Few in the history profession, at least in the academy, can confidently assert that brighter days lie just around the corner. Economic historians in particular have had much to lament. In a recent essay, Sven Beckert observes that economic historians now reside almost exclusively in economics departments. Others have documented the decline of economic history relative to other sub-fields in the last forty years as shown in a survey of U.S. history faculty listings in the AHA’s Directory of History Departments, Historical Organizations, and Historians. Amid this wholly justifiable sense of malaise and decline, there are a few signs of promise. The history of capitalism sub-field, which burst onto the scene in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession, has brought renewed vigor to the study of all things economic.

The latest publication from historian Sharon Ann Murphy, Other People’s Money, affirms the import of financial history through a survey of money and banking from colonial beginnings to the Civil War era. Murphy writes, “money and banking played a critical role in the lives of everyday Americans in the nineteenth century, shaping the society in which they lived and worked,” adding that understanding the financial history of this period “broadens and deepens our knowledge of the Early American Republic” (7). For Murphy, capturing Americans’ long-standing and complicated love-hate relationship with banks requires us to look back to the formative years of the early nineteenth century and Civil War period, years that presaged our modern financial system.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to basic economic concepts like barter, inflation, taxation, and public debt, showing how debates over these issues informed many of the most important episodes in the colonial and revolutionary eras. In chapter 2, Murphy uncovers some of the unresolved issues involving charters of incorporation that stemmed from the Constitution’s ambiguous language. It is in chapter 3, entitled “How Panics Worked: The Era of the Bank War,” that the author finds her groove, buttressing and enriching her analysis with salient primary sources. Consistent with recent scholarship emphasizing the global dimensions of the history of early modern capitalism, Murphy explains that the movements of specie and credit overseas, combined with peculiar domestic factors, produced disruptive financial panics in 1819 and 1837. The tipping points occurred when confidence and predictability, those elusive and intangible characteristics that greased the wheels of finance both then and today, suddenly evaporated. Murphy shows us in chapter 4 that early Americans fiercely debated the wisdom of fractional reserve banking, activist monetary policy, and the mixing of for-profit, commercial lending alongside the storage of public revenue in one financial institution. This was a notable feature of the nation’s early central banks, the First and Second Banks of the United States. Chapter 5 offers an overview of the struggles faced by both Union and Confederate governments in raising revenue during the Civil War, including the printing of greenbacks and establishment of a nationwide system of federally chartered banks.

Other People’s Money takes its name from the title of a book written by Progressive Era reformer, future Supreme Court justice, and intellectual godfather of the Federal Reserve, Louis Brandeis (165). Early twentieth-century reformers like Brandeis faulted the “money trust” for leveraging public money and depositors’ savings into high-risk bets, too often making off with riches while the majority suffered. The Panic of 1907 was a case in point. For Murphy, there was a common thrust between those who lambasted the immense concentrations of wealth and power epitomized by robber baron J.P. Morgan and the impetus behind Andrew Jackson’s Bank War. In both instances, average Americans knew that the game was rigged. The wealthy were picking winners and losers in violation of the principles of free market capitalism (167).

Murphy is concerned less with the degree to which financial institutions contributed to, and were shaped by, the early stages of the industrial revolution—a historiographical debate explored by previous scholars—and more with how early Americans experimented with new financial mechanisms and institutions through a process of trial and error. Often it was a calamitous financial panic, such as the famous one of 1837 that bankrupted the South’s plantation banks, or some other convulsive, watershed moment, such as the Civil War, that impelled financiers to rethink their assumptions and opt for a more efficient system. In other instances, important developments emerged gradually. Such was the case with investment banking—brokering and underwriting stocks and bonds, often to overseas investors—which capitalized much of the nation’s transportation infrastructure, or the interbank cooperation and clearinghouse systems that made the Panic of 1857 less damaging than it would have been otherwise.

One of Murphy’s contentions is that historians have described the political dimensions of major conflicts like the Bank War without providing sufficient economic context. Political cartoons of the era, she notes, tended to focus on the political battle between Jackson and Nicholas Biddle while only a few raised broader concerns about the economic implications of Jackson’s policies (96-97). One can agree with this claim in the main while at the same time holding that Murphy might be overstating the case. Even when biographies and histories of the antebellum era have maintained a predominantly political focus, they have, by necessity, delved into the economic conflicts that helped define the presidencies of Jackson and others. Specialists will find some overlapping content with Howard Bodenhorn’s excellent 2003 study, State Banking in Early America, particularly in the earlier chapters, and may at times yearn for the inclusion of a few more secondary sources in the endnotes and “suggested further reading” section. On the other hand, Murphy’s book, the latest release in the How Things Worked series published by Johns Hopkins University Press, is not a monograph. The abbreviated notes and suggestions for further reading reflect an editorial decision in consideration of the book’s targeted audience, and specialists, being specialists, already know where to look for more information. Other People’s Money, thus, works in a variety of educational settings. First-year graduate students who show an inkling for financial history (gasp!) will find a useful primer here. Professors teaching specialized classes in business history, the history of capitalism, and economics for non-economists (this class should be more widely taught) can assign it. Because the sheer number of different financial institutions and credit instruments of this era is daunting even for experts, they can keep this on their bookshelves or digital devices as a quick reference. Non-academics interested in early American history will also find this book accessible.

The strengths of this work are numerous. In addition to narrating some intriguing vignettes on Abigail Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Herman Melville, this book contains a fascinating array of cartoons and images of credit instruments, many of which are drawn from the author’s extensive personal collection. Murphy’s writing is also straightforward; her analysis, insightful. Financial history presents many challenges. To grasp its intricacies, one needs to know, for example, how a bill of exchange worked; what reserve ratios are; how panicky borrowers, reacting to information asymmetries, can imperil an entire economy. It requires immense skill to take complex, abstract, and highly technical accounting principles and explain them to the reader in digestible ways. Murphy is more than up to the challenge. She summarizes a great deal of content and manages to pack a lot of information into a few words with lucidity and clarity. Economic concepts are explored in this book, but without the intimidating formulas and regressions that would normally send students accustomed to a predominantly narrative-driven discipline running for the hills. Importantly, Murphy demonstrates an agile, dexterous familiarity with financial terminology so that she can explain definitions succinctly without sacrificing complexity. At the same time, she shows how these definitions fit together—a clear improvement over some of the more convoluted works of financial history that came out of the mid-twentieth century. This is economic history as it should be written. 

Post-2008, understanding the relationship between banks and recessions became paramount. There continues to be no shortage of craven politicians and pundits who fear-monger about debt and inflation while deliberately minimizing social welfare. Each year their apocalyptic predictions fail to materialize, but sadly, their platforms remain. When expertise that scholars have worked decades to develop is cavalierly dismissed as “elite” while abject ignorance is touted as a defining feature of what it means to be a “real” American, a back-to-the-basics, jargon-free approach to financial literacy is more essential than ever. In the world of antebellum-era finance, to find out how things worked, as the series title indicates, here is an ideal place to start.

 

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

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Stephen W. Campbell is a lecturer in the department of history at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author of articles that have appeared in American Nineteenth Century History, Ohio Valley History, Perspectives on History, and Missouri Historical Review.

Each year, enslaved men, women, and children across New York and New Jersey’s Dutch communities would receive time off to celebrate Pinkster—the Dutch version of Pentecost or Whitsuntide. Pinkster had been a predominantly Dutch church and folk celebration that Dutch settlers and their descendants brought to the Dutch colony of New Netherland, and which they continued to celebrate after the English took control of the region. Initially, their enslaved laborers participated in this Dutch tradition, but by the early nineteenth century, Pinkster had become a predominantly African American festival, usually with an African king in charge of the celebration. In Albany, where New York’s most famous Pinkster celebration took place, this king was known as King Charles, who served as “master of ceremonies, whose whole authority is absolute, and whose will is law during the whole of the Pinkster holidays” (60). He would parade through the streets of Albany, collect revenue, and only after he arrived on the Pinkster Hill, now the location of New York’s state capitol, the festivities could commence. For days, participants would make music, dance, drink, and play various games.

Pinkster has attracted the attention of several scholars, including Natalie Zemon Davis, Peter Burke, and Shane White, yet much remains unknown about the festival’s events or origins. Why, for example, were enslaved laborers allowed to gather in large groups during Pinkster, while on any other day they were prohibited from meeting with more than three fellow bondsmen or women? Why were they allowed to consume alcohol, even in excess, when they were not allowed to purchase alcoholic beverages on any other day of the year? And what were the origins of this celebration? Was it Dutch, African, or something new altogether? 

Jeroen Dewulf’s The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo addresses these questions, and in doing so he provides a welcome addition to the scholarship on this festival. It combines most known sources on Pinkster, and it incorporates analysis of primary sources in multiple languages. The book is well-written and highlights an important part of American history that has not yet received the attention it deserves. One of this work’s greatest contributions lies in its comparisons between Pinkster in New York and similar celebrations elsewhere in the Atlantic.

The book argues that Pinkster originated in West Central Africa, not in the Dutch Republic, as most scholars have claimed. In particular, Dewulf suggests that the origins of Pinkster could be found in the “mutual-aid associations in the tradition of Afro-Iberian brotherhoods established by the charter generation” (10). Dewulf contends that the practice had been brought to North America by its first generation of enslaved Africans who were predominantly of West Central African descent. He argues that subsequent generations of Africans adapted to the already existing practices introduced by this West Central African charter generation. In order to prove his argument, Dewulf investigates Pinkster traditions and similar celebrations in the Netherlands, West Central Africa, and the larger Atlantic world.

The book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter examines Pinkster celebrations in the Dutch Republic. It shows that the Dutch folk festival of Pinkster had various elements in common with the American Pinkster celebrations. Chapter two discusses slavery in New York and New Jersey, and examines how the African American community celebrated Pinkster. Chapter three explores the origins of Pinkster. It argues that the Dutch folk festival of Pinkster could not have survived in North America, and instead connects the North American celebration to Catholic, Luso-Kongolese traditions. The fourth chapter argues that the origins of Pinkster can be traced to the confraternities of the Afro-Iberian Atlantic and West Central Africa in particular. The fifth chapter links New Amsterdam’s West Central African charter generation to the later Pinkster celebrations. It argues that the social foundations of Pinkster in the early nineteenth century can be traced back to this seventeenth-century African community. Finally, chapter six examines the “demise and legacy” of the North American Pinkster celebration. Not only does this chapter explore how Pinkster came to an end, it also examines how the festival influenced North American culture in venues ranging from music to literature.

Dewulf is right to address the important West Central African influences on North American celebrations such as Pinkster. West Central Africans played an important role in many American slave communities, as several scholars have shown in recent years. Even the West Central African influence in New Netherland has been highlighted by a number of scholars, including Linda Heywood, John Thornton, Russell Hodges, Willem Frijhoff, and myself. Although the West Central African influence in the region’s culture is undeniable, the book’s argument that the Pinkster celebration is rooted exclusively in the cultural ways of the charter generation’s West Central Africans is not entirely convincing. After reading the book, the question remains how a relatively small African population in Manhattan laid the foundation of an elaborate festival that took place in Dutch communities all over New York and New Jersey. Especially so, because no persuasive evidence links these early nineteenth-century communities to New Amsterdam’s West Central African population, or shows a satisfying progression of the celebration over the course of the eighteenth century. 

Although this book is an interesting and worthwhile read, the reader should be aware of its limitations. The book relies predominantly on printed sources, many of which have already been used by other scholars, and in some places the book relies heavily on primary source quotations from other secondary sources without consulting the original sources. The author does not appear to have done much archival research; such research could potentially have uncovered new information. More importantly, on some occasions evidence is missing, making it impossible for a reader to verify certain claims. For example, Dewulf asserts that when the Pinkster Ode, an early nineteenth-century published poem about Albany’s Pinkster festival, mentioned the burial of Dinah, it likely referred to the enslaved girl named Dean who was executed for the Albany fire and who according to Dewulf was “buried in the African cemetery near the place where the African American Pinkster celebrations occurred” (162). But he does not provide any evidence for either of these claims. The book also misrepresents the historiography on several occasions. In chapter six, for instance, Dewulf claims that Bradford Verter, in his article “Interracial Festivity and Power in Antebellum New York: The Case of Pinkster,” has suggested that an author known only by the initials of A.B. “possibly refers to Aaron Burr, who habitually signed his correspondence with this abbreviation” (165), when Verter actually wrote the following: “The likelihood that Burr was himself the author of the article on Pinkster is rather remote.” Such inaccuracies or missing evidence undercut what is otherwise a worthwhile read.

Although the book presents an interesting approach to studying Pinkster, it does not convince the reader that it is more likely that the early nineteenth-century Pinkster festivals originated in the traditions of a relatively small African American community in New Amsterdam than in Dutch medieval Pinkster celebrations. Although Pinkster has many elements similar to West Central African traditions, it also resembles festivals elsewhere in Africa and Europe. While the book does not provide any conclusive answers to the outstanding questions, it does bring needed attention to this part of early American and Atlantic history.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

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Andrea Mosterman is assistant professor in Atlantic and Early American History at the University of New Orleans. She is currently completing her manuscript on the interactions between enslaved and free New Yorkers in the region’s Dutch-American communities.

Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760-1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 328 pp., $55.

Jenna Gibbs’s Performing the Temple of Liberty begins with a fanciful invitation to the reader to accompany her on a “stroll along the Thames River,” past the scene of slaves being led to ships that will transport them for sale overseas, towards taverns and coffeehouses where Londoners might have been discussing the Haymarket Theatre’s current production of Colman’s Inkle and Yarico. She juxtaposes these two images—shackled black bodies en route to the Americas with a play featuring white bodies in blackface debating the moral evils of slavery—to offer a point of entry into her larger subject: a comparative study of performance culture and abolitionism in London and Philadelphia during the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century.

Over the past twenty years, theater scholars have argued for the importance of performance culture in shaping political thought in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world. For example, Jeffrey H. Richards’s 1991 study, Theatre Enough, explores the metaphor of politics in America’s revolutionary ideology. Additionally, scholars such as Peter Reed, Daphne Brooks, Gay Gibson Cima, Lisa Merrill, Douglas Jones, John Frick, Amy Hughes, Marvin McAllister, W.T. Lhamon Jr., Tracy Davis, Sandra Gustafson, Sarah Meer, and Shane White (among others) have paid careful attention to the ways in which transatlantic performance culture engaged with issues of race, and particularly questions of liberty and slavery.

Gibbs’s seven-chapter study (divided into three parts with an introduction and a conclusion) shifts back and forth between London and Philadelphia as two poles of antislavery activity in the Atlantic world. In chapters one, two, and three, she explores the origins of what she labels “oral blackface,” or a “new genre of racial ridicule, with [a] free exchange between theatrical, print, visual, and civic culture” (49). She examines the ways in which the dialogue of popular blackface characters such as Mungo (from Charles Dibdin’s popular play The Padlock) infiltrated rhetorical and visual practices beyond the playhouse—whether in political cartoons or even costumes worn to fancy-dress balls (65). She suggests that even as Mungo and some of his counterparts (like Harlequin Negro) were adopted by antislavery activists, they also provided fodder for those who opposed abolition by offering infantilized or clownish representations of black characters. As Gibbs, Brooks, Reed, Nathans, and others have noted, depictions of African or African American characters were often co-opted by groups with diametrically opposed goals and invoked to demonstrate that slavery was inherently evil or that it protected those too simple to fend for themselves.

 

 

This paradox of representation lay at the heart of much antislavery performance culture in the Atlantic world. Communities of activists on both sides of the Atlantic sought a resolution to this seemingly inescapable contradiction by building grandiose visions of a return to Africa as a solution for British and American slavery and the repatriation of stolen African peoples, as well as a natural site for both territorial and evangelical expansion. In chapter three, Gibbs mentions William Dunlap’s adaptation of George Colman’s The Africans, or War, Love, and Duty as an example of a transatlantic drama that draws on a wider lexicon of sermons, histories, and other representations of Africa circulating in British culture. And while Colman and Dunlap (who was a secretary of New York’s Manumission Society) both championed the antislavery cause, Gibbs argues that each did so while both implicitly and explicitly “trumpeting white cultural superiority” (101).

