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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Baker is an assistant professor of English at Yale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human beings have five senses, but history focuses on only one. Visual sources (words, texts, the seen world) provide the raw material with which historians construct their narratives about the past. As a result, what we know about the past is really what people saw. But as Marcel Proust made clear with his madeleine, the visual is not always the most evocative of the senses. In real life, what you see is not always what you get.

Does history, as currently written, represent only one-fifth of lived experience? Mark Smith thinks so, and wants to render American history twice as rich and meaningful with his history of sound and hearing. Listening to Nineteenth-Century America offers an account of the forces leading to the Civil War, as well as two short chapters on the war itself and Reconstruction, focusing on a second sense, sound. Soundscapes, Smith argues, were crucial in constructing the sectional consciousness of antebellum Americans. “Without listening to what and how nineteenth-century Americans heard, we will remain only partially aware of the depth, texture, and nature of sectional identity and deny ourselves access to a fuller explanation of how that identity came into being with such terrible resolve” (7).

Americans in both the North and the South had preferred soundscapes, just as they had preferred landscapes. Not surprisingly, both Northern and Southern elites were generally satisfied with the sounds of their own section of the country, and disturbed by those elsewhere. What is remarkable is the extent and depth of their conviction. Southerners were horrified by the noises of the city, especially those of manufacturing and urban disorder, and celebrated the bucolic quiet of the plantation. Northerners heard the “sublime” tones of progress in even loud industrial noise, but shuddered at the “enfeebling quietude and loud cruelty” of the slave plantation (93). These potent and irreconcilable images worked to alienate Northerner from Southerner just as surely as did John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Smith does a marvelous job describing the soundscapes of antebellum America, making skilled use of diaries, personal narratives and letters, as well as novels and political tracts. Some of the Southern postbellum accounts he draws upon reflect a nostalgia about a quieter past more than the reality of rural noise, but Smith reads this nostalgia as further evidence of the significance of the Southern soundscape within the ideology of the South. His evocative descriptions of the sounds of different seasons, events, and activities turn up the volume on the entire fabric of nineteenth-century life.

While the majority of this volume focuses on the experiences of elites, Smith also describes the aural worlds of working men and women, and of slaves. Neither of these groups was completely comfortable with the reigning soundscape, and each worked to undermine the norms of the ruling class. Especially interesting is Smith’s close analysis of the ways in which masters attempted to control the aural landscape of the plantation, and the ability of the slave to control sound. Not only was slave noise potentially subversive of the carefully constructed fiction of the submissive servant, but so too was slave silence. As plantation mistress Mary Boykin Chestnut put it, “If they want to kill us, they can do it when they please, they are noiseless as panthers” (88).

Smith’s analysis of the aural landscape reinforces current wisdom about the growing divergence of antebellum North and South, tactics of slave resistance, the experience of the common soldier in the Civil War, the dynamics of the Confederate home front, and the contested nature of freedom during Reconstruction. While the object of his investigation is novel, his conclusions will be familiar to students of nineteenth-century America. The final chapter, “Sounds of Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Reunion,” is perhaps the most provocative here. Smith considers the attractiveness of the Southern soundscape to Northerners weary of the increasingly strident sounds of democracy and capitalism, and reveals how little we know about the marketing of the South as a vacation district in the late nineteenth century. Yet, while it is true that the Northern elite escaped the excesses of industrial capitalism in the relative quiet of the South, they flocked in even greater numbers to the towns and countryside of rural New England and other emerging Northern vacation districts, and also praised the peace and quiet of these Northern escapes. Clearly these postbellum Northerners did not see all Northern soundscapes as equal.

The heard world was obviously important to nineteenth-century Americans, but most readers will probably remain unconvinced that “Sectional consciousness was sensed, and hearing and listening as much as looking and seeing were important to its creation” (7). Indeed, the very quotes Smith chooses seem to argue for the greater importance of the visual. The narrators quoted here generally present a single observation about sound within a context of visual observations. Aural observations complement and reinforce visual ones, but rarely do visual observations complement and reinforce aural ones.

Smith’s argument is problematic in other ways as well. His thesis that there were two competing soundscapes—those of the plantation and industrial city—depends on the reduction of Southern experience to that of the plantation-dwelling slave owner, and Northern experience to that of the city dweller or factory worker. But what about urban Southerners? Or rural Northerners? What about the majority of white Southerners who owned no slaves? Was their soundscape any different from that of the Northern yeoman farmer? Did the “drone of bondage” truly “muffle the sounds of modernism” (125) in the upper South? Smith does a great job showing the way in which sound and hearing contributed to sectional ideology, but it is questionable whether any given individual had an especially sectionalized understanding of his or her soundscape. If Smith is correct, and sound matters, than it follows that urban Southerners and rural Northerners would be less inclined to secession than urban Northerners and rural Southerners. There is no evidence that this was the case.

Indeed, it would be just as easy to focus on the similarities between the Northern and Southern soundscape as on the differences. True, the North was becoming increasingly urban and industrialized in the nineteenth century, but only a small percentage of Northerners lived in cities or near mills during the period. Elites in the two sections also shared common expectations about noise. Certainly elite Northern women worked as hard to silence their children as did Southern women, and Northern farmers complained just as strenuously as their upcountry Georgia brethren about the noises of the railroads, while newspapers of both sections celebrated those same noises as sounds of progress. Wealthy Northerners were as likely as Southerners to choose heavy insulating fabrics for the interiors of their homes, and to buy quietude by moving to residential neighborhoods far from the noise (and dirt, and poverty) of the city. Christmas bells, fire bells, and noises of celebration all point to a remarkable, shared aural culture.

Ultimately this study raises more questions than it answers. Smith repeatedly claims that it is “difficult to grasp how utterly meaningful and potent the heard world was to antebellum Americans” (265) but provides little convincing evidence that it actually was more meaningful and potent than the heard world is today. Nor is it clear that the traditional sources this study is based on could allow even the most subtle and creative historian to accurately contextualize, to translate, really, the social and historical meaning of nineteenth-century soundscapes to the many different listeners of the period. We can listen to nineteenth-century America, but can we believe our ears?

This article originally appeared in issue 3.2 (January, 2003).

Amy S. Greenberg is associate professor of history at the Pennsylvania State University, and author of Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, 1998).

I’ve always been a big proponent of historical fiction, for the life and imagination it brings to often dry historical documents—indeed, one could say that historical fiction (embarrassingly, novels toward the romantic side) is what kept my interest in history alive through the stultifying middle- and high-school curriculum until I could discover social, cultural, and women’s history in college. However, today as a professionally trained historian, I most enjoy historical fiction in fields not too closely aligned to my own field—and it is here that this review thankfully lies, just a bit far afield of my own knowledge, but close enough to be educational.

