If Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme were a new release, its ad copy might pitch it as Twelfth Night meets Queer as Folk or maybe a gayish version of the HBO series Girls. Its publisher would locate it at the titillating border between YA and adult fiction, and its risqué cover might have you opting for the e-book. Prominent in promotional materials would be a photo of its 33-year-old author’s fetchingly delicate features.

Winthrop’s novel in fact came out in 1861, published by the prominent Ticknor & Fields, which advertised it as a “brilliant new romance,” described it as “sparkling,” and highlighted the tragedy of its author’s recent Civil War death. Yet it has had something of a 2016 comeback, likely the year’s only nineteenth-century reprint to see not one but two new editions: the first released by New York University Press with an introduction by Peter Coviello, and the second by the University of Pennsylvania Press with an introduction and extensive explanatory notes by Christopher Looby. (It’s those notes that, to my mind, make Penn’s the preferable edition.) Both presses pitch the novel as the academic version of “gayish Girls”: “one of the queerest American novels of the nineteenth century” (NYU) and “a very queer book indeed” (U Penn). This renewed attention speaks, I think, not to a nineteenth-century turn in queer studies—which has, after all, been immersed in the century’s fiction since at least Epistemology of the Closet (1990)—but instead to a new interest in texts located at that nascent threshold of modern sexual categorization, which hint at the homosexuality and heterosexuality yet to come while also, in their not-yet-solidified messiness, suggesting ways of organizing sex that didn’t quite survive into modern consciousness.

At doing just that, Cecil Dreeme does, indeed, sparkle. The plot features a group of young men about town, falling into love and lust, talking about art, and wondering what to make of their lives. Our narrator, Robert Byng, spends the novel undecided between three potential love interests: the brilliantly talented and mysterious Cecil Dreeme; the demonic and, for that, devilishly handsome Densdeth; and the graceful yet ultimately unreliable Emma Denman. As its title suggests, the novel contrives at every step to have us rooting for Dreeme, whose “fresh, brave, earnest character” instills in the listless Byng some of the clarity and focus that, for readers, remain at other times frustratingly absent (ch. 17). When the two finally touch—Dreeme, during one of the pair’s evening strolls, takes Byng gently by the arm—the relationship takes on real heat, leading quickly to Byng’s observation that the two resemble famous Greek pairs of yesteryear. At the novel’s end, however, Byng finally allows himself to realize what the reader has long ago come to understand. Cecil Dreeme is not the Damon to his Pythias but rather, as Emma Denman’s disguised sister Clara, the potential wife to his potential husband. Their relationship thus threatens to veer wildly from the passions and energies of male romance, “more precious than the love of women,” into the stale and predictable plotline of heterosexuality and marital union (ch. 19). Regardless, Byng publicly and without a hint of hesitation or self-consciousness continues using the masculine proper name and pronouns he clearly prefers for his lover, leaving readers to surmise that if the romance is to survive the revelation, Clara will be retaining more than a little of the Cecil. A very queer book indeed!

Those who’ve had the pleasure of reading Coviello on the errant ways of nineteenth century queer passions or Looby on the essentially literary nature of sexuality won’t be surprised that the two critics have great fun with Cecil Dreeme. Looby’s introduction first traces the novel’s long reception history, including the 1875 teenage journal entry of future queer novelist Henry Blake Fuller; an 1887 review by Julian Hawthorne, who bemoans the novel as “morbid and unwholesome” (while also, tellingly, comparing it to his father’s Blithedale Romance); and an explicitly phobic 2011 New York Times Opinionator column that willfully misreads the novel’s ending as a celebration of heterosexuality’s restoration. This incredible reception history indexes how modern sexual categorizations and their accompanying phobias became increasingly salient over time, and reveals the novel’s suspension between a world “in which same-sex passion was uncontroversial and celebrated and an emerging historical deployment that would soon stigmatize same-sex love as morbid, unwholesome, indecent, and perverse” (xxi). Its unsettled and in-between historical position allows the novel to celebrate socially sanctioned queer desire while simultaneously flirting with the sparkle of excitement that accompanies all things illicit. As Coviello argues, while the novel may predate the full cohesion of same-sex desires into identities, “this did not mean they were not full of titillation, or menace, or—in those wonderful, rarer cases—possibilities for pleasures too great and enticing to be easily forsworn” (xvi). Byng’s queer desires accrue such titillation, Coviello notes, primarily through the figure of Densdeth, the unrelentingly evil yet oh-so-beddable object of Byng’s erotic obsession. As a Gothic archetype, Densdeth lends even sanctioned queer desire the rousing edge of danger and prohibition.

For the most part, Coviello and Looby limit their analysis to the history of sexuality. Yet Densdeth’s gothic plotline positions the novel just as much within a history of race and white supremacy. The gothic, as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Ralph Ellison have all reminded us, accumulates sinister energy through the haunting presence of racial others, and Cecil Dreeme represents both its objects of improper, dangerous desire, Densdeth and Emma Denman, in explicitly racial terms. It describes Densdeth as “Hebrewish”; notes the “resemblance” between him and his servant, “an Afreet creature … black, ugly, and brutal as the real Mumbo Jumbo,” the one a “misbegotten repetition of the other”; and contrasts the appearance of its most benevolent character’s “Saxon coloring of hair and complexion” with “Densdeth’s Oriental hues”(chs. 1 and 5). Likewise, the novel echoes its description of Cecil Dreeme’s gender (“not easy to classify”) when it turns to his/her sister’s race (her “coloring did not classify her”; her “hair was in the indefinite shades”; “[o]ne would not expect from her the steadiness of the fair temperaments, nor the ardor of their warmer counterparts in hue”) (chs. 12 and 16). That we eventually discover these two ambiguously nonwhite characters have been lovers only serves to strengthen the novel’s sexual color line, which is to say, its racial distribution of desire into licit and illicit categories.

Cecil Dreeme thereby joins another nineteenth-century queer novel, Fredric Loring’s Two College Friends (1871), as an early instance of what Jasbir Puar has called homonationalism, which, in both novels, transpires as whiteness lends social sanction to queer desire and gender indeterminacy. In Cecil Dreeme, homonationalism operates through a neat structure in which the illicit and transgressive nature of Byng’s interracial queer desires serve to contrast and normalize his intraracial queer desire for Dreeme, while also haunting the proper love with a faint though entirely wholesome aura of unacceptability. While at the beginning of the novel Robert Byng begs off “Young Americanism,” asking for opportunity to mature “before you expect a man’s work of me,” we’re meant, by the novel’s end, to see his near liberation from desire for either Densdeth or Emma Denman as evidence of having accomplished just that (ch. 1). This novel is, in no small sense, the coming of age of the white queer as Young American.

And yet, as I imagine both Looby and Coviello insisting, let’s not be so neat about it. For, as Looby suggestively argues, “the two love plots (the romantic and the sinister)”— or, I would add, the intra- and the interracial—“meet and gaze at one another—we might almost say cruise each other,” or, as Coviello, with equal suggestiveness, puts it, Byng suffers Densdeth’s inevitable “demise with an altogether post-coital diminishment of spirit” (xxii, xix). Let me conclude, then, by suggesting a complicating layer of illicitness in Byng’s desire for Densdeth: it’s not merely that he desires sex with a nonwhite man; he more specifically desires to bottom for that nonwhite man. The evidence for this is so ubiquitous it almost becomes, for the reader, a running joke, just a few instances of which include Byng’s desire for Densdeth to “dominate” or “pervert” him and Byng’s anally inflected observation that Densdeth keeps touching his “raw spots” (ch. 5). Byng’s bottoming desires throw new light on his observation that attachment to Densdeth would amount to “becoming the hateful foe of my race” (ch. 22). Even as his desire turns on supremacist fantasies of nonwhite masculine virility, it simultaneously betrays Byng’s ambivalence vis-à-vis the color line. He seeks normalization through the displacement of racialized perversity, and yet, simultaneously, experiences an overwhelming urge to be made permeable and throw off the self-enclosed autonomy of white manhood. Ultimately, Cecil Dreeme’s greatest value might be here in this inventory of the contradictory racial impulses structuring white queer desire pulled, on the one hand, toward homonationalism, and, on the other, toward the pleasures of self-annihilation.

I hope it’s clear that I’m just scratching the surface. Cecil Dreeme is an incredibly rich novel that deserves to be taught, read, and studied extensively. Moreover, its two new editions point to exciting developments in queer literary studies, hinting at the ways editorial and critical work are building on and complicating each other. Indeed, the University of Pennsylvania edition is now part of an ongoing reprint series, edited by Looby, which also includes “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman” and Other Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories. All of which means we’re in for a new wave of work exploring not only the messy and uncategorizable aspects of nineteenth-century sexuality and gender, but also the intersection of that messiness with concurrent histories of race, citizenship, religion, and other axes of being.

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

Travis M. Foster is an assistant professor of English at Villanova University, where he is completing a manuscript titled After Emancipation: Genres of the New Racial Ordinary.

Scholars and teachers of early Native American studies have access to an increasing number of well-curated digital collections as resources for our work. We might characterize these collections in two loose groups: digital archives, which are sizable repositories of print and manuscript materials made electronically visible and searchable; and digital exhibits, which seek to tell stories about the kinds of materials and histories that scholars have often overlooked. The terms I invoke here—“archive” and “exhibit”—are contestable and far from mutually exclusive. But they represent different approaches to the larger project of decolonizing archives, ranging from digital repatriation (in which electronic surrogates of documents are theoretically available to the host communities that produced them) to deeper reflections on the colonial nature of the archive itself.

Some of the best collections hail from colleges and universities with significant print archives and the resources to make them electronically available. Dartmouth College, for instance, recently unveiled The Occom Circle Project, which showcases its trove of writings by the eighteenth-century Mohegan minister Samson Occom and his network of relations. This Website began over ten years ago, when a visiting Mohegan elder asked English professor Ivy Schweitzer and college archivist Peter Carini how they could bring more attention to Occom’s importance at the college. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Dartmouth’s team digitized over 500 documents: their entire Occom collection (letters, sermons, hymns, journals, petitions and tribal documents) as well as letters by people who knew him. These include his (in)famous employer, Dartmouth founder Eleazar Wheelock, and Native students at Wheelock’s Indian school.

The site is clean and easy to use, and texts are searchable by author, recipient, or date. Users have the option of looking at high-quality page scans, transcribed texts (with a further choice to select diplomatic or modernized transcription), or transcriptions and page images side-by-side. Pop-up boxes annotate key people, places, organizations, and events.

This, then, is a fairly straightforward digital edition, one that seeks to improve visibility and access to documents in the institution’s own repository. What is powerful about migrating such a collection online is that digital links, search capabilities, and facsimile images can help reveal a major historical figure’s “broad network of historical relations, allowing us to better appreciate the cultural world he inhabited and shaped” (“Project History”).

Other digital collections in the field of Native American studies have sought to engage indigenous people more directly in their development. At the Yale Indian Papers Project (YIPP), in fact, “[T]he document corpus is selected in a manner that ensures vital input from tribal partners,” with Mohegan, Schaghticoke, and other tribal historians selecting and annotating documents that they find significant to their communities (“About the Collection”). These include seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century documents written by, about, and for Native people primarily in what is now southeastern New England. While the Occom project draws on a single, localized print collection, YIPP gathers documents now dispersed all over the world, from various Connecticut state and historical archives all the way to the British Museum. Executive editor Paul Grant-Costa, who has decades of experience working with New England tribal nations on federal recognition petitions, is well-acquainted with a central problem in regional historiography: the “lack of published primary source materials, despite the existence of thousands of relevant documents,” compounded by the difficulty of accessing such far-flung and archaic documents (“About the Collection”).

The result of such painstaking collaborative work (and the benefits of working with YIPP and OCP side by side) can be seen in a document like the “Account of the Death of a Christian Mohegan Indian”—identified as Occom’s only after careful comparison of this documents to other pieces of Occom’s handwriting, and consultation with Mohegan elders and historians. Clicking on the document image will bring up a gorgeous full-size facsimile; clicking on “Scholarly Transcription” will bring up a PDF file containing a straightforward transcription of the text without corrections or changes to line and page breaks. Clicking on “Annotation” opens a new window with what is perhaps some of YIPP’s most important work: a rigorous, modernized, and thoroughly footnoted transcription. This contains hyperlinks to short biographies of people mentioned in the document, which are in turn hyperlinked to other biographies. As we find in the Occom project, this is a powerful method of revealing the extensive, historic networks among indigenous intellectuals and leaders.

I chose this admittedly less-than-vivid screenshot to further highlight the incredible metadata that YIPP is compiling. In addition to the expected fields of creator, language, genre, format, rights, and so on, YIPP is carefully curating names, dates, and topics associated with these texts. As you can see in just this partial example, these fields can be very thickly populated indeed. YIPP’s editors are, like many of the best researchers in this field, attempting to decolonize metadata, approaching it, as Grant-Costa explains, “from the bottom up, from a researcher’s perspective and from the Native perspective” (personal communication). This kind of work is extremely expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive, but it is impossible to overestimate its contribution to future scholarship.

With a somewhat larger corpus and perhaps more complex workflow, YIPP presents itself as more a work in progress than the Occom Circle Project. It is much larger, for one thing, with well over 2,000 documents already digitized and catalogued (though not all appear with transcriptions and annotations). In its current iteration, it is not necessarily built for easy browsing. Together, though, the Occom Project and Yale Indian Papers have given us a considerable corpus of indigenous-related materials digitized, transcribed, edited, and annotated to the highest scholarly standards. These collections are leaders in this field.

Still other notable digital collections emanate from archiving institutions like the American Philosophical Society or the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). The latter has taken a slightly different approach in the digital exhibit From English to Algonquian: Early American Translations. Its collection proper presently contains only thirteen items—high-resolution images from well-known texts like the Eliot Bible, The Massachuset Psalter, and New Englands First Fruits—most of which are already digitized in other databases (e.g., America’s Historical Imprints) but are therefore unfortunately behind a paywall. Instead of providing purportedly complete access to the texts themselves, AAS is telling a story about their colonial history and current history. (It is worth noting here that AAS staff members have been exceedingly generous in sharing their expertise in using this particular open-access platform, Omeka, to create digital exhibits.)

Curated by Kimberly Pelkey (Nipmuc), head of AAS readers’ services, From English to Algonquian teaches visitors about the history of collaboration between Native intellectuals and settlers in producing Algonquian-language texts, and about the resurgent use of these texts today by the Nipmuc, Mohegan, and Wampanoag tribes in their language-revitalization projects. It is a richly contextual site, built around a timeline of events in colonial history, brief biographies of major historic players (“People”) and publishers (“Organizations”), and reflections on indigenous uses of alphabetic, print literacy both past (“Translations”) and present (“Current Projects”).

There are other up-and-coming projects of relevance to scholars in early Native American studies, many presented at Dartmouth’s recent Indigenous Archives symposium. The Kim-Wait Eisenberg Collection at Amherst College is particularly exciting, as it aspires to be a comprehensive digital collection of public-domain books authored by Native American people. The best of these collections are proceeding slowly and thoughtfully, with extensive consultation and collaboration with a wide range of indigenous scholars, both institutional- and community-based, and in so doing they are helping to decolonize archives.

As this short survey suggests, the field is still quite emergent. We have nothing like the kinds of vast digitized corpora available to scholars working in pre-1923 American and/or western European fields. As a result, Native American studies has seen next to none of the kinds of digital humanities scholarship so abundant, for instance, among early modernists, who are busy topic modeling, text mining, mapping, and performing other kinds of distant reading. But the lack of a corpus is likely only one factor here. Scholars in Native American and Indigenous studies are increasingly sensitive to the fact that tribal communities do not necessarily want to digitize everything, nor do they necessarily want their cultural heritage to be treated as so much data. Whether our readings are distant or close, many of us want to engage tribal communities as much as possible in our work. Doing so requires the kinds of slow, piecemeal, and self-reflexive approaches exemplified by YIPP and AAS. It also requires us to think hyper-critically about questions of scale. Many scholars are feeling the pressure to identify and digitize the largest possible collections, especially when it comes time to attract major funding. Yet it is also possible to present just a small collection of items—or even a single item—meticulously curated, in a way that prompts visitors to a Website to reflect on how particular documents and objects wound up where they are, on who owns this heritage, on what it even means to have access to indigenous knowledge and culture in the first place.

Indeed, while many of the most highly praised digital projects hail, unsurprisingly, from universities and museums with a baseline of staff, equipment, and infrastructure, many tribal communities are quietly beginning their own. Some are sharing collections in the Mukurtu content-management system, which allows them to control who can access particular items and collections. Others are simply scanning and storing documents and photographs in-house. Still others are running private and public Facebook groups, where community members share and discuss archival photographs and pieces of writing. These kinds of projects—what Alex Gil might call “minimal computing”—deserve to be brought into the digital humanities fold. At the very least, they break down our stodgy periodization, which would separate “early” Native American studies from the contemporary. More profoundly, they challenge us to think about what has been lost, stolen, and saved, by whom and for whom. A good deal of large-scale collecting, after all, was historically part of large-scale colonialism. But tribal museums, offices, and elders have also been saving and cherishing their own materials, and they are increasingly interested in digitizing them and circulating them anew, even as they remain concerned about intellectual property and cultural protection. Digital platforms give us new opportunities to create dialogues between those large-scale, open-access institutional collections and smaller, intensively community-curated electronic items. If we seize these new opportunities, perhaps we might start to see new kinds of electronic and material worlds: radiant textualities dominated less by the ethnographic, and more by indigenous survival and resurgence.

Further Reading

Robin Boast and Jim Enote, “Virtual Repatriation: It Is Neither Virtual nor Repatriation,” Heritage in the Context of Globalization, ed. Peter Biehl and Christopher Prescott (New York, 2013).

Laura R. Braunstein, Peter Carini, and Hazel-Dawn Dumpert, “‘And There Was a Large Number of People’: The Occom Circle Project at the Dartmouth College Library,” Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists, ed. Arianne Harsell-Gundy, Laura Braunstein, Liorah Golomb. Association of College & Research Libraries (2015): 225–240.

Kimberly Christen, “Does Information Really Want to Be Free?: Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness.” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 2870–2893.

“Forum: Text Analysis at Scale,” Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016), ed. Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold. Web, accessed March 2, 2017.

Alex Gil, “The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make,” Minimal Computing: A Working Group of GO::DH (May 21, 2015). Web, Jan. 1, 2017.

Paul Grant-Costa, Tobias Glaza, and Michael Sletcher. “The Common Pot: Editing Native American Materials,” Scholarly Editing 33 (2012). Web, May 20, 2013.

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

Siobhan Senier is associate professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the editor of Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England (2014) and of dawnlandvoices.org.

Note from the column co-editors: Traditionally, Object Lessons columns have featured research projects centered on individual objects—from seventeenth-century bowling balls to glass ballot boxes—that reveal compelling stories about the past. In this issue, we have expanded that focus to include not only the study of specific objects, but also the cultures of collecting that transform the meanings of the material things under consideration.

Note from the author: This piece discusses colonial histories of collecting and handling Indigenous items, including some sensitive materials, in order to assess the nature and extent of these practices as well as Indigenous responses.

Today when researchers visit the gold-domed American Antiquarian Society (AAS) at the corner of Salisbury Street and Park Avenue in Worcester, Massachusetts, they typically focus on paper sources: printed books and ephemera, manuscripts, maps, graphics. Perhaps they are told in semi-reverent tones about the handful of objects that the Society displays in its Council Room, like a glass vial containing leaves of tea ostensibly thrown overboard at the Boston Tea Party, or the wooden highchair that accommodated young Cotton Mather. As objects linked to prominent Euro-American pasts, these items have operated as tangible tokens of identity, heritage, and public memory pertinent to specific slices of Americana. Yet few are aware that the Society once housed an enormous variety of material objects—or that Native Americans created many of them, and experienced an array of disruptions when they were removed from traditional contexts. From stone tools to buffalo robes, to wampum and ceremonial pipes, to fishing hooks and personal adornments, Indigenous objects featured prominently in earlier formations of the Society. As institutions like the AAS confront their own difficult legacies in the twenty-first century, these Indigenous objects, now largely dispersed across the Northeast and the globe, invite new reckonings.

In the nineteenth century it was no secret that the Worcester antiquarians actively solicited donations of Indigenous artifacts. They viewed “aboriginal” histories and associated “Indian relics” as vital components of the organization’s mission, shedding light on American (so-called) prehistory and the formative encounters between the continent’s original inhabitants and waves of European migrants and colonizers. The initial iterations of the AAS did not draw hard lines between types of historical sources. Its leaders and members believed all manner of traces from the past stood to contribute to national, regional, and local histories, a comprehensive mentality expressed by many other institutions of the era. Only over time did such places narrow their attentions and begin de-accessioning (giving away or discarding) material culture holdings. As a result of these decisions it has become difficult to trace the pathways of many objects. They can appear “lost,” irretrievably removed from scholarly and community sightlines as well as research endeavors.

