The title of Tom Cutterham’s book, Gentleman Revolutionaries, reflects the core paradox of the American Revolution—why did a group of elite colonial whigs revolt against the British Empire? White British North Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world in the eighteenth century. The revolutionary leaders generally were not drawn from the ranks of the downtrodden with nothing to lose. They had their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” at stake, as Cutterham notes in the opening (1). Why would these gentlemen risk all to create a republic, a government that would likely collapse, given the historical tendency of republican governments to fail? Cutterham’s approach to this paradox is not to study the ideological, political, economic, or social forces that pushed these gentlemen to revolt in 1776. Rather, he explores the republican order they sought to create after the Revolutionary War had ended. He focuses on the 1780s, a decade neglected by recent historians, myself included, who have tended either to study the resistance and revolution of the 1760s and 1770s or the political partisanship of the 1790s. Cutterham contended that “The American Revolution was led by men who set themselves above the ordinary, common man” (1). Status, not ideology or rights, motivated these revolutionaries. Obsessed with status, revolutionary gentlemen aimed to strengthen their newly acquired political authority by promoting social, cultural, and economic practices and associations that emphasized hierarchy and obedience in the 1780s.

Particularly welcome to historians of the American Revolution is the book’s long overdue reassessment of the Society of the Cincinnati, the controversial association created by Continental Army officers after the Revolutionary War. Chapter one adeptly argues that the officers intended the society to maintain the fraternal bonds that they had formed with each other during the war, while preserving their status as a distinct class of officers, set apart from rank and file soldiers. Cutterham illustrates here and throughout the book how this process of elite formation was two-fold: egalitarianism shaped relationships among the officer corps, but hierarchy and obedience defined the officers’ relationships with those below them. By initially allowing the eldest sons of officers to inherit their fathers’ status, the Society of the Cincinnati attempted to create a republican hereditary elite. Many contemporaries like Aedanus Burke argued that such a monarchical and aristocratic ethos was incompatible with republican government, but former officers like Alexander Hamilton and Henry Knox believed that the army represented a model for a republican order based on virtue, sacrifice, and hierarchy. Indeed, the Society of the Cincinnati subsequently became an effective military force against popular insurrections, as Cutterham points out in chapter five. That chapter examines the widespread discontent with elite authority that occurred by the late 1780s; in New England, conflicts over debt and paper money even pushed poor farmers to take extra-legal action during Shays’ Rebellion. Elites across the nation viewed this unrest as licentiousness and anarchy. The Society of the Cincinnati, led by member Benjamin Lincoln, played a role in suppressing Shays’ Rebellion, while other gentlemen like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton turned to political means—the Constitutional Convention—to secure elite interests against the threat of popular revolt.

Another recurring theme of the book is the failure of many elite projects due to the United States’ constrained finances during and after the war. For instance, gentlemen like Noah Webster, Joel Barlow, and Benjamin Rush advocated for an ambitious agenda of education reforms and ecclesiastical plans. They sought to use schools, universities, and literary culture to uphold their authority and teach the value of obedience to the common people. Even churches could be used to stabilize the fragile republican order, many like Rush believed, because religion promoted piety and morality among the people. Nonetheless, Cutterham emphasizes how the need to pay war debts thwarted real progress on expanding educational institutions and programs during the 1780s. Other projects of the revolutionary elites were not necessarily failures, but rather remained unfinished and inconclusive. Gentlemen aimed to advance their own “commercial view of justice” based on property and contract rights (79). In chapter three, Cutterham illustrates how elites regarded the courts as a counterbalance to the expanded powers of legislative bodies. Elites especially viewed state assemblies, which were too prone to popular enthusiasm, with suspicion. Instead, gentlemen sought to constrain the powers of democratic legislatures with, in Hamilton’s words, “the eternal law of justice and reason” (92). Yet, establishing these universal principles of justice and reason proved difficult in a post-revolutionary society that had experienced years of intense polarization and warfare. For example, Cutterham stresses that in considering the confiscation of Loyalist property, South Carolina elites like John Rutledge were torn between their desire to protect property rights and the social conflicts and material considerations that pushed the legislature toward revenge and a policy of confiscation. Overall, elites “aimed to limit, as much as they could, legislative interference with contract and property,” but the legislatures, subject to democratic pressures from the people whom they represented, were not always able to pursue such an agenda (92). 

Not only did revolutionary elites hope to enshrine commercial values in the republic’s new justice system, they also sought to develop financial institutions and banks to benefit the commercial classes. Cutterham focuses particularly on the sectional dimensions of this issue, for it was eastern gentlemen like George Washington who wanted “to extend their control into the hinterlands of the west” (122). This control was not just political and ideological, but economic. At a time when a strong national identity did not exist in the United States, elites believed that commerce would unite the regions west of the Appalachian mountains to the East. Banks could help finance western expansion, credit, and land speculation, but proposals for such institutions like the Bank of North America, the project of Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton, gave rise to intense sectional conflicts. Westerners increasingly banded together in force to resist such efforts.

The greatest contribution of Gentlemen Revolutionaries is its emphasis on the dynamism of the conflicts and debates that shaped American society immediately after the Revolutionary War. Those debates concerned fundamental questions about power and authority, as Americans argued about who would rule (not just politically, but socially and economically) in the new republic. Cutterham’s book convincingly argues that revolutionary elites attempted to consolidate their power through cultural, financial, and religious institutions and associations, but other Americans, many of them non-elite, ceaselessly fought against this process of elite formation through print culture, extra-legal protests, and armed revolt. This resistance convinced many elites of the need for a stronger Constitution to limit the power of the people over the republic. Cutterham’s narrative of the movement toward the Constitutional Convention thus complements recent work by Terry Bouton, Woody Holton, and others, who have emphasized the undemocratic nature of America’s constitutional settlement of 1787-88. Cutterham’s argument for the elite underpinnings of the Federal Constitution is not new, but his examination of the social and cultural background to the Convention greatly advances and strengthens this particular interpretation.

By the end of the decade, gentlemen revolutionaries had failed to secure their vision of a new republican order through social and cultural means, so they turned to politics. The full significance of this constitutional turn of 1787-88, however, remains unexamined in the book. From Cutterham’s discussion, it seems that during the 1780s gentlemen devoted their intellectual and organizational energies to establishing associations and institutions that operated outside of government, but did this emphasis on non-state activities occur at the expense of strengthening the Confederation itself? How was this focus on the extra-governmental sphere an outgrowth of the revolutionary experience of governance by committee, association, and convention? Did the failure of these social and cultural methods of establishing elite authority push elites toward the Constitutional Convention even more than the perceived weaknesses of the Confederation government? Ultimately, Cutterham’s work reveals how state formation became crucial to elite formation by the late 1780s, with gentlemen revolutionaries creating a new framework of government to uphold their status rather than relying on softer forms of social and cultural power. As with their former attempts to expand social and cultural influence, this process was two-fold: it entailed not only building a government to constrain the people’s authority, but also elevating gentlemen revolutionaries above the people. Cutterham’s thought-provoking work effectively highlights how this process of creating a new republican order centered on the concept of status.

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

Michelle Orihel is associate professor of history at Southern Utah University.

Why would Molly McDonald, a prominent Choctaw woman, place her eleven-year-old son in the care of American government official Silas Dinsmoor, a man who had already expressed his judgment that Choctaws were inferior? And why would Dinsmoor readily accept Molly’s son James McDonald into his home? Untangling this contradiction, that McDonald’s and Dinsmoor’s seemingly opposing interests would converge in McDonald’s son, is the goal of Dawn Peterson’s new monograph Indians in the Family (1). Peterson finds that the arrangement between McDonald and Dinsmoor was not so unusual in the antebellum period. Many indigenous families chose to send their children, most frequently boys, to live and learn among white families. Native families hoped that these sons would gain English literacy and some fluency in American culture and perhaps forge some bonds of affinity or obligation with their white benefactors. For their part, white patriarchs such as Dinsmoor “framed their actions as a part of a broader initiative on the part of their new republic to assimilate Indian people into its expanding territorial borders” (2). Not surprisingly, these goals came into conflict. Native sons used their educations to protect indigenous sovereignty and to oppose American efforts to seize Native territory. Americans then accused such Natives of not being “real Indians” who pursued their own personal interests rather than what was best for Native people.

Peterson organizes her study into nine largely chronological chapters that follow several families and their experiences with adoption. Her first chapter describes the emerging racial hierarchy in the years after the American Revolution. People such as Thomas Jefferson made judgments about the place of various categories of people in the social order. In chapter two Peterson shows that Native leaders such as Seneca chief Cornplanter turned to the placement of their children in white households to create kinship ties and diplomatic relationships to protect Native sovereignty following the American Revolution. The third chapter traces the contours of Silas Dinsmoor’s life as well as the social and cultural practices he encountered among the Choctaws. Peterson sketches an overview of Molly McDonald’s life in the next chapter to further illuminate why some Southeastern Natives chose to send their children into white homes. In matrilineal societies such as the Choctaws, fathers were benevolent kin who did not make many demands of their children. Rather, maternal kin had greater responsibility for a child’s education and upbringing and a greater claim to a child’s loyalty. Peterson suggests McDonald may have viewed Dinsmoor in this light. Thus, McDonald likely did not see her son James’s placement with Dinsmoor as a threat to her traditional authority over her child.

Chapter five centers on the household of future President Andrew Jackson. Peterson reframes the acclaimed “Indian fighter’s” decision to incorporate the Creek boy Lyncoya into his household as similar to Native captivity practices in which Natives adopted the child of an enemy. In a departure from traditional Native practice, however, Jackson gifted Lyncoya to his young son. Peterson’s sixth chapter describes Superintendent of Indian Trade Thomas McKenney’s strategies for civilizing Native peoples such as the factory system, in which the federal government traded manufactured goods for hides and furs; federally supported mission schools to educate Native children; and apprenticeship to further train them. Peterson poses the question of whether James McDonald’s time with McKenney was “apprenticeship or kinship” and concludes that it was the former: “There was never any talk of inheritance or property rights, of McDonald’s eventual return to the McKenney household for holidays or family events” (195).

