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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost Friends.

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

         ___________________________

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

Poetic Research Statement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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