But in actuality there are ways to begin reconnecting the pieces, using methodologies that link textual, material, visual, ethnographic, and environmental sources. The stakes of such reconnecting projects are not simply to illuminate changing histories of collecting, significant though they are. They offer an opportunity to reassess the protracted—and continuing—transits of Native objects through time and space, and to consider restorative processes by which heritage items may be brought back into conversation with Indigenous descendant communities who have so long been alienated from them.

From many material culture and museum studies perspectives, the act of “collecting” has been treated as a generative endeavor. Museums and related exhibitionary spaces have been celebrated as sites for creatively fashioning meanings, and educating publics about cultures, places, and times other than their own. These vantages are outgrowths of the early modern era’s initial forays into collecting, rooted in Western and Enlightenment conceptions of mastery, as well as imperial desires to classify, compare, and thus make comprehensible “exotic” artifacts from around the globe. Yet collecting and museumizing have also been occasions for loss. Those peoples who had important personal and community items taken from them, oftentimes without consent and never to be seen again, experienced collecting in dramatically different ways. The ensuing material diasporas have been especially acute for Indigenous communities in the Americas, for whom collecting unfolded in tandem with settler colonialism and the attempted dispossession of tribal nations of their lands, livelihoods, languages, and beliefs.

This troubling dimension of collecting has been impressed upon me over a number of years as objects, especially Indigenous ones, have woven their way into my scholarly work on the Native Northeast. Ongoing conversations with tribal historians and community members have stressed to me that tangible things are powerful conduits that connect present-day individuals and groups with their ancestors, and with the homelands where they were placed in “time out of mind” by the Creator. They have also underscored that limiting our understandings of historical traces to written texts, particularly those composed in English, severely undermines conceptions of the past by overlooking or negating the wider set of materials that speak to historical realities and lived experiences. And they attest that the removal of certain items from traditional contexts into institutional collections has been a major concern and source of emotional pain, as well as an impetus for restorative Indigenous activism. These issues have shaped my inquiries into early Americanist collecting projects like the ones I unpack here.

These insights from tribal knowledge-keepers also present opportunities to reframe foundational narratives about materiality and collecting. In certain respects, stories about these objects ought to begin not inside colonial museums or “cabinets of curiosities,” but instead within the complex Indigenous contexts where they were originally envisioned and created. In the Native Northeast, for example, an Algonquian artisan needed to possess deep traditional ecological knowledge in order to even start the process of crafting an object. He or she would draw upon multi-generational knowledge of specific lands and waters to determine where and in which season to harvest raw materials. Once sufficient quantities had been gathered, along with the necessary tools and in accordance with protocols involved in harvesting any other-than-human resource (whether it be moose, quartz, corn, or sweetgrass), the maker would expend thought, time, and labor in fashioning the object. Others might assist in the process, as with the collective burning and hewing of mishoonash (dugout vessels), or erecting of sapling-framed and mat-covered wetuash for family dwellings. During these creative labors songs might be sung, prayers and tobacco offered, stories relayed from one member to another. While an object might be created for one purpose, over time it could be reused, repurposed, and transformed for ends different than its original function. Certain items played important roles in mortuary and memorial settings, assisting Indigenous ancestors who were traveling onward and would be reliant on objects interred with them in the earth.

By the time a “collector” laid eyes or hands upon an object—sometimes centuries or millennia after its creation—it had already been invested with thickly layered meanings, memories, and values. It was not a tabula rasa upon which any manner of interpretation could be imposed, though museum curators routinely enacted that mentality. The moment of its entrance into a formal museum or comparable repository initiated a new set of meanings, some utterly different from what had come before. Tracing transformations like these requires being attuned to a wide range of historical and cultural contexts. It requires thinking over the full life of an object, not beginning at the moment of Euro-American acquisition or museum-formation. As the case study of the “lost” Native American objects once collected—or held captive—at the AAS demonstrates, it is an undertaking still very much in motion.

Resituating the antiquarians: Nipmuc homelands at Quinsigamond and the emergence of “Worcester”

Histories of the American Antiquarian Society conventionally commence around the time of its establishment in 1812. But the emergence of the AAS ought to be situated within deeper contexts that cast into different light its acquisitive desires and behaviors. The AAS arose within a place called Worcester by Euro-American colonizers and their heirs, but known for much longer as Quinsigamond and a multitude of other Algonquian-language toponyms by Native inhabitants. This was a fertile milieu in the heart of Nipmuc country, and near the homelands of Massachusett, Pennacook, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Mohegan, Pequot, and related tribal groups. As “people of the fresh water,” Nipmucs valued the rivers and brooks that crisscrossed low hills, providing ample sources of fish, reeds and saplings for building homes, grazing areas for deer and other game, and soil amenable to planting crops like maize and squash. Native people lived in this area since time out of mind, as deep-time origin stories often put it, and across thousands of years and myriad generations they created countless physical objects to assist them in inhabiting this part of the Dawnland. Native women needed implements like hoes to tend to the cornfields and awls to sew garments, while men required arrowheads and plummet weights to hunt and fish, to take just a few examples. Some items they fashioned from nearby raw materials. Others they made from farther-flung resources for which they traded, tapping into an extensive network of relations.

Over time, as objects wore out or were succeeded by new technologies and tastes, individuals and communities set aside or replaced certain ones. Those made from organic materials tended to disintegrate over time, returning to the soil, while those derived from stone or other non-organic bases sometimes survived intact in the earth or submerged underwater. What endured over the centuries was a subset of the entirety of materials that they used to dwell, travel, conduct diplomacy and ceremony, inter deceased relatives, and raise new generations.

As Euro-American colonizers from Massachusetts Bay and other expansionist colonial endeavors developed settlement plans for the Quinsigamond area in the mid-seventeenth century, they entered not into a “howling wilderness” but a thoroughly inhabited and known Indigenous place. Territorially acquisitive colonists angled to attain land grants and negotiate deeds with local Indigenous leaders, a much-contested history in itself. Colonization faltered in its earliest stages, thwarted by Indigenous pushback in the central Massachusetts region during the conflict sometimes called King Philip’s War (1675-1678). It was in the aftermath of that crisis, which resulted in painfully constrained circumstances for the Indigenous people and nations who survived its violences, that colonization accelerated, leading to the growth of a New England town around Quinsigamond. It is important to recognize that this conflict, as well as subsequent Northeastern “Indian wars,” did not sweepingly remove or destroy Indigenous populations. Many Algonquians endured in the region, carving out new livelihoods for themselves in an array of free and sovereign settings, as well as under the strictures of unfree labor and colonial surveillance.

How the American Antiquarian Society wound up situated in the midst of Nipmuc country was a consequence of geographic strategy by its Euro-American founders in the early American Republic. With the military devastations of the Revolutionary War relatively fresh in mind, founders were wary of selecting an exposed coastal location for their new venture, such as Boston or Newport, which might endanger its anticipated collections. As they organized in 1812 they looked inland for a suitable venue, as Isaiah Thomas had done with his printing operations during wartime, and chose Worcester. The AAS was established there with a conception of being a protective haven for precious historical treasures that might otherwise be lost to the ravages of social upheaval and time.

While the Society was the lone institution of its kind in early nineteenth-century Worcester, it had counterparts throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic. The Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, the East India Marine Society in Salem, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, collegiate museums and “cabinets” created at Harvard and Yale, and other sites similarly fashioned themselves as repositories for heritage items and/or centers for learned study. They rose to prominence during a pivotal moment when the newly independent United States was seeking to establish historicity of its own to rival that of Europe, and to set it apart from the “Old World.” Collecting historical objects, texts, and other Americana was critical to nascent projects of nation-building and myth-making. Certain of these institutions shared members who traveled in elite circles, but they also cultivated a genteel sense of competition, striving to lay claim to the most distinctive, illustrative, or extensive sets of materials.

Leaders at the AAS made Indigenous collecting central to its mission from the very outset. The initial cohort of antiquarians and their successors prized “aboriginal” artifacts as integral to their studies of early American pasts, and potentially useful in helping differentiate their enterprise from peer institutions. They did not wait passively for donations to trickle their way, but instead took proactive steps by repeatedly issuing calls for donations. Members, affiliates, and residents of the region began to view the AAS as a logical repository for “finds” they made, and responded by shipping Native objects to Worcester or delivering them in person. Because of its central Massachusetts location, the Society attracted a sizable number of objects from the immediate surroundings of Nipmuc and other Northeastern Algonquian homelands. As time went on, Indigenous objects from Midwestern, Southeastern, and eventually Western/Pacific areas also came into the collections. While the growing collection’s center of gravity lay in North American holdings, a number of items from Peru and the Yucatán also attained places of prominence in Worcester.

Once objects entered the Society’s chambers, their meanings evolved. They were still fully Indigenous objects, meaningful to tribal descendant communities albeit geographically dissociated from them. But upon passing into the Society’s hands, other forms of interpretation became applied. Inside they were curated and displayed in a cabinet, with handwritten labels affixed to them. AAS affiliates William A. Smith and Stephen Salisbury III overhauled these displays in the 1860s to reorganize Native American items into a series of glazed display cases. Many labels described them as generically “Indian” rather than tagging them with information about temporally, geographically, or socially specific histories.

While there was not a monolithic narrative that the AAS applied to all Indigenous objects, common themes did emerge. Frequently they were marshaled into the service of narratives about colonial conquest of Indigenous people, or used to support notions of Indian exoticism. Most problematically, they were employed as tangible evidence of Native pasts, but not presents: part of larger New England and American mythologies about alleged Indigenous decline, assimilation, and/or disappearance. It was no coincidence, after all, that robust collecting transpired in areas where colonizers and their heirs were directly engaged in the territorial dispossession of Native nations, and were intent on legitimating their claims by taking, “owning,” and exhibiting Native materials from those very grounds. This was a cultural dimension of settler colonialism: amassing Native artifacts to indicate that a previous people had passed away, making room for “settlers” who could then become the custodians of those “relics.”

The Worcester antiquarians attempted to be systematic in registering the items that came to the AAS. The librarian recorded both textual and material accessions in a donation book. This book (actually consisting of several folio volumes and loose papers, now housed in the AAS archives) documented items that were accessioned, names of donors if known, dates of arrival, and sometimes other contextual information. “An Indian Gouge, found in Worcester and presented by George Trumbull, Junior of Worcester,” read one entry from June 25, 1832, typical in its terseness. While this record-keeping system did give a semblance of logic to the growing collection, it was a highly limited framework. The information entered was partial and prone to errors, generally lacking the kinds of provenance that later generations of cataloguers would consider essential. Where, specifically, within Worcester was the gouge contributed by Trumbull unearthed? Was it simply “found,” lying within an exposed surface, or did Trumbull actively dig for it? If the latter, how deeply within the soil layers did it lie? Were other objects located near it?

The entry remained silent on those critical elements. Instead, it prominently foregrounded the Euro-American donor as a salient feature. Furthermore, this system imposed Euro-American logics on the growing array of materials, not Indigenous ones that likely would have described and organized these items very differently. The blanks and omissions in this form of record-keeping also affected other objects collected in period museums, especially those associated with non-elites, women, people of color, and children. Distinctive about Native items was the fact that they were sometimes treated as extensions of natural history, or as timeless traces, rather than clearly demarcated as the belongings of human beings from particular social, cultural, or geographic contexts. Certain accession information was also distilled into the published Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, allowing members who might not be able to visit the cabinet in person to cultivate a sense of its expanding contents. Vital to the entire mechanism were restrictions that encouraged items to enter the Society, but prevented their being loaned out, with few exceptions.

Unsettling acquisitions: Collecting in Native space

Each laconic archival snippet about an “Indian” object can be a lens onto complex tribal histories and interactions with colonizers. Unfolding these requires putting the AAS records into extensive conversation with other sources, in ways that sometimes bring to light painful happenings. To take just one example, in October 1816, a small bottle arrived at the AAS cabinet. It came from Natick, a town in eastern Massachusetts and the historical location of one of the so-called “praying towns.” In the mid-seventeenth century, a series of these towns was established within Native homelands under the oversight of Puritan missionary John Eliot, with the goal of gathering in and acculturating prospective Algonquian converts to English ways and Protestant Christianity. Despite these designs the “praying towns” were never fully Anglicized or Christianized spaces. Their Native inhabitants strategically combined traditional Indigenous lifeways and cosmologies with newer Euro-American ones, and remained connected to wider networks of kin and homelands resources beyond the contained boundaries of Natick proper. Following King Philip’s War, Native inhabitants of Natick gradually found themselves dispossessed of their land base by Euro-American neighbors, as historian and Native American Studies scholar Jean O’Brien (also a White Earth Ojibwe member and former AAS fellow) has minutely documented. By the time robust collecting was underway at the AAS, Natick-area Natives were enmeshed in basic struggles to survive amid a tide of Euro-colonial expansionism in Massachusetts.

The significance of a bottle from Natick might not be fully apparent at first glance. But additional information about its nature and circumstances was conveyed in a published local history. In his History of the Town of Natick, Massachusetts (1830), William Biglow extensively discussed cemetery areas in Natick, including an Indian burying ground close by the Charles River, a critical waterway for generations of area Algonquians. He noted that local (white) residents had repeatedly disinterred Native items as well as human remains in the course of agricultural and construction projects. In some instances the human remains were reinterred. In others they likely were not. During one of these episodes workmen came across funerary objects: a “small junk bottle was discovered with a skeleton, nearly half full of some kind of liquid; but the lad, who dug it up, emptied it before the quality of its contents was ascertained.” This now-empty bottle—likely made of thick, strong glass, as Biglow’s term “junk” can mean in an archaic/technical sense—along with “several other Indian curiosities,” was eventually conveyed to “the museum of the Antiquarian Society in Worcester.” Biglow himself appears to have been the donor.

At this very earliest moment of “collecting,” disruption was already part of the process. Yet to Biglow and myriad other Euro-Americans, extraction of Native artifacts from such grounds and donation to places like the AAS likely appeared to them admirable efforts at preserving a bygone people’s traces, rather than as desecration of the burial places of ancestors connected to living descendants. This is not merely speculation. Biglow was indubitably convinced of the decline and vanishing of Native populations. The advertisement to his History, announcing its raison d’être, commented: “it is thought that many will be desirous to know, as far as can be ascertained, the circumstances which accompanied the gradual decrease and final extinction of the first tribe, that was brought into a state of civilization and christianity, by a Protestant missionary.” In his eyes an extinguished people could have little interest in or claim to items like a buried bottle, nor the remains interred around it.

Natick’s prominence within the “praying town” context, coupled with regional hagiography about the “Apostle” Eliot, may have made it a magnet for collecting in this era. Numerous material artifacts and human remains associated with Natick-area Natives were disinterred by Euro-Americans over the years. Some came to reside in a series of natural history and historical organizations in Natick itself, construction of which further disturbed sensitive Native grounds. The AAS received at least one other item from Natick: a smooth, dark-colored stone, about the size of a fist, incised on one side with circular shapes apparently used for casting buttons, and on the other with an image of a turtle. It was described in the AAS Proceedings of 1868, in the middle of a list of Indigenous artifacts and ancestral remains from the Mounds areas and other regions, as a “Stone Mould, found in Natick, Mass., supposed to have been used by the natives in making lead ornaments.” The accession information sheds little light on the context from which this marked stone emerged. Was it removed from a burial or other sacralized ground? Textual records gave no direct indication that this was the case, but nor did they unambiguously rule out that possibility.

In situations like these, and especially those involving Indigenous ancestral remains, I hesitate about whether to narrate them at all—and if so, how to do so without inflicting damage. Focusing on them runs the risk of re-inscribing violence against Indigenous bodies, objects, and places. It can recapitulate centuries of problematic scholarly practices that have privileged such voyeurism under the guise of scientific inquiry and dehumanized its “subjects”; or give the impression to readers that they are grotesque spectacles to behold and scrutinize. It is never my intention to do so. In fact, I have chosen to be reticent about these details (though they are amply present in the archives), and to omit visual representations that would contribute to such violations, being cognizant that a digital publication like Common-place can make such representations circulate all the more widely.

At the same time, there is value in acknowledging and documenting the nature and extent of early Euro-American trafficking in Indigenous artifacts and remains. Current personnel and users at institutions like the AAS oftentimes have little sense of the scope and gravity of these “collecting” projects. Meanwhile, the repositories that eventually attained these items (as discussed below) may have only partial information about the objects’ origins and purposes. These historical contexts can be especially vital to recover in the twenty-first century as tribal communities and repositories navigate the dynamics of repatriation—the return of certain types of materials to descendant communities. Following passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, the landmark U.S. federal legislation (effected after generations of community-based activism) that provides for inventorying and eventual return of remains and objects, many repositories have been immersed in detailed, complicated, consequential research to determine appropriate paths forward.

The range of potentially NAGPRA-sensitive objects once held at the AAS was extensive, stretching well beyond the bottle from Natick. Human remains, funerary items, ceremonial objects, and similar materials constituted a significant portion of the holdings at the AAS in the nineteenth century. Consider a handful of examples gleaned from the Society’s institutional records and published in Proceedings. In August 1834, George C. Davis donated three human crania, disinterred from historical Pocumtuck homelands in the Greenfield, Massachusetts, area. This stretch of the Kwinitekw/Connecticut River Valley had been a dynamic Native thoroughfare and crossroads for thousands of years, connecting Algonquian inhabitants to Native relations across the Northeast. More recently, it had become a region with a problematic history of rampant antiquarian “harvesting,” as Abenaki scholar Margaret Bruchac and others have documented. Judging from the terse entry in the AAS donation book, it appears that only the trio of crania arrived in the Society’s cabinet. The very process of donating may have caused the disarticulation and attendant disruption of Indigenous ancestors’ bodily integrity, since Davis may have been mindful of transportation costs or the Society’s limited storage space.

In 1843, a correspondent donated several items taken from Onondaga burials in Haudenosaunee/Iroquoian homelands. (Over the centuries the Onondaga Nation has confronted numerous disturbances, and has been actively working on a number of repatriation efforts to redress damaging histories of collecting.) Numerous ancestral remains and associated items from the Mounds of the Midwest—ochre, ornaments of silver, copper, mica—were removed from the massive earthworks and donated as well. Some of these sites had likely only narrowly avoided desecration in 1835 when Christopher Columbus Baldwin, librarian of the AAS (and namesake of the “New World” colonizer), was dispatched to the Ohio region by the council to conduct research. “What I particularly want and am desirous of procuring is a collection of skulls,” he commented several years earlier to a correspondent. “I want the skulls of that unknown forgotten people who built the mounds and forts, and inhabited the country before the present race of Indians.” He was articulating a then-commonplace assumption that the “Moundbuilders” were not ancestors of contemporary Native Americans, a premise (now widely challenged) that seemed to confer moral legitimacy on Euro-Americans’ intrusive probings. Baldwin died en route in a stagecoach accident, permanently curtailing his personal collecting aspirations but not those of the learned society that he represented.

The Euro-Americans who removed these items from the earth considered them suitable specimens for understanding the deep past, or, alternatively, valued them as exotic curiosities. In their eyes, separating these materials from the places where they had been interred was not problematic. But Native descendant communities, whose spiritual systems relied on the proper treatment of ancestors and burial materials, would have viewed such disinterments as massively disruptive to the spiritual and social fabric. A critic might have countered that there was nothing singular about the Indigenous remains and funerary items that were amassed. The AAS also acquired human remains of a British grenadier disinterred from Bunker Hill, after all, and a cane purportedly hewn from the casket of Isaiah Thomas. But while such a critique acknowledges that occasionally white individuals were subject to invasive treatment and antiquarian display, it would gloss over the honorific manner in which Thomas (at least) was marshaled into the service of memento-making. It would also ignore the much larger scale of collecting that targeted Indigenous peoples, and eclipse the profoundly different power dynamics in operation during Euro-American acquisition of Indigenous materials, given the direct links to processes of territorial dispossession and racial marginalization.

Not every item in the cabinet emerged from these highly appropriative practices, certainly. Without delving into the minutiae of dozens of objects, it appears that at least some were attained through trade or other forms of consensual economic exchange. Others likely arrived in the hands of AAS donors via reciprocal practices of gift-giving and diplomacy, or through marketplace interactions in which skilled Indigenous artisans produced certain kinds of wares specifically for consumption by Euro-Americans. Using the resulting income to support themselves and their families in an era of massive land and resource loss, these Indigenous producers made strategic decisions to circulate certain kinds of handcrafted objects into private and public American venues. Sometimes they deliberately catered to aesthetic preferences of non-Native consumers in their basketry, quillwork, birchbark, woodcarving, and other media, fashioning eye-catching goods with complicated hybrid qualities. It is vital to account for these other potential routes of acquisition, since they can attest to the agency, adaptability, and resilience of Native people amid rising tides of settler presence and pressure. Yet as Ruth Phillips, the scholar of First Nations/Canadian material culture, has indicated about this spectrum of object transit, they were not necessarily unencumbered by larger concerns of colonialism and marginalization of Indigenous populations.