Next Peterson deploys James McDonald as an example of the many Native young men educated within white families who returned to Native communities and served as diplomats. Much to the chagrin of officials such as McKenney, these young men often became staunch defenders of Native sovereignty and land rights rather than allies to American imperialism. Peterson also asserts the centrality of property rights in slaves of African descent to McDonald’s defense of Choctaw sovereignty. Chapter eight outlines some of the provisions of the Choctaw constitution and conditions at the Choctaw Academy. The constitution included prohibitions on interracial sex between Choctaws or whites and enslaved people that suggest that the Choctaws had much in common with their white neighbors; however, the Choctaws also reserved the right to determine citizenship and preserved Choctaw women’s property rights, both of which affirmed the nation’s sovereignty. Peterson contends that young men attending the Choctaw Academy at Blue Springs, Kentucky, tested the limits of masculine authority in their assumption of sexual access to the enslaved black women in Richard Mentor Johnson’s household. Johnson did not oppose indigenous men’s rights to the bodies of enslaved black women; rather, he opposed their access to his property.

The final chapter of Indians in the Family turns to Removal policy. Native men educated in American settings often worked to defend indigenous sovereignty, which Peterson argues created a shift in thinking: Natives who adopted American practices regarding property, slavery, and governance were no longer seen as positive and exemplary by American officials. Instead figures such as Andrew Jackson began describing such Natives as not “truly Indians” (279). Thus, ironically, the presence of educated Native young men who pursued legal action in American courts, addressed American legislative bodies, and created written constitutions did not confirm the success of American acculturation efforts; rather, it threatened American efforts to seize Native land.

Peterson posits that “the politics of adoption took on singular importance, becoming a means to define citizenship within a slaveholding republic and to undermine indigenous resistance struggles based upon pan-Indian unity movements and transatlantic commercial, trade, and military alliances with European empires” (8). She defines adoption to encompass a variety of practices of differing duration aimed at incorporating Native people in the American polity (3). Thus, Greenwood Leflore’s five years with the Donly family in Nashville, Lyncoya’s life with Andrew Jackson’s family until Lyncoya’s death at the age of 16, and James McDonald’s time with Quakers, Dinsmoor, and Thomas McKenney are all forms of adoption. The differences in these situations, however, warrant more discussion. Moreover, in the Southeastern native communities that Peterson focuses on, formal adoption transformed an outsider into an insider with clan membership and all of the attendant rights and obligations. James McDonald’s mother, Molly, and Greenwood Leflore’s parents did not imagine their sons losing their clan affiliations because of the time spent living with American families. Similarly, as Peterson points out, many of the white families who “adopted” such sons saw the experience as temporary and did not fully incorporate Indian youths as kin. In some ways, Americans used the language of adoption to obfuscate that kin was not being created at all.

Peterson uses a variety of sources in this work including the papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, personal papers, and official correspondence from the Office of Indian Affairs and the Secretary of War. She focuses largely on Southeastern Natives, especially the Choctaws, and bookends this study with the American Revolution and Removal. In the end, Peterson argues that Americans used ideas about adopting Native youths in their households to “mask the violence of U. S. territorial expansion, Indian dispossession, and African American servitude,” while for Native people the practice was a way to protect Native sovereignty (312). These cross-purposes came to a tragic head in the forced Removal of indigenous peoples from the American Southeast.

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

Fay A. Yarbrough is an associate professor of history at Rice University.

Coming to terms with Theo Davis’s rich and compelling new book, Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman, requires a reversal of common assumptions about the status and function of ornament and, with it, of poetry. For in Davis’s conception, poetry has a fundamentally ornamental purpose. In Davis’s hands, this notion is far from trivializing; it is a view that critically illuminates the poetics of her chosen authors. Ornament in this study is less a noun than a verb; it is a movement, or a gesture, as indicated by the introductory chapter, “To Ornament.” “To ornament” is to offer something to one’s attention, to single it out, and to suggest and perform a relation to it, leaving a formal trace of the encounter. Movement is also captured in the sense of being drawn “to” ornament as a mark of attention and esteem on which we consequently place our attention, extending the ornamental gesture.  

Ornament, then, is recuperated as a dynamic index of relationality, the marking and drawing of a response. But ornament, Davis cautions, is never the thing itself—it “need not fuse to presence or convey it, it can simply go along with it” (129). The work of poetry, like that of ornament, is not trivial; it is an essential accompaniment to the immediate experience of the world. 

It is of course a lot of fun to declare, despite their own seeming disdain for ornament, and despite reams of serious canon-making arguments, that Whitman is, after all, a poet who troubles himself about his ornaments or that Thoreau is himself an ornament to nature (as in the chapter title, “Beautiful Thoreau: An Ornament to Nature”). But Davis avoids flippancy toward her poets, though critics come in for some schooling. Davis’s method is cantankerously ahistoricist—it does not desire to embed these poets in their political or social context, a method Davis holds to be reductive of their projects. But Ornamental Aesthetics does devise and draw on an intellectual and aesthetic genealogy of its own—in Greek and Renaissance poetics, including theories of the lyric, with dives into the phenomenology of Heidegger. Recourse to this archive leavens each chapter, from an introduction to ornamental aesthetics, to chapters devoted to each of the three authors. This serves in quite salient ways to illuminate both the theory of ornament that Davis assiduously recovers and the aesthetic rationale of each body of work under consideration. If this course in poetics sounds dry and old-school, prepare to be convinced otherwise. Aesthetics, poetry, and literature are rigorously and even passionately defended as necessary accompaniments to human existence in, and with, the world. 

Focusing on the quality of relation performed between poetry and the world it approaches, particularly the effects of style and address, Davis urges us to see anew the aesthetic work of poetry to relate, notice, and attend, and she re-litigates the ethics of doing so. She finds that poetry marks a site of snagged, even aggravated attention in Thoreau’s Journal; of glancing perception and recognition in Dickinson’s poetry; and of contact and honorific adornment in Whitman’s. Reading their poetry as seeking relation with the world rather than representing or interpreting it attunes us to primary registers of their work that have been obscured by the way we read.  

Ultimately it is “the quality of accompaniment” Davis brings to her own readings of these poets as she assiduously attends to their poetic projects that yields the strongest demonstration of her claims (192). The chapter on Thoreau is particularly evocative. Jettisoning notions of any narrative logic or informing interpretation, Davis reads aesthetically, attending to the “unprecedented art of seeing, being affected, and knowing” that we find in Thoreau’s Journal (39). In one example after another, we come to Thoreau’s “caught up, engaged moments of looking” (72)—often he is touching, moving, or gathering, and so placing his hands on the thing he looks at. Davis stays with such moments of contact—Thoreau’s impressions simultaneously on and of nature—refusing to regret them as human interference or appropriation. Against environmentalist and new materialist readings, Davis asserts Thoreau’s “nature” is a play of forces acting and responding, and Thoreau’s mental and physical encounters with it are not set apart from nature as an intruding agency, but are one of the forces within it. The traces of his impressions on the snow, on the bent or arranged leaf, in the flash of wing from the flushed duck, in the gathered egg, are “forms created by the exertion of impacts” and “capable of further impacting the mind that is attending to them” (71). Thoreau’s transfer of impressions into the Journal, like the transfer of design onto a textile, marks the ornamentality of his work and extends his “gesture of crowning attention” onto new ground (61). 

Davis refuses either traditional regret for Dickinson’s “rococo” side, or recent readings of Dickinson’s art as grounded in material craft (127). Instead, Dickinson’s poetics are described as “smatter[ing]” thought across fields where “images or ideas are posed” and temporarily “lit” with the poet’s attention (121, 91). What we experience in her poetry, in the drift, the glancing, the flickering of attention as it rests, briefly, on objects, then flutters away is “the instability of perception” and its “quick, sparkling temporality” (120). In Dickinson, these moments on the verge of seeing or grasping are as close as we come to a necessarily unrepresentable truth; they are a kind of exhilarating essence of human experience, and Dickinson marks them with poetic quickness and light, and frequently studs them with imagery that itself betokens ornament. This reading leads to a central claim about ornament: “far from being what must be stripped away to see presence, ornament is what we can see at all in the face of Being: it is what survives in relation to presence” (127). Davis’s attention to Dickinson’s odd orthography in using “opon” for “upon” yields the insight that there is close connection between placing “upon,” a gesture of ornamenting and poetic attention, and “opening” onto awareness or coming near a world of presence (102). Davis thereby argues that Dickinson’s poetics cannot be anchored to a context or material substrate, because such effervescent place-ing makes any grounding for experience “fugitive” (102). 

Davis’s reading of ornamental aesthetics as primarily gestural—as overtures of attending, recognition and appreciation—pay off in her reading of Whitman’s poetics as invested in a structure of address rather than a politics of representation. Accompaniment—coming and going along—is something that Whitman’s poetry commands his reader to do at every turn, but in this reading it is furthermore the ornamental desire of his poetry to accompany the world with praise and adornment. His primary gestures of laying on, whether of hands on bodies, arms on shoulder, or lines upon lines, is a mode of bestowing rather than laying bare. Drawing on concepts in classic rhetoric and lyric commemoration, Davis’s Whitman notices and praises decorous modes of behavior, styling his poetics not as embracing the indecent but as extending the appropriate. In this vein, Whitman pays homage not universally, to every single creature (as this would confer no distinction), but democratically, to objects that have not previously received such honors. This Whitman adorns rather than undresses, and confers distinctions rather than leveling them. 