Chapters four and five examine the rapid increase and expansion in the performance of urban blackface—connected to the proliferation of print and theatrical circulation in the wake of the War of 1812. Urbanization and early industrialization in the U.S. widened the racial spectacle(s) on display for British theater-goers in America, as they encountered new incarnations of familiar black characters. As Gibbs notes, “The urban picaresque and proto-variety vaudeville genres were … used to critique slavery even as their characters disparaged black freedom” (117). As theater scholars Nathans, Frick, Hughes, Meer, Jones, and Merrill have noted, part of the challenge of publicly critiquing African slavery onstage was that both British and American audiences had a long history of violent protest against unpopular ideas—protests that periodically resulted in the destruction of performance spaces or even bodily harm to the actors and orchestra members. Thus even the most passionately abolitionist managers, performers, and playwrights often framed their messages in more palatable or unthreatening forms.

And while black characters continued to be played by white actors in blackface (and often British actors in blackface, most notably in the case of Charles Mathews, which Gibbs discusses in chapter five), more and more United States-inflected representations of African American characters were emerging in the Atlantic circuit. As United States-based characters began to populate the theatrical, visual, and literary landscape, they underscored the “British critique of American democracy,”—a theme Britons had invoked since the Revolutionary War when Americans tried to justify their own battle for liberty alongside the continuation of chattel slavery (176).

Chapter six/part three begins with a fascinating consideration of how British cosmopolitanism combined with the “full-blown scientific racism embedded in the mockery of black slavery” to highlight “a dialogue between the burlesque and the utopian” (178). Gibbs argues that far from existing as inherent opposites, “blackface minstrelsy and revolutionary utopianism did not merely take the stage side by side; rather blackface minstrels became part of the performance of revolutionary utopianism” (179). The turmoil of the 1830s spawned a number of “coded figure[s] of contested meanings” on London and Philadelphia stages, from the heroic Spartacus to the clownish Jim Crow (205). For Gibbs, as for other scholars of theater history, the slave revolts of the 1830s offer a pivotal moment to reexamine the relationship between the representation of slavery and blackness in white Atlantic culture, as well as a renewed investigation of black agency. For example, Gibbs analyzes Robert Montgomery Bird’s familiar 1831 play, The Gladiator (a tragedy that the author acknowledged offered a natural association with the Nat Turner uprising), and considers it alongside Bird’s lesser-known novel Sheppard Lee (1836), which also traces the history of an uprising—this time one set in the South, rather than ancient Thrace and Rome. The juxtaposition underscores the ways in which Bird tempered his message to suit the medium of performance (as well as the personality of star actor Edwin Forrest, for whom the play was written).

Chapter seven and the conclusion examine the consequences of decades of building “radical agitation and sociopolitical unrest” (212). In this chapter, Gibbs pays particular attention to George Dibdin Pitt’s Toussaint L’Ouverture, or The Black Spartacus and novelist George Lippard’s Washington and his Generals; or, Legends of the Revolution. Both call for a “radical and racially inclusive social and economic regeneration” through the black heroes in their works (214). Including Lippard in this chapter is a particularly intriguing choice given his reputation for writing works that hit close to home among his fellow Philadelphians. The theatrical adaptation of his Monks of Monk Hall was reportedly so scathing and scandalous that it had to be pulled from the stage before its opening. As Gibbs notes, both Pitt’s Toussaint L’Ouverture and Lippard’s Washington and his Generals address the challenge of the growing white underclass (a theme scholar Peter Reed has explored as well). Gibbs also probes British audiences’ interest in the American-born black performer Ira Aldridge. Britons appreciated the ways in which Aldridge combined familiar tropes of minstrel performance with antislavery themes (224). As theater scholar Bernth Lindfors has observed, it was not until Aldridge “escaped” the Atlantic circuit and began performing elsewhere in Europe (most notably Prussia and Austria) that he began to be known as a classical actor.

In her conclusion Gibbs turns (perhaps not surprisingly) to the work that galvanized and transformed the performance of race and slavery in the Atlantic world: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe’s controversial novel was rapidly adapted for the stage in a bewildering array of genres, from the minstrel burlesque to tragedy, and produced a proliferation of images, pamphlets, and objects (such as china figurines of Uncle Tom and Little Eva) for audience consumption on both sides of the Atlantic. Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrated the inability of Atlantic performance culture to contain or control images of blackness or slavery, a point further underscored by Gibbs’s astute use of the image “Our Goddess of Liberty” (1870), representing a range of female faces, including white, Irish, African, and Native American, and punctuated with the query, “What is she to be? To what complexion are we come at last?” (250). This image offers a nice counterpoint to Gibbs’s invocation of the various “goddesses of liberty” or “Spirits of Columbia” that she cites throughout the text, tracing their trajectory alongside the young nation’s discourse on race relations and the role of whites in uplifting enslaved African populations.

As a minor note, the study is peppered with some factual errors related to dates of performance, as well as occasional chronological confusion among the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources that Gibbs cites. Nevertheless, this is a well-written and comprehensive work that should help scholars of British and American history imagine how they might integrate an understanding of performance culture into an examination of race and slavery in the pre-Revolutionary and antebellum periods.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3.5 (July, 2015).

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Heather S. Nathans is the author of Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (2003); Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787-1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (2009); and Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (under contract), as well as numerous other essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American theater. She is the president of the American Society for Theatre Research and the series editor for Studies in Theatre History and Culturewith the University of Iowa Press. Nathans is professor and chair of the Department of Drama and Dance at Tufts University.

Between 1790 and 1860, New York’s population increased dramatically, from under 35,000 to over 800,000. Gergely Baics examines how the city’s food system provided or failed to provide for its inhabitants as an infrastructure of public markets ceded to a deregulated sprawl of private purveyors. Feeding Gotham will be of interest to students of urban planning, geography, and social and economic history, as well as those engaged with the history and politics of food systems. In his conclusion, Baics pays special attention to the concept of “food deserts” in cities as a contemporary vocabulary for understanding problems of urban food justice and malnutrition, and he offers several comparative examples of how other cities have regulated their food supplies.

The book is organized into three parts. In part I, Baics explains the rationale for municipal public markets to provide citizens with access to food, narrating their emergence from colonial community institutions to their eventual deregulation through the Common Council’s 1843 repeal of market laws. These laws excluded unlicensed vendors and non-market butchers, whose success in spite of restriction had challenged the legitimacy of public markets. Gradually, many consumers came to believe the fees and rents associated with public markets increased the price of food unnecessarily. For their part, public officials began to question the cost of maintaining market infrastructure. Part II assesses how well the public market system fulfilled its objectives from the 1790s to the 1820s, concluding that it was largely successful in providing abundant and quality food for the city’s growing population. Throughout his analysis, Baics focuses primarily on meat, which he argues was a dietary staple, most susceptible to problems of quality and supply, and thus most constitutive of the municipal regulatory regime.

Part III narrates the debates leading to the emergence of the free market system of provisioning from the 1830s, which he subjects to the same standards of evaluation applied to the public market system. Baics has new insights into the so-called “antebellum paradox” explored by economic and demographic historians: that is, that increasing morbidity and decreasing standards of health accompanied rapid economic growth and rising per capita income. He pays special attention to the negative effects borne by poor New Yorkers by deteriorating availability and quality of food supplies, noting that deregulation introduced a “more complex, uneven, and riskier terrain of provisioning” (228). He concludes that “the liberalization of food markets propelled a formerly more egalitarian resource to become another structural layer of inequality, much like housing and sanitation” (235).

Baics observes that the deregulation of food provisioning did not signify a total movement toward liberalization or attenuation of municipal government. Rather, the infrastructure of public markets competed with the Croton aqueduct and other public goods and services for revenue, generating a bifurcated antebellum political economy. Against histories that attribute deregulation entirely to free market ideology, Baics argues that “the question was not whether the municipal government had an important role to play but rather in what areas of economic and social life public investments and regulatory oversight should be extended and where free-market relations should prevail” (4). While water became a municipally managed public utility, food provisioning was wholly deregulated.

Why then did food follow a path of extreme liberalization? Baics emphasizes aspects of the debate related to market supply, price, competition from independent vendors, and the cost of operating public markets. He focuses his analysis on prominent interest groups, including subscribers, licensed and unlicensed butchers, and the City Corporation, which owned and managed the public markets. In his analysis and selection of evidence, Baics prefers William Novak’s concept of a “well-ordered market” to E.P. Thompson’s “moral economy” because of the former’s narrower focus on regulatory frameworks and supposed lack of normative implication (25-6). Apart from the question of whether Thompson’s framing is applicable to nineteenth-century New York, some will object that markets cannot be understood apart from ideological, normative, and affective forms of politics that constitute them. Some readers will crave more discussion of the broader context of these debates, including the roles of commodity price fluctuation, Democratic and Locofoco movements for free markets, and instances of public demonstration and rioting in shaping public debate over access to resources and their proper government. Historians of the early republic will seek to connect the debates over public markets to a now rich literature on responses to the Panic of 1837, proliferation of paper currency, and the role of informal markets in structuring the antebellum economy.

Baics identifies his as a “history of food access” rather than “a history of food” (6), distinguishing his approach from social and cultural histories provided by Cindy Lobel’s Urban Appetites, for example. This is a useful way of communicating to readers why he focuses on public markets and butchers as the principle points of food access for antebellum New Yorkers. It also justifies his focus on meat, which occupied an outsized share of urban diets in this period. Baics provides new estimates of meat consumption for the period, which constitute a significant contribution to our understanding of urban diets and provisions. 

The formulation of “food access” nevertheless concedes the legitimacy of defining food primarily in terms of supply, security, or availability. Once defined purely in terms of food quantity and basic nutrition, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. now interprets “food security” as stable and universal “physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences [emphasis mine] for an active and healthy life.” In the case of the antebellum United States, dietary preference was for high consumption of red meat, a relatively expensive source of calories. The abundant supply in public markets justifies Baics’s assessment that they succeeded in supplying the city’s growing population with fresh and abundant food. He does not choose to explore the long-term sustainability of this consumer taste, or the cultural values that informed the choice of meat as a dietary staple. Similar analysis could be applied to the choice of wheat over rye and maize as staple grains, and to diets consisting primarily of meat and grain.

Inasmuch as food is a cultural object in addition to a biological requirement, histories of food may help to explain why this necessity of life followed a different regulatory path than water or housing. Histories of diet, cooking, eating, and restaurant culture thus provide complementary rather than disparate approaches to Baics’s analysis of access. Chronologically, it pairs well with Katie Turner’s account of the emergence of a federal regulatory system for food quality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also complements an emerging literature linking the feeding of captive populations and worker-citizens in the modern nation state. These related histories of food cultures offer to broaden Baics’s analysis beyond cities and to the world food systems in which they are embedded.

The great gift of Feeding Gotham is its methodological innovation and its painstaking tabulation and analysis of data. Baics showcases the potential of geographic information systems (GIS) as a tool for historical analysis, using GIS to reconstruct New York’s public market system and the proliferation of private food shops that followed its deregulation. The exciting collection of color maps provides visualizations of the meat supply system from slaughterhouse to point of sale over the course of the antebellum period. This creative use of quantitative analysis is a model for how historical geography can provide new insights into economic development and urban history, as well as the opportunities provided by the large-scale digitization of archival records. Baics draws on geospatial data compiled from digitized city directories, fire insurance atlases, and geo-referenced historical maps in the collections of the New York Public Library and New-York Historical Society.

Baics has reflected elsewhere on the promises of GIS as an analytic tool. Given the author’s creativity and command of these methods for historical analysis, one also wants to hear him reflect on their possible limits, and the challenges of following “the spatial turn.” Baics identifies cities as centers of conflict over political economy because of their scale and novelty, and the extremity of problems that emerged as a result. Even so, recent urban environmental histories such as Catherine McNeur’s Taming Manhattan have reminded us that cities are inseparable from the natures in which they are embedded. Most immediately relevant here is New York’s reliance on outlying areas for its food supplies. Baics’s analysis of urban crisis and reconfiguration invites new histories of provisioning that break down the imagined boundaries between urban and rural and the political economies they justified.

For the social historian, one of Baics’s most exciting chapters is his study of the Catherine Street market, derived from a close reading of the nineteenth-century New York butcher Thomas F. DeVoe’s history of municipal food markets. Baics bookends this chapter with DeVoe’s account of popular dance contests staged at the market, hosted by the butchers and featuring slaves and free blacks from Long Island to New Jersey. Baics argues that these exhibitions reiterated the social hierarchy of the market. Exploitative entertainments sponsored by the butchers helped structure the community’s performance of market rules. His analysis brings to mind Brian Rouleau’s account of minstrel shows aboard Commodore Perry’s 1853 naval expedition to Japan. Here also, entertainments featuring racist tropes and hierarchies provided the context for diplomatic negotiation and market relations. Notably, Baics uses the metaphor of “neighborhood ecology” (125) rather than economy to characterize the Catherine Street market, suggesting that political economy, geography, or supply-and-demand are insufficient optics to understand how the legitimacy of markets and community loyalty to them were secured.

Ecology demands a rendering of social relations that are often flattened by quantitative and cartographic representation, and it is to Baics’s credit that he includes the study of the Catherine Street market in a book that pursues synthetic geographical approaches. Here and throughout the book, Baics grounds his analysis in a careful reading of the lived experience of New Yorkers of all walks of life in pursuit of their daily bread or meat. The result is a careful attempt to understand how one major city managing massive demographic growth reconfigured access to food. Baics’s primary concern is to understand the benefits and costs of public markets and their deregulation for the living standards and material well-being of all of the city’s inhabitants. These questions remain essential.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

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Courtney Fullilove is associate professor of history at Wesleyan University and author of The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (2017).

You suggest in the introduction that the African Americans who started newspapers in the nineteenth century did so because of their sense of “black chosenness.” Can you explain what you mean by that term?

“Black chosenness” is shorthand for the belief that African Americans are God’s chosen people. This belief gained purchase and power among black communities in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and rests in a comparison between African Americans and the biblical Israelites, whom the Bible marks as God’s original chosen nation. The Bible records numerous instances where the Israelites suffer slavery and oppression. We’re perhaps most familiar with the period when the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites, which is recounted in the book of Exodus, but in later periods the Israelites were enslaved by the Assyrians and the Chaldeans, a civilization typically represented through its capital city of Babylon. African American preachers and writers repeatedly pointed out the obvious parallels between the Israelites in slavery and enslaved black people in the United States, and often argued that if black Americans were the modern manifestation of the biblical Israelites, then they too could claim the mantle of God’s chosen nation.

A faith in black chosenness often brought with it a sense of responsibility to act in a certain way (what I call “acting chosen”), though what exactly acting chosen meant in terms of on-the-ground behavior could change depending upon specific circumstances. But most importantly, perhaps, black chosenness contained within it a certainty that black Americans would eventually be free, since God would not allow his chosen people to remain in bondage forever. The when and how of freedom may have been uncertain, but black chosenness guarantees the fact of black liberation.

 

I don’t want to suggest, though, that black editors began their newspapers because of their faith in black chosenness. In each of my chapters, I try to flesh out in as much detail as possible the specific circumstances that led to the founding of particular newspapers. But black chosenness became a fundamental, if at times subtle, theme of the black newspapers that I take up in my book. Newspapers allowed black editors to apply their faith in black chosenness to specific circumstances, and those circumstances in turn affected the precise contours of black chosenness. For example, in 1848 Frederick Douglass and his staff used the North Star to explore the relationship between black chosenness and the anti-monarchical revolutions that rocked Europe during that year. And as it connected black chosenness to an international revolutionary movement, the North Star stretched the boundaries of the new chosen nation to include black and white revolutionaries located within and beyond the confines of the United States. As a medium in some ways designed to translate abstract ideas into concrete plans for action, the newspaper was an ideal way for black Americans to put the theory of black chosenness into practice. 

How many newspapers were published by African Americans during the antebellum era? How did you decide to focus on the five you selected for the book?

