Corinne T. Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 260 pp., $32.95.

If you are not currently convinced that age should be a historical category of analysis alongside gender, race, class, and disability, Corinne Field’s new book should go a long way toward persuading you. The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America advances the study of citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States by showing how the political significance of maturity and adulthood were at the center of women’s and African Americans’ efforts to expand democracy to its full meaning and potential.

Field’s monograph follows a straightforward format. Each chapter uses a specific set of writings by leaders in the abolition, women’s rights, or black rights movement to examine the connections between age, race, gender, power, and citizenship. Many of her subjects will be familiar to those interested in early American history—Abigail Adams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass. Others—such as Pauline Wright Davis and Frances Harper—are worthy of introduction or further acquaintance. The prologue traces the origin of Anglo-Americans’ association between maturity—embodied by white, middle-class men—and liberty during the Enlightenment. This grounds Field’s project in the intellectual and political developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although debates about coming of age and political power exist throughout history, Field identifies the unique circumstances of the early United States as a fruitful period for considering the connections between maturity and democracy.

In the first chapter, Field shows how prominent female writers viewed the ideology of republicanism. The shift from birthright to consent as the foundation of political participation extolled the significance of maturity for white men’s rational development from subjects to citizens. But women and African Americans remained “perpetual minors” in the eyes of the community and the state (22). By analyzing the work of Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley, and Mary Wollstonecraft, Field shows how women’s inability to achieve intellectual and moral leadership as they aged became a critique of men’s commitment to republican principles. By examining how these writers understood “that women could not make a transition to adulthood on the same terms as men,” Field establishes the connection between maturity and liberty that was at the heart of America’s democratic experiment (49).

Against the backdrop of the Jacksonian enfranchisement of the “common man”—a white male adult who possessed “the structures of the mind and the qualities of the heart” to maintain the nation’s liberty—Field examines “the political significance of chronological age” (53-54). Analyzing the writings of Frederick Douglass, David Walker, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, chapter 2 shows how these activists used the expansion of white male suffrage and the political empowerment of propertyless white men as a wedge to insert their call for expanded citizenship. If age, rather than wealth, was to be the measure of republican commitment, it should apply equally to women and African Americans as to white men.

Chapter 3 begins Field’s investigation into the organized women’s rights and antislavery movements that began in the 1840s and continued during the Civil War era. As activists within these interrelated movements advanced the citizenship claims of white women and African Americans, the significance of age and maturity revealed tensions within the alliance. Reform movement leaders challenged slavery and disenfranchisement by pointing to the emancipation received by white men at age twenty-one. But when it came to prioritizing white women’s or African American men’s advancement, activists fell back on stereotypes of maturity based on gender or race.

In chapter 4, Field explores popular ideas of life course, “the timing and sequence of transitions such as getting married and entering the workforce” (176 n.20), as a backdrop for activists challenging the boundaries of race and class that kept women and African Americans from achieving adulthood. Writers such as Pauline Wright Davis, Frederick Douglass, and Frances Harper worked to free African Americans from the state of perpetual dependence. They argued that fulfillment of one’s potential on the life course could come only from the independence that white men took for granted. Here Field gives more weight to the economic conditions that produced gender and race inequality around the meaning of age. She also discusses the pseudo-science of racial difference that prompted many white Americans to view African-descended people as naturally inferior. This economic and intellectual context makes this chapter one of the strongest in the book.

Chapter 5 follows the fate of the campaign for equal adulthood after the Civil War. During Reconstruction, the image of the valiant black soldier was pitted against the virtuous white mother in a battle over who was more qualified for citizenship. Women’s rights and African American rights activists tried to keep their alliance focused on equal political and social opportunity regardless of race or gender at age twenty one, but white male politicians appeared to favor granting suffrage to black men based on their military contributions. So, white and black women offered their own arguments for enfranchisement based on competing conceptions of gender, race, and maturity. By the 1870s, the alliance of equal adulthood fractured into internal conflicts over whether men or women, blacks or whites, educated or uneducated could best chart the nation’s future.

During Radical Reconstruction, the political rights of adult men—both black and white—were enshrined within the constitution. In chapter 6, Field discusses how this advancement for former enslaved men left women as perpetual minors. Instead of embracing adulthood as an equal standard for all people and viewing maturity as a universal experience, activists emphasized gender and race stereotypes to protect their group’s rights and interests. Even as white women and African Americans gained incremental rights and opportunities, they were unable to unseat white patriarchy from its position of dominance.