As with many inquiries into the past, Urquhart’s interest in the Shakers’ past stems from her own personal memories of family get-togethers in her grandfather’s big farmhouse just north of Boston. Her grandfather, also a writer (he worked, among other things, on the Gone with the Wind screenplay), purchased a farm in the 1930s. Urquhart found out later that the farmhouse had originally been a Shaker meeting house, the center of a strange but thriving religious community in the mid-nineteenth century that had died (perhaps unsurprisingly) with its last celibate devotees. In this, her first novel, Urquhart tries to raise the ghosts from a familiar space, and in so doing sheds light on nineteenth-century Shaker culture while also giving us a tragic drama of families and an engaging mystery. As a result, this genre-bending novel can be enjoyed by a range of audiences, from murder-mystery fans to highbrow literary folks, to historians looking for faithful representations of the past.

The storyline, simply put, is one of childhood trauma and familial estrangement. The Visionist focuses on four main characters whose perspectives structure each of the book’s chapters. The center of the tale is Polly, the daughter of an abusive man and a mother paralyzed by shame. Polly is spurred to a terrifying act to help the family escape his clutches, only to find that her mother guiltily indentures her and her brother to a community of Shakers several towns away. Simon Pryor is the lone male voice among the main characters. He is a sympathetic, self-described scoundrel who works for the even-more-conniving Hurlbut family, the county’s wealthy scions. Pryor finds himself morally awakened by the plight of Polly and her mother even though he has been instructed to destroy their claims to their family farm. In the Shaker world, we hear first from Sister Charity, a young woman raised entirely in “The City of Hope” (originally called Albion, Mass., just north of Boston—but this seems to be a fictional setting). Charity has internalized all of the precepts of the Shakers’ leader, Mother Ann Lee, yet she feels drawn to Polly after she spontaneously performs “spiritual gifts” in one of the first Sunday meetings. While Charity is sure of Polly’s saintliness, Elder Sister Agnes, the fourth interlocutor, is suspicious of Polly’s purported visions and eager to extract a confession from her, acting with an eye towards the religious group’s sustainability in ways both admirable and questionable.

Some historical fiction uses costume and place merely as a backdrop to modern issues; others bring to life a foreign way of thinking about the world to educate the empathic mind. Urquhart’s is the latter. Her strengths as a historical novelist are first and foremost her intensive study of the Shakers, a society of celibates whose theology pushed them to live apart from the world, yet who somehow drew on it for new converts and new sources of land and income. We learn myriad small details of Shaker worship and theology—that adherents believed in careful, rectilinear living (from cutting one’s food into squares to planning buildings and grounds on similarly severe lines). The story reveals how Albion was one of the communities to experience a cluster of extraordinary visions from young women in the generation after their founder Mother Ann’s death (the decades preceding the start of this novel, also referred to as the Era of Manifestations by Shaker historians). We learn how the Shakers took in children whose parents had fallen on hard times, binding the youngsters through an indenture contract until age 18, when they would decide whether to stay with the group and to sign over to the Shakers all their worldly belongings (including inheritances). Moreover, the Shakers demanded that these youngsters adhere to the precept that there be no more “flesh” brothers and sisters inside their communities, a point made heartbreakingly clear in the turmoil Polly feels as she and her younger brother begin their first few months in the City of Hope. We gain many small nuggets of daily life through descriptions of Charity’s training in medicinals and through her tutoring of Polly in the everyday life of the gender-separate, celibate world that was the Shakers’.

Urquhart occasionally blends in passages from Shaker theological texts, as she does quite well with The Youth’s Guide to Zion in one exchange between Polly and Elder Sister Agnes (172-77). In another great scene, she describes a pauper auction (the “New England method” for dealing with the financial constraints of poor relief). If I were a historian of the nineteenth century, I might quibble that this practice seems to have been phased out by the 1840s (when this book is set) with the rise of poorhouses—but I am not and thus I appreciated the perhaps slightly anachronistic historical tidbit. We can be sure Urquhart did her homework. A three-page bibliography closes the novel with suggestions from popular and scholarly works, including several theses. She also thanks Ted Widmer of the John Carter Brown Library and early Americanist John Demos as well as various curators and historians of Shaker life with whom she consulted. Perhaps the most evocative passage in the book for an audience of historians will be Urquhart’s ventriloquizing of the researcher’s daily routine:

Property deeds and church records of marriages, births, and deaths: Does society offer up documents of a more paradoxically dry nature? They testify to our ownership of the very earth upon which we live, our most costly oath, our grand entry, and our final bow. Still, it seems to me that they are written solely to be sorted in the wrong spot by a bespectacled clerk, pale as a grub and sporting suspenders (161).

Simon Pryor grumbles, as many of us do, of hours spent in futile search “in the bowels of the Ashland courthouse, dust and faded ink mak[ing] an enemy of me” (161).

But are the novel’s characters as convincing as its historical trappings? Although Urquhart gives ample attention to the hypnotic lure of Shaker dancing and the City of Hope’s peaceful and ordered passing of days, Polly’s almost instantaneous acceptance of industry as the key to her salvation seems an unlikely way to deal with trauma. Sister Charity’s spiritual worldview is more fleshed out—although it may not make her more sympathetic to modern secular readers. Urquhart’s is a classic tale of shame and redemption. To me, the novel felt sluggish until about a third of the way through, when we began to hear more from Simon Pryor, the most fully drawn character in the novel. In many ways, it is Pryor’s action, along with the slow unfolding of Polly’s secret, which drives the rhythm of the narrative. Therefore, it should not be a surprise that he sees her as the one to save him from his cynicism and bitterness. But we never hear from Polly what she feels about his final acts. Despite Urquhart’s attempt to tie up loose ends, I felt disturbed by the ending, which I could only see as bringing further tragedy. Perhaps it is this uneasiness that the author intended, a fluttering of feeling that defies any certainty of the meaning of past, present, or future.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3 (Spring, 2015).

Kristen Block is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she teaches courses on the colonial Americas. Some of her favorite courses (Slavery in the Atlantic World; Witchcraft and Magic in the Atlantic World) blend scholarly history and fictional representations of the past to encourage fun and critical consumption of popular culture. She is the author of Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (2012) and is working on a book-length study of religion and healing practices in the early Spanish, French, and British circum-Caribbean.

