Two years had passed since my discovery of a mystery letter in a Florence archive, and as I studied the correspondence on the Founders Online website run by the National Archives and the University of Virginia Press, I finally began to comprehend the significance of my accidental find. The letter, dated 1812, written in Italian and, according to the archival reference sheet, directed to “?”, did indeed have a recipient, and a notable one at that.  I realized that I had inadvertently stumbled upon a missing link in the extensive chain of correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and his friend Filippo Mazzei (1730-1816), Italian patriot of the American Revolution, who first arrived in Virginia as an agriculturalist in 1773. It struck me that over the course of 200 years, no one had read Mazzei’s letter of 1812 and Jefferson’s letter of the previous year side by side except for Mazzei himself. And now, me. With this realization, I found myself in the throes of my own “archive fever,” consumed by my letter and the mystery that surrounded it. I wondered if this 1812 letter had ever left Italy, and why no one had found it before I did. The clues were there, and I couldn’t resist diving headfirst into a bit of historical detective work.  

I stumbled, unknowingly, upon this hidden treasure as a result of a chain of events that can only be described as serendipitous. In June 2015, after co-directing the Bucknell University Engineering in a Global/Societal Context course in Italy, I reserved a day in Florence to conduct archival research on Carlo Bellini, father of Italian Studies in the United States. Friend to both Jefferson and Mazzei, Bellini, originally from Florence, was appointed by Jefferson in 1779 to teach Italian, French, Spanish, and possibly German at the College of William and Mary, a position which he held until his death in 1804. It was at William and Mary that I began studying Italian in the fall of 1991 as a first-year student, and when I heard the story of Bellini at a language conference in 2014, I decided that I owed it to his ghost to find out more about him and his life in the early years of our republic. So, on a cloudy day in June 2015, I set out for the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in search of an original Bellini document. 

A quiet space with a long oak table running down the middle, the rare manuscript room of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze is lined with drawers full of hand-written index cards, some dating to the early days of the library, which first opened to the public in 1747. I was drawn to the card catalogue on my right, which housed the recent acquisitions collection. A quick perusal of the catalogue confirmed that the collection held nothing filed under Carlo Bellini’s name. Purely out of curiosity, and not wanting to leave the library after so short and futile a search, I took a moment to look up Filippo Mazzei, whose name appeared in much of the correspondence between Jefferson and Bellini. Mazzei came to Virginia in 1773 under the patronage of Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, one of the earliest supporters of free trade in Europe. Leopold sent Mazzei to the colonies with the charge of shipping grain back to Tuscany, and once in Virginia Mazzei planned to cultivate a vineyard and produce wine. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mazzei bonded quickly with Jefferson over their shared interest in horticulture and Jefferson’s passion for the Italian culture and language. Mazzei recalled in his memoir that when he met Jefferson in 1773, the Virginian “knew the Italian language very well, but had never heard it spoken.” 

I found one card filed under Mazzei’s name. I signed for the document, and was handed a folder containing an original letter written in Italian and accompanied by an archival reference page. Mazzei at the time was living in Pisa and had addressed his letter simply to “Stimatissimo signore, e amico carissimo” (Most esteemed sir, and dearest friend) on September 27, 1812. In the first few lines Mazzei mentions that his letter will be sent with a friend through Paris, though no final destination is cited. There are references to both Monticello and Bellini within the text. Archived in the library as “not signed” and directed to “?” according to the reference sheet, the letter piqued my interest, so I transcribed it in Italian on my laptop.  When I returned home from Florence later that summer, the mysterious Mazzei letter remained in a folder labeled “Bellini” on my computer, and quite honestly, I forgot about it. I had no idea to whom it was written, and I figured it was an unsigned draft that had probably never left Italy. 

Two years later, with the 240th anniversary of Bellini’s hiring at my alma mater quickly approaching, his ghost continued to haunt me, as did the mystery letter sitting on my laptop. In search of answers, I began studying the extensive republic of letters exchanged between Mazzei and Jefferson archived on the Founders Online website. Right away, I noticed a gap in correspondence between the years 1811 and 1813. At the bottom of Jefferson’s July 9, 1811, letter to Mazzei, a footnote states that Mazzei had endorsed a response as written on September 27, 1812, but that the letter was not recorded in Jefferson’s Summary Journal of Letters and had not been found.  

At that moment I knew that I had made an important discovery on that cloudy June day two years earlier in Florence. Mazzei’s detailed response to Jefferson’s 1811 letter had finally made it across the Atlantic and was sitting right there on my laptop in Pennsylvania. But its identification raised more questions than it answered. Had the 1812 letter even made it as far as Paris? If so, how and when did it find its way back to Florence, and why had no other scholars discovered it? Had I unearthed any state secrets? And why wasn’t the letter signed?   

I contacted the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, requested a digital copy of the letter, and began the work of tracing the letter from its inception in 1812 to my discovery of it in 2015. As Mazzei had intended, a copy of the 1812 letter was indeed sent from Pisa to Paris amidst the economicand political turmoil that marked the end of Napoleonic rule in Italy, where it eventually landed in the hands of Consul David Bailie Warden, though for some reason was not included in the envelope that Warden later sent to Monticello. The copy that I found in the library is most probably a draft that remained in Pisa. According to their records, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze acquired this copy of the letter from Lim Antiqua, a manuscript dealer in Lucca, Italy, in 2009. The owner of Lim Antiqua surmises that the letter was likely part of the private archive of Count Luigi Cibrario of Torino, Italian statesman and historian. Lim Antiqua purchased the Cibrario collection in the late 1990s. Interestingly, Count Cibrario was stationed in Paris as the minister of foreign affairs of the Kingdom of Sardinia from 1855-1856 (prior to Italian unification in 1861, the Kingdom of Sardinia included Piedmont, the governing region of much of the peninsula). If this letter was indeed part of the Cibrario collection, he might have acquired it directly from Mazzei’s daughter Elisabetta Mazzei Tozzi Pini, who sold many of her father’s documents following his death. Stashed in a private archive, unsigned and addressed to no one, the letter remained in deep slumber until Bellini’s ghost led me to it in June of
2015. To read the letter in its entirety, click here.

Caroline Wigginton’s In the Neighborhood joins a new and vital wave of scholarship critically examining the affective ties that bound people together in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British American world. In the 1990s and early 2000s, scholars of women sought to demonstrate the very real conflicts that marked the lives (and the bodies) of their early modern subjects. Although these divisions had been examined and traced by scholars in the papers and archives of early modern men since the 1960s, this group of pathbreaking scholars of women—such as Elaine Crane, Patricia Crawford, Laura Gowing, Jane Kamensky, and Jennifer Morgan—offered an essential counter-narrative in their own scholarship: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British American women fought, slandered, and preyed upon one another. They policed each other, took each other to court, and screamed accusations at each other in the streets. They meted out punishments, physical and emotional. They enslaved other women. These actions were expected of them, as in this period women were imagined to be sharp-tongued, petty, and driven to gossip. Many women lived up to these terrible expectations. They lived in and were marked by a violent world, and in their violent actions sought autonomy, belonging, and survival.

But in the past five to ten years, scholars of British America have offered a corrective to the image of an early modern world riven entirely by discord. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America was a ferocious place, but it was also one in which powerful norms, laws, and dicta drove women and men to cooperate and live peaceably. How early modern people negotiated and reconciled the expectations that bound them together with the realities that drove them apart has been the subject of studies by authors such as Caleb Crain, Nicole Eustace, Cassandra Good, Naomi Tadmor, and Karin Wulf (as well as myself). These works focusing on an affective or relational seventeenth and eighteenth century resonate in some, although not all, ways with the new field of the history of emotion in their recognition that one of the many methods through which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century people sought social cohesion was via displays of positive feeling: expressions of love, professions of sister- and brotherhood, promises of concord and companionship. Caroline Wigginton’s book also participates in this broad scholarly conversation, as the author traces how women’s publications allowed them residence in early American neighborhoods, both real and imagined. These “relational publications” could help early American women to build consensus, senses of self, and ultimately, the author argues, an American republic (6).

