I’ve always considered editorial work to be an act of scholarly generosity. “See for yourself,” it says, “Don’t just take my word for it.” Editors make available to the world the results of their archival detective work: texts that amaze and astonish and upend. We are all made better scholars for our access to such materials. Theresa Gaul’s recent edition of the work of nineteenth-century writer Catharine Brown is one such text. Brown was born at the turn of the nineteenth century at a tumultuous time for the Cherokee people. Although she died in 1823, over a decade before the Cherokees were removed from their land and even before her friends and fellow converts from the Brainerd mission school controversially signed the notorious treaty at New Echota, Brown was immersed in the debates leading up to this moment in which the Cherokee Nation’s future felt more threatened than ever before. Among the many incredible challenges facing the Cherokee Nation at this moment was how, exactly, to engage with the missionaries suddenly turning their attention (and their financial resources) to the Cherokees. For a brief few years, Catharine Brown became the face of that mission, a representative Indian convert whose name became synonymous with missionary success, and whose religious letters were avidly read throughout the world, reprinted, as they were, in international missionary magazines.

When editorial work is done well, as it is in Gaul’s Cherokee Sister, it prods you toward a new way of thinking about a text or set of texts without closing down other interpretive possibilities. Gaul’s edition invites readers to consider a range of issues surrounding Catharine Brown’s writing: Cherokee pre-removal social and political identity, print culture, the cult of celebrity, American religious history, epistolarity, gender studies—the list goes on. Gaul makes a compelling case in her wonderfully robust introduction (fifty-seven pages, with notes) for seeing Brown as an advocate for her people, and lays to rest the older view that Brown’s evangelical Christianity somehow invalidates her commitments to her Cherokee roots. In Gaul’s words, “when read through the lens proffered by her writings and broader developments in the fields of Native and literary studies, Brown emerges as an agent, a leader, a figure of enduring Cherokee resilience and adaptability, and—importantly—a writer” (5). Gaul’s collection is divided into two sections. The first includes thirty-two letters written by Brown as well as a short diary. The second section includes representations of Catharine Brown, many of which borrowed heavily from her own writing. This section reprints The Memoir of Catharine Brown in its entirety, which is a narrative of Brown’s life compiled for publication by the missionary society by Rufus Anderson. This section also includes prose, poetry, and even an 1819 drama written by “a lady of Connecticut.” Together these two sections provide a valuable overview both of Brown as a writer with specific commitments to her Cherokee community as well as the missionary world so eager to embrace her story and make it meaningful to a national and international audience.

Gaul provides some helpful strategies for reading these materials, the evangelical nature of which the casual reader may find off-putting or at the very least unsettling in what is arguably the first extended writing by a Native woman. Those seeking unambiguously political or resistant rhetoric will not find it here, although Gaul’s introduction helps readers understand the constraints of Brown’s writing, not least of which that her only remaining letters were written to her mission family in a very specific context. Reminding us that Brown is the contemporary of widely recognized politically active Native figures such as William Apess (Pequot), Black Hawk (Sauk), and Cherokee men Elias Boudinot, John Ridge, and John Ross, Gaul notes that she has received very little attention despite the fact that with thirty-two recovered letters and a diary, Brown is quite possibly, according to Gaul, “after Occom and Johnson … the most prolific Native writer before the late 1820s” (5).

Gaul helpfully situates Brown in a cadre of literate Native Americans attached to English missions. Doing so allows Gaul to contextualize Brown’s strategies of reading and writing within the physical and material constraints on the expression of this entire cohort of Native writers. Gaul’s notes likewise point the reader to a wealth of resources, generously identifying the major scholars working in this area for those seeking further information: Theda Perdue, Joel Martin, Daniel Heath Justice, and Tiya Miles, among others. Through this careful historical and archival work, as well as through sophisticated close readings of Brown’s own texts, Gaul identifies several recurring themes in Brown’s letters, including sisterhood, family relations more generally, American Christianity, and Cherokee nationhood.

We are indebted to Gaul for her extensive archival work. Thanks to this edition, we now have not only far more original letters by Catharine Brown (some even in her hand), but also a much clearer sense of the complicated relationships that shaped missionary engagements in the Cherokee Nation. Gaul has reminded us of the wealth of Native writing buried within a massive archive of missionary documents attached to pre-removal missions such as the Brainerd Mission among the Cherokees.

In fact, this edition of Catharine Brown’s writings joins an extraordinary set of materials related to Christian missionaries and their relationships with the Cherokee people in the period before Indian removal. Made available in the last few decades, taken together they provide an incredible set of resources for the scholar of Cherokee culture, religious studies, or Indian-White relations more broadly. This extraordinary body of primary materials, not least of which includes Gaul’s own edition of the letters and other documents related to the scandalous marriage between Elias Boudinot and Harriet Gold, called To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriet Gold & Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839 (2005), shows us a culture in transition. Other recently edited mission records of the period include The Brainerd Journal edited by Joyce and Gary Phillips (1998), the two-volume The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees, 1805-1821, edited by Rowena McClinton (2010) and the two-volume The Payne-Butrick Papers, edited and annotated by William Anderson, Jane Brown, and Anne Rogers (2010). Together these works have made possible the kind of deeply nuanced scholarship that was once possible only for those with the budget and other resources to travel to archives spread across the country.

One of the great strengths of Gaul’s collection, and what sets it apart from these other sources, is her insight that Brown can most usefully be read in relation to other women authors in this period. Indeed it is not an accident that Gaul opted to publish Brown in the Legacies of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers series. By printing the letters both as authored documents and then again as they appear in Rufus Anderson’s Memoir of Catharine Brown, Gaul makes an important claim for Brown’s status as an author in her own right. Brown is both the object of study and the author of her own story in this collection, and it is only by acknowledging both that we can even begin to understand her rich position in American popular culture. She was a star, a woman made famous by her pious conversion to Christianity and her widely reprinted letters. As such she was feted for her power as a writer but ultimately boxed in by other peoples’ versions of her life: Anderson’s memoir, certainly, but also the drama by “a lady of Connecticut” and the various poems that Gaul has included in her final section. Gaul’s collection both acknowledges and represents that set of expectations but also gives us the background to understand Brown and her letters free from the benevolent frame of her nineteenth-century well-wishers. As Gaul writes, “Cherokee Sister redirects critical attention to Brown’s own writings and, in doing so, makes visible new interpretations of her work,” further arguing that Brown “merits attention along with other American women writers who employed the genres of life writing” (4-5).

Gaul’s careful and precise editing provides a valuable set of tools for considering audience, the difference between print and manuscript culture, and the constructed nature of (auto)biography. In this classroom-friendly edition of works both by and associated with Catharine Brown, Gaul has been generous as a scholar indeed, inviting generations of readers to consider the writings of this extraordinary figure.

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

Hilary E. Wyss, Hargis Professor of American Literature at Auburn University, has written extensively on Native literacy and community in early America. Her most recent book is English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750-1830 (2012).

Nearly since the ink was drying on the Declaration of Independence, nationalistic Americans have opined that American nationhood was inevitable, the result of a) the ultimate expression of Anglo-Saxon liberties, b) the westward march of democracy from ancient Greece, c) the frontier’s effect on political culture, d) the realization of a divine plan for national glory, or e) all of the above. Historians have tended to be more guarded—but not much. Whether looking for the origins of the American Revolution through the evolution of the colonies and their governmental and economic structures, considering Britain’s attempts to rationalize its empire in the aftermath of its stunning victory in the Seven Years War, or the republican lens through which many 1760s and 1770s colonists viewed those developments, historians, too, have rarely questioned whether America might have stayed in the British empire.

Thomas P. Slaughter, author of Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution, argues that this sense of inevitability is more than hindsight: rather, it was the consensus opinion of both Americans and Britons for much of the eighteenth century. For them, as Slaughter points out through numerous well-chosen examples, British America’s operating on its own was a question of “when” rather than “if.” The rub was how that “independence” would be structured. American colonists mostly desired some level of independence within the empire, along a spectrum perhaps somewhere between what American imperial possessions like Puerto Rico and Commonwealth countries like Canada enjoy today. Britons, on the other hand, from casual observers to members of Parliament to colonial governors, generally assumed that by “independence” American colonists meant a complete break from the empire.

Only the most perceptive observers on either side, among them Benjamin Franklin and Edmund Burke, intuited the distinction between these two conceptions of independence. In the wake of Britain’s budget-busting victory in the Seven Years’ War and expansion into India, imperial officials worked to raise money from the continental colonies through taxation, decrease defense costs by restraining colonists so as to reduce conflict with Native Americans, tighten up colonial enforcement of imperial trade regulations, rationalize imperial administration of colonial possessions, and prop up the global operation that was the East India Company (which, in Slaughter’s words, was deemed by Parliament to be “too big to fail” [153]). Radical and even moderate colonists saw each of these actions as an attempt to curtail their independence, while unsympathetic Britons characterized colonial resistance as a stalking horse for full national independence. Those perceptions, Slaughter demonstrates, resulted in an escalation of mutual misunderstandings in the 1760s and 1770s, until, by 1775, each side was entrenched in a position from which retreat was unthinkable.