A further essential twist in the story of the Society’s collecting is that some of its textual accessions directly refuted American mythologies about Indian primitivity and vanishing. In 1832, the Society acquired copies of The Cherokee Phoenix, a bilingual (English/Cherokee-language) periodical edited by Elias Boudinot in New Echota and partly composed with the Cherokee syllabary devised by Sequoyah. Visitors to the AAS who consulted issues of the Phoenix would have encountered robust tribal critiques of U.S. expansionism in the age of attempted Indian removal in the Southeast. As they turned its pages, they would have been compelled to reflect on the carefully typeset evidence of a tribal community that was embracing technological innovation, and indigenizing print culture to serve the communicative and political needs of the Cherokee Nation’s citizens in a moment of pervasive transformation. The Society also added to its shelves the landmark Worcester v. Georgia Supreme Court decision of the Marshall trilogy in 1832, which spoke to contemporary efforts to assert sovereign powers and clarify jurisdictional lines between tribes, states, and the United States. And the AAS accessioned an 1834 compendium of grievances articulated by the Mashpee (Wampanoag) tribal community, engaged in a protracted struggle with Euro-American neighbors and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Accessions also included a range of texts authored by Native intellectuals and activists, such as an execution sermon for the Wampanoag Moses Paul, delivered in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1772 by the Mohegan minister Samson Occom and published in multiple editions. Indigenous authors like Occom strategically adapted Euro-American print conventions to express their own outlooks, histories, and futures, and pushed back against mentalities and policies that endeavored to erase them. Yet as Michael Kelly, head of Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College, who is currently overseeing development of a large collection of Native American literature, has pointed out, there is a difference between institutions’ collecting of printed multiples—published texts expressly designed by their authors to be widely read—and the collecting of material heritage objects, many intended to be kept within the tribal community that produced them, yet taken through coercion or without consent. All of these types of items shared space in nineteenth-century Antiquarian Hall, however uneasily.

Rethinking the cabinet: Deaccessioning at the AAS and the establishment of the Harvard Peabody Museum

The Worcester antiquarians’ enthusiasm for objects waxed and waned over the course of that century. As late as 1868 the Society clearly expressed desire to foreground Indigenous “specimens,” asserting that the AAS “should possess as perfect a collection as possible of all the portable monuments of the customs, the intellectual conceptions, and manual skill of the original inhabitants of this continent.” (The curious phrasing of “portable monuments” suggested antiquarians’ willingness to dislocate Indigenous items from their contexts, sometimes by hundreds or thousands of miles, even when the communities that created them expressly resisted those removals.) Yet even in its early years the Society faced challenges in curating and displaying its material holdings. A visitor to the Society in the 1820s reported disappointment at the state of affairs, particularly the dearth of reliable staffing to ensure order and access:

On requesting a view of the cabinet of curiosities and antiques, the stranger is informed that no admission has been allowed for more than a year. There are collected all the interesting specimens of minerals, arms, utensils, dresses, ornaments, &c. which have been forwarded to the Society from different parts of the country, with which the world have been made acquainted through their publications; but on account of the confused situation in which they are allowed to remain, they are considered unfit for exhibition.

For decades the Society struggled to find sufficient space for its multifarious collections, outgrowing one location and moving to a new building, or requiring additions, several times. Members became concerned about the fragility of “perishable” artifacts—presumably those containing organic components vulnerable to light, insects, mold, and other environmental factors—and debated whether the Society could be a proper custodian. The intellectual underpinnings of the Society also morphed and led some antiquarians to view “ethnological” objects as peripheral to the mission of an institution increasingly focused on being a library. Maintaining the cabinet seemed at odds with desires to maximize resources for the preservation and study of texts. They worried that by remaining so capacious, the Society was losing a distinctive mission and becoming hampered as a literary center for early Americana.

As the Society reassessed its collecting purview, a new institutional development to the east presented alternative possibilities for handling the objects. George Peabody, a Danvers-born financier who made his wealth in dry goods and British banking, donated $150,000 to launch a museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His philanthropic bequest established the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (PMAE) at Harvard University in 1866. Additional bequests established institutions like the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, the trajectory of which bore strong similarities to the Harvard enterprise. By 1877 a purpose-built, fire-resistant building on Divinity Avenue in Cambridge housed the nascent museum collections, which had previously inhabited Boylston Hall on campus. Over time its contents encompassed artifacts from the Americas, north and south, as well as from across the globe. Located less than fifty miles east of Worcester, the PMAE cultivated ties to existing networks of influential Euro-American collectors and antiquarians. The PMAE’s board of advisors included the heads of learned societies such as the Massachusetts Historical Society and the AAS, while its longest-serving director was Frederic Ward Putnam, an active AAS member.

No Native communities were represented on the board or museum staff, even as the PMAE took root within ancient and ongoing Native space. It was in Cambridge, after all—in the midst of Massachusett and Wampanoag territories, and alongside the same river that flowed through Natick—that an Indian College at Harvard had arisen in the mid-seventeenth century. Although a small number of young Native men became Harvard scholars in that era, institutional support for Native higher education soon dropped off and the Indian College’s history had become nearly invisible to collegiate affiliates by the time of the U.S. Civil War. Moreover, nineteenth-century mentalities about who constituted learned “authorities” or legitimate members of an elite space like Harvard were strongly racialized, leading to a slate of Euro-American museum advisors who strenuously believed they could accurately comprehend and speak to the material heritages of diverse peoples. Anthropologists of this period sometimes recognized the importance of Native community members as “informants,” but by and large did not envision them as scholars, critical commentators, or peers.

The early evolution of the PMAE was heavily influenced by the tenure of Frederic Ward Putnam. His interests in “Indian” researches ran deep, encompassing work on New England Algonquian contexts, the Midwestern and Southeastern mounds, and other sites. His intensive use of Native human remains for purposes of study and illustration manifested enormously problematic attitudes toward Indigenous materials and ancestors—harvesting them as “specimens” and subjecting them to public display—though at the time he and his audiences considered them appropriate vehicles for scholarly inquiry. Museum settings like the PMAE were not the only academic venues in which troubling dynamics like these played out. American medical schools also sought human remains for anatomical study, and turned disproportionately to people of color, immigrants, the poor or criminalized, and other socially marginalized groups for their “supplies,” as Michael Sappol has noted. In the contexts of museums and the emerging medical profession, the very foundations of “study” and “knowledge” often rested on the appropriated bodies of those classified as “other” and denied social power. (A salient distinction was that medical settings often treated the remains as disposable, whereas museums more often approached them with notions of preservation.) Overall Putnam aspired to systematize studies of the past and of other peoples. In an 1889 description of the PMAE solicited for the AAS’s Proceedings, he remarked, “The day had gone by when collections of bric-a-brac were designated museums.” (Perhaps he had the catch-all quality of the AAS cabinet in mind.) Instead, he wished to support “the science of man.”

In his directorial capacity Putnam seems to have encouraged the transfer of objects from the AAS to the PMAE. At the very least he was receptive and took an active role at the invitation of the AAS Council. Following a slight delay due to his role overseeing the anthropological exhibitions at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago of 1893, Putnam perused the cabinet and selected materials for transfer to Harvard. The remainders were to stay at the Society, or be offered to the Worcester Society of Antiquity. (Today this institution, housed at the corner of Elm and Chestnut Streets in the city, is known as the Worcester Historical Society.) While the details of these deliberations and transfers are documented only partially, it appears that the parties involved believed they would conveniently address two problems: the AAS’s struggles to house and manage its cabinet, and the young PMAE’s desires to build up its own collections. In several stages in the 1890s and early 1900s, the AAS packed up batches of Native American and other artifacts, de-accessioned them, and had them carted east to Cambridge for deposit at the PMAE. The AAS profited from these transfers, receiving at least $400; these funds it used to purchase reference books. In certain respects these Indigenous objects had become commodified, attaining value in a marketplace governed by Euro-American elites, while removing them yet another step from Indigenous settings.

When these objects physically left Worcester, they began to recede from institutional memory at the AAS. But the objects themselves remained, and their lives continued in a museum devoted to comparative study of global cultures. The PMAE’s own history belongs to a larger story about the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline, and the consolidation of university-affiliated museums for teaching and research purposes. In addition to soliciting and accepting donations, the PMAE built its collections by sponsoring “fieldwork” expeditions to locales like the American Southwest with the express goal of bringing back large quantities of items for comparative research. These practices held consequential implications for Indigenous communities that became targets for collection building, often without full knowledge of which artifacts and traditional practices were being removed or recorded, and ultimately represented to external audiences.

Still present: Indigenous survivor objects and new approaches to collections

Today large numbers of the Indigenous items formerly held at the AAS are still very much in existence at the PMAE. The majority of them lie in controlled storage rather than on display for the public. Most have not been used in substantive scholarly inquiries, though a few have occasioned incisive revisitations of their meanings. Because my own work centers on the Native Northeast and colonial New England, I have been particularly interested in those with ties (real or purported) to this region , such as a beaded textile long referred to as “King Philip’s sash.” This delicate item occasioned a closer look by Peabody staff members, in conversation with Elizabeth James Perry of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe, who has done extensive cultural heritage and repatriation work in the region. Their investigations brought together anthropological and tribal perspectives, and the resulting multivocal analysis suggested that the red fabric sash, decorated with dark beads, may bear more similarities to Southeastern or Wabanaki material practices than to seventeenth-century Wampanoag ones. These reassessments have raised the question of why antiquarians might have felt invested in ascribing the sash to the famous Wampanoag sachem and resistance leader of the seventeenth century named Metacomet/King Philip—perhaps desiring to bolster their own reputation by claiming an object associated with a prominent Native figure instrumental in formative conflicts with early colonists.

A bag described by early collectors as having belonged to Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, a 1665 Wampanoag graduate of the Harvard Indian College, has appeared under closer scrutiny to be fashioned from fibers and weaving techniques typically arising from West African contexts. These material evidences suggest possible Afro-Indigenous connections, exchanges, or transatlantic influences. Alternatively, they may open up complex histories of misattribution and mythologizing, with the antiquarians again invested in claiming possession of an item characterized as the property of a prominent Algonquian individual. And the dark stone with button-molds and an incised turtle from Natick may have been used for casting garment-fasteners in a powerfully hybrid or syncretic form of Indigenous self-fashioning, Diana DiPaolo Loren has suggested. Given longstanding traditional meanings of turtles in Algonquian oral traditions and belief systems, it may also be possible that turtle castings were mobilized, traded, and valued for purposes beyond clothing.

When I visited the PMAE’s collections and archives in summer 2016 during a multi-day visit facilitated by curators, archivists, and additional staff members, I was certainly compelled by the items described above. Their enduring ambiguities invite much further consideration, especially by diverse descendant communities whose own knowledge-keeping practices may shed new light on these objects’ meanings, and on the pathways for their future treatment. Yet I was equally interested in more quotidian ones: a fragment of a soapstone bowl, for instance, carved from a steatite formation that Algonquians knew well, and likely used for cooking. There was also a fishing plummet, employed for harvesting riverine or coastal species from well-traveled taskscapes in “wet homelands”; a purse embroidered with delicate quillwork in floral and geometric patterns, with tassels of animal hair and sewing thimbles reworked into decorative and sonic elements, possibly created for use in the tourist trade; and many others. Each of these objects stands to illuminate Indigenous histories and the relationships between Native people and Euro-American colonizers, in ways that may not be fully evident in the documentary records on which so many scholars rely.

Unfolding these stories requires careful, creative methodologies that look beyond the labels applied by antiquarians. A “decolonizing” approach also necessitates conversations with present-day Indigenous descendant communities, and the foregrounding of Indigenous epistemologies and forms of knowledge-making. It involves recognizing that “research” itself is attended by uneasy baggage, such as the differential kinds of access to collections that Native and non-Native investigators sometimes experience. What I have sketched in this short piece is a roadmap rather than a fait accompli. These are long-term agendas, to be realized over years rather than weeks or months, and they hinge on cultivation of respectful, reciprocal relationships as much as on technical investigative skills.

Ideally this work is collaborative and multivocal since pertinent documents, objects, scholarly perspectives, and traditional knowledge exist in a multitude of sites, and require tremendous effort to bring together in systematic ways. It respects the fact that certain kinds of community deliberations and insights are considered private or internal, and not appropriate for academic analysis or public discussion. It proceeds with the understanding that present-day tribal communities carry substantial burdens in the restorative labors they take on in areas like education, language revival, wellness, and environmental stewardship. Historical research shares space and energy with these vital projects, and is intertwined with these more holistic community concerns. When Euro-American repositories that possess considerable resources can make materials relevant to cultural heritage more readily accessible, it can help open the way for Native-centered work to proceed. Sometimes these processes can be contentious, as I have come to understand at the three New England institutions where I have been a student or faculty member (Harvard and Yale Universities, and Mount Holyoke College). Each has a long history of collecting that has occasioned debates over repatriation, as well as the appropriate handling of Indigenous materials that remain in storage or on display. But these are necessary struggles that involve reckoning with foundational issues of identity, ethics, and relationships.

Institutional histories of the AAS typically have acknowledged the historical amassing of Indigenous objects. Yet they have tended to treat this corpus as an aberration, an over-extending of the Society’s mission that was ultimately corrected by transmitting them to other repositories and re-focusing the collection on texts and images. None of the Society’s published accounts have yet reckoned directly with the nuances of these objects’ complicated transits or their long afterlives. Nor have they deeply reflected upon the ethics involved—both historically and in the present day—or the array of tribal descendant communities that in a sense are still tied to the institution as a consequence of this difficult past. Even certain recent institutional histories have characterized the collecting of Indigenous human remains in an almost flippant manner, addressing the matter of a “Kentucky mummy” as a macabre curiosity rather than bringing more substantive critical sensibilities to bear upon it. These narratives deserve to be revisited and amended, especially in light of growing support at the AAS for scholarly work in Native American and Indigenous Studies, and for research done by Native community members.

The Indigenous objects that once resided in early American learned societies, libraries, and museums present powerful opportunities for institutions in New England and the United States, not to mention Europe, to reflect on their own entanglements with centuries-long patterns of dispossession and settler colonialism. They also present occasions for reckoning with responsibilities that the original collecting sites still may bear to tribal nations, even if the objects themselves are no longer within their purview in a legal sense. To put it another way, the AAS was a reason why so many Native objects were dislocated, and a reason why they entered a system of appropriation that is ongoing. Optimally, such institutions can move beyond past generations’ constrained views of “Indian curiosities” to build collaborative relationships with contemporary tribal communities, who maintain complex understandings about their own material heritages. It is time to make space for their knowledge and interpretative insights at the center, rather than relegated to the margins or editorial afterthoughts. These communities, after all, are often involved in parallel research and curating of tribal-run museums, such as the Hassanamisco Museum of the Nipmuc Nation, the Tantaquidgeon Museum of the Mohegan Tribal Nation, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation Museum, the Niantic/Narragansett-run Tomaquag Museum, the Mashpee Wampanoag Museum, and others. These places act as caretakers for objects not in order to isolate static views of history, but to bind together past, present, and future in support of the endurance of Native people and nations.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the American Antiquarian Society (through a National Endowment for the Humanities long-term fellowship in 2016), as well as by a faculty research grant from Mount Holyoke College and Mellon curricular development support from the college’s Nexus program. I am grateful to librarians, archivists, curators, and preservationists in many areas of the Northeast for access to collections and insights on these histories and future possibilities. I am particularly indebted to tribal community members for ongoing conversations about these matters, such as Elizabeth James Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag) and Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel (Mohegan); to members of the Five College Native American and Indigenous Studies faculty group; and to Mike Kelly at Amherst College’s Archives and Special Collections for intellectual grounding in futures of collections. I am also grateful to Kelly Wisecup, Drew Lopenzina, Patricia Rubertone, and Scott Stevens for taking part in a panel on “Native American Material Histories” at the 2016 Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture conference in Worcester.

At the AAS, Nan Wolverton shared helpful information about material culture and institutional collecting practices, while Kimberly Pelkey and Paul Erickson helped me think through several dimensions of Native Studies as it pertains to this repository. During my fellowship, Pelkey (Nipmuc), head of Readers’ Services, developed the digital portal From English to Algonquian: Early New England Translations. AAS fellows in residence during winter-spring 2016 generously shared feedback on my work-in-progress. At the PMAE, Meredith Vasta, Katherine Myers, Patricia Capone, and Diana DiPaolo Loren shared insights and sources, while Ethan Lasser at the Harvard University Art Museums has been an interlocutor about early Americanist collecting. Staff at the Natick Historical Society informed my understandings of that space. At the Mount Holyoke College Art and Skinner Museums, Aaron Miller, Ellen Alvord, and Kendra Weisbin have shaped my thinking on historical collecting and new directions, as have students in my “Afterlives of Objects” seminar. My research assistant Allyson LaForge helped me work through collections lists and decolonizing avenues. Common-place editorial staff, Ellery Foutch, and Sarah Anne Carter assisted with development of this piece, while Jackie Penny facilitated access to AAS images.

Further Reading

For an overview of Nipmuc homelands and historical contexts, written by current Nipmuc Nation chief and researcher Cheryll Toney Holley, see “A Brief Look at Nipmuc History,” in Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England, ed. Siobhan Senier (Lincoln, Neb., 2014): 404-410. Institutional archives are critical sources for reconstructing objects’ movements and changing interpretations over time. Among other sources, at the AAS I drew upon the series of donation books in the AAS archives. For published accounts of developments at the AAS in its formative years, see successive volumes of Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, which have been partially digitized. At the PMAE, I drew upon copies of the ledger books of accessions; individual object accession files; and Frederic Ward Putnam papers, as well as the online catalog. The objects mentioned in the final section are Peabody numbers 90-17-10/49333 (sash attributed to King Philip); 90-17-50/49302 (bag attributed to Cheeshahteaumuck); 10-47-10/79966 (steatite fragment); 10-47-10/79968 (fishing plummet); 10-47-10/79953 (stone with incised turtle); 90-17-10/49322 (small pouch with quill decoration).

Histories of collecting, museum-building, and concomitant disruptions to Native communities have generated a large body of literature. For overviews and Northeast-specific considerations, see Kathleen Fine-Dare, Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA (Lincoln, Neb., 2002); Patricia E. Rubertone, Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Washington, D.C., 2001); Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago, 2010); Samuel Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge, Mass., 2016). On appropriations of human remains for anatomical study, see Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, N.J., 2002). On Putnam’s roles in shaping anthropological approaches to Indigenous subjects, see Steven Conn, chap. 5, “The Art and Science of Describing and Classifying: The Triumph of Anthropology,” in History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 2004). For discussion of Indigenous ancestral remains with direct ties to the AAS, see Judy Kertesz, “Skeletons in the American Attic: Curiosity, Science and the Appropriation of the American Indian Past” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012). On Indigenous participation in the “tourist trade” through salable material objects, see Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Seattle, 1998). On early American collecting at a nearby Massachusetts institution, which also encompassed Indigenous objects, see Patricia Johnston, “Global Knowledge in the Early Republic: The East India Marine Society’s ‘Curiosities’ Museum,” in East-West Interchanges in American Art: “A Long and Tumultuous Relationship,” eds. Cynthia Mills, Lee Glazer, and Amelia Goerlitz (Washington, D.C., 2012): 68-79.

Most institutional histories of the AAS have downplayed the role of objects: see A Society’s Chief Joys: An Introduction to the Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, with a foreword by Walter Muir Whitehill (Worcester, Mass., 1969), esp. 10, 17, 18; Philip F. Gura, The American Antiquarian Society, 1812-2012: A Bicentennial History (Worcester, Mass., 2012), esp. 39-42, and In Pursuit of a Vision: Two Centuries of Collecting at the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Mass., 2012), esp. 26, 51, 73. For a retrospective consideration of the role that objects played and details on how they were situated, see Mary Robinson Reynolds, “Recollections of Sixty Years of Service in the American Antiquarian Society,” Proceedings 55 (1945). Several objects that remain at the Society have been researched by Nan Wolverton: see “On High: A Child’s Chair and Mather Family Legacy,” Common-place.org 13:4 (Summer 2013), and “An Old Vial of Tea with a Priceless Story: The Destruction of the Tea, December 16, 1773,” Past Is Present: The American Antiquarian Society Blog, Dec. 14, 2014. On textual productions by Native writers, intellectuals, and critics, some of which were being collected at the AAS at the same time as Native objects, see Phillip H. Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010). Round’s blog, The Repatriation Files: Conversations on Native American Cultural Sovereignty, engages ethical and historical dimensions of collecting. On histories of collecting related to Samson Occom, see Paul Erickson, “Moses Paul to Samson Occom: Rediscovering a Treasure,” Past Is Present: The American Antiquarian Society Blog, 20, 2015.  On Christopher Columbus Baldwin’s pursuits and contexts, see A Place in My Chronicle: A New Edition of the Diary of Christopher Columbus Baldwin, 1829-1835, Jack Larkin and Caroline Sloat (Worcester, 2010).