In the Neighborhood offers a boldly argued and compelling alternative to the traditional narrative of the imagined communities of early America. Alongside the “certain men who fostered the nation through republican print,” Wigginton reveals the many different kinds of American women—including women of color, lower-status women, and dissenting or exiled women—who participated in the public dialogues that helped to constitute an American sense of national identity (1). Wigginton explodes open the definition of a publication, arguing that any communique that “makes public an expression of its author, invites a reading, submits itself to circulation” should be counted and considered alongside the elite, masculinized, formal writings that scholars of early America have chosen to represent the republican canon (5). Wigginton’s chapters are structured around breathtakingly and refreshingly different genres of publication. These include belts of black beads woven by Lenape women, funeral elegies written by former slaves, Quaker commonplace books, and diplomatic marches led and performed by Creek women: for Wigginton, all of these public expressions were publications, and all of them allowed women to shape early American community. The author’s evidence is rich and compelling, with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources from Savannah and Newport compared with those from New York and Philadelphia, although there is a particular focus on British colonial cultures and legacies rather than Dutch, French, Spanish, or Portuguese ones.

Throughout the book Wigginton works hard and well to offer careful attention to the many different kinds of neighborhoods that existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and shows an admirable willingness to engage with and analyze relationships that would never have been understood as traditional “friendships” in the period—itself a limited category of relation allowed to only a limited kind or number of people. An especially good example of this occurs in chapter two, “Vexing Motherhood and Interracial Intimacy,” where Wigginton investigates the “asymmetrical and at times uncomfortable intimacy” between Sarah Osborn, a white slaveowner and schoolmistress, and Phillis, an enslaved woman who was the mother of a boy over whom Osborn claimed mastery (63). Sarah Osborn and Phillis socialized together, prayed together, and argued with one another, and Wigginton carefully pulls each singular, complex layer of their relationship back to demonstrate how the women each used this relationship for their own ends. Wigginton’s acknowledgement that difficult and unequal relationships could still create senses of neighborhood, and that all of these attachments—even ones rimmed in fury, despair, ambivalence, or jealousy—were critical American relations, is an important one. In our explorations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sociability, it is crucial to recognize the inherent strains between prescriptive expectation and practical experience, as well as the variety and complexity of relationships themselves.

Wigginton manages these deftly, but as In the Neighborhood focuses on publication—the ways in which British American women made themselves heard, albeit subtly, differently, or contrarily—I was left wondering about times when these women were forced into silence, and when their gorgeously complex, messy relationships allowed them to silence one another. In the introduction, Wigginton describes how in their letters, two “impoverished and marginalized” Narragansett women “enacted and denied affinities by insisting on particularity, thereby prefiguring autonomy” (15). It is worth thinking carefully about that interpretive jump between particularity and autonomy, particularly in regards to public speech, thought, and action. This was a society in which autonomy or individuality was often read as strangeness, and then brutally punished. It was a society that sought to stamp out distinction and self-determination by quickly and abruptly silencing anything foreign, alien, other. In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British diaspora, people who spoke or acted out had their writings banned or burned in public bonfires, were locked into solitary confinement in prisons, or were bored through the tongue with hot irons. People (and sometimes exclusively or especially women) were threatened or punished with the branks, the gag, and the scold’s bridle, and with being ducked underwater, deprived of breath and voice. Enslaved people were silenced in the most cruelly and horribly effective ways of all, as they faced physical tortures while also being systematically, deliberately, and unswervingly denied access to speech, selfhood, and education. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people whose public speech or actions marked them as different were taught, told, and made to shut up right now, and many methods of punishment ensured that they stayed muzzled, sometimes permanently. Discord was a part of early American relationships, but discord could also be anonymizing, erasing self and voice and independence through very real punishment and pain.

In the Neighborhood does not seek to, nor should it necessarily have to, examine the dynamics of relational silencing in addition to those of relational publication. But as scholars continue to explore the relational turn, and to uncover and problematize the ties that stubbornly, vexingly bound together the women and men of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world, we must grapple with just how sophisticated and intricate those relationships could be.  

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2.5 (Winter, 2017).

Amanda E. Herbert is assistant director at the Folger Institute of the Folger Shakespeare Library, where she runs the Fellowships Program.   She earned her MA and PhD in history from the Johns Hopkins University, and completed her BA at the University of Washington. Her first book, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain, was published by Yale University Press in 2014 and won the Best Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaeherbert.

In the 1942 essay “Pacifism and War,” George Orwell wrote, “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist . . . . If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help that of the other.” In his address to Congress in 2001, George W. Bush declared, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” And now, more recently, in our own presidential election, many suggested the illegitimacy of the “protest vote.” At critical junctures in American history, people who occupy the middle ground on controversial issues have been pressured to choose a side. Such an insistence has often edged out and persecuted those who refuse. And few have been so intent in their efforts to maintain their neutrality than the Society of Friends, as Sarah Crabtree explains in Holy Nation.

Because of their insistence on pacifism, Quakers historically have been treated as suspicious, at best, or traitors, at worst. Most scholars have argued that Quakers responded to pressures to conform by retreating from politics altogether, but Crabtree convincingly contends that “[p]ublic Friends in particular remained extremely active” during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (215). Because Quakers could be neither with the nation nor against it without violating their principles, they framed themselves as citizens of a “holy nation,” united by faith, dedicated to the mission of establishing a “church militant upon earth” (2, 92).

In “Part 1: Combat 1754-1789,” Crabtree tracks the beginning of this imperative to the Seven Years’ War. During this period, public Friends called for the creation of “a new Zion”—a spiritual homeland—so that they might “maintain . . . cohesion . . . amidst the chaos of the world around them” (32). The biblical notion of Zion appealed to the Quakers because they, like the Jews, were forced to endure exile and oppression. And they, like the Jews, took solace in spiritual unity with fellow believers in the face of diaspora.

As the Zionist narrative allowed Quakers to maintain their principles during the Seven Years’ War, so it did during the American Revolution. Crabtree points to the Virginia exile crisis as a particularly trying time for Quakers, whom a falsified missive had implicated as spies. Friends throughout the colonies suffered for these accusations as Congress targeted them for requisitions and quartering to “ensure that they contributed one way or another” (45). But Crabtree contends that, since Quakers saw suffering as part of their faith, they maintained cohesion. Holy Nation is one of the very few (if not the only) book-length sources written in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries that addresses this crisis, which marked a crucial turning point in the war—not just for Quakers, but for anyone who voiced dissent—and Crabtree provides a fresh and insightful reading of this event.

Just what constituted “political engagement” could have used some clarification in Part 1. Although the Quaker Margaret Morris framed herself as a “mother in Israel” in her Revolutionary War journal, she also hid a loyalist informant in her house. And while Elizabeth Drinker—a key figure in the Virginia Exile Crisis—described herself as a member of the holy nation that Crabtree describes, she (and other Friends) negotiated with George Washington to set the exiles free. They were neither removed from nor above worldly politics, as Crabtree claims the Quakers were. In short, the line distinguishing the “holy nation” from the outside world was a bit murkier during the Revolution than is represented here.

