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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

________________

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

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

[3] Tuggle, 117.

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

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

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

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

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

[9] Esquirol, 336.

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

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

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

[13] Price 3, 11.

[14] Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 335.

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

[16] Thompson and Varela, 418.

[17] Thompson and Varela, 424.

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

[19] Meteyard et. al., 790.

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

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

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

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

 

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

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

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About the Author

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same could be said for the early republic.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

The books under review here all concern power, its loss and its consolidation. They each take as their subject relations between indigenous populations and European colonizers. Zamumo’s Gifts focuses on material exchange,Revolutionary Negotiations on the political culture of diplomacy more broadly, and Settler’s Sovereignty on law and jurisdiction. They each share an abiding interest in issues of sovereignty—its meanings, its practices, and its theorization.

In Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast, Joseph M. Hall Jr. ambitiously traces the importance of gifts and trade to the exchange networks in what is now the southeastern United States. Hall takes his title from an encounter between a Native leader, Zamumo of Altahama, and a large party lead by Hernando de Soto. As that title announces, Hall offers an analysis that foregrounds Indian protagonists and practices as he convincingly argues that for much of the period we have come to call colonial, “Indians continued to insist on practices that were both older than and distinct from European logics of the market” (5).

Hall begins his book by introducing his readers to Zamumo in the spring of 1540 in the Oconee Valley (today’s central Georgia), aware of a party of foreigners a two-day’s journey away. The view from the mound atop his township included the homes, fields, and granaries of his followers, together comprising the largest town in the river valley. As Hall describes the panorama, he also describes Zamumo’s power and its limits, the world beyond Altahama, and the proximity of Ocute, a more prominent chief. The view also afforded Zamumo sight of the approaching group of strangely armed men, the absence of women potentially signaling aversion to peace.

Drawing on Spanish chronicles, Hall describes the objects exchanged and makes clear that at first meeting Zamumo and de Soto are already familiar enough with each other’s expectations to engage in meaningful gift exchange. De Soto and his party receive food and an offering left unspecified in the record. In turn, Zamumo receives a single silver feather. Hall’s interpretative feat is to unpack the spiritual and cultural meanings of the feather and its place in the local cosmology: a powerful symbol of lightness, purity, and power; originating from creatures of the sky (or the heavens); and recalling bird effigies that decorated the headdresses and graves of Zamumo’s predecessors.

The chronicles record that Zamumo asked de Soto whether he should offer him the tribute he usually sent to Ocute and note this moment as one of submission. Hall, however, reads the same moment and supplies a less transparent account: Zamumo performs a kind of subservience motivated by the hope that de Soto and Ocute would vie for his friendship and in so doing leverages his position. Gifts thus emerge as objects of power that foster and seal human relationships. This initial sketch fills in effectively over the pages of the introduction and intermittently over the course of a well-researched and beautifully written book. We gradually come to learn more about the world Zamumo occupies and shares, about its past and future.

In order to provide a long history of the politics of Mississippian exchange, Zamumo’s Gifts takes readers back to 950 C.E., about 600 years before Zamumo’s encounter with de Soto. The book ends by taking measure of the eighteenth-century re-calibrations necessary after the Yamasee War (1715-17), particularly the rise of the Creek nation. One of the volume’s particular contributions is to provide a history of what other scholars have called “the forgotten century,” the slightly documented and understudied period between the mid-sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries. Zamumo’s Gifts remains engaging and does not become unwieldy in part because the book is firmly grounded in a particular geographic territory, but also because the exchange of gifts between Zamumo and de Soto remains a touchstone and an emblem. That anecdote anchors Hall’s study of the material exchanges between and among native peoples and the Spanish, French and English in the piedmont region of Georgia and Alabama and in the colonies of Florida, Louisiana, and Carolina. Hall illuminates the southeast as a place shaped more profoundly by exchange than by warfare and slave raiding.