Rather than writing an extended brief for Slaughter’s contentions, Independence provides a broad and yet selective sweep of the history of the thirteen colonies that became the original United States. The challenge for any author is that there is no best way to cover that much time and space in a straightforward story. Slaughter decides on a more episodic approach, nonetheless managing to weave in a great many incidents and issues that serve as pieces to the puzzle.

The first of its three sections lays the foundations of colonists’ growing pains within the empire in a series of thematic chapters surveying New England’s Puritan settlements, New York’s commercial ambitions, New England’s rebellion during the Glorious Revolution and battles with French Canada, warfare with Indians and the French in the 1740s and 1750s, and the Seven Years’ War (including a perhaps overly detailed digression on Britain’s military progress in India). He also examines a series of intra-imperial conflicts ranging from the Glorious Revolution in Maryland and Virginia’s Parson’s Cause to early 1760s controversies over colonial legislatures’ prerogatives in making their own laws. The book’s second section more broadly considers conflict over the wave of imperial policies, whether through new laws or more stringent enforcement, beginning with simmering American discontent with the British military, the cat-and-mouse game of American smuggling, and exaggerated fears of the establishment of an Anglican bishop in America; the Proclamation of 1763 that limited legal colonial settlement to the Atlantic watershed; the imperial tax regime through the early 1760s; the long origins of and resistance to the Stamp Act; intra-colonial unrest in New Jersey and the Carolinas that exacerbated colonial suspicion of imperial authority, and the long fuse that exploded with the Boston Massacre. The last section quickens the pace, beginning with colonial resistance to imperial efforts to prop up the East India Company, the implementation of the “intolerable acts” of 1774, the slow organization of the Continental Congress, last ditch-efforts in Britain to avoid war, and finally, the road to Lexington and Concord that convinced so many colonists and Britons that backing down would be unacceptable.

Independence is written for a general audience and is unabashedly a synthesis of a century of scholarship, exhibiting the mastery that comes from Slaughter’s distinguished career of reading and teaching the American Revolution. Those familiar with that stream will recognize Slaughter’s debts to the imperial school of the early- to mid-twentieth century, placing the Revolution in the context of the British empire, and Theodore Draper’s The Struggle for Power (1996), which first most clearly set out the terms of Americans’ and Britons’ differing definitions of their preferred imperial relationship. Yet Slaughter elegantly illuminates often overlooked details in the literature that provide human context. For example, New York Governor Richard Coote’s scolding colonists for their fractiousness and “‘Independance from the Crown of England'” (158) as early as 1699 showed the depth of British fears, and the 1741 loss of well over half a contingent of colonial volunteers to starvation and disease when they were essentially jailed on board ships outside Jamaica in a failed British attempt to take Spanish Caribbean possessions, indicated how disused colonists felt. Failure to enforce a decade-long lawsuit over the cutting down of Massachusetts pine trees (prized for masts and reserved by law for the Royal Navy) and the many specific ways that 1760s and 1770s colonial smugglers flouted the Navigation Acts demonstrated how the American economy marched forward with little respect for imperial oversight. And accounts of futile, last-minute bids to salvage an accommodation, among them back-channel discussions between Franklin and well-connected London banker David Barclay as well as public proposals by William Pitt and Edmund Burke, showed just how unsalvageable the Anglo-American relationship was.

Ultimately, Slaughter implies that no mutually acceptable accommodation could be drawn from a well already so poisoned. Over a century of recriminations had been exacerbated by a decade of increasingly outrageous violations of what each side perceived as the basis of the imperial relationship: for Americans, the ability to rule themselves within the empire, and for Britons, the necessity of Parliamentary prerogative in running its global enterprise.

Given that Slaughter places the American Revolution in the context of the British empire, relevant questions are tantalizingly unexplored. Slaughter pays considerable attention to England’s conquest of India, but little to how imperial administration of India affected American and British attitudes toward the American mainland. More curiously, Independence slights Britain’s Caribbean colonies, despite their having borne much investigation in recent years. English Caribbean planters and merchants were among continental colonists’ biggest trade partners and smuggling accomplices, as Slaughter points out. Did mainland colonists consider themselves unfairly singled out for imperial ire compared to their Caribbean cousins? If, as Slaughter notes, the Continental Congress reached out to Caribbean assemblies, why did they not join the American cause? This is not to suggest that Slaughter should have written a book about Jamaica or Barbados—this work is impressive enough—only that, as with any good history, this one raises new questions for every one that it answers.

Which brings us back to the big question. What Americans and Britons believed inevitable was some sort of split between a maturing set of American colonies and its mother country. That divorce eventually happened with nearly every British imperial possession, some amicably, like Canada, others less so, like India. Each of these relationships, though, was unique. Slaughter’s book serves as a well-hewn capstone to shelves’ worth of books on why the American Revolution happened, just as scholars are shifting their gaze to how it happened: the relationships among patriots, loyalists, and disaffected; slavery and revolution; governance in flux; the challenge of living in a civil war. That doesn’t mean that Independence will be the last word on the cause of the American Revolution—no book ever will be—but that this will be the one to read for a long time.

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

Andrew M. Schocket is professor of history and American Culture Studies and director of American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University, and author of Fighting over the Founders: How We Remember the American Revolution (2015).

A massive painting of Philadelphia’s Market Street hangs in the Second Bank of the United States Portrait Gallery. Here, for the first time, it is attributed to New England imagemaker James Kidder, who toured it through eastern U.S. cities in an exhibition mounted after the War of 1812.

“What is that?” I uttered aloud after turning a corner in the Second Bank of the United States Portrait Gallery in Philadelphia. After meandering through rooms filled with the faces of long-dead luminaries, I found myself in front of a massive street scene. Its subject and size seemed starkly out of place (fig. 1). Taller than I and broader than my arm span, the painted canvas arrested me with a vast, elevated view of Philadelphia’s Market Street, mere blocks from where I stood. It depicted a central brick edifice, built for municipal business in 1707, as it stood in early national Philadelphia, forming the headhouse of a ramrod spine of market stalls. Pedestrians in the thoroughfare stood in service of this visual effect, their artificially straight rows pointing to the canvas’s vanishing point. The minutely painted details of the scene worked with the view’s receding lines to draw me closer. I approached wanting both to inspect the canvas’s surface details and to move past their plane into the urban corridor seemingly opened before me. Curatorial foresight, in the form of velvet ropes, held me a foot or two at bay as I leaned in, squinted, and marveled at the fine rendering of the architectural centerpiece and commercial brick buildings on either side. This representational detail carried over to the diminutive figures that met under awnings, inspected goods outdoors, and moved along Market Street as laborers, vendors, and shoppers. I backed up to take in the whole scene again.

Turning to the wall label, I found a research intrigue: the canvas’s painter was listed as “an unidentified artist.” Already curious about why this painting hung in a portrait gallery, and why someone would have painted a view of Market Street in this size and from this perspective, I decided to start my inquiry by trying to figure out exactly who painted the view. Following my hunch that this painting would have cut a public profile in the early nineteenth century, I retreated to newspaper archives.

There, in issues from 1816 and 1817, I found James Kidder and Daniel Bowen announcing their exhibition of four “large and elegant paintings” that included “a natural representation of Market-Street, in Philadelphia.” Kidder’s view made its debut, however, not in Philadelphia, but in Boston. The exhibition history of the Market Street view shows it to be not simply a depiction of an urban commercial corridor but also an artifact of one imagemaker’s efforts to navigate the post-war market economy. At a moment when national policy and the spread of capitalism intensified American commerce, James Kidder sought to profit from a view that maintained the instructiveness of art for the cultivation of good citizenship. He did so, however, by promoting a vision of civic welfare that stemmed from discerning market behavior rather than political representation.

For Daniel Bowen (1760-1856), Kidder’s paintings constituted yet another attempt to make a living as a museum proprietor. In the years after the Revolution, the Massachusetts native and Revolutionary war veteran had built a collection of wax figures, natural history curiosities, entertaining deceptions like speaking boxes, and artwork. Exhibited as the Columbian Museum from New England to Charleston, the collection went up in flames in 1803. Another fire destroyed Bowen’s second collection in 1807. The erstwhile proprietor lost his third collection, too. Entirely broke by 1816, Bowen turned over his stake in the Columbian Museum to fellow Boston proprietor William Doyle.

Bowen tried yet again to assemble a successful museum exhibition. This time, he partnered with James Kidder (1793-1837?) to build a new collection showcasing the young imagemaker’s work. Bowen spun his previous misfortunes into a public appeal for support. Highlighting natural disaster, not financial ruin, as the source of Bowen’s prior failures, Bowen and Kidder christened their new collection the Phoenix Museum and solicited benefactors in the greater Boston area (fig. 2). When the Phoenix opened in June of 1816, at Franklin Hall in Boston’s south end, Bowen offered his contributors passes to the galleries. Adults could buy single admission for fifty cents, and later a quarter, while children gained entry for half price.