“Part 2: Compromise, 1779-1809,” discusses how the Friends created walled garden schools to resist the “nationalist education project” (105). Quakers who attended public schools were taunted and harassed as “Tories,” and government-mandated curriculum insisted the children learn “principles of liberty and government” (103, 122). In an effort to protect the holy nation in the midst of these pressures to homogenize, Quakers created their own educational system that taught children to follow God’s law over national law. The theory that someone could “wall in” that which he wanted to protect and “wall out” that which he wanted to eschew did not hold. (Donald Trump, take note.)

In “Part 3: Concession, 1793-1826,” Crabtree explains that war-weary Quakers who could not endure another fifty years of persecution sought reconciliation through cosmopolitanism. Quakers stopped thinking of themselves as “wholly outside of the nation” and began forming coalitions with activist societies whose goals aligned with theirs (134, 145). Unfortunately, however, both America and France still viewed the Friends as inimical to their nationalist projects, and the Quakers’ “still small voice was drowned out by the nationalist cheers” (196). The Hicksite-Orthodox separation of 1827—which split the Society of Friends and rocked the core of Quaker ideology—sounded the death-knell for the Friends’ new Zion. Although they had lived for so long as “a nation apart, together,” they now had to “cast their lot with the worldly nations in which they lived” (2, 213).

Holy Nation is well written, well organized, and thoroughly researched. But more than that—it is also hopeful and, paradoxically, disconcerting. This book reminds us, after a very contentious election, that dissenters threaten polarized parties who wished to simplify complex political issues for their own gain. This dissent is essential, but always imperiled. The construction of the holy nation suggests that people will always find a way to voice that dissent, but its dissolution underscores how great the pressures were and continue to be to conform.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2.5 (Winter, 2017).

Kacy Dowd Tillman is an associate professor of English and writing and associate director of the Honors Program at the University of Tampa. Her publications include “Women Left Behind: Female loyalism, coverture, and Grace Growden Galloway’s Empire of Self” in Women and the Formation of Empire (2015); “Paper Bodies: Letters and Letter-Writing in the Early American Novel” in Tulsa Studies of Women’s Literature (2016); and “Constructing Female Loyalism(s): Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution,” Loyalty and Revolution: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon (2017). She is working on her monograph, Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution.

What is a hemispheric region? We are accustomed to thinking of regional differences within the national borders of the United States, but how does region emerge if we think about associations across and throughout the American hemisphere? And what might surface if we rethink literary regionalism as a hemispheric cultural and imaginative construct rather than one confined by the national boundaries of the U.S.?

In Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre, Gretchen J. Woertendyke unsettles and unmoors our geographic conceptions, whether arranged by nation, region, continent, or hemisphere. Through her example, Woertendyke encourages us to re-draw our literary and spacial maps by tracing the networks and movements suggested by a particular archive. For Hemispheric Regionalism, Woertendyke has carved a region that extends the nineteenth-century borders of the United States to include Haiti and Cuba, part of the archipelago of islands, colonies, and nations in or along the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea. This specific though fluid hemispheric region is meant to suggest other re-mappings of the local, national, hemispheric, and transnational, such as we have seen in Matthew Pratt Guterl’s American Mediterranean (2008) and more recently, in Monique Allewaert’s Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (2013), Raul Coronado’s A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (2013), and Martha Schoolman’s Abolitionist Geographies (2014).

Ultimately, Woertendyke defines the phrase “hemispheric regionalism” as “multiple scales of geography and history in dynamic relation, rather than a static space” and “an alternative set of relations within the broader categories of nation and hemisphere” (3). Sometimes “hemispheric regionalism” signifies a space we might locate on a map, and sometimes, as Jennifer Greeson has said about the U.S. South, it is “a term of the imagination, a site of national fantasy.” We are confronted with an expansive, even fluid sense of “region” as conceptualized by and through literary representation. Throughout her book, Woertendyke engages concerns with aesthetic form and genre theory; with hemispheric, transatlantic, and oceanic literary paradigms; and with the construction of our literary canons.

Nuanced and wide-ranging, Woertendyke’s Hemispheric Regionalism also shifts critical focus from “novel and nation,” a pairing ingrained for scholars of the early United States at least since Cathy Davidson’s seminal Revolution and the Word (1988), to “romance and region.” Woertendyke directs her readers to longstanding debates about the development of prose fiction in the United States (152), debates that both precede and follow Davidson’s work. Hemispheric Regionalism alerts us to the ways in which a too singular focus on the novel has distorted U.S. literary history, as well as to the limits of pursuing a nation-centered literary history in lieu of a regional or Atlantic one. Its archive contains titles both familiar and those less so. While gothic, popular, and historical romances are central to her analysis, Woertendyke has also gathered fugitive slave narratives, periodical fiction, advertisements, political documents, and commentary. She mines the editorial work of Maturin M. Ballou. She reads the works of Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, and Denmark Vesey, the fiction of John Howison, William Gilmore Simms, and J.H. Ingraham as well as Walter Scott, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and James Fenimore Cooper.

As this list suggests, Woertendyke contends with materials that have been understudied or overlooked and juxtaposes them with those more canonical. The result is, in part, an important contribution to scholarly conversations about the genres of the romance and the novel. Woertendyke revisits the commentary of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James on the romance as a genre distinct from the novel, while reminding us of the various positions taken by Richard Chase, George Dekker, Ian Duncan, Leslie Fiedler, Northrop Frye, Catherine Gallagher, F.O. Matthiessen, and Ian Watt. In doing so, she substantially expands that conversation, insisting on the distinct contributions of the gothic, the popular, and the historical romance traditions. Fantastical, wildly imaginative, and sometimes improbable, the romance emerges as a versatile kind of “border fiction” in which extra-national regions became crucial in grappling with early national anxieties about shifting local and global alliances and geopolitical instability. Woertendyke follows Charles Brockden Brown in conceiving of the romance as “a speculative genre,” and in viewing romance as “an adaptive form of conjectural history” (13). That the capaciousness of the romance genre could and did accommodate revolutionary, reactionary, and assimilationist impulses suggests one explanation for its popularity and its persistence throughout the nineteenth century.

Woertendyke has organized her book in three parts, each with paired chapters: one section on the gothic romance and Haiti; a second on popular romance, Cuba and oceanic spaces; and the final one on historical romance and United States. Temporally, the sections overlap as chapters organized by specific genres and geographies layer within particular decades even as Woertendyke traces material that appears over the course of the long nineteenth century. Woertendyke’s organization and methodology thus resemble the sedimentation that Fredric Jameson ascribes to the genre of romance itself, in addressing its particular power to sense other historic rhythms, the ways in which romance reveals the “worldness of the world” (8).

In Part 1, “Specters of Haiti and the Gothic Romance,” Woertendyke claims an origin point for the New World gothic romance in the reports and accounts of slave uprising in Saint-Domingue and the ensuing establishment of Haiti, a dynamic that repeats with subsequent accounts of uprisings in the fugitive slave narratives of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. In “Fugitive Slave Narratives and Atlantic Conspiracies,” Woertendyke elucidates how the spectacular violence of the Haitian Revolution brought latent fears of blackness to the surface, shaping the print archives of the conspiracies of Prosser, Vesey, and Turner, all of which deploy the language of terror and horror. These archives in turn, Woertendyke argues, help establish a link between slavery, blackness, and gothic romance throughout the United States. In the second chapter, “‘The Sea is History’: Apocalypse and the New World Romance,” Woertendyke traces the use of the sea as a metaphor for uncertainty, mobility, and the horrifying unknown by reading John Howison’s “The Florida Pirate” (1821) alongside Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), and tying the violence of slavery and revolution to an apocalyptic vision with either no resolution (Poe) or unfathomable annihilation (Melville).