I hesitate to even offer an estimate about the number of black newspapers published in the antebellum era. Frankie Hutton’s foundational book The Early Black Press in America lists seventeen “extant antebellum black newspapers,” but scholars continue to find references to papers that we have not yet recovered. For example, Thomas Hamilton is perhaps best known as the editor of the Weekly Anglo-African, a newspaper that I focus on in my book. But according to his contemporaries Hamilton also edited the People’s Press sometime in the 1840s, and I recently discovered references to a short-lived Tri-Weekly Anglo-African, also edited by Hamilton, that ran for a single week in 1865. Now, Thomas Hamilton was a well-known member of New York City’s black elite, and still we’re missing entire publications that he produced. So I have to imagine that there are also as-yet-unrecovered black newspapers published in small cities and towns across the northern United States that we don’t even know we’re supposed to be looking for. And if we decide to consider black newspapers published in Canada and the Caribbean (I think we should), the number grows even larger. All of which is to say, there is still an immense amount of work to be done recovering and analyzing early black newspapers, and I always intended my book to be an entry point into a vast archive, rather than a comprehensive study.

I decided to focus on the five newspapers in my book for practical as well as thematic reasons. I wanted to be able to write about newspapers with runs of at least a year, and as much as possible to be able to read each paper’s entire run. So when narrowing down my archive I was immediately confronted by problems of archiving and access. At the time I began my work on this book, only a single issue of newspapers like Martin Delany’s Mystery was extant, while multiple years of Frederick Douglass’ Paper were either missing or incredibly difficult to access. On the other hand, nearly full runs of Freedom’s Journal, The Colored American, the North Star, the Provincial Freeman, and the Weekly Anglo-African are all relatively easily accessible, either on microfilm or (for a select few) digitally.

But beyond such practical concerns I chose to write about these five newspapers together because the publications and the people who made them were intimately connected to one another. One reason I decided to focus on newspapers published over a relatively short time period (about forty years) and small geographic area (the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada) is that the women and men who made and sustained these papers knew one another personally. Thomas Hamilton’s father, for example, helped found Freedom’s Journal, a newspaper that profoundly influenced Philip Bell’s decision to start The Colored American (where the teenage Hamilton worked as a newspaper wrapper). John Dick, who printed and contributed numerous articles to the North Star, later emigrated to Canada and helped produce the Provincial Freeman, edited by Mary Ann Shadd. And Shadd’s good friend and neighbor Martin Delany had his novel Blake published in the Weekly Anglo-African. In addition, because the editors of the papers I selected engaged in numerous activities besides newspaper editing, they met and interacted with one another in a variety of venues. For example, Samuel Cornish, Philip Bell, Charles Ray, Frederick Douglass, Mary Ann Shadd, and Thomas and Robert Hamilton all attended Colored Conventions. Cornish and Bell served together on education committees in the 1830s, and Douglass and Ray argued over the need for a new black newspaper in the 1840s. And sometimes these cooperations and disagreements spilled over into the pages of their newspapers long after the conventions had closed. So I tried, as much as possible, to put these particular newspapers into conversation with one another precisely because the people reading and writing these papers were actually in conversation with one another. And reading the five newspapers I cover in my book together, I want to suggest, offers us a far richer sense of a community that existed in person and in print than we would get if we read any one of the papers in isolation. Some of the newspapers that I focus on have been written about by other scholars, in helpful and important ways, but there’s much more work to be done teasing out the collective and collaborative nature of the early black press, within and across individual papers. My hope is that my book offers one example of what that kind of work might look like.

Throughout the book, you note that the editors of these newspapers saw their publications as vehicles to regulate or channel the behavior of African Americans. Why did they believe that their newspapers would be a successful avenue to pursue that goal?

It may be impossible to overstate the importance of the newspaper in the nineteenth-century United States. As the era’s dominant form of media, I tend to think of the newspaper in the nineteenth century in relation to television in the twentieth or the Internet in the twenty-first. When conducting research for this book, I read through a number of travel accounts from European visitors to the United States, and without fail the authors expressed their astonishment at the sheer number of newspapers in the U.S., and the influence that these papers exerted over the populace. The most famous of these accounts is probably from Alexis de Tocqueville, who devotes an entire chapter of Democracy in America to the place of newspapers in the United States, and sees the newspaper as the key means to not only reach but also to influence a scattered citizenry. Contemporary scholars have debated whether or not the newspaper actually possessed that kind of power, but nineteenth-century advocates and critics of the newspaper alike believed that it did. This respect for the power of the newspaper helps explain why delegates to Colored Conventions spent so much time discussing not only the creation of black newspapers, but the need to support papers of, in the parlance of the day, high moral standing. The minutes of these conventions are dotted with delegates worrying about the influence that a “bad” paper could have on its readers, especially children, and urging families to subscribe to journals that would teach upright behavior.

For the black New Yorkers who founded Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper published in the United States, this faith in the power of the newspaper to shape the perceptions and behavior of its readers was based in personal experience. Freedom’s Journal was founded for a number of reasons, but one of them was to provide a means to counter the racist representations of African Americans that were rampant in New York’s white newspapers. And we see attempts to correct such misrepresentations present in all of the newspapers that I write about in my book, because these lies could have material consequences. Beyond contributing to and justifying the general discrimination that African Americans faced in the North, white editors could and did use the pages of their papers to stir up and organize mobs to attack black gatherings, parades, and businesses. This is not to dismiss or minimize the importance of other institutions like the church, or other forms of print like the pamphlet and book. But when someone in the nineteenth century wanted to get their message out, if they could, they started a newspaper (or many newspapers). This is true for political parties, organizations committed to causes like temperance or the abolition of slavery, religious denominations from the mainstream to the Millerites, and a wide range of immigrant groups. So the belief by black editors that their newspapers could shape the ideas and actions of their readers reflected the broadly accepted view of the power of the newspaper, which could be wielded for good or ill.

In what ways did these newspapers connect through their mission to other nineteenth-century movements, including abolitionism and evangelical moral reform? What I suggest in my book is that black newspapers applied their theories of black chosenness to a range of issues. For example, Freedom’s Journal argued that being a member of God’s chosen nation brought with it the responsibility to act in a certain way. And for that newspaper, acting chosen meant behaving according to certain class-based norms. The paper railed against working-class black New Yorkers for being too loud, too showy, for lacking decorum and humility. So in this example, Freedom’s Journal connected black chosenness to its efforts to instill what its editors called “propriety” in its black readers.

And while I decided to focus on the place of black chosenness in black newspapers, this is only one of many stories we could and need to tell about the early black press. The black newspapers that I study were not single-issue publications. Instead, they covered and commented on a range of topics. These papers were certainly abolitionist, printing speeches from well-known black and white abolitionists and consistently agitating for the end of slavery. But they were not simply abolitionist papers. The same can be said for an issue like temperance, which was taken up frequently by black newspapers in the antebellum era.

To what extent did the editors see inclusion among the American nation as a possibility for African Americans?

The black newspapers I study, with the exception of the Provincial Freeman, absolutely saw inclusion among an American nation as a possibility for African Americans. But crucially, for these newspapers “American nation” did not necessarily equal the United States of America. Instead, the black newspapers that I study consistently imagined God’s chosen people as members of American nations that existed independently of, and at times in opposition to, the United States.

We see this most clearly with The Colored American, a newspaper that at times equated the United States to Babylon, a city that, in the Bible, God eradicates because its people hold the Israelites in slavery. With this connection in mind, The Colored American speculated that black Americans would only find true freedom after the United States had been destroyed. And out of that destruction, the paper concluded, would come a truly free American nation composed of those that the United States had formerly enslaved and oppressed (including Native Americans). Indeed, The Colored American drew an explicit connection between African Americans and Native American tribes like the Seminoles, while also focusing on the history of Native nations that predated the United States. By reminding their readers, and us, that American nations had existed before the United States and will exist after it, black newspapers like The Colored American put some healthy distance between the concepts of nation (or people) and state (or government). There is a long history of U.S. Americans working hard to collapse those two concepts and portray the United States as the natural, inevitable, and only imaginable state of an American nation. But as the contributors to and readers of the black newspapers that I write about in my book recognized, that conflation is designed to eliminate the pursuit of alternative American nation-states free from the oppressive structures and conditions that constitute the United States.

 

You note, both above and in the book, the difficulty for scholars in gaining access to newspapers because so few of them are digitized. What is the current status of digitization projects for black newspapers specifically, and what work remains to be done?

When I began this project in the early 2000s, I could only access antebellum black newspapers through microfilm and a visit to the American Antiquarian Society, which holds quite a few original issues of the papers I write about in my book. At present, quite a few black newspapers, including but not limited to the five I focus on in my book, have been digitized. These digitization projects have undoubtedly made black newspapers more widely available. The caveat, though, is that the for-profit companies that have digitized and archived these papers charge subscription fees that only the richest universities can afford, and typically do not even offer subscription options for individuals unaffiliated with such institutions. Moreover, the newspaper databases that are freely accessible, such as the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America project, are woefully inadequate in their coverage of black newspapers. So we have a situation where newspapers produced by and for a people who had been bought and sold have been transformed into a commodity accessible only to scholars and students at a select few universities. One of the saddest consequences of this inaccessibility, I think, is the difficulty of bringing black newspapers into the classroom and introducing new generations to the power and beauty of the early black press.

What we need, then, is a freely accessible archive (or archives) of black newspapers (and black print more generally) created and curated by scholars, archivists, and librarians and supported by university libraries. This is a daunting task, especially for folks already overburdened by a range of other professional responsibilities. But projects like the Colored Conventions Project and the Digital Colored American Magazine are models for how this sort of work can proceed, and show that it can be accomplished, slowly, as a collective effort.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

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Benjamin Fagan is assistant professor of English at Auburn University, where he teaches courses in early African American literature and culture. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary History, African American Review, American Periodicals, Legacy, and Comparative American Studies. He is the author of The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (2016) and editor of African American Literature in Transition, 1830-1850, a collection of essays under contract with Cambridge University Press. During the 2017-18 academic year, he is a visiting research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.

Precisely fifty years ago, on a frosty Sunday when winters were truly wintry, having little or no zest for my graduate studies, and nothing particular to divert me from the bad tidings in the Boston Globe about Vietnam and Soweto and Selma, I thought I would borrow a friend’s car and escape for a day from the poisonous effluvia of politics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So I drove out to visit Old Sturbridge Village (OSV), an outdoor history museum in central Massachusetts that recreates life in rural New England in the early nineteenth century. The fresh country air, I thought, would refresh my spirit. Little did I expect that on that day I would find a lifelong vocation in public history.

For four or five hours, I slogged through the snowy lanes of the village, in and out of wooden buildings, coming face to face with men and women wearing aprons and bonnets, broad-brimmed hats, button-fly trousers, and high leather boots that made a lot more sense than my already soaked penny loafers. In midafternoon, I took refuge in the Fenno House on the Village Common, where a kindly lady put aside her handwork and invited me to thaw out in a Windsor chair that faced the fire. She described the 1720s dwelling and suggested I look over a period newspaper, a reproduction of the Massachusetts Spy from 1820, which sat on the candlestand next to my chair. I picked it up, adjusted my eyes to its tiny font, and shifted my chair several times to catch the light from the single candle on the table, the fireplace, and the last rays coming through the windows. And though my eyes were much better in those days, I found myself reading slowly, even moving my lips. Then it dawned on me.

The architecture of the room, the physicality of the paper, my reversion to reading aloud, the lightweight chair that allowed my movement, the candlestand, the candlestick, the different sources of light—all combined to form a single cultural artifact full of rich complexity, rooted entirely in the inescapable materiality of the place. My own body became an investigative tool to probe the actions, thoughts, and feelings of people long departed, and perhaps to recover a deeper sense of their humanity. Becoming a professional historian had trained me to seek out abstract stories. I had learned to speak of “ideological origins,” “mimetic strategies,” and “nationalist impulses.” But I hadn’t until that day in Sturbridge felt the concrete urgencies of the past.

From the Fenno House, I trudged over to the cavernous Village Meetinghouse, where I instantly realized that all those Puritan sermons I had parsed at Harvard University, at the feet of the great intellectual historian Perry Miller and his disciples, had been delivered on days like this to congregants wrapped in capes, blankets, and probably the family dog. I’d been studying these New Englanders for years. Now I could no longer recall what images I previously had of them, or whether I had any at all. I started to people the room with what I knew of the social history of the time and place—the rich folks down in the front pews, the tithingman on the look-out for the flirtatious glances of the young women, a wife cutting off the snoring of her husband. The words I had decoded in the quiet of the university library were totally transformed in the theatrical and experiential actuality of this building.

 

Embarrassed by my ignorance of the palpable realities of nineteenth-century men and women, I drove back to Sturbridge the next day and talked myself into a 30-hour-per-week job, at $1.10 an hour. Dressed in those funny costumes, I could hold forth as a schoolmaster, country parson, or lawyer for an audience of families with squally toddlers and surly teenagers, well-read older folks, honeymooning couples, and many, many social-studies teachers. In my off hours, I prowled through the museum’s library, searching through massive town histories and personal narratives for stories I could impart to “my” visitors. I constantly fought against the visitors’ romantic desire to enshrine the past, physically challenging as it surely was, as morally superior. Instead, it was the dense physical complexity of every historical moment which allowed me to visit it as a site that tested my imagination at every turn. I learned most by watching how the blacksmith knew by his acute color sense “to strike the iron when it was hot,” or when the cabinetmaker pressed his chisel harder on the lathe and his foot more rapidly on the treadle, or how the passage of carts slowed as the ice melted into mud on the roads. Observing the epiphenomena of everyday life, largely unrecorded in the archive, led me to think that there was a dimension of cultural and intellectual history that had escaped my notice and that of my teachers and classmates.

Eight months later I returned to Cambridge with renewed energy to finish my PhD course work and exams. And then Old Sturbridge Village came knocking—offering a real job (at $8,000 per year) as a historian in residence, charged with providing our costumed interpreters with broader contexts for the little corners of history they represented. I leapt at the opportunity.

 

As I began my work at Sturbridge, I needed to find a pedagogy that would invite museum visitors to explore the past. At the time, there was scarcely any scholarly literature and few instructional guides in museum studies, material culture, or public history. One or two graduate programs had begun to attract students interested in museum careers, but even they relied more heavily on hands-on experience than readings and classroom work.

I began to note how our visitors moved from one encounter (with an artifact, an interpreter, or a crafts demonstration) to another. Too much of their day consisted of disconnected fragments, rarely tied to larger ideas. How did the gallery of clocks ring out with ideas about the way a sense of time changes with industrialization, and could we see the shifts in the way artisans organized their labor? What did the newly restored general store, its shelves stocked with reproductions of goods imported in that earlier era of globalization, say about the integration of local agricultural and handcraft production with regional markets? What did the taste for printed cottons teach us about the decline of domestic spinning and weaving?

The problem was built into the conventional model of almost all museums at the time. In art museums like the Met or MOMA, works were usually arranged alone, surrounded by white space, their original settings in studios, churches, or burial tombs conveniently erased, and each labeled with only minimal information about the artist, the medium, and the donor. In great libraries like the Morgan or the Huntington, long identification labels frequently shared the vitrines with treasured books and manuscripts, to be read only by the cognoscenti willing and able to understand them. In history museums, many of the objects were marvelously mysterious, like old farm implements, and required extensive description, diagrams, and period illustrations to make them comprehensible, but the interpretation of each object was disconnected from what came before and after. In all such venues, the more the visitors brought to the encounter, the more they could take away. But woe to the uninitiated and the unassisted.

 

The one-artifact-at-a-time approach to display—probably a better word than exhibition—foreclosed a more coherent interpretation of the American past. What linked the objects was their rarity, or their superb individual quality, and not how they each contributed to a lucid exposition or narrative about American history.

State and local museums then usually featured a core exhibition of a long, winding timeline. Era after era succeeded one another. The first gallery invariably focused on local Indian tribes, whose “lives in harmony with nature” were illustrated by a diorama and display case with a dozen dark brown archaeological specimens—pots and fabrics and arrowheads. Succeeding exhibition cases featured a predictable progression of Pioneers (flintlocks and wolf traps); Settlers (axes and aprons); Founding Fathers (inkwells); Inventors (patent models); Captains of Industry (engravings of sprawling factories); Immigrants (colorful folk costumes); Governors or Presidential Candidates (campaign buttons picturing men with beards); and Veterans of the World Wars (posters, packs of Lucky Strikes, ration cards). The past lay across a great divide; how we got from one era to the next unexplored. Chronology took the place of interpretation.