For all its extolling of the ornamental arts of accompaniment, Ornamental Aesthetics keeps company with few critics. The polemical nature of its defenses, the diversity of paths with which it parts ways, and the frequency of such partings seem a deep part of the engine that drives the book’s innovation. Davis slices through Gordian knots that have been the recent agon of academics. At times, however, the body count can clutter the fresh vista. The debate with Dickinson’s materialist critics seems particularly fraught, likely because those critics have of late done so much to challenge the way we read and the way we define poetry, two prongs of Davis’s own challenge. Davis obviously must defend her use of lyric convention against those who suggest that its importation to Dickinson’s poetry is a distorting modernist back-formation, but her interest in lyric as occasional poetry (in the Whitman chapter) also meets up with some of this schools’ central findings in ways that suggest a relation.  

Ornamental Aesthetics yields an exhilarating portrait of these authors in part because it consistently demolishes the partition between mind and world that has long been perceived to characterize these authors’ predicaments. They are not the cerebral skeptics alienated from a world of experience, relationship, and sensual feeling, a Cold War way of reading them that persists into concerns that poetry itself is partitioned from the world and so risks appropriating it, divorcing one from its materiality, or failing to fully embody it. But Davis insists we fully embrace poetry’s ornamental function. Poetry need not be the world, it need only attest to its presence and accompany our experience of it. Here we find these poets well aware of the limits of poetry and the mind’s ability to apprehend the world, yet fully exhilarating in the approach, inhabiting the senses, and seeking connection. Davis brings to poetics a newly enlivening framework of gesture, relation, and immediacy that boldly recasts how we read these poets, and with it the worldly work of poetry.  

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

Dorri Beam is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University. She is the author of Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing (2010). 

If one were to seek the origins of Asian diasporic literatures in North America, the name that emerges is Sui Sin Far, the pseudonym of Edith Maude Eaton, a mixed-race writer of Chinese descent from the turn of the century. Now acclaimed as the “mother” of Asian North American literature, Sui Sin Far’s place in both canon and scholarship has, in what Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has famously called Asian American literary studies’ fundamental contrasting modes, ascended from necessity to extravagance. Her name first emerged as a historical aside in the foundational 1974 Asian American writers anthology Aiiieeeee! In 1981, she was introduced to an academic audience through S.E. Solberg’s MELUS piece. “She was not a great writer,” states Solberg, “she has only one book (a collection of her stories) to her credit, but her attempts deserve recognition.” Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks’s landmark 1995 Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings heralded a major push for Sui Sin Far scholarship to go beyond the “necessity” of recovery and toward “extravagant” complexity. From initial recognition of her “attempts” at representation during the era of anti-Chinese sentiment have come sophisticated analyses of her engagement with cultural and racial hybridity, tricksterism, transnationalism, queerness, and disability, among other issues. Hsuan Hsu’s 2011 edition of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, which reprinted her book in its entirety, continues this development: he places Far’s short stories in dialogue with carefully curated appendices that shed light on her contexts in terms of professional writing, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the work of Christian missionaries, and representations of Chinatown. Reclaiming Sui Sin Far, as Guy Beauregard once observed, is an ongoing process that offers opportunities to rethink the commitments behind recuperative urges. One might wonder, then, where do we go from here?

In a radical departure from these earlier edited collections of Eaton’s work, Mary Chapman’s Becoming Sui Sin Far includes neither Mrs. Spring Fragrance nor her autobiographical essays. The volume contains seventy previously uncollected and rediscovered writings, a greatly expanded bibliography of attributed works, a detailed biographical timeline, and a rediscovered interview. This project, however, is not about rote accumulation or the filling of gaps. The bold decision to avoid the best-known writings reflects Chapman’s editorial project, which is aimed at drawing attention to new ways of reading Eaton and the development of her Sui Sin Far persona. Chapman gives us a comprehensive biography of Edith Maude Eaton’s life and career (1865-1914) that “exposes the limitations of interpreting her oeuvre solely along racial or national lines.” New research includes thrilling insights. For instance, we learn of Eaton’s Chinese mother’s career as a captive acrobat traveling the globe who was eventually “rescued” by English missionaries. There is also the strong possibility that Eaton aided her white, British father in smuggling Chinese people in defiance of the racist restrictions on either side of the U.S.-Canada border. This Eaton is a far more productive writer than previously supposed, one who enjoyed a national popularity that enabled her to earn a living from her writing.

Chapman’s careful attention to the textures of Eaton’s life and writing elevate this important collection. She reframes the usual focus on Eaton’s Chinatown fiction by situating them in relation to her prolific writings across an under-acknowledged range of genres and topics. To fully appreciate Eaton’s cultural and political work requires treating her writing qua writing: Chapman divides Eaton’s twenty-six year career into three phases that reflect changes in geography and occupation along with distinct shifts in style, tropes, intended audience, and venues of publication: experimentation and journalism from 1888 to 1898; Chinatown fiction in West Coast regional publications from 1898 to 1908 when she worked as a stenographer; and finally, recognition as a widely syndicated writer who earned her living publishing children’s stories and autobiographical writings in national periodicals from 1908 to her death in 1914. The organization of the volume divides the chosen texts into five sections that track her development as a writer through these phases, with the first three and last two sections demarcated by Eaton’s eventual adoption of the stable spelling of her Chinese pen name in 1898. The first gathers her Montreal poetry, sketches, and fiction (1888-1891); these experiments are derivative of famous British and American writers, as was typical in early Canadian print culture. The second highlights unsigned Montreal journalism and letters to the editor (1890-1896), in which she advocates for the local Chinese community, reports on smuggling, and lays the groundwork for her later explorations with sensationalist and realist styles of writing. Eaton then moved to Jamaica for work as a court stenographer and reporter; selections from her column for Gall’s Daily News Letter are featured in the third section, in which she wrote under pseudonyms like “Canadian Fire Fly” (1896-1897), revealing the development of her consciousness as a person of Chinese descent connected to other peoples of color. During this period she crafted new modes of self-referential observation and embodied journalism that would inform her later naturalist and realist fiction.

The fourth section brings the reader to the “Sui Sin Far” era. Sue Seen Far/Sui Seen Far/Sui Sin Fah’s early uncollected stories (1896-1906) began to transmute her journalistic work into the periodical fiction that she is better known for today, along with her signature preoccupations with borders, identity, lesbian subtexts, and the struggles of mixed race women (1896-1906). Finally, in the fifth section Chapman shares Eaton’s longest authorial project (1904), a serialized travel narrative written in the persona of Wing Sing, a Chinese man and Los Angeles merchant, on a journey across the continent by railroad from the West Coast of the U.S. to Eastern Canada and back again, a trajectory that overturns narratives of westward white expansion. Subjects in movement recur throughout Eaton’s biography and writings; as Chapman remarks, “Being in transit functions as a trope for the state of in-betweeness for those with complex post-national identities.”

The extensive introduction of over sixty pages encourages us to read these works in ways attentive to an expanded sense of current scholarship and Eaton’s historical contexts. Her work in each phase is placed in a comparative framework alongside other contemporary writers in different traditions. Chapman emphasizes different perspectives on Eaton that speak to an array of overlapping areas of study: as a popular middlebrow author, as a woman journalist, as a writer of children’s literature, and, perhaps most importantly, as a writer of color articulating new approaches to racial and ethnic representation at the same moment that Indigenous, African American, and Jewish American authors were also developing them. Some of these issues echo in our present moment: for instance, current tensions between “white” feminism and women of color feminisms share common ground with Eaton’s ambivalences about the rise of the New Woman, a topic that allows Chapman to draw upon her own notable monograph on women’s suffrage and print culture. In addition to the treatment of Eaton in the increasingly global discipline of Asian American literary studies, Chapman places her in the sometimes-subordinated field of Asian Canadian studies, where the head tax—not exclusion— shaped the Chinese diaspora. Chapman points to further considerations of Eaton’s transnationalism with regard to the Caribbean and Pacific Rim; rediscovered stories reveal her interest in exploring racial and cultural identities beyond her own heritage. These gestures toward future possibilities for research are balanced by Chapman’s perceptive editorial work on the specifics of Eaton’s writing. In particular, the excellent footnotes guide a reader to connect how Eaton revisits, adapts, reprints, and even self-plagiarizes events, themes, characters, and passages from her oeuvre at different stages of her career.  

These insights into a greater understanding of Eaton/Far are not Chapman’s alone, as she makes clear. The updated bibliography of over 260 works by Eaton, almost four times as many as were attributed in Ling and White-Parks’s 1995 anthology, represents the combined efforts of the Sui Sin Far scholarly community. Chapman pays homage to the sleuthing and findings of Diana Birchall, Jean Lee Cole, Martha J. Cutter, Dominika Ferens, Carol Helfer, June Howard, Amy Ling, Karen Skinazi, and Annette White-Parks. Chapman’s own entry into the quest for Eaton’s undiscovered writings began with a simple Google search that brought up hitherto forgotten works. The introduction details how she developed methodologies from the strategies of these other scholars in order to scour traditional and digital archives. Doing so allowed her to uncover and attribute even unsigned writings. In this way Becoming itself models the “becoming” of such discovery and recovery projects, an exercise in transparency that I found fascinating as someone less familiar with editorial labor.

“But is it any good?” The question famously critiqued by Jane Tompkins in the 1980s often still lingers in the academy for those early writers of color who forged what would become traditions of ethnic literatures. As Becoming Sui Sin Far demonstrates, Edith Maude Eaton is more than a token representative of Asian North American literatures within the overarching fields of American and Canadian literatures. While “We need diverse books” began as a campaign for contemporary publishing, editorial work like Chapman’s responds to that call by showing the diverse breadth of earlier periods of literary culture. Such occasions present opportunities for early and nineteenth-century American literary studies to push for deeper engagement with ethnic studies fields to enhance research, pedagogy, and outreach toward antiracist ends. To return to Wong’s early iconic study, shifts between necessity and extravagance are the archetypal modes of existence and practice both in Asian American literature and its field as a disciplinary project. The trajectory of Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far from necessity to nuance operates as a paradigmatic case study in the reconsideration of a writer of color for early and nineteenth-century American literary studies. 