The second part of the book, “The ‘Boulevard of the New World’ and the Work of Popular Romance,” posits Spanish America (or Cuba as a metonym for the continent) as the popular subject of romance, and locates the southern hemisphere both as an object of manifest destiny and as central to the generic development of U.S. romance. The first chapter of this section pairs Washington Irving’s biography of Christopher Columbus and Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin’s The Buccaneers of America. Woertendyke reads Irving and Exquemelin as writing romance-histories that grapple with the specter of Spanish imperial and colonial violence, and the tyranny associated with the Black Legend as they alternately domesticate the figure of Columbus as patriotic, and figure the “pirate” as an object of anxiety and desire. The way Irving and Exquemelin marshal and navigate through vast geographies, collapse and traverse historical time, and negotiate the conventions of romance fiction, romance history and travel accounts makes clear why they would prove such generative precursors for other long-form romances, but also for the periodical fiction Woertendyke examines next.

In the second chapter of this section, “Maturin M. Ballou, Periodical Romance, and the Editor Function,” Woertendyke locates the emergence of popular cheap fiction not in the dime novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but in the periodical fiction of the 1840s and in the company of other writing that explores the future of U.S.-Cuba relations. Reading news of hemispheric conditions and accounts of the racial, political, and cultural threats posed to the U.S. by its southern neighbors provided what Woertendyke calls “fertile ground” both for the “far-flung fantasies” of romance fiction and for readers to “conjecture about would-be political and social arrangements between the United States and Cuba” (98-99). This chapter offers scholars a list of periodicals and a sampling of the fiction they contain that is also near fertile ground and might potentially provide the basis to revise the literary history of short fiction.

In the final section, “Historical Romance and the New National Novel,” Woertendyke argues that U.S. writers find in the historical romances of Walter Scott a “language and a landscape with which to produce a fundamentally national literature” (122). Moreover, Woertendyke contends that U.S. historical romances she examines “consolidate hemispheric tensions into a coherent national vision” grounded in regionalism (17). Hemispheric spaces like Haiti and Cuba fall away in this section and instead the very geographic expansiveness of the Americas replaces the centuries of time that Scott collapses to great effect. Woertendyke understands the hemispheric energies of the Haitian Revolution in the gothic romance and of imperialist fascination with Cuba in the popular romance to be assimilated in the historical romance as the form becomes the vehicle of literary nationalism.

James Fenimore Cooper, J.H. Ingraham, and William Gilmore Simms followed Scott’s model in which regional materials and preoccupations synecdochically fuse the local to the national. In Ingraham and Simms’ hands romance becomes a vehicle through which the South could represent the nation’s history, present, and future. The translation from the Caribbean to the South, from Scotland to the United States is mediated by turning to Cooper, the “American Scott,” and to his sea fiction and its figurations of the pirate. In the alternate literary history Woertendyke lays out, the cowboy eventually supplants the pirate, as western expansion supplants southern expansion.

While remarking on the regionalist fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett and Charles Chesnutt and its investments in New England, the South, and the West, this chapter is provocatively silent on how writers like Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, and Nathaniel Hawthorne may have similarly turned to the historical romance in order to situate New England as the space of the nation’s history, present, and future. The chapter is silent too on how Melville ranged over the entirety of the terraqueous earth in Moby-Dick and changed locations from the Mississippi to the Hudson, from Wall Street to the Galapagos in search of the imaginative spaces for his various tales. Given the critical attention that these writers and their texts have garnered, and given that the genealogy Woertendyke sketches ends in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation—in a coda titled “Hyperbolic Regionalism, Confederate Nationalism, and the New Southern Frontier”—these silences are ultimately inconsequential to the argumentative arc of Hemispheric Regionalism. In effect, Woertendyke’s generative theorization of the romance genre’s use of time, history, and geography, as well as the interpolations of non-U.S. hemispheric spaces and figures in U.S. romances seems an irresistible invitation to rethink the historical romances that have attained more canonical status in a nationalist U.S. literary history, as well as an incitement to return to the archives with eyes newly opened to the possibilities of other imaginative geographies.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2.5 (Winter, 2017).

Martha Elena Rojas is an associate professor of U.S. literature and culture and the director of the Edmund S. and Nathalie Rumowicz Literature of the Sea seminar and lecture series in the English Department at the University of Rhode Island. She specializes in the early American literature of public documents and in oceanic literary narratives. She is co-editor of The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture (2017).

Law of Torment

after Jill Lepore

When military law would not apply
nor would the laws of war. Eye for an eye,

instead. Or more. Two eyes? Twenty for
one? Lawful captives taken in Just Warres,

we called enslaved Algonquians back in the day,
like that’s legit. We show up. Okay. Straight off we violate

Habeas Corpus, the law of nations, the rule
of law over war. Our exceptionalism means we, too,

can kill innocents, or citizens, like Al Qaeda when
a gleaming skyscraper became a tomb. We went

a little crazy with the torture techniques: the waterboard, Fear
Up Harsh and We Know All, stuff we picked up from SERE. SERE:

the training we gave our good guys
on withstanding anti-law-of-nations types

in Russian Korea. Commies. Bad guys, what they do
to force a false confession out of you.

Monticello Visit

“Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

We love our country, all its fathers, times.
Jefferson and his best friend’s shared grave
under a favorite oak: pretty gay. Which is fine
with us. We worried they’d gloss over the slaves—
not mention the math he did on their increase, how
that all worked out. But then we see the place
is so small, everyone there must have known.
Getting Sally Hemmings pregnant? More slaves.
Smart baby slaves, fresh-bred to look like you.
I ask a docent which slaves he picked to sell.
Did he keep his kids? He might have wanted to
but there wasn’t the money for it. Right; money. Ah, well.
What he did for his country. What we do for ours.
What we think family means. And what money’s for.

Satan’s Cupboard 

A morning with Athena,
the Boston Athenaeum’s on-line catalogue.

An afternoon with Mary, Assistant Reference Librarian. She points
out heads of the dead: hidden relief of Dante, hooded

Petrarch, dusty Shakespeare in the stairwell. On your right,
here’s Jesus Christ; on the left you’ve got your Satan. Christ:

huge with grace, forbearance, years across the hall
from Beelzebub. He’s looking down on us, says Mary, who should know.

I stoop, and see his placid brow is hairless. Lucifer’s
is out of bounds, unruly eyebrows of an old professor, cast out

by his wife. His line of sight is blocked by the King’s Chapel’s Library,
stately cupboard of books. Satan sneers, has always sneered,

at Keith’s Dispute with Quakers, Illustrations of More, Defences of More.
During the renovations, he saw less than ever: dim interior of crate. Forgive

his bitterness: the prince of the power of air’s now carved in marble. All
this knowledge hanging, ripe, just out of reach. His chin cleft or cloven, hair

corkscrewed, tumbling forth
like a fountain, like

Athena herself from the forehead of Zeus. Mary says that during renovations
the cupboard’s shelves were misplaced, lost

a long time. Where did they turn up? I ask. She intercedes, asks
Stanley. Satan, that old serpent, hid them under prints and portfolios,

under power of darkness. Untidy spirit, spiteful on the return
of the bookshelves, books that Satan looks at: More on Apocalypse, Sherlock 

on Death, Goodman on Sin. Lucifer, on his pedestal,
is tempered by these neighbors, through with acquisitions. He would kill

to be their editor. He could suggest a few changes, hopeful
new titles in the tradition of Fowler on Christian Liberty,

 Stillingfleet on the Separation,
Defence of Snake in the Grass.