Rather than a story of growing dependence or acquiescence, Hall stresses instead Indian agency, autonomy and a continuity of cultural practice. Relying on archeological evidence to examine exchange during the pre-contact era ending at about 1500, Hall reconstructs webs of social connection that privilege bonds between giver and receiver over profit or particular commodities. Drawing from Marcel Mauss’ theoretical model of gift giving in which social networks are formed and structured by exchange, the trade networks which emerged did not signal the economic or political subordination of native peoples to Europeans, but rather the integration of Europeans into a political economy ordered by the “spirit of giving” (32). Thus over the course of the sixteenth century, St. Augustine becomes “the center of a new network of exchange that linked [Indian] town squares to the Atlantic outpost” (34). Crucially, this is not a story of stasis or of an older world staving off change. Hall painstakingly demonstrates that the logic of gift exchange and that of trade interpenetrate each other, changing the thinking of all trade partners in the region.

Hall narrates a dynamic history as the Mississippian southeast accommodates the Spanish in the sixteenth century as well as an increase in trade that introduces objects into wide circulation outside the rituals of diplomatic exchange; as it copes with seventeenth century English-sponsored slave raiders from the north through intertown alliances created to safeguard security and autonomy; and as communities reorganize after the Yamasee War into a new multilateral order by which towns reassert autonomy and prevent the Spanish, English, and French from enjoying any distinct advantage in the region. He also offers an account of the emergence and rise of talwas (Indian towns); of the talwa as the locus of cultural identity and cohesion; and of the networks of alliance and trade that interconnected towns across and beyond the southeast. Gift exchange linked southeastern Indian towns to each other (creating “bonds that held their town together” and “in turn influenced exchanges between towns”) and native peoples to Europeans (22). The maps of the region that Hall provides as the narratives proceeds chronologically are invaluable, as is a glossary of place names that often delineates the groups of towns that form confederations better known as the Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, or Catawba.

 

Zamumo’s Gifts finds a corollary in Kathleen Duval’sNative Ground (2006), though that study focuses on the Arkansas River Valley to the west of the territory Hall investigates. They share a methodology that mines an array of archival, archeological, and anthropological materials, a commitment to placing indigenous people at the center of their narratives, and an emphasis on Indian agency. Hall’s history of the colonial Southeast does not treat Indian history as distinct or something apart from colonial or imperial history. He sustains an elegant and nuanced accounting of the various players in the Southeast who “fashion the fabric of empires” by insisting throughout on trade as a mutual relationship (5).

Hall’s multilateral world becomes Leonard J. Sadosky’s international one—”a variety of sovereign polities” that include Christian Europe, the “Barbary Regencies” of Islamic North Africa, and the indigenous peoples of North America (3). While relations between the United States and North Africa receive only passing mention in the volume that follows, Sadosky reminds us of the traditional divide historians have maintained between European diplomacy and the American Indian diplomacy of the United States. In Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America, Sadosky ambitiously sets out to consider these relations together, announcing that his book is as much about “how the United States came to be” as it is “about how many of the powerful and independent American Indian nations of eastern North America came to be much less than they had once been” (8). He consistently resists any lingering isolationist strains in the historiography of the new nation and its diplomatic relations.

There is much to admire in Sadosky’s examination of the international context within which the United States emerges. His work locates itself at the intersection of various kinds of historiographies that include that of U.S. diplomacy, American Indian diplomacy, the law of nations, intellectual history, political history, and political science. It also draws on international relations theory. These influences are evident in the language he employs as he balances the overlapping frameworks that organize relations between “nations,” whether between European states (the Westphalian system), between Indian nations and European empires (the borderlands system), or between the thirteen American states under the Articles of Confederations as well as the states under the U.S. Constitution (the Philadelphian system).

Sadosky takes as a given the Westphalian system (what others have called the international system or the community of nations), and it structures many of his arguments. Sadosky concisely explains that in the wake of the Thirty Year’s War and with the 1648 treaty of Westphalia that formally ends the conflict, early modern European nation-states organized themselves into a system rooted in the inviolability of state sovereignty, in territorial integrity, and in the (legal) equality of states. The Westphalian system encourages cooperation and solutions to conflict through negotiations that would follow a set of rules meant to protect the sovereignty of each state. This legal fiction is at the heart of the law of nations under which all states agree to negotiate with each other as equals regardless of the inequalities of power that do in fact exist. It is in essence a gentleman’s agreement that under pressure risks being abandoned. Challenges to the order imposed by the law of nations thus tend to come in the form of “raison d’état,” which pits self-preservation against the good of the whole.