Well aware of the challenges of proprietorship and the need for competitive appeals, Bowen and Kidder pinned their hopes for success on Kidder’s paintings. When they announced their exhibition opening on June 21, 1816, directly under the masthead eagle of Boston’s Columbian Centinel, they drew singular attention to Kidder’s work (fig. 3). They enumerated the subjects of the “large and elegant paintings” showcased amidst other paintings and prints: New York City and its harbor—an “emblem of peace and commerce”; a scene of Providence during the great storm of 1815; St. Helena at the time of Napoleon’s arrival that same year; and Philadelphia’s Market Street. The composition of these images substantiated their appeal: they were views rendered from “correct drawings taken from Nature,” composed by an artist trained by “celebrated Painter and Drawing Master” John Rubens Smith in New York City. To their minds, the representational quality of environmental views—canvas size, detail, and perspective, composed by a trained hand—not just their subject matter, would sell tickets.

Bowen and Kidder exhibited in Franklin Hall for a month. When they failed to relocate to Boston’s commercial center, the men took their show on the road and doubled down on their genre-based advertising strategy. In Providence, beginning on Nov. 1, 1816, the proprietors advertised Kidder’s paintings as “panorama views,” hoping to entice visitors to Aldrich’s Hall by promising them large-scale works that used compositional perspective and immersive installation to heighten the effect of standing at the depicted site (fig. 4). It’s hard to know if the paintings fulfilled or disappointed visitors’ expectations. Kidder and Bowen may have constructed a viewing platform to elevate gallery visitors before the painting, enhancing the simulation of a rooftop view. The Market Street painting itself, and perhaps its sister views, approached its claims to the panoramic with elevated viewpoint and large canvas size rather than with an encompassing field of vision created by radial sight lines or circular installation. Its scenic foreground also resisted typical panoramic conventions. Kidder and Bowen, however, were willing to risk visitor letdown with increasingly prominent pronouncements of the panoramic and natural qualities of their paintings.

After two weeks in Providence, the pair took their paintings to Philadelphia, opening a gallery in the Shakespeare Building at Sixth and Chestnut on New Year’s Day of 1817. They played to local interests when they announced their “Panoramic Views, &c. (Drawn from Nature),” giving top billing in the Aurora to “A correct representation of Market street, Philadelphia from the Old Court House to Centre Square” (fig. 5). Even for spectators long familiar with Market Street, Kidder’s canvas lofted their views into a perspective that many likely had never taken for themselves.

The Market Street panorama remained on display at the Shakespeare for two months. And then it disappeared from advertisements for Bowen and Kidder’s subsequent exhibitions in Philadelphia and nearby Reading. In the summer of 1817, the men relegated their four original showpieces to anonymous collections when they advertised Kidder’s newest work: a semi-circular panorama of New Haven, depicting the town’s buildings, green places, improved cemetery, and mountainous surroundings over a stretch of canvas forty feet long and nearly nine feet tall. They hoped this larger format and rounded installation of a town view, later invoked as the “grand panorama,” would draw visitors to their new gallery on 11th Street near Market.

The Phoenix, however, did not last long. In the fall of 1817, Kidder departed the partnership and returned to New England to continue his work as a painter and engraver. He either retrieved or replicated his painting of the great storm at Providence and exhibited it again in that city in 1818. In Philadelphia that same fall, Bowen continued to exhibit the Phoenix’s other panoramas alongside a massive new painting: a 9-by-19-foot canvas of a sea serpent, executed by Boston painter John Ritto Penniman soon after the monster was supposedly spotted off the Massachusetts coast that August. Though Bowen promoted his display in Paxton’s Annual Advertiser for 1818, his latest effort as a panorama entrepreneur did not last long. In February 1818, he sold the monster canvas to the Peale family for their museum and wrapped up his exhibition of the New Haven panorama by the end of the month. Bowen remained in the Philadelphia area, struggling to support himself for the rest of his long life.

This new attribution of the Market Street painting to James Kidder does more than attach a name to the canvas. It opens up new avenues for discussion in longstanding conversations about visual culture and commerce in the early United States. Linking Kidder’s painting with its label as a panorama painting makes it fresh food for thought in studies of a genre whose extant examples are rare survivals. Kidder created his view to compete in a marketplace of instructive entertainment like music lessons, lectures, theatrical shows, and other museums and art exhibitions. For instance, Bowen and Kidder’s advertisement in the Jan. 3, 1817, issue of Philadelphia’s Aurora appeared alongside notices for John Vanderlyn’s itinerant gallery of paintings and a circus. The reconnection of the Market Street painting with its documentary record enables us to assess its visual and material characteristics in the context of these competitive appeals. It also puts the view into instructive comparison with contemporaneous survivals, perhaps most notably Vanderlyn’s semi-circular panorama of Versailles, painted in 1818 and 1819 and now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The contrasting subjects, compositions, installations, and artist biographies of both pieces encourage a reappraisal of the perceived promise and adjudged failure of American panorama displays in the postwar era.

The Kidder attribution also places the Market Street view in the broader context of Kidder’s body of work and gives scholars a richer view of the career of one work-a-day imagemaker. Kidder’s foray into museum proprietorship was one of many strategies by which he sought to monetize his production of images. In addition to selling tickets for gallery viewing, Kidder offered engravings of his Providence storm painting for one dollar (fig. 6). Late in 1818, he tried to sell the panoramic painting itself to that city’s town council. More widely, though, Kidder made his career by producing commissioned drawings and engravings for prints, trade cards, and books, selling his own prints by subscription, and painting trompe-l’oeil pictures (fig. 7). Nearly all of his ventures rendered the urban built environment into views marketed to a popular audience. Many pictures, like his Market Street canvas, enticed consumers with views of historic landmark buildings at the center of urban commercial scenes (fig. 8). These images appealed to consumers by simultaneously fixing and making mobile views of urban change intended to circulate in the market of goods that they depicted.

In his Philadelphia painting, James Kidder deployed the political implications of perspectival conventions to make the case for the instructive value—and market worth—of his broader oeuvre. On the canvas, he merged a scenographic depiction of the market building with a panoramic perspective of Market Street to create a view of civic virtuosity in the post-war United States. The conventions of scenographic viewmaking, as Wendy Bellion has explained, prized detailed representation to draw viewers into close looking. The panoramic, by contrast, encouraged comprehensive viewing of the landscape that was only attainable with elevation. In 1788, she has argued, Charles Willson Peale used these conventions to weigh in on debates over state and society during the Constitutional debates. In two views of, and from, the Maryland statehouse, he visualized the seemingly contradictory skills of critical observation of the state and immersive political participation demanded by the republican ideal of citizenship.

In 1816, Kidder used these conventions to different effect as U.S. citizens considered the trajectory of a national economy and society emerging from a second war with Britain. When Kidder married the scenographic and panoramic perspective modes in a single depiction of the Philadelphia marketplace, he recast the political implications of immersive participation and detached observation in the realm of market behavior. From the rooftop vantage created by the canvas, spectators appraised the headhouse market scene from an air of critical remove. Its minutely painted architectural and figural details encouraged them to inspect the discrete goods, people, and elements of the commercial environment depicted in front of them. This critical looking, Kidder implied, was a necessary skill for successfully navigating economic and social transactions in the marketplace.

Yet the image still situated viewers firmly in the urban market itself, which included not only the market buildings but also its streets, sidewalks, and rows of storefronts on which Kidder perched. From an elevated point within this district, viewers could better see—and critically assess—the vastness and variety of the market in which they stood. With a panoramic painting that simultaneously removed and immersed spectators in the market, Kidder sought to affirm and cultivate a moral eye: one that demanded of viewers the dual modes of looking that would prompt exclusive economic discernment and inclusive civic empathy. This balanced thinking, he implied, would lead citizens to act in ways that responded to the interests of fellow citizens as well as themselves.

In this way, Kidder commented on the issues of public and private that bubbled up around conversations of postwar urban economy and society. His marriage of perspective and panoramic views conveyed a narrative of the historical development of Philadelphia’s commercial corridor. The detailed rendering of the antiquated architectural features of the centerpiece municipal building—first described in Philadelphia advertisements as “the Old Court House”— encouraged viewers to reflect on its century-long history as a civic meeting place. First a hub for diverse court, municipal, political, and public gatherings, it had transformed into a more concentrated, if varied, market district. At the same time, Kidder cast its façade into exaggerated shadow and illuminated the westward stretch of Market Street with bright afternoon sun. This lighting effect, enhanced by the recessional pull of Kidder’s vanishing lines, drew viewers’ eyes down Market Street to the horizon. Here, their gaze landed on Center Square, a tree-lined gem of municipal improvement that housed the first mechanism in the United States to deliver clean water to city dwellers, and by 1816, formed a popular civic gathering place. With this linear progression from old municipal building to newer public amenity, Kidder made manifest a version of the city’s historical development that implied that market development ushered in urban improvement.

