Precisely fifty years ago, on a frosty Sunday when winters were truly wintry, having little or no zest for my graduate studies, and nothing particular to divert me from the bad tidings in the Boston Globe about Vietnam and Soweto and Selma, I thought I would borrow a friend’s car and escape for a day from the poisonous effluvia of politics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So I drove out to visit Old Sturbridge Village (OSV), an outdoor history museum in central Massachusetts that recreates life in rural New England in the early nineteenth century. The fresh country air, I thought, would refresh my spirit. Little did I expect that on that day I would find a lifelong vocation in public history.

For four or five hours, I slogged through the snowy lanes of the village, in and out of wooden buildings, coming face to face with men and women wearing aprons and bonnets, broad-brimmed hats, button-fly trousers, and high leather boots that made a lot more sense than my already soaked penny loafers. In midafternoon, I took refuge in the Fenno House on the Village Common, where a kindly lady put aside her handwork and invited me to thaw out in a Windsor chair that faced the fire. She described the 1720s dwelling and suggested I look over a period newspaper, a reproduction of the Massachusetts Spy from 1820, which sat on the candlestand next to my chair. I picked it up, adjusted my eyes to its tiny font, and shifted my chair several times to catch the light from the single candle on the table, the fireplace, and the last rays coming through the windows. And though my eyes were much better in those days, I found myself reading slowly, even moving my lips. Then it dawned on me.

The architecture of the room, the physicality of the paper, my reversion to reading aloud, the lightweight chair that allowed my movement, the candlestand, the candlestick, the different sources of light—all combined to form a single cultural artifact full of rich complexity, rooted entirely in the inescapable materiality of the place. My own body became an investigative tool to probe the actions, thoughts, and feelings of people long departed, and perhaps to recover a deeper sense of their humanity. Becoming a professional historian had trained me to seek out abstract stories. I had learned to speak of “ideological origins,” “mimetic strategies,” and “nationalist impulses.” But I hadn’t until that day in Sturbridge felt the concrete urgencies of the past.

From the Fenno House, I trudged over to the cavernous Village Meetinghouse, where I instantly realized that all those Puritan sermons I had parsed at Harvard University, at the feet of the great intellectual historian Perry Miller and his disciples, had been delivered on days like this to congregants wrapped in capes, blankets, and probably the family dog. I’d been studying these New Englanders for years. Now I could no longer recall what images I previously had of them, or whether I had any at all. I started to people the room with what I knew of the social history of the time and place—the rich folks down in the front pews, the tithingman on the look-out for the flirtatious glances of the young women, a wife cutting off the snoring of her husband. The words I had decoded in the quiet of the university library were totally transformed in the theatrical and experiential actuality of this building.

 

Embarrassed by my ignorance of the palpable realities of nineteenth-century men and women, I drove back to Sturbridge the next day and talked myself into a 30-hour-per-week job, at $1.10 an hour. Dressed in those funny costumes, I could hold forth as a schoolmaster, country parson, or lawyer for an audience of families with squally toddlers and surly teenagers, well-read older folks, honeymooning couples, and many, many social-studies teachers. In my off hours, I prowled through the museum’s library, searching through massive town histories and personal narratives for stories I could impart to “my” visitors. I constantly fought against the visitors’ romantic desire to enshrine the past, physically challenging as it surely was, as morally superior. Instead, it was the dense physical complexity of every historical moment which allowed me to visit it as a site that tested my imagination at every turn. I learned most by watching how the blacksmith knew by his acute color sense “to strike the iron when it was hot,” or when the cabinetmaker pressed his chisel harder on the lathe and his foot more rapidly on the treadle, or how the passage of carts slowed as the ice melted into mud on the roads. Observing the epiphenomena of everyday life, largely unrecorded in the archive, led me to think that there was a dimension of cultural and intellectual history that had escaped my notice and that of my teachers and classmates.

Eight months later I returned to Cambridge with renewed energy to finish my PhD course work and exams. And then Old Sturbridge Village came knocking—offering a real job (at $8,000 per year) as a historian in residence, charged with providing our costumed interpreters with broader contexts for the little corners of history they represented. I leapt at the opportunity.

 

As I began my work at Sturbridge, I needed to find a pedagogy that would invite museum visitors to explore the past. At the time, there was scarcely any scholarly literature and few instructional guides in museum studies, material culture, or public history. One or two graduate programs had begun to attract students interested in museum careers, but even they relied more heavily on hands-on experience than readings and classroom work.

I began to note how our visitors moved from one encounter (with an artifact, an interpreter, or a crafts demonstration) to another. Too much of their day consisted of disconnected fragments, rarely tied to larger ideas. How did the gallery of clocks ring out with ideas about the way a sense of time changes with industrialization, and could we see the shifts in the way artisans organized their labor? What did the newly restored general store, its shelves stocked with reproductions of goods imported in that earlier era of globalization, say about the integration of local agricultural and handcraft production with regional markets? What did the taste for printed cottons teach us about the decline of domestic spinning and weaving?

The problem was built into the conventional model of almost all museums at the time. In art museums like the Met or MOMA, works were usually arranged alone, surrounded by white space, their original settings in studios, churches, or burial tombs conveniently erased, and each labeled with only minimal information about the artist, the medium, and the donor. In great libraries like the Morgan or the Huntington, long identification labels frequently shared the vitrines with treasured books and manuscripts, to be read only by the cognoscenti willing and able to understand them. In history museums, many of the objects were marvelously mysterious, like old farm implements, and required extensive description, diagrams, and period illustrations to make them comprehensible, but the interpretation of each object was disconnected from what came before and after. In all such venues, the more the visitors brought to the encounter, the more they could take away. But woe to the uninitiated and the unassisted.

 

The one-artifact-at-a-time approach to display—probably a better word than exhibition—foreclosed a more coherent interpretation of the American past. What linked the objects was their rarity, or their superb individual quality, and not how they each contributed to a lucid exposition or narrative about American history.

State and local museums then usually featured a core exhibition of a long, winding timeline. Era after era succeeded one another. The first gallery invariably focused on local Indian tribes, whose “lives in harmony with nature” were illustrated by a diorama and display case with a dozen dark brown archaeological specimens—pots and fabrics and arrowheads. Succeeding exhibition cases featured a predictable progression of Pioneers (flintlocks and wolf traps); Settlers (axes and aprons); Founding Fathers (inkwells); Inventors (patent models); Captains of Industry (engravings of sprawling factories); Immigrants (colorful folk costumes); Governors or Presidential Candidates (campaign buttons picturing men with beards); and Veterans of the World Wars (posters, packs of Lucky Strikes, ration cards). The past lay across a great divide; how we got from one era to the next unexplored. Chronology took the place of interpretation.

Though the objects on display were drawn from local examples, the story they told was generic: America was anywhere and everywhere a tale of endless economic progress, democracy, and the expansion of science and industry. A similar narrative framed the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of History and Technology (NMHT, now called the National Museum of American History), where mechanical marvels—locomotives, combines, and die-stamping presses—marched across immense galleries, proof of America’s exceptional genius. Much of the actual quotidian experience of Americans—the communities they shared, the skills they used, and the relations they had with one another—was excluded. Public history, largely inattentive to the lives of ordinary folk, was instead a celebration of the rich, the powerful, and the famous.

It seems scarcely credible today that when the NMHT opened in 1964, it displayed almost no images of African-Americans or Indian peoples. Not a single working-class home or neighborhood in the United States was then deemed worthy of preservation or interpretation. The enormous architectural legacy of American industrial places, from Maine through New York City’s Soho district and west through the Great Lakes states, was in danger of being destroyed by urban-renewal programs. At plantation museums in the South, the lives of enslaved people were invisible—“meals were served” and “cotton was harvested.” The immigration stations at Ellis Island and Angel Island were abandoned ruins. Museums of decorative arts often cut off their collections at 1820, deeming unworthy the public’s interest in machine-made furniture.

 

Coming of age in the 1960s, my generation of museum historians aimed to shatter such a simplistic teleology and to explore themes that took a more critical stance on our nation’s history. As devotees of the new social history, we wanted museums to open for investigation the everyday experiences, perspectives, and agency of ordinary people in the past. Not to leave visitors gawking at their weirdness, but to have them put themselves in the shoes of Americans dealing with the threats and promises of their times—a boom-and-bust economy, intergroup rivalry and conflict, shifting family roles, as well as more powerful disruptions like enslavement, immigration, impoverishment, violence, epidemic, and dislocation.

The answer to fragmented visits and implicit teleology had to be both pedagogical and historiographical. At Sturbridge, I had experimented with coaxing visitors to participate, through a variety of hands-on experiences, in “thematic” tours about Family Roles (should farmers send their daughters to work in textile mills?), Work (how did mechanization transform the skills of rural people?), and Community Development (who would benefit if the town built a high school?). At the end, the visitors’ “findings” represented the heart of the “wrap-up.” The great cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner taught us that visitors would take away more of what they said and did than what we offered, so it was important to get them to “externalize” their understandings.

After leaving Sturbridge, I joined in 1980 with my friend Sam Bass Warner, a great historian and public citizen, to create the American History Workshop, a collaborative of scholars, educators, curators, designers, and media producers working to bring fresh scholarship, imaginative design, and effective pedagogy to supplement the staff resources of cultural institutions. The workshop has since been the vehicle for my professional career, through more than 500 projects in thirty-four states and the District of Columbia.

 

In each case, we have construed the museum visit as an experience in time as well as space, a performance in which the visitors played the leading roles. My first artistic love had been the theater, and increasingly I saw the museum space as a stage, but with a more flexible toolbox for engaging visitors. Our exhibitions could present a range of historical evidence that far surpassed the texts that our academic colleagues discussed—artifacts, remnants of places, sounds and images (through film and video), and gestures (in performances and demonstrations incorporated into the visitors’ pathway). Technical aids have been continually proliferating: beautifully rendered graphic panels, audio-visual programs, computer-interactive devices, role-playing and simulation exercises, and stagecraft that recreates historical spaces, moments, and situations.

Over the course of the 1980s, however, it became clear to me that we were failing. Visitors did not exactly warm to these exhibitions of the new social history. They did not identify with “ordinary people” in the past, and they quickly wearied of social-science generalizations about urbanization or deindustrialization. A turning point came when we started to outline the tour programs of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Instead of an interpretive exhibition that would explore the evolution of working-class life in New York City’s famous gateway neighborhood, the museum decided to animate its six-story 1864 brick building at 97 Orchard Street with apartments that would recreate the lives of distinct immigrant and ethnic families—one for German Americans and others for Irish, Eastern-European Jewish, Italian, Chinese, and African-American families. Teams of historians were enlisted to construct composite, “typical” life histories for the families.

 

The results were disappointing. Our historical consultants painted the facts correctly, but in overly broad strokes. All their imagined Irishmen, of course, worked on the docks, the Germans in furniture, the Jews in shmattes (garments). Each community was composed of diverse sub-ethnic groups (Sicilians, Neapolitans, etc.). The ambitious sons in each gravitated to influential positions in different niches of public and economic life—the Irish to Tammany Hall and the police, the Germans to the shooting society on St. Marks Place and the unions. Added together, the family patterns our historians described had a sameness that threatened to turn the museum into a repetitive “soap opera” of how immigrants overcame adversity, group after group, year after year.

At that point, a genealogist working for the museum discovered the 1883 petition of Nathalie Gumpertz, a tenant at 97 Orchard Street, asking New York’s Surrogates Court to declare her husband Julius legally dead. She said that Julius had gone to work one day in the depression year of 1874 and never returned. Informed that he could now inherit $600 from relatives in Prussia, Nathalie asked the court to declare Julius dead and to grant her the money. The census returns confirmed Julius’s presence in 1870 but not in 1880. Then the fun began. Who was Nathalie? Was she Roman Catholic, Jewish, or freethinking? What could she do to support herself and three daughters when her husband vanished? As we researched those questions—learning about the education of German-American girls in New York City, the technology of dressmaking, and other subjects—we fleshed out the dilemmas of a household led by a single mother.