The July 19, 2010, issue of Time proclaimed the rise of the only child. The author of the featured article, Lauren Sandler, reveals that one in five American families have a single child. Still, many Americans express discomfort with this trend, identifying only children as spoiled and neurotic. According to Sandler, 46 percent of Americans believe two children is the perfect number. The fertility rate for the United States, currently 2.1, supports this ideal.

Sandler’s article illuminates an ongoing transformation in American lives, the shift from high to low birth rates, also known as the demographic transition. In 1800, American families had an average of seven children. By 1900, the average number of children was 3.5. In her fascinating book, Susan Klepp traces the origins of the demographic transition to the American Revolution. Viewing land shortages, industrialization, urbanization, lower infant mortality rates, Victorian morality, and other explanations as inadequate, Klepp points to American women, who seized on revolutionary ideas of equality, reason, and virtue to control their reproductive lives. In doing so, they irrevocably changed the status of American women.

In colonial America, settlers celebrated the fertility of their women alongside the fertility of the land. Colonists used agricultural metaphors to describe pregnant women, including “flourishing,” “breeding,” and “fruitful” (64). Klepp offers an engaging analysis of women’s pre-Revolutionary portraits, which pictured female subjects with their legs slightly parted and a basket of fruit on their laps, blatant symbols of sexuality and abundance. As Klepp notes, women were “the Sex,” “ruled at bottom, not by reason, but by their procreative physiology” (61). Women were not merely objects of male colonists’ desires; they also gloried in their reproductive abilities. American birth rates peaked from the 1740s to the 1760s, only to begin a steady decline soon after.

Klepp finds the explanation for this sudden, and at the time, unnoticed, change in the letters, diaries, and other writings of American women. Both Europeans and Americans were exposed to enlightenment values of liberty and equality, but only in the United States and France did fertility decline in the late eighteenth century (the rest of western Europe did not follow until the 1870s). Klepp argues that the American Revolution made new ideas about marriage, childrearing, individualism, and happiness more tangible. American women applied this language to their own lives, abandoning “the Sex” for self-controlled, sensible, and rational womanhood. They viewed large families as a self-indulgent and aristocratic luxury. American women also saw unrestrained fertility as an obstacle to egalitarian marriages, equal treatment of their male and female children, and their ability to control their bodies. American women turned to family planning, and their husbands and children followed.

The question is how, approximately a century before the diaphragm, and two centuries before the birth control pill, American women controlled their fertility. In her first chapter, Klepp includes the quantitative data on the demographic transition, and notes the various methods that demographers have used to study birthrates, including crude birthrates, child-woman ratios, and age-specific marital fertility rates (24). The age-specific marital fertility rates indicate some of the strategies women used to limit their family size, such as delaying marriage, increasing the intervals between births (often by breastfeeding), or stopping childbearing before menopause. As Klepp points out, demographers view stopping as “the only real evidence of deliberate family planning, because it implies that couples have agreed upon an ideal family size and planned accordingly” (48).

Klepp also examines the various technologies to limit or stop childbearing. Her evidence demonstrates that women used emmenagogues, or medicines for regulating the menstrual cycle, such as savin, juniper, rue, aloe, pennyroyal, and snakeroot, as abortifacients. Klepp also finds prescriptions for vigorous physical exercise like horseback riding or jumping rope. Late eighteenth-century medicine defined amenorrhea, or absent menstruation, as a symptom of illness as well as pregnancy, so there was no social condemnation of its treatment. And, though most of these methods seem to be dubious ways to end a pregnancy, Klepp notes some success. The records of the Philadelphia Dispensary show that 80 percent of the women treated for amenorrhea were “cured” using potions made with some of the above ingredients (199).

This other American Revolution created new opportunities for middle-class women. Liberated from constant pregnancies, early nineteenth-century women expanded their involvement in churches and voluntary societies. They joined campaigns to end prostitution (prostitutes used less respectable methods like coitus interruptus or condoms to limit fertility), slavery, intemperance, and war. Instead of devoting their lives to childbearing, women emphasized their status as mothers, essential to the health, education, and welfare of their children. Finally, as Klepp writes, “family limitation and feminism were intertwined” (284). As these virtuous women and sensible mothers expanded their presence in the public sphere, they made additional demands for equality.

Klepp also considers the exceptions to this transformation in American households. The very wealthy, including slaveholders, were slower to limit their family size than middling and poorer classes. Their large families demonstrated their commitment to patriarchy as well as hierarchy. High birth rates continued among enslaved Americans. In addition to owners’ pressure on enslaved women to reproduce, Klepp argues that slaves may have found value and meaning in their families, however insecure, which countered the brutality of slavery. After emancipation, former slaves followed the practice of northern free blacks in limiting their fertility. Meanwhile, some sources, like Susanna Rowson’s bestselling seduction novel Charlotte Temple, implicitly criticized only children, who, like the female protagonist, might cast aside parental guidance and sexual virtue, run away with a rakish soldier, and die in childbirth.

Despite her mention of Charlotte Temple, Klepp does not discuss another important phenomenon in Revolutionary America: premarital pregnancy rates approaching 30 to 40 percent. Historians argue that changing sexual mores, a highly mobile population, the breakdown of community and familial controls on courtship, and new priorities of individual choice and romantic love influenced the large numbers of premarital pregnancies. Spiking premarital pregnancy rates and falling birthrates may not be incompatible, but they do suggest another way Americans may have resisted rational womanhood and limited families.

Women also lost something in the demographic transition. The passionless Victorian replaced the intensely physical experience of “the Sex.” Women increasingly ceded control over pregnancy and childbirth to male doctors. The new values associated with family planning stigmatized those who did not conform. As many Americans celebrated the virtues of small, rational families, they began to criticize large families. Unsurprisingly, enslaved women’s higher birth rates became another justification for their bondage. By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans associated large families with poverty and lack of self-control. Moral reformers argued that access to abortion and contraception only encouraged the promiscuous habits of immigrants, African Americans, and the poor. As Klepp observes: “So it was that the birthrate fell at the same time that large segments of the population embraced the goal of sharply restricted fertility, and yet voters, clergymen, doctors, judges, and legislators demanded more and more restrictions on contraception and abortion” (263). Shaped in the first century of the demographic transition, the ideal of the small nuclear family continues to influence American policy on immigration, welfare, education, and health care. Unfortunately, Klepp notes, prejudice against those who do not control their fertility is a regular feature of these policy debates.