The Struggle for Equal Adulthood shows us how democracy brought the promise of equality, but spread it unevenly through the nation. Granting the privileges of adulthood based on assumptions about race and gender allowed political leaders to celebrate equality while denying it to the majority of the population. Through the political power of maturity, democracy expanded the authority of young, propertyless white men and age requirements emerged as a solution to the arbitrary nature of aristocracy. Overall, Field gives us a deeper understanding of democracy in the nineteenth century by showing how activists recognized the privilege of adulthood built into the early American political system.

The significance of Field’s scholarship extends well beyond the primary focus of her study of citizenship and politics. The power of adulthood includes not only formal political rights, but also opportunities for participation in the public sphere, recognition in the home, and respect in the realm of commerce. Using the perspective of age and maturity, Field’s study of the politics of age removes the artificial boundary between the personal and the political, or the so-called private and public spheres. She shows how nineteenth-century activists “connect[ed] otherwise disparate demands for political rights, control of their own labor, sexual autonomy, cultural power, and family authority—all of which were things adult white men claimed for themselves but regularly denied children, men who were not white, and all women” (5). Maturity was the lynch pin of power in nineteenth-century America, and scholars can take the lessons from Field’s study to many other topics in early American history.

Corinne Field makes an important contribution to early American history by showing how maturity became a new way to enforce racial and gender hierarchy within the republican environment of the nineteenth century. Adulthood seemed like a democratic measure of power and civic participation, but it was subject to the less-visible discrimination based on stereotypes of who possessed maturity. With age as a category of analysis, scholars can see how patriarchy and white supremacy were entwined features of nineteenth-century democracy.

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

Jane Fiegen Green studies how the experiences of young men and women laid the foundation for the mythology of democratic capitalism in nineteenth-century America. She received her PhD in history from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014.

In A Nation of Counterfeiters (2007), Stephen Mihm takes account of the seamier side of capitalism in the early republic: the corner-cutting, get-rich-quick ways mirrored in a vast economy of counterfeiting. Common-place asked him: if American capitalism has always been “a confidence game,” as A Nation of Counterfeiters makes plain, why are we so frequently conned and so surprised by the experience?

As the recent financial crisis entered its final months, news of a stunning fraud blew through the canyons of Wall Street and reverberated throughout the global financial system. Acclaimed financier Bernard Madoff had been arrested for running a massive Ponzi scheme, defrauding investors of tens of billions of dollars. It was the largest fraud of the sort ever perpetrated.

Or was it? The losses inflicted by Madoff were small potatoes next to the exploits of the banks, hedge funds, and other institutions that make up the global financial system. While they rarely broke the letter of the law, these institutions mocked the spirit of it, practicing a brand of corner-cutting capitalism similar to Madoff’s. Over the years, they created a system of debt-fueled bets and counter bets that skirted regulatory boundaries, ethical constraints, and just plan common sense. Madoff’s fraud may be stunning, but plenty of kindred spirits perpetrated their own cons on incredulous investors throughout the world. As Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman observed last year, “How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?”

Sadly, all of this is a familiar tale. Each of the speculative booms and busts that have hit this country over the centuries had its share of outright cons, but these have been overshadowed by the more dangerous confidence game that flourishes under legal and social sanctions. So yes, swindles in western lands preceded the panic of 1837; a stunning embezzlement brought down the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company in 1857, and with it, much of the global economy; the Credit Mobilier Scandal foreshadowed the collapse of 1873; shadowy dealings in the copper market helped trigger the panic of 1907; the list goes on. But in all of these cases, fraudulent transactions paled in comparison to the rotten, if nominally legal, schemes that simultaneously percolated throughout the financial system and the larger economy. Sometimes banks deliberately circumvented regulations aimed at curbing their risk taking; in other cases, the forerunners of today’s “financial engineers” devised new instruments to mask risk while promising unprecedented returns. Other times, speculators resorted to shady practices to pump up the prices of stocks and bonds. In almost every case, a stampede of investors joined the spectacle, sinking their life savings into the market in the hopes of striking it rich.

Why do these scenes recur over and over in the nation’s history? Why, in other words, are we so readily drawn to cons of all stripes? I think the economist Charles Kindleberger got it right when he observed that “commercial and financial crises are intimately bound up with transactions that overstep the confines of law and morality, shadowy though those confines be.” He sadly concluded that “the propensities to swindle and be swindled run parallel to the propensity to speculate during a boom.” In boom times, “fortunes are made, individuals wax greedy, and swindlers come forward to exploit that greed.” Sometimes those swindlers hail from the ranks of outright criminals; more often, they straddle what Kindleberger called the “wavery” line that separates moral from immoral, legal from illegal.