The Gumpertz narrative became a template for other tenement museum apartments, as we sought to construct stories around the lives of actual residents of 97 Orchard. Josephine Baldizzi, a daughter of Sicilian immigrants who had grown up there during the Great Depression, came forward to donate detailed stories as well as her father’s tools, which he’d used for the odd jobs he scratched together to make ends meet. We found that visitors empathized and identified with these individual stories of real people more intensely than they ever did with the composite figures fabricated by historians.

The project taught me that narratives always trumped themes. Public history is far more than the dissemination of scholarly research to a wider audience. It is itself an alternative method of intellectual discovery. Visitors did not come to museums to get an M.A. in social history but to engage their hearts and minds, skills, and self-images, in an encounter with human situations structured by a time and place different from our own. Thematic exposition thus evolved into what I have come to call a “storyscape.”

Working on interpretive plans for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, several American Indian cultural centers, and Holocaust museums also pressed me to acknowledge the political implications of cultural and historical recovery. I learned that almost every important new museum project had to bridge two roles—serving as the cultural expression of one ethnic group or another and contributing to a larger American narrative about socioeconomic power and its limits.

That didn’t mean scoring political points with long didactic labels—usually less likely to make an impression on visitors as they might on scholarly review committees. Our goal was to maximize the visitors’ opportunities “to see themselves in the story,” to represent multiple perspectives in the working-out of the historical events, and to leave the ultimate conclusions open-ended.

 

We had our best chance to display this methodology in a series of six blockbuster history shows for the New-York Historical Society in 2005-2011. In the first, Slavery in New York (2005), we avoided editorializing about “the nefarious trafficking in human beings” in favor of demonstrating how fundamental the institution was to the economic and physical development of the city—a surprise to most  New York visitors, Black as well as White. Even more important, the exhibition drew visitors slowly away from an outsider’s view toward embodying the perspectives and voices of its African and African-American citizenry. “Curating the silence” became our byword, following in the footsteps of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1997).

Visitors entered the next show, New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War (2006), under a hanging replica of a 500-pound bale of cotton, suggesting the dominance of the cotton trade on the politics and culture of New York City in the antebellum period, against which the city’s community of free Blacks and sympathetic Whites fashioned a crusade for abolition and racial equality. In succeeding exhibitions, we tackled the construction of American nationhood in the nineteenth century through events like Lafayette’s tour in 1824-25 (French Founding Father: Lafayette’s Return to Washington’s America, 2007) and the creation of the U.S. Army (Grant and Lee, 2008). In Lincoln and New York (2009), we dug deeply into the domestic civil war in New York City between Copperheads and Republicans, and its influence on the much more familiar national scene. Our final show at N-YHS, Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn (2011), aimed to construe the effects of the eighteenth-century political upheavals, and particularly the Haitian Revolution, in delegitimizing social hierarchies.

All this experience informs my advice for young people aiming to carry their passion for history beyond the academy. In making that transition myself, I had to overcome three hurdles. First, I had to redefine what I meant by the “audience” for my work—not only in its greater diversity but also in its role. At its best, public history engages the visitor’s active curiosity with the curatorial and interpretive resources of the scholar. Much contemporary academic scholarship argues over issues that are of only remote concern to the wider public, like the exchange of gifts between English and American Indian groups in eighteenth-century Georgia. It gives long-winded answers to questions laypeople would never raise, like the congruence of FDR’s economic policies with earlier currents of academic research.

 

Our history workshop begins by doing “content research” with our potential visitors: What do they now understand about the idea of “revolution”? What could make them see the federal Constitution as a jerry-built construction, with procedural compromises to overcome deadlock? How could they serve as witnesses for the resourcefulness of families in moments of economic distress or social exclusion? Incorporating the urgencies of potential visitors is not a matter of dumbing down the interpretive message, but of respecting museumgoers as thinkers.

The second hurdle was learning my trade. A museum historian doesn’t have to master the design of computer programs. Working on a film doesn’t mean that one needs to handle a camera or an editing suite. But it is critical to understand how design decisions, filmmaking techniques, or software protocols influence the narrative and the interpretation we are seeking. Many architects, designers, and media producers would rather that the historian simply turn over the research, and let them create the script or the space. We established AHW precisely to insist on the centrality of the historian to all stages of the interpretive work, from the initial concept to the choice of objects and interpretive devices, and even to the color, light, and ambient sound of the final installation. Early in my career, I had decided I would not be satisfied as a “consultant.” So in assuming the producer’s chair, I had to learn how to set performance criteria for my subcontractors and keep the project on budget and schedule. I had to lean heavily on friends in design offices and advertising agencies, and to spend many weeks carefully observing how their projects evolved, in the service of learning the ropes.

The third hurdle was to grasp the organizational culture of my work. Taking courses in museum studies and public history can usefully sharpen a student’s sense of the scope and focus of professional work beyond the academy. And by now there has been an explosion of writing, teaching, and public commentary about museums. Some of it aims to “theorize” the museum, often using it as evidence of everything that is disappointing in contemporary social and intellectual life. Others take the current museum as a given, recommending “best practices.” Though I’ve enjoyed dipping into this literature, it has had only limited influence on my work. There is no substitute for immersion in the very different institutional world of the museum, the public-broadcasting station, or the art center. Seminar papers are very different from the sequence of proposals, alternate concepts, interim drafts, and final scripts that mark the stages of a public history project.

Ultimately, however, public historians are actors in the same intellectual milieu as their academic colleagues. Beyond their work as interpreters of the past, public historians today share perplexities that are both peculiar to our trade but also rooted in our wider intellectual landscape.

I see three great challenges confronting our work today.

 

Do we still value attentiveness? I grew up worshipping at the altar of attentiveness. It was, after all, the means to every good end. If you wanted success in school, or in learning to appreciate literature or music, you had to pay attention and stick with it. To my generation, the wandering mind was a dangerous outlaw. Though I loved watching Sesame Street in its early years with my young son (I was more attentive than he was), commentators blamed the program for abbreviating the attention spans of children. There followed the epidemic of attention deficit disorder, especially among young boys who might have been dubbed restless or obstreperous in earlier times. Economist Herbert Simon worried publicly about the danger of brief attentiveness to rational decision-making. But more recently, intuition, instinct, and snap judgments have made a cultural comeback. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, argues that effortful and rational thinking, or what he calls “System 2,” is not only slower and more biased, but even more likely to be wrong, than “System 1,” or intuition. The book has sold over a million copies since its publication in 2011. Malcolm Gladwell’s racier Blink: the Power of Thinking without Thinking (2007), a celebration of intuitions, attracted an even larger readership. Psychologists, behavioral economists, sociobiologists, and spiritualists have converged on the idea of yielding to “gut” feelings, jumping to snap judgments, and eliminating extraneous filters that could lead to labored reasoning.

As I’ve noted, much of my museum career has been an effort to overcome the discontinuous nature of attentiveness. If anything, ubiquitous smartphones and social media have now made distraction even more tempting. It is so easy for our visitors to lose focus in attending to an ever-proliferating “elsewhere.” We know that the museum experience—unlike film, theater, or even classroom instruction—is inherently built around intermittent encounters. Over the years, however, we have learned to acknowledge and turn potential distractions to our advantage. We help parents guide their children. We provide seating and contemplative spaces to relieve the physical strain of intensive looking and reading, and so on.

Can we now reinvent the rhythms of museum engagement to integrate new media into the process of learning and aesthetic pleasure?

The tyranny of immediacy. Timothy Wu’s brilliant and breezy 2016 book The Attention Merchants traces “the epic scramble” of technology promoters “to get inside our heads.” With the advent of recordings of live interviews and commentaries captured in the midst of an occurrence—first on radio and then television, then via audio and video recorders, and now on smartphones—our distance from global and local events has vanished. Immediacy has become the chief criterion of importance. No other source is more compelling than a report from the scene, bringing us that face-to-face encounter with a world-changing event, just as it happens, in the voice of ordinary participants or eyewitnesses. How desperately we’ve missed such testimony about the great events of the past! And how much we’ve tried to compensate for that gap by re-creating dramatic moments in individual lives. In some ways, that’s been the capstone of my creative labors in museum design.

But slowly, perhaps insidiously, “immediatism” has undermined the value of other kinds of information. Aren’t there other actors, other actions, other causes and consequences that are worth interpreting? Is what happened on 9/11 only what happened at the tip of Manhattan or at the Pentagon or at Shanksville, Pennsylvania? Do the 2,500-plus “Portraits in Grief,” capsule biographies of the 9/11 victims first published in The New York Times and now exhibited at the memorial museum in lower Manhattan, give us the whole story of what occurred that day? Of course not, but it’s difficult to reinsert other voices—registering longer-term perspectives and contexts to tell us what the eyewitnesses miss—when our media privilege first-hand narratives.

Slowly, gradually, the insistence on immediacy has altered the role of public historians. Erasing the distance between the past and the present, between the witness and the observer, has turned up the heat in historical presentations. The pain of enslavement, or social exclusion, or economic exploitation, now pushes to one side the exposition of its contexts in historical conditions. Immediate reactions and consequences squeeze out slowly emerging causes. Public historians treating difficult subjects—racial violence, for example—themselves absorb the suffering of historical victims. As historical distance is effaced, the traumas of lynching are visited on those who study and interpret it for the public, and the public too may be deliberately exposed to the pain.

Public historians want history to be relevant and personally meaningful. But they also need to help visitors, viewers, and readers to step back and detach themselves from history’s horrors. My generation of historians and curators has worked hard to claim a space for critical history in our museums and historic sites and, at the same time, to make our storytelling emotionally compelling. We don’t want museums to become “books on the wall,” dense and dreary with arid generalizations, but we have to resist the alternate danger, that we become uncritical shrines or memorials, or weak substitutes for community social service agencies.

Can we make coherent sense of our fragmented storylines? Our old triumphalist narrative of America masked a lot of troubling episodes, construing the story of a segment of mostly White, middle-class men as THE story of America. Two generations of historians have recovered many of the missing pieces of our diverse national experience. But today synthesizing the history of our nation in any way has become as daunting as overcoming the fragmentation in our politics. The New Left’s suspicion of “the system” has converged with the New Right’s antagonism to big government, amounting to what the historian Daniel T. Rodgers describes as “the narrowing down of institutional society into word-pictures of isolated individuals.” We have millions of great stories, but what do they add up to? For every saga of a dream fulfilled we seem to have another heartbreaking tale of a life impoverished or lost.

 

By the end of the Obama years, many historians may have grown complacent about the value and challenge of stronger narratives. Fragmentation could plausibly be read as diversity. Was that not a good thing? Then, quite suddenly, the 2016 election revealed a huge hole in our profession’s thinking about the nation’s character and evolution. Where had this Trump coalition come from? Where had it been hiding all these years? Other fissures appeared. How could the triumphalist narrative of the civil rights revolution—a staple of museums across the nation—survive in the wake of renewed attention to police shootings of Black men or, more broadly, in the attack by Michelle Alexander and others on mass incarceration as The New Jim Crow (2012), yet another chapter in the control of Black men? How could longstanding narratives about prosperity survive the evidence of growing inequality and wage stagnation, even in the midst of a very long economic expansion?

All these phenomena—Trump, Black Lives Matter, and the disappearing middle class—warn us against grasping at “happy endings” in our public history narratives. Can we develop storyscapes that show how they relate to deep and persistent patterns in our national experience? Will institutions dependent upon public support—whether tax-supported or market-driven—accept presentations of the unresolved, incomplete, and even ongoing tragedies of American history?

Perhaps one day a history department will reframe its program to help its students address these questions and seize the opportunity to answer them, but after a half century I’m doubtful. In many graduate schools, there is now much talk about public history as an alt-career, a fallback in the very real likelihood of missing out on an academic position. But few departments actively assist students in gaining the skills, the perspectives, and the sensitivity to institutional cultures that are needed for success beyond the academy. Few members of history faculties have the personal experience to guide students in finding new ways to do history beyond the university. And unlike many other fields, the faculty-development system in history has made it impossible to recruit senior practitioners of these historical arts as mentors.