Klepp offers an exciting new interpretation of women in Revolutionary America, and she presents her quantitative and qualitative evidence in an accessible and elegant manner. Though women did not gain legal or political equality, they took control of their bodies and their families, with lasting consequences for female citizenship. Women made a conscious effort to limit their fertility, balancing childrearing with their expansive religious, intellectual, and political interests.

Carol Faulkner is associate professor of history at Syracuse University, and the author of Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (2003). Her forthcoming books include Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (spring 2011) and Women in America to 1880: A Documentary Reader (spring 2011).

When Elizabeth Palmer Peabody traveled by railcar publicizing her textbook A Chronological History of the United States (1856), she carted a fat fabric roll containing samples of her iconic historical grids. Students who studied Peabody’s textbook would translate her tables of historic events into colorful, 100-square visualizations, with each square representing one year. For every box-shaped year in a century-long history, students demarcated the countries involved in an event by color, and the event’s type by its position—wars, revolutions, or disasters, for example, would appear in a different location within each year’s square. The result, for the most diligent students, was a mosaic of multi-colored squares and triangles exploring a century’s trajectory in the abstract. For every classroom that purchased a textbook set, Peabody would make a large-scale fabric grid as accompaniment, a task she described as backbreaking labor (none of these full-scale models survive).

In Lauren Klein’s digital project The Shape of History, and in conference presentations, articles, and her current book-in-process on the topic, she asks what Peabody’s grids might contribute to the development of an embodied, affective, and feminist approach to data visualization. Klein’s most detailed explanation of the project, her 2017 Modern Language Association presentation “Feminist Data Visualization: Or, the Shape of History,” argues that Peabody saw the labor of completing her grids as a generative act:

Peabody devised her method at a moment of great national crisis—the decade leading up to the Civil War—and she recognized that the nation’s problems would be difficult to solve. Her goal was to prompt an array of possible solutions—one coming from the creator of each chart. And her hope was that, by designing new narratives of the past, her students would also imagine alternate futures.

In our own historical moment, infographics and other data visualizations are consumed as pleasing visual synopses that distill complex ideas, as exemplified by the Canva Design School’s “Topics Explained Perfectly by Infographics.” By returning to the archive to find models of data visualization, Klein has uncovered a nineteenth-century antecedent that uses the visual not merely to clarify information, but to engage audiences in the emotional possibilities of a complexly rendered historical narrative, to help them tell visual stories about history as a way to imagine new outcomes.

For scholars seeking to legitimate the digital humanities, it has been necessary to explain how labor and process can both inform scholarly production and be scholarly products in themselves. The dominant terms in this discourse, like Stephen Ramsay’s “building” or Jentery Sayers’s “tinkering,” are historically associated with masculine labor. In contradistinction, Klein situates Peabody’s grids within a feminine matrix of scholarly and artistic production. Though observers have noted the grids’ resemblance to Piet Mondrian’s art, for example, Klein finds a more likely modernist descendent in the quilts painstakingly crafted by a small community of African American women in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, who explored the form and function of narrative in the triangles and squares of their textiles. Like the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Peabody’s grids emphasize the embodied labor of designers and, says Klein, “affirm the role of pleasure and the senses.” In Klein’s talk, she shares the grid of a student who was daunted by the task of coloring in each event; he or she instead created a kaleidoscope of full-page triangles. A critical awareness of the process of working, and sometimes failing, to conceptualize history and its possible futures, says Klein, is what the humanities can offer data visualization. In other words, the humanities provide a means of embracing a practice that is contextualized, often emotional, and always process-oriented. Here Klein is synthesizing nineteenth-century scholarship with affective design and computing, which studies how new technologies can meaningfully elicit and respond to human emotion. Klein’s digital project attempts to bring this idea to fruition in contemporary data visualization.

Klein and her collaborators—Caroline Foster, Erica Pramer, Adam Hayward, and Shivani Negi—have designed the site with squares that invite users to meander in all directions, mimicking the multiple pathways available in Peabody’s grid. The “Explore” square offers completed grids, including renderings of Peabody’s century-long tables as well as new tables detailing women’s history since 1918 and the 100 days before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The “Compare” square puts Peabody’s grid alongside a traditional timeline to consider how straight chronology simplifies history by ignoring cross currents. With the “Learn” square, users can color the grid using the provided tables, whereas “Play” provides a space to devise an original table on any topic and map it on the grid.

The team designed the project for a general audience, with the idea that a version of the site targeted at academic scholars would be launched later. Despite this caveat, the background information on Peabody delivers minimal insight into why someone would engage with this project who is not invested in the nineteenth-century or data visualization. Though the project is designed to guide readers through a thought experiment rather than provide an archive of Peabody’s grids, adding images of student grids could provide users with a more informed, contextualized entry point.

Klein expects her users to play, to dabble, to experiment with this blocked visualization of history, but she herself notes that, in terms of eliciting an emotional response, frustration may have been “the point.” Painstakingly deciding the color and placement of eighty-five historical events to complete a grid for the nineteenth century was enough to make me, like Peabody’s students, contemplate the futility of history. Yet, I’m reminded of Emily Dickinson’s work pressing flowers in her herbarium; she began with Linnean classifications but resorted to her own categorizations, more poetic in their placement than scientific. Dickinson created an embodied, aesthetic visualization that defied categorization just as Peabody’s grids encouraged her students to color outside of the lines in the hopes of understanding time and human history with fresh eyes. In Klein’s writing, the significance of recovering histories of feminist visualizations—like Peabody’s and Dickinson’s—is actually about unearthing previously undervalued ways of knowing to help us reframe our present and imagine those “alternate futures.” I’m eagerly awaiting her book, which will explain in greater detail how she imagines affective design from this contextualized feminist perspective.

Further Reading

Klein’s 2017 co-authored article in Feminist Media Histories titled “The Shape of History” provides additional information. See also her talk “Visualization as Argument” from the Genres of Scholarly Knowledge Production conference and her accompanying blog post about that presentation, “Floor Charts on the Floor Screen.” For the 2016 Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities, Klein collaborated with Catherine D’Ignazio on “Feminist Data Visualization,” an overview of best practices and helpful research for feminist data visualization. Finally, Klein and her collaborators at Georgia Tech’s Digital Humanities Lab are documenting their fabrication of an interactive floor model of Peabody’s grid.

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

Jessica DeSpain is an associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and is the co-director of SIUE’s IRIS Center for the Digital Humanities. She is the author of Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book (2014), and the lead editor of The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition, an exploration of the more than 170 reprints of Susan Warner’s bestselling nineteenth-century novel. She has published several articles on the intersections of book history and digital humanities pedagogy. DeSpain is currently collaborating with scholars in English, history, education, and STEM on the NSF-funded Digital East St. Louis Project, in which middle school students in East St. Louis collaborate to build a digital project about the history and culture of their city.