But the concept of greed alone does not fully capture the impulses that lead people into the hands of swindlers of various stripes. After all, it’s quite possible to be greedy and still hew to the Protestant ethic of hard work, discipline, and deferred gratification. Instead, what is fully exposed during these boom times is the antithesis of that ethic, the spirited pursuit of what historian Jackson Lears called “something for nothing,” which derives its power from dreams of overnight riches and wealth without work.

This has been a perennial theme in the nation’s history. Take, for example, the curiously prescient words of a British visitor to the United States named David Mitchell. “Speculation in real estate has for many years been the ruling idea and occupation,” he observed in 1862. “Clerks, labourers, farmers, storekeepers, merely followed their callings for a living, while they were speculating for their fortunes. Everyone of any spirit, ambition, and intelligence (cash was not essential) frequented the National Land Exchange … By convenient laws, land was made as easily transferable and convertible as any other species of property. It might or did pass through a dozen hands within sixty days. Millions of acres were bought and sold without buyer or seller knowing where they were, or whether they were anywhere.”

As always, fraud flourished in this environment. Shady land speculators sold lots in cities that had yet to be built and quite often never were; banks issued vast quantities of paper money backed by little more than the illusory promise of future profits; and speculators knowingly unloaded dud properties on credulous buyers without remorse. In all of this the fine line between bona fide con men and the rest of the populace became pretty blurry. Indeed, in times like the ones that Mitchell witnessed, people become not only the victims but the perpetrators of cons in their rush to become rich.

And so it remains today. Everyone conned everyone else. Mortgage applicants lied about their income and their assets in order to take out the biggest loans and make the biggest profits; mortgage lenders knowingly sold those toxic mortgages to banks, falsely claiming to have vetted applicants; banks bundled those mortgages into opaque and impenetrable securities that deliberately disguised just how rotten the underlying assets remained; ratings agencies blessed securities with AAA ratings with almost no questions asked, pocketing a fee for turning a blind eye; and investors chasing high returns gladly bought up bottom-of-the-barrel tranches of collateralized debt obligations, buying into the bogus belief that real estate was a safe investment and that housing prices only go up. There were cons aplenty; Madoff was but the beginning.

Whether we’re talking about the current crisis or something that happened well over a century ago, there’s a pervasive inclination to rationalize what’s going on as a reasonable response to market forces in which demand creates its own supply. In the same way that bankers and counterfeiters of the antebellum era justified both their sanctioned and clandestine additions to the money supply as an act of public service, delivering what one criminal termed “an essential benefit”—cash for a cash-starved society—contemporary apologists for “financial innovation” voiced much the same sentiments. As Alan Greenspan told a still worshipful audience in 2005, the wild growth of securitization had led to the best of all worlds: a “rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending, fostering constructive innovation that is both responsive to market demand and beneficial to consumers.” If there’s a demand for something, Greenspan argued, the market must be met, preferably without regulation or interference. It’s a sentiment that the crooked bankers and counterfeiters of yore would have applauded.

One would hope that some lesson could be taken from all of this, but it’s unlikely. After all, just a few years before the housing bubble, we had the high-tech bubble, complete with hundreds of companies that traded at astronomical prices, despite having no business plans, no profits, and in many cases, no obvious means of making one. Aside from a halfhearted observation that the markets showed signs of “irrational exuberance,” Greenspan did nothing as the bubble inflated. That colossal con ended with the NASDAQ (which, in a perverse twist, Madoff chaired in an honorary capacity for many years) losing almost 80 percent of its value, wiping out day traders and long-term investors alike. If the experience of living through a boom-and-bust cycle a mere decade ago did nothing to deter people from joining the mania for real estate speculation, it’s safe to say that what happened one hundred and fifty years ago is even less likely to make an impression.

Indeed, anyone who thinks that we’ve seen the last of booms and busts in our own lifetime—much less confidence games large and small—should read what David Mitchell wrote of the mania for land speculation in the 1850s. “The whole domestic history of the time, which ended in the panic, affords a striking illustration of the … tendency to seize upon some project or idea, to dwell upon it, inflate it, make it into a mania, run it into the ground … and then forget all about it.”

Will we be surprised next time we get conned? It’s a safe bet we will.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.1 (October, 2009).

Stephen Mihm is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia. He is the author of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, published by Harvard University Press in 2007. He is presently at work on a history of the dollar.