I often get phone calls from graduate students desperately seeking advice. Some say, without knowing how reckless it sounds to me, “I want to do what you’ve done.” But my example is probably irrelevant now. I had the fortunate opportunity to finish my PhD dissertation while I worked full-time in a museum. When I got my degree, at age 32, I had already completed seven or eight years of museum work and built a network of colleagues I could rely upon for a lifetime of collaboration and companionship. Instead, I refer my inquirers to the brave young historians I know who’ve more recently jumped ship and struck out on their own. Some have found work in museums or with documentary-film projects, but others are developing apps, websites, podcasts, and games, writing books and curricula, collaborating on public art projects, and creating and leading tours. All of them would agree that doing this work well couldn’t wait until one has tried and failed to succeed as a university professor. In sum, my advice is: Start now.

 

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

---

Richard Rabinowitz is founder and president of American History Workshop. His most recent book, Curating America: Journeys Through Storyscapes of the American Past, is published by the University of North Carolina Press. Illustrations by Richard T. Hoyen. All images courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.

The next morning I was discussing My Bondage

and My Freedom with the Frederick Douglass

t-shirt spread out on my bed like a flag.

I’d climbed out of the sheets believing myself

a slave to various pornographies of style

(hair, language, demeanor), and because

I wanted the glamor of the mythic black man

with a blasting afro and fortified stare to adorn

my vulnerable heart that day, I said to the t-shirt,

“I don’t know if it’s the guy who wears

eyeglasses that’s me, the guy who wears contacts,

or the guy who wears nothing at all.” Frederick

Douglass wrote, “I prefer to be true to myself,

even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule

of others,” but the t-shirt was silent.

I know it seems odd to converse with a garment,

but I have no one else to talk to these days,

plus I think it’s great that I can talk to a t-shirt

when I am not confessing to a sheet of paper.

Most people are not so lucky; some only have

conversations with God, money or bodies.

Last night I dreamed my father had shed

like 200 pounds. Shirtless, the muscles

he’d had in his twenties when he met my mother

and me were restored and made me ashamed

because in the dream I realized he’d never been

comfortable enough to walk bareback

through his own house. “Titties,” my mother called

them before he moved out of their bedroom

and began to dress and undress downstairs.

“I say nothing of father, for he is shrouded

in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate,”

Frederick Douglass wrote. In the dream my father

smiled when I told him he looked good with no shirt,

but the truth is, growing up, I was happy

he did not walk around shirtless. He was so large

I feared the flesh hanging from his chest

would remind me of a woman’s breasts.

 

I told the Freddy D tee the infant that would become

our first black president nursed at the breasts

of a white woman from Kansas and the shirt replied,

“Naturally, the mother was a tapestry of nurture,

who does not desire that? I was born Frederick

Augustus Washington Bailey into slavery

on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay,

and still remember that my mother’s touch,

before I was taken from her, was like cloth

the shape of my future, all the threads of decision

and consequence to come; how her spirit

filled me with elaborate dreams, extraordinary clarity,

and doom as I moved among the so called pilgrims

in the kingdom of God.” “A man’s character

always takes its hue, more or less, from the form

and color of things about him.” FD also said,

“My first wife was the color of my mother

and the second, the color of my father.” Color,

it turns out, is fluid. Some of us sweat History

more than others. Frederick Douglass was married

to the black underground railroad abolitionist

and laundress, Anna Murray, for 44 years

before she died, but no t-shirt honors her visage.

Later when he slept beside his second wife,

a younger, very white woman named Helen Pitts,

he did not once stroke the downy hair along her

arms without the embarrassment of an erection.

She would be asleep when it happened, the touch,

the erection, and in the dark the great black man

would reach beneath a fabric as plush as the fabrics

his first wife laundered before and after marrying him.

The children with the first wife likely considered this

the worst of their father’s abolitions. The mind longs

to abolish misery, but unfortunately who can say

whether a mind can actually abolish anything.

A mother’s clutch, marriage, slavery, heartache:

it all lives in the thread. I believe nothing

can be abolished, that’s my problem. Not fear

in this universe of cost and erasure, the death inside

everything, not fear of the world’s dark avenues

and adventures, not fear of other men and women,

the Zimmermans, the plain clothes cops, the handcuffs

and malice, blame, bullets, bruises, and blues

alighting the skin, slipknots, silk cloth, mischief—

nothing can be abolished, though we agree,

Frederick Douglass and me, slavery nearly abolished

our ancestry just as it nearly abolished our families.

 

I wanted to wear the Frederick Douglass t-shirt

because it’s as close as I’ll ever be to Frederick

Douglass. I wanted to appear revolutionary

and decorous entering the day like a needful star,

superb in love and logic. My mother often says

she’s so happy she didn’t kill me when she found out

she was pregnant. She’s so glad she didn’t give me

to the old woman who asked to adopt me.

When sweat weeps along the sides of my ribs

from the two great stains yellowing my shirt pits,

I’m like a man ashamed by his own tears.

I used to keep my arms clamped at my sides

the hot days of my adolescence in South Carolina,

oh Carolina, peace was not the word I knew there.

The last time I visited my mother told me how,

when her handyman gave the waitress

sweating before them a ten dollar tip, the waitress

gave him in return the keys to the apartment

she lived in with her delicate 20 year old son.

He whined “Why mamma” exactly like a daughter

anticipating the heartache her mother was courting,

“Why would you let somebody you barely know

into our house?” “He used to turn all the heads in town,”

my mother told me, and though he was fatter now

because of the drugs he took with a mind to change

himself into a woman, he was still easily mistaken

for a girl in a sundress with his milk-less breasts,

and gooseflesh swaddling his belly and biceps.

Two months later the handyman and the waitress

broke up. He was not even that handy, really,

he was just out of work and hired by my mother

to repair some leak or shamble and because

she did not pay him much, sometimes she’d take

him to lunch. I was the shade of perspiration

imagining his fingers sliding over a woman

whose mouth straightened, curled and puckered

as if she was praying or giving birth. Taffeta

is the kind of cloth that makes a sound

when you touch it. It sounds like flowers

being painted on a dress. It falls in a crush

by the bed and the tongue folds around

a lonely center and because of it,

your son changes his name to Taffeta

when he becomes female. We’re all so full

of envy. Nature’s favorite color is green.

Taffeta’s dress is covered in flowers.

At sixteen I wore my mother’s dress to school

and stood on a stage with three other boys

in lipstick lip-syncing to the Mary Jane Girls.

I loved the feel of cloth folding around

my movement. That dress still hangs somewhere

waiting to be worn, its sheen and she-ness

shameless. There’s a yearbook photo

to prove I wore it though it’s true a photograph,

especially when it’s an image of flesh,

grows over time, more and more strange.

You are not you for long. I am not trying

to change the world, I am trying to change

myself so that the world will seem changed.

 

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

---

Terrance Hayes is the author of five collections of poetry, including How To Be Drawn in 2015, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2015. His website is terrancehayes.com.

On January 31, 1867, the Social, Civil, and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Philadelphia offered the fourth in their 1866-1867 course of lectures at Philadelphia’s National Hall.  Tickets cost 35 cents, and could be purchased at the door or in advance from the African Methodist Episcopal Church Bookstore at 631 Pine Street, Trumpler’s Music Store at Seventh and Chestnut, or members of the Association’s Committee of Arrangements, led by William Still and Jacob C. White Sr.  The February 2, 1867, Christian Recorder noted “a large audience of both colors” attended.

Listeners that night were deep in the swirl of Reconstruction—as the choice of speakers for the course, from General Oliver O. Howard to Congressman William Darrah Kelly, testified.  They might have been wondering whether the state legislature would ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, or they might have been thinking about the ongoing battles over racial discrimination in the city’s transit system.  They might have been thinking of the Philadelphia Public Ledger’s New Year’s Day issue, which hoped to see “North and South heartily reconciled and fully one again, politically and socially.” Or they might have been remembering the association’s last event, on January 3, when Frederick Douglass linked African American rights and women’s rights when told a packed house, “Drive no man from the ballot-box because of his color, and keep no woman from it on account of her sex.” 

All who came on that chilly Thursday evening, though, wanted to see Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who the January 26, 1867, Christian Recorder promised would “deliver her new and eloquent lecture on ‘National Salvation’” to the citizens of the city she had recently made her home.

No wonder: so accomplished, so lively, and so forceful were her lectures that newspaper coverage regularly compared her positively to white radical sensation Anna Dickinson.  A letter in the September 15, 1866, Recorder even said, “We have heard Frederick Douglass, and hesitate not to say that for beauty of expression, richness of illustrations, and, in a word, rhetorical finish, she is his superior.  He is more massive than Mrs. H., but she is more polished than he, and fully his equal in warm and glowing eloquence.”  

The lecture wasn’t out of the ordinary for Harper.  In July 1866, she’d spoken at Philadelphia’s “Freedmen’s Fair” benefit before journeying to lecture in cities ranging from Newark to Washington, D.C.  The turn into 1867 found her giving several lectures in Nashville, Tennessee; after her January 31 lecture and a brief respite in Philadelphia, April and May would see her in South Carolina for yet another set of lectures and a speech at a radical Republican state convention. 

What makes Harper’s January 31 lecture rare is that we have its full text.  The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph printed a transcription of “National Salvation” the day after Harper spoke.  That transcription is shared below.

The Telegraph took a “hands-off” approach to the transcription—not only presenting it, uninterrupted, but asserting that “the merits of the lecture which we give below will speak for themselves.”  Still, featuring Harper’s lecture—along with a biographical sketch and a separately published poem—was part of a limited opening of the paper’s pages to Black subjects.  The Telegraph also shared transcriptions of other lectures in the association’s course—including Douglass’s, published in the January 4, 1867, issue—and offered a massive and somewhat friendly article on Philadelphia’s Black community in their March 30, 1867, issue, curiously titled “Africa!  The Colored Population of Philadelphia: Their Numbers, Callings, and Manner of Life.”  The condescending tenor of such work can be guessed at from language in the paper’s biographical sketch of Harper: “she is a living and present proof of the fact that the colored race is not hopelessly depraved and benighted.”  That pompous, patronizing tone—notably, the Telegraph sometimes supported Andrew Johnson—reminds us of how often we must sift through white noise to find Black voices.

The Telegraph’s transcription of “National Salvation” nonetheless gives an unparalleled sense of Harper’s Reconstruction oratory—oratory that brought her national attention and powerfully supported a new, major phase of her literary career, one led by her serialized Recorder novel Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869) and her powerful long poem Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869).  Frances Smith Foster’s groundbreaking collection A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader reproduces only two speeches from this period, both presented at events where Harper shared the platform—the brief “We Are All Bound Up Together,” given at the Eleventh Women’s Rights Convention in May 1866, and the slightly longer “The Great Problem to Be Solved,” given at the Centennial Anniversary of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, on April 14, 1875, in Philadelphia.  When talking about Harper’s Reconstruction oratory, most scholars rely on these texts or on the brief snippets—presented through both quotation and paraphrase—in press coverage of Harper.

“National Salvation,” however, runs over 5,000 words—more than three times the length of “We Are All Bound Up Together.”  Further, only one other figure was noted in event announcements:  Philadelphia singer Elizabeth Greenfield, the celebrated “Black Swan,” who regularly gave short performances to round out association events.  Harper’s lecture was the raison d’être for the evening’s gathering.  As such, “National Salvation” gives us a much fuller example of the content, character, rhythms, and rhetorical strategies of Harper’s oratory.