Common-place asks historian Kariann Akemi Yokota about the process of researching and writing her bookUnbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation, and about the book’s contributions to discussions of American national identity.

Your book asks, “What does it mean to think of Americans of the early republic as ‘unbecoming British?’ rather than simply ‘becoming American.'” What led you to frame the question this way, and what did you learn?

My book explores the post-Revolutionary generation’s struggles with the process of “unbecoming British” in the aftermath of America’s victory. In their efforts to analyze the formation of the United States, scholars of the Revolutionary period and the early republic have tended to focus on colonials’ efforts to break free from the British Empire—in other words, they tell the story of becoming American. This is understandable considering the historic changes that occurred as a result of the war for independence. Unbecoming British looks at this period from a different perspective in that it highlights the continuing importance Americans placed on their cultural, economic, and social ties to the mother country in the “postcolonial” era.

The same individuals who would become the nation’s leaders had recently been British subjects who had dedicated a good portion of their lives striving to be recognized as equals to their counterparts in Great Britain. For instance, George Washington earnestly pursued a career in the British military but was held back to a large extent because of his American birth. To understand the early history of the United States, it is essential to explore how these types of formative colonial experiences influenced citizens of the new nation.

After the Revolution, Americans faced the difficult task of establishing equality with, as well as separation from, Great Britain. The creation of an independent national identity—which necessitated unbecoming British—was a tricky business. It entailed construing differences between the U.S. and Great Britain where there were similarities (language, religion, Anglo-Saxon heritage) and attempting to diminish important differences (economic institutions, geographic distance, cultural development) in an attempt to establish parity. Many Americans simultaneously emulated and repudiated the mother country as they undertook the complex process of creating a separate society.

Many historical accounts of this period have downplayed Americans’ desire to remain a part of existing transatlantic Anglo-American networks. Conversely, anything that can be interpreted as an indication of a separation from Great Britain is taken as proof of the development of American national identity. I do not see the nation unfolding in a linear progression away from “Britishness” and towards cultural independence. Instead, what my research shows is that in the years following the Revolution, like other postcolonial societies, Americans vacillated between emulation and repudiation of the mother country. While there was a strong desire to establish their independence, American leaders also recognized that their connections to Great Britain contributed to the strength of the United States. These ties afforded them the civility that would legitimize their republican experiment during this tumultuous period of transition.

Moreover, the economic and cultural inequities that characterized the colonial relationship endured throughout the early republic. In that sense, emerging victorious from the Revolutionary war was the first, rather than the last, step in gaining independence. Political change tends to outpace shifts in culture. The Declaration of Independence represented a formal break with the British Empire, but by no means did Americans immediately abandon British cultural practices and norms.Americans were dependent on transatlantic networks of intellectual, religious, and commercial exchange and they needed British support to survive. In fact, when the formal relationship with the Empire ended, Americans had to work harder to maintain relationships with their British patrons. The pursuit of British material and intellectual sustenance kept Americans dependent upon the mother country long after independence was won.

You mention the persistence of “British cultural practices.” Can you elaborate a bit, and discuss how you went about investigating these?

While the Revolutionary War was a watershed event for political history, it plays a less dramatic role in the cultural practices of the nation. That said, the political break certainly influenced how Americans viewed their continuing links to Great Britain. After independence, Americans felt it was necessary to justify their cultural preferences to their fellow countrymen and to critical observers in Europe. Thomas Jefferson characterized his “enthusiasm for the arts” (and the large quantity of European goods he purchased consequently) as an expression of his patriotism. In a 1785 letter to James Madison he explained “its object is to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world and to procure them its praise.” Foreign allies brought Americans’ love of British goods into question. A year later, in an attempt to defend himself to the Marquis de Lafayette, who had noticed his predilection for British goods, Jefferson explained: “It is not from a love of the English but a love of myself that I sometimes find myself obliged to buy their manufactures.”

Americans like Jefferson acquired cultural capital from their association with Europe, while at the same time celebrating their freedom from its corruption. Still, the extent of their borrowing fueled insecurities about the derivative nature of what was ostensibly an independent society. New citizens feared being seen by the rest of the world, not least the British, as still mired in colonial dependence. On the other hand, too much reverence for the mother country would be “unbecoming” a newly free people. My book contains several examples of how Americans grappled with what constituted the proper balance between innovation and imitation.

This leads to my use of material culture in historical research. While the writings of the Revolutionary leaders have been collected, edited, and analyzed by several generations of scholars, significantly less attention has been paid to the political significance of their material possessions. Despite the fact that the field of material culture scholarship is continuing to develop, historians tend to rely upon written texts. This strikes me as a crucial oversight considering the importance the Founders themselves placed on their possession of the latest refined, imported goods from Europe and Asia as markers of the United States’ legitimacy.

I want to encourage readers to think about how the use of material culture as historical evidence can enhance and even overturn the way we understand the early American nation.Unbecoming British analyzes the lingering effects of America’s colonial past on the formation of national identity by paying close attention to the social significance of objects. What I discovered, to my great pleasure, was that objects often revealed a very different side of America’s postcolonial relationship with Great Britain. Americans coveted and consumed British goods before, during, and long after the Revolution. People are often surprised to learn that English pottery manufacturers made a handsome profit selling goods that commemorated American Revolutionary success to patriotic customers in the U.S.

Although objects figure prominently in my research, I also draw upon textual sources when analyzing the process of unbecoming British. The writings of American statesmen document their self-conscious pursuit of the imported goods deemed necessary to establish America as a civilized nation. In these letters, the politics of objects come to the fore. For instance, discussions about the virtues of home manufactures versus imported goods of superior quality arose when the nation’s leaders debated whether America’s first president should make his debut on the international stage in the latest European styles or in rougher cloth that was produced domestically. These seemingly prosaic issues had political implications for postcolonial Americans who were aware of the eyes of the world upon them.

This issue of Common-place focuses on internationalizing American history. How does the transnational lens you used in your book change our understanding of the political processes of nation-making and the cultural creation of national identities? And how would you characterize your approach to transnational history?

Looking at early American history from a transnational perspective significantly influenced the way in which this project took shape. Due to my focus on the politics of cultural practices in this period of transition, my research followed a variety of objects as they led me across political borders and oceans. My chapter on the early China trade came about because of my desire to let the trajectories of these goods define the boundaries of the study. Tracing the “life histories” of the imported Chinese items that Americans owned helped me to understand the cross-cultural relationships that were created by the international exchange of objects. In this way I would say that my approach to transnational history is more connective than comparative.