On the history of the PMAE, see Rubie Watson, “Opening the Museum: The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology,” Occasional Papers I, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, from Symbols (Fall 2001); Frederic Ward Putnam, “The Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge,” in Proceedings of the AAS, new series, Vol. VI, April 1889-April 1890 (Worcester, Mass., 1890), 180-190. On the transfer of certain objects from the AAS to the PMAE in 1895, see “Report of the Librarian,” in Proceedings of the AAS, new series, Vol. X, April 1895-October 1895 (Worcester, Mass., 1896), esp. 71-73. On museum-building in other parts of Harvard and nationally, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, Sara Schechner, and Sarah Carter, Tangible Things: Making History through Objects (New York, 2015); Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago, 1998).

On new assessments of selected objects once held at the AAS and now at the PMAE, see T. Rose Holdcraft, Elizabeth James Perry, Susan Haskell, Diana DiPaolo Loren, and Christina Hodge, “A Rare Native American Sash and Its Paper Label ‘Belt of the Indian King Philip. From Col. Keyes.’ A Collaborative Study,” in European Review of Native American Studies 21:2 (2007): 1-8; Claire Eager, “Settlers, Slaves, and ‘Salvages’: The American Fabric of History and Value in an African ‘Indian’ Bag,” Tempus: The Harvard College History Review V:1 (Fall 2002); Diana DiPaolo Loren, chap. 11, “Casting Identity: Sumptuous Action and Colonized Bodies in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology, eds. Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox (New York, 2014): 251-267.

For a historical assessment of the “vanishing” Indian trope in New England, see Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, 2010), as well as Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 (New York, 1997). Emerging conversations in the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies have stressed the need for collaborative, respectful, authority-sharing research that connects scholars and tribal community members. On collaborative and decolonizing possibilities, see Jordan E. Kerber, ed., Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States (Lincoln, Neb., 2006); Sonya Atalay, Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities (Berkeley, Calif., 2012), especially the concept of “braiding knowledge”; Margaret M. Bruchac, “Lost and Found: NAGPRA, Scattered Relics, and Restorative Methodologies,” Museum Anthropology 33:2 (2010): 137-156; Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2012); Susan Sleeper-Smith, ed., Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives (Lincoln, Neb., 2009).

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

Christine DeLucia is an assistant professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, and a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. Her first book, The Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (forthcoming from Yale University Press in the Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity, 2017), examines Native American and colonial understandings of place and memory in the wake of seventeenth-century conflicts.

November is peak public-outreach month for early Americanists, so if your riff on the Pilgrim curriculum feels tired, try out this angle with your audience. Tisquantum or Squanto—whose adeptness in English and multiple Algonquian dialects famously saved the colony—also spoke Spanish. He had lived in Malaga, where Spanish priests rescued him from his English abductor and where he met Amerindians from many parts of Spain’s empire. As Anna Brickhouse tells it, by the time he met the Plymouth group, Squanto was already “worldly, in the exilic, political sense of the term” (43), equipped with “a transatlantic and hemispheric perspective upon the potential consequences” of colonization (44). He had firsthand experience of globalized slave markets that fed the endless need for labor in the New World; he had heard stories about wrenching upheavals in the lives of people who resembled him. He knew what might be coming.

The late Benedict Anderson wrote that “the most instructive comparisons . . . are those that surprise,” and this arresting portrait of “Hispanophone Squanto” in The Unsettlement of America is the lead-in to a series of just such illuminating surprises. Brickhouse travels fluidly between the disciplinary territories of history and literature with as much suppleness as Anderson himself. With its persistent exploration of multilingual source materials and its measured movement from the telling detail to the macro-level interpretation, The Unsettlement of America deals a stunning blow to whatever might be left of the notion of English primacy in North America. As two major book awards (to date) attest, it makes a compelling case for what scholars trained in literary analysis can bring to the task of interpreting history: a careful attention to the slipping points between and within language systems, to the performative stance that narrators take, and to the ways a story can be adapted, imitated, misread, and re-circulated through different genres across space and time.

The Unsettlement of America revolves around a personage, the Algonquian-speaking Indian known as Paquiquineo or Don Luis de Velasco, and a critical concept, unsettlement, that he embodies. Taken from his home in present-day Tidewater Virginia to the Spanish court, Don Luis returned to the Americas on the king’s command to help settle the northern reaches of La Florida. He accompanied a party of Jesuit missionaries to his homeland, Ajacán, in 1570 as their translator and go-between. When a Spanish ship returned two years later, they found the priests dead, the trappings of their religion desecrated: the plot, a survivor reported, of the supposed convert Don Luis. Unlike the mythologizing stories about later indigenous translators who made European incursion into North America possible (Squanto foremost among them), that of Don Luis has been mostly purged from both Spanish and English American memory, perhaps—Brickhouse suggests—because of his apparent embrace of a project of unsettlement. Unsettlement, a key term throughout, is defined as a strategy “undertaken by an indigenous subject and involves the concrete attempt to annihilate or otherwise put an end to a European colony, or to forestall or eliminate a future colonial project” (2).

Read as the deepest treachery against not only the Jesuit expedition but against European civilization itself, Don Luis’s story has profoundly unsettled readers over the centuries, in the different sense of the term that was also current in the sixteenth century: “to confound, to change a fixed opinion or view, or leave in a state of uncertainty” (3). Ultimately, it’s the “fixed opinion” of the field of American studies, even or perhaps especially in its ascendant “transnational” phalange, that Brickhouse aims to surprise into productive uncertainty. Like much recent scholarship in early American studies, The Unsettlement of America works toward a more Native-centered narrative that emphasizes indigenous agency and adaptation. The Don Luis portrayed here is not a simple figure of resistance but a sophisticated rhetorician: one among many cultural mediators between the European and indigenous worlds who performed what Brickhouse calls “motivated mistranslations” (13) in thoughtful response to colonial circumstances. Translation is not only a recurring theme, but one of her own tasks as well, since The Unsettlement of America also intersects with another major current of recent scholarship: multilingually grounded studies of the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch colonial projects in the Americas that guided, subverted, or competed with the English one. Such comparative colonialist work can’t be accurately subsumed under the “transnational turn” in American studies, since it precedes the national era—but this book, with its unusually capacious chronological reach, converses across period divisions in the field, too: it “brings the early modern Native hemisphere into critical relation with our contemporary transnational one” (12).

The book is divided into three parts of two chapters each. Parts I and II explore a range of Spanish sources from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries to meditate on the discourses of settlement, beginning with Columbus’s effort in La Navidad and moving on to other places in that vast expanse of eastern North America that the Spanish claimed as La Florida. As Brickhouse works her way through this spider web of texts to show how the destruction of the Ajacán mission got elevated into fable, she takes us along some fascinating side paths. The mestizo intellectual Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, whose 1605 Historia de la Florida contains an influential version of the Don Luis story, also offers a different perspective on the personal account by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca that many early Americanists have adopted into their syllabi. While Cabeza de Vaca poses as an exemplary translator of indigenous lifeways—in contrast to another Spanish captive he meets, Juan Ortiz—Garcilaso’s version presents both as “cross-cultural failures” (141) who misinterpreted Indian messages. We also learn about a kind of mirror image to Don Luis: Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, a Spaniard who lived for seventeen years among the Calusa in present-day Florida. After being redeemed (or was he?) by the Spanish, Fontaneda stressed the difficulty of converting and conquering the Calusa, as if to put a damper on the settlement plans, and Brickhouse speculates that he might have crossed paths with Don Luis prior to the Ajacán episode.

The “might have” here hints at the undocumented and undocumentable: Brickhouse seeks to “shed light upon what and how Don Luis . . . knew, and how this knowledge shaped both historical outcomes and subsequent writers’ responses” (89). She argues for “a kind of reparative critical approach . . . that seeks to construct imaginative or speculative possibilities rather than merely to expose or destabilize an ideological position” (8). This plausible-speculation approach pays off at the climax of Part II, where she examines another Spaniard’s claim to have encountered Don Luis some years afterward, enjoying high status among a group of sovereign Indians who traveled and traded between Florida and Cuba. Whether or not that cacique was indeed the same man, the systematic Indian revolts that rocked Spanish settlements along this southern Florida coast after 1572 admit the possibility that after Don Luis left Ajacán, he went on to warn the Guale, Timucua, and Calusa against Spanish designs. To imagine such networks of communication is to acknowledge “the hemispheric potential of indigenous revolt” (187), a possibility unthinkable to generations of Euro-Americans. Don Luis’s sharing of information can’t be conclusively proven, but this is precisely Brickhouse’s point about method: sometimes un-knowing our learned assumptions (that indigenous people would not organize rebellion across tribal lines, for instance) “requires both the associative and the imaginative flexibilities of intellectual and speculative history, respectively” (41).

It goes without saying that The Unsettlement of America works against the narrative of a U.S. national character of hardy English fortitude that originated in Plymouth—a myth that really took hold only in the mid-nineteenth century. Part III of the book picks up the thread of Don Luis’s story as it was transmitted in English by nineteenth-century U.S. novelists and historians: among them Robert Greenhow (a plagiarist of that great plagiarizer, Poe), who discovered—and then suppressed—evidence of the Spanish settlement of the Chesapeake, lest it challenge English rights to first discovery; and William Cullen Bryant, who “recasts the Ajacán narrative as Anglo-America’s primal, counterfactual, nationalist fantasy” in which the Spanish had taken North America. We also learn about the Catholic historian in the 1840s who mistakenly thought colonial La Florida corresponded to the state of Florida, and thus spent fruitless hours looking at the wrong maps; about the significance of Don Luis for the Omaha activist Susette La Flesche; and, in the final chapter, about the Southern Agrarians in the twentieth century who novelized and dramatized the colonization stories of early Virginia to ground U.S. origins in the South, for better or worse.

More than one of these fictive versions places Don Luis in Jamestown—which, like St. Augustine, Florida, and the spot in El Paso where Juan de Oñate claimed the southwest for Spain, has been promoted, with centenaries and commemorations, as an alternate North American “first.” These pre-1620 colonial sites were never forgotten, but rather relegated to a second-tier regionality in contrast to the supposedly more determinative Plymouth. Even as new excavations reveal more of the Spanish port of Santa Elena in South Carolina, the Tristan de Luna settlement in Pensacola, and other sixteenth-century sites of Spanish-Indian contact, the exact location of Ajacán remains unfixed: a 1935 plaque near Quantico memorializing the “Jesuit martyrs” suggests they sailed in on the Potomac River, while other contemporary boosters argue for the Rappahannock, the York, or the James. This confusion seems apt. For Brickhouse’s larger purpose is not to win the battle of commemorative sites, but to challenge the perspective that labels one kind of colonial contact as a failure, the other a success. Thanksgiving provides a good moment to ponder the interestedness of any such claim—and an occasion to reflect on the indigenous critical perspective emblematized by Don Luis, an “unfounding father” (4). “Unsettlement” does not claim to be a new master narrative, but a heuristic—a way of getting around restrictive habits of thought. It makes this wonderful book difficult to imitate, but rich to think with and upon.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

A professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Kirsten Silva Gruesz is the author of Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing and over two dozen essays on Spanish-language print culture in what is now the United States.

Whatever happened to the Stamp Act? Over the past hundred years, scholars have offered a number of explanations for its importance: it was a foolish imposition by metropolitan officials who didn’t care enough about the colonies to formulate a better policy. Remonstrations against it articulated a consistent ideological objection to parliamentary authority that anticipated the Declaration of Independence. Crowd actions protesting it revealed class consciousness by urban workers at a moment of economic depression.

In the United States, the standard role of the Stamp Act in school curricula and college lectures is to mark a major turning point in the run-up to the American Revolution. Yet Zachary Hutchins and the authors in this collection want to extract us from a textbook timeline and encourage us to take “the transatlantic taxation debates of the 1760s” on their own terms (xiii). While the eight essayists still wind up discussing the origins of independence, the volume opens up new opportunities by making American nationalism a smaller part of the story.

This is a book that needed writing. While plenty of scholars have discussed the Stamp Act, only a handful of works treat the Stamp Act as their central concern. The year 2015 marked the 250th anniversary of the Stamp Act’s passage, and while Common-place has done its part to commemorate the occasion with a roundtable about Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan’s The Stamp Act Crisis, Hutchins was the only scholar with the foresight to publish a book on the subject.

The essayists include both literary scholars and historians, almost all of them early and mid-career academics. Their essays use a range of visual and textual evidence and a few different methodological approaches. Four pairs of essays are grouped under headings: “Ritual Responses,” “The Poetics of Taxation,” slavery, and Native Americans, and Hutchins frames these essays with an introduction and conclusion.

When considering a volume like this, the reader wants to know whether the essays cohere in a way that justifies their aggregation. Thankfully, the editor was meticulous in this regard: the authors refer to one another’s essays, conveying an overall argument with multiple vectors.

Three of the essays are by historians with new vantage points on the politics of the moment. J. Patrick Mullins makes a nuanced argument that the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew’s A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers wasn’t the proximate cause of the destructive Boston crowd action on August 26, 1765, since Mayhew disavowed such protests. Nonetheless, Mayhew’s political sermons fused with Boston’s economic grievances, and so his ideas made an underlying contribution to the opposition.

Molly Perry analyzes Stamp Act protests as ritual performances with local and imperial audiences in mind, where the spectators were just as important as the ringleaders. The Sons of Liberty and their allies had to thread a needle delicately: they had to convince Parliament to see their side of the story, while intimidating their enemies closer to home. Participants in crowd actions weren’t necessarily unified in their views—there were “disaffected” persons among the politically mobilized—but commenters did manage to rally around a definition of political legitimacy that excluded women, Indians, and blacks.

Alexander R. Jablonski shows how the Stamp Act debates forced a fracture in the ideas about “subjecthood” on both sides of the Atlantic. Opponents of the Stamp Act, “resplendent in their outrage,” insisted that subjecthood included the duty to resist tyranny, and any restraint on their political liberty was tantamount to slavery (150). Yet prior to the Stamp Act, many British metropolitans and colonists shared an understanding of a subject as having responsibilities as well as rights, wherein true sons of liberty decried licentiousness. Colonists were particularly anxious to draw upon their British heritage to distinguish themselves from enslaved blacks.

The majority of the essays are by literary scholars. Gilbert L. Gigliotti focuses on a neo-Latin poem that appeared in the Boston Gazette in May 1765. Full of allusions, the verses criticize colonial sycophancy as well as monarchical overreach, ultimately taking up a moderate call for more dialogue rather than a rousing cry for revolution. Caroline Wigginton and Hutchins evaluate two different textual responses to John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer: one, “The Dream,” by Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson in 1768, and the other by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, in his Letters from an American Farmer, begun in 1769 and published in 1782. By looking at moderate writers who eventually became Loyalists, Wigginton and Hutchins show how Americans debated the proper degree of obedience. Yet these texts were about more than formal politics: Fergusson was also making a case for women’s participation in an orderly resistance, even though she was eclipsed by male radicals. Crèvecoeur’s letters, meanwhile, amount to a kind of slave narrative, which thereby scorned and resisted Dickinson’s “equation of slavery and involuntary taxation” (140).

Todd Nathan Thompson examines Benjamin Franklin’s responses to stereotypes about Americans in a pair of 1766 “Homespun” essays, and Clay Zuba looks at the uses of Indian figures in transatlantic debates. In Thompson’s telling, Great Britain’s attempt to symbolically reduce the American colonists to Indians (or otherwise “other”) was leading the colonists instead to unify around an anti-metropolitan consensus. Zuba tells a similar story, using visual culture as well as texts: “the figure of the Indian registers a rupture in the compatibility of nation and empire” (219). In other words, metropolitan Britons, once they began differentiating themselves from creoles and Native Americans, made space for new (exploitative and racialized) national identities to develop.

The volume as a whole is occasionally playful; one author describes his own interests as “schizophrenic” (233); another uses the word “snarky” (191); while others seek out satires, parodies, and “tongue in cheek” moments to illuminate the past (98, 180). Hutchins even concludes the volume with an unforgivable pun, lending gravity to the standard apology for “linguistic infelicities” that survived the editorial process (x, 229).

Certain (more serious) themes also connect the essays, particularly the importance of race in the construction of Atlantic identities and the tensions inherent in ordered resistance. Hutchins concludes with a meditation on corporatism, which he says “animated collective action during the Stamp Act Crisis” (xix), and remains as “an alternative, largely forgotten tradition” alongside individualism (228).

While the essayists all bring fresh insights to the Stamp Act, the editor might have been bolder in his framing of the volume. This is the first book on the Stamp Act in a while, after all, and so a deeper engagement with past waves of scholarly literature would have been welcome. Rather than cite a politician like Rand Paul (xii) or even a jurist like Samuel Alito (225) to discuss American notions of liberty and corporatism (224), Hutchins might have profited from a deeper engagement with scholars (such as John Phillip Reid, Rowland Berthoff and John Murrin, Gary Nash, or Johann Neem) who explored early American understandings of such ideas. Tastes may vary, but I found Hutchins’s references to twenty-first-century Supreme Court cases (National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores) to be superficial and distracting, and I worry that they will date a book that really deserves to endure as a contribution to our understanding of the Stamp Act Crisis.

New things are happening with the Stamp Act, in other words—and this volume should signal to a broad range of scholars that 1765 is a good year for deep thinking. This book shows how an interdisciplinary conversation can breathe new vitality into long-standing discussions.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

Benjamin L. Carp is the Daniel M. Lyons Professor of American History at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (2007) and Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (2010).

In his 2008 essay “After Man,” Alexander Weheliye sets as his task a rigorous consideration of this question: “What different modalities of the human come to light if we do not take the liberal humanist figure of ‘man’ as the master-subject but focus on how humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain?” Lloyd Pratt’s new work, The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature, answers this question in vital and revelatory ways. Forgoing the discrete literature review, Pratt deftly weaves the critical history of African American literary studies throughout his argument, reshaping longstanding debates centered on the role of evidence and African American agency in the face of the formal constraints endemic to early African American print culture. Setting aside the well-worn argument that the raison d’être for antebellum African American writing was to use “print to secure recognition of [African American] humanity,” Pratt notes that “these writers had other things on their minds than simply proving to white people that they were human” (5). Attending to “the forms and institutional contexts” that characterized antebellum African American men’s writing, Pratt identifies a political-aesthetic project that he terms “stranger humanism”: a redefinition of the human founded on difference rather than similarity or commonality.

As a political-aesthetic philosophy tied to pragmatic political organizing, stranger humanism deliberately refuses the racialized notion of the human as a fixed category characterized by arrival or exclusion most often expressed in terms of the liberal individual. Pratt attends to the intersection of nineteenth-century debates over strangerhood (often centered on the Biblical account of the stranger in Leviticus) and contemporary debates over the human (including those advanced by Weheliye, Sylvia Wynter, Anthony Bogues, Soyica Diggs Colbert, and Nancy Fraser, among others), as well as the rich literary history of the figure of “the stranger.” Doing so allows Pratt to show how African American men’s writing in the antebellum era constitutes an alternative humanism governed by its own rules of engagement, most fundamentally “never to mistake another’s request for solidarity, for aid, or for witness as an invitation to remake or displace her or him” (2). Pratt’s archive is broad, though two main bodies of writing form the cornerstone of his argument: Frederick Douglass’s writing—particularly the flashpoint of his 1845 Narrative—and what is acknowledged to be the first anthology of African American literature: a collection of French poetry by free men of color in New Orleans, entitled Les Cenelles: Choix de poesies indigenes, published in the same year.

To convey the open-ended, active nature of the political-aesthetic project of stranger humanism, Pratt employs an often counter-intuitive vocabulary—avoiding proper names and proliferating gerunds—to emphasize process, materiality, and plurality. The book’s title is a great example. In many ways “The Strangers Book” goes against the grain of our expectations of authorship or scholarly declarations of a new conceptual framework. I found myself considering what was at stake in The Strangers Book rather than either “Stranger Humanism” (to name the political aesthetic project the book identifies) or “The Stranger’s Book” (to highlight the alternative, vernacular humanism the book illuminates). The former would make stranger humanism more available as a conceptual theory divorced from its pragmatic nature and material expression, while the latter reconstitutes the insider/outsider logic of liberal humanism that takes the individual as its essential unit. By contrast, The Strangers Book highlights the plurality of stranger humanism but also insists on its materiality and historical specificity. We come to learn that the “strangers book” is a mid-nineteenth century genre established by organizations such as the Nantucket and Boston Atheneums, which kept ledgers documenting the entry of non-members—strangers—into their organizations. As Pratt describes them, “the four-columned strangers books provide space for recording each stranger’s date of introduction, or entry, to the institution; the stranger’s name; the stranger’s place of origin or residence; and the name of the introducing member” (115). In addition to linking the literal space of democracy with attempts to manage and regulate strangers’ participation, strangers books resonate in tantalizing ways with antebellum African American men’s understanding that “the space of democracy…emerge[s] from the joining of rhetorical practice to the physical world” (2). Pratt’s shorthand for his archive—a term he avoids in favor of “this writing”—is similarly counterintuitive. Where one might expect “the texts under consideration” or “these texts,” Pratt offers “this writing,” terminology that vitalizes our understanding of print culture by asserting a relational dynamic over a singular entity. Analogous to the conception of self advanced in stranger humanism, which is always evolving, “this writing” is also productively ambiguous (it does not name a closed set of texts) and is, at times, potentially self-reflexive. As this example attests, throughout The Strangers Book Pratt refuses linguistic resolution into the individual, the singular, or the objectifying, effacing the division between form and content and preserving the open-endedness of print culture and the democratic potential in nuanced rhetorical scenes. Pratt’s analysis of Les Cenelles demonstrates what is at stake in this critical reorientation. He notes that the contribution of the Les Cenelles poets has been largely overlooked because their work is “perceived to have absorbed the white racist norms of the period” (64). However, he argues that these poets “engage practices of citation, revision, and address that disaggregate the sense of self without destroying it,” instituting a political philosophy that Pratt calls the preservation and extension of “an I-to-we” republican framework that is central to stranger humanism (69).