Harper’s position at the podium that night was one of both experience and rebirth.  Born Frances Ellen Watkins in Baltimore in 1825, she’d lectured on abolition and temperance during the 1850s throughout the Northeast (going as far west as Indiana), and she’d published a rich range of literary work—short fiction, essays, letters, and individual poems in periodicals ranging from the Liberator to the Anglo-African Magazine and from the National Anti-Slavery Standard to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, as well as a pamphlet collection, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, originally published in 1854 and enlarged in 1857, that built in part from her recently rediscovered first collection, the c.1846 Forest Leaves. 

But when she married Fenton Harper on November 22, 1860, in Cincinnati, she pulled back from lecturing, published much less, and helped build a family—the Harpers’ daughter Mary joined Fenton Harper’s children from an earlier marriage c.1862—and farm outside Columbus, Ohio.  Only with Fenton Harper’s untimely death in May 1864 did she return to lecturing—called by both economic necessity and a recognition of how much the nation-at-war needed her voice. 

Those early lectures included a speech to the National Convention of Colored Men held in Syracuse in October 1864 and lectures with titles like “The Mission of the War” and “The Causes and Effects of the War.”  Harper was educating audiences from Indianapolis to Philadelphia, in the words of the May 21, 1864 Recorder, about the U.S. government’s “slow awakening” to “the character and influence of slavery and slave-power,” “its final comprehension of the question and magnitude” of the Civil War, and “the future of the nation, conditions of reconstruction, [and] the relation of the blacks to that future.”  The centerpiece of these lectures was “an earnest appeal for a national recognition of the colored man as freeman and citizen.”

By early 1867, that appeal had developed into a multi-faceted argument that full civil rights offered the only path to “National Salvation.”  Asserting early in that January 31 lecture that “slavery, as an institution, has been overthrown, but slavery, as an idea, still lives in the American Republic,” Harper explores how the forces that broke the nation and caused the Civil War still split the populace.  Only “a higher form of republicanism and a purer type of democracy”—ideas she frames in a deeply Afro-Protestant sense of history, “with truth and justice clasping hands”—could “win the fight.”

On one level, Harper’s sense that both slave-power and slavery still lived deeply informs the critique of Andrew Johnson that runs throughout the lecture.  In an extended metaphor that received some press coverage after the lecture, she depicts him as an unknowing “great national mustard-plaster” spread “all over this nation, so that he might bring to the surface the poison of slavery which still lingers in the body politic.”  But her direct calls to impeach Johnson—to throw away the “plaster” when its work was done—are only a piece of her larger naming of white racism and its tentacles.  Harper treats the racist violence at the heart of the 1866 riots in Memphis and New Orleans, like Johnson’s person and policies, as clear extensions of the long history of American politics, “a history of compromise and concessions from the hour that Georgia and South Carolina demanded the slave trade, down to the last Constitutional amendment.” 

In her trademark weaving of multiple senses of the domestic, Harper speaks in great depth about the newly freed folks of Kentucky and Tennessee she met touring in 1866, emphasizing their love of liberty and country, their great faith, and their “dignity of soul.”  Here, she exhibits an updated version of her antebellum lectures, which Manisha Sinha reminds us “combined abolitionist polemics with literary romanticism.”  These people’s stories—and those she heard from diverse other newly freed folks on several wide-ranging visits to the South—touched Harper deeply: they became the subject matter for several poems (especially in her 1872 Sketches of Southern Life) and novels Minnie’s Sacrifice and Iola Leroy (1892). 

On that January night in Philadelphia’s National Hall, she told listeners that “some of the most beautiful lessons of faith and trust that I have ever learned, which could never have been learned in the proudest temples of wealth or fashion, I have learned in these lowly homes and cabins of Tennessee.”  These recently enslaved people, Harper asserts, had a stronger sense of nation and home than most of the rest of the country.  The hands of Andrew Johnson, she tells us, “are not clean enough to touch the hems of their garments.” 

Nor, she submits, are the hands of those worrying over the “bugbear” of “social equality” or the hands of white Northerners who do nothing to stop racism at home.  In the lecture’s amazing final sections, she says “I am coming right home to Philadelphia” and “am not going to bathe my lips in honey when I speak.”  What follows is a stunning crescendo of condemnation—reminiscent of Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”—that depicts representative Philadelphians who allowed a Black woman to be kicked off a city car. Harper, indignant, asserts that “when that man kicked that woman, he kicked me.  He kicked my child, and he kicked the wife and child of every colored man in Philadelphia . . . the wife, sister, and child of every colored man who went out to battle and to lay down his life for his country. . . .” 

Harper shares that this moment also led to one of her young daughter Mary’s first recognitions of racism,  reminding us of Harper’s rhetorical habit of recognizing the political and the public as “domestic,” as threads of lived experience.  This powerful linkage also highlights Harper’s integration of tropes of motherhood and widowhood into her self-representation in the wake of the Civil War—rich ground for further study.

This striking content is matched by Harper’s skill with rhetoric, rhythm, and tone.  Her seemingly simple and repeated address to the audience—“My friends” is a case in point—draws connections to her audience but also highlights the responsibilities inherent in truly being a “friend.”  Harper’s escalation of moral and emotional tone is paired with, alternately, stunning pathos and wicked humor (often biting irony) that temporarily diffuses—but never dismisses—the growing tension.  There are moments in the speech—especially after her powerful sequence of images tied to racism surrounding city transit moves into a critique of “social equality” fears—that make us laugh with their unveiling of absurdity, even as we cry and rail against how that absurdity causes immense tragedy within individual Black lives.  When we remember, per the Telegraph’s biographical sketch, that she was “rather small,” “with vivacious manners and an enthusiastic bearing” filled with “earnestness and sincerity,” the fireworks at the lecture’s end seem all the more spectacular.

Such moments also remind us that, as we move toward rightfully recognizing Harper as one of the most important American public artist-intellectuals of the nineteenth century, we need to ensure that her oratory is, in turn, a center of our studies.

 

Editorial note:  The February 1, 1867, issue of the Telegraph is available digitally through the Chronicling America project.  I share the full Telegraph article, including the paper’s biographical sketch and the brief introduction provided by AME minister James Lynch, in part to give a sense of the event.  Beyond this, though, the sketch offers personal information available only from Harper or a close friend like William Still—including some material that complicates existing biographies—and thus functions as a valuable artifact of Harper’s careful self-presentation and reputation-building.  The poem referred to in the sketch is Harper’s “Appeal to the American People,” which had been published earlier in the July 21, 1866, Recorder, was collected in Harper’s 1871 Poems, and is reproduced in Brighter Coming Day; as it is widely available and was not a part of the lecture, I have not included it.  Of note, Harper gave the lecture—or one with this title—at least once more, as part of the 1866-1867 course of lectures at the Lyceum of Salem, Massachusetts.  Original spelling and punctuation has been retained with the exception of one potentially confusing moment when the Telegraph gives “pretroleum” for “petroleum.”  Audience responses given in parenthesis in the original have similarly been retained.

 

***

 

National Salvation.

A Lecture Delivered Last Evening at National Hall, by Mrs. F. E. W. Harper, with Some Account of the Lecturer.

[Official Report for the Evening Telegraph.]

 

The fourth lecture in the present course before the Social, Civil, and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Philadelphia, was delivered at National Hall, last evening, by Mrs. Frances E. W. Harper, a colored lady of more than ordinary oratorical powers.  In this connection a

Sketch of Mrs. Harper

may not be uninteresting.  Her early life, under the name of Frances Ellen Watkins, was passed in Baltimore, where she was born in 1825.  Her mother was born a slave, but through the exertions of her grandmother her freedom was purchased, and Miss Watkins was, therefore, free from birth.  She remained at school in her native city until she was fourteen years of age, and subsequently to that obtained her own livelihood for some years by sewing and teaching school.  In the former occupation she was for some time employed by Mrs. Isaac Cruise, of Baltimore.  This lady was the possessor of quite a large library, to which Miss Watkins had free access at all times.  Being strictly enjoined against perusing novels, the information which she thus picked up in her leisure hours was of the most solid and desirable character.  Her experience as a school teacher was quite extensive, and this calling she followed at times in Baltimore and the neighboring country for some years.

Miss Watkins was early given to poetizing, some of the productions of her muse—of which a specimen, entitled “An Appeal to the American People,” is printed elsewhere in our issue of to-day—exhibiting more than ordinary depth of thought and fervor of expression.  These early poems she usually composed while busy with needle and thread.  While on a visit to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1854, she recited some of her poems to her friends, who were so deeply impressed with their merit that she was invited by them to appear before the public as a lecturer.  Just previous to this she had become strongly imbued with a desire to contribute, in some measure, to the enlightenment and social elevation of the outlawed race to which she belonged.  This ambition sprung from the recital in her presence of a story which in those days was as common as it was disgraceful to the community by which it was tolerated.  A free colored man had moved into the State of Maryland, and in pursuance of the law then and there in vogue, he was for this dire offense seized by the authorities and sold into slavery.  Being afterwards taken to Macon, Georgia, he there made his escape, but only to be recaptured and returned to a bondage from which he was soon after released by death.  From the time that Miss Watkins listened to this oft-repeated tale, she resolved to devote all her time and energies to the welfare of her kindred race.  So she was nothing loth to appear upon the platform, and delivered her first lecture in New Bedford in 1854, from which time forth, for six years, she continued upon the stage, restricting her labors principally to the New England States.  For a time, however, she acted as an agent of the Anti-Slavery Society in this State.

In November, 1860, Miss Watkins was married in Cincinnati to Mr. Fenton Harper, a free colored man, from Loudon county, Virginia.  Her married life was passed on a farm in the neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio.  During this time she seldom appeared in public as a lecturer.

Mr. Harper died in May, 1864, and in October, 1865, Mrs. Harper resumed her former calling, which she has steadily pursued up to the present time.  New England was again her favorite field, but she has likewise spoken in many of the other States, and, during the present winter, has passed some time in Kentucky and Tennessee, addressing the people, white and black, whenever and wherever she could get a chance.  On the 24th of last month she spoke at a meeting in the Capitol, at Nashville, Tennessee, her oratory even receiving praise from the semi-Rebel sheets which still flourish there, although her politics were denounced as abominable and as tending to create a hatred between the races, deeper than that which at present exists.  Last evening was the occasion of her third appearance before a Philadelphia audience.

We have given this lengthy sketch of Mrs. Harper’s career, because she is a living and present proof of the fact that the colored race is not hopelessly depraved and benighted.  In person she is rather small, and of prepossessing appearance, with vivacious manners and an enthusiastic bearing that impresses all who listen to her, either in public or in private, with her thorough earnestness and sincerity.  The merits of the lecture which we give below will speak for themselves.  She was introduced last evening to the audience by the following

Remarks by Rev. Mr. Lynch,

Ladies and Gentlemen:—You are assembled to listen to one of the most cultivated daughters of the persecuted race, who has plead their cause for more than twelve years, in poetry, in thrilling eloquence, and in logic, from the platform.  Additional interest may be expected in this lecture to-night, as she is recently from the South, where she lectured to the delight and instruction of the loyal whites and blacks; and, judging from the encomiums of semi-Rebel Andrew Johnson journals, we have discovered that she possesses a power that we have not before known—that of enchanting a certain kind of serpent called Copperheads.  I now have the honor of introducing to you Mrs. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.  (Applause.)

Address of Mrs. F. E. W. Harper,

Reform has her seed-time and her harvest, her night of trial and endeavor, as well as her day of success and victory.  But before her ears are greeted with the shouts of triumph, they are hailed with the hisses of malice and the threats of revenge; but as amid the darkness and the cold, nature spreads her dews and carries on the work, so amid the darkness, cold, and pain the spirit of reform carries on her work of progress, and sows in tears the harvest she is to reap in joy.  Men tread with bleeding feet their paths, and from the soil covered with the ashes of martyrs and drenched with the blood of heroes, has sprung up a new growth of character and civilization.