Poetic Research Statement

I use research in and for my poems all the time. Sometimes the poems are just an excuse to do the reading and travel I dream up. You read Between the World and Me and want to take those ideas to Monticello? You want to make notes the first time you get a tour of the Boston Athenaeum so you don’t get lost? You want to read Jill Lepore’s article on the history of torture closely enough that you can teach it? You’re half way to a stack of poem drafts!

Sometimes research comes to the house, which saves time. The found text in “Law of Torment” arrived in my mailbox in a New Yorker. I started reading it in the steam room at my gym, then realized I was going to need those pages less soggy, and got out of there. When I started seeing rhyming couplets, I had the road map I needed to take it where I wanted to go.

“Monticello Visit,” the sonnet for Jefferson and his boyfriend buried together under the oak a short walk from Sally Hemmings’ cabin, comes out of my realization that Monticello is tiny, that everybody knew who was up to what with whom. It’s astounding how determined we have been not to know that the founding fathers, like so many other slaveowners, could be found prowling the quarters of enslaved people on any given evening. That it was OK to do it, just kind of tacky to bring it up. It’s like how surprised we all were when Trump won, or Beyoncé lost; it’s just too painful to remember what-all we already know about ourselves. So many chickens, so much roosting.

“Satan’s Cupboard” features Mary Warnement. She’s now the William D. Hacker Head of Reader Services at the Boston Athenaeum, and she’s been my friend since I won a Mary C. Mooney fellowship there in 2001. Now I bring Boston public high school students in to look at manuscripts by Boston residents over the centuries to get them inspired to write their own personal essays. And I bring in UMass Boston MFA students to look at engravings of, say, the ruins of Palmyra, to start them thinking on writing, say, anti-ISIS poems. But this poem is from the first tour Mary gave me of the Athenaeum, back when she was assistant reference librarian. Back in the day, another time, when I was worried I’d get kicked out for wearing sneakers.  

Stanley Ellis Cushing, the dapper Anne C. and David J. Bromer Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, makes an appearance in this poem, too. So does my habit of admiring books for their titles: The Complaining Millions of Men and My Cave Life in Vicksburg were recent spines I took photos of. Stumbling across those, doing any kind of research in person, letting yourself drift into lucky breaks instead of traveling down digital wormholes—it’s not as efficient, but holding real objects can help. My second book has a whole series of poems based on William Alcott’s 1847 anatomy book for children, The House I Live In, or The Human Body. Its front matter is engraved with a skeleton knocking at a door, announcing “I am fearfully and wonderfully made!” Who isn’t? Aren’t we all?

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2.5 (Winter, 2017).

Jill McDonough’s books of poems include Habeas Corpus (2008), Where You Live (2012), and Reaper (2017). The recipient of three Pushcart prizes and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, NEA, NYPL, FAWC, and Stanford, her work appears in Slate, The Threepenny Review, and Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and directs 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center online. Her fifth poetry collection, Here All Night, is forthcoming from Alice James Books.

In the politicized atmosphere of 2017, few Americans deny the significance of the national media to the narration and interpretation of contentious political issues. Many also lament the alleged “liberal media” or “conservative media” bias and reminisce about a time when news sources could be trusted for their balanced, apolitical presentation of events. If there ever was a time immemorial when American media was unbiased, it was certainly not during the Revolutionary War. Indeed, historian Robert G. Parkinson demonstrates how patriot printers actively constructed and circulated a pro-independence narrative through colonial newspaper exchange networks during the 1770s and 1780s. Their efforts united the thirteen disparate colonies into a cohesive political, cultural, and military alliance against Great Britain, an alliance that would eventually coalesce into the independent United States. In his book The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution, Parkinson argues that without newspaper printers’ pro-independence spin, the Revolutionary War would probably have ended in British victory. Yet more than that, The Common Cause reveals that colony-wide unity depended on breaking down the deep cultural connections and shared national identity between colonists and Great Britain. While enlightenment ideology and economic pressures were important, Parkinson argues that the survival of patriots’ “common cause” in the face of the Revolutionary War’s many setbacks was possible only by “associating [Britons] with resistant slaves, hostile Indians, and rapacious foreign mercenaries” and circulating this story of racial and ethnic difference throughout the colonies via newspaper exchange networks (20). Patriot forces constructed race while they created a new nation.

Scholars of the American Revolution have long recognized the significance of colonial newspapers, but Parkinson argues that they have focused on the wrong sections. Historians have pored over the front pages, where printers inserted political essays spouting Revolutionary ideology of liberty and natural rights, and the back pages, where the economic consequences of British taxation and the agency of African Americans appeared in advertisements for imported goods and runaway slaves. Parkinson instead points to the “war stories” in colonial newspapers’ middle pages as printers’ most powerful contribution to the common cause. The “succinct paragraphs, the extracted accounts, the mundane details: these items—largely hidden in plain sight from scholars thus far—were essential to political and, especially, military mobilization during the Revolutionary War” (14). Because printers were describing real events, scholars have overlooked the significance of these war stories and have not understood the profound impact they had on the patriot cause.

The Common Cause explores how these seemingly innocuous stories of military events distanced colonists from their “cultural cousins” by associating Britons with colonial “proxies,” particularly African Americans, American Indians, and, to a lesser extent, German mercenary soldiers. Printers and American politicians attributed slave resistance to irresponsible British policies like Dunmore’s Proclamation and blamed violent confrontations between white settlers and “savage” Native Americans in the colonial backcountry on British Indian agents. Newspapers also circulated accounts of Hessian atrocities, since these German troops were in North America only as British mercenaries. Over the course of the war, Americans bought in to the racial and cultural appeal of the common cause. How could colonists still identify with their “cultural cousins” when the British were personified in the colonies by escaped slaves, savage Indians, and violent Hessians?

Parkinson employs a traditional chronological narrative of the Revolutionary War, but he interprets military and political developments through the lens of newspaper accounts and exchange networks to reveal the ongoing, active construction of colonial unity. The book begins in the war’s early years when Britain recruited Indian allies and encouraged slave resistance to minimize military expenses. Ironically, these cost-cutting measures backfired. Parkinson argues that it was the use of these proxies, not ideological or economic issues, that first convinced lukewarm colonists to oppose British rule. Fears of British-sponsored slave insurrections and military alliances with the Creek and Cherokee, for example, drove Carolinians to protest and mobilize against their royal governors in 1775. Newspapers exchanged stories of British intrigue and southerners’ opposition, which furthered the common cause by proving to undecided colonists in other regions that Carolinians supported revolution. Parkinson even notes that news of events in the Carolinas surpassed reports of Washington’s appointment to the Continental Army, proving how news of British proxies was more important to patriot unity than Washington himself.

In chapter after chapter, Parkinson offers his own survey of the war while revealing how patriot newspapers circulated war stories designed to support the common cause within the changing context of the Revolution. In many instances, the actions of British proxies received even more coverage than patriots’ military success. Americans remember the siege of Yorktown, for example, as the momentous climax of the struggle for independence. During late summer and early fall of 1781, however, patriot printers exchanged more news of Indian-white violence on the New York frontier than reports of Washington’s entrapment of Cornwallis. These stories “underscored British crimes as much as Cornwallis’ invasion did” (516). For years after Cornwallis’s surrender, newspapers continued to advance the common cause by reporting on the violence between white settlers and Native Americans in the trans-Appalachian West.