Pratt’s preface and epilogue make explicit the self-reflexivity and contemporary urgency that is the undercurrent of the book as a whole. In an exquisitely concentrated and provocative preface, Pratt juxtaposes the emblematic force of the Times-Picayune’s front page of their first publication after Hurricane Katrina—a photograph of distraught New Orleans resident Angela Perkins kneeling in the street under the headline “HELP US, PLEASE”—with the abolitionist icon “Am I not a man and a brother.” Pratt exposes the newspaper’s ventriloquism in its tacit mode of address: “Angela Perkins becomes the paper’s proxy; it is she, not the paper or the city, who requires witness and assistance. The paper draws on her presence while nevertheless associating her with the disorder it describes in a smaller headline [reporting on the] ‘chaos and lawlessness [which] rule the streets’” (xi), tacitly reinforcing a national identity premised on her marginalization. At this moment Pratt hails his own readers, disrupting the singular humanism tied to an exclusionary nation-building project ushered in by the “you” implied by the Times Picayune’s plea for help, situating his own book as a contribution to stranger humanism: “In our moment of distraction, the category of the human came to be figured as isomorphic with the nation. We became Americans again and so did you. Other options were available” (xii). The epilogue picks up this self-reflexive thread, considering the ways canon formation and curricular innovation have largely operated by a similar logic to that of liberal humanism, which is to say by the damaging logic of inclusion and exclusion. However, juxtaposing the preface and the epilogue also marks the limits of the book’s self-reflexivity and raises the most urgent questions about Pratt’s methodology for a full accounting of stranger humanism. In delimiting his exploration of stranger humanism to African American men’s writing, Pratt leaves unexamined the role of African American women’s writing in constituting this alternative public sphere. What alterations would have to be made to our understanding of stranger humanism if we take seriously the substitution of Angela Perkins for the masculine figure of appeal in “Am I not a man and a brother?”

Pratt’s compelling analysis of the deliberate interactions antebellum African American men undertook between print and the human, generating and theorizing what Édouard Glissant would later call “convergent opacity,” makes use of the open-ended, participatory, relational logic immanent within stranger humanism itself. For Pratt, stranger humanism is an evolving and contingent category rather than a bounded target or something extant in a single text to which we might point. Instead, it is created in strategic moments of collective disclosure that make possible intersubjective recognition and thereby open up a democratic space. The writing under consideration enacts this stranger humanism, though—importantly—it does not leave behind a portable or transcendent notion of “the human.” In Pratt’s words, “The rules and results of stranger humanism are always occasional….[T]he forms of being-with-strangers that this writing pursues do not permit the creation of some greater whole—whether a public or a romantically conceived nation—that is superordinate over its members” (8). To bring these African American redefinitions of the human into view, Pratt argues that print culture, too, must be recognized as a dynamic, unbounded, discursive space rather than a static collection of textual objects or publications. Consequently, Pratt’s intricately wrought close readings remain as attentive to texts’ conditions of production, formal construction, and rhetorical scene as they do to their content. This is the novelty of his approach: stranger humanism is inseparable from its material expression and constitution. In this way, he reminds us that “‘the space of democracy’ must never be mistaken … for a metaphorical phrase; neither should it be reduced to a single given chamber, a single rhetorical figure, or a single gathering of people” (2-3).

In The Strangers Book, humanity is a series of verbs—writing, publishing, meeting, reading, witnessing, pursuing, becoming—that facilitate and create but never arrive at a resolution or crystallize into their correlate nouns. Douglass and the free men of color writing in Les Cenelles create the rhetorical conditions to enact human being as active, transforming, and transformative, necessarily founded on “a sense of the binding strangeness of each to all” (6) and even the perpetual strangeness of ourselves to our own evolving, unfixable selves.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

Janet Neary is an associate professor of nineteenth-century African American literature and culture in the English Department at Hunter College, CUNY. She specializes in slave narrative form and African American literature of the West. She is the author of Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives (2016).

Common-place talks with Carla Mulford about Benjamin Franklin and his views on agriculture, Ireland, and the colonial relationship with Britain.

In the acknowledgments, you note that Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire began as a study of Franklin’s relationship with Native Americans. That is still a core part of your discussion, but can you trace the intellectual journey that took you from that point to a broader project on Franklin’s ideas about liberalism and empire?

The project evolved as I learned more and more about the British Empire and about Franklin. My original concern pertained to constructions of race in the eighteenth century. I wondered whether Franklin was sympathetic to Native peoples, as some have observed, or whether he conceived of Native peoples as obstructing the “progress” of Europeans in North America, whom he perceived to be “better” than all others. The question arose from my study of Franklin’s late writings, especially his “Remarks concerning the Savages of North America” and his comments in the Albany Plan that suggested he admired the Six Nations peoples (the Iroquois) for forming a league and engaging collaboratively in treaty councils. As I delved more fully into Franklin’s writings, a more complicated set of problems emerged: What were Franklin’s views about the British Empire? He didn’t quite seem to be the unquestioning imperialist that many have written about. He seemed again and again to be emphasizing the liberties of all Britons, wherever they lived, to pursue activities that brought them better livelihoods.

I concluded that while still an imperialist, Franklin also believed that he had come up with a better imperial plan—a more flexible imperial structure, if you will—that would enable Britons in North America to have a reasonable living, secure their borders, and still contribute to the Empire, all without losing all their political rights and privileges as Britons. What evidence do we have that Franklin developed his own potentially workable plan for empire? Franklin’s 1750s Albany Plan of Union, clarified and elaborated on in some long letters to William Shirley, governor of Massachusetts, and several writings from the 1760s, particularly his Canada pamphlet (as it’s frequently called), The Interest of Great Britain Considered, with Regard to Her Colonies, and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadaloupe (1760).

Conceiving that Britons everywhere had the same liberties, Franklin abhorred the notion that Britons in England considered themselves better than Britons in North America. In addition, he grew increasingly troubled about the conditions of Africans in the European colonies. His affiliations with the Associates of Dr. Bray in London helped him realize that slavery was wrong for both humanitarian and economic reasons. Finally, I discovered that in the 1760s, as he watched the results in Parliament of Britain’s brutal takeover of India, Franklin grew interested in the question of original sovereignty. He began to study England’s presumed sovereignty over Ireland as reports of land and tribal wars in India arrived in London. He studied the Pratt-Yorke opinion rendered on Britain’s takeover of lands in India, in addition to William Bolts’s Considerations on India Affairs: Particularly Respecting the Present State of Bengal and Its Dependencies (1772). Franklin ultimately concluded that if land were taken by purchase and settled and improved, sovereignty over the land belonged to the persons engaged in those activities, not to the monarch who ruled over them at the time they left their original location in order to settle a different location. Sovereignty derived from the Natives’ original title, by use and tradition, and sovereignty transferred to those who acquired Native lands in fair dealing.

As several pieces written in 1773—including two essays, “On Claims to the Soil of America” and “An Edict by the King of Prussia,” and a fascinating letter to William Franklin—indicate, Franklin eventually worked out a legal opinion that the British American colonists, by purchasing Native lands freely offered (not stolen, as he conceived the Penns prone to do in later years), had, by making a purchase and settling the lands, acquired their own sovereign territory from the Natives, who themselves held original sovereignty. His acceptance that Native people held original sovereignty (which disputes the idea of a right of conquest) made a clear case for the British Americans’ sovereignty over the territories they bartered for or bought from Native peoples. I went back to Franklin’s earliest readings and found a thread of liberal ideas, including many of the rights Americans still hold dear, that, I believe, explains the evolution of Franklin’s thinking. It was a complicated process, and it took me two decades to work it out, but I finally found the subject I wanted to write about.

Benjamin Franklin does not lack for biographers or historians. What attracted you to contribute a “literary biography” to scholarship on Franklin?

There are many useful biographies out there on Franklin. I didn’t want to re-tell the same stories about Franklin that others were telling. As a literary scholar interested in rhetoric and propaganda, one who was trained to evaluate the import of a text based on its audiences, I conceived I had something peculiar and interesting to contribute that others might not have observed. Readers have noted that Franklin was a brilliant rhetorician, but few have gone on to try to show the validity of the assessment. I discovered in the long process of studying Franklin’s thought that he was also a brilliant mathematician and economist, as well as a knowledgeable agriculturist. I decided to pay very close attention to what Franklin said but also—and this is important—why he said it, to which audiences, and under what circumstances. In so doing, I was not only writing an intellectual biography, as one reviewer has aptly noted, but also a literary biography that evaluated both the purpose and the rhetorical implications of Franklin’s writings. My purpose went beyond what one might normally do in a biography.

Franklin’s theory of empire, the book argues, rested on an “environmental logic for British colonization.” Can you explain what that means?

I really like this question, because it enables me to speak more fully about Franklin’s study of lands, waterways, and colonial productions.

Because he was interested in analyzing Britain’s imperial structure, Franklin was in the habit of studying customs reports. He was very interested in shipping traffic, and he examined bills of lading, where the ships came from, what they were carrying, what they had traded in order to bring in the cargo, and so forth. By nature a very curious person, he could see that certain colonies were more likely to have success harvesting some products and not others, more likely to be able to mine and develop iron or glass or vineyards, more likely to have deciduous trees rather than evergreens, more likely to have an excess of produce to share with other colonies and Britain, and on and on. He asked his friends situated around the Atlantic to send him information on soil quality and productions, and they did so. There are many letters from different people, for instance, who tell Franklin about the trees and soil in their vicinity, the navigability of their rivers, and the likelihood of building canals for transport. He would frequently offer advice on agricultural matters in the Poor Richard almanacs. In Poor Richard Improved, for 1749, for instance, Franklin offers a long opening essay—based on information originally provided to him by John Bartram—on timber and soil. It is amazingly detailed. Adapting Bartram’s information for his own purpose, Franklin suggests that this learned discussion about timber was his friend’s:

“By a diligent observation in our province, and several adjacent, I apprehend that timber will soon be very much destroyed, occasioned in part by the necessity that our farmers have to clear the greatest part of their land for tillage and pasture, and partly for fuel and fencing. The greatest quantity of our timber for fencing is oak, which is long in growing to maturity, and at best is but of short duration; therefore I believe it would be to our advantage to endeavour to raise some other kind of timber, that will grow faster, or come sooner to maturity, and continue longer before it decays.”

He then devotes in the Poor Richard column considerably more space to what kinds of timber can be produced in what kinds of soil, and he speaks to the productivity of certain soils for growing trees. Franklin regularly made observations on environmental matters and husbandry.

These commentaries are often overlooked by historians who are interested in his politics, his social life, or his scientific endeavors exclusive of agricultural matters. As one interested in his views of empire, I found his keen interest in agriculture and cultivation very pertinent to my study of his imperial theories. Franklin had a deep curiosity and knowledge about agriculture. And he was interested in harnessing agriculture to industry and finding economic support for the empire in the different agricultural products harvested in the different locales held as British territories. He writes about these things in general ways in his economic tracts. By looking at the economic tracts alongside Franklin’s particular advice about soil, timber, and agricultural production, I realized that Franklin’s theory of empire was driven by detailed information about the productions of the colonies. Some of this knowledge he witnessed first-hand, some he gained from letters written to him by his wide acquaintance, and some he learned by studying customs reports of imports and exports.

He ultimately determined that if the British administration would just permit the colonies situated around the Atlantic to produce what they wished to and engage in a collaborative (and untaxed) trading system, the Empire could grow, its people would be better off, live longer, and be happier and more willing to participate in governance and defense. This is why I concluded that Franklin’s was an environmental logic for colonial development.

How did Franklin’s reading on empire and political economy influence his arguments for colonial self-government in Pennsylvania specifically and North America more generally?

Well, I guess this is the main argument that the book establishes, so I’ll try to keep this brief.

During his youth, Franklin was reading materials about inherited British liberties, such as those discussed in John Trenchard’s and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters, at the same time that he was reading mercantilist tracts about British colonies and colonial production, such as those written by, for instance, Thomas Mun and William Petty. Indeed, when he wrote his Silence Dogood essay No. 8, Franklin included some rhetorically powerful lines about liberty. This essay was published while he was printing James’s New-England Courant, while James was incarcerated. These early readings were very important to Franklin’s development as an economist and an intellectual. The readings on British liberty suggested to him that people ought to be free to pursue their own livelihoods and their own religious preferences. The readings in mercantilist literature suggested to him that from the imperialist standpoint, people should be constrained to produce certain kinds of goods and not others, and they should not be given too much freedom, because they would not make good choices (with a lot of emphasis on the word good). He didn’t agree with such negative views.

When Franklin got to Philadelphia and saw the political and economic situation there, he witnessed how the colonial system, represented by the Penns’ stranglehold over the Pennsylvania colony, was in conflict with the energy of the people and their resourcefulness as producers. The Penns’ absence from their colony and their desire to exact quit-rents from their presumed tenants resembled the situation in Ireland, where absentee landlords held a majority of the lands, which were worked by day-laborers who could never manage to support themselves because they were working for others. Laborers ought to be able to work out their indenture periods, Franklin reasoned, and then become their own individual landholders, so that they could work for themselves, not some overlord. They would be more inclined to work harder if they worked for themselves, he believed.

Franklin admired the attitude of toleration emulated by many Quakers, but he also saw that their peace testimony compromised the possibility of defense. Many Quakers were willing to support the idea of defense, if it meant defending their own lands and persons, but the idea of using guns and munitions to defend the Penns’ lands or the British Empire as a whole was abhorrent to them. In Franklin’s view, defense of land for the Empire should be paid for (and soldiered by) the Empire, not by individuals whose families and lives were at risk simply because they settled territories that bordered lands held by other Europeans.

The situation in Pennsylvania led Franklin to conceive first that it might be better to have the colony become a royal colony (directed by the king rather than a proprietary family). Eventually, when the plan to make Pennsylvania a royal colony foundered in London, Franklin decided that self-governance (via the elected Assembly) was essential to the security of the colony and the success of its peoples. That experience in Philadelphia enabled him to develop a colonial philosophy that he wanted to see implemented in all British-held dominions. This is the premise of my book.

Scholars of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic world have long discussed whether Ireland was a model for English colonization efforts in North America. You argue that the island became a model (or perhaps a cautionary tale) for Franklin as he thought about the role of the North American colonies in the British Empire. Why did the experience of Ireland hold such influence for Franklin?

Franklin first saw Ireland during a visit there in 1771, when he was the particular guest of Wills Hill, Lord Hillsborough, whom he knew to be an enemy to his political endeavors on the colonies’ behalf.

But Franklin had been reading and writing about Ireland—the colonial situation of Ireland—for some time, beginning back in the days when he was establishing himself as a printer and political leader in Pennsylvania. Politically, he was concerned that Ireland seemed to be the kind of colonial model that the Penn family was emulating for Pennsylvania, with absentee landlords and quit-rents expected well above what the economy could bear, keeping the laborers poor while the landholders grew wealthy. Ireland, like North America, had a significant indigenous population that was under social duress.

In the late 1760s, Franklin hoped that he might be able to persuade some of his Irish friends to support independence. When he actually saw the conditions of the laborers in Ireland, however, he realized that that plan was doomed. Hillsborough had spent a day in 1771 trying to impress on Franklin how estate holders’ wealth could be supported easily by harnessing and oppressing the local labor force. Franklin spent the day—he was sick from his sea crossing—trying to be polite, hiding his compassion for the workers and his anxiety about the political situation he was facing.

He had absorbed from his youth a different value system, one based in ideas of personal liberty, the very liberty undermined in Ireland by the Anglo-Irish landlords. That day when Hillsborough showed Franklin around his estate and the countryside in Ireland, Franklin was shocked, and he started to worry about the prospects for British North America. He wrote back to his American friends in letter after letter about the poverty, absence of vitality, and depression of laboring peoples in Ireland. He reported that they were living on potatoes and buttermilk, had no meat in their diets, and were not just unkempt but unclothed (shirtless, and some shoeless). The letters about Ireland and Scotland reveal a level of shock not found in any other of Franklin’s correspondence. He was devastated.

Franklin knew the American colonies needed to be free to operate on their own in a collaborative network of enterprise. His experience in Ireland confirmed that view. He couldn’t get away from there fast enough so that he could write home: “If my Countrymen should ever wish for the Honour of having among them a Gentry enormously wealthy, let them sell their Farms and pay rack’d rents; the Scale of the Landlords will rise as that of the Tenants is depress’d who will soon become poor, tattered, dirty, and abject in Spirit.”

The book’s argument emphasizes that Franklin believed that men were entitled to the fruit of their labors. How did you reconcile that theoretical framework with his participation in slaveholding?

Franklin’s mature views emphasized that people should enjoy the fruits of their labor. For the first part of his life, up until the 1760s, and like many of his generation, Franklin’s concern centered on Britons in North America more than on any other population, whether Germans, Native peoples, or Africans in America (whether enslaved or free). We know that Franklin kept slaves even after he had come to question the validity of slaveholding or its function within an economic system like that he envisioned for the colonies.

As early as 1750, he was concerned that the plantation economy of the South was militating against his ideal of having British North America be composed of independent agriculturalists. (See his Observations on the Increase of Mankind, for example.) But it took another decade for him to be willing to recognize that the intellectual capacities of Africans were like those of Britons and Europeans. His transformation was gradual, pressed on him partly by personal circumstances and friendships and partly by his views of the best economic system for the greatest number of people, a non-plantation system.

His last efforts—the efforts he was engaged in at the end of his life—reveal how deeply Franklin believed Africans to have been wronged, and how essential it was to free them. As president of the newly re-formed Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Franklin wrote a memorial imploring Congress to act to emancipate Africans and African Americans held in slavery. The memorial was taken up in Congress but discussed in a relatively short time. Some wished the memorial tabled and not entered into the congressional record. As might be expected, congressmen from the slaveholding South stood against the idea of emancipation. Franklin would not let it go. His disappointment in his congressional colleagues found an outlet in satire. He went home to write. Franklin’s last essay, a brilliant satire, thoroughly mocked James Jackson, congressman from Georgia, for supporting slavery. He took Jackson’s arguments and using irony and polite urbanity worked step by step to obliterate them. The essay written by Franklin as “Historicus” was published in the Federal Gazette March 25, 1790, less than a month before he died.

Further Reading

Benjamin Franklin to Joshua Babcock, January 13, 1772, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 41 vols. to date, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, et al. (New Haven, 1959), 19:6-7.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

Carla J. Mulford is professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and the founding president of the Society of Early Americanists. She has published over 15 essays and book chapters on Franklin and a Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin in addition to her recent monograph, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire. She is currently writing another monograph on Franklin, this time on the intersections of his scientific and political accomplishments, under the working title Benjamin Franklin’s Electrical Diplomacy.

Formal Women and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s “The Dream”

As this year’s presidential campaign has abundantly reminded us, the public often judges women based on form: what they wear, how they laugh, how they style their hair. What covers women’s bodies stands in, often in caricatured ways, for the content of their character and the substance of their ideas. This certainly holds true for Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and other U.S. First Ladies like Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose names have been invoked throughout this past election season and who, like Clinton and Obama, have been further covered by their husband’s reputations, charismatic performances, and political records.

Such spousal covering recalls the longer history of coverture in the U.S., the now (at least officially) dormant common law doctrine that understood wives to be covered by their husbands. Wives had no legal identity separate from their husbands. Except in rare instances, they could not make contracts or own property. They could not have a political affiliation different from that of their husbands. And how could a husband rape his wife? That would be like a man violating himself. Legally inconceivable.

Thus women poets’ use of form usually says much about gender and power. In British North America, women celebrated. Women mourned. Women adorned the home, went to church, and tended their families. They wrote occasional verse (poetry composed for a particular occasion) like lyrics, elegies, and meditations, not extended philosophical treatises in heroic couplets or national epics like Alexander Pope and John Milton. Women poets were under-recognized experts and artists in the forms associated with their homes and neighborhoods, the realms where they held power and influence, often as what Laurel Thatcher Ulrich calls deputy husbands, though women have always negotiated the contours and limits of their authority.