Though the objects on display were drawn from local examples, the story they told was generic: America was anywhere and everywhere a tale of endless economic progress, democracy, and the expansion of science and industry. A similar narrative framed the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of History and Technology (NMHT, now called the National Museum of American History), where mechanical marvels—locomotives, combines, and die-stamping presses—marched across immense galleries, proof of America’s exceptional genius. Much of the actual quotidian experience of Americans—the communities they shared, the skills they used, and the relations they had with one another—was excluded. Public history, largely inattentive to the lives of ordinary folk, was instead a celebration of the rich, the powerful, and the famous.

It seems scarcely credible today that when the NMHT opened in 1964, it displayed almost no images of African-Americans or Indian peoples. Not a single working-class home or neighborhood in the United States was then deemed worthy of preservation or interpretation. The enormous architectural legacy of American industrial places, from Maine through New York City’s Soho district and west through the Great Lakes states, was in danger of being destroyed by urban-renewal programs. At plantation museums in the South, the lives of enslaved people were invisible—“meals were served” and “cotton was harvested.” The immigration stations at Ellis Island and Angel Island were abandoned ruins. Museums of decorative arts often cut off their collections at 1820, deeming unworthy the public’s interest in machine-made furniture.

 

Coming of age in the 1960s, my generation of museum historians aimed to shatter such a simplistic teleology and to explore themes that took a more critical stance on our nation’s history. As devotees of the new social history, we wanted museums to open for investigation the everyday experiences, perspectives, and agency of ordinary people in the past. Not to leave visitors gawking at their weirdness, but to have them put themselves in the shoes of Americans dealing with the threats and promises of their times—a boom-and-bust economy, intergroup rivalry and conflict, shifting family roles, as well as more powerful disruptions like enslavement, immigration, impoverishment, violence, epidemic, and dislocation.

The answer to fragmented visits and implicit teleology had to be both pedagogical and historiographical. At Sturbridge, I had experimented with coaxing visitors to participate, through a variety of hands-on experiences, in “thematic” tours about Family Roles (should farmers send their daughters to work in textile mills?), Work (how did mechanization transform the skills of rural people?), and Community Development (who would benefit if the town built a high school?). At the end, the visitors’ “findings” represented the heart of the “wrap-up.” The great cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner taught us that visitors would take away more of what they said and did than what we offered, so it was important to get them to “externalize” their understandings.

After leaving Sturbridge, I joined in 1980 with my friend Sam Bass Warner, a great historian and public citizen, to create the American History Workshop, a collaborative of scholars, educators, curators, designers, and media producers working to bring fresh scholarship, imaginative design, and effective pedagogy to supplement the staff resources of cultural institutions. The workshop has since been the vehicle for my professional career, through more than 500 projects in thirty-four states and the District of Columbia.

 

In each case, we have construed the museum visit as an experience in time as well as space, a performance in which the visitors played the leading roles. My first artistic love had been the theater, and increasingly I saw the museum space as a stage, but with a more flexible toolbox for engaging visitors. Our exhibitions could present a range of historical evidence that far surpassed the texts that our academic colleagues discussed—artifacts, remnants of places, sounds and images (through film and video), and gestures (in performances and demonstrations incorporated into the visitors’ pathway). Technical aids have been continually proliferating: beautifully rendered graphic panels, audio-visual programs, computer-interactive devices, role-playing and simulation exercises, and stagecraft that recreates historical spaces, moments, and situations.

Over the course of the 1980s, however, it became clear to me that we were failing. Visitors did not exactly warm to these exhibitions of the new social history. They did not identify with “ordinary people” in the past, and they quickly wearied of social-science generalizations about urbanization or deindustrialization. A turning point came when we started to outline the tour programs of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Instead of an interpretive exhibition that would explore the evolution of working-class life in New York City’s famous gateway neighborhood, the museum decided to animate its six-story 1864 brick building at 97 Orchard Street with apartments that would recreate the lives of distinct immigrant and ethnic families—one for German Americans and others for Irish, Eastern-European Jewish, Italian, Chinese, and African-American families. Teams of historians were enlisted to construct composite, “typical” life histories for the families.

 

The results were disappointing. Our historical consultants painted the facts correctly, but in overly broad strokes. All their imagined Irishmen, of course, worked on the docks, the Germans in furniture, the Jews in shmattes (garments). Each community was composed of diverse sub-ethnic groups (Sicilians, Neapolitans, etc.). The ambitious sons in each gravitated to influential positions in different niches of public and economic life—the Irish to Tammany Hall and the police, the Germans to the shooting society on St. Marks Place and the unions. Added together, the family patterns our historians described had a sameness that threatened to turn the museum into a repetitive “soap opera” of how immigrants overcame adversity, group after group, year after year.

At that point, a genealogist working for the museum discovered the 1883 petition of Nathalie Gumpertz, a tenant at 97 Orchard Street, asking New York’s Surrogates Court to declare her husband Julius legally dead. She said that Julius had gone to work one day in the depression year of 1874 and never returned. Informed that he could now inherit $600 from relatives in Prussia, Nathalie asked the court to declare Julius dead and to grant her the money. The census returns confirmed Julius’s presence in 1870 but not in 1880. Then the fun began. Who was Nathalie? Was she Roman Catholic, Jewish, or freethinking? What could she do to support herself and three daughters when her husband vanished? As we researched those questions—learning about the education of German-American girls in New York City, the technology of dressmaking, and other subjects—we fleshed out the dilemmas of a household led by a single mother.

The Gumpertz narrative became a template for other tenement museum apartments, as we sought to construct stories around the lives of actual residents of 97 Orchard. Josephine Baldizzi, a daughter of Sicilian immigrants who had grown up there during the Great Depression, came forward to donate detailed stories as well as her father’s tools, which he’d used for the odd jobs he scratched together to make ends meet. We found that visitors empathized and identified with these individual stories of real people more intensely than they ever did with the composite figures fabricated by historians.

The project taught me that narratives always trumped themes. Public history is far more than the dissemination of scholarly research to a wider audience. It is itself an alternative method of intellectual discovery. Visitors did not come to museums to get an M.A. in social history but to engage their hearts and minds, skills, and self-images, in an encounter with human situations structured by a time and place different from our own. Thematic exposition thus evolved into what I have come to call a “storyscape.”

Working on interpretive plans for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, several American Indian cultural centers, and Holocaust museums also pressed me to acknowledge the political implications of cultural and historical recovery. I learned that almost every important new museum project had to bridge two roles—serving as the cultural expression of one ethnic group or another and contributing to a larger American narrative about socioeconomic power and its limits.

That didn’t mean scoring political points with long didactic labels—usually less likely to make an impression on visitors as they might on scholarly review committees. Our goal was to maximize the visitors’ opportunities “to see themselves in the story,” to represent multiple perspectives in the working-out of the historical events, and to leave the ultimate conclusions open-ended.

 

We had our best chance to display this methodology in a series of six blockbuster history shows for the New-York Historical Society in 2005-2011. In the first, Slavery in New York (2005), we avoided editorializing about “the nefarious trafficking in human beings” in favor of demonstrating how fundamental the institution was to the economic and physical development of the city—a surprise to most  New York visitors, Black as well as White. Even more important, the exhibition drew visitors slowly away from an outsider’s view toward embodying the perspectives and voices of its African and African-American citizenry. “Curating the silence” became our byword, following in the footsteps of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1997).

Visitors entered the next show, New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War (2006), under a hanging replica of a 500-pound bale of cotton, suggesting the dominance of the cotton trade on the politics and culture of New York City in the antebellum period, against which the city’s community of free Blacks and sympathetic Whites fashioned a crusade for abolition and racial equality. In succeeding exhibitions, we tackled the construction of American nationhood in the nineteenth century through events like Lafayette’s tour in 1824-25 (French Founding Father: Lafayette’s Return to Washington’s America, 2007) and the creation of the U.S. Army (Grant and Lee, 2008). In Lincoln and New York (2009), we dug deeply into the domestic civil war in New York City between Copperheads and Republicans, and its influence on the much more familiar national scene. Our final show at N-YHS, Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn (2011), aimed to construe the effects of the eighteenth-century political upheavals, and particularly the Haitian Revolution, in delegitimizing social hierarchies.

All this experience informs my advice for young people aiming to carry their passion for history beyond the academy. In making that transition myself, I had to overcome three hurdles. First, I had to redefine what I meant by the “audience” for my work—not only in its greater diversity but also in its role. At its best, public history engages the visitor’s active curiosity with the curatorial and interpretive resources of the scholar. Much contemporary academic scholarship argues over issues that are of only remote concern to the wider public, like the exchange of gifts between English and American Indian groups in eighteenth-century Georgia. It gives long-winded answers to questions laypeople would never raise, like the congruence of FDR’s economic policies with earlier currents of academic research.

 

Our history workshop begins by doing “content research” with our potential visitors: What do they now understand about the idea of “revolution”? What could make them see the federal Constitution as a jerry-built construction, with procedural compromises to overcome deadlock? How could they serve as witnesses for the resourcefulness of families in moments of economic distress or social exclusion? Incorporating the urgencies of potential visitors is not a matter of dumbing down the interpretive message, but of respecting museumgoers as thinkers.

The second hurdle was learning my trade. A museum historian doesn’t have to master the design of computer programs. Working on a film doesn’t mean that one needs to handle a camera or an editing suite. But it is critical to understand how design decisions, filmmaking techniques, or software protocols influence the narrative and the interpretation we are seeking. Many architects, designers, and media producers would rather that the historian simply turn over the research, and let them create the script or the space. We established AHW precisely to insist on the centrality of the historian to all stages of the interpretive work, from the initial concept to the choice of objects and interpretive devices, and even to the color, light, and ambient sound of the final installation. Early in my career, I had decided I would not be satisfied as a “consultant.” So in assuming the producer’s chair, I had to learn how to set performance criteria for my subcontractors and keep the project on budget and schedule. I had to lean heavily on friends in design offices and advertising agencies, and to spend many weeks carefully observing how their projects evolved, in the service of learning the ropes.

The third hurdle was to grasp the organizational culture of my work. Taking courses in museum studies and public history can usefully sharpen a student’s sense of the scope and focus of professional work beyond the academy. And by now there has been an explosion of writing, teaching, and public commentary about museums. Some of it aims to “theorize” the museum, often using it as evidence of everything that is disappointing in contemporary social and intellectual life. Others take the current museum as a given, recommending “best practices.” Though I’ve enjoyed dipping into this literature, it has had only limited influence on my work. There is no substitute for immersion in the very different institutional world of the museum, the public-broadcasting station, or the art center. Seminar papers are very different from the sequence of proposals, alternate concepts, interim drafts, and final scripts that mark the stages of a public history project.

Ultimately, however, public historians are actors in the same intellectual milieu as their academic colleagues. Beyond their work as interpreters of the past, public historians today share perplexities that are both peculiar to our trade but also rooted in our wider intellectual landscape.

I see three great challenges confronting our work today.

 

Do we still value attentiveness? I grew up worshipping at the altar of attentiveness. It was, after all, the means to every good end. If you wanted success in school, or in learning to appreciate literature or music, you had to pay attention and stick with it. To my generation, the wandering mind was a dangerous outlaw. Though I loved watching Sesame Street in its early years with my young son (I was more attentive than he was), commentators blamed the program for abbreviating the attention spans of children. There followed the epidemic of attention deficit disorder, especially among young boys who might have been dubbed restless or obstreperous in earlier times. Economist Herbert Simon worried publicly about the danger of brief attentiveness to rational decision-making. But more recently, intuition, instinct, and snap judgments have made a cultural comeback. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, argues that effortful and rational thinking, or what he calls “System 2,” is not only slower and more biased, but even more likely to be wrong, than “System 1,” or intuition. The book has sold over a million copies since its publication in 2011. Malcolm Gladwell’s racier Blink: the Power of Thinking without Thinking (2007), a celebration of intuitions, attracted an even larger readership. Psychologists, behavioral economists, sociobiologists, and spiritualists have converged on the idea of yielding to “gut” feelings, jumping to snap judgments, and eliminating extraneous filters that could lead to labored reasoning.

As I’ve noted, much of my museum career has been an effort to overcome the discontinuous nature of attentiveness. If anything, ubiquitous smartphones and social media have now made distraction even more tempting. It is so easy for our visitors to lose focus in attending to an ever-proliferating “elsewhere.” We know that the museum experience—unlike film, theater, or even classroom instruction—is inherently built around intermittent encounters. Over the years, however, we have learned to acknowledge and turn potential distractions to our advantage. We help parents guide their children. We provide seating and contemplative spaces to relieve the physical strain of intensive looking and reading, and so on.

Can we now reinvent the rhythms of museum engagement to integrate new media into the process of learning and aesthetic pleasure?

The tyranny of immediacy. Timothy Wu’s brilliant and breezy 2016 book The Attention Merchants traces “the epic scramble” of technology promoters “to get inside our heads.” With the advent of recordings of live interviews and commentaries captured in the midst of an occurrence—first on radio and then television, then via audio and video recorders, and now on smartphones—our distance from global and local events has vanished. Immediacy has become the chief criterion of importance. No other source is more compelling than a report from the scene, bringing us that face-to-face encounter with a world-changing event, just as it happens, in the voice of ordinary participants or eyewitnesses. How desperately we’ve missed such testimony about the great events of the past! And how much we’ve tried to compensate for that gap by re-creating dramatic moments in individual lives. In some ways, that’s been the capstone of my creative labors in museum design.

But slowly, perhaps insidiously, “immediatism” has undermined the value of other kinds of information. Aren’t there other actors, other actions, other causes and consequences that are worth interpreting? Is what happened on 9/11 only what happened at the tip of Manhattan or at the Pentagon or at Shanksville, Pennsylvania? Do the 2,500-plus “Portraits in Grief,” capsule biographies of the 9/11 victims first published in The New York Times and now exhibited at the memorial museum in lower Manhattan, give us the whole story of what occurred that day? Of course not, but it’s difficult to reinsert other voices—registering longer-term perspectives and contexts to tell us what the eyewitnesses miss—when our media privilege first-hand narratives.

Slowly, gradually, the insistence on immediacy has altered the role of public historians. Erasing the distance between the past and the present, between the witness and the observer, has turned up the heat in historical presentations. The pain of enslavement, or social exclusion, or economic exploitation, now pushes to one side the exposition of its contexts in historical conditions. Immediate reactions and consequences squeeze out slowly emerging causes. Public historians treating difficult subjects—racial violence, for example—themselves absorb the suffering of historical victims. As historical distance is effaced, the traumas of lynching are visited on those who study and interpret it for the public, and the public too may be deliberately exposed to the pain.

Public historians want history to be relevant and personally meaningful. But they also need to help visitors, viewers, and readers to step back and detach themselves from history’s horrors. My generation of historians and curators has worked hard to claim a space for critical history in our museums and historic sites and, at the same time, to make our storytelling emotionally compelling. We don’t want museums to become “books on the wall,” dense and dreary with arid generalizations, but we have to resist the alternate danger, that we become uncritical shrines or memorials, or weak substitutes for community social service agencies.

Can we make coherent sense of our fragmented storylines? Our old triumphalist narrative of America masked a lot of troubling episodes, construing the story of a segment of mostly White, middle-class men as THE story of America. Two generations of historians have recovered many of the missing pieces of our diverse national experience. But today synthesizing the history of our nation in any way has become as daunting as overcoming the fragmentation in our politics. The New Left’s suspicion of “the system” has converged with the New Right’s antagonism to big government, amounting to what the historian Daniel T. Rodgers describes as “the narrowing down of institutional society into word-pictures of isolated individuals.” We have millions of great stories, but what do they add up to? For every saga of a dream fulfilled we seem to have another heartbreaking tale of a life impoverished or lost.

 

By the end of the Obama years, many historians may have grown complacent about the value and challenge of stronger narratives. Fragmentation could plausibly be read as diversity. Was that not a good thing? Then, quite suddenly, the 2016 election revealed a huge hole in our profession’s thinking about the nation’s character and evolution. Where had this Trump coalition come from? Where had it been hiding all these years? Other fissures appeared. How could the triumphalist narrative of the civil rights revolution—a staple of museums across the nation—survive in the wake of renewed attention to police shootings of Black men or, more broadly, in the attack by Michelle Alexander and others on mass incarceration as The New Jim Crow (2012), yet another chapter in the control of Black men? How could longstanding narratives about prosperity survive the evidence of growing inequality and wage stagnation, even in the midst of a very long economic expansion?