Although many printers abandoned their prewar attempts to report events neutrally and instead deliberately spun stores to create a dichotomy between colonial heroes and British villains, Parkinson hesitates to label patriot newspapers as propaganda. The term “recalls totalitarian systems, mass media, corporatism, and disinformation campaigns” and does not fit within the historical context of the American Revolution. He instead prefers to categorize such patriotic reporting as “propagation”: printers and patriot leaders used newspaper exchange networks to “grow more patriots” (18). In addition, the existence of a powerful exchange network long before the outbreak of war allowed the common cause rhetoric to reach all but the most distant colonial settlements. The thirty-seven newspapers published throughout the colonies on the eve of the Revolution connected disparate colonists who would otherwise have little knowledge of one another.

Parkinson devotes the book’s first chapter and three detailed appendices to outlining exactly how the network connected newspapers to other newspapers and colonists to other colonists and supports his claims through a case study of the Pennsylvania Journal. William Bradford, editor of this Philadelphia newspaper, printed around 1,700 copies of the Journal each week in 1774, and over the course of the next two years his subscriber base expanded both numerically and geographically as colonists demanded more news of military events and political developments. Only a third of the newspapers ended up in the hands of Philadelphia residents, while post riders and watercraft delivered the other issues to interior Pennsylvania, New England, other Atlantic colonies, the Chesapeake Bay, southern colonies, and even Caribbean ports. Bradford printed local Philadelphia news, but he also included news from other papers in the Pennsylvania Journal, linking his customers to other newspaper circulation networks in addition to his own. The Journal is the only Revolutionary-era newspaper with surviving account books, but if even some of the three dozen newspapers had a similar geographical footprint, it is safe to say that patriot rhetoric blanketed the thirteen colonies. Though wartime events would significantly disrupt the newspaper exchange network, it remained the most effective way to spread the common cause and create colonial unity in opposition to British proxies.

Printers and patriot leaders constructed the common cause to generate support for the Revolutionary War, but Parkinson argues that it also had a lasting effect on the place of British proxies within the new nation. Because of the constant rhetoric about Native American “savagery” and their raids against white frontier settlers during the war, American Indians became racially marked as inherently incapable of American citizenship, including those who had fought alongside patriot forces. African Americans experienced a similar fate. Parkinson notes that northerners’ ambivalence to slavery’s expansion in the southern United States was a natural outgrowth of the common cause. Northerners dampened their antislavery sentiments during the war to gain slaveholders’ support, so when southern politicians insisted on proslavery policies in the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, northerners’ wartime accommodation set a precedent for the postwar period. German troops, however, did not experience the lasting effects of the common cause. In the later stages of the war, patriot leaders deemphasized earlier Hessian atrocities. Germans did not exhibit the same cultural and racial differences as people of color, and patriot leaders willingly accepted them as American citizens so long as they pledged loyalty to the new nation. Many scholars, such as Rogers Smith and Douglas Bradburn, have pointed to the racialization of American citizenship during the early Republic and antebellum decades, but Parkinson demonstrates in The Common Cause how these racial restrictions were forged during the war for independence in the service of creating colonial unity.

The Common Cause is more than 700 pages long, yet Parkinson’s clear prose and logical structure make it a joy to read. Parkinson’s analysis contains innumerable examples of how newspaper coverage of British proxies contributed to the patriot cause throughout the the Revolutionary War. The book’s length appears daunting, but Parkinson’s argument requires such extensive evidentiary support. The Common Cause is based on correlations between exchanged war stories and Americans’ response, and Parkinson provides little direct evidence from colonists themselves that explicitly connects newspaper accounts to their individual support of the patriot cause, presumably because such evidence does not exist. This is certainly a limitation for Parkinson’ argument, but his exhaustive research into thousands of newspaper articles allows him to overcome this lack of direct evidence. The abundance of common cause rhetoric against African Americans, Native Americans, and Hessian troops within colonial newspapers combined with Parkinson’s narrative of wartime events support his claim about a common patriotic appeal constructed in opposition to these groups. Historians of the American Revolution will undoubtedly continue to stress the significance of ideological issues or economic pressures, but Parkinson’s impressive analysis based on thousands of newspaper articles will force future scholars to engage with his uncomfortable argument that American independence rested on racism and ethnocentrism.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2.5 (Winter, 2017).

Lucas P. Kelley is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is in the process of writing a dissertation about continental expansion, state power, and legal governance in early republic Tennessee.

Fifteen years after the United States declared its independence from Great Britain, enslaved men and women in the French Caribbean sugar colony of St. Domingue rose up against their captors in an intense struggle that, after more than a decade of brutal warfare, ended with the creation of the free and independent nation of Haiti. This Haitian Revolution rocked the Atlantic world and ended Napoleon’s dreams of an American empire. And, as a wealth of recent scholarship has revealed, the Haitian Revolution and subsequent presence of a free black nation in the Caribbean dramatically affected the shape and outlook of the nascent United States.

The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies, edited by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael J. Drexler, is at once a tribute to roughly a decade’s worth of work establishing such connections and a showcase for exciting new work in the field. In their introduction, Dillon and Drexler declare that “It should no longer be possible to write a history of the early republic of the United States without mentioning Haiti, or St. Domingue, the French colonial name of the colony known as the ‘pearl of the Antilles’ and the site of a world historical anticolonial, antislavery revolution that occurred between 1789 and 1804” (1). Indeed, recent monographs such as Matthew Clavin’s Toussaint and the Civil War (2010), Ronald Johnson’s Diplomacy in Black and White (2014), and Marlene Daut’s Tropics of Haiti (2015)—a sampling that is by no means exhaustive—have decisively demonstrated the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the United States in the late eighteenth century and beyond. Such work builds upon not only C.L.R. James’s foundational history of the Haitian Revolution, Black Jacobins (1938), and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s crucial theorization of the Revolution’s reception in Silencing the Past (1997), but also a resurgence of scholarship on the Haitian Revolution from historians such as Carolyn Fick, David Geggus, and Laurent Dubois. To their great credit, Dillon and Drexler do not claim to have discovered well-explored territory, but rather signal their indebtedness to this body of work by including Fick, Geggus, Dubois, and Daut as contributors.

But in addition to acknowledging what has come before, The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States makes a striking and important claim about the precise nature of the relationship between the New World’s two revolutionary nations. As Dillon and Drexler argue in their introduction, the scholarship on this relationship has tended to focus either on an early period of potential alliance (exemplified by the cooperation between the governments of Toussaint Louverture and John Adams and elegantly described in Carolyn Fick’s essay in the volume) or on an era of antagonism and disassociation inaugurated by Thomas Jefferson’s 1806 embargo on the island. The quick jump from the former to the latter, contend Dillon and Drexler, produces “a story that begins with revolutionary Haiti as the double of the revolutionary United States but shifts suddenly to a nineteenth-century Haiti literally written off the map of the continental United States, and ultimately to a contemporary Haiti seen as a poor and obscure space antithetical to ‘America’ as we know it—a nation whose flickering encroachments on U.S. consciousness appear in the form of refugees, disease, and disaster” (13-14). There is, though, an “un-narrated story of Haiti and the United States,” one in which the interrelationship between the two nations continues long after the 1806 embargo, but is “reconstructed in terms that construe the United States and Haiti as opposites” (14). “This is not,” Dillon and Drexler conclude, “a non-relation but a relation of obscured interdependence” (14). Many of the essays in The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States focus on incidents of “obscured interdependence,” moments when the United States’s very attempts to distance itself from Haiti reveal the presence of a deep and abiding, if disavowed, relationship between the revolutionary neighbors.