In the revolutionary era, the so-called “Most Learned Woman in America,” Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, wrote in these occasional forms. She was born to Thomas and Ann Diggs Graeme in 1737, and she spent the majority of her life on her family’s estate, Graeme Park, in Pennsylvania outside Philadelphia. As a child, she received a comprehensive education in languages and literature, including Greek and Latin. In her twenties, she visited England and Scotland, and in 1764, while she was there, the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which was generally abhorred by North American colonists. She also learned of her mother’s passing while away, and when she returned home in 1765, she turned to writing in grief. Now the female head of the house, she began to host a salon in her family’s home. The salon consisted of elite and intellectual friends, both men and women, and served as a place where they were free to exchange ideas and writings, including their own poetry.

But Fergusson did not always write her poetry as occasional verse. Her 1768 “The Dream” is not an occasional poem. Instead, it is 698 lines of georgic verse composed in response to the political crisis that had persisted even in the aftermath of the Stamp Act’s 1766 repeal. John Dickinson, a sometime member of her salon, had written a notable response to the Stamp Act Crisis in the form of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, in which he argued that the colonies should be sovereign, rather than subject to the demands of the British.

“The Dream,” versions of which were probably read by Fergusson’s salon, refers to and revises Dickinson’s ideas. It recounts in first person a dream in which the speaker, ostensibly Fergusson herself, witnesses an angry reprimand from Albion, a female personification of Britain, to the Pennsylvania colony. The colony’s deceased founder, William Penn, descends from the skies to make his rebuttal and departs after presenting Fergusson with a scroll. In the poem, she hands this celestial scroll to John Dickinson, whom she refers to as a “youth Conspicuous.” The bulk of “The Dream” is Dickinson’s oral delivery of Penn’s scroll to his fellow colonists. It argues that a self-sufficient and largely rural Pennsylvania—one in which the entire household, including women, contributes to the domestic economy—is the best form of resistance to Britain’s tyranny.

Throughout “The Dream,” Fergusson covers herself with masculine form. She writes a georgic in heroic couplets, like Englishman John Dryden’s influential translation of Virgil’s Georgics. The eighteenth-century British Atlantic associated georgic poetry with state-building because agricultural productivity should regulate nature, civilize citizens, and ensure national prosperity. Politics, and by extension georgics, were the province of men. Though Fergusson was a woman author of her georgic, the poem itself locates her as an inflection point between Penn and Dickinson. Her first-person poem and its political ideas are dressed, or covered, like a man.

Here, the article of men’s clothing most metonymic for Fergusson’s formal turn to masculine dress is the glove. I say glove because the poem is a holograph (handwritten by the author), a material expression of her hand. Eighteenth-century handwriting was gendered: different kinds of script (what we would call cursive today) were taught to men and women. Fergusson’s hand in this poem keeps escaping her control. She has sought to produce a clean, legible, and perhaps elegant copy of “The Dream,” but individual letters and words get squeezed, elongated, truncated, or embellished, reverting to her usually untidy handwriting. Though she wears a man’s glove, her unique and woman’s hand remains present and palpable. One easily forgets that it is Dickinson’s voice, not Fergusson’s, that is delivering the poem’s political sentiments. Her handwriting suggests that for Fergusson, being a covered woman may have felt awkward like an ill-fitting glove, one that she would prefer to discard.

Personal history had given Fergusson much reason for discomfort with being covered by a man. Though she first composed “The Dream” in 1768 as an unmarried Elizabeth Graeme, she transcribed the version below some twenty-two years later, in 1790. It is uncertain whether she edited the poem in the eventful intervening years. Between 1768 and 1790, she had met her future husband, Scotsman Henry Fergusson, at a meeting of her salon; experienced the American Revolution, a cause she initially supported; become embroiled in scandal after she couriered, at her husband’s urging and perhaps unwittingly, a letter encouraging General George Washington to defect to the British (this wasn’t her only such scandal); saw Graeme Park confiscated due to her husband’s enlistment with the British troops (her case wasn’t helped by her own participation in seemingly treasonous actions); was abandoned by her husband; and finally regained control of Graeme Park in 1781, though her personal property had already been sold. She alludes to these years of hardship in her introduction to the poem, where she expresses her disillusion: “How little did I think when I was writing this Rural Peice that I should have my Husband and Nephew exild in Consequence of the Independancy.”

By 1790, when she transcribed this version of “The Dream,” Fergusson would have had enough of being a woman covered by a man, even if she could not fully disrobe and deliver (or even take credit for) Penn’s scroll herself. For me, then, reading the holograph of Fergusson’s “The Dream” in her singular and often messy script causes me to observe a kind of gleefulness in the public appearances of former or soon-to-be-former First Ladies Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. Watching their speeches, in which their own forms are front and center, is to see them bare-handed, their husbands’ gloves pulled off and discarded.

A Note on the Text

To the best of our knowledge, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s “The Dream” (1768) has never been published before now. We have edited and annotated her 1790 transcription of the poem, the earliest extant version of which we know. The 1790 transcription comes from her manuscript book Poemata Juvenalia, housed at the Library Company of Philadelphia. The book is part of a two-volume collection that she made of her own writings. A later, revised version of “The Dream” can be found in the second volume, Lania to a Friend. Fergusson’s 1790 transcription is atypically clean and legible. She ruled her pages, included catchwords, and numbered the lines after each hundred. Such markers of care suggest that she expected this transcription to be read by others. In editing the poem, we have added additional line numbers and corrected her misnumbering so that there are line numbers every ten lines. We have removed catchwords and page breaks, and kept her irregular-length stanzas, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. However, sometimes there is little to distinguish her upper- from lowercase letters or her commas from periods, and we have used our best judgment. Fergusson only very occasionally struck through or inserted words and phrases. These corrections have been silently included in our edition. In a few places, she scraped the page and wrote the lines fresh. We have not sought to determine what she wrote originally in those places. A large portion of the poem is ostensibly the contents of Penn’s celestial scroll. When quoting the scroll, Fergusson provided running quotation marks down the left margin, only adding closing quotations at the end of the stanzas. When she neglected to include the quotation marks, we have silently inserted them. The poem includes handwritten footnotes, some in Fergusson’s hand, some in unknown hands (perhaps hers occasionally). Some of these notes are dated. All of these notes are included with our endnotes. Fergusson’s notes (“Author’s note”) are distinguished from those in unidentified hands (“Manuscript note”).

The Dream
A Poem

This little peice was wrote in October 1768: At a time when th’Americans thought themselves unkindly treated by the English; upon which the Colonies were Endeavoring to turn their thoughts on the produce of their own Country; and trying to retrench[i] the use of those Comoditys Which are imported from Brita[i]n: as they thought Both their Libertys and Propertys unjustly Struck at by the Taxes and Dutys which the Mother Country levied on the American Colonys.

How little did I think when I was writing this Rural Peice that I should have my Husband and Nephew exild in Consequence of the Independancy—now 1790

The Contents.

A Spring Evening described. Sleep. a Dream. A view of th’Atlantic Ocean. Britania her Speech to America. William Penn[ii] the first founder of Pennsylvania appears and Answers the Genius of Britain.[iii] delivers a Scroll to be read to his people. Gods particular Care of Nations. The fruitfulness of the Country. Nature to be followd: extreems shund. The Beauty of true Simplicity. The rural Life pleasing to Heaven. Innocent chearfulness Acceptable to God. A Digression to Virgils Georgics.[iv] Nature and Religion closly conected. Th’ Animal Creation a lively Lesson of Industry. The Bee, the Spider, the Beaver,[v] their Ingenuity. the Care of the Birds to their young. A view of Summer: the richness of that Season; All Nature sensible of the Sun’s Force. the Division and rolling round of the Seasons should fill Mankind with Serious thoughts of th’importance of Time; as every Day brings us nearer to or sets us at a greater distance from th’Almighty. Autumn the plenty of that Season; advice not to Neglect the poor and friendless at that time. Enjoyment of all the Comforts of Life Allowable And the Mistake is only in th’ Excess. Winter Evening describd as spent in domestic Life in A Country family. A disswasive from making use of Slaves in tillage. An adress to Commerce the use it has been to Pensylvania; but Compard now to a drooping Flower. The Beauty of Liberty and the Deformity of Faction.

The Dream
A Poem
Wrote In October 1768
Philadelphia
The Philosophical Farmer.[vi]

The Dream.
A Poem.[vii]