All these phenomena—Trump, Black Lives Matter, and the disappearing middle class—warn us against grasping at “happy endings” in our public history narratives. Can we develop storyscapes that show how they relate to deep and persistent patterns in our national experience? Will institutions dependent upon public support—whether tax-supported or market-driven—accept presentations of the unresolved, incomplete, and even ongoing tragedies of American history?

Perhaps one day a history department will reframe its program to help its students address these questions and seize the opportunity to answer them, but after a half century I’m doubtful. In many graduate schools, there is now much talk about public history as an alt-career, a fallback in the very real likelihood of missing out on an academic position. But few departments actively assist students in gaining the skills, the perspectives, and the sensitivity to institutional cultures that are needed for success beyond the academy. Few members of history faculties have the personal experience to guide students in finding new ways to do history beyond the university. And unlike many other fields, the faculty-development system in history has made it impossible to recruit senior practitioners of these historical arts as mentors.

I often get phone calls from graduate students desperately seeking advice. Some say, without knowing how reckless it sounds to me, “I want to do what you’ve done.” But my example is probably irrelevant now. I had the fortunate opportunity to finish my PhD dissertation while I worked full-time in a museum. When I got my degree, at age 32, I had already completed seven or eight years of museum work and built a network of colleagues I could rely upon for a lifetime of collaboration and companionship. Instead, I refer my inquirers to the brave young historians I know who’ve more recently jumped ship and struck out on their own. Some have found work in museums or with documentary-film projects, but others are developing apps, websites, podcasts, and games, writing books and curricula, collaborating on public art projects, and creating and leading tours. All of them would agree that doing this work well couldn’t wait until one has tried and failed to succeed as a university professor. In sum, my advice is: Start now.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

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Richard Rabinowitz is founder and president of American History Workshop. His most recent book, Curating America: Journeys Through Storyscapes of the American Past, is published by the University of North Carolina Press. Illustrations by Richard T. Hoyen. All images courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.

The next morning I was discussing My Bondage

and My Freedom with the Frederick Douglass

t-shirt spread out on my bed like a flag.

I’d climbed out of the sheets believing myself

a slave to various pornographies of style

(hair, language, demeanor), and because

I wanted the glamor of the mythic black man

with a blasting afro and fortified stare to adorn

my vulnerable heart that day, I said to the t-shirt,

“I don’t know if it’s the guy who wears

eyeglasses that’s me, the guy who wears contacts,

or the guy who wears nothing at all.” Frederick

Douglass wrote, “I prefer to be true to myself,

even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule

of others,” but the t-shirt was silent.

I know it seems odd to converse with a garment,

but I have no one else to talk to these days,

plus I think it’s great that I can talk to a t-shirt

when I am not confessing to a sheet of paper.

Most people are not so lucky; some only have

conversations with God, money or bodies.

Last night I dreamed my father had shed

like 200 pounds. Shirtless, the muscles

he’d had in his twenties when he met my mother

and me were restored and made me ashamed

because in the dream I realized he’d never been

comfortable enough to walk bareback

through his own house. “Titties,” my mother called

them before he moved out of their bedroom

and began to dress and undress downstairs.

“I say nothing of father, for he is shrouded

in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate,”

Frederick Douglass wrote. In the dream my father

smiled when I told him he looked good with no shirt,

but the truth is, growing up, I was happy

he did not walk around shirtless. He was so large

I feared the flesh hanging from his chest

would remind me of a woman’s breasts.

 

I told the Freddy D tee the infant that would become

our first black president nursed at the breasts

of a white woman from Kansas and the shirt replied,

“Naturally, the mother was a tapestry of nurture,

who does not desire that? I was born Frederick

Augustus Washington Bailey into slavery

on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay,

and still remember that my mother’s touch,

before I was taken from her, was like cloth

the shape of my future, all the threads of decision

and consequence to come; how her spirit

filled me with elaborate dreams, extraordinary clarity,

and doom as I moved among the so called pilgrims

in the kingdom of God.” “A man’s character

always takes its hue, more or less, from the form

and color of things about him.” FD also said,

“My first wife was the color of my mother

and the second, the color of my father.” Color,

it turns out, is fluid. Some of us sweat History

more than others. Frederick Douglass was married

to the black underground railroad abolitionist

and laundress, Anna Murray, for 44 years

before she died, but no t-shirt honors her visage.

Later when he slept beside his second wife,

a younger, very white woman named Helen Pitts,

he did not once stroke the downy hair along her

arms without the embarrassment of an erection.

She would be asleep when it happened, the touch,

the erection, and in the dark the great black man

would reach beneath a fabric as plush as the fabrics

his first wife laundered before and after marrying him.

The children with the first wife likely considered this

the worst of their father’s abolitions. The mind longs

to abolish misery, but unfortunately who can say

whether a mind can actually abolish anything.

A mother’s clutch, marriage, slavery, heartache:

it all lives in the thread. I believe nothing

can be abolished, that’s my problem. Not fear

in this universe of cost and erasure, the death inside

everything, not fear of the world’s dark avenues

and adventures, not fear of other men and women,

the Zimmermans, the plain clothes cops, the handcuffs

and malice, blame, bullets, bruises, and blues

alighting the skin, slipknots, silk cloth, mischief—

nothing can be abolished, though we agree,

Frederick Douglass and me, slavery nearly abolished

our ancestry just as it nearly abolished our families.

 

I wanted to wear the Frederick Douglass t-shirt

because it’s as close as I’ll ever be to Frederick

Douglass. I wanted to appear revolutionary

and decorous entering the day like a needful star,

superb in love and logic. My mother often says

she’s so happy she didn’t kill me when she found out

she was pregnant. She’s so glad she didn’t give me

to the old woman who asked to adopt me.

When sweat weeps along the sides of my ribs

from the two great stains yellowing my shirt pits,

I’m like a man ashamed by his own tears.

I used to keep my arms clamped at my sides

the hot days of my adolescence in South Carolina,

oh Carolina, peace was not the word I knew there.

The last time I visited my mother told me how,

when her handyman gave the waitress

sweating before them a ten dollar tip, the waitress

gave him in return the keys to the apartment

she lived in with her delicate 20 year old son.

He whined “Why mamma” exactly like a daughter

anticipating the heartache her mother was courting,

“Why would you let somebody you barely know

into our house?” “He used to turn all the heads in town,”

my mother told me, and though he was fatter now

because of the drugs he took with a mind to change

himself into a woman, he was still easily mistaken

for a girl in a sundress with his milk-less breasts,

and gooseflesh swaddling his belly and biceps.

Two months later the handyman and the waitress

broke up. He was not even that handy, really,

he was just out of work and hired by my mother

to repair some leak or shamble and because

she did not pay him much, sometimes she’d take

him to lunch. I was the shade of perspiration

imagining his fingers sliding over a woman

whose mouth straightened, curled and puckered

as if she was praying or giving birth. Taffeta

is the kind of cloth that makes a sound

when you touch it. It sounds like flowers

being painted on a dress. It falls in a crush

by the bed and the tongue folds around

a lonely center and because of it,

your son changes his name to Taffeta

when he becomes female. We’re all so full

of envy. Nature’s favorite color is green.

Taffeta’s dress is covered in flowers.

At sixteen I wore my mother’s dress to school

and stood on a stage with three other boys

in lipstick lip-syncing to the Mary Jane Girls.

I loved the feel of cloth folding around

my movement. That dress still hangs somewhere

waiting to be worn, its sheen and she-ness

shameless. There’s a yearbook photo

to prove I wore it though it’s true a photograph,

especially when it’s an image of flesh,

grows over time, more and more strange.

You are not you for long. I am not trying

to change the world, I am trying to change

myself so that the world will seem changed.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

---

Terrance Hayes is the author of five collections of poetry, including How To Be Drawn in 2015, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2015. His website is terrancehayes.com.

On January 31, 1867, the Social, Civil, and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Philadelphia offered the fourth in their 1866-1867 course of lectures at Philadelphia’s National Hall.  Tickets cost 35 cents, and could be purchased at the door or in advance from the African Methodist Episcopal Church Bookstore at 631 Pine Street, Trumpler’s Music Store at Seventh and Chestnut, or members of the Association’s Committee of Arrangements, led by William Still and Jacob C. White Sr.  The February 2, 1867, Christian Recorder noted “a large audience of both colors” attended.

Listeners that night were deep in the swirl of Reconstruction—as the choice of speakers for the course, from General Oliver O. Howard to Congressman William Darrah Kelly, testified.  They might have been wondering whether the state legislature would ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, or they might have been thinking about the ongoing battles over racial discrimination in the city’s transit system.  They might have been thinking of the Philadelphia Public Ledger’s New Year’s Day issue, which hoped to see “North and South heartily reconciled and fully one again, politically and socially.” Or they might have been remembering the association’s last event, on January 3, when Frederick Douglass linked African American rights and women’s rights when told a packed house, “Drive no man from the ballot-box because of his color, and keep no woman from it on account of her sex.” 

All who came on that chilly Thursday evening, though, wanted to see Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who the January 26, 1867, Christian Recorder promised would “deliver her new and eloquent lecture on ‘National Salvation’” to the citizens of the city she had recently made her home.

No wonder: so accomplished, so lively, and so forceful were her lectures that newspaper coverage regularly compared her positively to white radical sensation Anna Dickinson.  A letter in the September 15, 1866, Recorder even said, “We have heard Frederick Douglass, and hesitate not to say that for beauty of expression, richness of illustrations, and, in a word, rhetorical finish, she is his superior.  He is more massive than Mrs. H., but she is more polished than he, and fully his equal in warm and glowing eloquence.”  

The lecture wasn’t out of the ordinary for Harper.  In July 1866, she’d spoken at Philadelphia’s “Freedmen’s Fair” benefit before journeying to lecture in cities ranging from Newark to Washington, D.C.  The turn into 1867 found her giving several lectures in Nashville, Tennessee; after her January 31 lecture and a brief respite in Philadelphia, April and May would see her in South Carolina for yet another set of lectures and a speech at a radical Republican state convention. 

What makes Harper’s January 31 lecture rare is that we have its full text.  The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph printed a transcription of “National Salvation” the day after Harper spoke.  That transcription is shared below.

The Telegraph took a “hands-off” approach to the transcription—not only presenting it, uninterrupted, but asserting that “the merits of the lecture which we give below will speak for themselves.”  Still, featuring Harper’s lecture—along with a biographical sketch and a separately published poem—was part of a limited opening of the paper’s pages to Black subjects.  The Telegraph also shared transcriptions of other lectures in the association’s course—including Douglass’s, published in the January 4, 1867, issue—and offered a massive and somewhat friendly article on Philadelphia’s Black community in their March 30, 1867, issue, curiously titled “Africa!  The Colored Population of Philadelphia: Their Numbers, Callings, and Manner of Life.”  The condescending tenor of such work can be guessed at from language in the paper’s biographical sketch of Harper: “she is a living and present proof of the fact that the colored race is not hopelessly depraved and benighted.”  That pompous, patronizing tone—notably, the Telegraph sometimes supported Andrew Johnson—reminds us of how often we must sift through white noise to find Black voices.

The Telegraph’s transcription of “National Salvation” nonetheless gives an unparalleled sense of Harper’s Reconstruction oratory—oratory that brought her national attention and powerfully supported a new, major phase of her literary career, one led by her serialized Recorder novel Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869) and her powerful long poem Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869).  Frances Smith Foster’s groundbreaking collection A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader reproduces only two speeches from this period, both presented at events where Harper shared the platform—the brief “We Are All Bound Up Together,” given at the Eleventh Women’s Rights Convention in May 1866, and the slightly longer “The Great Problem to Be Solved,” given at the Centennial Anniversary of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, on April 14, 1875, in Philadelphia.  When talking about Harper’s Reconstruction oratory, most scholars rely on these texts or on the brief snippets—presented through both quotation and paraphrase—in press coverage of Harper.

“National Salvation,” however, runs over 5,000 words—more than three times the length of “We Are All Bound Up Together.”  Further, only one other figure was noted in event announcements:  Philadelphia singer Elizabeth Greenfield, the celebrated “Black Swan,” who regularly gave short performances to round out association events.  Harper’s lecture was the raison d’être for the evening’s gathering.  As such, “National Salvation” gives us a much fuller example of the content, character, rhythms, and rhetorical strategies of Harper’s oratory.

Harper’s position at the podium that night was one of both experience and rebirth.  Born Frances Ellen Watkins in Baltimore in 1825, she’d lectured on abolition and temperance during the 1850s throughout the Northeast (going as far west as Indiana), and she’d published a rich range of literary work—short fiction, essays, letters, and individual poems in periodicals ranging from the Liberator to the Anglo-African Magazine and from the National Anti-Slavery Standard to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, as well as a pamphlet collection, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, originally published in 1854 and enlarged in 1857, that built in part from her recently rediscovered first collection, the c.1846 Forest Leaves. 

But when she married Fenton Harper on November 22, 1860, in Cincinnati, she pulled back from lecturing, published much less, and helped build a family—the Harpers’ daughter Mary joined Fenton Harper’s children from an earlier marriage c.1862—and farm outside Columbus, Ohio.  Only with Fenton Harper’s untimely death in May 1864 did she return to lecturing—called by both economic necessity and a recognition of how much the nation-at-war needed her voice. 

Those early lectures included a speech to the National Convention of Colored Men held in Syracuse in October 1864 and lectures with titles like “The Mission of the War” and “The Causes and Effects of the War.”  Harper was educating audiences from Indianapolis to Philadelphia, in the words of the May 21, 1864 Recorder, about the U.S. government’s “slow awakening” to “the character and influence of slavery and slave-power,” “its final comprehension of the question and magnitude” of the Civil War, and “the future of the nation, conditions of reconstruction, [and] the relation of the blacks to that future.”  The centerpiece of these lectures was “an earnest appeal for a national recognition of the colored man as freeman and citizen.”

By early 1867, that appeal had developed into a multi-faceted argument that full civil rights offered the only path to “National Salvation.”  Asserting early in that January 31 lecture that “slavery, as an institution, has been overthrown, but slavery, as an idea, still lives in the American Republic,” Harper explores how the forces that broke the nation and caused the Civil War still split the populace.  Only “a higher form of republicanism and a purer type of democracy”—ideas she frames in a deeply Afro-Protestant sense of history, “with truth and justice clasping hands”—could “win the fight.”

On one level, Harper’s sense that both slave-power and slavery still lived deeply informs the critique of Andrew Johnson that runs throughout the lecture.  In an extended metaphor that received some press coverage after the lecture, she depicts him as an unknowing “great national mustard-plaster” spread “all over this nation, so that he might bring to the surface the poison of slavery which still lingers in the body politic.”  But her direct calls to impeach Johnson—to throw away the “plaster” when its work was done—are only a piece of her larger naming of white racism and its tentacles.  Harper treats the racist violence at the heart of the 1866 riots in Memphis and New Orleans, like Johnson’s person and policies, as clear extensions of the long history of American politics, “a history of compromise and concessions from the hour that Georgia and South Carolina demanded the slave trade, down to the last Constitutional amendment.” 

In her trademark weaving of multiple senses of the domestic, Harper speaks in great depth about the newly freed folks of Kentucky and Tennessee she met touring in 1866, emphasizing their love of liberty and country, their great faith, and their “dignity of soul.”  Here, she exhibits an updated version of her antebellum lectures, which Manisha Sinha reminds us “combined abolitionist polemics with literary romanticism.”  These people’s stories—and those she heard from diverse other newly freed folks on several wide-ranging visits to the South—touched Harper deeply: they became the subject matter for several poems (especially in her 1872 Sketches of Southern Life) and novels Minnie’s Sacrifice and Iola Leroy (1892). 

