early national America’s leading black reformers. In 1813, protesting against a proposed Pennsylvania law limiting black migration in the Quaker State, Forten penned a pamphlet that called on Americans to live up to their founding language. The Declaration, Forten argued, “embraces the Indian and the European, the Savage and the Saint . . . the White man and the African,” and anyone who violated that sacred notion of equality should be “subject to the animadversion of all.”

Although an inspiration to celebrated antebellum figures such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, James Forten (like many of his cohorts in the black founding generation) has suffered in semiobscurity in recent years. For a long time, no major biography of him even existed. That has now changed with Julie Winch’s important and compelling new work, A Gentleman of Color. Winch’s book is indeed a milestone. At five hundred pages, it is probably the longest biography of an antebellum African American (William McFeely’s Frederick Douglass is just a bit shorter), and it is certainly the most extensively researched monograph on an early national black figure. It also makes a case for defining Forten into the hallowed founding generation. Not only was he a community leader and black institution builder, Winch makes clear, he was also a key part of the new nation’s cultural and political fabric—a black man who defied racial categorization and stereotypes to try to expand the meaning of liberty and justice for all.

In Winch’s capable hands, Forten’s rags-to-riches life-story comes alive. Born in 1766 to a free black family of “modest” status, Forten became perhaps the richest black man of the early republic. Indeed, at his passing in 1842, Forten was favored with one of Philadelphia’s largest public funerals. He fought in the American Revolution as a mere lad, became a respected businessman (one who employed white as well as black workers), and assumed a place as race leader and abolitionist as if born to these roles. In fact, Forten’s life was constantly framed by racial injustice. “Although he knew he was the descendant of one of the first people to settle in Philadelphia,” Winch observes, “he was painfully aware that his great-grandfather had arrived in [slave] shackles” (27). Born almost exactly a century before W.E.B. Dubois, Forten grappled early and often with Dubois’ famous conundrum—he was an African and an American, his two identities often sparring.

Winch treats Forten’s life with as much attention to detail as is possible for an early “gentleman of color.” “Regrettably, for a man who lived so long and achieved so much,” Winch writes, “there is no James Forten archive” (7). And unlike Frederick Douglass or even Harriet Jacobs, Forten left no autobiography for later writers to examine. Winch exhaustively searched records in America and England, piecing together everything from stray business receipts to Forten’s anonymous newspaper writings. She also learned Forten’s sailmaking trade, for “James Forten’s life was also written in canvas” (7). In 1785, Forten apprenticed himself to a white sailmaker named Robert Bridges. In little over a decade, he would become a master sailmaker himself, taking over Bridge’s business and acquiring enough wealth to assume a leadership position in Philadelphia’s black community. Forten’s shop “was a showplace of his industry and values” (84). Winch reprints an 1834 newspaper article on Forten’s business, where “his workman, twenty or thirty in number, were industriously at work . . . Here was one who had been in his employ for twenty years . . . Here was another who had been rescued from ruin. These were WHITE men, but not so all.” Everyone from white politicians to fellow black leaders would visit Forten’s shop to get what Winch calls “an all-too-rare sight of an integrated workplace” in antebellum America (84).

As the best biography does, Winch’s portrait of Forten illuminates not only the man’s life but his times. This is critically important in the case of the founding generation of black leaders. There are simply many more biographies of antebellum black men and women (from the likes of Frederick Douglass to important but lesser-known people such as Mary Ann Shadd Cary and T. Morris Chester). Antebellum black life is therefore much more richly detailed than the Revolutionary era or early republic. Readers interested in how a black man like Forten was educated in the 1770s, how he assumed a prominent status in black reform circles, how he viewed the battle against slavery and racial prejudice before 1830, and a host of other matters, will find much in Winch’s book.

One thing readers may find surprising is the skepticism of early black leaders. Forten’s most enduring role was as a racial reformer but he was not always sure that racial reform could succeed in America. Forten tried everything: he signed a congressional petition against racial injustice, wrote an important pamphlet attacking prejudicial laws, and became a leading critic of the American Colonization Society. But Forten also flirted briefly with colonization’s flip side: black emigration. Forten believed that white colonizationists viewed blacks as inherently unequal—and that blacks could have no place in American society. Black emigrationists, on the other hand, told blacks to better their condition wherever they could, even beyond American shores. For a few years, then, he “promoted” emigration to the black republic of Haiti and joined the board of managers of the Haitian Emigration Society. Although he dropped active support of Haitian emigration during the 1820s, Forten remained critical of colonization. “The rising tide of intolerance he saw all about him could not help but make James Forten anxious about the future,” Winch comments. “What kind of world would his children inherit?” (233). Faith in American ideals—”liberty, equality, brotherhood”—had stirred Forten’s soul for years but a worsening racial climate “made him question those ideals” (233).

The advent of radical abolitionism in the 1830s reinvigorated Forten, and it is no surprise that he was a critical part of its formation. Forten helped William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery young Massachusetts printer and soon-to-be publisher of the antislavery newspaper, the Liberator, gain monetary support for his journal from the black community and abolitionist content from black writers. “What created a bond between the two was a passionate commitment to antislavery and equally passionate hatred of the American Colonization Society” (239). Forten remained an important abolitionist voice until his very death.

Despite her exhaustive treatment of Forten, Winch cannot surmount the problem facing all biographers of early black figures. She must resort to conditional phraseology when the documentary trail dries up, as it too often does. Forten “might have” done this; he certainly “could have been” at that meeting. No matter, for Forten has found a biographer who treats his life with all the rigor and celebration it deserves. Forten deserves to be viewed as part of the founding generation of American leaders, and Winch’s book of this gentleman of color certainly deserves a wide readership.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.1 (October, 2002).

Richard Newman teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002), and is currently writing a biography of Richard Allen.