When soft Ey’d May did vernal Treasurs pour,
And filld Creation with a fragrant Show’r:
When Heavens rich Arch glowd with resplendent Light,
Supreamly radiant with the Queen of Night:[viii]
When all was Solemn, calm, and mild Serene;
And no rude Sound disturbd the silent Scene.
With heedless Steps I innocently strayd;
Where babbling Waters in smooth murmurs playd;
The Banks of Delawars[ix] rich stream I viewd,
[10] And Active Fancy various themes pursu’d.
A swift Succession thro my Brain there past,
The Wand of Morpheus[x] oer my Eyes was cast,
Sweetly invaded my exhausted Frame
Sleep soft Composer! uninvited came!
Lull’d every Sorrow of my Anxious Breast,
And laid each Tumult to a peaceful Rest.
The Mind unfetterd fled her native Home,
And unimprisond did unbounded Roam;
Burst every Barrier of her waking Care,
[20] And launc[h]’d unbodied thro’ the yielding Air.                                                           
A New fine Motion she thro Ether[xi] found:
Disdaining Matter, and terestrial Ground;
As featherd Songsters skim th’ airy space,
Like the fleet Movments of the fluttering Race:
Then down quick tumbling from a pointed Rock
Fearful I fell, and dread th’impending Shock.[xii]
Yet sunk as gently as when downy Beds
With Soft Indulgence kind refreshment spreads.[xiii]
A pleasing Wonder fill’d my active mind,
[30] And Gloomy Terror could no Harbor find.
A spacious Vale methought showd various Charms,
And Met th’Ocean with extended Arms;
The vast Atlantic rolld his proud Waves round,
And touchd with Majesty the neighboring Ground:
Soft, and more Soft, his Azure Billows rose;
A gentle Motion did his waves disclose:
Till smooth they grew as the pelucid[xiv] Stream,
That gayly glitters to the Suns rich Beam:
His bosom parted; as when Israels Host,
[40] Lost Nile’s proud Sons on famished Egypts Coast.[xv]    
A liquid Wall on either Side was seen
And a delightful solid Path between.
There, Albions[xvi] Genius in full splendor stood,
And claimd Dominion o’er the briny Flood:
Fiercly she lookd; with haughty warmth she glowd;
And to the West an angry Eye bestow’d.
“What means she cryd this factio[u]s upstart Race
“For them I leave my concave Grottos place;
“Dare they reject my Commerce and my Power,
[50] “And spurn my Influence in a fatal Hour?
“Shall the rich Vessel part my Waves no more
“Nor fling my treasures on their woody Shore?
“Shall taste, and Elegance, of every kind,
“Be by the Natives of those wilds resignd?
“Forbid it Royalty! forbid it Trade!
“Albion forbids and she shall be obeyd!
“Draw forth ye daring Tribes Retract your claim
“And learn to tremble at a Britons Name.”
            She spoke indignant, with commanding Sound,
[60] The Waters murmurd; and the waves rolld round:
The rough Sea echod to th’angry Tone
And ownd her Misstress of his depths alone.
Then to the West with wondring Eyes I saw,
A lucid Cloud its silver lining draw;
With purple Edging was it glorious fring’d,
And blushing Crimson oer the foldings ting’d.
A Form Celestial, venerable, Good,[xvii]
Lookd down complacent on th’ Azure Flood:
Mild Truth resplendent round him stood confest
[70] As he the Genius of the Deep adrest.    
            “Guardian of England! listen and Atend
“For Heaven inspires and is fair Virtues Friend:
“Great is your Power; but still that Power has Law,
“And God, and Reason certain Limits draw,
“I once claimd Britain, for my Natal Soil;
“And thence I led a hardy Race for Toil,
“These Western Woods from Savage Steps we cl[ear]ed
“And just I[n]dustry her rich Ensigns reard.
“We fled the soft delights of downy Ease,
[80] “For Manly Liberty and virt[u]ous Peace;
“Conveneince, Comfort, Elegance, arose,
“And Curious Science did her Charms disclose:
“My Pennsylvania flourishd fair to view;
“Divinely Waterd with Celestial Dew.
“No cramping[xviii] Bigot dard prescribe harsh Rules
“From the proud Customs of Tyranic Schools;
“All who claimed Jesus as the Son of God,
“Those trod the Mazes of Religions Road:
“Freedom we honord; but did Faction hate
[90] “The vile Subverter of a new formd State.
“Heaven [seems] to favor our obscure Retreat,
“And dove like Peace here fixd Her rural Seat,
“But earthly Bliss is still a fleeting Cloud
“That Sorrows Mantle will at last enshroud.
“A grasping few with Narrow sordid View
“And Slavish Shackels my dear Sons pursue;
“Tho fair America they see with Pain
“And seek to bind her with a lordly Chain
“Yet know tho’ Liberty is oft abusd,
[100] “And her bright Name to various ills misusd   
“She glows untainted in some worthy Breasts
“The Sacred Flame in virtuous Bosoms Rests:
“Some Patriotic merit yet remains,
“With ardent Zeal on Pennsylvanias Plains;
“Thousands and thousands catch the happy Fire:
“And to the generous noble warmth Aspire.
“Such is the Fate of human things below,
“So sadly blended, it is hard to know;
“If selfish Faction and licentious Strife
[110] “Push not the Current of impet[u]ous Life:
“All passion dread as you a fire would Shun
“[Hard] to extinguish where its [now] begun!
“Sad fate of Language! that ‘tis not confind,
“To show the feelings of the honest Mind
“Hence Candor, Liberty, the Patriots Sigh;
“The Laws of Honor, and each virt[u]ous Tye
“Lose half their Energy, their nervous Force,
“By being tainted in so base a Course:
“These Hacknyed Themes from every mouth transpire
[120] “And all dare [boast] of Virtues hallow’d fire.
“But Time alone, the true Criterion, proves
“Who hates pious Virtue or pure Virtue Loves.”
            Me thought I saw a fair long written Scroll
Our pious Founder did the Leaf unroll;
Gently to me the happy Spirit drew,
And in my Bosom this commission threw,
“Go show my Children what is written here
“May Pennsylvania hold my precepts dear.”
            The Cloud swift vanishd and th’ azure Main,
[130] Became a vernal and delightful plain;   
Where to the West rolld Schuylkills[xix] limpid Streams
And East grand Delaware met Sols[xx] first Beams.
A busy Multitude around were seen,
And trod in groupes the tufted vivid Green.
One youth Conspicuous, towerd above the rest[xxi]
This Countrys Freedom had inspired his Breast
To him the scroll I instantly resignd
That he its Characters should strait unwind.
With modest Diffidence he graceful Bowd
[140] And read their meaning to the listning Crowd.
“Think not my Sons that Gods paternal Eye
“Dont all Creation in an instant Spy?
“For if a sparrow touches not the Earth[xxii]
“Unseen by him who gave all Nature Birth:
“And each hair numberd in his Sacred Page
“An Injurd Nation must his Care ingage:
“For small and great are only terms below
“Our maker does the whole Gradation know
“Tho’ happy, glorious, of all Good possest,
[150] “He views the Sorrows of each suffering Breast:
“Points out Expedients for a peoples Rise;
“And Blesses Virtue from his Sacred Skys;
“Such is your tangled and embarrassd Fate;
“Such is the Nature of the present State;
“You must rich Commerce for a time resign
“Nor need you deeply at the Change[xxiii] repine.
“Then hear my Children all your native Store,
“What Bountys Heaven does on y^r Country pour.
“So highly favord in your Natal soil,
[160] “It asks but Easy and well seasond Toil:
“Each useful Thing for Lifes fair path is found
“And fertile plenty scatters Bliss around.
            “Yet not from choice you Britons wealth disdain
“Only to fly the Fe[tter] galling Chain.
“To lesser Evils thro’out Life we run,
“When we a greater wisely seek to shun.
“Then hear the methods I point out to view
“How you may Plentys liberal Wallks pursue.”
            “Keep simple Nature in your steady Eye
[170] “Observe her movements, her Directions spy;
“Tho’ the great Parent of a numerous Race
“She smiles benignly on that favord place;
“Where she is Courted, honord, and reverd;
“Her precepts valu’d; and her Laws are heard
“There will she rise in Majesty Divine
“As Gods Chief Agent most Illustrious Shine.
“Not Rough and Rugged as the savage kind,
“Whom Rules cant fetter, nor soft Manners bind;
“Not deaf to social and endearing Life,
[180] “Not bold, Contentious, full of angry Strife;   
“Not chargd with vengeance and malicious guile
“Unconscious of the sympathetic Smile
“Where Bosoms feel not for a Brothers grief
“Nor Souls fly speedy to a Friends relief;
“Not such the Manners that I wish to Reign
“In Brutal Roughness on my favord Plain.”
“A happy Medium be my Sons your Guide
“From rustic rudeness, and a splendid pride:
“As you would flee the Savage Indians roads,[xxiv]
[190] “Trod by the Nations of your green Abodes;  
“To shun the softning Lure of British Wealth,
“The fair subverter of your Countrys Health:
“Too nice,[xxv] too elegant, for your new Soil;
“A sweetend poison; a distructive smile.
“Live Independant of her gewgaw[xxvi] Charms
“In shunning them you shun a train of Harms:
“Turn then from Commerce your too blinded Eyes,
“And learn your Countrys own produce to prize.
“Nor think the Subject mean[xxvii] that points the Way
[200] “How Toil industrious pleasure shall convey;
“Labor and Rest shall just Alternates know,
“Sweet is the Rest, which does from Labor flow;
“And sweet that Labor too, supreamly Blest!
“Which Strength recovers by the Balm of Rest:
“Show by your Actions, not in wordy War,
“That Patriotic Liberty is dear;
“Dear to your Souls as Ophirs[xxviii] purest Gold,
“And for no price, be sacred Freedom Sold.
            “With all thats useful does your Earth abound
[210] “Then dig most chearful her maternal Ground;
“There the rough Iron lays in virgin Ore
“And gives in loads a hardy ponderous Store;
“The nodding Forest yields a wood of Fire,
“To make the Metal every Form acquire;
“For Ships, for Tools, for every Stroke of Art
“That Man Ingenious wishes to impart.”
            “Your Wool-clad Sheep unite in grazing Flocks
“And frisk delighted on the hilly Tops;
“Shear their soft Coats; and draw the fleecy Wool
[220] “In threads extended from the whirling Spool:
“Thence Manufactured in a decent Form
“In Winters Cold to keep your household warm;
“And Mark industry for the Female Bands,
“And gives Employ to ancient feeble Hands,
“Whose Strength admits not Labors ardent Toil
“Whose sex too tender for to dig the Soil.”
           “Observe with Pleasure that delightful green
“The highest Verdure of the verdant Scene,
“The shooting Flax[xxix] in all its turns pursue;
[230] “Till on the Mead the whitening Web you view:
“By murmuring Waters and pelucid Streams;
“Wet the fine Linnen in the Suns warm Beams;
“Till it a fairness on the meadow Shows
“Pure as the surface of untroden Snows:
“This Task my Daughters Be immediate thine
“In Life Domestic ye were born to Shine;
“Sweet in Simplicity in native Charms,
“Turn turn from Pleasurs too bewitching Arms;
“By just Employ you fly a Groupe of Ills
[240] “That oft the Breasts of Idle Females fills.
“Yet Chearfulness with Innocence and joy
“May share the moments from severe Employ
“The God of Spirits loves your Bliss to See,
“He is no Stern no dreadful Deity:
“Think not the Lord of all delights to Scan
“A Surly Sorrow in repining Man;
“Who Bows his Head as the bent Bull-Rush down
“And views His maker only in a frown;
“Such feel the Devils in their Hell below
[250] “Perhaps that Terror the worst Hell they know.”
            “As Joy, Complacence, and a Source of Love;
“Fill up the Moments of the Blest above
“So you who placed are on a middle State,
“Must Joy, and Sorrow, thro’ your Moments date:
“Alternate Chequerd is your earthy Lot,
“So let your Station never be forgot:
“Let humble Confidence your Bosoms warm
“And steady Reason every Act inform;
“Know you can fall; yet hope you[’re] born to rise,
[260] “In happy Splendor to your native Skys;
“Indulge this Virt[u]ous, this expecting Joy,
“It shall the stings of venomd Life destroy.”
            “But now ‘tis Freedom’s more immediate Cause,
“That you from Luxurys Attractions draws:
“To show proud Albion that you can resign
“Her Manufactures, and her Trade decline:
“When weighty Taxes do each good invade
“And strike at Liberty, that lovely Maid!
“Safe let her rest beneath your Western Skys;
[270] “And fall her Martyrs; or her Heroes rise.”
            “But know abstracted from your present State
“Tis there, ‘tis certain past the last debate;
“That Comfort flows not from the Pallace wall
“Nor comes Obsequious at the Wealthys call.
“Th’Almighty Parent of the world assignd,
“Some Source of Pleasure to all human kind;
“And if the Sons of Comus boast their joy[xxx]
“In wanton Revels; soon those Revels Cloy:
“The sparkling Bowl with Bitterness is crownd;
[280] “And Dissapointment hovers all around:
“Thus the voluptious in each new excess
“Finds more untasted, than he can possess;
“The Blosom promises beyond the Fruit
“He Spurns the present for some fresh pursuit
“And Idle vacancy gives some new Plan;
“And holds up Phantoms to deluded man.”
            “Thus when the Peasant does your Pity Share,
“By constant Labor, and a Scanty Fare;
“You recollect not half the Ills you feel
[290] “In the Atainment of the studyd Meal:
“The train of Wants that Elegance will draw
“When you are fetterd by Gay Fashions Law:
“The Strings of Envy that in little Minds
“Which Wealth Superior in the Neighbor finds:
“The Shifts, the Meanesses, to make a glare
“That Fools may wonder; and aplauding Stare;
“Such are the draw backs on the Heart that aims
“To square its Wishes by anothers claims;
“These are the Taxes thro’ Lifes fashiond Ways
[300] “When Fancy flys from Sober Reasons Rays:
“Stop at Convenience; That you may procure,
“And no one hardships need in Life endure:
“More Health, more Chearfulness, and more Content;
“Would in your Stations be to each one lent:
“Oh could you view the happy rural Scene!
“Where minds for Comfort do not Weakly lean
“On foreign Pleasures, and on foreign Joys;
“That fly when tasted or repeated Cloys:
“You might exult beneath your peaceful Clime
[310] “And bring the Fables of the golden Time
“Back to your sight; in those primevial Days                                                                                   
“Where happy poets; happier scenes displays:
“But leaving Fiction let your Eye pursue
“The Sacred Page where you may [pleasing] view;
“The pious Patriarch with blest delight
“And Mamre’s Plain and Shady Oak invite;[xxxi]
“There dwells the Sage, as Prophet, Priest, and King;
“Around extending his all shielding Wing;
“Friendly each night beneath his vernal-Oak
[320] “He did the Strangers weary Steps invoke
“To rest from Travel underneath his Shed,
“And taste the Comfort of his rural Bed:
“Such Hospitality pleasd Israels God
“His Angel Shelterd in the kind Abode!
“The worthy Host was from Destruction spard
“While guilty Sodom[xxxii] fiery Vengeance shard.”
            “Listen my Sons while I a portrait plan
“Do you intently all the movements Scan
“Of Rural Manners; as the Seasons glide,
[330] “And Lights bright Circle does your Time divide:
“Thro’ the gradation of the rolling year
“Till the Suns Orb surounds your lower Sphere.
“How pleasing in Springs vernal Seasons Time,
“The striking Emblem of Man’s youthful Prime;
“To mark th’ Earth her frozen Sap unbind,
“And melt and soften to the Southern wind:
“Shoot out the Treasurs that she holds in Store
“And rich luxuriance on each Land[scape] pour.
“Yet not alone her lovely face admire,
[340] “To action them with busy Steps Aspire;
“Dig and manure th’opening thawing Soil
“Nor spare the Labor of industrious Toil.
“In Romes Gay Court when Grand Augustus[xxxiii] reignd
“The rural Poet every Ear detaind;
“The theme and writer were by all admird
“A deathless Fame this happy Verse acquird
“He more true Knowledge in those Lines conveyd
“By teaching Methods for the Peasants aid;[xxxiv]
“Than when he did great Ilions[xxxv] fall recite,
[350] “And the dark Terrors of that gloomy Night,  
“When good Eneas left his Native Shore,
“New Lands untroden hardly to explore.
“The Mantuan swain[xxxvi] was heard with higher joy
“When simple Subjects did his Pen employ;
“Than when the Passion of an injurd Queen
“Was in his Numbers but too lively seen;
“When Life with Honor was to Dido lost
“Soon as Eneas left Rich Carthage’s Coast.”
            “Think not these Subjects then beneath y^r view
[360] “But Native skill my darling Sons pursue;
“Close with Religion are her Precepts wove
“Man must his Maker in his Works approve:
“Then turn transported to the mighty Source
“That gives the System its surprizing Course.
“Birds Beasts and Reptils do to mankind preach
“All to the Heart some useful Moral teach;
“What you from Dearth of Language Instinct Name
“Is what the Race of Animals all Claim:
“Is Nature pointed to the properest Ends,
[370] “Which to the Good of Individual[s] Tends:
“In feelings given by the Lord supream
“To keep in harmony the wondrous scheme
“Of Life and Nature; so the various Aims;
“Each Race of Beings from their Parent Claims:
“All as Lights scatterd Rays converge at last
“To bind the Chain the curious system fast.
“Then let not Nature raise her voice in vain
“Nor let proud Man these useful Hints disdain;
“Know they immediate for thy aid were sent
[380] “As proper Lessons for thy service lent.
“When the wise Bee who can fully excell
“Loads with rich Fragrance all her waxen Cells;
“And Sips the sweetness of her shining Flower
“From sunny Banks or shady gloomy Bow’er:
“Let this a Hint to wondring man throwout,[xxxvii]
“Like her to guard his native House about;
“While the Drone exild knows no happy home
“A useless vagrant does neglected roam.”
            “Mean tho’ the Spider to your Eyes appear,
[390] “Nor by her Figure does her Deeds endear:
“Yet the neat Loom was first to Mankind given[xxxviii]
“Thro’ this small Creature by the will of Heaven:
“Her curious Web alternated fine,
“First taught the notion of the flaxen Line;
“As the thin filaments she artful Drew,
“And wove and plaited the perplexing Clue.
“The wondrous Beaver by the waters Side,[xxxix]
“First in Contrivance stands of Beasts the Pride!
“Large Logs, and Trees those Active People bring
[400] “And in a Compact all united fling:
“Their Houses built Commodious, strong, and Large
“Neatly constructed at the Public Charge,
“With Walls and Ramparts firmly guarded Round
“No Spot defencless near their Forts are found:
“Best for each purpose is each movment pland
“As Reasons Eye the wondrous whole had scand.”
            “The Featherd Familys in Chorus join,
“To prove the Goodness of a Hand divine;
“The Care minute of their enfeebled Race
[410] “The soft Enclosures of the little Place
“Where the fond mother kindly hopes to rest
“And guard from rudeness all her helpless Nest:
“This whispers fore thought to the Female Trains,
“A lively Picture to the Sex remains;
“Of Soft Attention, and Maternal Care
“That no Indulgence to their young ones spare.”
            “Thus All Creation is a living Page,
“Which should the Eye of Reasons Sons engage;
“Too vainly proud of that superior Claim:
[420] “They boast all haughtily of the Sounding Name:
“Their Shame or Glory as by them tis usd,
“Mans chief Abasment when the most abusd!”
            “Now tread with me the blushing Summers morn
“When Fruits and Foliage the gay Scenes adorn;
“Nature maturer glows in vivid Hues,
“And Early glitters through the pearly Dews:
“Life, Action, Pleasure, Animate each grove
“And all the Raptures of the Seasons prove!
“The happy Farmer views with honest joy,
[430] “The growth luxurient of his late imploy;
“The vallys sing; the Hills with plenty smile,
“And bend beneath the rich and golden Spoil:
“In shining Rows swell the redundant Grains
“And droop oer loadend on the yellow Plains:
“They wave in chorus to the gentle Breeze,
“A rustling quiver to the fluttring Trees.
“An undulating motion o’er them Skims
“As the Soft Air light on their Surface swims.”
            “The fleecy Flocks resign their Tufts of Wool
[440] “From them swift transferd to the whirling spool;
“Chearful they yield their Warm and useful Charge
“And leap exulting oer the Fields at large:
“Range thro’ the meadow, or the solemn Grove
“And all the joys of thoughtless Freedom prove.
“A lovely Eden[xl] rises to the Sight,
“And fills the Bosom with Serene delight:
“Earth, Air, and Water feel the Suns warm rays,
“And glow beneath his peircing genial Blaze.
“The God of Nature gives this Sun his power,
[450] “And marks the Action of each fleeting Hour:
“Whether an Innocence of Soul you feel,
“Or impious Malice in your Breast conceal;
“His the Religion of the virt[u]ous Heart;
“That the great Fount that does a Bliss impart:
“All actions tingd from that one Cistern flow
“From thence polluted or refind they glow;
“Tis not th’End of unforseen Events,
“But tis the Nature of the Soul’s intents;
“Makes man accepted in the Sight of God,
[460] “And turns to Mercy the vindictive Rod.
“Thus every Season Stamps you good or Ill;
“As you the movments of Times Circle fill:
“Tremendous Certainty! most awful Thought!
“To know each instant we are nearer brought.
“Or further distanced from the Lord above,
“The Source of Comfort, and the Spring of Love!
“Each rolling Period brings an honest joy
“When wisely measurd by a just Employ.”
            “The God of Nature when he walked on Earth[xli]
[470] “He who pre[s]ided at Creations Birth.
“Declard no monarch in his Eastern Power,[xlii]
“Could vie in Beauty with a simple Flower:
“State and Magnificence at once must yield
“To the fair Lilly that adornd the Field;
“Such the Decision of the Son of God;
“As thro’ Judeas neighboring meads he trod.[xliii]
“Then think my Sons a rural Life is Best,
“When God with kindness has your Soil thus blest,
“Pursue the Seasons with a grateful Soul,
[480] “As they alternate thro’ Lifes Circle roll.”
            “Now bounteous Autumn bends beneath his weight
“And pours profusely at the Farmers Gate;
“The folded Corn, and every [O]thr Grain[xliv]
“Is gatherd chearful from the Stubble plain:
“The hoary Morn and evenings chilly Frost
“Quicken Mans Labor lest his Toil be lost;
“Since Nature lavishes a generous Store,
“Turn not the helpless from your rustic Door:
“With open Hand a liberal share impart
[490] “To Glad the pensive, and the widowd Heart;
“So shall that little Sanctifye the whole
“In double increase for the well Timd toll.
“Use the remainder with a decent joy,
“The honest earnings of a just Employ.
“Let gloomy Souls preach heaviness of Heart,
“And fears, and Terrors dreadfuly impart,
“Taste not, and touch not; is their narrow Cry
“Lest you ofend an angry Diety.”                                                                             
            “Tis Superst[it]ion! littleness of Mind![xlv]
[500] “God sheds his Bountys on the human kind,
“A grateful Heart is pleasing in his Sight
“A chearful Spirit does the Lord delight,
“Tis th’ Excess, but not th’ Use ofends
“Each good is purpos’d to proportiond Ends;
“Those Bounds exceeded terminate in Pain
“And teach in Sorrow that Man must abstain.
“Heaven then disgusted throws the pointed Dart
“And Strik[e]s with venom the volupt[u]ous Heart.
“Now shortning Days and lengthning Nights roll round
[510] “The keen Frost whitens all the hardning Ground;
“The lowing Cattle claim peculiar Care
“And all mans Household should Protection Share:
“Let not that Household be of Africs Bands
“From the Scorchd Borders of parchd Guineas lands[xlvi]
“Draw not a People form their Natal Coast,
“While you the Rights of sacred Freedom Boast.
“Can different Color Stamp a Man a Slave?
“Unworthy Notion of a spirit Brave!
“Weak Plea to argue they are Happy Made,
[520] “When torturing Shackels do their Peace invade;
“To Every Bosom is fair Freedom Dear
“Her Loss of Losses is the most Severe;
“A Real Evil, a substantial Wo[e]
“All Men from Vassalage must undergo.
“And tho their Labor should enrich your Soil,
“Despise the gleanings of so forcd a Toil;
“Where the Heart Curses what the Hand pursues
“And oft in Vain for gentle Pity Sues:
“Their Crys when Injurd do to Heaven ascend
[530] “For God at last the wretched will defend;
“The Poor, and Captive his Attention Shares
“The Sigh of Sorrow reach his Sacred Ears;
“The Groan of Anguish scales his holy Throne
“And every Tear in Bitterness is known.”
            “Now Winter comes in all his chilling Trains
“No vernal Beauty ornament the Plains;
“The fields diserted harrowd up from Toil
“Ice chains the Rivers, and close Binds the Soil.
“Here happy Home becomes Mans chief delight
[540] “Now mark the Picture of the rural Night.
“The tender Father with his little Race,
“Are close collected in a narrow Space;
“Th’active Blaze the social Circle Warms
“While kind Instruction curious minds informs.
“First Sacred Scripture filld with pious Truth
“Is read with Caution to attentive Youth;
“This is your Bulwork; this your Source of Good
“The Souls Subsistance; and its Mental Food:
“The Anxious Parent prays that Grace divine
[550] “May light each Period and infold each Line.”
            “His Female Partner tums the Wheel[xlvii] around
“While soft Complacence in her Breast is found;
“That conscious Worth which Innocence bestows
“Thro’ every Act does Dignity disclose:
“Graces each Motion, animates and Cheirs
“And the lest Movment by some way endears.
“Well timd Employ to every Sex and age;
“Does the fond Groupe attentively engage;
“Their hopd reward, is that the Parents Eye
[560] “With Aprobation may their Progress spy.
“Oft Tomsons gentle rural themes are read;[xlviii]
“Beneath the Shelter of their humble Shed:
“Or the smooth numbers of the Mantuan Swain
“Who paints the Culture of Romanias Plain;[xlix]
“Now modern Italy: But ah how lost!
“No more the Shepherd, nor the Heroes Boast;
“Dead to each manly and each honest joy
“Loose loves, loose Sonnets all their Hours employ;
“Plain in their Lot this weighty Truth is shown
[570] “That all is lost, when Liberty is flown
“Too soft for virtue, pliant but to Vice,
“The Soul becomes fastidious and Nice;
“Binds all its Force to things beneath its Care
“And Pants for Triffles light as Summers Air.”
            “Milton, and Lock, and Addison, are read,[l]
“Each Page where Virtues lovely Form is spread:
“The Tale, the Poem, and the Fable may
“If managd right all useful Truths convey:
“To one bright Point may different Roads converge[li]
[580] “And Vice, and folly in their Pictures Scourge;
“Raise up meek Merit, crush the Foot of Pride
“That seeks Mild Virtue in her Cell to hide;
“Draw forth the Honest to the Public Sight
“And place their Goodness in a Beam of Light;
“When such the motives of th’Authors Plan
“Do not too rigidly his conduct scan;
“When Truth and Virtue Animates and Warms
“He may like Proteus[lii] move in various forms.
“Thus pass the Seasons, such the Farmers Life
[590] “Exempt from Envy and tumult[u]ous Strife;
“Within himself he may each Comfort find
“That can give Pleasure to the human kind:
“A decent Plenty and a golden Mean[liii]
“Around his House in just arange are seen;
“Love, and Affection, and each Social Tye;
“That fills the Heart with mutual Sympathy:
“A soul dilated from a Conscience pure;                                                                   
“A Body hardy that can ought endure
“Of Heat and Cold, viscitudes[liv] below!
[600] “The happy feelings of a healthful Glow;
“These are his Treasures, Treasures truly namd!
“Their Spring is Nature, by calm Reason aimd;
“Tracing his God in every Plant and Flower
“In all the Beautys of the fragrant Bower.
“In the fine movments of the spangled Night,
“Or the meridian of the Lamp of Light;[lv]
“No vile Dependence undermines his Truth
“No City Vices Sap the Bloom of Youth;
“No false Refinments Constitute his Taste
[610] “No ill timd Elegance his Substance waste.
“But God and Nature are his sacred Guides
“And Reasons Torch, a steady Light provides;
“A noble Liberty his Spirit proves,
“A generous Freedom all his Actions moves;
“Now independant is the Rural Plan
“More his own Master is the Rustic Man;
“Than most of Beings In whose Lot you find
“A train of Shackels to drain down the Mind:
“Tho’ all mankind must Social Fetters draw
[620] “This Is Societys compacted law.[lvi]
“The useful Links of Mans connected Chain,
“The close Dependance of the Human Train
“Checks pride and Folly, Meliorates the Soul
“And makes kind feelings in the Bosom Roll.”
            “Hail noble Commerce! Pennsylvanias boast!
“Let not your Merit in my theme be lost;
“Judge not I seek your Virtue to Depress,
“Or with reluctance your high Worth confess;
“Be yours the Glory of Yon growing Pile[lvii]
[630] “The honest Harvest of your [Watry] Toil:
“Trade reard her Banners; and her Ensigns spread
“In Pomp[lviii] she raisd her unsuspecting Head:
“Long there she flourished like a fragrant Flower
“The richest Triumph of some lovely Bower.
“Cast her fine foliage and her sweets around
“And Scaterd beautys on the shinning ground.
“Fed the wise Ant and th’ Industrious Bee
“And gave her Treasures undisturbd and free
“Till on a fatal and a cruel Day
[640] “A cold North-wind did frozen Blasts convey:
“Shriveld the luster of its lovely Hue,
“And bathd its brightness in a chilling Dew;
“It fades, it droops, it seeks its natal Earth,
“Resigns its Honors, and forgets its Birth:
“Lost and low troden with the Common Clay
“Tis bore neglected from its Soil away:
“But in some Period that is yet unborn
“The lovely Flower may still your wallks adorn;
“Shine out Refulgent and revive to light
[650] “And by fresh Luster every Eye invite.
“Make Pennsylvania blest in every Sweet
“The happy Harbor and the calm retreat
“Of Worthy Foreigners from every Land,
“A Pleasing, social, and a generous Band;
“There Hospitality with open Door
“Shall pour delighted from Profusions Store;
“To distant Trav’lers a kind Welcome give
“And mutual take, and mutually receive
“The various Produce of each differing Soil
[660] “With honest frankness and binignant[lix] Smile.
“Then shall Brittania her own Interest view
“And soft measures will at last pursue;
“Self Love will teach her by new Plans to move
“And you the Sweets of Noble freedom prove;
“But for a Time that Freedom to Secure
“You must the Loss of Elegance endure;
“Turn then your thoughts to rural Manners now
“And break the Glebe[lx] with th’ ind[en]ting Plough.
“Pray th’ Almighty kind to bless your Toil;
[670] “And look down gracious on your culturd Soil;
“Far, far be Faction from your People fled
“Of every Evil most that Monster dread;
“As widely different from true Freedoms Form,
“As the chaste Flame which does the Matron warm
“Is from the Fire that animates the Breast
“Of wanton Lais when she stands confest[lxi]
“The loose enticer of some hapless Youth
“Who flys from Virtue, and the Paths of Truth.
“Freedom, and Faction never can unite,
[680] “Tho undestinguishd to the Vulgars Sight,
“A nice Decorum in the one is Seen
“Th’other boasts an Insolence of Mien;”
           “Adieu my Sons! this last advice revere
“Fear God alone, but never Albion Fear.”
A buzing Murmur of Applause flew round
And filld the confines of the Neighboring Ground;
Loud as when Waters dash the pebbled Shore
And hallow winds at first are heard to roar.
Sleep fled reluctant at the gathering Sound
[690] No more his Fetters all my Senses bound;
I wakd by Schuylkills murmur[ing] winding Tyde!
No more the Streams did undulating glide:
A Storm of Thunder hoverd from on High
And Lightnings Darted from the Fiery Sky
No gentle Zephyr flutterd on the Trees
No waters bubbled to the Curling Breeze;
In one short Hour the placid Scene was fled
[698][lxii] And Gloom and Darkness oer all Nature spread.

                                                            Laura[lxiii]

            Graeme Park October ^th 15 1768

Further Reading

Anne M. Ousterhout’s posthumously published The Most Learned Woman in America: A Life of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (University Park, Penn., 2004) offers a readable and thorough biography of Fergusson. Ousterhout’s book is introduced by Susan M. Stabile, whose own book, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004), presents a fascinating account of the interconnection of women’s manuscript authorship, handwriting, memory, and domestic spaces. Caroline Wigginton relates Fergusson’s “The Dream” to early American women’s capacious approach to publication in her book In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America (Amherst, Mass., 2016). She discusses the poem and its georgic form in further detail in her essay “Letters from a Woman in Pennsylvania, or, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson Dreams of John Dickinson,” included in Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act, Zachary McLeod Hutchins, ed. (Hanover, N.H., 2016). For the landmark history of women in the American Revolution, see Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980). To learn more about the concept of deputy husbands, read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York, 1991).

[i]  i.e., to diminish or reduce

[ii] Quaker William Penn founded the Pennsylvania colony in 1681.

[iii] Fergusson figures Britain as a woman at several moments in the poem. Sometimes the figure is named Britannia, sometimes Albion, sometimes the Genius of Britain or Albion.

[iv] Virgil’s Georgics was a Latin poem from around 30 BC that became particularly popular in the eighteenth century after British poet John Dryden translated it into English in 1697. This translation sparked in the upper, urban classes of the time an interest in agriculture and its relation to the cultivation of nationhood.