The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States consists of seventeen essays, including the introduction and epilogue, from contributors working primarily in English and History, organized into three sections: Histories, Geographies, and Textualities. Rather than attempt an inevitably oversimplified summary of these diverse and wide-ranging contributions, I would like to focus on a single essay from each of the book’s three sections, which together exemplify the volume’s overall focus on a relationship between the United States and Haiti characterized by “obscured interdependence.” Duncan Faherty’s “‘The Mischief That Awaits Us’: Revolution, Rumor, and Serial Unrest in the Early Republic,” appears in the volume’s Histories section and focuses on the largely un-narrated story of three French frigates that, loaded with imprisoned black revolutionaries from the West Indies, anchored in New York harbor for two months in the summer of 1802. Consulting a trove of primary documents, including newspaper reports and private correspondence between government officials, Faherty traces the panic that the presence of these ships inspired in U.S. Americans from Maine to South Carolina, many of whom feared that the foreign black revolutionaries imprisoned offshore would inevitably reach U.S. soil (either through escape or as part of a planned invasion). White Americans from a variety of backgrounds—northern and southern, Federalist and Democratic Republican—came together in their belief that these “French Negroes” threatened the security of the United States, and this “universal insistence on preventing any of the prisoners from disembarking onto U.S. soil reveals a domestic ethnoscape intent on securing futurity by keeping unwelcome foreigners and their revolutionary intrigues in abeyance” (60). For Faherty, then, this 1802 episode reveals “how a fragile sense of national cohesion was formed by a widespread practice of negation,” as the threat of the Haitian Revolution helped produce an American national identity constituted in large part by what it was not (59).

While Faherty offers a compelling account of engagement through negation, Cristobal Silva provides an exciting model for uncovering and analyzing additional, and at times surprising, pathways through which Haiti and the early United States shaped one another. In his “Republic of Medicine: Immunology and National Identity in the Age of Revolution,” in the volume’s Geographies section, Silva explores a relationship between Haiti and the United States grounded in the overlapping concepts of disease and immunity, focusing in particular on the yellow fever pandemic that dramatically affected the course of the Haitian Revolution and ravaged Philadelphia from 1793 to 1794. Reading the revolution and the pandemic together, Silva contends, “repositions the relationship between place and nation by introducing health and illness as a matrix for defining the terms of citizenship in the revolutionary era” (131). By considering the seemingly distinct geographies of Philadelphia and St. Domingue as “loci of pandemic,” Silva unhinges “the concept of national identity from territorial integrity,” as “the very definition of a pandemic obviates the political and geographical boundaries of nationhood in favor of disease, vectors, migrations, and transmission routes” (131-132). Faced with a disease that cared little for the borders (physical and ideological) that U.S. Americans attempted to erect between their nation and the revolutionary Caribbean, Atlantic world physicians attempting to limit the spread of yellow fever relocated “the bonds of communal and national identity in relation to shared immunities and susceptibilities” rather than geography (132). By focusing on the role that St. Domingue refugees played in Philadelphia’s yellow fever outbreak, and providing a series of convincing readings of medical treatises grappling with that pandemic, Silva shows how communal identities that appeared to be anchored in specific spaces (like the United States or St. Domingue) were broken down and reconfigured “in relation to shared immunities and susceptibilities” (132).

The volume’s final section, Textualities, concludes with Marlene L. Daut’s “The ‘Alpha and Omega’ of Haitian Literature: Baron de Vastey and the U.S. Audience of Haitian Political Writing, 1807-1825,” an exploration of the writings of the Haitian author Baron de Vastey and their circulation and reception in the United States. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Vastey wrote at least eleven works and was widely read and commented upon by U.S. Americans. These texts took up a variety of topics but were “most importantly,” writes Daut, dedicated to “narrating the history of Haiti from a Haitian point of view” (288). And the largely positive reviews of Vastey’s work in northern U.S. newspapers complicate “the idea that Haiti suffered a unilateral ‘bad press’ in the nineteenth century that has influenced and overdetermined its relationship to the United States up until the present time” (290-291). By foregrounding the ways in which Vastey in particular, and Haitian writers in general, used the U.S. press to help shape American attitudes toward Haiti, Daut offers a crucial intervention. As she notes, much of the work surrounding the United States and the Haitian Revolution continues to focus on “U.S. reactions to and readings of the Haitian Revolution” instead of “analyzing the Haitian reaction to U.S. nonrecognition, on the one hand, and Haitian reactions and contributions to U.S. readings of their revolution, on the other” (292). Daut concludes with a call for more work that corrects this silencing, since “by not reading the very Haitian authors who addressed and described in the nineteenth century their understanding of Haiti’s relationship with the United States, we tend to unwittingly propagate not only the fable of nonrecognition, but the fiction of Haiti’s essential lack of importance” (313). Her essay provides a powerful example of how such efforts might proceed.

A volume focused on the relationship between the United States and the Haitian Revolution could quite easily participate in the silencing that Daut argues against, and many of the contributions to The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States do remain centered upon U.S. American reactions to their revolutionary neighbor. But the presence of work such as Daut’s essay, Edlie Wong’s chapter on Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer’s efforts to recruit African American settlers, and Michael Drexler and Ed White’s reading of Toussaint’s Constitution as an origin of African American literature, testifies to the editors’ efforts to address this critique. Some scholars may also find that the volume’s focus on the “United States,” while offering a degree of clarity, privileges particular sites of analysis at the expense of others. For example, the city of Philadelphia appears in numerous essays while New Orleans, a city that was home to black and white francophone communities and a primary destination for refugees from St. Domingue, but beyond the boundaries of the U.S. until after the Haitian Revolution, receives scant attention. Rather than diminishing the value and power of this volume, such an absence provides even more evidence of the incredible amount of work that remains to be done teasing out not only how, but also where, Haiti and the United States engaged with and shaped one another. The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States makes no pretensions to be the first or last word on this subject, but is rather an absolutely indispensable guide to where we have been, where we are going, and how to get there.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2 (Winter, 2017).

Benjamin Fagan is assistant professor of English at Auburn University. He is a specialist in early African American literature and print culture, and the author of The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (2016).

According to most accounts, the Haitian Revolution ended on January 1, 1804, with Haiti’s Declaration of Independence. But on January 2, it was not evident that the revolution was over. Haiti’s first leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, made sure to highlight that it would never be done—the war with France would be “eternal.” But how did Haiti maintain its independence? My research focuses on the complex layers of recognition that help explain both Haiti’s success in establishing a place in the Atlantic world and the limitations of this success for building an independent and sovereign nation. Haiti’s declared independence posed unprecedented questions about human rights and the interplay of economic, political, and legal priorities that have continued to stymie the international community more than two centuries later.

How did taking an Atlantic perspective help you in seeing Haiti’s relationship with other nations after it declared independence in 1804?

To understand these multi-layered Atlantic world connections, my research has pursued relevant historical evidence in diverse archives across multiple jurisdictions including Haiti, France, England, the United States, Jamaica, Denmark, and the Netherlands. These geographically disparate repositories highlight the constant contact and communication within and between empires, colonies, and countries in the Atlantic world and reveal both the significance and the permeability of the political and legal boundaries of the diverse societies within the region.