Sadosky outlines how in the process of colonization in the Americas, Europeans attempt to extend the Westphalian system to govern their putative new domains. When the United States seeks recognition of its new sovereign status, it too seeks a place within the Westphalian system (not its rejection or even reform). When the thirteen American states combine into a union, the result is a subsystem of the Westphalian system. It is a capacious model capable of assimilating a great deal. Sadosky calls differences from the Westphalian model deviations, signaling that he too cedes to the normalizing rhetorical power of the law of nations (7). Yet the terms “the borderlands system,” and “the Philadelphian system” suggest difference as much as affinity. They reflect the resilience of regional customary norms, of divergent ways of understanding sovereignty and power, and of resistance to absorption into a universal model.

Sadosky is at his best offering a history of how the “United States are made,” and of the central and in many ways determining role that diplomacy plays in the founding and establishment of the United States and its government. The bulk of the book is dedicated to the process of securing recognition of the federal union as a sovereign member of the community of nation (acceptance into the Westphalian system); to outlining the limitations of the Articles of Confederation in the international context; and to the new solutions and problems posed by the Constitution to the federal union, to the thirteen individual states, and to relations with Europe and Native America. The ways in which sovereignty remains contested and divided between the federal government and each of the individual states is at the fore of Sadosky’s analysis. He does not allow his readers to forget the frailty of the federal union.

The final two chapters take up the consequences of U.S. independence for Native American nations in the administrations of Washington and Jefferson particularly. Here, Sadosky amplifies and refines the claims he makes in the introduction, that as the United States sought acceptance into the Westphalian system, the U.S. also sought the exclusion of Native American nations from it, desiring an end to the borderlands system that implicitly recognized the sovereignty of indigenous peoples. The emphasis on the shared, divided, and contested sovereignty between the federal and state governments resonates as Sadosky makes clear that in matters concerning relations with the Creeks for example, Georgia commissioners demanded a voice along with that of the federal commissioners, and that each group of commissioners made arguments about with whom the treaty-making prerogative lay (171). Commerce and consumption of “European goods and American Indian lands” come to dominate the diplomacy of the Jefferson administration after the Louisiana Purchase and the incorporation of the Mississippi River. Proposals for programs of voluntary Indian removal (“exchange of territory”) begin to emerge, giving the history Sadosky tells a sense of regrettable inevitability (192).

Revolutionary Negotiations begins in 1729 with an anecdote about a Cherokee village chief made “Emperor of the Cherokee” by Sir Alexander Cunning, a minor Scots nobleman who proceeds with no formal authority in the province of South Carolina (13). It ends with an epilogue entitled “The Cherokee Lawyer,” about the Baltimore attorney William Wirt, perhaps best known as federal prosecutor in Aaron Burr’s 1807 treason trial, hired by the Cherokee to defend their nation’s sovereignty in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831). That trial resulted in the Supreme Court decision designating the Cherokee nation a “domestic dependent nation,” stripping it of legal status as a foreign state. Key in the developing relations between the Cherokee and those who settled among them, both are episodes filled with indigenous actors. Yet, in this account they remain animated by dramatic personae neither of whom is Cherokee.

Sadosky investigates diplomacy in the twilight of the imperial world that Daniel Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country convincingly demonstrated made “the coexistence of Indians and European colonials possible” on the North American continent. Lisa Ford’s Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836, covers, in part, similar historical territory. Ford’s emphasis, however, is comparative, focusing on settlers in the state of Georgia and the British colony of New South Wales in Australia. Such comparative work is still relatively rare. Ford offers a parallel analysis of these two disparate places and a novel model for thinking about Anglophone settler colonies.

Acknowledging distinctions between Georgia and New South Wales, Ford narrows in on their striking similarities as she argues for a new form and practice of sovereignty that emerges in both places at about the same time. Before 1830, settlers in both places accepted the persistence of customary law that had evolved through the kinds of negotiations and exchanges described by Hall and Sadosky. After legal cases in 1830 and 1836, settler (local) authorities asserted a new jurisdiction, over space rather than subjects, which circumvents and denies native sovereignty. In this account the law trumps diplomacy and becomes a mechanism for dispossession. It also weakens the authority that the nation or federal government, in the case of Georgia, or the British empire in the case of New South Wales, exercises over distant settlers and quickens the pace of territorial expansion.