When historians adopt geopolitical lines of demarcation for their studies, they risk missing some of the most important aspects of the process of nation building. I am fascinated by the interactions and contestations that were continually occurring along the unstable borders of the nation-state. Some of the most interesting new research is coming out of borderland studies because they capture intercultural exchange so brilliantly. Furthermore, the domestic focus in American history is at odds with the importance people in the early republic placed on international events and their own connections to the wider world.

A transnational approach also helped me see a different side of the history of racial inequality in America. Put simply, if you examine a figure like Thomas Jefferson from a solely domestic perspective, he clearly occupied the top of the social, economic, and political hierarchy. He was wealthy, he owned slaves, and he enjoyed the respect of his fellow Americans. However, if you take a transnational perspective and consider his position within the larger transatlantic world, he becomes a lesser figure on a global stage.

In my book, I place Anglo-American settlers—including those individuals otherwise known as the Founding Fathers—within a larger international framework where they do not inhabit the top echelons of the social hierarchy. Seen from an elite British perspective, New World slave owners were petty provincials toiling in a distant and uncivilized land. Although Americans worked hard to change this view after the Revolution, they still realized that it existed. The Reverend Timothy Dwight noted in the late eighteenth century that the British looked down upon Americans because they were mere “inhabitants of a new world … lately occupied by a race of savages.” He put a call out to his fellow Americans, telling them that “The time is come … to explode the European creed that we are infantine in our acquisitions, and savage in our manners.”

White settlers in America attempted to address their lower status within the transatlantic context through various strategies of internal domination. After all, without the violent exploitation of people of color whose land and labor they stole, Americans could not purchase the things they needed for a gentlemanly lifestyle, nor could they have the leisure time to pursue intellectual endeavors befitting aspiring Enlightenment scholars. Seen in this way, I argue that American racism originated from a position of insecurity as much as from notions of superiority. The awareness of their lack of international status contributed to the vehemence with which Anglo Americans oppressed people of color. The same kinds of denigrating remarks about the primitive nature of the material life of Native Americans and African Americans were used by British observers to describe the lifestyle of Anglo Americans. By recognizing that the nation’s leaders struggled with their own sense of inferiority when compared to the British, we can begin to understand racial domination as being an expression of both power and powerlessness.

Let’s talk about your discussion of China—hardly a part of the world most people would expect to see in a book on the founding era. How did examining American interactions and exchanges with China enhance your argument?

In the late eighteenth century, Chinese tea, silks, and porcelain represented the epitome of style for Europeans and Americans alike. The importation of Chinese goods was an integral part of a provincial people’s attempt to construct a “civilized” nation on the periphery of the transatlantic world. One of the first things that Americans did after winning the war was to send a ship to China. In a literal, legal sense, this was the ultimate expression of independence because mercantile laws restricted colonists from trading directly with China. It was because of the desire for refined goods that Americans found themselves in Canton facing their British counterparts as well as the Chinese. It is crucial for scholars to recognize that American national identity was often established in geographical locations outside of the U.S. and Europe.

Since I was interested in studying race relations in the early modern transatlantic world from a triangulated perspective, I looked at the relationship among Chinese, British, and “white” Americans in Canton, China. Researching and writing that chapter allowed me to interrogate issues of a burgeoning American national identity from a location that was far outside of the nation-state. I found that in some respects, merchants from the U.S. and Great Britain reenacted their unequal relations in this foreign location because Americans were new to the trade, having been legally excluded from it. Americans showed deference to their British counterparts, whom they depended on to explain to them the intricacies of the Canton trading system. In other instances, Americans celebrated their new-found freedom by flouting British business conventions and playing up their relations with French traders as a way of insulting the British. Seeing the representatives from the British East India Company in a subordinate position vis-à-vis the powerful Chinese government was useful for Americans who were working so hard at “unbecoming” British in this period.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Chinese perspective adds a key dimension to the study of Anglo-American relations in this period. When Chinese officials asked Americans and Britons to explain the differences between these people so recently at war with one other, both were hard-pressed to answer. After all, they looked the same, spoke the same language, and shared the same tastes in objects. When I read several of these encounters in the archives, I thought to myself that this was the perfect illustration of Benedict Anderson’s point about the constructed nature of national identity. Americans and Britons who had so recently fought a bitter war against one another struggled to come up with significant differences that would convince a powerful Chinese official that they were separate people.

One section is provocatively titled “Race, an American Commodity.” Can you explain a bit what you mean by that, and how your arguments about the creation of racial difference and hierarchy fit with your points about the importance of objects?

White Americans often criticized people of color for their incivility, violence, and lack of discipline. Yet those Americans who were engaged in transnational networks in person and in print were disturbingly aware that they were being maligned for the same things by some British observers who regarded them with disdain.

As I have already suggested, hierarchies based upon levels of civility often revolved around the possession and production of refined objects. The unequal nature of the relationship between Britain and the new United States was embodied in the transatlantic exchange of refined and unrefined objects. Generally speaking, throughout the early nineteenth century, Americans continued to trade raw materials for finished products manufactured in Britain. To give just one example, American settlers obtained beaver pelts from Native Americans on the Western frontier. These pelts were shipped to Britain, where they were made into top hats which were then sold back to American consumers at a profit. Analyzed symbolically, these hats were among the possessions that white Americans used to indicate their discerning sense of taste which they believed differentiated them from “savage” others who had originally procured the raw materials used to make them.

Although I cannot explore the full argument here, in the final chapter of the book I draw upon the work of scholars who have theorized about the unique role of “whiteness” in the American context as a way to understand the process of unbecoming British. Living so intimately among people of color, European Americans gave whiteness an elevated value which it did not hold in Europe. While elite white Americans continually needed to turn to Europe for their refined goods, the one thing that they no longer had to import was their whiteness. Seen in this way, whiteness was a valuable commodity that could elevate an individual’s life prospects. As with other forms of material property, Anglo Americans passed laws to protect whiteness in order to maintain its value. More than anything else, I would like my book to urge readers to consider American racism at this time at least partly as a consequence of postcolonial insecurity. Of course, this is not to excuse it, but rather to understand racism in all of its complexity.

Since you mention postcoloniality, I’d like to conclude by asking what it means to be a postcolonial nation? How does the early American republic fit within this category, and how important is such a description or designation to the book’s ultimate contributions?