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

Christine “Xine” Yao is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia and will be Lecturer of American Literature to 1900 at University College London. She holds a PhD in English from Cornell University and is currently working on a book manuscript about the racial, sexual, and cultural politics of unfeeling in nineteenth-century America.

In “Chronicling White America,” a short, provocatively titled piece for a forum in American Periodicals on digital approaches to periodical studies, Benjamin Fagan laments the paucity of black periodicals in freely accessible digital databases like the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America and condemns the “modern-day ‘capturing,’ buying, and selling” of antebellum black periodicals by for-profit, private corporations that sequester those archives behind prohibitive digital paywalls. For Fagan, this simultaneous absence from or imprisonment within the digital domain not only echoes the racial, economic, and carceral logics of slavery, but also risks erasing from American history black cultural productions and the communities that made them.

Fagan’s warning, I trust, will resonate with readers of Common-Place, dedicated as they are to countering such historical erasures in early American histories as well as in the physical and digital archives out of which those histories are written. Readers will thus welcome Fagan’s first book, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation, which demonstrates what new questions could be asked and new insights gained if antebellum black newspapers were freely accessible and equally represented in our digital repositories. Keenly aware of the ways that the material obstacles facing scholars of black newspapers and the methodological priorities of book history can obscure the vibrant role black newspapers played in African American communities, Fagan chronicles the emergence of a black periodical tradition and maps the social, material, and institutional networks that created and sustained it. Far from simply recovering a neglected archive, however, Fagan knits together the overlapping histories and figures behind five early black newspapers—the New York-based Freedom’s Journal and Colored American in the 1820s and 1830s; Frederick Douglass’s transatlantic organ, the North Star; Mary Ann Shadd’s Canadian-based Provincial Freeman; and the Civil War-era Weekly Anglo-African—to demonstrate in profoundly new ways the collaborative and collective project that was the black newspaper in the nineteenth century. While none of these titles will be new to scholars of early African American print or nineteenth-century print culture more broadly, it is Fagan’s scrupulous attention to their interwoven histories and the complex body of black thought about emancipation, citizenship, and nationhood they give voice to that distinguishes his book from earlier, more comprehensive accounts of the nineteenth-century black press like Irvine Garland Penn’s pioneering The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (1891) or from the tremendously insightful but narrow profiles of particular titles like Jacqueline Bacon’s Freedom’s Journal: The First African-American Newspaper (2007) or Eric Gardner’s recent Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (2015).

The heart of Fagan’s argument concerns how black newspapers transmitted, shaped, and fostered the myriad “practices of a dynamic black chosenness,” a powerful ideological tradition linking the experiences of black Americans with God’s chosen nation (8). Akin to notions of American exceptionalism, black chosenness became a multifaceted site for imagining black liberation and eventual American citizenship. African American communities saw the newspaper as a powerful medium for articulating such notions as well as a key weapon in the fight for black rights, and each chapter illuminates a new development in the historical relationship between black chosenness and American national identity. It goes without saying that the conjunction of terms in Fagan’s title will remind readers of a commonplace in early American scholarship since Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: the newspaper-nation nexus by which the unique form of the newspaper enables geographically scattered readers to imagine themselves as belonging to the same community. By tracing the trope of black chosenness through five decades of newspapers, however, Fagan revises this commonplace, demonstrating how black editors and readers created communities that transcended national boundaries and “worked to bring black Americans into chosen nations that existed independently of, and at times in direct opposition to, the United States” (7). 

Fagan’s first chapter shows how Freedom’s Journal articulated a theory of black chosenness that saw proper black behavior as the avenue to belonging in the American nation. Liberation would be achieved, according to this theory, when black Americans could prove their fitness to white America, and Fagan examines this idea’s influence on the editorial practices of the newspaper: always aware of two audiences, one black and one white, the newspaper aimed to instruct black readers in proper behavior while displaying black respectability to a white audience. The middle chapters then redefine black chosenness and its link to American national identity, delineating the different ways that the Colored American (chapter two), the North Star (chapter three), and the Provincial Freeman locate black chosenness beyond the narrow confines of the United States and, in the case of the Provincial Freeman, beyond the boundaries of racial solidarity. Eschewing the need for white acceptance and picturing the United States as a modern-day Babylon, the Colored American reimagines black Americans “as one part of a larger, chosen American nation,” a nation defined by the experience of oppression and not by political membership in the United States (64). The transatlantic orientation of Douglass’s North Star takes this “uncoupl[ing] of the promise of black chosenness from American identity” one step further, by situating black Americans as one part of a global army of liberation coursing through the revolutionary Atlantic of 1848 (94). For Shadd’s Provincial Freeman, it is an open question whether the United States could ever be redeemed as a space for black freedom. Her advocacy of emigration to Canada as a pathway to liberation locates freedom in Britishness, not in racial identity, thus demonstrating the “limits of black chosenness” (98). The story of black chosenness, however, does not end in Canada, and Fagan closes his book by examining the ways that the Civil War and emancipation shuffled the deck of black chosenness. While readers of the Weekly Anglo-African hardly trusted the U.S. government to ensure the liberation of slaves, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation renewed the cause of black chosenness, linking it once again to American national identity, and the Weekly Anglo-African reimagined the mission of black chosenness in the image of an army of black teachers heading south to redeem newly freed slaves and bring them into the American nation.

One of the pleasures of The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation is the way that Fagan anchors his argument in a detailed accounting of the social, material, and institutional networks of black newspapers. Early in the book he notes that his methodology was “guided by the relationships between and among the people who produced the papers,” and each chapter paints a richly textured portrait of the publishers, editors, printers, subscription agents, writers, and the communities they reached (19). This approach allows Fagan to reconstruct a deeply rooted periodical tradition from black print’s fragmentary record. With each new newspaper that he profiles, Fagan introduces new voices and figures, but also documents the social, institutional, and even familial relationships that stretch across time and space in sometimes unexpected ways. For example, Thomas and Robert Hamilton, responsible for launching the Weekly Anglo-African in the late 1850s, not only worked for the Colored American in the 1830s, but were also the sons of William Hamilton, a close associate of the men who founded Freedom’s Journal in 1827. Another case in point, one that highlights the ways that black newspapers transcended national and even racial boundaries during this time, involves John Dick, a white printer and Scotsman who immigrated to the United States in the 1840s. Having learned the printing trade in London, Dick played a key role at Douglass’ North Star in Rochester, not only setting type, but running the day-to-day affairs when Douglass was traveling and serving as an unacknowledged co-editor. Dick reappears, though, in the 1850s in Canada, where he assists Mary Ann Shadd in the printing of the Provincial Freeman.

In addition to reconstructing this deeply human history of the early black press, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation also offers an incisive workshop on how to read nineteenth-century newspapers and, in the tradition of some of the best periodical scholarship, Fagan derives his approach to these newspapers from the very “theories and practices developed by the black men and women who lived with the print” (10). Nineteenth-century newspapers can be exasperatingly eclectic and difficult to read, a chaotic landscape of editorials, letters, serialized fiction and poetry, local reporting, subscriber lists, market prices, advertisements, and miscellaneous squibs, jokes, and puns. The black newspaper was no exception, and Fagan teases out a range of editorial, printing, and reading practices by which nineteenth-century audiences made sense of the printscape before them. His sensitivity to the “social nature of newspapers” and the materiality of the newspaper page makes black newspapers a productive site for creative engagement, unexpected connection, and unintended reading (10-14). As a demonstration of the powerful semiotic flexibility of the newspaper’s material form and the ingenious ways black editors employed it, for example, Fagan shows how Douglass folded local reports of slave uprisings and escapes—including the large-scale Pearl affair in which seventy-seven slaves attempted to escape aboard a northern-bound schooner before being recaptured—into his coverage of the revolutionary events in Europe in 1848. By juxtaposing local, national, and international events on the same page, Douglass could connect numerous revolutionary fronts and suggest that slave uprisings in the U.S. were just one part of a global war for liberation.

Fagan’s work invites us and teaches us how to read like a nineteenth-century newspaper reader, attuned to the unexpected and the unintended, and alive to the possibility of different American futures. It is this invitation that ultimately makes his book such a rewarding and invigorating read.

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

James Berkey is assistant professor of English and director of the Writing Studio at Penn State Brandywine. He recently co-edited a special issue of American Periodicals on war and periodicals and has written articles for the Journal of Transnational American Studies and the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies.

Picture a gaggle of tourists along Boston’s Freedom Trail. Filing into Christ Church in the North End, the Old North Church of Longfellow lore, they prepare to hear of Robert Newman hanging signal lanterns and Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride. In between the tour guide’s talk, an observant visitor glances at pews 46 and 47 and sees a brass marker reading “The Bay Pew: This Pew for the use of the Gentlemen of the Bay of Honduras, 1727” (figs. 1, 2). The public historian/docent in me hopes they ask questions. What were people—gentlemen, no less—from the Bay of Honduras doing in Boston at this Anglican church? What is the deal with their fancy double-pew? Why does their story matter? And how does it fit into larger understandings of early American religion?