My Great Great Grandparents Read
George Moses Horton and David Walker
          Northampton County, North Carolina 1852

I
          “My heart to lift…”
                 —from George Moses Horton’s “Myself”

To see her carrying tomatoes
up the low path round the side
of the rose bushes, hair tied back,
might a man take a break, sit down
in the miracle of his eyes to see
how it feels to have a woman open
him up wider than he thought
wide could ever be, and sing
to what lays up inside tomorrow,
that kind of being free, that timber
in this land where woe will give way
someday. The horse’s leg in his lap,
he knows a hoof is softer than stone,
but taps ground to make the sound
of a dream sitting on top a wish,
the high place where things begin.

II

To walk out into a world,
to hear a bird’s wing sing
riddles of masks and clouds,
a man must trust a city
with his weak assembly,
the beating of his joints
into where they make whole
a pile of bones and wishes,
a body or a ship sailing
in dreams that cannot name
themselves, moving the night
aside to where he can trade
the business of making chains
for the wild fears of love.

III

At night his hammer found
its way to her across the heads
of cabbage around back, sounds
soft, then hard, then nothing,
a message she thought went up
to a star he must have known
from where he went sometimes,
slipping out of sight inside
the carriage house, invisible
in between the big clock
that banged in the mansion,
some power, she thought, not
his but what belongs to What
made us flesh with air to breathe.

IV

Wrapped into his eyes,
she listens until his voice
is sucked into the calm,
a lace let down easy over all
the field, him making words
sing off the pages, correcting
him when he falters, a teacher
to the man she loves, the poet
they read held in a heaviness
of chains from the black metal
of law in Northampton, black
skin every shade of what
can be seen, what can be sung.

V

     “…troubling the pages of historians…”
           from David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together
          with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World

It was done when the leaves
shut up the clatter of wind against them,
the last hound ripping the peace
until the candle shivered, blood
giving way to the child’s first cry,
Walter holding Walker’s Appeal
in his hand, the midwife wiping
sweat from Mary’s forehead,
calling God Allah, their son Ruffin,
a name born in wishes, a name
to travel for a hundred years
to the spirits of poets in an Irish town,
Baltimore, where their songs are
the music of the corner, the corner
an altar to a people’s will to love.

Poetic Research Statement

In Courtship and Love Among the Enslaved in North Carolina, Rebecca J. Fraser notes that North Carolina was the only place on the North American mainland where the West Indian and Caribbean John Kooner parades took place. Black folk took on clothing resembling traditional West African dress and had mock performances where they overturned the southern hierarchy, acting out scenes subverting the status enforced in the day to day operations of plantation life. When I came upon this information, I was reflecting on my completed poem “My Great Great Grandparents Read/ George Moses Horton and David Walker,” and I felt affirmed. I have no way of knowing the actual facts of the romantic life of my paternal great-great-grandparents. Such is the tragedy of slavery. What I do have is a faith in the ability of black people to maintain loving structures despite the pressures of slavery.

The opportunity to write a poem rooted in research for Common-Place was an opportunity to continue a writing method that began forty-three years earlier, when in 1974 I sat with elders and listened to oral histories of how things came to be. In 1994, along with my father and one of my sisters I drove from Baltimore down to Northampton County, North Carolina, to visit my Aunt Janet, my father’s oldest sister. We took her to Shoney’s, a buffet restaurant. She was a small woman, about the same size as her mother, Grandma Mariah. They shared a mysterious stillness in their being, an air that commanded our attention. So I was immediately entranced when Aunt Janet declared, “Michael, I have something to tell you.” In the world of my grandparents and great-grandparents, the elders often passed vital information to the oldest children, and there I was in that part of the country where my family traces its origins. My mother’s side of the family traces back to this same piece of land stretching across the state line from North Carolina into Virginia, just seventy-five miles west of the Dismal Swamp, where black folk escaped from slavery and took the perilous journey into the swamp to set up a community. So I leaned forward to listen as Aunt Janet told the story of her father’s parents, my great-grandparents.

She told us of two little sisters who were kidnapped as children in West Africa and taken to the coast, where they were separated and placed on two different ships, never to see each other again. The one whose name was Phoebe survived the voyage to the western hemisphere and landed in the U.S., where she married a Native American. In 1852, they had a daughter whom they named Elvira. When Elvira became an adult, she married a man by the name of Ruffin Weaver, and they had several children, including my grandfather, Joseph Lundy Weaver, who inherited his mother’s height. The oral history of Elvira and Ruffin was well known to us as a family, and I was able to verify the facts in census reports, and records of birth, death, and marriage that I found on ancestry.com. Phoebe’s parents are listed as “unknown,” identities lost in the grief of the Middle Passage or Maafa, the African Holocaust.