Nations that emerge from colonialism must inevitably grapple with the legacy of that history. Imperial projects rely upon the establishment of asymmetrical economic, social, and cultural exchanges between colony and metropole. To a large extent, this unequal system depends upon its subjects internalizing hierarchies of distinction that privilege the mother country. These do not automatically disappear after independence is won.

I am interested in exploring how the early United States of America was influenced by its colonial past. Many Americans felt extremely proud of their membership in the British Empire, and they continued to value their historical connection to it after they had separated. Thus, the establishment of American national identity was a complex, long-term process, rather than an instantaneous transformation. This approach was inspired by the work of postcolonial scholars who for the most part focus on the Indian subcontinent, Asia, and Africa. While these societies differ temporally and geographically from the United States, the intriguing questions postcolonial scholars have raised about the lasting effects of colonialism were generative. Their scholarship helped me to be sensitive to the concurrent desire to emulate and repudiate one’s former colonizers. As Ashis Nandy has aptly observed, “colonialism never seems to end with formal political freedom.” The ideas of scholars of “white” settler societies such as Australia, Canada, and South Africa offer a closer analogy to the U.S. One of the unique challenges postcolonial settler populations faced was the dual task of establishing their right to their adoptive land while still retaining the privilege of their European inheritance.

In Unbecoming British I consider the ways in which the United States resembles later postcolonial societies. Although one must always be cognizant of how its specific history was different, seeing early America in this manner illuminates certain aspects of the nation’s history that are often overlooked. For instance, the oppression of minority groups in the U.S can be better understood if we recognize that postcolonial American elites felt marginalized within a larger transatlantic world. Viewed from this angle, their acts of oppression are both expressions of power and powerlessness vis-à-vis larger economic and cultural systems still dominated by Europe. Given what we know about the ascendency of the U.S. to the status of a dominant world power, it is easy to forget that it had such an unstable beginning. Ultimately, I hope the book reminds readers that the U.S. might not be so exceptional after all.

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

Common-place sat down with Denver Brunsman to ask him about his 2013 book The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World and the impact that pressing sailors into service had on Britain’s age of naval supremacy.

The book’s title, The Evil Necessity, captures the ambivalence felt by most British imperialists about naval impressment. Why was the institution and practice so fraught?

One argument of my book is that British statesmen in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries made a conscious decision to pursue a particular form of maritime empire. The idea had appeal for a host of reasons, not least ideological, for it allowed Britons to square their pursuit of empire with their self-identification with liberty (a system of thought neatly traced by David Armitage in his Ideological Origins of the British Empire). The problem with a maritime empire—and any form of empire, really—is that it required (and requires) enormous amounts of labor. In other words, there is no such thing as empire “on the cheap”: it’s just a matter of who pays. Slavery was the primary form of forced labor that made economic production within the early British Empire possible. But impressment was also necessary for providing the maritime labor needed to defend and extend the imperial realm in times of war.

Into the early nineteenth century, pressing (predominantly) white sailors into naval service was far more controversial than enslaving Africans. A wide variety of pamphlets, cartoons, ballads, and other cultural mediums in the British Atlantic world attacked impressment for violating the principles of British liberty. I was surprised by how much this discourse reached and influenced the upper levels of the British state. Although there were certainly callous admirals and other government officials who simply dismissed the critiques of impressment, the majority could see the hypocrisy of building a self-proclaimed empire of liberty on the backs of impressed seamen. As an early example, in 1669 the famed diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys prepared notes for a meeting with James, Duke of York, the future King James II, who was then England’s Lord High Admiral: “Impressing of men and its management considerable, first as it is a charge to the King, secondly, as it reflects on the reputation of the service abroad.” To solve the problem, Pepys proposed ending impressment. James agreed, and the navy stopped taking men, but only briefly. By Pepys’s retirement in 1689, the English navy had started to expand impressment across space (to the Western Hemisphere) and time (for the full duration of wars, rather than the original term of a fighting season).

Unfortunately, the trend continued. Rather than reform the Royal Navy’s manning system, later British statesmen and legal authorities justified it to themselves and, they hoped, the broader public by partaking in the same discourse of liberty as its critics. The basic reasoning went that impressment might temporarily violate the individual liberty of the British seaman, but it was necessary in times of emergency (or “necessity”) for safeguarding the greater liberty of Britain and its colonial territories. British statesmen further defended impressment in the name of liberty against more bureaucratic conscription schemes, especially the French inscription maritime.

I came up with the title of “Evil Necessity” having sworn that the phrase was used repeatedly by British officials. In fact, when I went back through the sources, I discovered that they used “evil” and “necessity” frequently, often in the same works, but never (as far as I can tell) together as “evil necessity.” Still, I decided that the phrase best captured how early British imperialists came to reconcile the practice of impressment with liberty in the eighteenth century.

Do you see yourself correcting or repairing the reputation, whether among historians or general readers, of impressment?

When I began the study, the topic of impressment had an extremely polarized historiography. One side featured British naval historians, most prominently N.A.M Rodger, who saw little wrong with impressment; it was a way of life for early modern British seafarers. The other side consisted largely of American social historians, led first by Jesse Lemisch and then by Marcus Rediker, who emphasized the misery and devastating toll of impressment and the seafaring life more generally. I found much to admire in the work of historians on both sides of the debate, and Lemisch and Rediker have been very generous to me. But my primary goal was to understand how impressment worked, not to settle once and for all the question of “how bad was it?” Instead, the question guiding my work has been “if impressment was so bad, why was the British navy so good?” My answer, not to give away the exciting conclusion of the book, is that impressment was that bad and the British navy was that good. Atlantic mariners despised the British press gang and did everything humanly possible to avoid capture. Hence, impressment was hardly an accepted way of life. Yet, once captured, sailors performed admirably aboard British naval vessels. Facing both the system of British naval discipline and the dangerous natural conditions of the high seas, they had little choice. But I argue there is more to it—that for reasons of professional pride and manhood, brotherhood with their crewmates, and self-interest broadly defined, impressed sailors contributed immensely to the success of the eighteenth-century Royal Navy.

This success was not by accident. I contend that mariners differed from every other large group of forced laborers in the British Atlantic in a key respect: they were not selected for their class, beliefs, ethnicity, or skin color but rather for their particular skill set—the ability to “hand, reef, and steer” sailing vessels. No doubt class contributed heavily to impressment; it is hard to imagine the same outcome befalling a more affluent or politically connected group. But class was not determinative in naval impressment as it was in, say, army impressment. The British navy sought skilled seafarers, and for this reason the majority of impressments always took place at sea.