The term “perfect settler sovereignty” describes the condition in which states exercise jurisdictional control over all peoples living within a defined territory. It effectively ends the possibility of a middle ground, legal or otherwise, that the first half of the book describes by making it difficult for federal or imperial mediation between settlers and indigenous peoples. The moment arrives definitively in 1830 when a convention of judges in Georgia ruled that George Tassell could be tried and executed by the state for the murder “of another Cherokee on Cherokee land within the territorial boundaries of Georgia” (1).

Ford’s great contribution to settler studies and to early American studies is to reconstruct the moment in which sovereignty is re-imagined through a redefinition of acts of indigenous violence as crime, and a strict delineation of jurisdiction (sites of legal authority) within territorial boundaries. The first part of Settler Sovereignty describes the plurality that presided into the nineteenth century in both locales. Incidents of violence were subject first to shared codes of reciprocity and retaliation. The most egregious acts of violence were resolved, when they could be resolved, through diplomacy. Tensions increased between the state of Georgia and the federal government, and between officials in London and in Sydney, over sovereignty and jurisdiction. By the 1820s and ’30s, local courts increasingly treated indigenous theft and violence as crime and not, as it were, as a diplomatic incident.

Ford’s innovative study, like Sadosky’s, is richly archival and skillfully wields the evidence she finds about settler communities in Georgia and New South Wales in order to examine their intensely local histories. The book’s much more encompassing subtitle, “Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia,” however, encourages generalization from the local to the whole, an extrapolation that seems unwarranted. Settler Sovereignty,a predominantly legal story, and Revolutionary Negotiations, Sadosky’s more traditional diplomatic history, complement each other well. William Wirt, Sadosky’s Cherokee lawyer, is in fact the attorney who takes up George Tassell’s appeal in 1830. Ford’s story does not simply pick up where Sadosky’s ends. In many ways Sadosky’s study provides an expansive context to Ford’s tightly disciplined assessment of the law as an exercise of power. In order to convey a sense of what his diplomats were compelled to negotiate, Sadosky must take measure of geopolitics, of economic demands, and of the explosive demographic shifts that drove the confiscation of land, the dispossession of the Indian nations in the southeast and the assault on indigenous rights. When Ford takes full measure of economic, social and geographical factors (in the section “Federal Roads in Indian country”), and when she confronts the brutality of colonialism and its simultaneous recourse to the law and to violence (in, for example, the killing of two aboriginal boys by a local constable in the section “Tales of Peril on the Hawkesbury”), her analysis is riveting (67-73; 97-103).

The book’s focus on criminal jurisdiction clarifies the legal contest over sovereignty between the center and peripheries of nations and empires. Her concern with the increasingly prevalent practice of linking sovereignty to jurisdiction and territory, however, obscures spaces outside the courtroom where Indian and indigenous agency and autonomy may have been practiced in Georgia and New South Wales. Indigenous voices appear and are heard in both Ford’s and Sadosky’s accounts, but they seldom control the terms of conversation.

Ford’s careful and rigorous attention to the establishment of settler sovereignty through an aggregation of court cases and legal arguments can blind readers to this moment as transitional. However transformative, such a moment opens as well as closes possibilities, and one wonders about residual and new ways of conceptualizing sovereignty. While the three books under review are each important contributions to overlapping as well as disparate fields, taken together they generate questions and provoke thinking about the category of sovereignty. Ford throws “sovereignty” into relief as crucial to both Sadosky’s and Hall’s work. Revolutionary Negotiations is filled with evidence of the challenges posed by the series of Atlantic revolutions, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars to sovereignty as codified in the law of nations and as practiced and protected within the Westphalian system. Nonetheless, sovereignty as such remains relatively unexamined. Sadosky does provide George III’s assessment of the attributes of sovereignty: a military force; the right to tax; and legislative, executive, and judicial powers (69). The king’s list does not include diplomacy, and it may be that as the putative head of an established state, he takes that power for granted.