Now in the question of dynamics, or the application of force to any end, it is necessary to know the amount of resistance to be met, and the power which is needed to overcome that resistance.  For instance, a man who would wish his locomotive to go fifty miles an hour would not be acting very wisely if he only put on steam enough to carry it ten miles an hour; and the same remark would apply to the man who would wish a large water-wheel turned by little rills, and would supply fifty gallons of water where a thousand were needed.  This man would not be acting wisely in these particulars.  He would be failing to take the right means to gain the desired end.

Now, in the moral and political world, as well as in the physical, there are resistances to be met and obstacles to be overcome in carrying out the aim of true civilization, which is the social advancement and the individual development of the human race.  And if we look through the history of the past, we will find that there has been an old struggle going on for ages—a struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor—a battle which has been fought under different names, and continued under different auspices, but which is still the continuation of the old struggle.

In one age it has assumed the form of a conflict between the lowest of the people and the hierarchy; still again against the despotisms which shackled the human intellect and put fetters upon the human conscience.  In another age it has been a struggle between freedom on one side and slavery on the other.  Slavery, not content with having simply a battle of ideas, resorted to the arbitrament of the sword, and the sword decided against it, and slavery went down in tears, and wrath, and blood—went down amid the rejoicing of men and women who had burst their chains.

Now slavery, as an institution, has been overthrown, but slavery, as an idea, still lives in the American Republic, and the problem and the duty of the present hour is this:—Whether there is strength enough, wisdom enough, and virtue enough in our American nation to lift it out of trouble; whether by its legislation and jurisprudence these distinctions between man and man, on account of his race, color, or descent, shall cease.  Last year, my friends, I spoke of the nation’s great opportunity.  I still think we have one of the greatest opportunities, one of the sublimest chances that God ever put into the hands of a nation or people.

But it is not in opportunities presented, but in opportunities accepted, that the very pith and the core of our national existence lies.  What we need, my friends, in this county, is all the energy, all the wisdom of the nation so to reconstruct this Government that it will render another such war impossible.  There is something wonderful, my friends, in the power of an idea.  And what to-day is the watchword of the present hour?  It is the brotherhood of man amid the din and strife of battle, amid the conflict of the present age; and yet it is an idea which has been struggling through the centuries, baptized in blood and drenched in tears.

To-day the tendency of the spirit of the age is towards a higher form of republicanism and a purer type of democracy, and yet this idea has been struggling for ages.  I look away back on the pages of history, and hear it preached by Him who made it, in His death, the sublime lesson of His life eighteen hundred years ago.

Proud and imperial Rome stood crowned and sceptred amid her seven hills, apparently the strongest power in the world.  At the same time, in a manger lay a child whose work of reform was destined to live when the proud empire should be laid away amid the dead kingdoms.  This idea, my friends, met with opposition, just the same as this idea of equal rights meets with opposition to-day.  This man held up the single idea taught by Jesus Christ, with His giant enthusiasm for humanity, and it was met with opposition from every distinct class.

And yet this reform, meeting with all this opposition, lived on until it became the professed faith of the most enlightened and progressive nation on earth.  The men who martyred Jesus Christ now sleep in forgotten graves.  He lives and shines in the hearts of all who accept Him as the true and living Christ.  The crown of thorns has changed to a diadem of glory, and the cross has become a power and ensign of victory.

The Protestant Reformation sprang from the same spirit, and still fights its way against the ignorance and superstition of ages.  It lived on until the Inquisition ceased to claim its victims, until the auto-de-fe no longer lit its fires, until Protestant kings sat upon the very thrones from which the edicts against the children of Reformation had gone forth.

Men then grappled with agony and death, so that they could secure the rights which we this day enjoy.  We are carrying on the cause, but we have only got through one part of the struggle; the reform we are now carrying on, we may feel assured, notwithstanding all the opposition, notwithstanding all the obstacles in its way, with truth and justice clasping hands, shall yet win the fight.

Oh, my friends, the work goes bravely on!  I look back seven years ago, and see this nation apparently in a prosperous career, with slavery bound to her with a four-fold cord.  In your commercial interests, men said, virtually, Let us make money, though we coin it from blood and extract it from tears.  Here were ecclesiastical interests, the same from Maine to California; here were our political parties clasping hands North and South; and yet they were all snapped asunder, simply because they lacked the cohesion of justice.  (Cheers.)  Now to-night the question arises, What shall be done?  How shall we serve the interest of freedom so that this nation shall be wise enough to know its citizens, and knowing them shall be strong enough to protect them?

One thing that this nation has been doing, is throwing away an element of strength.  The colored man, as a laboring force, as a political force, and even as a moral force, in this country is an element of strength or of weakness.  As a passive force he is an element of weakness; that is, he weakens the country when he is pressed down in the scale of life, when he is wronged and robbed.  But justice will certainly take sides with this people who have been pressed down in the scale of life—a people who are struggling for a higher and purer state of existence.  Now, I hold that the colored man is capable of being an element of strength to the American nation.

I have lately been down amid the cabins and humble homes of Tennessee; and—would you believe it, my friends? some of the most beautiful lessons of faith and trust that I have ever learned, which could never have been learned in the proudest temples of wealth or fashion, I have learned in these lowly homes and cabins of Tennessee.  There may be some people who think within themselves that it is a little strange Andrew Johnson, after having promised the colored people that he would be their Moses, should turn around, and instead of helping them to freedom, should clasp hands with the Rebels and traitors of the country.  (Cheers.)

My friends, since I have come from Tennessee, I am not surprised at the position that Andrew Johnson takes.  Do you know why it was that David was not permitted to build the temple of the Lord?  Because his hands were not clean; he was a man unfit for the work.  And so, when I have gone among some of the people of Tennessee, who have breathed their words of faith and trust, I see in Andrew Johnson a man whose hands are not clean enough to touch the hems of their garments.  (Cheers.)

Do you ask me to-night what are the colored people doing in Tennessee?  They are doing just exactly what Mr. Lincoln said the colored man might be required to do in this country.  They are helping to keep the jewel of liberty in the family of nations.  And how are they doing it?  I have heard, my friends, of serfs to whom a broader and higher freedom came, and they did not know how to appreciate it, and offered to go back again into serfdom.

I have been in humble homes where poverty has been staring them in the face, and said to them, Would you not rather go back again into slavery?  And such an answer as this has come up:—“I would rather live in a corn-crib.”  I remember, some few years ago, I met in Louisville, Kentucky, a woman who lived in a room which looked as though it might have been a stable converted into a dwelling.  I said to her:—“If your master would take good care of you, would you not rather be back again?”  The woman, with eyes filled with indignation, for she did not know that I loved freedom so well that I liked to hear its praise from the humblest lips, said to me:—“Don’t you wish to be free and stamp your foot in Jubilee?  God bless the poverty that brings me that privilege.”  (Applause.)

There is one thing that has impressed me more forcibly, perhaps, than anything else about the inner life of these people who have lately come up to freedom, and that is their faith and trust in God.  I met a mother there who had lost her child.  But here was a mother looking over the track of distant years.  How did she feel, as a mother who has given her child up to death, saying:—

                        “That innocent is mine;
                             I cannot spare him from my arms,
                        To lay him, Death, in thine.

                        “I am a mother dear;
                            I gave that darling birth;
                        I cannot bear its lifeless limbs
                            Should moulder in the earth.”

—when her child was taken from her, and when she felt the distance increasing between them, and knew she could not meet it till she met it in another world.

Oh, when I look at this beautiful faith and trust, when I see them, too, in their humble homes, and ask them what has sustained them, what has kept them up in these dark and gloomy years?—the almost invariable answer that comes to me is:—“The power of God!”

I met with a woman in Tennessee who had been the mother, I think she said, of five children.  All were absent from her except one.  I don’t know that she could say in what part of the world her children were.  She prayed for them, and said, “I only see them in my dreams.”  This was a woman upon whose heart the shadow of slavery still hung black and heavy.  Her husband heard that his children wanted to see him, and he started to go to them; and then word came to this mother and wife that her husband was dead.

Before he started he had contracted a debt of twenty-five dollars.  When the news came to the mother of his death, what did that woman do?  She went and paid off the obligation, by working at nine dollars a week, and living in a house where she was charged five dollars a month.  Look at the dignity of soul in that woman!  Her husband dead, no one could have forced her to pay that debt; yet with such a keen sense of honor and dignity of soul, she takes up the obligation, and pays it off.  Interested friends, let me tell you Andrew Johnson’s hands were not clean enough to clasp that woman’s hands, to be her Moses, and lead her up to freedom.

When I see this faith and trust, it is beautiful.  But there is another feature of life among these people which might impress you just as pleasantly, and that is the tender humanity displayed among them.  I have gone into the little cabins, where the light of the sun came through a single window without a pane of glass, and yet, in that humble home, they were taking the children and sending them to school, and it is a thing you will often see in many of these little homes.  This people, that have gone through this weary night of suffering, have come out of it with a tender humanity, clasping in their arms poor little orphan waifs, giving them shelter, schooling, and a home.  (Cheers)

And then there is another feature, and that is their greediness for knowledge.  A few weeks since I was in Louisville, Kentucky.  They had just opened a school for colored people, charging twenty-five cents a month, I believe.  The people were so eager that their children should have schooling, that by half past nine o’clock it was necessary for the Superintendent to lock the door, because they were overcrowded with applicants, and many of the parents went away in tears because their children could not enter the school.  This greediness for knowledge on the part of the colored man is an element of hope and future strength in this Government.  (Applause.)

The ancients had an idea that there was a giant chained under Mount Etna, and that the eruptions of the mountain were caused by his turning over.  So when I go down South, and see and hear of their eagerness for knowledge, I see the rising brain of the colored man, and I hope, my friends, that if any of the enemies of humanity shall attempt to build any system of despotism with an idea to the disenfranchising of a race—making it in the name of freedom, and torturing it with the essence of slavery—that the rising brain of the colored man will be evoked, and quell the despotism at the start.

In treating this question, I think of the legend of ancient Rome, of the chasm that yawned there, and of which the sorcerers predicted that whosoever should bring the most precious gift should be the means of closing it and saving the city.  Cassius, thinking that he himself was the most precious gift, leaned into its yawning jaws.  The legend has been repeated in part in this country.  Slavery has made a chasm in our American republic.  It has made you two people in the midst of one nation—a people for freedom and a people for slavery—a people for knowledge and a people for ignorance!  And what have you tried to do?  You have been trying to bridge it over by compromise, until the history of American politics is the history of compromise and concessions, from the hour that Georgia and South Carolina demanded the slave trade, down to the last Constitutional amendment.

Slavery wanted more room, and you gave it land enough for an empire.  It wanted the power to hunt the trembling fugitive, and the Fugitive Slave bill was passed, and the trembling victim was thrown into the chasm.  Still it yawned, and slavery was not satisfied.  For itself it wanted a white man’s government, and you made a trial of a white man’s government in this country for four years, and the prayers of the freedmen are ascending that we may never have another such a government as long as the world may stand.  (Applause.)  You threw into this chasm a few million lives, warm with the rich blood of your patriots.  You threw into it the life of your loving, honored chief—Abraham Lincoln.  (Applause.)  And yet to-night the chasm yawns.  You are still two people in the midst of one nation.

Would you close over this chasm?  Do not try any more compromise or concession; you might as well try to bridge with egg-shells the Potomac river.  What you need to-night is to take the shackle from the wrist of the colored man, and to put the ballot in its stead.  (Applause)  When I see the streets of New Orleans and Memphis red with the blood of unexpiated murders, and I hear of that miserable Recorder counselling them to burn and hang the nigger, I ask that the colored man should have that much power in his hands, to turn all such men out of office.  (Applause.)

Look at New Orleans.  Whose fault was it?  You should ask that of Andrew Johnson.  Let me tell you Andrew Johnson is not the most guilty man in this republic.  I don’t know but that we have needed him. I have, in the course of my life, had to put a mustard plaster on myself.  Now, I don’t like a mustard-plaster, and yet I would rather suffer an hour with it than suffer a pain in my chest for a week.  I don’t know but what we have needed Andrew Johnson in this country as a great national mustard-plaster, to spread himself all over this nation, so that he might bring to the surface the poison of slavery which still lingers in the body politic.  But when you have done with the mustard-plaster, what do you do with it?  Do you hug it to your bosom, and say it is such a precious thing that you cannot put it away?  Rather, when you have done with it, you throw it aside.