As it turns out, the Gentlemen of the Bay played a pivotal if unheralded role in funding the church’s famous steeple. Their relationship with Christ Church began in 1727 when they donated 107 tons of logwood, a valuable dyewood harvested along the many feeding rivers in the Bay of Honduras (present-day Belize). However, when I began researching the Baymen for the Old North Foundation—which since 1991 has engaged the public and preserved the church’s legacy—more questions than answers surrounded the Bay Pew and the men who sat there. While working as a docent at King’s Chapel, the oldest Anglican Church in New England, and continuing research on Boston’s interrelated Anglican Churches, I kept returning to the Baymen, as all logwood cutters were frequently referred to, and looking at Anglicanism from the perspective of outsiders and patrons, paying attention not only to the money they donated, but more particularly to material things, such as pews, artifacts, and commodities.

In only one other instance—naval officers who generously contributed toward King’s Chapel in 1694—were church members granted use of a special pew, making me even more curious about the Gentlemen of the Bay’s relationship with Christ Church. My search into their story first focused on entries in the Vestry Book of Records: descriptions of meetings where lay officials discussed important, often financial, matters. On June 9, 1727, vestrymen at the church voted as a gesture of thanks for the promised gift of logwood “That a Pew be expeditiously built next to the Pulpit and lin’d handsomely [with red cherry] for the use of the Gentlemen of the Bay of Honduras who have been or shall be Benefactors to this Church” (figs. 3,  4). Work on the transatlantic trade in logwood shows Boston was an important intermediary port between the logwood camps in Central America and European markets. In extant church correspondence, vestrymen and donors exchanged specialized commercial knowledge pertaining to the chartering of a vessel to fetch the wood from the bay, the hiring of crew, acquisition of a shallow-draft craft for navigating the rivers along the bay, and the best means of selling the wood to best effectuate the proceeds going to the church. While in danger of becoming lost in the minutia of commercial knowledge and transactions, I nevertheless became all the more fascinated at the connections between religion, commerce, and material culture that linked disparate parts of Britain’s Atlantic empire.

I naturally wondered why the Baymen donated to Christ Church. While seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English observers frequently caricatured logwood cutters as irreligious drunkards, rogues, and pirates, church records show the opposite. Several Baymen who were known in Boston solicited contributions from fellows along the Bay of Honduras, who, sight-unseen, supported this “Pious designe for helping to Carry on Compleat & finishing a Church in Boston in New England” (figs. 5, 6, and 7). Operating on the margins of empire, the Baymen yearned for connection. Material culture provides valuable and underutilized evidence of their lived religion. In correspondence between donors, for example, Baymen stressed their interest in the church and described the pew as “one of the best & largest & in the best manner sett out with [six] handsome Common Prayer Books” (fig. 8).

While I initially focused on pews as status symbols, prodding from a dissertation advisor helped me to read sources looking for religion. Indeed, beyond their satisfaction with the form and location of their exclusive pew, the Baymen saw the Prayer Books as signs of favor and status within the congregation and entry into worship. While many non-Anglicans viewed Prayer Books with suspicion and Puritan Increase Mather attacked them as formulaic and popish, Anglicans found in them a religious manual with forms of worship for all occasions, including at sea (figs. 9, 10). Just as patronage granted the Baymen favored physical status within this congregation, these six Prayer Books—and vital sacraments such as the burial of two unnamed Baymen in November 1739—united the Baymen in common liturgy with fellow Anglicans across the expanding English speaking world. Thinking about subscriptions—lists of individuals and pledged contributions—as evidence of religiosity, I honed my dissertation approach and looked at contributors to Anglican causes from Boston and across the Atlantic.

By giving this gift, the Gentlemen knowingly entered the fray of local religious politics.  Christ Church, which in the words of the Baymen “is in Great want and is much Hated and Envyed by them who call themselves Puritans,” was a flashpoint in ongoing disputes between Anglicans and Congregationalists over the expansion of Anglican worship in New England and Christ Church’s polarizing first minister, who had resigned as president of Yale College to take Anglican orders. Therefore, Baymen in Boston urged dispatch in loading the promised wood: “This Charitable and Generous Act makes a great noise & appears to the Cred[it] & Reputation of you there and us hereof.” But if the donation should fail to materialize, “it would be a great hurt in all our proceedings and they would take us to be persons not of our words” (fig. 11). While these sources did not necessarily distinguish between the Baymen’s religious and commercial proceedings, reputation was a currency of its own. Benevolence purchased a respectability that could transcend religious denominations. For example, Peter Faneuil’s legacy rests on his civic donation of a town market, his numerous donations to Anglican causes and marriage to the daughter of Christ Church’s minister, and commercial ties to Protestants and Catholics in Bordeaux, Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica, Bilbao, the Canary Islands, the United Colonies, and England.

Beyond specific donations, I looked for more intimate relationships linking individual Baymen to Boston and Christ Church. Key word searches and hours of clicking and scrolling through Readex’s Early American Newspapers, 1690-1922, led me to a fascinating 1732 blurb in the Boston Gazette describing the Spanish capture of a vessel carrying women—wives, voluntary or involuntary sexual partners—for the logwood cutters. While the fate of these women is unclear, turning to Boston town records, I found one marriage between a Bayman of considerable visibility at Christ Church with a non-Anglican woman from a successful trading family. I counted that as a successful match. After all, religious intolerance makes for bad business.

Of course, the logwood gift was inextricably linked to intra-imperial conflicts over the territory and resources along the Bay of Honduras and interactions between Boston and the Baymen. Materials in the Massachusetts Archive Collection documented efforts by known logwood donors to protect property, including slaves, from Spanish guarda costas. In the early 1730s, newspapers covered the expulsion of British logwood cutters from the bay by an overwhelming Spanish force. In 1732, as a result of this expulsion, the Gentlemen consulted the church vestry to have the pew divided into two parts since their numbers were too few and pew too large (figs. 12, 13). Four years later, a group of Baymen donated twenty-one tons of logwood and requested that the “Baymens Pew be entirely restored to the Baymens use and no others by the consent and law of the undermentioned gentlemen.” The church gladly accepted these conditions. The proceeds from the sale—£323:10:8—were then “lay’d out towards finishing and handsomely completing the Steeple,” which was finished in August of 1740. The vestry penned a laudatory note in their book of record and singled the Baymen out for a special entertainment at a local public house later that fall (figs. 14, 15).

As the Baymen maintained their relationship with Christ Church, they also considered other options. In 1739, for example, members of Boston’s newest Anglican congregation, Trinity Church, requested donations and offered the Baymen a special pew in their newly opened building.  While this came to nothing, over the next years the Baymen became immersed in the inner workings of Christ Church. Pew ownership was tied to more than status, with proprietors of full pews receiving a vote in church affairs, and in early 1741 Christ Church formalized its relationship with the Baymen by granting Captain William Richardson, a Bayman “partly established here and [a] constant comer to Church,” a vote on behalf of the whole. Richardson, who was also elected to the vestry, helped facilitate a gift of thirty tons of logwood. Another trusted intermediary, the captain of the charter, was dispatched to fetch the wood and carried a cask of brandy with instructions to treat the Baymen. Brandy, of course, was a more refined beverage than the usual rum, and this act suggested a regular custom of treating Baymen with libations to get the best wood. More importantly, this episode underscored the role of intermediaries and the range and variety of religious business and service that took place across the Atlantic: on board vessels, in public houses, far away from home congregations, and often lubricated with good spirits.

Vestry records, church correspondence, and subscription lists helped me find these elusive Baymen and also led me, perhaps not surprisingly, to a much larger and looser association of people who financially contributed and supported Boston’s Anglican churches. Baymen and other lay Anglicans were inevitably involved in worldly affairs. In April of 1744, newspapers reported that a Spanish privateer attacked and, after “a most desperate fight,” took Captain Richardson’s vessel as it entered the Bay of Honduras, leaving part of the crew ashore on a key and carrying Richardson and the remainder of the crew to Campeche. After transportation to Havanna, the Christ Church vestryman and defacto spokesman for the Baymen was freed as part of a prisoner exchange (fig. 16). Richardson arrived back in Boston soon after his release but did not remain there for long. By November, as commander of a privateer, he took several prizes off Newfoundland. He died of wounds sustained in battle in early 1745. The Boston Gazette and Vestry book similarly chart the exploits of Captain James Gruchy and the co-owners of the privateer Queen of Hungary, all of whom were vestrymen at Christ Church, who donated a set of decoratively carved cherubim and a chandelier liberated from a Spanish ship to the church. In June of 1746, the church vestry placed the cherubim near the organ and hung the chandelier in the body of the church, transforming religious materials bound for a cathedral in Catholic New France into refined fixtures in a Protestant church in Boston’s North End (fig. 17).

The Gentlemen of the Bay of Honduras were a unique interest group that straddled many religious, imperial, and commercial networks. Beyond their known involvement at Christ Church, Baymen interacted with Spanish governors and soldiers, Mosquito Indians, and English and Dutch merchants. As they did with Christ Church, they frequently acted collectively. In 1744, for example, the Boston-Evening Post reprinted a letter detailing a plan by all Baymen to trade exclusively with the Holland-based Hope Company in order to get a better price on logwood (fig. 18). Prolonged imperial conflict and market changes that shifted the trade to New York prompted the Baymen’s exit from Boston. On Sept. 5, 1759, the vestry “Voted Unanimously that the large pew on the North side of the Church, called the Bay Pew, be divided by a partition and made into two convenient pews, & that the Wardens have power to dispose of the same for the most they will fetch for the benefit of the Church” (fig. 19). Always hurting for money, the wardens did just that.      

While I have been unable to pin down the exact details of the Baymen’s final years in Boston, I have enjoyed the search. Within the study of early American religion, which I believe too often focuses on clergy, the Gentlemen of the Bay of Honduras made for a perfect introduction to Anglicanism. They offer a way to follow monetary and material contributions by a colorful cast of merchants, smugglers, privateers, and public-minded and respectable types. From this lay vantage point, we can better understand the intersections of religion and commerce in early America. The Baymen similarly help us better appreciate the built and material environment.  Through their story, we can see the vital liturgical ties that centered on the church and its diverse congregation of elite, ordinary, and impoverished white parishioners and often ignored numbers of free and enslaved people of color. We can simultaneously see material things and people as both worldly and religious. For that, I raise to them a glass of brandy.