Strikingly, the Declaration of Independence is almost solely concerned with diplomatic attributes of sovereignty, as it declares: “that as Free and Independent States, the [United States] have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce.” Other facets of sovereignty are summarized as “all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” Following Jefferson, it is largely sovereignty as a state’s right to practice diplomacy that preoccupies Sadosky. In accounting for the “Foundation of America,” Sadosky productively dwells on the divided and competing claims to sovereignty in need of near constant negotiation between the federal and state governments. It matters less whether that sovereignty reflects dominion over citizen-subjects or territory, as it does for Ford. InRevolutionary Negotiations, the question is less about what sovereignty is, but rather where and with whom it lies.

“Sovereignty” is a word that seldom appears in Zamumo’s Gifts, though Hall is deeply concerned with the exercise of authority and the wielding of power. By my count, “sovereignty” appears three times, twice in quotation. The first quotation is taken from the work of Creek literary scholar Craig Womack, who uses the term in relation to creation stories. Womack contends that by telling their own history, Creeks “are setting themselves apart as a nation of people with distinct worldviews that deserve to be taken seriously. This is an important exercise of sovereignty” (31). It is this sense that Hall echoes in his final paragraph where he asserts the “indomitable autonomy of the talwas, clans, and the larger Creek nation,” explaining that though the “Creek remain colonized, they are still capable of exchanging stories. This exchange, and the sovereignty it asserts, is perhaps Zamumo’s greatest gift” (171). Unremarked, but deserving of further reflection, is the redefinition presented here of sovereignty (or rather the refinement of sovereignty) as self-determination. Sovereignty comes to mean the power to insist on an alternate point of view disseminated through the exchange of stories.

More broadly still, the rich archives excavated by Hall, Sadosky, and Ford might be fruitfully read alongside the recent critical work that responds to or takes up philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s writing on sovereignty and biopolitics. Of these works, Mark Rifkin’s essay “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples,” is most on point (2009). That sovereignty is the subject, implicitly or explicitly, of such meticulous and imaginative projects promises to provoke our critical and historical conversations in new and probing ways.

“Skin and Bones: Tattoos in the Life of the American Sailor,” Independence Seaport Museum, Philadelphia. Curator: Craig Bruns. Reviewed at Mystic Seaport: The Museum of America and the Sea, Mystic, Connecticut.

To escape the overwhelming heat of Tidewater Virginia in late May 1862, the crewmen aboard the USS Monitorwent swimming. It was in moments like these that sailors like George S. Geer could admire their shipmates’ tattoos. Geer, who hailed from the Lower East Side of New York City, was new to the Navy, having enlisted after the start of the Civil War. Since tattoos were uncommon among landlubbers, Geer found these tattoos worth mentioning to his wife back home:

…I wish you could see the bodys of some of these old sailors: they are regular Picture Books. [They] have India Ink pricked all over their body. One has a Snake coiled around his leg, some have splendid done pieces of Coats of Arms of states, American Flags, and most all have the Crusifiction of Christ on some part of their Body…

No matter what the tattoo expressed, sailors wore their identities and philosophies on their bodies. These ephemeral records amount to a unique if underappreciated collection of American folk art and a window into the lives of a group of well-travelled working-class men.

The “Skin and Bones: Tattoos in the Life of the American Sailor” exhibit celebrates sailors’ decorated bodies from colonial days through the present. The exhibit originated at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia in 2009, where it was researched by curator Craig Bruns. Mystic Seaport picked up the exhibit, which contains a rich collection of tools, photographs, drawings, flash (tattoo art), and other artifacts. “Skin and Bones” invites visitors to contemplate what tattoos meant to the sailors who made the decision to use their skin as a canvas.

While sailors’ memoirs are relatively rare, their tattoos provide a way to understand their lives, beliefs, and identities. Their bodies were their records. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tattoos were as much about self-expression as they were about having a unique way to identify a sailor’s body should he be lost at sea or impressed by the British navy. The best source for early American tattoos is the protection papers issued following a 1796 congressional act to safeguard American seamen from impressment. These proto-passports catalogued tattoos alongside birthmarks, scars, race, and height. Using simple techniques and tools, tattoo artists in the early republic typically worked on board ships using anything available as pigments, even gunpowder and urine. Men marked their arms and hands with initials of themselves and loved ones, significant dates, symbols of the seafaring life, liberty poles, crucifixes, and other symbols.