Kidder himself, of course, hoped to profit from this view of commercial activity serving the common good. His proprietorship of the Phoenix Museum and his work making images were business pursuits. Yet he pitched his products as morally instructive. Admission to the Phoenix panorama gallery was money well spent, he implied, because it was remuneration to Kidder for the laudable public service he provided by displaying his paintings. It was a lofty goal. But if Kidder could convince some patrons of these designs, he might earn social capital as well as financial profit.

So perhaps the Market Street painting isn’t so out of place in the Second Bank building after all. Chartered the same year that Kidder first displayed his canvas, the Bank itself emerged from some of the same broad questions about public and private market values as did Kidder’s painting. The institution’s founders were as optimistic as Kidder that the U.S. economy could increase domestic production and consumption for the benefit of the common good. By 1819, both the credit economy that it fueled and the Phoenix Museum had gone bust. Yet the bank itself survived for the rest of its chartered term. Its building, completed in 1824, seemed to some a symbol of the collective wealth of the United States and to others a temple to moral bankruptcy and individual ruin. So, too, did James Kidder’s painting survive after the close of the Phoenix Museum. After passing perhaps through the collections of Charles Willson Peale and then through the hands of a book dealer, it became the municipal property of Philadelphia in 1874. Today, it hangs in a museum administered by Independence National Historical Park, just reopened after renovation, and open to the public free of charge. In this setting, the history of James Kidder’s Market Street painting offers rich fodder for a meditation on the complex histories of private profit and public good in the cultural realm. In this bicentennial year of the bank’s charter and the public debut of Kidder’s painting, I look forward to making a return visit to the Second Bank galleries and viewing the Market Street painting in a new light.

Acknowledgments

This article is based on more than thirty newspaper advertisements and articles regarding Bowen and Kidder’s exhibitions printed in collections in the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and America’s Historical Newspapers database by Readex. The author wishes to thank Karie Diethorn and Andrea Ashby of Independence National Historical Park, as well as Nan Wolverton, Wendy Woloson, Will Coleman, Elizabeth Eager, and Nenette Luarca-Shoaf.

Further Reading

Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011).

Wendy Bellion, “ ‘Extend the Sphere’: Charles Willson Peale’s Panorama of Annapolis,” The Art Bulletin 86:3 (Sept. 2004): 529-549.

Peter Benes, “ ‘A few monstrous great Snakes’: Daniel Bowen and the Columbian Museum, 1789-1816,” in New England Collectors and Collections, ed. Peter Benes (Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 2004): 22-39.

David Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington, D.C., 1995). 

David Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America: 1815-1848 (New York, 2007): 63-90.

 Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (Berkeley, Calif., 2001).

Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things (Princeton, N.J., 2001).

Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley, Calif., 2014): 69-115. 

Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, Conn., 2009): 145-179.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.4 (September, 2016).

Whitney Martinko is an assistant professor of history at Villanova University. She is currently the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, where she is completing a book manuscript tentatively entitled Public Property, Private Profit: Preservation, Morality, and the Real Estate Market in the Early United States.

Whereas many scholars have grappled with the apparent paradox of Thomas Jefferson’s writings on liberty and his involvement in slavery, Padraig Riley tackles the larger question of why so many northerners “who believed the United States should be a beacon of democracy for a world enslaved by aristocratic power became the political allies of men who believed the United States was obliged to protect a master’s right to enslave” (1-2). In hindsight, the rise of Jefferson’s Republican Party can appear to be the beginning of “Slave Power,” slaveholders’ dominance of the federal government, which matured during the Jacksonian era and oversaw the expansion of slavery, the suppression of abolitionism, the dispossession of Native land, and the political denigration of free people of color. Eschewing a simplistic focus on racism, Riley provides a compelling and nuanced interpretation of northern Republicans centered on their egalitarian ideals and unintended consequences. His study effectively integrates state and national developments while drawing on obscure as well as prominent characters and events.

Jeffersonians were committed to social mobility and a political culture that expanded suffrage and political participation beyond the tradition elite. Those in New England were often religious dissenters who perceived themselves as oppressed by wealthier Federalists and looked to southern Republicans to aid them in expanding the boundaries of democratic self-government and promoting religious freedom. The Mid-Atlantic states, meanwhile, included large numbers of immigrants who celebrated the United States as a haven of liberty and embraced the Republican Party for its support of self-government and easy naturalization. Although Riley gives less attention to political economy, northern Republicans also often shared their southern comrades’ preference for small government and laissez-faire economics, believing such policies facilitated personal liberty and economic opportunity.

Northern Republicans’ egalitarianism was often cosmopolitan, leading them to support freedom across racial as well as national boundaries. For example, in the 1780s, Levi Lincoln (a future Jeffersonian) helped argue the court cases that ended slavery in Massachusetts, and in the 1790s, Abraham Bishop of Connecticut called on Americans to support the rebel slaves of Saint-Domingue (Haiti). James Sloan of New Jersey was a vocal congressional critic of slavery during Jefferson’s presidency, seeking to tax the Atlantic slave trade (before it could be abolished in 1808) and end slavery in Louisiana and Washington, D.C. Moreover, northern Republicans led the effort to restrict slavery in Missouri in 1819. Like some other recent scholars, Riley convincingly challenges the common notion that antislavery in Congress was confined largely to northern Federalists.

However, at times northern Republicans’ alliance with a southern-based political party led them to downgrade emancipation as a priority, and even suppress antislavery sentiment. For instance, they dismissed New England Federalists’ criticism of the Constitution’s three-fifths clause (by which slaves were counted when enumerating political representation) as a cynical ploy rather than a humanitarian issue. Abraham Bishop mocked the Federalists for complaining about the three-fifths clause while they claimed full representation for “their white slaves,” who were disenfranchised by property restrictions (46). Bishop and other northern Republicans did not abandon antislavery, but “in substituting northern political inequality for southern slavery, they helped create a complex political alliance that in turn made it difficult to achieve antislavery objectives in national politics” (48).

Another factor limiting northern Republicans’ attacks on slaveholders, Riley shows, was their tendency to exaggerate the extent of antislavery sentiment among their southern allies. Focusing on Jefferson’s antislavery expressions, rather than his actual practices, northern Republicans constructed “an antislavery Jefferson” in order to “incorporate slaveholders as legitimate partners in a project of democratization” (80-81). In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson had expressed his hope that population changes wrought by European immigration would facilitate the gradual abolition of southern slavery. Some northern Republicans, especially immigrants, echoed such rhetoric for it allowed them “to fantasize about the emancipatory promise of the United States” (85). The fact that “southern Federalists were the most voluble defenders of slavery” also helped northern Republicans avoid recognizing their southern comrades’ commitment to protecting slavery (58). They could similarly dismiss Virginia’s John Randolph as an eccentric outlier while imagining that most southern Republicans truly desired the end of slavery.

Sectional divisions within the Republican Party increased over time, especially after Jefferson’s trade embargo and during Madison’s early presidency. Some dissident northern Republicans allied with the reviving Federalist Party while others, such as James Sloan, supported New Yorker George Clinton as an alternative to another Virginia president. However, the War of 1812 “helped contain internal Republican dissidents, while projecting the United States as the last best hope of democratic emancipation from imperial power” (168). High-minded ideals again downgraded the importance of antislavery, and Republicans portrayed Britain’s practice of impressing sailors into naval service as worse than racial slavery and “attacked Federalist antislavery criticism as borderline treason” (163).

Riley’s final chapter and conclusion examine the two Missouri Compromises of 1819-1821, which he frames as the “culmination of sectional conflict over slavery during the Jeffersonian era,” rather than a sharp break marking the beginning of the antebellum era (203). James Tallmadge Jr., a New York Republican, initiated the “restriction” movement against admitting new slaveholding states into the Union, but eventually a small though sufficient minority of northern “doughfaces” (both Republicans and Federalists) voted with the South to allow Missouri to enter the union as a slave state. (Separate laws restricted slavery in the remaining federal territories north of 36°30′ latitude and admitted Maine as a free state). During the second Missouri Crisis, in 1821, Congress permitted the new state to forbid free African Americans from entering the state, essentially indicating that the federal Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause was limited by race.

But Riley cautions against interpreting this moment as “the emergence of a self-consciously white republic” (251). He notes that most congressmen who opposed the provision were northern Republicans, and that northerners who supported the compromise framed it in terms of preserving the Union rather than racial supremacy. Threats of secession and warnings of disunion had reached a peak during the first Missouri Crisis and many northern Republicans were reluctant to bring the nation back to the precipice. Accommodating slavery and sacrificing the rights of African Americans was “the necessary price of union” (252). Northern Republicans who voted with the South focused on what they perceived was the greater good. Although tainted by slavery, the Union and the Jeffersonian political alliance helped liberate middling northerners from elite control and served as a democratic beacon in a world dominated by authoritarian governments. In taking seriously northern Republicans’ egalitarian ideals and the world-historical significance they attributed to the Union, Riley offers an important corrective to scholarship that exaggerates the political influence of racism.