On that January night in Philadelphia’s National Hall, she told listeners that “some of the most beautiful lessons of faith and trust that I have ever learned, which could never have been learned in the proudest temples of wealth or fashion, I have learned in these lowly homes and cabins of Tennessee.”  These recently enslaved people, Harper asserts, had a stronger sense of nation and home than most of the rest of the country.  The hands of Andrew Johnson, she tells us, “are not clean enough to touch the hems of their garments.” 

Nor, she submits, are the hands of those worrying over the “bugbear” of “social equality” or the hands of white Northerners who do nothing to stop racism at home.  In the lecture’s amazing final sections, she says “I am coming right home to Philadelphia” and “am not going to bathe my lips in honey when I speak.”  What follows is a stunning crescendo of condemnation—reminiscent of Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”—that depicts representative Philadelphians who allowed a Black woman to be kicked off a city car. Harper, indignant, asserts that “when that man kicked that woman, he kicked me.  He kicked my child, and he kicked the wife and child of every colored man in Philadelphia . . . the wife, sister, and child of every colored man who went out to battle and to lay down his life for his country. . . .” 

Harper shares that this moment also led to one of her young daughter Mary’s first recognitions of racism,  reminding us of Harper’s rhetorical habit of recognizing the political and the public as “domestic,” as threads of lived experience.  This powerful linkage also highlights Harper’s integration of tropes of motherhood and widowhood into her self-representation in the wake of the Civil War—rich ground for further study.

This striking content is matched by Harper’s skill with rhetoric, rhythm, and tone.  Her seemingly simple and repeated address to the audience—“My friends” is a case in point—draws connections to her audience but also highlights the responsibilities inherent in truly being a “friend.”  Harper’s escalation of moral and emotional tone is paired with, alternately, stunning pathos and wicked humor (often biting irony) that temporarily diffuses—but never dismisses—the growing tension.  There are moments in the speech—especially after her powerful sequence of images tied to racism surrounding city transit moves into a critique of “social equality” fears—that make us laugh with their unveiling of absurdity, even as we cry and rail against how that absurdity causes immense tragedy within individual Black lives.  When we remember, per the Telegraph’s biographical sketch, that she was “rather small,” “with vivacious manners and an enthusiastic bearing” filled with “earnestness and sincerity,” the fireworks at the lecture’s end seem all the more spectacular.

Such moments also remind us that, as we move toward rightfully recognizing Harper as one of the most important American public artist-intellectuals of the nineteenth century, we need to ensure that her oratory is, in turn, a center of our studies.

 

Editorial note:  The February 1, 1867, issue of the Telegraph is available digitally through the Chronicling America project.  I share the full Telegraph article, including the paper’s biographical sketch and the brief introduction provided by AME minister James Lynch, in part to give a sense of the event.  Beyond this, though, the sketch offers personal information available only from Harper or a close friend like William Still—including some material that complicates existing biographies—and thus functions as a valuable artifact of Harper’s careful self-presentation and reputation-building.  The poem referred to in the sketch is Harper’s “Appeal to the American People,” which had been published earlier in the July 21, 1866, Recorder, was collected in Harper’s 1871 Poems, and is reproduced in Brighter Coming Day; as it is widely available and was not a part of the lecture, I have not included it.  Of note, Harper gave the lecture—or one with this title—at least once more, as part of the 1866-1867 course of lectures at the Lyceum of Salem, Massachusetts.  Original spelling and punctuation has been retained with the exception of one potentially confusing moment when the Telegraph gives “pretroleum” for “petroleum.”  Audience responses given in parenthesis in the original have similarly been retained.

 

***

 

National Salvation.

A Lecture Delivered Last Evening at National Hall, by Mrs. F. E. W. Harper, with Some Account of the Lecturer.

[Official Report for the Evening Telegraph.]

 

The fourth lecture in the present course before the Social, Civil, and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Philadelphia, was delivered at National Hall, last evening, by Mrs. Frances E. W. Harper, a colored lady of more than ordinary oratorical powers.  In this connection a

Sketch of Mrs. Harper

may not be uninteresting.  Her early life, under the name of Frances Ellen Watkins, was passed in Baltimore, where she was born in 1825.  Her mother was born a slave, but through the exertions of her grandmother her freedom was purchased, and Miss Watkins was, therefore, free from birth.  She remained at school in her native city until she was fourteen years of age, and subsequently to that obtained her own livelihood for some years by sewing and teaching school.  In the former occupation she was for some time employed by Mrs. Isaac Cruise, of Baltimore.  This lady was the possessor of quite a large library, to which Miss Watkins had free access at all times.  Being strictly enjoined against perusing novels, the information which she thus picked up in her leisure hours was of the most solid and desirable character.  Her experience as a school teacher was quite extensive, and this calling she followed at times in Baltimore and the neighboring country for some years.

Miss Watkins was early given to poetizing, some of the productions of her muse—of which a specimen, entitled “An Appeal to the American People,” is printed elsewhere in our issue of to-day—exhibiting more than ordinary depth of thought and fervor of expression.  These early poems she usually composed while busy with needle and thread.  While on a visit to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1854, she recited some of her poems to her friends, who were so deeply impressed with their merit that she was invited by them to appear before the public as a lecturer.  Just previous to this she had become strongly imbued with a desire to contribute, in some measure, to the enlightenment and social elevation of the outlawed race to which she belonged.  This ambition sprung from the recital in her presence of a story which in those days was as common as it was disgraceful to the community by which it was tolerated.  A free colored man had moved into the State of Maryland, and in pursuance of the law then and there in vogue, he was for this dire offense seized by the authorities and sold into slavery.  Being afterwards taken to Macon, Georgia, he there made his escape, but only to be recaptured and returned to a bondage from which he was soon after released by death.  From the time that Miss Watkins listened to this oft-repeated tale, she resolved to devote all her time and energies to the welfare of her kindred race.  So she was nothing loth to appear upon the platform, and delivered her first lecture in New Bedford in 1854, from which time forth, for six years, she continued upon the stage, restricting her labors principally to the New England States.  For a time, however, she acted as an agent of the Anti-Slavery Society in this State.

In November, 1860, Miss Watkins was married in Cincinnati to Mr. Fenton Harper, a free colored man, from Loudon county, Virginia.  Her married life was passed on a farm in the neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio.  During this time she seldom appeared in public as a lecturer.

Mr. Harper died in May, 1864, and in October, 1865, Mrs. Harper resumed her former calling, which she has steadily pursued up to the present time.  New England was again her favorite field, but she has likewise spoken in many of the other States, and, during the present winter, has passed some time in Kentucky and Tennessee, addressing the people, white and black, whenever and wherever she could get a chance.  On the 24th of last month she spoke at a meeting in the Capitol, at Nashville, Tennessee, her oratory even receiving praise from the semi-Rebel sheets which still flourish there, although her politics were denounced as abominable and as tending to create a hatred between the races, deeper than that which at present exists.  Last evening was the occasion of her third appearance before a Philadelphia audience.

We have given this lengthy sketch of Mrs. Harper’s career, because she is a living and present proof of the fact that the colored race is not hopelessly depraved and benighted.  In person she is rather small, and of prepossessing appearance, with vivacious manners and an enthusiastic bearing that impresses all who listen to her, either in public or in private, with her thorough earnestness and sincerity.  The merits of the lecture which we give below will speak for themselves.  She was introduced last evening to the audience by the following

Remarks by Rev. Mr. Lynch,

Ladies and Gentlemen:—You are assembled to listen to one of the most cultivated daughters of the persecuted race, who has plead their cause for more than twelve years, in poetry, in thrilling eloquence, and in logic, from the platform.  Additional interest may be expected in this lecture to-night, as she is recently from the South, where she lectured to the delight and instruction of the loyal whites and blacks; and, judging from the encomiums of semi-Rebel Andrew Johnson journals, we have discovered that she possesses a power that we have not before known—that of enchanting a certain kind of serpent called Copperheads.  I now have the honor of introducing to you Mrs. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.  (Applause.)

Address of Mrs. F. E. W. Harper,

Reform has her seed-time and her harvest, her night of trial and endeavor, as well as her day of success and victory.  But before her ears are greeted with the shouts of triumph, they are hailed with the hisses of malice and the threats of revenge; but as amid the darkness and the cold, nature spreads her dews and carries on the work, so amid the darkness, cold, and pain the spirit of reform carries on her work of progress, and sows in tears the harvest she is to reap in joy.  Men tread with bleeding feet their paths, and from the soil covered with the ashes of martyrs and drenched with the blood of heroes, has sprung up a new growth of character and civilization.

Now in the question of dynamics, or the application of force to any end, it is necessary to know the amount of resistance to be met, and the power which is needed to overcome that resistance.  For instance, a man who would wish his locomotive to go fifty miles an hour would not be acting very wisely if he only put on steam enough to carry it ten miles an hour; and the same remark would apply to the man who would wish a large water-wheel turned by little rills, and would supply fifty gallons of water where a thousand were needed.  This man would not be acting wisely in these particulars.  He would be failing to take the right means to gain the desired end.

Now, in the moral and political world, as well as in the physical, there are resistances to be met and obstacles to be overcome in carrying out the aim of true civilization, which is the social advancement and the individual development of the human race.  And if we look through the history of the past, we will find that there has been an old struggle going on for ages—a struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor—a battle which has been fought under different names, and continued under different auspices, but which is still the continuation of the old struggle.

In one age it has assumed the form of a conflict between the lowest of the people and the hierarchy; still again against the despotisms which shackled the human intellect and put fetters upon the human conscience.  In another age it has been a struggle between freedom on one side and slavery on the other.  Slavery, not content with having simply a battle of ideas, resorted to the arbitrament of the sword, and the sword decided against it, and slavery went down in tears, and wrath, and blood—went down amid the rejoicing of men and women who had burst their chains.

Now slavery, as an institution, has been overthrown, but slavery, as an idea, still lives in the American Republic, and the problem and the duty of the present hour is this:—Whether there is strength enough, wisdom enough, and virtue enough in our American nation to lift it out of trouble; whether by its legislation and jurisprudence these distinctions between man and man, on account of his race, color, or descent, shall cease.  Last year, my friends, I spoke of the nation’s great opportunity.  I still think we have one of the greatest opportunities, one of the sublimest chances that God ever put into the hands of a nation or people.

But it is not in opportunities presented, but in opportunities accepted, that the very pith and the core of our national existence lies.  What we need, my friends, in this county, is all the energy, all the wisdom of the nation so to reconstruct this Government that it will render another such war impossible.  There is something wonderful, my friends, in the power of an idea.  And what to-day is the watchword of the present hour?  It is the brotherhood of man amid the din and strife of battle, amid the conflict of the present age; and yet it is an idea which has been struggling through the centuries, baptized in blood and drenched in tears.

To-day the tendency of the spirit of the age is towards a higher form of republicanism and a purer type of democracy, and yet this idea has been struggling for ages.  I look away back on the pages of history, and hear it preached by Him who made it, in His death, the sublime lesson of His life eighteen hundred years ago.

Proud and imperial Rome stood crowned and sceptred amid her seven hills, apparently the strongest power in the world.  At the same time, in a manger lay a child whose work of reform was destined to live when the proud empire should be laid away amid the dead kingdoms.  This idea, my friends, met with opposition, just the same as this idea of equal rights meets with opposition to-day.  This man held up the single idea taught by Jesus Christ, with His giant enthusiasm for humanity, and it was met with opposition from every distinct class.

And yet this reform, meeting with all this opposition, lived on until it became the professed faith of the most enlightened and progressive nation on earth.  The men who martyred Jesus Christ now sleep in forgotten graves.  He lives and shines in the hearts of all who accept Him as the true and living Christ.  The crown of thorns has changed to a diadem of glory, and the cross has become a power and ensign of victory.

The Protestant Reformation sprang from the same spirit, and still fights its way against the ignorance and superstition of ages.  It lived on until the Inquisition ceased to claim its victims, until the auto-de-fe no longer lit its fires, until Protestant kings sat upon the very thrones from which the edicts against the children of Reformation had gone forth.

Men then grappled with agony and death, so that they could secure the rights which we this day enjoy.  We are carrying on the cause, but we have only got through one part of the struggle; the reform we are now carrying on, we may feel assured, notwithstanding all the opposition, notwithstanding all the obstacles in its way, with truth and justice clasping hands, shall yet win the fight.

Oh, my friends, the work goes bravely on!  I look back seven years ago, and see this nation apparently in a prosperous career, with slavery bound to her with a four-fold cord.  In your commercial interests, men said, virtually, Let us make money, though we coin it from blood and extract it from tears.  Here were ecclesiastical interests, the same from Maine to California; here were our political parties clasping hands North and South; and yet they were all snapped asunder, simply because they lacked the cohesion of justice.  (Cheers.)  Now to-night the question arises, What shall be done?  How shall we serve the interest of freedom so that this nation shall be wise enough to know its citizens, and knowing them shall be strong enough to protect them?

One thing that this nation has been doing, is throwing away an element of strength.  The colored man, as a laboring force, as a political force, and even as a moral force, in this country is an element of strength or of weakness.  As a passive force he is an element of weakness; that is, he weakens the country when he is pressed down in the scale of life, when he is wronged and robbed.  But justice will certainly take sides with this people who have been pressed down in the scale of life—a people who are struggling for a higher and purer state of existence.  Now, I hold that the colored man is capable of being an element of strength to the American nation.

I have lately been down amid the cabins and humble homes of Tennessee; and—would you believe it, my friends? some of the most beautiful lessons of faith and trust that I have ever learned, which could never have been learned in the proudest temples of wealth or fashion, I have learned in these lowly homes and cabins of Tennessee.  There may be some people who think within themselves that it is a little strange Andrew Johnson, after having promised the colored people that he would be their Moses, should turn around, and instead of helping them to freedom, should clasp hands with the Rebels and traitors of the country.  (Cheers.)

My friends, since I have come from Tennessee, I am not surprised at the position that Andrew Johnson takes.  Do you know why it was that David was not permitted to build the temple of the Lord?  Because his hands were not clean; he was a man unfit for the work.  And so, when I have gone among some of the people of Tennessee, who have breathed their words of faith and trust, I see in Andrew Johnson a man whose hands are not clean enough to touch the hems of their garments.  (Cheers.)

Do you ask me to-night what are the colored people doing in Tennessee?  They are doing just exactly what Mr. Lincoln said the colored man might be required to do in this country.  They are helping to keep the jewel of liberty in the family of nations.  And how are they doing it?  I have heard, my friends, of serfs to whom a broader and higher freedom came, and they did not know how to appreciate it, and offered to go back again into serfdom.

I have been in humble homes where poverty has been staring them in the face, and said to them, Would you not rather go back again into slavery?  And such an answer as this has come up:—“I would rather live in a corn-crib.”  I remember, some few years ago, I met in Louisville, Kentucky, a woman who lived in a room which looked as though it might have been a stable converted into a dwelling.  I said to her:—“If your master would take good care of you, would you not rather be back again?”  The woman, with eyes filled with indignation, for she did not know that I loved freedom so well that I liked to hear its praise from the humblest lips, said to me:—“Don’t you wish to be free and stamp your foot in Jubilee?  God bless the poverty that brings me that privilege.”  (Applause.)

There is one thing that has impressed me more forcibly, perhaps, than anything else about the inner life of these people who have lately come up to freedom, and that is their faith and trust in God.  I met a mother there who had lost her child.  But here was a mother looking over the track of distant years.  How did she feel, as a mother who has given her child up to death, saying:—

                        “That innocent is mine;
                             I cannot spare him from my arms,
                        To lay him, Death, in thine.

                        “I am a mother dear;
                            I gave that darling birth;
                        I cannot bear its lifeless limbs
                            Should moulder in the earth.”

—when her child was taken from her, and when she felt the distance increasing between them, and knew she could not meet it till she met it in another world.

Oh, when I look at this beautiful faith and trust, when I see them, too, in their humble homes, and ask them what has sustained them, what has kept them up in these dark and gloomy years?—the almost invariable answer that comes to me is:—“The power of God!”

I met with a woman in Tennessee who had been the mother, I think she said, of five children.  All were absent from her except one.  I don’t know that she could say in what part of the world her children were.  She prayed for them, and said, “I only see them in my dreams.”  This was a woman upon whose heart the shadow of slavery still hung black and heavy.  Her husband heard that his children wanted to see him, and he started to go to them; and then word came to this mother and wife that her husband was dead.