The difficulty with this historical source, of course, is that unless it was replicated in a painting, drawing, or photograph, the tattoo was buried with the sailor. As folk art, tattoos are intrinsically ephemeral. The “Skin and Bones” exhibit works creatively to get around this issue by substituting other sailor crafts and artifacts when images of the original tattoos are not available. Alongside the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century protection papers are scrimshaw, wooden boxes, and linen badges whose artwork likely resembled the tattoos. Flash books, cataloguing a tattoo artist’s collection of images, and photographs make it easier to represent the tattoos of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The exhibit has some of the oldest flash books from the turn of the twentieth century on display, by the artists C.H. Fellowes and C.V. Brownell. While the original flash books are kept in a protective case, the exhibit has reproductions for visitors to thumb through and get a sense of the range of images available to sailors, from the patriotic to the downright bawdy.

A big turning point for tattoos came in 1891 with Samuel O’Reilly’s invention of the electric tattoo machine. Not only was the process made less painful but designs could be more elaborate. This is evident in sailors’ tattoos commemorating the Spanish-American War, which included amazingly detailed depictions of the explosion of the USS Maine. Many sailors who participated in the 1898 Battle of Manila Bay also tattooed likenesses of Commodore George Dewey and the USS Olympia on their bodies. This tradition of honoring battles continued through the World Wars. As tattoos became widespread among recruits, they also entered mainstream culture and gained broader meaning and appeal. The tattoos that adorn today’s inked Americans can trace their roots back to the well-traveled sailors who were likewise struggling to express their identity and mark their kinship to others.

The tattoos that decorated sailors carried many messages. They could be superstitious, such as the chicken and pigs on sailors’ feet that kept them from drowning (livestock typically survived shipwrecks), or commemorative of milestones, such as crossing the equator or traveling 5,000 miles. Certain tattoos were badges of honor, and a sailor who got a tattoo prematurely could face reprimand from shipmates. Tattoos also expressed sailors’ pride in their career and a unity with fellow seamen. They indicated worldliness, honored loved ones at home and friends onboard, paid tribute to religions, and symbolized masculinity. The exhibit does a great job of cataloguing the different meanings sailors gave to tattoos in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with written explanations and a documentary, but more could have been done to look back and see how these meanings have changed from the early republic through the present.

The “Skin and Bones” exhibit has the ability to draw in a broad audience—from those fascinated with early maritime or social history to tattoo enthusiasts who might be interested in seeing vintage designs. The exhibit is family friendly, incorporating a virtual tattoo booth, where an artist explains the significance of the visitor’s selection while the image is projected onto their hand, and a chance to draw your own tattoo on a sailor cut-out. Though the exhibit was born in Philadelphia, the Mystic Seaport iteration incorporates the work of local Connecticut tattoo artists in a constantly looping slideshow. Unfortunately, the slideshow’s placement is lost amidst the nineteenth-century materials, breaking up the otherwise chronological narrative of the layout.

More than anything else, the modestly sized “Skin and Bones” exhibit gives visitors a taste of the vast and underappreciated epidermal archive. The exhibit’s mere existence is evidence that tattoos’ status is rising in American culture. No longer sideshow oddities, they can now be found in the exhibition halls of respected museums. This is an exhibit for anyone interested in American folk art, tattoos, and the lives and culture of sailors.

Editor’s Note: Although the exhibit has closed, interested readers might wish to consult the catalogue, Skin & Bones—Tattoos in the Life of the American Sailor, which contains most of the images from the exhibit along with the complete exhibit text, and supplemental essays and interviews. Skin & Bones—Tattoos in the Life of the American Sailor is available through the Museum Shop at Independence Seaport Museum, 215-413-8615 orcneapolitan@phillyseaport.org

How did Americans look at one another in the years after the Revolution and on into the antebellum era? What were they trying to see? Or again: How did Americans furnish their houses during these years? How did the objects they placed in their rooms and on their walls actually express and shape how Americans understood themselves? These can seem subtle questions, inviting us to explore the young and maturing Republic less in terms of formal institutions, electoral politics, and overt conflicts than through what might be characterized as textures of history. But explored sensitively, textures can have wide implications and disclose vital meanings. And two recent studies go some way to demonstrate that grappling with visual discernment and the process of filling homes can in truth tell us something important about what was happening in this time of national origination and consolidation. It can open new historical terrains.