Yet he gives surprisingly little attention to northern Republicans’ ideas about federalism and their commitment to states’ rights, local power, and strict construction. Riley quickly dismisses southern arguments about federalism as a “secondary argument” during debates over slavery without considering that many northerners may have found them compelling (111; see also 226, 231). The one instance where he engages with conceptions of states’ rights suggests that additional analysis would have been fruitful. When discussing a fugitive slave bill that northern Republicans helped block in 1818, Riley highlights fundamental differences it revealed between the sections: “Slaveholders wanted greater federal power to protect their property rights, while northerners sought to protect state prerogatives and the liberty of free African Americans.” He further suggests that southerners’ subsequent arguments about states’ rights would “have seemed hypocritical” during the Missouri Crisis (211). This is an important observation and one that could have been further developed throughout the book.

Before 1819, Republicans typically only attacked slavery when doing so was consistent with their commitment to strict construction (such as taxing the Atlantic slave trade and abolishing it as soon as the Constitution permitted, in 1808). In 1819, southerners could make compelling arguments that it was too late to constitutionally prohibit slavery in Missouri. Congress should have imposed restrictions early in Missouri’s territorial stage in order to follow the precedent of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery; imposing restriction in 1819, when Missouri was ready for statehood, would rely on Federalist-style broad construction. Given Republicans’ tradition of strict construction, the fact that the overwhelming majority of northern Jeffersonians broke with their southern brethren to support restriction in 1819 suggests both the extent of their egalitarian hatred of slavery and that they had indeed become skeptical of southerners’ alleged concern about states’ rights. Only the greater good of preserving the Union could justify the continued compromises and concessions to slaveholders. Had Riley treated conceptions of federalism as seriously throughout as he treats egalitarianism, it would only have reinforced his many important contributions.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.4 (September, 2016).

Nicholas P. Wood is the Cassius M. Clay Postdoctoral Associate in Early American History at Yale University. His publications include “John Randolph of Roanoke and the Politics of Slavery in the Early Republic,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (Summer 2012) and “Jefferson’s Legacy, Race Science, and Righteous Violence in Jabez Hammond’s Abolitionist Fiction,” Early American Studies (Summer 2016).

Perhaps it is fitting that in the grand panorama of the American Revolution—that revolution against patriarchal authority—the story of a rebellious adolescent looms so large.

When the American Revolution broke out, Sarah Vowell explains in Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, the teenage Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, was still a teenager. He had only recently married Adrienne de Noailles, who was the daughter of the brigadier general of the king’s armies, great-niece to France’s ambassador to Britain. He was the scion of one of France’s noblest families; his ancestors had been fighting on behalf of French kings since the Crusades. Their wedding was attended by King Louis XV himself. Lafayette’s future at the Versailles Court was assured.

But the nineteen-year-old aristocrat wasn’t interested. Defying orders of the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, the comte de Vergennes, he fled to America, to what he saw as the Enlightenment struggle. Lafayette wasn’t just disobeying his king or risking his fortune and his professional future. He left his two-year-old daughter and pregnant wife to cross the Atlantic and join the American cause. “Don’t be angry with me,” he wrote the poor Adrienne before he sailed away (66).

From a certain perspective, one might say that the United States owes its independence, at least in part, to the flights of fancy of an idealistic young liberal. Think on that, ye haters of millennials!

Lafayette’s actions were a diplomatic embarrassment for the French crown, as yet reluctant to bet on the American cause. The young aristocrat, after all, had met King George in London just before planning his furtive escape. (Lafayette would later admit that he was a little “too fond of playing a trick upon the king he is going to fight with” [66].) Few people were better connected at the Versailles court, or more likely to mobilize French public opinion on behalf of the American cause.

The Americans knew this wasn’t just any kid. Fed up as Congress was with haughty Europeans, many of them posing as aristocrats, all of them demanding exalted appointments and generous salaries, it was wise enough to know a good thing when it fell in its lap. Lafayette was immediately invited to serve on George Washington’s staff.

The boy had lost both his parents; Washington had no children. Although the American general had scraped his way up from the middling ranks of the provincial gentry, the nobleman from the French court was in raptures over Washington’s “majestic figure and deportment,” and the “noble affability of his manner” (86). “I had never beheld so superb a man,” Lafayette would later remember (185). The two quickly became surrogate father and son.

In America, Lafayette drew on reserves of wisdom little suggested by his age or previous experience. “I am cautious not to talk too much, lest I should say some foolish thing,” Lafayette wrote his father in-law, “and still more cautious in my actions, lest I should do some foolish thing” (136). He asked for no money. He was unusually tactful—“It is to learn, and not to teach, that I come hither,” he told a grateful George Washington after reviewing his ill-clad, ill-fed troops (88). He gave good counsel. No wonder he was such a hit.

Lafayette arrived amid the darkest moments of the American Revolution, during those times that would try men’s souls at the hard winter in Valley Forge. He fought valiantly, and made friends easily. His boundless cheer, humor, and his unusual selflessness for American independence boosted American morale and helped keep the flame alive in France. “He made our cause his own,” Thomas Jefferson would later write. “I only held the nail, he drove it” (72).

After General John Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga—and many letters from the tireless Lafayette—Vergennes was finally persuaded to support the American cause, approving the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce. Lafayette wept when he heard the news at Valley Forge. “Long live the King of France!” shouted the shoeless American troops (173). The French alliance gave new life to the rebellion, providing funding for the virtually bankrupt nation, some of the world’s finest soldiers, and, perhaps most importantly of all, a formidable navy.

It’s hard, today, to recall how different global power dynamics were in the eighteenth century. France was the great power then. The British defeat at Yorktown, when it finally came, was more a French victory than an American one. French officers persuaded Washington to fight at Yorktown, French engineers organized the siege, and the French Navy kept British reinforcements away. It was only at the insistence of Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, that the British surrendered their arms to the Americans rather than the French. Sarah Vowell does not exaggerate when she notes that “we owe our independence to the French navy” (258).

Vowell came at the idea for her study during the outbreak of anti-French sentiment following the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. If many Americans were furious at the apparent ingratitude of the French, “it seemed obvious that Americans had forgotten France’s help in our war for independence” (239). Vowell sets us straight.

Calling herself a “historian-adjacent, narrative nonfiction wise gu[y],” the author, comedian, and journalist serves as narrator and guide (147). What an entertaining guide she is! The book is as much a tour through the quirky corners of the author’s mind as it is through the Revolutionary past. She’s dug up detail and observation to amuse general readers and gratify the nerdiest of Franco-American enthusiasts. Vowell has a sharp eye for paradox, contradiction, coincidence, and most especially for hypocrisy. She delights in poking her finger into the eye of American complacency. “The Founding Fathers,” she observes, “while sticklers about taxation without representation in general, were magnanimously open-minded about the French crown overtaxing French subjects to pay for the French navy to cross the Atlantic.” Delicate readers, beware: “Les insurgents,” she adds for good measure, “wanted what all self-respecting, financially strapped terrorists want: to become state-sponsored terrorists” (2).

This is no dead history. America’s Revolutionary past is leavened with accounts of Vowell’s visit to a Lafayette puppet show in southeastern Pennsylvania, encounters with park rangers and historical reenactors, and tales of her Thomas Edison-loving friends. Vowell knows her history, of course, but humor is her calling card. If some of the jokes fall flat (and really, who am I to criticize?) others garner well-earned chuckles.

It’s hard to know what to call Vowell’s narrative approach, so full of digression and chronological rupture. Vowell confesses that she sees American history “as a history of argument” (112). It’s a nice formulation. Jumping back and forth from past to present and back again, she enlivens the conversations with provocative formulations: Congress was “neck-deep in arrogant boobs” wanting to serve the “transatlantic anti-monarchical punks” (51 and 62). The Moravians who attend to a wounded Lafayette don’t fare so well either, described here as “German-American Jesus freaks” (127). At times, one is reminded a little of those “Drunk History” clips on YouTube—with a little less vomiting, perhaps.

Historians will wish that recent generations of scholarship had left a bigger mark on such an intelligent writer. Vowell doesn’t much engage with the problem of slavery in the Revolution, for instance. Disagreement about slavery was, as it happens, a gripping feature of Lafayette’s relationship to the United States in general, and to Washington in particular: one of the few matters on which the French son took strong issue with his American father. But Vowell’s references to slavery mostly take the form of snarky asides. Similarly, a brief discussion of the gendered nature of revolutionary resistance relegates the homespun movement to sideshow, while grand declarations and brave fighting remain on center stage, albeit a little reluctantly.

Vowell’s relentless focus on individuals has limitations that will be obvious to academic readers. This American Revolution is driven largely by quirks of personality. Lafayette’s boyish enthusiasm, Washington’s revanchist obsession with recapturing New York, Pierre-August Caron de Beaumarchais’ charm and ambition: these were hardly irrelevant to the history of the American Revolution, of course, but they can occlude as much as they explain.