This perspective and archival strategy developed as I focused on explaining how Haiti made the transition from revolution to independence in a hostile Atlantic world. Since the Haitian Declaration of Independence did not automatically signal diplomatic recognition or national sovereignty, this status had to be negotiated over decades with other Atlantic empires and nations in order for Haiti to join “the powers of the earth.” These negotiations harkened back to the aftermath of the American Revolution but also included Haiti’s unprecedented rejection of the racialized ideology that underpinned the era. Haiti’s success was uncertain since this was a world in which slaveholding powers dominated the seas and the political landscape, and, unlike in the American and French Revolutions, the slave revolution in Haiti overturned the racial hierarchy of the colonial slave system. The basis of the Atlantic economic system was under attack. This challenge has led scholars to assume that Haiti was isolated after the Declaration of Independence—what historian Thor Burnham has called “the isolationist thesis.” The claim has persisted because of an emphasis on the heightened importance of racial fears and the future of slavery elsewhere in the Atlantic world. Haiti’s identity as a “black republic” (even when it wasn’t a republic) often overshadows all of its other characteristics—agricultural gold mine, pawn in the Napoleonic Wars, victor of a war for independence—that foreign officials and individuals also used in their calculations when they considered how to react to the Haitian Declaration of Independence.

Haiti only secured formal diplomatic recognition slowly between 1825 and 1862. My research, however, revealed that throughout the initial period of official diplomatic non-recognition, various layers of economic, legal, and political connections sustained Haiti’s independence. Governments and individuals extended economic, temporary, and de facto recognition of Haiti’s independence while withholding official diplomatic recognition. By developing these unofficial connections, Haitians established their place in the Atlantic world as members of a sovereign country.

You note that within a few years of declaring independence, Haiti had only Britain available as a legitimate trading partner. In what ways did that shape the approach of Haitian leaders to their development as a sovereign nation?

By 1806, all other nations and empires had outlawed trade with Haiti (trade, however, continued illegally), except the British. Instead, the British formally legalized and regulated trade with Haiti. The lack of options and bargaining power meant that Haitian leaders had to settle for economic recognition without diplomatic recognition. Economic recognition on the part of the British provided badly needed supplies (manufactured goods and military supplies, in particular) and had implications for Haiti’s perceived diplomatic status, especially in the admiralty courts. But while the legitimate and legal trade between the British Empire and Haiti had day-to-day implications for Haiti’s sovereignty, it did not allow state leaders in Haiti to pursue traditional means of diplomatic communication and negotiation with foreign leaders. The result was that Haiti was independent in practice (economically), but not in name. After 1810, American merchants were again allowed to trade with Haiti legally, but the British still played a dominant role in Haiti’s foreign trade.

One theme of Haitian Connections is that previous scholars have focused almost exclusively on race and imperial views about slavery to explain the early relationship between Haiti and other Atlantic nations and empires. Can you explain how you assess the role of race in the dealings that Haiti had with other nations in the Atlantic basin in the years after it declared independence?

Race certainly played an important role in Haiti’s post-revolutionary experiences. But my research revealed that foreign governments and individuals also had to consider a web of other factors in their responses to Haiti’s declared independence. These other considerations included economic concerns, military strategy, political ideology, and safety concerns. Given the emphasis on Haiti’s alleged isolation and exclusion from the diplomatic world of the Age of Revolution, the diversity of reactions that resulted from these mixed priorities appears surprising. The competing interests of individuals and governments at the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, help explain how Haiti was able to sustain its independence in the middle of a world based on slavery and one quickly transitioning to new and more rigid forms of racism. Furthermore, while the actions taken by individuals and governments reveal the competing priorities of empires and nations, the discussion and language that these people used to debate the proper course of action with respect to Haiti reveal that race remained central to their decision-making processes. Political leaders grappled with how to reconcile the theories espoused by the Age of Revolution with existing socio-racial hierarchies. In doing so, they found ways to profit from the post-colonial state while rejecting a universal application of their own conceptions of liberty and equality.

Haitian Connections focuses primarily on the foreign relations and diplomacy of Haiti as part of the Atlantic world. In what ways did the trade negotiations and other diplomatic endeavors that you discuss influence politics and society within Haiti?

Following Haiti’s Declaration of Independence, the state attempted to maintain control over the laboring population in order to revive the plantation economy. Extending Toussaint Louverture’s system of plantation labor using cultivateurs (formerly enslaved people tied to plantation land and paid a small portion of the crops that they produced), Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexandre Pétion, and Henry Christophe all tried to recreate Saint-Domingue’s sugar-based export economy. Foreign governments and merchants also promoted this vision of limited “freedom” after the Haitian Revolution since it was in their own economic interest. Freedom at the state level, therefore, was primarily based on the legal abolition of slavery and national sovereignty. This was in contrast to the definition of freedom as conceived by the majority of the population, which had much more to do with control of one’s time and access to land.

For foreign audiences, the state’s version of freedom signaled the limits of Haiti’s radical revolutionary program. While the cultivateurs were legally free, the state attempted to implement limits on their time and mobility. These early Haitian leaders were mostly unsuccessful in this goal. Instead of a plantation economy, the majority of Haitian citizens sought to retreat from plantation life in order to create community-based sustainable farms. The drastically different interpretations of “freedom” in independent Haiti created a divide between the state and the majority of the population—Michel-Rolph Trouillot studied this in detail in Haiti: State Against Nation.

So what we see are the competing interests of foreign merchants and governments, the Haitian government, and the Haitian people. These conflicting interests meant that Haiti began its history as a divided country, not just in terms of the civil war between 1807-1820, but also in terms of the long-term goals of the state and the population—conflicts that would continue and would have consequences well into the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first century.

In 2010, you made national news when you found the only known printed copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence in the U.K. National Archives. How did that experience shape your research and writing about Haiti’s history?

Talking with people outside of academia about my research highlighted the strong desire from a public audience for more information about Haiti’s complex history. Media portrayals of Haiti’s history often emphasize a story of decline, concluding that Haiti was doomed from day one. While disavowing Pat Robertson’s famous claim that Haitian leaders made a pact with the devil, these narratives still maintain an oversimplified explanation of Haitian history. Providing the opportunity for non-academics to read Haiti’s founding document, and giving them some context for this important document, highlighted “Why Haiti Needs New Narratives,” as Gina Athena Ulysse puts it.

It was also interesting to see how non-academics reacted to the content and language of the document. Jean-Jacques Dessalines articulated a powerful argument for self-government and human equality—and the lengths to which Haitians were willing to fight for these results, “liberté ou la mort.” I think a lot of the surprise felt by twenty-first-century readers stemmed from the constant contemporary depictions of Haiti as a place vulnerable to natural disaster and political upheaval. At the same time, however, I think there was an aspect of surprise caused by Haiti’s exclusion from narratives of the Age of Revolution and the Enlightenment. More and more, scholars are highlighting the ideological and political contributions made by the Haitian revolutionaries, but this new research has not yet become a central part of popular narratives of the transition to modern history and is rarely connected to debates about our own histories of freedom and equality.

How did the discovery of the printed Declaration change our perspective on the Haitian Revolution?

I think it allowed an international and particularly an American audience to see the similarities between their own histories and that of Haiti. The Declaration justifies the war for independence and makes a strong case for self-governance based on freedom and equality. I think it’s particularly useful in the classroom in order to help students see their own history as integrally connected to and intertwined with Haiti’s history (in addition to other places throughout the Americas). In reporting on my discovery, Rachel Maddow crossed her index and middle fingers and said, “Us and Haiti, we’re like this, we always have been.” By using the Declaration of Independence as a jumping-off point, we can help our students understand the history of the United States beyond the geographical borders that now make up the country—in a lot of ways Haiti’s history is America’s history.

Further reading

Gina Athena Ulysse, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle, translated by Nadève Ménard and Évelyne Trouillot (Middletown, Conn., 2015); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins & Legacy of Duvalierism (New York, 2000).

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2 (Winter, 2017).

Julia Gaffield is assistant professor of history at Georgia State University. In addition to Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World she is the editor of The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy (2016).