I fear that some readers, particularly in the academy, will misinterpret my effort to understand impressment as an apology for the practice. I purposely try to conceal my personal feelings to avoid interfering with my analysis. But there should be no doubt that I consider the entire enterprise, however successful, a travesty that with some creative policymaking could and should have been avoided.

What are some of the most compelling comparisons, contrasts and/or intersections between impressment and the other, most extreme form of forced labor in the British Atlantic World, slavery?

Slavery is absolutely fundamental to understanding impressment in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. This conclusion, as much as any other, opened exciting lines of inquiry and analysis in my research. First, in terms of numbers, impressment was the second most common form of forced labor in the eighteenth-century British Empire. As I stress in the book, it was a distant second and never approached the horrors of slavery. Impressed seamen received wages (although not always on time), adequate food and clothing, and freedoms unknown to slaves. Most important, a term of naval impressment ended at the close of any given war—it was not permanent and hereditary. Yet, “slave” was the rhetorical term of choice used by impressed mariners and critics of impressment to describe the condition of being impressed. I think, as with American revolutionaries opposing British policies in the 1760s and 1770s, slavery provided the most powerful rhetorical comparison because it was the most horrible condition imaginable by whites. In my research, I discovered cases of enslaved men fleeing to the British navy to escape their masters—in essence, seeking freedom in impressment. There is no more profound evidence that impressment was a “step up” from slavery along the spectrum of freedom and unfreedom in the Atlantic world.

You confront the issue of sailors’ agency and resistance—two important concepts in historical scholarship. How is your approach novel?

I had to confront the concept of agency in trying to understand how impressment functioned and why impressed sailors seemed to work to the fullest of their abilities on British warships. In so much historical writing—good historical writing —various oppressed and subaltern peoples only have agency when committing acts of resistance. There is no consideration if and when subjects of oppressive conditions might make a conscious choice to not resist—that is, to behave in a manner that might be beneficial to their oppressors. Obviously, these are complex issues that require great sensitivity, especially for scholars living by comparison in extreme comfort. I found a way forward by reading deeply in the literature on slavery. I was especially influenced by the extraordinary work of Walter Johnson, who has argued persuasively that we deny historical actors their full humanity if we do not consider the entire range of their actions, including decisions that might surprise or even disappoint us.

For a variety of reasons, relating to gender, economics, professionalism, and self-preservation, a majority of impressed seamen made the Royal Navy the supreme fighting force—on land or sea—of its time. I did not want to deny the agency of individual sailors in that achievement; the available evidence suggests that they took considerable pride in British naval supremacy. At the same time, to a man, nearly all the same seamen would not pass up particular opportunities to desert. Both things—resistance and compliance—could be true at the same time. The novelty of my contribution lies in applying this broader concept of agency to impressed sailors, but my approach is akin to that of other scholars who attempt to recover the full humanity of historical actors facing incredibly difficult circumstances. Whether in studies of slavery, impressment, or colonization of the Americas, scholars are increasingly realizing that the categories of resistance and accommodation present a false dichotomy of human behavior.

The Evil Necessity is a history with nearly global reach within the framework of the British Empire, and you conducted research in an impressive range of collections. What was your favorite archive, archival experience or discovery?

There are so many. Historians’ lives today are generally so tame compared to the events that we study. I was able to live out some of my own wanderlust through studying early modern sailors and visiting archives throughout the U.S., U.K., and Canada. I cherish those experiences and meeting with so many of my friends and family in different locations, which I recount in one of the longer Acknowledgment sections that you will ever see. As for research finds, it is hard to beat discovering notes by George III in his own hand from 1770 at the British Library (originally, his library) on the 1743 legal decision Rex v. Broadfoot. The case was the most significant legal defense of impressment ever issued in Britain, and George III expressed his agreement by copying entire passages of the decision word-for-word. Around the same time, Benjamin Franklin was also in London reading the same decision. Not surprisingly, he came to the opposite conclusion of George III, determining that impressment unfairly violated seamen’s liberties. Franklin recorded his thoughts on the margin of a pamphlet version of the legal case; the marginalia are reprinted in vol. 35 of the Franklin Papers. One of the only ways to make the practice fairer, according to Franklin, was to impress various British elites, including judges, navy officers, and the king! I love that story and use it in the Epilogue to frame the different responses to impressment by Americans and Britons in the revolutionary Atlantic.

The book’s final paragraph references several paradoxes at the heart of impressment, ones that have trans-historical resonance, and claims that “the centrality of impressment to Britain’s self-fashioned empire of liberty raised difficult questions that are still relevant.” Does your book help illuminate any contemporary (and perhaps paradoxical) issues in particular?

As any good history class teaches, historians cannot entirely escape the times and places in which they research and write. And I confess: The Evil Necessity is undoubtedly a product of the post-9/11 world (although it was first conceived as a dissertation topic prior to 9/11). It is hard not to see analogies between the eighteenth-century British Empire and the current global imperial reach of the United States. In both cases, the state/empire in question professed values (sincerely, I believe) that it violated in order to protect those very values. As the ongoing debate over the U.S. national security apparatus suggests, it is a potentially slippery slope once states begin to trade on their values for a perceived greater good.

The other obvious analogy is to the human cost of empire, both domestically and for conquered populations. One reason that impressment continued at high rates for more than a century is that it was out of sight and therefore out of mind for most of the British population. Likewise, approximately 0.45 percent of the U.S. population has carried the burden of the country’s foreign policy as military personnel since 9/11. I have great admiration for these men and women—so great that I joined the U.S. Army Reserves as an infantryman during the researching and writing of my book (I have since completed my enlistment, without being sent overseas).

It is hard to know the exact solution to these different issues. The American ideal of an all-volunteer force, for instance, was born in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a reaction against European conscription systems, particularly impressment. Trading volunteers for conscripts today would violate one set of historical national values, freedom and volunteerism, for another, fairness and democracy. As historians, perhaps we cannot provide many specific answers. Yet, ideally we can raise the relevant issues and questions that contribute to more informed, historically aware policy decisions.

Further Reading

Readers interested in British notions of liberty should see David Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York, 2000). For Samuel Pepys’ comments on impressment, see Pepys, “Notes from My Discourse to His Royal Highness Tomorrow May 14^th, 1669 about the Practice of Impressing Men as It Is Now Managed,” in Samuel Pepys and the Second Dutch War: Pepys’s Navy White Book and Brooke House Papers, ed. Robert Latham (London, 1995).