After all, the French didn’t join the colonial rebellion just to appease their “national grudge,” nor to “stic[k] it to the British” for their drubbing in the Seven Years’ War (38, 174). There were serious geopolitical interests at stake in detaching the North American colonies from the British. With the United States established as a French client state, Britain’s lucrative Caribbean colonies would be imperiled. Who knows what other fruits of empire could eventually be plucked away? In the end, the Americans’ double-crossing of Vergennes and the French alliance helped maintain American independence.

But to complain about such matters may be too churlish. This book was never meant for graduate oral exams, and it offers a good response to those people who say they never much liked history: too many facts and dates. The lightness of tone provides a welcome contrast to the excessive earnestness of too much academic scholarship. We could use a little more of Vowell’s wit, I daresay.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.4 (September, 2016).

François Furstenberg, who grew up in a Franco-American household, teaches in the history department at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (2014).

Common-place talks with Brian Murphy, author of Building the Empire State, about the business and politics of early New York State, how historians address questions of political economy, and the resonances of early republic politics in the twenty-first century.

Why did so many early Republic politicians seek incorporation for institutions such as banks and companies dedicated to infrastructure and internal improvements? What powers and protections did they afford?

The easy answer is that a corporation—that is, an organization or business that’s been granted the privilege of a state-issued corporate charter—enjoys a particular set of legal protections and economic advantages. They are why businesses still incorporate today.

As a fictional corporate “person,” a corporation has the right to sue and be sued in court as its own entity. That means the board of directors or larger population of shareholders don’t have to file lawsuits individually; instead, they can just do it under the aegis of their corporate organization. Similarly, you can go after a corporate entity in court rather than each shareholder-owner separately.

A corporate structure also lends longevity to a firm. Whereas a partnership has to be dissolved or bought out when someone dies or quits, a corporate charter ensures that managers or directors can be replaced without fundamentally changing the structure or mission of the company. Names change and often rotate, and the company itself endures for as long as a charter will allow, which is called perpetual life.

For these and other reasons, the corporation was an ideal vehicle for “capital formation”—a term we use to describe the pooling of investment capital. People can buy shares, vote in elections for seats on the corporation’s board of directors, and buy more shares if they like how things are going. If they don’t, they can sell their shares. That all makes it easier to raise money for a project, and it’s why state legislatures that were short on cash were willing to grant charters to early American improvement promoters who were looking to make money by building infrastructure projects or founding banks and other companies. The state could mobilize private capital toward public ends, and set the terms of that company’s mission and scope by writing the language of its corporate charter.

Why have historians struggled with understanding how Americans in the early republic distinguished between public and private forms of finance and business investment?

Our language around public and private often obscures more than it illuminates. Ultimately, it’s not at all clear to me that there was a bright line between public and private spheres of action in the early republic. It’s a muddled gray zone of colliding intentions and interests.

I think many historians are basically uncomfortable with that idea. Much of the historiography of the early republic assumes there were identifiable divisions between public and private finance and action, and that, if there weren’t, people must have been very upset about it. We don’t like the contradiction of being self-dealing and publicly minded at the same time. We want to see some angst. A reviewer recently suggested that what I was really writing about in my book is deal-making in the early republic, as if state formation was something more refined and above the logrolling I describe. But this is what legislating and governance looked like in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century United States.

In my research I kept seeing colonial kinship networks, political patronage, dependence on credit, insider dealing, and political party affiliations all intersecting to make the financing of projects and banks a complicated affair that was partly new and also partly a throwback to pre-Revolutionary ways of doing business. With that in mind, one of the interventions I’m trying to make in the literature is to show that many legislators and early American internal improvement promoters were comfortable with these arrangements. So instead of searching for clean hands or applying a one-dimensional analysis, I think a better approach is to dive into the details and try to understand the context. The evidence speaks for itself: political economy involved politics.

Historians often explain the national development of political parties (to the extent that they existed formally) through discussions of editor networks or galvanizing issues such as the French Revolution. How does Building the Empire State alter that narrative?

I don’t think you can understand the development of institutional political parties in this era unless you realize that they were supported by, and existed within, a network of early American corporations, particularly banks.

Because state governments had the right to grant charters—municipalities and counties couldn’t—incorporation was an inherently political process. After all, legislators controlled access to something that people wanted and they would never grant every request. So the first question is: how do you wrangle a charter?

It turns out that the process of assembling a coalition and petitioning lawmakers on behalf of a project was a kind of political mobilization. The process followed the same cycle elegantly embedded in the First Amendment’s speech clause: speech, press, assembly, and petitioning. So to win a bank charter, you have to organize a coalition, print up materials to attract investors, hold a public meeting, and submit a petition for a charter. But to win that charter—to get a majority of votes—you ultimately have to recruit supporters in state legislatures. And that’s where the political entrepreneurs come in: well-connected people who act as intermediaries between elected officials and would-be investors. They might not know anything about banking, but they’re helpful and necessary. They know which legislators will want to be rewarded with board seats or stock shares, or access to bank credit.

This means that there’s already a concentration of political capital and expertise in early American corporations. But banking is even more special: because lending is inherently discretionary, you have to be a member of the board or know one, or know someone who knows someone, to access a limited supply of credit. That means that these bankers have sway in their communities. They’re gatekeepers who control access to a pile of money, and it’s a short leap before they start using that influence toward partisan ends by rewarding allies and supporters and punishing dissenters.

The thing to realize here is that party formation is gradual. It’s not a sudden shock like the French Revolution. The Bank of New-York wasn’t founded as a Federalist bank. After all, there aren’t Federalists in 1784. But what happened is that the bank’s leadership and lending gradually became more—and almost exclusively—concentrated in Federalist hands by the late 1790s. When Aaron Burr and other Republicans founded the Manhattan Company as an alternative, they knew that they’d be able to recruit political supporters among people who had been denied credit by the Bank of New-York. And they knew that credit offered them a tool to exert discipline among an unstable political coalition of Federalist opponents. Credit (or debt—there’s no sense in getting worked up over which term you use since they’re flip sides of the same coin) was thus a way to maintain and discipline political coalitions and mobilize support among legislators and voters alike.

Therefore, before there were formal political parties that had their own institutional structures or a state apparatus that could dispense vast amounts of patronage, partisanship dwelled in corporations. Banking and internal improvements were something that partisans could do together that gave them a shared material interest in their alliances with one another. It wasn’t just that they shared ideological commitments or read from the same newspapers; they were also in business together, a cooperative effort that extended beyond the narrow window of the calendar year devoted to electioneering.

To what extent is the story of banking and canal-building applicable to the history of the United States outside of New York? 

I wrote this book about New York because I wanted to be able to provide some deep context for what was happening around the country in this era. Pick up the legislative journal of any state in any year in the early republic and see what lawmakers are working on: petitions from coalitions of investors seeking exclusive monopoly privileges, special rights, or corporate charters for a road, bridge, manufacturing enterprise, or some other public-private initiative. The specific projects may be different from what was happening in New York, but you’ll find similar legislative processes and the interposition of political entrepreneurs who acted as intermediaries between capital and the state.

In some cases states very explicitly emulated New York. Pennsylvania’s canal experiments were attempts to replicate the success of the Erie Canal, despite obvious geographical differences. But New York’s 1790s canals were inspired in part by Virginia’s 1785 Potomac Company. People interested in internal improvements and banking were keeping tabs on what their peers in other states and nations were doing, and they saw themselves as progressive, transformative voices in their own locales.

I also argue that once the Erie Canal opens and commercial trade to the west flows through New York City, New York’s canal experience becomes a de facto national story. That’s a transformative moment for the city, state, and the country as a whole. Suddenly, Philadelphia and Boston and a bunch of other cities are, from an economic standpoint, less relatively important. The financialization that happened in New York provided the basis for building the canal, and the canal in turn amplified the scale and scope of those financial institutions and markets.

Among its contributions, Building the Empire State seems to offer an alternate route into recent debates about the history of capitalism. That is, your narrative of finance and internal improvement seems to shift the conversation away from the role of slavery, on which many of the most prominent recent books in the field have focused. In what ways do you see Building the Empire State as an extension of or challenge to that work?

I certainly didn’t set out to challenge that recent work, and many of those books came out while I was revising or rewriting a project that had started way back in 2002. Along the way I was influenced by Stephen Mihm’s book on counterfeiting and Julia Ott’s book on investing and shareholding. Jessica Lepler and I have been circling each other since a SHEAR conference in Montreal and reading one another’s work for a decade now.

A story I’m trying to tell is how markets are structured by the state and how entrepreneurs used the rules of the game to enrich themselves and shut out competitors. I think the state is the agent of change in the early American economy. But I have to say that I don’t really think of myself as someone writing about capitalism per se because I don’t know how useful that term is for me as a way to frame an investigation into how the profit motive expressed itself in early American politics, and how people either resisted or accommodated it. For me, it was crucial at the outset to ground my work in institutional settings, and “political economy” was a far more useful conceptual way to enter the literature.