Further Reading

Old North Church (Christ Church in the City of Boston) records, Massachusetts Historical Society.

Christine Baron,  “One if by Land! Two if by River? Or, What if Everything You Thought You Knew were Wrong?” The History Teacher 43 (2010): 605-613.

Michael A. Camille and Rafael Espejo-Saavedra, “Historical Geography of the Belizean Logwood Trade.” Yearbook. Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers 22 (1996): 77-85.

Ross A. Newton, “‘Good and Kind Benefactors:’ British Logwood Merchants and Boston’s Christ Church,” Early American Studies 11:1 (2013): 15-36.

On a bitterly cold morning in February 1862, John Kelso found himself amid a group of Union Army stragglers on the Missouri-Arkansas border. Kelso, a Unionist from Missouri, had spent the night sleeping on the frozen ground, shivering with his coat over his head, and had scarcely eaten for several days. He was now trying to make his way back to his unit. As it became light, he saw dozens of injured and exhausted soldiers who had been pillaging nearby Confederate farms. One man had speared a huge rasher of bacon on his bayonet; another wore a pair of freshly killed turkeys draped over his shoulders like a stole. And yet another, Kelso recalled, “a kind of Oscar Wilde, nearly seven feet in height, who cared more for the beautiful than the useful, wore upon the lower part of his body, the immense hooped skirt of some gigantic female; upon his shoulders, a large striped shawl; and upon his head, a huge, funnel-shaped, Leghorn bonnet of the style of fifty years ago.”

Written in 1882—the same year Wilde traveled across the nation to preach the gospel of Aestheticism—Kelso’s recently published “Auto-biography” often seems to predict the cross-dressing picaresque of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published three years later. Impeccably edited by Christopher Grasso, Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War doesn’t shed light on particular battles or historical events so much as it reveals the contingent, harrowing, and often surreal experiences of an individual soldier in a border state that experienced some of the least-known but nonetheless bloodiest guerrilla fighting of the entire conflict.

Kelso was never a major figure in the Civil War. Born in 1831, he graduated from Pleasant Ridge College on the Missouri-Kansas border the same year John Brown launched his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. As Grasso explains in his introduction, Kelso became a “preacher and schoolteacher turned Civil War guerrilla fighter who subsequently became a congressman calling for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, then later a public agnostic, a spiritualist lecturer, and eventually an anarchist.” He managed all this in just fifty-nine years.

Kelso’s Civil War experiences were confined mainly to Missouri, a theater that included very few large-scale battles such as Antietam or Gettysburg but was marked instead by persistent and vengeful guerrilla actions. Neighbors literally fought neighbors in what many historians have described as a war within a war. Southern partisan rangers and Union-sympathizing Jayhawkers burned houses and destroyed the crops of their opponents. Rape and assault are portrayed in Kelso’s recollections as frequent weapons of war.

In this brutal and often ambiguous terrain, Kelso’s greatest tactic was disguise. He and his men dress in borrowed rags to impersonate hapless farmers or Confederate sympathizers in order to capture and sometimes execute opponents. One reason this approach worked so well is because Kelso got along with proslavery families almost as well as with those who supported the Union. In fact, while Kelso occasionally articulates antislavery sentiments, his motivations for fighting seem more personal than ideological. He is driven by revenge after Confederate neighbors torched his house. Even persistent anxiety about his wife’s infidelities with a handsome Union physician fuels his rage, which he directs toward the enemy instead of confronting her.

One of the great pleasures of reading Bloody Engagements involves the footnotes. Grasso has scrupulously tracked down every name and village Kelso mentions, and the military operations he participates in are given historical specificity by frequent references to the compendious War of Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. The result is a richly dialogic text, a case study in the way official language obscures as much as it reveals. In an otherwise inconsequential engagement in Ozark, Missouri, for instance, Kelso reports that he found one lieutenant “trying to persuade a handsome young colored woman to accompany him” while another officer was busy plundering gold and jewelry from a Confederate house. The same episode is reported as follows by the officers in question: “We collected about 50 head of horses, 5 wagons and teams, and a considerable amount of other property useful to the army. . . . ”

Kelso’s own volatile language registers the topsy-turvy world of guerrilla warfare, reflecting Melville’s observation in “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight” that war would challenge conventional heroic poetry and force alterations in the way combat was imaged. Kelso’s coldblooded depictions of the day-to-day grind of soldier life foreshadow the imaginative work of Stephen Crane and others, but they are also interspersed with treacly homilies and a residual Romanticism that is jarring in its quaintness. This is especially the case when women are involved. Describing a governess who begged Kelso and men not to burn down her employer’s house, he writes that the young woman died of “heart disease brought on by excessive fright” later that night, prompting him to apostrophize: “Oh! war! war! why shouldst thou ever exist?”

In truth, though, one of the strongest impressions we receive from Kelso’s recollections is his gratitude that war did exist. The comparatively undisciplined life of a Missouri regiment allows him enormous freedom from the civilian responsibilities of teaching, preaching, and parenthood. One of his favorite activities is to abandon his unit in order to wander the Ozark wilderness, ostensibly scouting Confederate movements but instead enjoying the respite from social and military duties. “For me, this wild life and these wild scenes had an indescribable charm, and I was as nearly happy, I suppose, as so restless a spirit can ever be.” Like many veterans, he seems also to have become something of an adrenaline junkie; in one emblematic passage, he approaches a house filled with sleeping Confederate soldiers and experiences “a kind of strange, wild delight in the very madness of my undertaking.”

As his “Auto-biography” progresses, Kelso becomes less reticent about a disturbing fact: He enjoyed killing. In civilian life, Kelso was bookish, vain, pugnacious, and a compulsive braggart. During wartime, he found his true métier, becoming a ruthless and efficient killer. In one extended passage, he finds himself chasing a running soldier, trying to shoot him in the back but discovering that the dew has fouled his revolver. “I still pursued [him], however,” Kelso writes, “determined, if possible, to strike him down with the barrel of my revolver. His long, slender white legs fairly whizzed through the young hazels and briers. . . I wanted him very much. If I had had ten thousand dollars, I would, in my excitement just then, have given it for the ability to run just a little faster. In spite of my utmost efforts, however, he out-ran me and made his escape. I felt that in not letting me kill him, he had done me a great wrong.”

While Kelso erases actual scenes of killing from his memoirs, he brags about killing dozens of Confederates during the course of the war. Ultimately, this relish for killing becomes a dominant strain in his memoir. Bloody Engagements is a vivid, if minor, addition to Civil War life writing, but it is also a powerful document for the stories it does not tell. Kelso would not continue in the military after the Civil War, but his experiences shed light on those who did and who turned their attention westward to places where the pleasures of killing could continue among native populations for the remainder of the century.

This article originally appeared in issue 18.1 (Winter, 2018).

Randall Fuller is the Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of Kansas and the author most recently of The Book that Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation (2017).

Douglas Winiarski’s Darkness Falls on the Land of Light is the latest volume in a renewed scholarly interest in the eighteenth-century culture of New England. Winiarski’s  sweeping 632-page synthesis stands in company with recent work by Margaret Ellen Newell, Hilary E. Wyss, and Shelby Balik. Collectively, these studies look to define the contours of New England’s religious identity and particular the effect that the First Great Awakening had on a notoriously quarrelsome and insular colonial region. Notably, this scholarship emphasizes the religious lives of ordinary people over what Christopher Grasso called a “speaking aristocracy”: well-educated Puritan elites who had for several generations controlled much of New England’s religious and civic life. Winiarski’s book is also reflective of a trend to focus on regional identity, rather than treating individual colonies separately.

Winiarski is primarily interested in the impact of the introduction of popular religion on New England. It will come as no surprise to scholars of the Great Awakening that he highlights the role that the 1740 arrival of Grand Itinerant George Whitefield played in unsetting an already religiously fractious New England. The erosion of the Puritan canopy by the turn of the eighteenth century, the waning influence of the clergy in civic matters, the region’s expanding connection with the commercial world, and the growth of individualism combined with a concern by New England clergymen like Benjamin Coleman that piety was on the decline among New Englanders. By 1740, Whitefield was already enmeshed in religious controversies in other regions, including his decade-long feud with Carolina Commissary Alexander Garden and the Old Side/New Side schism among Pennsylvania’s Presbyterians. Indeed, his support for Gilbert Tennent’s incendiary pamphlet “On the Danger of an Unconverted Ministry” was cause for alarm among many New England clergy and came with political costs for some. It is in this theo-political climate where Winiarski’s assessment of New England’s religious culture begins.

Darkness Falls on the Land of Light is a dense volume, drawn on twenty years of research and closely focused on the ways in which evangelism challenged and even dismantled New England’s Congregational establishment. It is subdivided into five chronological sections beginning with an exploration of religious vocabulary in the sixty years leading up to George Whitefield’s first missionary tour (23-130). Parts two through four discuss the ways in which revivalism broke down New England’s strict Congregationalist hierarchy. In particular, Winiarski convincingly documents the ways epistolary networks persuaded participants that they were “witnessing an unprecedented outpouring of the Holy Spirit” (18, 131-364). Part five demonstrates the ways revivalism brought discord to churches, but also to the followers of evangelical leaders (365-506). The religious pluralism that resulted, Winiarski argues, was so profound that it took until the early nineteenth century for New Englanders to come to grips with the change (19).