Now, my friends, why do you not do the same with Andrew Johnson, and impeach him (applause), and bring him before the bar of the nation, and prove to the world that this American nation is so strong, and so powerful, and so wise, that the humblest servant beneath its care, or the strongest, is not to behave without its restraint.

I was in Boston a few days since, and I heard a gentleman speaking of an accident that had happened.  It was of an engineer who was insane.  I suppose that the people did not know that he was insane.  He got on the locomotive, and he imagined that he was going to the moon.  He was not swinging around the circle, but was going to the moon, and he was dashing away wildly.  Death was of no moment to him; he was going to the moon.  Now what did the people do?  Did the people stop to ask his friends about him, or try him a little longer until he had done some mischief?  No, no; the case was too imminent for that.  A student picked up a block of wood to try to dash him off.  So to-day Andrew Johnson stands at the head of the Government, a man who is striking hands with the Rebels of the South.  Is there not in this nation, from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, a hand strong enough and earnest enough to throw at him the billet of impeachment, and let him go home to Tennessee to rust out the remainder of his life?  (Applause.)

I don’t, my friends, berate him because he may have swung around the circle from the seaboard to the Mississippi, although, as far as that is concerned, it reminds me that the colored man has the advantage of him there.  I remember when I was a girl how the colored man used to be burlesqued in popular songs.  One of those songs ran thus:—

                    “If I was President of the United States,
                      I would lick molasses candy and swing upon the
                         gates.”

That might have been a burlesque upon the colored people; but, my friends, I have lived to see the time when the President, though he don’t swing upon the gates, does swing around the circle, and though he does not lick molasses candy, takes something that is a great deal stronger.  (Sensation.)

Now, this reform must be carried on, as others are, against opposition and persecution.  This cause has already passed through part of the time of persecution.  It is a different thing to-day from what it was when William Lloyd Garrison threw his words like burning coals upon the nation’s heart.  Since then the ideas that originated in the Boston garret have become a mighty building, bearing upon its bosom hundreds of millions of men, women, and children, translating them from the oligarchy of slavery to the commonwealth of freedom.  Still the work needs courage to-day.

There is a small matter of prejudice that I want to take up—that against color in particular—and I am coming right home to Philadelphia, and not intending to spend my ammunition on the Rebels, who are so many thousand miles away.  But I am to talk to those who clasp hands with Rebels in the city of Philadelphia, and I am not going to bathe my lips in honey when I speak.  Two weeks last Saturday night I was in Louisville, Kentucky.  I came on from Nashville, had a little business down the street, and I got into the city cars; and I found that there is no difference there in Kentucky as to the people’s riding in the cars; Kentucky had just burst from her chains, yet she was ahead of Philadelphia in that.

I went into the house and picked up a Philadelphia paper—a Christian Recorder.  What did I read?  There I read that a woman had been kicked out of the cars in the streets of this city.  What had she done?  Simply claimed her right to travel, and had been brutally kicked in these streets.  Where was she kicked?  Let me tell you.  Did you see that man with the surplice, chanting his solemn litany?  That man is an Episcopalian minister, and that brutal man kicked her in his presence.

Did you see that man with a simple ritual?  He is a Presbyterian.  I don’t think there is a Church in the world to whom civil liberty owes more than to the Presbyterian Church.  They came out and preserved civil liberty in the wilds of Scotland, and this man kicked this woman in his presence.

Do you see that man who has just been celebrating the centenary of his Church, of which John Wesley is the St. Paul?  That man is a Methodist, and he kicked her in his presence.  Do you see that lady and gentleman, in plain garb?  They, too, have a grand memory, reaching away back to William Penn, who came here to Pennsylvania, and taught the world how peace and justice could clasp hands; and Mary Dyer, who gave up her life on Boston Common and who died for a principle.  (Cheers.)  He is a Friend, and that woman was kicked in his presence.

Do you see that man, upon another plain, who knows it is better to have the peace of Christ than to quarrel about Christianity?  He is a Unitarian; kicked in his presence also.  Do you see that man, who believes in God and the brotherhood of the human race, and that He will ultimately clasp us all in a living embrace?  That man kicked her in the presence of the whole popular Church of Philadelphia, and I ask them have they done their duty on this subject?

I pick up the papers, and I hear a great deal said about the running of the cars on Sunday.  The day is sacred in Philadelphia, but man is vile.  Where did he kick this woman?  In the very streets over which colored men marched to the front, faithful to the country when others were faithless (applause)—who were rallying around the flag when Rebels were trampling it under feet; true to the country when she wanted a friend.  Witness, now, that the sisters and mothers of these men can be kicked from the cars in our popular thoroughfares. (Applause.)

Friends, when that man kicked that woman, he kicked me.  He kicked my child, and he kicked the wife and child of every colored man in Philadelphia.  He kicked the wife, sister, and child of every colored man who went out to battle and to lay down his life for his country; and I am here to-night to protest against it.  (Applause.)

Last summer I was here; it may have been the fourth of July; it does not matter, though.  I was going up the street with my child, between five and six years of age.  My friend Mr. Still was with me.  He, living on Fifth street, thought the drivers would know him, and wait for us.  I did not ask these drivers to take me in; I shall faint upon your paved streets before I ask such a favor.  Do you think they would stop for us?  Oh, no!  They swept by us as if we were paupers.

The next day my child came to me and said: “I know why we can’t ride in the cars; because we are colored!”  No women feel this deprivation so keenly as we do, and when my orphan child came home and told me that she had read the cruel, bitter lesson, I felt bad.  And yet to-night, poor, ignorant, and trodden under foot as our people are, I would not change souls with the richest and proudest stockholder in Philadelphia.  I would not change souls with a man who reproaches his God by despising His poor!  (Applause.)  Again, my friends, I do not feel that the colored people need despair; we only take our turn in the suffering world.

I do not demand social equality; I do not demand that you shall take us into your parlors, and make us companions of your wives and daughters, if they have no liking for us.  All I ask is that you take your prejudices out of the way and give the colored man a chance to grow; give him a chance at the ballot-box.  Why this idea of social equality?  I don’t know of any colored man that demands it.  After all, this thing depends upon social affinities, customs, wealth, and habit, and in some cases on shoddy and petroleum.  But there is a dread of blood degeneration.

Somehow I do not think I should like to stand before the world, with pale lips, dreading the bugbear of social equality; afraid of giving the colored man a chance, for fear that he might somehow outstrip me in the race of life.  (Applause.)  If I was in his place I would say, “I will give him all the chance I can; I will not press him down in the scale of life.”  I should feel that I was superior, because of a superior teaching.  Look at slavery: has it not robbed us of our wives, children, and husbands; robbed us of our very complexion, and put some of the meanest kind of white blood in our veins?  (Cheers.)  And we have lived through it all, and come out of the war the very best characters down South.  If we don’t complain about it, what right has anybody else to do so?  (Cheers.)

O friends! if there is any danger, you make your President and Congressmen; you make your own laws; if any man feels that the case is urgent, let him go before the Legislature and say to them:—“Honorable Sirs—We have a deep concern on our minds; it haunts us by day and comes over our dreams by night.  We are so afraid that some colored man’s uncle’s aunt will marry some white man’s cousin’s aunt, and we want you to put a law upon the statute books that no white man shall marry a black woman unless he wants to.”  (Great laughter.)  I think that they must necessarily be guided by their wishes.  Some men have no other wants than those which are low and grovelling; they are like the men to whom the grasshopper is a burden; they are afraid of that which is high.

Justice is high, and liberty is high, and equal rights are high; and these men are afraid of that which is high, and putting their ears to the ground they hear the advancing tread of the negro, and would retard his coming.  (Cheers.)  Why you have a paper in this city called the Age.  The better name for it would be to call it Behind the Age.  Last spring it had a call for a Democratic meeting, and in the call it included all those who voted for a white man’s Government.  I have been taught that the power of gravity gravitates in the strongest hands.  What possibility is there that we should get to the head of the Government, or that the white race should stand trembling before us, or that eight thousand persons are going to get the upper hand of the nation?

He has dropped the rags of the plantation and put on the uniform of the nation.  In the District of Columbia he has exchanged the fetters on his wrists for the ballot in his right hand.  Mr. Johnson did not admire that very much, so he gave us a veto; he paid us a compliment, somehow, by supposing that we would come into the District for the purpose of giving a vote.  If it is such a privilege to an American citizen, he will go where he can have the rights of a citizen.

The colored man is taxed in this country, he is drafted in war; and yet to-night I live in an American republic; I am a taxpayer.  The Government may increase its taxes until it runs down every seam and fold of my dress, may tax the very bread I break to my orphan child; but it brings me back a rich compensation when it makes my child free in South Carolina, in Tennessee, and Alabama, and even in this city of Philadelphia when I want to ride in your cars.

Friends, this is the nation’s hour for every heart and hand to build on justice as a rock, to trust in the truth, and never yield.  With truth and justice clasping hands, we yet shall win the fight.

 

***

 

Further Reading

Manisha Sinha’s quote comes from her fine essay “The Other Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,”  Common-place 16:2 (winter 2016).

Any student of Harper’s life and work should start with A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York, 1990), edited with an introduction by Frances Smith Foster.  Foster’s edited Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper (Boston, 1994) and the sections on Harper in William Still’s The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia, 1872) are also essential.  Useful complements to this work include Melba Boyd’s Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E.W. Harper 1825-1911 (Detroit, 1994); Maryemma Graham’s Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (New York, 1988); Carla Peterson’s “Literary Transnationalism and Diasporic History: Frances Watkins Harper’s ‘Fancy Sketches,’ 1859-1860,” Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, eds. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (New Haven, 2007), 189-208; and Margaret Washington’s “Frances Ellen Watkins: Family Legacy and Antebellum Activism,” Journal of African American History 100:1 (winter 2015): 59-86. 

Recent rediscoveries that broaden this base include Johanna Ortner’s immensely important “Lost No More: Recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves,”  Common-place 15:4 (summer 2015) and my “Sowing and Reaping: A ‘New’ Chapter from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Second Novel,”  Common-place 13:1 (October 2012). Among exciting recent work on Harper, see Meredith McGill’s “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry,” Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia, 2012): 53-74, and Stephanie Farrar’s “Maternity and Black Women’s Citizenship in Frances Watkins Harper’s Early Poetry and Late Prose,” MELUS 40:1 (spring 2015):  52-75.

Carla Peterson’s “Doers of the Word”: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830-1880 (New York, 1995) offers the richest primer on Black women lecturers including Harper; Shirley Wilson Logan’s “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale, 1999) offers another good starting point.  On the nexus of race, gender, and politics Harper engaged, see Martha S. Jones’s “All Bound Up Together”: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (Chapel Hill, 2009) and Carol Faulkner’s Women’s Radical Reconstruction:  The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (Philadelphia, 2003).  Andrew Diemer’s “Reconstructing Philadelphia:  African Americans and Politics in the Post-Civil War North,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 133:1 (January 2009): 29-58 provides valuable local context.  Primary sources tied to Black oratory can be found in Philip S. Foner and Robert Branham’s Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787-1901 (Tuscaloosa, 1997) and the online Colored Conventions Project.  Outside of the Telegraph piece, the fullest reporting I’ve located on this specific lecture appears in “Philadelphia Correspondence,” National Anti-Slavery Standard (9 February 1867).

 

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

---

Eric Gardner is professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University and the author or editor of five books, most recently Black Print Unbound:  The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (2015).  Two-time winner of the Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize, he helped found the “Just Teach One: Early African American Print” project, and he blogs at blackprintculture.com. 