When I read some of the economic historians who had done work on banks, it often seemed like they were missing the fundamental, obvious fact that corporate chartering was an inherently political act. Likewise, I think some of the recent work on capitalism and slavery is under-institutionalized or relies on terminology and jargon to do heavy lifting that could have more effectively been accomplished by investigating and explaining concrete financial relationships and the rhythms and mechanisms of commerce. When we describe capitalism as a culture, what does that mean exactly? In some venues it can mean anything and everything, and you can write about capitalism without ever writing about money or banks or credit. If you end up comparing apples to oranges and can’t show the frequency or impact of particular activities, people who know the economics won’t be able to figure out what to make of your work.

I think a challenge we have as historians right now is to ask how the early American economy was structured and functioned and why there’s this explosion of banks, corporations, stocks and bonds, mortgages, insurance policies—all of these instruments—contributing to a rapid financialization in the antebellum period. It’s a big deal, and I hope my book is a helpful piece of the puzzle.

You’ve written previously at Common-place about how your historical training has aided you in your recent work reporting on corruption in New Jersey politics. Can you discuss the reverse process, that is, how your work as a journalist has helped you understand the construction of the Erie Canal?

In many ways my work as a journalist is why I became a historian. I covered personal investing and then a presidential campaign in 2000, and then had this interesting job covering state politics in New Jersey in 2002. I had no idea at the time that that job would later be so important in the overall trajectory of my career, but even then it was provocative and interesting.

I reported on Cory Booker’s first race for mayor of Newark in 2002, when he lost to the incumbent mayor, who was also a state senator, the chairman of a water utility, and a coach on the payroll of a local community college. Plural office holding! In the twenty-first century!

I covered a newly elected governor and state legislators and intensely local politics in a state big enough to have some regional variety but small enough that you could pretty much get a handle on everything important that was happening in a few months. And in that time something became clear: many of the most powerful people in politics weren’t names I had heard before. They operated behind the scenes and in mixed economy institutions that straddled the public and private spheres. For the most part, the general public has no idea who they are. I had already read Robert Caro’s book about Robert Moses, The Power Broker, so I already had a reference point to process what I was seeing. Nevertheless, it was a revelation.

When I started thinking about the Manhattan Company, I became interested in why Aaron Burr and Robert Livingston would use a water utility as an institutional foundation for opening a bank. How did that work legislatively? How did they build the coalition? What role did it play in New York? Who was in the room where these decisions happened, whose interests were at stake, and whose were prioritized?

People had written about the Manhattan Company before, but there was something missing from those accounts. It seemed to me that they didn’t quite get the politics and the nuance. So I started digging. I didn’t decide to impose an analysis and then go hunting for evidence to back a worldview. I wanted to know how it happened.

Something similar happened when I started that Erie Canal chapter. The legislative history of that project is a two-volume set published to commemorate its opening. There are petitions, meetings, reports, hearings, surveys, land transfers. It’s huge. But I kept thinking of something that modern-day reporters and legislative staffers say all the time: until everything is agreed to, nothing is agreed to. And so I was interested in seeing what particular unresolved details had derailed previous canal plans, and what the last-minute hurdles were before the New York legislature gave final approval to canal legislation in 1817. It turned out that the issues and principles at stake in that moment turned on a question about the propriety of financing large internal improvement projects via corporations governed by private interests. When lawmakers decided to fund the canal’s construction with state-issued bonds, they were laying out on a new course for how we build public works in the United States.

It was fun to write a chapter with that big a payoff and have this fantastic set of people—DeWitt Clinton, Martin Van Buren, Gouverneur Morris—driving the narrative. The big institutional story matters, but I think my journalism background always drags me toward writing it up in a way that feels immediate and personal. I want students and people outside of our profession to be able to pick the book up and share my excitement about this stuff.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.4 (September, 2016).

Brian Phillips Murphy is an associate professor of history and the director of the Honors College at Rutgers University-Newark. He is also a contributing editor at Talking Points Memo. Building the Empire State won the 2016 James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

The early American quest for a national culture, a distinctive music, literature, and art, was much like Thomas Jefferson’s for mammoths. Jefferson had seen the colossal beast’s bones and was certain mammoths continued to roam out West. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, many saw bits and pieces of what could create an American national music. The possibilities ranged from the tunes of Native Americans and slaves to the sounds of nature, especially those heard on the farm. While Jefferson looked for a large mammal—which had been around, he held, since time immemorial—boosters looked for an American national music—a culture, they held, about to appear for the first time. There was a hope that music somehow deemed national would unify the young country across diverse geographic and demographic divides, signal American genius to foreigners, and provide a cultural buttress for the democratic experiment then underway. In the end, Jefferson and American cultural nationalists found skeletons, but failed to find a whole, living thing.

In Sounds American, Ann Ostendorf launches a search for an American music in the lower Mississippi River Valley. Here she explores how music framed in the early American republic “was intimately connected to what today would best be called race or ethnicity,” and was, in commercial form, a safeguard from the very racial and ethnic types it solidified (2). The national music culture sought after by early Americans, Ostendorf concludes, existed in “the experience of categorizing difference” (7). Through an endless exercise to define what American music was not—Swiss, African, or Native American, for example—white Americans nurtured a shared cultural sense.

In 1803, President Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, which brought the region in Ostendorf’s study under American control—the official transfer took place on December 20. One key event for Sounds American happened at a public ball two weeks later in New Orleans. Tensions flared when supporters of a French and an English quadrille entered the dance floor at the same time. The two sets were at odds over which dance the band should support. “When an American raised his walking stick at the fiddler,” Ostendorf writes, “bedlam ensued” (73). Calmed by William Claiborne, the new American governor, the dancers commenced with a French quadrille. But soon an American cried out for an English one. Amid the jostling, the women, in a time-honored ritual that has killed everything from elegant socials to school proms, walked out. Claiborne reported the “fracas,” which he believed had a “political tendency,” to Secretary of State James Madison (74).

Though hard to fathom in a twenty-first century devoid of such an entrenched dance ethos, in 1804, the French and Americans continued to battle over the form and shape of public musical life. The measures the Americans put in place after the initial fray—an increased police presence and a published dance order—only heightened the conflict. At the next public ball, the two groups stood at odds and, once again, the women left to defuse the situation. The “War of the Quadrilles,” as Ostendorf titles the chapter, beautifully highlights the interplay between politics and culture. Claiborne and the Americans learned that political control does not provide cultural authority, that cultural authority may be the route to a more efficient political control, and that women wield significant cultural capital.

Ostendorf sets up the War of the Quadrilles as an instance of political power and an “example of ethnocultural conflict” (82). What’s at stake in her interpretation, however, is the very thing she has set out to explain. Nationalism, whether cultural, political, or economic in form, is a process by which one of several diverse expressions achieves widespread acceptance. To be understood as music emblematic of the new nation, an English quadrille, for example, would need to speak not only for the political and social elites who battled in New Orleans, but a spectrum of the city’s population, from servants and musicians to those in the middling class. Whether or not such a development took place, though, is not explained, and the volatile mix of culture and politics is largely left alone.

That Ostendorf opts to leave the details of such change unexplored is one of the great frustrations of Sounds American. The reader learns that Louisianans “integrated their previous identity into their understanding of what it meant to be American;” however, a careful look at the transformation of the public ball is missing (105). In its place are a series of broad gestures that rush through time—an 1828 celebration for Andrew Jackson, the 1844 presidential election, noted for its campaign songs, and an 1850 newspaper article on “national music.” To situate ethnicity, race, and music in historical context opens the way to track change over time in the musical life of the lower Mississippi River Valley. After all, in 1804 Claiborne moved into a West fraught by French colonial tradition, Native American hostilities, and a growing domestic slave trade. By 1860, New Orleans was the largest city in the South and an active hub of one of the largest slave societies in human history. How did music here transform in this tumultuous time?

Ostendorf is strongest in her analysis of a national music culture. The differentiation among racial and ethnic music genres was an important rite for those concerned with music and nation. Perhaps even more so, the buying and selling of tunes from church hymns to minstrel songs shaped a unique national music, too. Of course discomfort with the impulses of the market revolution ensured that almost no American would dare admit to it. So while the commercialization of music broke down the elitist barriers characteristic of the European concert hall tradition, the standard upheld for many American musicians, at the time few noted its democratic tendencies. They continued to look for an American music as defined by Romantic understandings of creativity—artists developed a national culture in their relationship to the American landscape, the nation’s farms, lakes, mountains, deserts, and streams. The suggestion that an American national music generated from one’s wallet held much less appeal.

Sounds American opens an historical inquiry into the music of a region important as a political, social, and cultural crucible in the American past. The book would prove a challenging read for undergraduates, who would be well rewarded, though, in making the effort. For historians, this book fills a glaring gap in American music history. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, New Orleans jazz culture has been well documented. From 1800 to 1860, however, when the Crescent City and its environs were central to the greater national dialogue on slavery, expansion, and the market revolution, the region’s rich musical life was, until now, largely unexplored.