As scholars of religious history and New England studies are aware, print culture played a pivotal role in New England and had since the seventeenth century. Mark Valeri, Charles E. Clark, and others have ably demonstrated the ways in which print culture shaped public discourse. One of the book’s strengths is the thoroughness of Winiarski’s research of pamphlets, tracts, diaries, and letters. He capably marshals them into a clear synthesis of eighteenth-century religious life and the fundamental shifts New England underwent as the result of the introduction of evangelicalism into the region. His chapters feature rich storytelling drawn from extensive primary resources. For example, the third part of the volume opens with a vignette of Martha Robinson, a young, belligerent woman confronting magistrate Joseph Pitkin and  Timothy Dwight. Robinson, a devout woman who was influenced by George Whitefield’s 1740 visit to Boston, found herself pulled between her “strong convictions” and “dark periods of melancholy punctuated by fleeting glimpses of spiritual light” (210-211). Her experiences with Whitefield, and then Gilbert Tennent and Daniel Rogers in the following months, were illustrative of a young woman struggling to understand her conversion. Robinson was amenable to conversion, but the intensity of her feelings appear to have frightened her.

Winiarski is correct in his assessments of the ways in which the Great Awakening challenged and undermined both traditional New England’s piety and the ways in which it changed the roles of women, African Americans, and Native Americans in its religious life. For instance, he describes the ways that revivalism bolstered opportunities for African Americans to “enhance their social status through church affiliation,” at a time when “owning the covenant declined among whites” (184). Winiarski acknowledges that many New England revivalist preachers were proslavery, including Jonathan Edwards. Yet, in contrast with other Protestant clergy, these preachers embraced catechism of African Americans and Native Americans (185).

One of the book’s weaknesses is its tight focus on New England. Winiarski does devote the fifth part of his book to “travels,” which illustrates the decentralized nature of evangelism within New England (367-506). But, with the exception of a few brief mentions, the book remains fixated on New England. To an extent, Winiarski’s close focus is understandable. Evangelism affected the British dominion unevenly. New England was not the Chesapeake, and the southern colonies had their own local politics. And as thorough as Winiarski is, it would be a tall order for him to include some of the broader Anglo-Atlantic geographical context with the level of detail that permeates his book. Yet, news and gossip involving the Great Awakening spread from region to region. Itinerants like Whitefield sold newspapers. New England’s theo-politics were certainly different from those elsewhere in the empire, and it meant that there were differences between regions in the ways evangelism stressed, angered, and/or excited its occupants. As a result, some readers may find that Darkness Falls would have benefited from a bit more attention to the connections between events in New England and events elsewhere in the British colonies. Nevertheless, this is a fine synthesis of eighteenth-century religious life and one that will be of particular use to scholars who are new to the field.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4.5 (Fall, 2017).

Jessica Parr teaches at Simmons College, Boston. She specializes in the history of race and religion in the early modern Atlantic world.

Mark J. Miller’s Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700–1850 plumbs a series of interpersonal metaphors in the writings by and representations of marginalized Americans to argue that suffering is central to the tenor of dissent in the Atlantic world. As Miller argues, suffering licenses and legitimates the speech of those with limited access to print public spheres. Pain, as an entryway to publicity, is a queer agent in this study, empowering through disempowering individuals and providing them with the rationale to court a readership even as they retain positions of abjectness. This paradox—of empowerment through pain, voice through silence, and agency through abjection—runs through Miller’s book, and it allows him to offer subtle and new readings of canonical texts while also deepening our understanding of their historical contexts.

I first wish to applaud the capacious versatility of Cast Down. This versatility is best on display when Miller connects abjection to religious conversion and discourses of race and sexuality. Even more, Miller seeks to locate the operations of certain psychoanalytic categories—such as masochism—before their coherence into the twentieth-century categories we understand today. What I find of immense value to that project is his ability to work between theoretical and historical registers, in one breath distinguishing Leo Bersani’s and Judith Butler’s valorizations of subjection and then showing their bearing, for instance, on the posthumous circulation of Jonathan Edwards’s “Personal Narrative.” Although Miller differentiates his categories of analysis from more contemporary psychoanalytic concepts, he usefully suggests that his study of masochism encourages scholars to ask how “eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts and writers helped create material, intellectual, and emotional conditions of possibility for sexological and psychoanalytic taxonomies?” (7). These “conditions of possibility” suggest a type of Foucauldian genealogy that transposes in richly compelling ways what may seem like anachronistic associations between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Cast Down thus can serve as a model for future scholarship that combines theoretical incisiveness with historical specificity.

Miller’s book centers on the queerness of suffering, theorizing modes of abjection that destabilize and shift sexual and racial identifications. Following a Christian history that valorizes suffering, and explicitly describing his “book’s movement from Foxe to Freud” (12), Miller shows how “abjection can be used to create, sustain, and contest racial, sexual, and gendered identities” (6). Examining a broad archive of materials, from Jonathan Edwards’s Faithful Narrative (1737) to a printed woodcut of abolitionist icon Jonathan Walker’s branded hand (1845), and from William Apess’s reformist A Son of the Forest (1829) to martyrological figures in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Moby-Dick (1851), this book offers a textured literary history: indeed, the chapter titles themselves (“Conversion, Suffering, and Publicity,” “Indian Abjection in the Public Sphere,” “The Martyrology of White Abolitionists,” and “Masochism, Minstrelsy, and Liberal Revolution”) provocatively announce the book’s contribution to studies of race, religion, and sexuality in early America. As a brief overview of Cast Down’s historical arguments, chapter one explains that the “ambivalent embrace” of converts by an emerging evangelical public set the stage for “the colonial dispossessed”—such as Native Americans, African Americans, and white women—to aspire to public recognition (41); that prepared the way for radical Methodist William Apess to turn “toward the polite literature of the evangelical public,” as analyzed in chapter two (80). Chapter three rethinks the histories of “male access to civic abstraction” by following the representation of embodied white suffering to protest black enslavement—a gesture, Miller argues, that eclipses the very cause of abolition, wherein it permits white men to speak over black men and women (101). Chapter four focuses on “the complexities of masochism for men of color” (119) by reexamining Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, offering a nuanced reading of how it “produce[d] a more complex account of blackness than earlier humanitarian abolitionist writing” (144). Lastly, the epilogue turns to Moby-Dick’s Pip, contextualizing him within Orientalist “child pet” traditions while arguing that Melville uses this figure to highlight “the tension between the moral and the erotic” in abolitionist discourse (156).

As one might anticipate, Miller gravitates toward the strong, overwhelming feelings and desires archived in the likes of Puritan Thomas Shepard’s journal—with “his need to ‘desire Christ and taste Christ and roll myself upon Christ’” (34)—and narrated in “Pip’s extreme emotional response to Ahab’s kindness” (164). These strong feelings connect the various figures across the long temporal span of the study (over a century and a half). Even though Pip’s drive toward self-destruction at the novel’s end indicates his structural (and racialized) abjection, Miller shows how his drastic response also points toward “Melville’s refusal to allow Pip’s self-abasement to redeem Ahab” (161). More pointedly, Miller argues, because suffering shapes one’s access to a public, the public pay-off of that suffering differs according to race and sexuality. Whereas eighteenth-century figures such as Edwards and George Whitefield access redemption through their represented suffering, such is unavailable to Pip, who cannot redeem Ahab, much less himself. Put more directly, abjection has ineluctably shaped racial and sexual politics in the United States. Although this stands as irreproachable historicism, this presentation of black subjection and white agency seems somehow yet unfinished. One wonders if there are alternative readings of these power dynamics latent in Miller’s archive. Miller even approaches that possibility in his introduction, explaining that his “broader framework can help expand the horizons for contemporary queer readings of masochistic sexuality, as eighteenth-century evangelical negotiations of power, publicity, sex, and gender inform embodied and imagined pleasures in both the past and the present” (21), yet the gravitational pull of the more familiar narrative tugs the argument away from this prospect.

There is much to praise in Cast Down, in terms both of argument and method, and so to conclude I would like to gesture to one of Miller’s most prominent interventions in the fields of religion and secular studies. As noted above, Cast Down illuminates the centrality of religious discourse in constituting racial and sexual difference by reclaiming the generative possibilities of abjection. Examining what he calls “scenes of abjection” (12), a nod to Saidiya Hartman, Miller shows how religious discourse—and its representations—imbued suffering with specific meanings that reverberated with racialized implications in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To date, many books and articles have approached the so-called public spheres of early America under the guise of Habermas’s declension narrative (the fall from a disinterestedly republican eighteenth century to a compromised liberal nineteenth century). Miller’s turn to “feminist anthropological and psychoanalytic criticism” (6) to retell that story is refreshing. Thinking with Hortense Spillers’s “vestibulary publicity” (17) as a counterpoint to Habermas’s rational public sphere allows him to show how “embodied differences”—produced through structural inequities “in health, safety, labor, speech, [and] writing”—always already foreground access to publicness. Miller emphasizes how the Habermasian conception of the public sphere relies on the abjection of certain bodies that bear the marks of their exclusion. Miller imagines, instead, how “the vestibulary public reveals the trace of those most marked by abjection, as well as the structuring principles of abjection—of inclusion and exclusion—that underlie all similar structures” (18). In this way, Miller offers a vocabulary for understanding how abjection and exclusion constitute our dominant understandings of the public sphere. The surprising discoveries gained as Miller moves away from a static notion of the public sphere and toward its “vestibulary” recesses provide compelling possibilities for rethinking the sexual, racial, and religious politics of early America. Cast Down not only reads well-known narratives and novels in smart and nuanced ways but also creates an opening—we might say it casts down a foundation—through which to ask new questions about the culture and history of early and nineteenth-century America.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4.5 (Fall, 2017).

Ben Bascom is an assistant professor of English at Ball State University, where he teaches early and nineteenth-century American literature and queer studies.