Before he started he had contracted a debt of twenty-five dollars.  When the news came to the mother of his death, what did that woman do?  She went and paid off the obligation, by working at nine dollars a week, and living in a house where she was charged five dollars a month.  Look at the dignity of soul in that woman!  Her husband dead, no one could have forced her to pay that debt; yet with such a keen sense of honor and dignity of soul, she takes up the obligation, and pays it off.  Interested friends, let me tell you Andrew Johnson’s hands were not clean enough to clasp that woman’s hands, to be her Moses, and lead her up to freedom.

When I see this faith and trust, it is beautiful.  But there is another feature of life among these people which might impress you just as pleasantly, and that is the tender humanity displayed among them.  I have gone into the little cabins, where the light of the sun came through a single window without a pane of glass, and yet, in that humble home, they were taking the children and sending them to school, and it is a thing you will often see in many of these little homes.  This people, that have gone through this weary night of suffering, have come out of it with a tender humanity, clasping in their arms poor little orphan waifs, giving them shelter, schooling, and a home.  (Cheers)

And then there is another feature, and that is their greediness for knowledge.  A few weeks since I was in Louisville, Kentucky.  They had just opened a school for colored people, charging twenty-five cents a month, I believe.  The people were so eager that their children should have schooling, that by half past nine o’clock it was necessary for the Superintendent to lock the door, because they were overcrowded with applicants, and many of the parents went away in tears because their children could not enter the school.  This greediness for knowledge on the part of the colored man is an element of hope and future strength in this Government.  (Applause.)

The ancients had an idea that there was a giant chained under Mount Etna, and that the eruptions of the mountain were caused by his turning over.  So when I go down South, and see and hear of their eagerness for knowledge, I see the rising brain of the colored man, and I hope, my friends, that if any of the enemies of humanity shall attempt to build any system of despotism with an idea to the disenfranchising of a race—making it in the name of freedom, and torturing it with the essence of slavery—that the rising brain of the colored man will be evoked, and quell the despotism at the start.

In treating this question, I think of the legend of ancient Rome, of the chasm that yawned there, and of which the sorcerers predicted that whosoever should bring the most precious gift should be the means of closing it and saving the city.  Cassius, thinking that he himself was the most precious gift, leaned into its yawning jaws.  The legend has been repeated in part in this country.  Slavery has made a chasm in our American republic.  It has made you two people in the midst of one nation—a people for freedom and a people for slavery—a people for knowledge and a people for ignorance!  And what have you tried to do?  You have been trying to bridge it over by compromise, until the history of American politics is the history of compromise and concessions, from the hour that Georgia and South Carolina demanded the slave trade, down to the last Constitutional amendment.

Slavery wanted more room, and you gave it land enough for an empire.  It wanted the power to hunt the trembling fugitive, and the Fugitive Slave bill was passed, and the trembling victim was thrown into the chasm.  Still it yawned, and slavery was not satisfied.  For itself it wanted a white man’s government, and you made a trial of a white man’s government in this country for four years, and the prayers of the freedmen are ascending that we may never have another such a government as long as the world may stand.  (Applause.)  You threw into this chasm a few million lives, warm with the rich blood of your patriots.  You threw into it the life of your loving, honored chief—Abraham Lincoln.  (Applause.)  And yet to-night the chasm yawns.  You are still two people in the midst of one nation.

Would you close over this chasm?  Do not try any more compromise or concession; you might as well try to bridge with egg-shells the Potomac river.  What you need to-night is to take the shackle from the wrist of the colored man, and to put the ballot in its stead.  (Applause)  When I see the streets of New Orleans and Memphis red with the blood of unexpiated murders, and I hear of that miserable Recorder counselling them to burn and hang the nigger, I ask that the colored man should have that much power in his hands, to turn all such men out of office.  (Applause.)

Look at New Orleans.  Whose fault was it?  You should ask that of Andrew Johnson.  Let me tell you Andrew Johnson is not the most guilty man in this republic.  I don’t know but that we have needed him. I have, in the course of my life, had to put a mustard plaster on myself.  Now, I don’t like a mustard-plaster, and yet I would rather suffer an hour with it than suffer a pain in my chest for a week.  I don’t know but what we have needed Andrew Johnson in this country as a great national mustard-plaster, to spread himself all over this nation, so that he might bring to the surface the poison of slavery which still lingers in the body politic.  But when you have done with the mustard-plaster, what do you do with it?  Do you hug it to your bosom, and say it is such a precious thing that you cannot put it away?  Rather, when you have done with it, you throw it aside.

Now, my friends, why do you not do the same with Andrew Johnson, and impeach him (applause), and bring him before the bar of the nation, and prove to the world that this American nation is so strong, and so powerful, and so wise, that the humblest servant beneath its care, or the strongest, is not to behave without its restraint.

I was in Boston a few days since, and I heard a gentleman speaking of an accident that had happened.  It was of an engineer who was insane.  I suppose that the people did not know that he was insane.  He got on the locomotive, and he imagined that he was going to the moon.  He was not swinging around the circle, but was going to the moon, and he was dashing away wildly.  Death was of no moment to him; he was going to the moon.  Now what did the people do?  Did the people stop to ask his friends about him, or try him a little longer until he had done some mischief?  No, no; the case was too imminent for that.  A student picked up a block of wood to try to dash him off.  So to-day Andrew Johnson stands at the head of the Government, a man who is striking hands with the Rebels of the South.  Is there not in this nation, from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, a hand strong enough and earnest enough to throw at him the billet of impeachment, and let him go home to Tennessee to rust out the remainder of his life?  (Applause.)

I don’t, my friends, berate him because he may have swung around the circle from the seaboard to the Mississippi, although, as far as that is concerned, it reminds me that the colored man has the advantage of him there.  I remember when I was a girl how the colored man used to be burlesqued in popular songs.  One of those songs ran thus:—

                    “If I was President of the United States,
                      I would lick molasses candy and swing upon the
                         gates.”

That might have been a burlesque upon the colored people; but, my friends, I have lived to see the time when the President, though he don’t swing upon the gates, does swing around the circle, and though he does not lick molasses candy, takes something that is a great deal stronger.  (Sensation.)

Now, this reform must be carried on, as others are, against opposition and persecution.  This cause has already passed through part of the time of persecution.  It is a different thing to-day from what it was when William Lloyd Garrison threw his words like burning coals upon the nation’s heart.  Since then the ideas that originated in the Boston garret have become a mighty building, bearing upon its bosom hundreds of millions of men, women, and children, translating them from the oligarchy of slavery to the commonwealth of freedom.  Still the work needs courage to-day.

There is a small matter of prejudice that I want to take up—that against color in particular—and I am coming right home to Philadelphia, and not intending to spend my ammunition on the Rebels, who are so many thousand miles away.  But I am to talk to those who clasp hands with Rebels in the city of Philadelphia, and I am not going to bathe my lips in honey when I speak.  Two weeks last Saturday night I was in Louisville, Kentucky.  I came on from Nashville, had a little business down the street, and I got into the city cars; and I found that there is no difference there in Kentucky as to the people’s riding in the cars; Kentucky had just burst from her chains, yet she was ahead of Philadelphia in that.

I went into the house and picked up a Philadelphia paper—a Christian Recorder.  What did I read?  There I read that a woman had been kicked out of the cars in the streets of this city.  What had she done?  Simply claimed her right to travel, and had been brutally kicked in these streets.  Where was she kicked?  Let me tell you.  Did you see that man with the surplice, chanting his solemn litany?  That man is an Episcopalian minister, and that brutal man kicked her in his presence.

Did you see that man with a simple ritual?  He is a Presbyterian.  I don’t think there is a Church in the world to whom civil liberty owes more than to the Presbyterian Church.  They came out and preserved civil liberty in the wilds of Scotland, and this man kicked this woman in his presence.

Do you see that man who has just been celebrating the centenary of his Church, of which John Wesley is the St. Paul?  That man is a Methodist, and he kicked her in his presence.  Do you see that lady and gentleman, in plain garb?  They, too, have a grand memory, reaching away back to William Penn, who came here to Pennsylvania, and taught the world how peace and justice could clasp hands; and Mary Dyer, who gave up her life on Boston Common and who died for a principle.  (Cheers.)  He is a Friend, and that woman was kicked in his presence.

Do you see that man, upon another plain, who knows it is better to have the peace of Christ than to quarrel about Christianity?  He is a Unitarian; kicked in his presence also.  Do you see that man, who believes in God and the brotherhood of the human race, and that He will ultimately clasp us all in a living embrace?  That man kicked her in the presence of the whole popular Church of Philadelphia, and I ask them have they done their duty on this subject?

I pick up the papers, and I hear a great deal said about the running of the cars on Sunday.  The day is sacred in Philadelphia, but man is vile.  Where did he kick this woman?  In the very streets over which colored men marched to the front, faithful to the country when others were faithless (applause)—who were rallying around the flag when Rebels were trampling it under feet; true to the country when she wanted a friend.  Witness, now, that the sisters and mothers of these men can be kicked from the cars in our popular thoroughfares. (Applause.)

Friends, when that man kicked that woman, he kicked me.  He kicked my child, and he kicked the wife and child of every colored man in Philadelphia.  He kicked the wife, sister, and child of every colored man who went out to battle and to lay down his life for his country; and I am here to-night to protest against it.  (Applause.)

Last summer I was here; it may have been the fourth of July; it does not matter, though.  I was going up the street with my child, between five and six years of age.  My friend Mr. Still was with me.  He, living on Fifth street, thought the drivers would know him, and wait for us.  I did not ask these drivers to take me in; I shall faint upon your paved streets before I ask such a favor.  Do you think they would stop for us?  Oh, no!  They swept by us as if we were paupers.

The next day my child came to me and said: “I know why we can’t ride in the cars; because we are colored!”  No women feel this deprivation so keenly as we do, and when my orphan child came home and told me that she had read the cruel, bitter lesson, I felt bad.  And yet to-night, poor, ignorant, and trodden under foot as our people are, I would not change souls with the richest and proudest stockholder in Philadelphia.  I would not change souls with a man who reproaches his God by despising His poor!  (Applause.)  Again, my friends, I do not feel that the colored people need despair; we only take our turn in the suffering world.

I do not demand social equality; I do not demand that you shall take us into your parlors, and make us companions of your wives and daughters, if they have no liking for us.  All I ask is that you take your prejudices out of the way and give the colored man a chance to grow; give him a chance at the ballot-box.  Why this idea of social equality?  I don’t know of any colored man that demands it.  After all, this thing depends upon social affinities, customs, wealth, and habit, and in some cases on shoddy and petroleum.  But there is a dread of blood degeneration.

Somehow I do not think I should like to stand before the world, with pale lips, dreading the bugbear of social equality; afraid of giving the colored man a chance, for fear that he might somehow outstrip me in the race of life.  (Applause.)  If I was in his place I would say, “I will give him all the chance I can; I will not press him down in the scale of life.”  I should feel that I was superior, because of a superior teaching.  Look at slavery: has it not robbed us of our wives, children, and husbands; robbed us of our very complexion, and put some of the meanest kind of white blood in our veins?  (Cheers.)  And we have lived through it all, and come out of the war the very best characters down South.  If we don’t complain about it, what right has anybody else to do so?  (Cheers.)

O friends! if there is any danger, you make your President and Congressmen; you make your own laws; if any man feels that the case is urgent, let him go before the Legislature and say to them:—“Honorable Sirs—We have a deep concern on our minds; it haunts us by day and comes over our dreams by night.  We are so afraid that some colored man’s uncle’s aunt will marry some white man’s cousin’s aunt, and we want you to put a law upon the statute books that no white man shall marry a black woman unless he wants to.”  (Great laughter.)  I think that they must necessarily be guided by their wishes.  Some men have no other wants than those which are low and grovelling; they are like the men to whom the grasshopper is a burden; they are afraid of that which is high.

Justice is high, and liberty is high, and equal rights are high; and these men are afraid of that which is high, and putting their ears to the ground they hear the advancing tread of the negro, and would retard his coming.  (Cheers.)  Why you have a paper in this city called the Age.  The better name for it would be to call it Behind the Age.  Last spring it had a call for a Democratic meeting, and in the call it included all those who voted for a white man’s Government.  I have been taught that the power of gravity gravitates in the strongest hands.  What possibility is there that we should get to the head of the Government, or that the white race should stand trembling before us, or that eight thousand persons are going to get the upper hand of the nation?

He has dropped the rags of the plantation and put on the uniform of the nation.  In the District of Columbia he has exchanged the fetters on his wrists for the ballot in his right hand.  Mr. Johnson did not admire that very much, so he gave us a veto; he paid us a compliment, somehow, by supposing that we would come into the District for the purpose of giving a vote.  If it is such a privilege to an American citizen, he will go where he can have the rights of a citizen.

The colored man is taxed in this country, he is drafted in war; and yet to-night I live in an American republic; I am a taxpayer.  The Government may increase its taxes until it runs down every seam and fold of my dress, may tax the very bread I break to my orphan child; but it brings me back a rich compensation when it makes my child free in South Carolina, in Tennessee, and Alabama, and even in this city of Philadelphia when I want to ride in your cars.

Friends, this is the nation’s hour for every heart and hand to build on justice as a rock, to trust in the truth, and never yield.  With truth and justice clasping hands, we yet shall win the fight.

 

***

 

Further Reading

Manisha Sinha’s quote comes from her fine essay “The Other Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,”  Common-place 16:2 (winter 2016).

Any student of Harper’s life and work should start with A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York, 1990), edited with an introduction by Frances Smith Foster.  Foster’s edited Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper (Boston, 1994) and the sections on Harper in William Still’s The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia, 1872) are also essential.  Useful complements to this work include Melba Boyd’s Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E.W. Harper 1825-1911 (Detroit, 1994); Maryemma Graham’s Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (New York, 1988); Carla Peterson’s “Literary Transnationalism and Diasporic History: Frances Watkins Harper’s ‘Fancy Sketches,’ 1859-1860,” Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, eds. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (New Haven, 2007), 189-208; and Margaret Washington’s “Frances Ellen Watkins: Family Legacy and Antebellum Activism,” Journal of African American History 100:1 (winter 2015): 59-86. 

Recent rediscoveries that broaden this base include Johanna Ortner’s immensely important “Lost No More: Recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves,”  Common-place 15:4 (summer 2015) and my “Sowing and Reaping: A ‘New’ Chapter from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Second Novel,”  Common-place 13:1 (October 2012). Among exciting recent work on Harper, see Meredith McGill’s “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry,” Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia, 2012): 53-74, and Stephanie Farrar’s “Maternity and Black Women’s Citizenship in Frances Watkins Harper’s Early Poetry and Late Prose,” MELUS 40:1 (spring 2015):  52-75.

Carla Peterson’s “Doers of the Word”: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830-1880 (New York, 1995) offers the richest primer on Black women lecturers including Harper; Shirley Wilson Logan’s “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale, 1999) offers another good starting point.  On the nexus of race, gender, and politics Harper engaged, see Martha S. Jones’s “All Bound Up Together”: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (Chapel Hill, 2009) and Carol Faulkner’s Women’s Radical Reconstruction:  The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (Philadelphia, 2003).  Andrew Diemer’s “Reconstructing Philadelphia:  African Americans and Politics in the Post-Civil War North,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 133:1 (January 2009): 29-58 provides valuable local context.  Primary sources tied to Black oratory can be found in Philip S. Foner and Robert Branham’s Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787-1901 (Tuscaloosa, 1997) and the online Colored Conventions Project.  Outside of the Telegraph piece, the fullest reporting I’ve located on this specific lecture appears in “Philadelphia Correspondence,” National Anti-Slavery Standard (9 February 1867).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

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Eric Gardner is professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University and the author or editor of five books, most recently Black Print Unbound:  The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (2015).  Two-time winner of the Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize, he helped found the “Just Teach One: Early African American Print” project, and he blogs at blackprintculture.com. 