[v] Bee, Spider, Beaver: animal symbols of industry

[vi] Fergusson used the space below the poem’s title to copy another poem. It is not clear if the poem was to accompany “The Dream” or when the poem was added. The poem is “An Acrostic on a Celebrated Nymph” and Fergusson included a marginal bracket on the left to indicate that the last three lines are a triple rhyme. It is an acrostic poem, in which the first letter of each line together spell a word, in this instance LIBERTY:

         Like pure Retreats of tractless Virgin Snows
         In Alpine Heights, where no Rude Footsteps goes!
         Balmy a[s] Zephirs of Sabean Groves;
         Easy and Careless as the Bird that Roves.
         Rural as A[uburn] on the Village Green,
         Tripping Elastic oer the artless Scene,
         Youth, Truth and Vigor, blended in her Mien

         Graeme Park Laura 1790

[vii] This repetition of the poem’s title occurs on the next page.

[viii] i.e., the moon

[ix] Philadelphia was founded on the banks of the Delaware River, which flows into the Atlantic.

[x] Greek god of dreams

[xi] As air filled the lower regions of the atmosphere, a medium called ether was thought to fill the upper regions.

[xii] Manuscript note: “That is a Sensation in dreaming I suppose evry one has Experiencd at times”

[xiii] The manuscript indicates that there is a footnote for this line, but there is no footnote at the bottom of the page.

[xiv] i.e., pellucid, or transparent

[xv] A reference to the Old Testament story of Moses and the Israelites escaping their enslavement in Egypt. God parts the Red Sea for them and then drowns their Egyptian pursuers.

[xvi] Albion, i.e., the island of Britain. See n. 3.

[xvii] Manuscript note: “William Penn who Settled Pennsylvania 1780.” The year likely refers to when the note was added, not the year of Pennsylvania’s founding, 1681.

[xviii] cramping: forcibly narrowing or constricting

[xix] The Schuylkill River flows into the Delaware River. Penn founded Philadelphia at their confluence.

[xx] i.e., the Sun

[xxi] Author’s note: “M^r John Dickinson a gentleman who wrote a Series of Letters Called the Farmers Letters which were almost universaly admird For explaining the Rights of Taxation and the Constitution of Pennsylvania its Charter.” The last four words, followed by a scribble, were added later and are perhaps in a different hand. John Dickinson wrote an influential series of pamphlets, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, from 1767 to 1768 that contained his opinion on the sovereignty of the colonies. He was also opposed to the British taxation of the colonies for revenue, likening it to slavery. Dickinson was an occasional member of Fergusson’s salon.

[xxii] Manuscript note: “Matthew 10c.” The biblical verse Matthew 10:29 reads, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”

[xxiii] i.e., the Royal Exchange, a London precursor to modern stock exchanges

[xxiv] Pennsylvania initially had a peaceful relationship with the region’s resident and neighboring Native nations—the Lenape (or Delaware), the Shawnee, the Susquehannock, the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois)—but these relationships deteriorated into distrust and violence over time, often due to treaty and trade violations as well as land encroachment by colonists. It was difficult for Pennsylvania’s government to regulate the steady influx of European immigrants, many of them non-Quakers who settled in what was called the backcountry.

[xxv] i.e., fastidious or refined

[xxvi] i.e., a showy but useless object

[xxvii] i.e., unimportant or of low social status

[xxviii] Ophir was wealthy biblical port city, noted for sending luxurious tributes to King Solomon.

[xxix] Flax is a plant from which linen is made.

[xxx] Manuscript note: “Comus God of Drunken Revels and feasting.” A revel is a festivity or party, often associated with drinking and unruliness. At celebrations, alcohol was often served as a punch in a bowl.

[xxxi] In the biblical book of Genesis, three strangers, thought to be angels, visit Abraham and Sarah on the Plain of Mamre and promise a child, despite the couple’s advanced age. Within a year, Isaac is born. Abraham and Isaac are two of the three Patriarchs of the Israelites. An oak, still standing today, is said to mark the site.

[xxxii] Sodom is a biblical city destroyed by God for its sinfulness. Abraham pleads with the three angels for its deliverance soon after they visit and promise him and Sarah a child, but the angels are unable to find the requisite ten righteous residents.

[xxxiii] Founder and first emperor of the Roman Empire

[xxxiv] Manuscript note: “This Refers to Virgils Georgicks.” See n. 5. The note has been placed here by the editors, but the manuscript does not indicate where to place the note. There are parentheses around line 334, but they appear to have been added after Fergusson’s 1790 transcription.

[xxxv] Ilion refers to the legendary city of Troy. The Aeneid (29-19 BC), also by Virgil, begins with its titular hero Aeneas (here Eneas) fleeing Troy at the end of the Trojan War, in search of a new home. The new home is Rome, and the Aeneid credits him with its founding. The remainder of the stanza refers to this ancient epic poem, familiar to her coterie.

[xxxvi] i.e., Virgil, who was a native of Mantua, Italy

[xxxvii] i.e., throughout

[xxxviii] Manuscript note: “The Invention of the Loom i[s] thought was sugested by this The Spidr.”

[xxxix] Manuscript note: “There is no Poetical license taken as to the acount of the Beaver[.] read Nature displayd and many other writers on natural History.” This note was likely added after 1804, the publication year of Nicolas Dufief’s Nature Displayed, in Her Mode of Teaching Language to Man (Philadelphia, 1804).

[xl] Biblical garden of God and the home of Adam and Eve before sin

[xli] Manuscript note: “6 Chap^r S^t Matthew 28 Verse.” Matthew 6:28-29 asserts that even the great king Solomon was not as gloriously arrayed as the simple lilies of the field.

[xlii] i.e., King Solomon, an important biblical figure

[xliii] In biblical accounts, Judea, or Judah, was one of the two main regions of the united Israelite kingdom under King Solomon.

[xliv] Manuscript note: “Indian Corn folded different from other Grain.” The phrase “folded Corn” has been underlined in the passage.

[xlv] Vertical manuscript note in left margin: “What Blessings Thy Free Bounty gives Let me not cast away For God is paid when man receives To Enjoy is to Obey Pope’s Prayer.” This is the fifth stanza of Alexander Pope’s poem “The Universal Prayer.”

[xlvi] Guinea, along with Ethiopia, was frequently used, especially in poetry, to refer to Africa. More properly, Guinea is a European term for a portion of West Africa. Many slave ports were located on West Africa’s coast.

[xlvii] i.e., spinning wheel

[xlviii] Scotsman James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726-1730) was a popular poem cycle in four parts, corresponding to the seasons.

[xlix] i.e., Rome’s

[l] John Milton (1608-1674), John Locke (1632-1704), and Joseph Addison (1672-1719) were English authors who remained famous and respected in the eighteenth century.

[li] Fergusson mistakenly wrote “one” twice. The extra “one” has been removed.

[lii] Greek god of seas and rivers known for his elusive and fluid changeability

[liii] Philosophical idea referring to the ideal middle between extremes

[liv] i.e., vicissitudes or changes of fortune

[lv] Perhaps a poetic phrase for midday, when the sun, or “Lamp of Light,” is at the meridian

[lvi] Manuscript note: “This part is meant for Gentleman Farmers not Peasant men Such [as] are in the jers[e]ys [rather] than Pennsylvania.”

[lvii] Manuscript note: “Philadelphia”

[lviii] i.e., magnificent ceremony or display

[lix] i.e., benign or kind

[lx] i.e., soil of the earth

[lxi] Manuscript note: “A famous Greek Courtezan”

[lxii] Fergusson’s line numbers indicate she believes this final line is number 700, but she miscounted in the first third of the poem.

[lxiii] Laura was Fergusson’s well-known poetic pseudonym. Most women writers used them at the time, including those who exclusively wrote and circulated manuscript poetry.

This article originally appeared in issue 16:4.5 (November, 2016).

Caroline Wigginton is assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America (2016) and the co-editor, with Joanna Brooks and Lisa L. Moore, of Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (2012).

William J. Crosby is a recent graduate of the University of Mississippi. He received a BA in English.

Michael C. Cohen’s The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America begins with the observation that nineteenth-century American poetry contains a mass of poems “so popular, so unread, [and] so seemingly unreadable” (12) that critical interest in them has been scant at best. He takes on this body of disregarded poetry not by focusing on reading the poems, but by highlighting their social uses. He looks at how readers forged social connections through poems—by reading them aloud, recopying them, buying and selling them, and in other ways using poems rather than interpreting them. Without quite maintaining that anyone should read the poems he studies, Cohen brings us a cluster of curious finds from the archives, which he discusses in ongoing relation to the career of John Greenleaf Whittier.

Chapter one begins with Whittier’s childhood memories of “a Yankee troubadour” (17) named Jonathan Plummer, who practiced a form of ballad poetry that circulated outside the bounds of the literary sphere. As a Massachusetts “balladmonger” (22), Plummer sold his poems himself—sometimes hawking them in the streets. Cohen notes that Plummer’s work was understood by many of his readers to be “worthless” (37); this worthlessness, however, was necessary to its popularity as a medium of social relations (the process is not unlike how people share things on Facebook in order to assert social connection). The chapter then moves to consider a Mainer named Thomas Shaw, who wrote and transcribed a voluminous amount of verse in which he expressed his hostility to literary culture and the world of printing (he was often unsuccessful in his attempts to publish). Taking the cases of Plummer and Shaw together, Cohen suggests that in the nineteenth century what poetry meant, and what counted as poetry, appeared unstable and often unclear to its practitioners, as did its relation to a distinct literary sphere. Still, what was central to poetry overall was its “social exchange value” (59; italics in the original), which proliferated outside the bounds of whatever solidified literary culture there was.

Chapter two takes up this argument by looking at poetry connected with reform, and with the abolitionist movement in particular. The very “generic-ness” of most abolitionist poems, Cohen writes, mattered because it “prepared them for reprinting and reproduction across different venues” (65), making this poetry important because its emptiness enabled it to build social connections in an implicitly unstructured fashion. Cohen’s reading of an ornate scrapbook edition of Whittier’s abolitionist poetry emphasizes how a group of friends copying out his poems constituted a relationship to poetry outside of authorship, one that contributed to the social fabric of their reform community. The third chapter discusses the genre of the contraband song, songs either actually or only purportedly authored by the formerly enslaved who reached Northern territory during the Civil War (and were classified by the Union as “contraband” of war). An instance of the ambiguity of these songs’ status is that one of the most famous, “At Port Royal,” was actually written by Whittier, and then learned and performed by African American singers. Cohen uses the popularity of such songs as “At Port Royal” and “Let My People Go” as an example of how the circulatability of inauthentic poetry fostered a sense of shared sociality in the post-Civil War United States, in which poems were shareable in part because they were easily torqued into conflicting political directions.

Chapter four returns to the ballad, focusing on the role of the Harvard professor Francis Child in the formalization of the genre. In one of the book’s more striking moments, Cohen relates how Child understood the popular ballad to be a genre defined not by its formal features but by its existence in relation to a society lacking in class difference and without a sense of distinction between literary and popular culture. Cohen argues that while the ballad may lack its supposed natural origin in spontaneous oral culture and have no formal identity, it was powerful just as a name for the concept that there are specific poems around which impressions of social unification cluster. The ballad features in the fifth chapter as the means through which Whittier became enshrined as a major national poet, a process Cohen discusses in relation to an archive of letters written by readers who appreciated Whittier’s poems. Here again, the ballad as a genre names not a quality identifiable in the text, but a quality of readers’ relationship to those poems and their sense of what reading the poems did for them. The final chapter takes up the topic of spirituals and minstrel poetry, arguing that, during Reconstruction, there was no firm boundary in the print culture between minstrel songs and the spirituals that W.E.B. Dubois set forth as central to African American identity. Cohen concludes that “Performance, not race, consolidated black poetry as a tradition after 1870” (224; italics in the original). Put that way, the claim appears not to allow for thinking of race as itself a performance, but the main point seems to be that African American poetry has its “origin . . . in the welter of mid-century and postbellum popular American poetry” (224).

The discussion of the ballad’s status in nineteenth-century American culture—a theme that runs across several of the book’s chapters—is the book’s strongest and most compelling account of how a poetic genre might have a cultural presence without having an identity one could locate in the form or words of any particular poem. The cases of Jonathan Plummer and the interpretation of Whittier, along with other examples throughout, follow the thread of the ballad across the century with persuasive detail. Cohen’s commitment to keeping interpretation at bay has its limitations, and one of them is that the book does not offer as much historical context and explanation as the material calls for. For example, his account of the presentation of spirituals, contraband songs, and minstrel songs as popular commodities open to all and cut off from an authentic origin or fixed meaning traces the flexibility of the songs’ applications without critiquing that flexibility, partly because one of the book’s principles is that the separation between a text and its authorship is implicitly anti-hierarchical and thus liberating. But given the interlacing of conceptions of blackness with the structure of the commodity, market circulation, and openness to use, connections which have been explored in works such as Stephen M. Best’s The Fugitive’s Properties (2004), the stakes of race and circulation raised by this archival material would benefit from further interpretation and historicization. In like measure, the history of how literary and popular culture became striated in the nineteenth century (as considered in Lawrence W. Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow [1990], for instance), and the history of nationalism’s relationship to the Civil War and Reconstruction, are not themselves made much clearer by the book’s account of how poems contributed to these two historical developments. That poetry was so used is evident; what difference that makes to the historical issues is harder to specify.

While Cohen announces that he will “suspend the assumption that poems are meant to be read” (10), and that he is interested in how poems were used rather than in their content, the location of the titular “social lives of poems” remains ambiguous. At times, the point appears to be that the social use of poems had little to do with the poems as such, but in many cases the sociality appears to be located in the texts themselves: Cohen states at one point that “complex social relations inhere in poems” (102), which would place the sociality in the poem rather than in their readers or users. The title’s droll phrasing also suggests that the sociality at stake is a property of the poems, rather than of the human society in which they emerged, and for all its interest in the usage of poems, it would not be accurate to call this book a history of reading or a reception history, as Cohen himself observes. Perhaps as a consequence of the theoretical ambiguity concerning where the social life of poems resides—in persons or in poems—the book does not land as far “beyond the bounds of ‘reading’” (2), and even of new critical formalism’s commitment to the text as the best source of information about a culture, as it aims to do. I take this to be the reason why, as I have already indicated, the book is not at heart a historicist study. It does not stray far from the archival objects that are its primary focus, and it tends to treat those texts as synecdoches of the broader historical period—that do not, therefore, require historical explanation. Ultimately, the departure not from formalism but from historicism struck me as the more significant critical commitment of the book, although this shift away from historical, rather than formal, interpretation is not acknowledged by the author.

This article originally appeared in issue 16:4.5 (November, 2016).

Theo Davis is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University and the author of Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman (2016) and Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (2007).

Southern Provisions is a remarkable piece of scholarship from a remarkable scholar. David Shields’s name is well known to readers of Common-Place for his foundational work on early American belles-lettres, not to mention his pivotal role in founding the Society of Early Americanists. This monograph on southern foodways offers a synthesis of these twin passions for archival research and social organization.

Southern Provisions stretches the literal definition of a monograph in the variety of its ambitions. In its larger conceptions, Southern Provisions has more in common with Nature’s Metropolis (1992), William Cronon’s extensive study of the links between Chicago and its rural hinterlands, than it does with foodways scholarship that is focused on a given dish, crop, or region. The book offers three distinct sections, framed around cooking, selling, and planting, each of which could stand alone. The first section, “Cooking in The South,” details several pinnacles of antebellum southern gastronomy—nineteenth-century fine dining in New Orleans restaurants; the Maryland Club Feast; catering in Charleston; and a more detailed account of a single meal, at the Jockey Club Banquet of February 1, 1860. This section closes with a coda detailing humbler fare, titled “Possum in Wetumpka.” The middle section, “Selling,” details the evolution of the Charleston City Market from 1810 to 1860, the pivotal role an African American ex-Confederate gunrunner played in developing Charleston’s seafood industry, the New York market for southern provisions, and truck farming.

The final section, “Planting in the Lowcountry,” treats specific commodities: Carolina Gold rice, sugar, sorghum, cooking oils, peanuts and peanut oil, and citrus. One of the very salient appeals of this section is that in several cases, the reader can buy, cook, and eat the commodities Shields describes recovering. This history of commodities, considered together, offers an inspiring alternative to the more narrowly focused commodity histories—Mark Kurlansky’s Cod (1997), or Larry Zuckerman’s Potato (1999)—that have populated nonfiction bestseller lists over the last several years.

Across these three sections, Shields works with simultaneous concern for the past and future. There is as much detail as almost anyone could want about the history of southern crops and dishes—the chart detailing sources for South Carolina garden seeds stretches for eight pages (41-49), and represents untold hours of archival work. Shields is most eloquent, however, on efforts to promote the return of several of these vanished crops, most notably Carolina Gold rice. In concert with Glenn Roberts, the proprietor of Anson Mills, and scientists Anna McClung and Gurdev Khush, among others, Shields worked to reintroduce the nearly extinct variety of rice that was the foundation of the Carolina rice kitchen celebrated in Karen Hess’s 1992 book of the same name. This work of recuperation is outside the ambit of most early American scholars, and, not surprisingly, these passages find Shields at his most persuasive. Describing the beginning of this quest, Shields explains, “I wanted to taste that lost variety, whose reputation remained so potent that it sold millions of dollars of anonymous white rice in the nation’s groceries” (231).

Like the germplasm banks that provide some of the resources for this work of agricultural recovery, Southern Provisions contains the seeds of many books. There are crops, institutions, and cooks too numerous to name, all of which emerge as deserving of more extensive scholarship. (This is certainly the first book that made me want to read up on sorghum, for instance.) At the same time, the variety of tasks this book takes on makes it challenging, at times, to engage as a sustained narrative. Chronology works somewhat differently in each of the three sections, and determining exactly how each section relates to the other takes some effort. Geographic range and definition appear equally elastic. Shields’s focus is mainly on South Carolina, except when his stories take him elsewhere. In like measure, his definition of “southern” (like any definition of “southern,” really) will raise objections from partisans of the regions it excludes or neglects. Perhaps because of this capaciousness rather than despite it, Southern Provisions, much more than most academic books, is one that rewards dipping into, both for its historical insights and its compelling prose. It’s rare to review a book for a journal and find oneself reading selections aloud to companions, but a sentence like “Conservation was a rich man’s movement directed against the ambitions of laissez-faire profiteers from the wild” (99) is hard not to share.

Southern Provisions thus shows the many opportunities, and perhaps a few of the pitfalls, that food studies has to offer scholars and enthusiasts of early America. Food has the potential to forge links between the past and the present that resonate in the imaginations of the broader public with a general interest in early American culture. Shields traces many of these links in compelling fashion. The crop restoration projects Shields has promoted offer a kind of reemergence of the past that is impossible to imagine for other facets of early American culture. One cannot walk down King Street in Charleston as it was in 1870, but one can enjoy the same rice that those Charlestonians did.

At the same time, because food, and especially good food, lends itself to celebration, there is always a danger that food-oriented projects focused on recovering a southern past will inevitably offer a somewhat sanitized and cheerful version of that past. This is a cultural history of food, more than it is a social history of food, but in its focus on promoters and impresarios then and now, the immense labor that attends any agricultural work can be difficult to see in this account. It may in part be a function of the concurrent appearance of a number of high-profile monographs about slavery (notably Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told [2014]), but considering this is a book about the South both before and after slavery, it’s surprising that there is not more of an effort to tease out the difference between the legal status of being a slave and the cultural status of being Black. In particular, a passing mention of free Black women in Charleston who owned slaves warrants a bit more explanation (114-115). To be sure, there are sketches of some remarkable Black lives, notably Charles C. Williams, the Black Confederate gunrunner who then used his intimate knowledge of Carolina’s coastal waters to revamp Charleston’s seafood industry during Reconstruction, and then used that experience to become a leading ichthyological expert. That said, the foodways Shields documents, both before and after slavery, relied upon social relations of inequality and exploitation that seem missing from his account. Then or now, on a plantation or at a farm-to-table restaurant where the server breathlessly details the provenance of your pork chop, part of the art of fine dining consists in occluding the messy, dirty social relations that populate the road from the field to the plate.

In all, Southern Provisions is a wide-ranging and ambitious book, a remarkable achievement that tells the stories of remarkable achievements in which its author played a major role. While it is possible to imagine other books that might have been written from this same archive, we hope this is the beginning of a conversation with an array of voices chiming in. Academics, including early American academics, like to talk about the intervention a scholarly work makes. Usually, these interventions exist in an abstract and intellectual realm. While Shields will no doubt change how future writers think about southern foodways, he also details more concrete interventions. Thanks to the work that Shields has done himself, and the work of others he has promoted, the fruits of several of the historical recoveries he describes are available via Anson Mills and other vendors. The full impact of Shields’s work comes in savoring interventions you can cook and eat.

This article originally appeared in issue 16:4.5 (November, 2016).

Jonathan Beecher Field is an associate professor of English at Clemson University. He is the author of Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London (2009). He sometimes writes about food at The Gurgling Cod.