I sat the early night under watchful care of guardswomen—Lilly (who wants to be Dawn), her small girl Mary (who will become Iona) and Eve (who will stay Eve in this life, one-eye a weary cloud and one on my unveiled head)—all huddled in our dirt shed, waiting to be discovered. The night cut from both ends gave us little time for breathing, less for tracing the route in my hair. They use wool card, water and seed oil to fashion a plat. Plotting the straight and winding way, a comb made from bits of bone burns my scalp. Eve sees the route, sometimes with her good eye closed, and I was born brave—surly and wry white folks say, meaning, I must be watched for all my wandering into the wrong row, the lash, anywhere almost a country, a reckoning of its own. I am almost born a bird, say these women who saw me landed here, almost a comet—wild-eyed, strands streaked with gray, face ageless. I leave tonight with all the makings of an unknown journey. I run for a doorway, river, hearth, cave with a ladder. If I am caught, what body will return? My crown, they’ll loose me of it. If I am dragged back, they’ll burn lie into my skin. In heaven, I’ll have my body. Wade past what freedom they know. This furrow of want and the root in my hair—the patience of the wild—guiding me. The guards make me repeat what comes before the map: trace black moss along swamp’s edge, find the stone mile post at the base of the water where dying trees bend and lean. Sabbath Eve. Nothing on the path but stands of angels, also hiding, before the deep tract of living. Scarf perfectly black as skin and thin to keep the map from unraveling. Years from now, remembering this, it will seem like a dream—brief sleep in the hollow of a tree, my palm: a lover reading my hair. I am all creation: bark and mud and silver, the matter surrounding stars, undershine and crown, fire-fly wing and inlet, the dark in God’s mouth, silent altar, prayer flesh.

Lost Friends.

NOTE. –We receive many letters asking about
lost friends. All such letters will be published in
this column from the end of the Civil War until
those in need stop looking and, in such a case, in
perpetuity. We make no charge for publishing
these letters from subscribers to the Southeastern
Herald. All others enclose fifty cents to pay for
publishing. Pastors will please read the requests
published below from their pulpits, and report any
case where friends are brought together by means
of letters.

         ___________________________

Dear Editor: I wish to inquire for the women
in me, in the interest of my mother, father,
aunts, uncles and a great many cousins.—I want
to find my people. They were carried from us
when I was less than thought of. In their
dreams, they called me Seborn or Glory but
now I am called Still Becoming. My parents’
names are Here, Holding. Uncles names are
Sprightly, Long Gone, Whisper and Roadbed;
Aunts Hunger, Childfree, Childmany, Want
and Wanting. My cousins are like blades
of grass or kudzu and can barely be chased or
named. Some were here, some are dead.
Before the war, these women belonged to
Masters most of us have swallowed but each
eve return as odd growths under the skin. My
mother’s mother and father’s grandmother’s
grandmother were barely living in Petersburg,
Va.  There were within miles of each other
and, I fear, did not know blood was nearby.
We heard tell before then one was bought by a
family named Gee or Blackburn, the other by
some called Hyman or Knight; they died and
we fell to others. I was born and have not
heard from them since. Friends, if you have
footing on their whereabouts, please Address
me at Stillwater, Va., with letters, trinkets, any
knowledge of what’s come of us.

Poetic Research Statement

In July, my husband and I take our children to the new National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C. It has taken six months to get tickets and the lines outside and in are still wrapped around the structure, the makeshift ropes, the Slavery and Freedom 1400-1877 exhibits. What is left to say about slavery? a woman asks loudly, her irritation palpable, as we make our way in. Before the trip, I’ve begun working on a project about my grandmothers that’s been swirling in my head for years. In a strange twist of kismet, my ancestors intersect in Petersburg, Virginia, forty years before I am born. My paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Fulkes, lives in Petersburg and is interviewed for the WPA slave narratives in 1937. My maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, after birthing her first child, is given a diagnosis of “water on the brain” (post-partum was an ongoing mystery) and sent to the Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane in 1940, a stone’s throw from where Minnie resides. I find this connection fascinating—two disparate women of my history, at opposite ends of their lives, converging upon the same space and time, telling their stories and ushering in the stretchstrain of folks who will usher in me. I know their lives commence long before this confluence and am determined to search for their beginnings. 

I am a poet, so I must call on history’s gatekeepers (librarians and elders) to help me. They send a confluence of archives and databases, marriage and birth certificates, books and burial plots. My inquest becomes part ethnographic, part family lore. It is difficult for most Black Americans to trace ancestors past 1865, as it is for me, so I begin looking for little-known cultural and regional history to fill in the minutia of the times. Research is often what feeds me as a poet and I am prone to follow tangents until I am given a spark. I have traced invented psychoses, living quarters, grooming and hair rituals, faith practices and maroons before my family and I arrive on the museum’s bottom floor. I pride myself on being staunch, matter-of-fact, clear, and considered when teaching my children about even the ugliness of history. I am only teacher-mother-knower explaining artifacts from a slave ship. Teacher-mother-knower near Jefferson’s ancestors, stacked as a pile of engraved bricks called the Paradox of Liberty. I turn a corner when a reconstructed slave cabin stands in front of me. I have been reading the book Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger and recognize the cabin’s slatted wood, dark entry, and dirt floor. I am mother-daughter-brokenbird, and cry in the museum’s corridor.

In early America, I am searching for what my ancestors may have seen and known. I have no illusions about finding things they might have loved because what was to love about being Black in America other than being alive? I am looking for their daily things, their living, evidence that they marked this land, were more than marked by it. I am trying to picture the physical space, so begin researching antebellum Virginia landscapes and battlefields leveled by hard-fought progress. What was bound in the trees then? I read Daniel O. Sayers’ book A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp at the same time I am combing through ads from The Geography of Slavery in Virginia, a digital repository of runaway slave advertisements and other documents from 1736-1803 helmed by the University of Virginia. While most who placed the ads believed the enslaved were running for cities or ports nearby, Sayers’ text presents a new idea for me: thousands of runaways made their way deep into the Dismal Swamp, where they created communities and lived in freedom, most never emerging until after the Civil War. Just past the cabin at the museum, I photograph objects from a Spirit Bundle, a collection of amulets that mirrors West African traditions meant to protect passageways between physical and spiritual worlds. Because there are so many people and so little time, we have to move quickly; Reconstruction is a blur and soon we are three floors up in the modern-day galleries. I am arrested by a large visual artwork, a crown of sorts made of tools used to sculpt Black hair about which the artist, Kenya Robinson, says on the object label: “For complex reasons of race, class, gender…I will probably have a hair conversation with other black women for all of my days, like some kind of not-so-secret handshake of experience and history.” I begin writing the poem “Commemorative Headdress For Her Journey Beyond Heaven” with all of these seemingly disparate encounters swirling in my mind. I imagine a woman who is having the route she must travel to escape the plantation braided into her hair. (I haven’t found evidence of this tactic being used in the U.S.; this is just hope and imagining—though I am fascinated by the legacy of Colombia’s Benkos Biho, as braiding maps into the hair of women has been reported as a method used to help others escape). The poem’s speaker is looking for a pathway into another world, here the swampland that will put her and her sistren out of reach, sight, and mind. Writing the poem I think again about what the enslaved loved, the bundle and amulets. Of course they loved even the thought of freedom, the hope and wonder of it, of being together in it, a Black kind of heaven. Hence, the title of the poem is the same as that of the visual work by Robinson, with the exception of one article (from changed to for), as the poem is meant to convey the beginning of a journey and not an ending of or looking back on one.

When we leave the museum, I look for things I’ve missed. Weeks later, I find a picture on my phone of thousands of well-dressed Blacks lining the streets of an unknown city with the caption “Emancipation Day Parade, 1905” and can’t remember when I took it or what was nearby, so I scour historical newspapers like the National Anti-Slavery Standard and the Norfolk Journal and Guide from the 1840s through the 1950s. What I find is a great many people searching—for good omens, legal victories, justice, faith, children, joy. The “Information Wanted” and eventually the “Lost Friends” columns, published as early as 1866, filled full pages of each standard. Freed men and women placed the advertisements to search for others lost before or during the war. In her book Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery, Heather Andrea Williams does the seemingly impossible work of following the trail of these ads, their impetus and a few outcomes. The Historic New Orleans Collection, much like The Geography of Slavery in Virginia, has digitized thousands of the columns. After reading fifty or so, I come across one by Maria Ross of Yazoo City, Mississippi, published in the Southwestern Christian Advocate that began, “Dear Editor:—I want to find my people.” And it breaks me open inside. It is so plain, please help me find my people. It cuts me to the core remembering that all folks wanted was to be together, to have someone to love and find anyone who knew to love them. The weight of my grandmothers—with all their fullness and distance—wearies and worries me. I write the poem “Lost Friends.” as an imitation of the column but with modern-day connotations of those left wanting by their absence. There is pleading, because I am desperately searching, there is birthing and blood and loss, there are figurative names that tell our stories juxtaposed against family monikers that most likely belonged to the slaveholders we are ever trying to cast off. Something about sifting through pieces of the once-living lends itself, in my brain, to various types of abstraction. I know no matter how many details I uncover, there is still a breathing wanting left out of all I’ll find. The poet’s job (i.e. the poet as historian, as opposed to other undertakings such as poet as soothsayer, poet as family arbiter, poet as line dancer and the like) is to make the dead become the living. I hope these poems, and all the summer’s discovery, will eventually become a larger body of work, a book of poems in the voices of those journeywomen  illumining the voices of the times they endured. Perhaps, for someone in the distance, the poems will blossom and be: a Spirit Bundle, a trove or pathway, what there is left to say, an alternate kind of history.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4.5 (Fall, 2017).

Remica L. Bingham-Risher earned an MFA from Bennington College, and is a Cave Canem fellow and an Affrilachian poet. She is the author of three books: Conversion (2007), What We Ask of Flesh (2013) and Starlight & Error (2017). She is the director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.