Picture a sine curve, a single wave endlessly rising and falling across the x-axis. That is the Puritan life. It models their version of sanctification, the fruits of grace that follow from justification (the moment God redeems a sinner). The ascent of each wave was called comfort, or assurance, and that came from believing Christ had substituted himself for one’s own sins and paid the price in full. Rising in assurance, believers would begin to commune with Christ through their desire for him and their deeper and stronger sense of his loveliness and holiness. It was wonderful. It could be rapturous. Some described it as a “joy unspeakable.”

But then—just like that—it ends. The wave peaks. The believer begins to sink.

The downward turn occurs precisely because of its ascent. The fact that Christ died for sins makes the godly recognize the depths of their sin and ingratitude. And the more they could see of their own depravity and disobedience, the further they would fall into what Puritans called humiliation, a godly sorrow: could Christ really have died for me? As sorrow seemed about to sink the soul, however, the preaching of the minister and the fellowship of a godly community would begin to convince the sinner that, yes, even this degree of depravity has been covered. Christ died for me! The believer would rise again.

In his new, excellent book on Puritanism, Baird Tipson emphasizes that this life of faith accrued assurance of salvation over the long haul. Conversion was not a moment; it was more like momentum. It involved a daily turning. No particular “religious experience” could produce an ability to rest in full assurance, just as no particular failing could be cause for despair. Progress instead would be measured “by a Christian’s affection or desire rather than by the actual results of her efforts” (282). That is because, as Tipson summarizes, “At its core, conversion involved a ‘change of heart,’ a convert’s changing how she desired to live and what she desired to do. It involved an Augustinian reorienting of the core disposition of the human will” (273).

Such a change of will marked how the godly life would go on. Unlike an actual sine curve, the peaks and troughs of Puritan sanctification were not supposed to be the same height and depth each time. Every peak should rise higher, and every trough dip deeper. The more believers realized how badly they had failed, the more amazed, assured, and comforted they would be that Christ had died for them. The more they were able to witness and realize Christ’s beauty and grace and glory, the more they would see just how badly they had failed. The lows sink as the highs rise. And on it goes, day after day, until one day the believer finally dies: in glorification, assurance changes from a foretaste of heaven into a seat at the table of the Lord. No Puritan life ever mechanically followed this graph, but the idea behind it served as a guide to many.

That guide came to most Puritans through their preachers. As Tipson writes, “ministers like Hooker and Stone were not only describing the kind of conversion they wanted their hearers to experience, they were also using the rhetorical techniques at their disposal to induce and shape that conversion” (273). The sensations of those in the pew came filtered through an interpretative framework preached from week to week, moving sinners through an expanding sine curve of sorrow and hope, comfort and fear.

Ideally, every sermon contained both the comfort and the sorrow, but ministers directed their words to stress one or the other as needed. If congregations moved too much toward security (turning assurance into complacency), preachers administered the Law; they showed how far all had fallen short. But if congregations seemed to be sorrowing too much—if they approached that terrible dip into despair—then ministers preached the Gospel, the comfort of grace. Faced with despair, Puritan ministers frequently insisted that even the dimmest beginning of a mere desire to believe constituted a good sign that the seed of grace had taken root and would grow into salvation. The bruised reed, they liked to say, would not be broken; God would not snuff out the smoking flax.

Anxiety and assurance, the sorrow of sin and the comfort of Christ, the law and the gospel—this was the Puritan way of grace.

Such guidelines were accepted by most who professed themselves the “godly” (what Puritans called themselves), but each minister had his own way of applying it. In Hartford Puritanism, we find an “extreme Augustinianism” that emphasized terror as a form of grace. In fact, Hooker seemed to think of humiliation as the ultimate sign of salvation, and he bent his congregation to long and agonizing struggles of the soul. For Hooker, as Tipson explains, “Brokenness, not ecstatic experience, was the best sign of God’s presence” (355).

This does not mean that Hooker rejected comfort. He agreed with others that the purpose of preaching was “twofold: to reprove the false pride of sinners, and, only after their repentance, to comfort faithful souls in those times when they doubted that they had gained God’s favor” (249). But as Tipson explains, “He gained a reputation among his ministerial colleagues for the ferociousness of his reproofs” (249). Hooker once claimed that God had called on him to fling “hell fire in your face” (249). Like certain evangelical preachers who would come later, Hooker intended to save by fear. His God was an angry God.

That potential link to modern evangelicalism functions as one of the guiding purposes of Tipson’s study. For Tipson, Hooker “documents a vital stage in the development of Protestantism from the Reformation to the great Evangelical Revivals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries,” and he claims that Hooker “anticipated much of what was to come” (4). Unfortunately, the full connection to evangelicalism seems to be waiting for a further study. What we get in this book, on the contrary, is a wonderful account of one particularly important Puritan and his extreme theology in an era grappling with predestination and practical divinity. A biographical sketch appears of Hooker (chapter 2), but this is not biography; instead, it is a model contribution to its Oxford series, “Studies in Historical Theology.”

As a study of historical theology, Tipson lucidly lays out, for example, every possible early modern position on predestination and shows both what was at stake and why so many people cared. Over the course of two brilliant chapters (5 and 6), Tipson ranges from Jesuits, Dominicans, and Jansenists to Protestants such as Martin Luther, William Perkins, Thomas Hooker, and Jacobus Arminius. Consider the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina—one of the most influential (albeit now-forgotten) thinkers of the sixteenth century. Using what amounts to an early form of modal logic, Molina posited that God contemplated all possible worlds before bringing ours into being. In each one, God foresaw the decisions every person would make. Then God chose to create the one world in which the elect would come across the proper conditions to encourage belief. Incidentally, this is the same model Arminius adopted. As Tipson shows, for all that “Arminianism” has come to mean “opposition to predestination,” it did not begin that way. Arminius just worked out God’s predestination through a process whereby God carefully formed and guided the worldly conditions in which each person’s will either would or would not be persuaded by the presentation of God’s grace.

In fact, as Tipson shows in these chapters, despite the ferocity surrounding predestination (the king eventually outlawed any preaching about it), no one really objected to predestination per se. What they objected to was the conception of human will each model implied. One of the main opponents to Molina and Arminius was the influential Puritan William Perkins. In the seventeenth century, his works outsold Shakespeare. His books guided Oxford and Cambridge. His ideas trained up a whole generation and more of Calvinists in both England and America. And when it came to predestination, Perkins believed that Molina did not go far enough. God does not persuade the will; he replaces it. He does not coax the unregenerate; he overpowers them. And thus, God’s predestination does not depend on the creation of conditions for belief; it depends on an active re-creation of the sinner’s heart.

How does that happen? By preaching the word. In his sermons, the minister became the instrument of God, and when the experience functioned properly, Puritans called it the “demonstration of the Spirit”—the work of God made possible “in, with, and under” the preacher’s words. And yet, that preaching still needed to be done with careful skill to make possible the demonstration of the spirit. As Tipson shows, Hooker imitated the theatrical style of a famous minister named John Rogers. Rogers would play-act while preaching, taking on the role of God and impersonating His voice: he would bellow and roar, he would threaten and console, he would plead with wild gestures from the pulpit. And in the process, he packed the church. Most Puritans hated the theaters—closed them down, in fact—but they also copied what worked.

Moreover, they defined “what worked” by what moved those sitting in the pews. Puritans preached to change the will, not convince the mind. Logic still mattered, of course, and some, such as Hooker, thought saints could deduce the grace of God in their lives through the shape their lives had taken. If a person’s experience matched the sine curve of sanctification, then he or she could conclude that justification had occurred—even if the moment had passed unnoticed. Nonetheless, sermons still aimed at the heart. As Tipson explains, Hooker believed the understanding would find a way to reject whatever the will would not accept. So he cut a middle line between logical deduction and emotional experiences. Assurance of salvation, Hooker believed, did not result from a single religious rapture, but instead arose over a long period of reflection on one’s desires, deeds, and dispositions, one’s steady growth in grace. According to Hooker, genuine faith had three distinguishing marks: it arose from contrition, it inspired daily repentance, and it stirred believers to want more of faith and grace.

From predestination to preaching, from abstract theology to practical divinity, Tipson does a marvelous job covering the terrain of Puritanism as it appeared in the world of Thomas Hooker. In the process, Tipson shows that Hooker was both an ordinary Puritan and an extraordinary outlier. His godly colleagues critiqued him for terrifying people too much, or for demanding a humiliation so extreme that no saint could possibly achieve it. That’s where Samuel Stone comes in. The subtitle of the book makes it sound as though he and Hooker will receive equal billing, but this is not a book about Stone, who was ordained alongside Hooker in the Hartford church and wrote the first complete body of divinity in New England. Stone, who was just as much a Puritan as Hooker, approached their shared doctrine quite differently. As Tipson puts it, “Stone’s emphasis on the attractiveness of Christ and the soul’s eagerness to embrace him contrasts startlingly with Hooker’s emphasis on the soul’s continued need for brokenness and rigorous self-discipline” (342). In the balance between justice and mercy, Hooker leaned on the former, Stone on the latter.

The law and the gospel. Never one without the other. It would seem that in seventeenth-century Hartford, Hooker and Stone divided the duties incumbent on all Puritan ministers. One scared the hell out of the ungodly, the other took the weak believer by the hand and held out the promises of God. As this beautiful, learned book reminds us, Puritans insisted on both.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3.5 (Summer, 2017).

---

Abram Van Engen is associate professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (2015).

More than 150 years since the conclusion of the Civil War, we live in a world rife with forced migration and less-than-free labor. In many places across the globe, refugees flee their war-torn homelands and all that they have ever known in search of safety in strange new societies where mixed fortunes await them. Elsewhere, the desperately poor attempt to cross national borders in the hopes of providing better lives for themselves and their families. The private prison complex makes vast profits for its investors on the backs of prisoners, many of whom are young men of color. In other cases, people, women and children in particular, are bought and sold by unscrupulous predators along well-worn national and international networks of human trafficking. The victims’ new lives are defined in large part by exploitation and a lack of freedom. The twentieth century witnessed forced migration and unfree labor on an epic scale. Nazi labor camps and the genocidal efficiency with which millions of people were transported to their death during the Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag exhibited two of humanity’s lowest points. In the midst of all of this suffering, dislocation, and exploitation, the transatlantic slave trade and Atlantic slavery stand out as particularly cruel and horrifying examples of forced migration and unfreedom.

 

Few topics in Atlantic history elicit more debate or stronger feelings than the transatlantic slave trade. Spanning close to three centuries, the trade in African men, women, and children stands alone as history’s largest forced migration, with at least twelve million people captured, sold, transported, and bought. The enslaved who survived the horrors of the Middle Passage provided the labor that served as the economic bedrock on which Atlantic empires and modern nation states were built. Today, tens of millions of descendants of the enslaved live across the Americas and elsewhere, often in harsher socioeconomic circumstances than their fellow citizens. Those who remained in Africa dealt with loss, dislocation, and disruption as their lives and societies were systematically exploited to feed the labor demands of faraway European colonies in a process that began as a proto-capitalist phenomenon and concluded as one that was at the heart of nineteenth-century capitalism. The impact of the slave trade and later European imperialism are intensely felt in Africa today. In fact, the legacy of the slave trade has led some to argue that reparations are warranted for this grievous injustice.

 

Given the immense significance of the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery, it is hardly surprising that scholars have studied and debated these topics for centuries. Some historians have sought to understand the complex interplay of ideas about race, culture, economics, and empire that led to the rise of slavery and the slave trade. Many of these inquiries have been forced to address the challenging topic of African involvement and complicity. Some have concerned themselves primarily with numbers, seeking to quantify the lives of millions of men, women, and children. Such scholars have been aided immeasurably by the creation of Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Others have examined the economics of the slave trade and its larger impact on regional, imperial, Atlantic, or global economies. Historians have taken cultural approaches to the slave trade, seeking in particular to understand the extent to which African cultures survived the trade and enslavement. Social historians have painted harrowing portraits of life and death aboard slave ships. Others have analyzed shipboard rebellions, or topics related to health, technology or seafaring. Political studies have sought to understand the fight to abolish or defend the slave trade and slavery.