Picture a sine curve, a single wave endlessly rising and falling across the x-axis. That is the Puritan life. It models their version of sanctification, the fruits of grace that follow from justification (the moment God redeems a sinner). The ascent of each wave was called comfort, or assurance, and that came from believing Christ had substituted himself for one’s own sins and paid the price in full. Rising in assurance, believers would begin to commune with Christ through their desire for him and their deeper and stronger sense of his loveliness and holiness. It was wonderful. It could be rapturous. Some described it as a “joy unspeakable.”

But then—just like that—it ends. The wave peaks. The believer begins to sink.

The downward turn occurs precisely because of its ascent. The fact that Christ died for sins makes the godly recognize the depths of their sin and ingratitude. And the more they could see of their own depravity and disobedience, the further they would fall into what Puritans called humiliation, a godly sorrow: could Christ really have died for me? As sorrow seemed about to sink the soul, however, the preaching of the minister and the fellowship of a godly community would begin to convince the sinner that, yes, even this degree of depravity has been covered. Christ died for me! The believer would rise again.

In his new, excellent book on Puritanism, Baird Tipson emphasizes that this life of faith accrued assurance of salvation over the long haul. Conversion was not a moment; it was more like momentum. It involved a daily turning. No particular “religious experience” could produce an ability to rest in full assurance, just as no particular failing could be cause for despair. Progress instead would be measured “by a Christian’s affection or desire rather than by the actual results of her efforts” (282). That is because, as Tipson summarizes, “At its core, conversion involved a ‘change of heart,’ a convert’s changing how she desired to live and what she desired to do. It involved an Augustinian reorienting of the core disposition of the human will” (273).

Such a change of will marked how the godly life would go on. Unlike an actual sine curve, the peaks and troughs of Puritan sanctification were not supposed to be the same height and depth each time. Every peak should rise higher, and every trough dip deeper. The more believers realized how badly they had failed, the more amazed, assured, and comforted they would be that Christ had died for them. The more they were able to witness and realize Christ’s beauty and grace and glory, the more they would see just how badly they had failed. The lows sink as the highs rise. And on it goes, day after day, until one day the believer finally dies: in glorification, assurance changes from a foretaste of heaven into a seat at the table of the Lord. No Puritan life ever mechanically followed this graph, but the idea behind it served as a guide to many.

That guide came to most Puritans through their preachers. As Tipson writes, “ministers like Hooker and Stone were not only describing the kind of conversion they wanted their hearers to experience, they were also using the rhetorical techniques at their disposal to induce and shape that conversion” (273). The sensations of those in the pew came filtered through an interpretative framework preached from week to week, moving sinners through an expanding sine curve of sorrow and hope, comfort and fear.

Ideally, every sermon contained both the comfort and the sorrow, but ministers directed their words to stress one or the other as needed. If congregations moved too much toward security (turning assurance into complacency), preachers administered the Law; they showed how far all had fallen short. But if congregations seemed to be sorrowing too much—if they approached that terrible dip into despair—then ministers preached the Gospel, the comfort of grace. Faced with despair, Puritan ministers frequently insisted that even the dimmest beginning of a mere desire to believe constituted a good sign that the seed of grace had taken root and would grow into salvation. The bruised reed, they liked to say, would not be broken; God would not snuff out the smoking flax.

Anxiety and assurance, the sorrow of sin and the comfort of Christ, the law and the gospel—this was the Puritan way of grace.

Such guidelines were accepted by most who professed themselves the “godly” (what Puritans called themselves), but each minister had his own way of applying it. In Hartford Puritanism, we find an “extreme Augustinianism” that emphasized terror as a form of grace. In fact, Hooker seemed to think of humiliation as the ultimate sign of salvation, and he bent his congregation to long and agonizing struggles of the soul. For Hooker, as Tipson explains, “Brokenness, not ecstatic experience, was the best sign of God’s presence” (355).

This does not mean that Hooker rejected comfort. He agreed with others that the purpose of preaching was “twofold: to reprove the false pride of sinners, and, only after their repentance, to comfort faithful souls in those times when they doubted that they had gained God’s favor” (249). But as Tipson explains, “He gained a reputation among his ministerial colleagues for the ferociousness of his reproofs” (249). Hooker once claimed that God had called on him to fling “hell fire in your face” (249). Like certain evangelical preachers who would come later, Hooker intended to save by fear. His God was an angry God.

That potential link to modern evangelicalism functions as one of the guiding purposes of Tipson’s study. For Tipson, Hooker “documents a vital stage in the development of Protestantism from the Reformation to the great Evangelical Revivals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries,” and he claims that Hooker “anticipated much of what was to come” (4). Unfortunately, the full connection to evangelicalism seems to be waiting for a further study. What we get in this book, on the contrary, is a wonderful account of one particularly important Puritan and his extreme theology in an era grappling with predestination and practical divinity. A biographical sketch appears of Hooker (chapter 2), but this is not biography; instead, it is a model contribution to its Oxford series, “Studies in Historical Theology.”

As a study of historical theology, Tipson lucidly lays out, for example, every possible early modern position on predestination and shows both what was at stake and why so many people cared. Over the course of two brilliant chapters (5 and 6), Tipson ranges from Jesuits, Dominicans, and Jansenists to Protestants such as Martin Luther, William Perkins, Thomas Hooker, and Jacobus Arminius. Consider the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina—one of the most influential (albeit now-forgotten) thinkers of the sixteenth century. Using what amounts to an early form of modal logic, Molina posited that God contemplated all possible worlds before bringing ours into being. In each one, God foresaw the decisions every person would make. Then God chose to create the one world in which the elect would come across the proper conditions to encourage belief. Incidentally, this is the same model Arminius adopted. As Tipson shows, for all that “Arminianism” has come to mean “opposition to predestination,” it did not begin that way. Arminius just worked out God’s predestination through a process whereby God carefully formed and guided the worldly conditions in which each person’s will either would or would not be persuaded by the presentation of God’s grace.

In fact, as Tipson shows in these chapters, despite the ferocity surrounding predestination (the king eventually outlawed any preaching about it), no one really objected to predestination per se. What they objected to was the conception of human will each model implied. One of the main opponents to Molina and Arminius was the influential Puritan William Perkins. In the seventeenth century, his works outsold Shakespeare. His books guided Oxford and Cambridge. His ideas trained up a whole generation and more of Calvinists in both England and America. And when it came to predestination, Perkins believed that Molina did not go far enough. God does not persuade the will; he replaces it. He does not coax the unregenerate; he overpowers them. And thus, God’s predestination does not depend on the creation of conditions for belief; it depends on an active re-creation of the sinner’s heart.

How does that happen? By preaching the word. In his sermons, the minister became the instrument of God, and when the experience functioned properly, Puritans called it the “demonstration of the Spirit”—the work of God made possible “in, with, and under” the preacher’s words. And yet, that preaching still needed to be done with careful skill to make possible the demonstration of the spirit. As Tipson shows, Hooker imitated the theatrical style of a famous minister named John Rogers. Rogers would play-act while preaching, taking on the role of God and impersonating His voice: he would bellow and roar, he would threaten and console, he would plead with wild gestures from the pulpit. And in the process, he packed the church. Most Puritans hated the theaters—closed them down, in fact—but they also copied what worked.

Moreover, they defined “what worked” by what moved those sitting in the pews. Puritans preached to change the will, not convince the mind. Logic still mattered, of course, and some, such as Hooker, thought saints could deduce the grace of God in their lives through the shape their lives had taken. If a person’s experience matched the sine curve of sanctification, then he or she could conclude that justification had occurred—even if the moment had passed unnoticed. Nonetheless, sermons still aimed at the heart. As Tipson explains, Hooker believed the understanding would find a way to reject whatever the will would not accept. So he cut a middle line between logical deduction and emotional experiences. Assurance of salvation, Hooker believed, did not result from a single religious rapture, but instead arose over a long period of reflection on one’s desires, deeds, and dispositions, one’s steady growth in grace. According to Hooker, genuine faith had three distinguishing marks: it arose from contrition, it inspired daily repentance, and it stirred believers to want more of faith and grace.

From predestination to preaching, from abstract theology to practical divinity, Tipson does a marvelous job covering the terrain of Puritanism as it appeared in the world of Thomas Hooker. In the process, Tipson shows that Hooker was both an ordinary Puritan and an extraordinary outlier. His godly colleagues critiqued him for terrifying people too much, or for demanding a humiliation so extreme that no saint could possibly achieve it. That’s where Samuel Stone comes in. The subtitle of the book makes it sound as though he and Hooker will receive equal billing, but this is not a book about Stone, who was ordained alongside Hooker in the Hartford church and wrote the first complete body of divinity in New England. Stone, who was just as much a Puritan as Hooker, approached their shared doctrine quite differently. As Tipson puts it, “Stone’s emphasis on the attractiveness of Christ and the soul’s eagerness to embrace him contrasts startlingly with Hooker’s emphasis on the soul’s continued need for brokenness and rigorous self-discipline” (342). In the balance between justice and mercy, Hooker leaned on the former, Stone on the latter.

The law and the gospel. Never one without the other. It would seem that in seventeenth-century Hartford, Hooker and Stone divided the duties incumbent on all Puritan ministers. One scared the hell out of the ungodly, the other took the weak believer by the hand and held out the promises of God. As this beautiful, learned book reminds us, Puritans insisted on both.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3.5 (Summer, 2017).

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Abram Van Engen is associate professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (2015).

More than 150 years since the conclusion of the Civil War, we live in a world rife with forced migration and less-than-free labor. In many places across the globe, refugees flee their war-torn homelands and all that they have ever known in search of safety in strange new societies where mixed fortunes await them. Elsewhere, the desperately poor attempt to cross national borders in the hopes of providing better lives for themselves and their families. The private prison complex makes vast profits for its investors on the backs of prisoners, many of whom are young men of color. In other cases, people, women and children in particular, are bought and sold by unscrupulous predators along well-worn national and international networks of human trafficking. The victims’ new lives are defined in large part by exploitation and a lack of freedom. The twentieth century witnessed forced migration and unfree labor on an epic scale. Nazi labor camps and the genocidal efficiency with which millions of people were transported to their death during the Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag exhibited two of humanity’s lowest points. In the midst of all of this suffering, dislocation, and exploitation, the transatlantic slave trade and Atlantic slavery stand out as particularly cruel and horrifying examples of forced migration and unfreedom.

 

Few topics in Atlantic history elicit more debate or stronger feelings than the transatlantic slave trade. Spanning close to three centuries, the trade in African men, women, and children stands alone as history’s largest forced migration, with at least twelve million people captured, sold, transported, and bought. The enslaved who survived the horrors of the Middle Passage provided the labor that served as the economic bedrock on which Atlantic empires and modern nation states were built. Today, tens of millions of descendants of the enslaved live across the Americas and elsewhere, often in harsher socioeconomic circumstances than their fellow citizens. Those who remained in Africa dealt with loss, dislocation, and disruption as their lives and societies were systematically exploited to feed the labor demands of faraway European colonies in a process that began as a proto-capitalist phenomenon and concluded as one that was at the heart of nineteenth-century capitalism. The impact of the slave trade and later European imperialism are intensely felt in Africa today. In fact, the legacy of the slave trade has led some to argue that reparations are warranted for this grievous injustice.

 

Given the immense significance of the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery, it is hardly surprising that scholars have studied and debated these topics for centuries. Some historians have sought to understand the complex interplay of ideas about race, culture, economics, and empire that led to the rise of slavery and the slave trade. Many of these inquiries have been forced to address the challenging topic of African involvement and complicity. Some have concerned themselves primarily with numbers, seeking to quantify the lives of millions of men, women, and children. Such scholars have been aided immeasurably by the creation of Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Others have examined the economics of the slave trade and its larger impact on regional, imperial, Atlantic, or global economies. Historians have taken cultural approaches to the slave trade, seeking in particular to understand the extent to which African cultures survived the trade and enslavement. Social historians have painted harrowing portraits of life and death aboard slave ships. Others have analyzed shipboard rebellions, or topics related to health, technology or seafaring. Political studies have sought to understand the fight to abolish or defend the slave trade and slavery.

 

Leonardo Marques adds his voice to the field of slave trade studies with The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776-1867. Based on a 2013 Emory University PhD dissertation, Marques’s book focuses on the role that citizens of the United States and their ships played in the slave trade to other parts of the Americas in the eras spanning from independence to shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War. Impressively researched in English, Spanish, and Portuguese-language archival and published primary sources, deeply conversant with an expansive historiography, and making nimble use of the Voyages database, The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas seeks to correct a field of study which, in Marques’s opinion, has been hindered by the persistent influence of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, the failure to expand chronologically beyond c. 1820, and an overly dismissive attitude about the effects of anti-slave trade legislation.

 

Marques seeks to correct these perceived shortcomings by illustrating the effectiveness of U.S. slave trade legislation and analyzing the landscape of international law that U.S. slave traders had to navigate. The author’s argument unfolds over six chronologically organized chapters. It begins with the creation of a truly American branch of the transatlantic slave trade, which emerged between independence and 1807; moves to a transitional period (1808-1820), in which the traffic was abolished to the U.S. but American merchants figured out ways to continue to ply their trade; shifts to an approximately forty-year era in which U.S. merchants conducted brisk (largely contraband) business in Brazil and Cuba, and concludes with the era of the Civil War, which turned out to be the event that finally ended American involvement in the slave trade.

 

At the heart of Marques’s analysis is an attempt to understand the seeming dissonance between the fact that ships flying the American flag imported  around one million Africans to other countries (many illegally) but only 100,000 or so slaves to the U.S. (most prior to 1808). In other words, how did a nation that was, legally at least, cut off from the African slave trade after 1808, and had only a moderate tradition of transatlantic slave trading as an independent nation, come to play such a substantial role in the traffic? The answer lies in demand, greed, small communities of mutual interest, transatlantic geopolitics, and a mosaic of international law that excluded subjects and citizens of some empires and nation states from the trade, but often provided Americans with loopholes to participate in this traffic. Complicating matters further, the first half of the nineteenth century was a time in which the U.S. was becoming one of the hemisphere’s most prominent slave societies as well as the major incubator of both pro- and antislavery thought in the Americas. Accordingly, the topic of legal and illegal slave trade became the source of much debate among activists, politicians, and the public as the republic careened toward Civil War.

 

This is a book about slave traders (captains, ship owners, and investors, largely), their ceaseless quest for profit as they sought to satisfy a demand for labor, a quest that had little regard for laws, national loyalties, or timing, and the forces that influenced the buying and selling of people. The story of these men and the political, legal, and economic forces that shaped their lives and actions is situated in multiple corners of the Atlantic world, from Rhode Island to the American South, from the coast of Africa to Brazil and Cuba. The latter two places receive the majority of space due to their continuing demand for Africans well into the nineteenth century. Marques also places his findings within various national and colonial histories, which are then situated in dialogue with each other. For example, legal developments within the early American republic are presented alongside the political culture of the contemporary British empire and the economic landscape of post-independence Brazil. In this sense, the book is a good example of the recent historiographic turn that might be called “U.S. and the World.” What emerges within Marques’s Atlantic and international framework is a lively analysis of the role that American citizens, their ships, and their flag played in transporting Africans across the Atlantic world, long after the slave trade to the United States had been abolished.

 

The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas has a number of strengths. The book’s evidentiary base is impressive. Marques’s dual Atlantic and international framework is thoughtful and effective. Most importantly, the author is largely successful in meeting his goal of detailing and analyzing American involvement in the transatlantic slave trade between independence and the Civil War. There are, however, some shortcomings to the book. For one, the book sometimes reads like a dissertation, which is exactly what it was just three years before publication. Second, very few Africans appear in the book. This is, of course, a political and legal history that states clearly that its primary focus is slave traders. At the same time, however, this is a political and legal history that seeks to explain how a million or more men, women, and children were violently uprooted from their homelands, forced to endure the Middle Passage, and then sold into slavery. The voices and experiences of these people demand a place in a study of the transatlantic slave trade. Regardless of this shortcoming, The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas is a valuable book that adds to Atlantic and international history, as well as our understanding of slavery and the slave trade.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3.5 (Summer, 2017).

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Nathaniel Millett is an associate professor of history at Saint Louis University. He is the author of The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World, which won four prizes. Thanks to a Fulbright Fellowship in London and a Weatherhead Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, he has made major progress on a book that considers the role that indigenous people played in the Anglo-Caribbean between the sixteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century.