Aunt Janet passed away, and I held onto the story for years, checking now and then with relatives to see if any of them had heard the story of Phoebe. It seemed my Aunt Janet had passed on to me something of a family jewel, the story of this little girl who survived the trip across the Atlantic and became a matriarch of the Weaver clan. The best clue I had as to why the story was so little known was in what my Uncle Andrew, the youngest of the twelve siblings, explained to me. He said the elders often gave such information only to the eldest sibling, so Aunt Janet was keeping a tradition.

Almost two decades later, I had a chance to make good use of the way Phoebe inspired me. In 2012, I was asked by politically conservative friends in Wisconsin to write a book of poems about African American history, and I chose to write a series of thirteen poems entitled A Hard Summation to illustrate significant themes in this history, with a focus on ordinary people. The story of my great-great-grandmother became the origin, and I wanted to verify that the children in Aunt Janet’s story were indeed shipped to the U.S. I went to the Emory University website slavevoyage.org and found the Jesus Maria, a ship where the human cargo was, by and large, children. Their names were listed in the log. Phoebe had to have been shipped into the Caribbean and enslaved by plantation owners until she eventually landed in the area of North Carolina and Virginia, where Elvira was born. With that information I set out to write the thirteen poems inspired by history. I was now driven by a passion rooted firmly in the history of my own origins, which provided the creative strategy for writing the suite of poems featured in this column.

When I came across that ship and saw the children’s names I felt a web of emotions: grief, horror, sadness.

In the case of “My Great Great Grandparents Read/ George Moses Horton and David Walker,” again love seemed to be the only choice, but it was a more complex choice in this instance. Phoebe’s son-in-law Ruffin was my father’s grandfather, and my father bore his first name as his own middle name. I began to imagine Ruffin’s parents, Walter and Mary, in the context of George Moses Horton, an important poet, a founder of the tradition, and David Walker, a man who gave his life to the act of resistance and liberation. I wanted to imagine them as connected to the larger pulses of their time. So I spent several weeks trying to get the poem to open to me, to present a central image and an emotional access point.

The poem did not begin until I literally walked into a magical moment with my partner, Kristen, on one of our evening strolls in rural Connecticut where we live on what was once one of the largest working farms in the area, complete with cows and rolling hills. It was a cool evening this past summer, an unusually cool summer, so my partner and I were a bit chilled as we walked up the road back to the house, along the edges under the trees hanging over the small roads that line the county. There was the duck and geese pond at the knoll just opposite us, a few yards farther up the incline. Bales of freshly rolled hay lay in the shades lengthening under the sun setting over the lumpy rise and fall of the foothills around us. The dogs were mostly not minding us, as we halfway minded them. I looked at my partner and was flooded with love. The whole moment was transformed, and I saw an image of my great-great-grandmother Mary carrying a basket of tomatoes around the edge of the pond, an embodied gift from my imagination and my memories.

The other pieces of the poem that suggested themselves during my research now took on form, and I made a decision to make it an assembly of short lyrical pieces. They were as much the product of research as they were my memories of Aunt Janet with her husband, my Uncle Louis, sitting by their fireplace one evening in 1974, when I traveled to the family homeland in Virginia and North Carolina with a notebook and tape recorder. Aunt Janet and Uncle Louis told me stories handed to them by their ancestors, including Ruffin, the son of Walter and Mary, and the woman he married, Elvira, whose mother was Phoebe, the little girl stolen from her home in West Africa. That trip formed the seed of what would become my first book, Water Song. It appeared in 1985, a little over a decade after that evening by the fireplace.

In structuring this essay about Walter and Mary, I have had a chance to revisit foundational parts of my writing process. History has always been important to my work, and although I never thought of my poetry as research, that is indeed what it has been and continues to be. My gaze on the past is one where I invest a lyric tone in what I perceive. When I try to write lyrically in the present, it is with the awareness of the paradox of history, as the only real time is the now. That leaves the poet the joy of celebrating the central place of poetry in human consciousness, that central place where we poets live. In winters here in rural Connecticut, my partner and I look forward to using the fireplace. On the mantle are books that have been important to either or both of us, books we have read from while the fire burned in the hearth, books that speak to humanity and justice. The sun rises and sets on fields that have not changed since the time when Walter and Mary enjoyed a life together, reading by the fireplace, bound in slavery, but freed by the power of love to dream.

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

Afaa M. Weaver’s latest collection is Spirit Boxing (2017). He has received four Pushcart prizes, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and fellowships from the Pew and Guggenheim foundations, among other awards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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