 

Leonardo Marques adds his voice to the field of slave trade studies with The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776-1867. Based on a 2013 Emory University PhD dissertation, Marques’s book focuses on the role that citizens of the United States and their ships played in the slave trade to other parts of the Americas in the eras spanning from independence to shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War. Impressively researched in English, Spanish, and Portuguese-language archival and published primary sources, deeply conversant with an expansive historiography, and making nimble use of the Voyages database, The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas seeks to correct a field of study which, in Marques’s opinion, has been hindered by the persistent influence of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, the failure to expand chronologically beyond c. 1820, and an overly dismissive attitude about the effects of anti-slave trade legislation.

 

Marques seeks to correct these perceived shortcomings by illustrating the effectiveness of U.S. slave trade legislation and analyzing the landscape of international law that U.S. slave traders had to navigate. The author’s argument unfolds over six chronologically organized chapters. It begins with the creation of a truly American branch of the transatlantic slave trade, which emerged between independence and 1807; moves to a transitional period (1808-1820), in which the traffic was abolished to the U.S. but American merchants figured out ways to continue to ply their trade; shifts to an approximately forty-year era in which U.S. merchants conducted brisk (largely contraband) business in Brazil and Cuba, and concludes with the era of the Civil War, which turned out to be the event that finally ended American involvement in the slave trade.

 

At the heart of Marques’s analysis is an attempt to understand the seeming dissonance between the fact that ships flying the American flag imported  around one million Africans to other countries (many illegally) but only 100,000 or so slaves to the U.S. (most prior to 1808). In other words, how did a nation that was, legally at least, cut off from the African slave trade after 1808, and had only a moderate tradition of transatlantic slave trading as an independent nation, come to play such a substantial role in the traffic? The answer lies in demand, greed, small communities of mutual interest, transatlantic geopolitics, and a mosaic of international law that excluded subjects and citizens of some empires and nation states from the trade, but often provided Americans with loopholes to participate in this traffic. Complicating matters further, the first half of the nineteenth century was a time in which the U.S. was becoming one of the hemisphere’s most prominent slave societies as well as the major incubator of both pro- and antislavery thought in the Americas. Accordingly, the topic of legal and illegal slave trade became the source of much debate among activists, politicians, and the public as the republic careened toward Civil War.

 

This is a book about slave traders (captains, ship owners, and investors, largely), their ceaseless quest for profit as they sought to satisfy a demand for labor, a quest that had little regard for laws, national loyalties, or timing, and the forces that influenced the buying and selling of people. The story of these men and the political, legal, and economic forces that shaped their lives and actions is situated in multiple corners of the Atlantic world, from Rhode Island to the American South, from the coast of Africa to Brazil and Cuba. The latter two places receive the majority of space due to their continuing demand for Africans well into the nineteenth century. Marques also places his findings within various national and colonial histories, which are then situated in dialogue with each other. For example, legal developments within the early American republic are presented alongside the political culture of the contemporary British empire and the economic landscape of post-independence Brazil. In this sense, the book is a good example of the recent historiographic turn that might be called “U.S. and the World.” What emerges within Marques’s Atlantic and international framework is a lively analysis of the role that American citizens, their ships, and their flag played in transporting Africans across the Atlantic world, long after the slave trade to the United States had been abolished.

 

The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas has a number of strengths. The book’s evidentiary base is impressive. Marques’s dual Atlantic and international framework is thoughtful and effective. Most importantly, the author is largely successful in meeting his goal of detailing and analyzing American involvement in the transatlantic slave trade between independence and the Civil War. There are, however, some shortcomings to the book. For one, the book sometimes reads like a dissertation, which is exactly what it was just three years before publication. Second, very few Africans appear in the book. This is, of course, a political and legal history that states clearly that its primary focus is slave traders. At the same time, however, this is a political and legal history that seeks to explain how a million or more men, women, and children were violently uprooted from their homelands, forced to endure the Middle Passage, and then sold into slavery. The voices and experiences of these people demand a place in a study of the transatlantic slave trade. Regardless of this shortcoming, The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas is a valuable book that adds to Atlantic and international history, as well as our understanding of slavery and the slave trade.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3.5 (Summer, 2017).

---

Nathaniel Millett is an associate professor of history at Saint Louis University. He is the author of The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World, which won four prizes. Thanks to a Fulbright Fellowship in London and a Weatherhead Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, he has made major progress on a book that considers the role that indigenous people played in the Anglo-Caribbean between the sixteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century.

It seems fair to say that the idea of assembling individual human beings into a “population,” through counting, feels natural. It so thoroughly structures our individual and collective lives that its origins and effects have become invisible to us. In the opening pages of her thoughtful and original book, Molly Farrell carefully de-naturalizes the concept of “population,” making strange the idea of counting bodies as both a power of the state and an accepted and codified discourse. In a series of case studies, Farrell examines “moments around the colonial Atlantic world when writers explored the implications of enumerating people before censuses and birth registries shaped everyday life” (8). Although she does not neglect key moments and texts in the formation of population science, Farrell’s interest here is explicitly in the “literary prehistory” of population, that is, the “imaginative, personal and narrative writings that performed the cultural work of normalizing the enumeration of colonial bodies” (2). Implicit in this statement are two of the book’s central claims: first, that before the counting of bodies was consolidated into population science, literary texts not only reflected but helped to construct emergent notions of population; and, second, that colonial space and colonial bodies were not just incidental scenes or sources of data for a metropolitan project. Rather, the experience and the situation of colonialism itself encouraged the shift toward thinking of human communities in terms of numbers. Most strikingly, she suggests that the impulse toward thinking of bodies as discrete numbers continually ran up against the linkages and interdependencies between human subjects. What Farrell lays out is a fascinating spectacle, a colonial practice of counting bodies that is perpetually collapsing and producing odd, indeterminate results, even as it consolidates its conceptual hold as a way of thinking about human communities.

The first two chapters of the book address early documents of colonial experience in seventeenth-century America. The first chapter, “Poetics of the Ark Ashore,” examines the Massachusetts colonist and poet Anne Bradstreet’s engagement with early modern ideas about population and reproduction. In keeping with a broader theme in Counting Bodies, Farrell shows how Bradstreet’s poetry connects cataclysm and death with reproduction and regeneration, a link she builds by contrasting the poems with William Bradford’s record of colonial death and increase. The centrality of loss, and its relation to generation, will likely sound familiar to anyone who has read Bradstreet’s famous elegies. Farrell, however, shows us how the act of remembering the dead in these poems undermines a dominant vision of colonial populations as a ceaselessly multiplying collection of interchangeable individuals. Likewise, she reads Bradstreet’s less-studied epic poems as a complex response to triumphalist visions of colonial population increase. Building on her reading and revision of Guillaume Du Bartas, Bradstreet’s poems imagine a fertile, teeming colonial world, but one that is absolutely tied to the complexity of reproduction. In Farrell’s account, Bradstreet’s poetry, in both its lyric and epic modes, “focuses on the unreliability and innumerability of humans’ reproductive capacity” (60). Farrell elegantly evokes these themes of unreliability and uncountability in the quite different setting of the second chapter, which focuses on Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657). Farrell sees Ligon doing the work of counting human bodies at the “intersection of aesthetic ideals and mathematical reckoning” (80). In his literary and numerical accounting of Barbados, Ligon tries to impose a degree of control on the human complexity of the plantation system. That ordering work, unstable throughout, fails most completely when it turns to the reproductive bodies of enslaved women. The problem, again, is bodies that cannot be counted: both their aesthetic status and their individual human value is distorted by a system in which bodies are goods and human reproduction is a central form of commodity production.

The second half of the book extends these lines of inquiry about counting and innumerability into later colonial moments. The third chapter considers the role of numeracy in Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Counting bodies, for Rowlandson, becomes a tactic for imposing order in moments of dissonance and conflict, but also for separating a quantifiable white colonial population from seemingly innumerable indigenous groups. Farrell suggests, however, that the most anxious and complicated counting work in Rowlandson’s narrative happens around women and children, or as she puts it, “bodies that have the potential to alter the count” (132). These are bodies at once mutable (as when the adoption of a captive child could convert English to Indian) and persistently, stubbornly interconnected, even beyond death (as in Rowlandson’s intimate connection with her deceased daughter, Sarah). The book’s final chapter expands on the link between counting and death by focusing on colonial mortality bills. The dead body, Farrell points out, was a more easily countable unit than a living person. If the event of a birth in colonial America remained largely private and unreported, the numbers from the burial grounds could be (and increasingly were) added up and printed in the newspaper. Drawing on mortality bills printed in early eighteenth-century colonial newspapers, Farrell argues that it was the process of counting the dead (outside of crises like plague, war, and famine that had long been occasions for counting bodies) that helped to naturalize the idea of social enumeration. Her central example is Benjamin Franklin’s fascination with vital statistics, beginning with his practice of publishing mortality bills in his newspapers. Farrell then traces how Franklin, in his 1750 Poor Richard Improved, used the changes in rates of death to extrapolate about living colonial inhabitants. Death, then, became the starting place for thinking about the growth, categorization, and demarcation of a population.

In drawing out some of the key themes, texts, and lines of inquiry above, I may risk obscuring one of the pleasures of reading Farrell’s book, namely the range of her sources and the deftness with which she interweaves them. In each chapter, she moves skillfully between her central cases and broader discursive contexts, including Albrecht Durer’s aesthetic theory, Thomas Malthus’s population science, and Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics.” This range might occasionally leave readers wishing she would pause for longer on some of these supporting characters and questions. In my case, I would have been curious to hear more (and more directly) about the discourse of biopolitics, and Michel Foucault’s work in particular. I saw the outlines of Farrell’s engagement (both in opposition and agreement) with biopolitical ideas, but felt that she could have been more explicit about how she seeks to modify our sense of biopolitics as a dominant way of thinking about population.

I was continually excited by this book, and was especially struck by the way that Farrell’s focus on the literary representation of population, and particularly on bodies that are difficult to count, might open up new possibilities for thinking about the complexity and variability of colonial American ideas of community. I’m persuaded, for example, that her book can help us think about colonial understandings of disability, another form of human categorization that was just beginning to emerge during this period. The idea of disability calls into question the degree to which individual members might “count” in a population. Certainly, then, scholars of disability representation will be interested in Farrell’s demonstration of how colonial and early national counting practices explicitly devalued certain individuals, and disregarded crucial interdependencies between people. Just as important, however, is her careful attention to how writers in early America obstructed, disallowed, and resisted this kind of counting. Farrell’s book is worth thinking with, and I’m eager to see how her methods and conclusions might further expand and enliven our understanding of what it meant to count and be counted in colonial communities.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3.5 (Summer, 2017).

---

Nicholas Junkerman is assistant professor of English at Skidmore College. He writes on early American literature, religion, and the representation of disability. His article “‘Confined Unto a Low Chair’: Reading the Particulars of Disability in Cotton Mather’s Miracle Narratives” appears in the Spring 2017 issue of Early American Literature.

This photograph of Abraham Lincoln and his son Thomas (Tad) was taken by Anthony Berger in Mathew Brady’s Washington, D.C. studios on February 9, 1864. It shows the president and his son looking at a photograph album (a prop that was lying around the studio) together. The photograph was commissioned by the painter Francis Carpenter, who was at the time working in the White House preparing sketches that would serve as the basis for his First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln (1864). This particular sitting led to a number of images that have become part of U.S. national iconography. For example, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln that was taken on this day was used as the basis for the image that appears on the five-dollar bill. This image of the president and his son, however, soon to become one of the most popular and most reproduced depictions of Lincoln, was not published or otherwise publicly distributed until a year after its completion. Only after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 did the image become ubiquitous. The variety of changes introduced to the image in its reproductions offers a fascinating glimpse into how iconography produces narratives and fantasies about national history, culture, and values.