Nancy Newman’s Good Music for a Free People is the first book-length exploration of the Germania Musical Society, a small but gifted private orchestra from Berlin that settled permanently in the United States in 1848 and toured the nation extensively until 1854. Turning away from earlier tendencies to treat musical life in the U.S. as an isolated cultural phenomenon, contemporary scholars of American music have increasingly adopted transatlantic perspectives in order to illuminate the rich cultural interfaces between Europe and the United States, especially before the twentieth century. Newman has adopted this approach in her book and ably demonstrates the direct influence of European politics, social theories, and musical values on the Germanians and their American audiences.

Readers of Common-place may be familiar with the Germania through the work of the late cultural historian Lawrence Levine, whose influential Highbrow/Lowbrow (1990) includes a brief discussion of the ensemble. Levine suggests that the Germania’s staple repertoire of canonical pieces by famous composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven and Felix Mendelssohn represented an early instance of a gradual “sacralization” process that overtook American culture in the course of the nineteenth century. Levine’s book critiques this process. Newman rejects the simplicity of Levine’s argument, which she correctly claims is based on outdated research on the Germania. She attempts instead to see the world through the eyes of the Germanians themselves, and what emerges is a sympathetic portrayal of the ensemble’s rise and fall that allows the reader to understand the group’s historical and symbolic importance within the larger scheme of German-American cultural relations at midcentury.

The Germanians were among a diverse group of “Forty-Eighters,” or immigrants who left the German-speaking lands for the U.S. during or shortly after the 1848-49 insurrections and for whom the United States and the freedom afforded its citizens represented an ideal, or at least a more promising, political and social future. What distinguished these musicians from other immigrants and political refugees, however, was their firm belief that music, particularly the large instrumental works of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, not only symbolized the ideals of social harmony and equality, but also instantiated these ideals in performance. The Germanians thus believed that they created a sound print, or an aural image, of a model society through the act of musical performance. This confluence of political, social, and musical values animating the orchestra’s career makes the group a particularly inviting case study in immigration history.

The book itself comprises five chapters followed by three appendices. The unusual structure of the five main chapters is neither chronological nor thematic, though given the complexity of Newman’s subject, it is difficult to imagine a better way of arranging them. The exterior chapters, one and five, present Newman’s argument concerning the importance of European social theory to the life of the Germania and assesses the Germania’s potential contributions to our understanding of immigration history. The interior chapters, two through four, describe the trajectory of the group’s career—from its formation in Berlin in 1848 to its dissolution in Boston in 1854—and then interpret its programming choices in the light of new understandings of mid-century musical taste. Finally, the appendices greatly increase the book’s value for future research. They provide a wealth of new and carefully cataloged factual information about the Germania’s touring schedule, programming, and membership as well as a handful of archival documents related to the society, which Newman has translated into English.

Chapters two and three form the core of the book’s plot. Far from providing an uninteresting blow-by-blow account of the group’s extensive national tours (it performed nearly 1,000 concerts over six years), Newman skillfully crafts her narrative alongside a first-hand history of the ensemble written by one of its members, Henry Albrecht, here presented in full English translation for the first time. This approach is similar to that found in Vera Brodsky Lawrence’s three-volume survey of music in New York City during the nineteenth century, Strong on Music, which presents and comments upon many excerpts from the famous diary of George Templeton Strong (1820-75). These two chapters offer the reader a wealth of information not only about the Germania’s activities, but especially the personalities they encountered during their touring career. Through what must have been painstaking research, Newman has provided contextual biographical data about virtually every person whose name appears in the book (mostly musicians). This attention to detail alone gives the work great future value for historians of the period, especially musicologists. Readers will also undoubtedly be struck by anecdotes about performances for famous political figures, including presidents, as well as the toll that such a grueling schedule of performances would have taken on these two dozen men.

Chapter four analyzes and interprets the Germanians’ repertory choices, which, as Newman argues, contributed both to their success and to their ultimate failure. Here, too, she fleshes out her critique of Levine by suggesting that the processes of modernization, especially “the proliferation of mass media—public concerts, sheet music, and journalism,” (117) provide a better model for explaining the bifurcation of music into “high” and “low” cultural categories during the later nineteenth century than does Levine’s theory of aesthetic revaluation. Levine imagined concert programs as occupying an aesthetic spectrum: one side is meant to please the highest number of people possible while the other is meant to educate or to enlighten a select few. In Levine’s narrative, the Germania typically occupied a space near this latter side of the spectrum, yet Newman demonstrates that this was not actually the case.

Programming directed toward diverse and eclectic audiences had been a central strategy in Europe and in the United States throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The Germania continued this trend by programming mixtures of dances, operatic numbers, marches, descriptive musical scenes, and, finally, large-scale instrumental works such as symphonies and concert overtures. By appealing to such a wide customer base, the group amassed huge successes in its first years. As the tour progressed, however, the musicians had come to believe that Americans were beginning to prefer “heavier” instrumental pieces by composers such as Beethoven and Mendelssohn; they were wrong. During the 1853-54 season, their last, they struggled to stay afloat as they offered two types of programs—one dedicated solely to “lighter” works and one dedicated to European masterworks. Far from pointing the way toward a sacralized future for American music, as Levine would have us believe, the Germanians instead caused their own demise by straying from their earlier eclecticism, which continued to have cultural capital well into the latter half of the century.

The gentle irony that an organization dedicated to communistic principles was brought down by the vagaries of the audience marketplace serves as a starting place for understanding Newman’s broader argument about the ensemble’s place within American cultural history. Chapter one situates the orchestra’s move to the United States within the larger context of German immigration history. In addition to commenting on larger-scale interpretations of German transatlantic migration (e.g., by Veit Valentin, Carl Wittke, and Bruce Levine), she argues that the social dimensions of the 1848-49 revolutions, not the purely political, played a significant role in the decision of many Germans, including the Germania Orchestra members, to leave their homelands for the U.S. The American cultural landscape was, in turn, more receptive to social utopianism than post-revolutionary Europe. The Germanians immediately found welcome support among social reformers in the United States, especially in Boston, where former members of the Fourierist phalanx called Brook Farm, including the preacher-turned-music critic John Sullivan Dwight (1813-93), became some of their most vocal proponents.

The book’s final chapter follows this line of thought by tracing and tying together several other strands radiating from the life and ideas of the French utopian socialist Étienne Cabet (1788-1856). Not only did Cabet’s social theories arguably spur the creation of the Germania Orchestra, but its unprecedented success in the U.S. was largely dependent on Americans’ general receptivity to the ideals of European social reform. The Frenchman’s pull on the Germania was so strong that even after the group’s dissolution, Henry Albrecht continued to pursue musical relationships with utopian societies in the United States, including Cabet’s own “Icarian colony” in Nauvoo, Illinois. Newman concludes by noting that traces of social utopianism and the Germania’s drive toward self-determination as a musical ensemble have persisted in American culture despite their earlier and sometimes dramatic failures.

Newman’s book offers a challenging new perspective on music’s vital contributions to the discourses of modernization and social theory that emerged in the early part of the nineteenth century, and it implicitly posits that no understanding of musical life in the United States is complete without accounting for contemporaneous developments in Europe. In addition to readers interested in nineteenth-century music more generally, then, it should find a welcome audience among those with further interests in social theory, cultural history, immigration history, and the transatlantic exchange of culture occurring throughout the century.

Douglas Shadle is a visiting assistant professor of music history at the University of Louisville. His primary research specialty is classical music in the nineteenth-century United States.

Over the last three decades, a dedicated corps of historians has been endeavoring to increase the attention devoted to the Dutch colony of New Netherland in the telling of American history. Aided by the ongoing translation of the trove of seventeenth-century Dutch records at the New York State Library and spurred by heightened public interest in the Dutch following the celebratory events of the quadricentennial of Henry Hudson’s voyage of exploration in 2009, these researchers have measurably increased knowledge of the Dutch colony during its forty-year existence and, in the process, kindled interest in the legacy of Dutch colonization in the mid-Atlantic region. The accumulating weight of this body of scholarship, coupled with the adoption of an Atlantic World perspective by students of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, has ensured that pleas for the integration of the Dutch into the national narrative no longer go unheeded. Bernard Bailyn’s recently published The Barbarous Years. The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 is only the latest chronicle of early America to incorporate an extended treatment of seventeenth-century Dutch colonists.

Even as American historians have been busy situating New Netherland in the stream of the nation’s history, scholars in the Netherlands, critical of the long-standing emphasis on East India Company possessions in accounts of the seventeenth-century Dutch empire, have been paying greater attention to the colonies under the dominion of the West India Company, among them New Netherland. In the course of deliberating on how New Netherland fits into the broader picture of Dutch colonial enterprise, they have crossed paths with Americans assessing New Netherland’s impact on the development of American institutions. Evan Haefeli’s long-awaited study of religious toleration in New Netherland lies at the intersection of these two historiographical trends and thus speaks to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, it is Haefeli’s decision to frame the history of New Netherland’s encounter with religious diversity in the context of the seventeenth-century Dutch world instead of the usual trajectory leading to the American revolutionary period that distinguishes his work.