This surprising exchange in the Missouri Republican sent me searching for traces of the play on American stages, where I discovered its enduring popularity for at least a half century following its 1835 debut in New York. I found no other evidence of controversy, in St. Louis or elsewhere, which surprised me given that the play first appeared in Boston the spring after the Ursuline Convent riot in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In America, Pet would have resonated with the bestselling convent captivity narratives Six Month in a Convent, Or, the Narrative of Rebecca Theresa Reed (1835) and Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), which cast the convent as a danger to Protestant womanhood and domesticity, exciting prurient interest and controversy. What was the relationship, I wondered, between this “revolt of the convent” and the intensifying anti-Catholicism of the 1830s that scholars have found across Anglo-American print culture? Pet offers a tantalizing glimpse at the way comedy translated these themes as light fare. 

Pet of the Petticoats extends the reach of Anglo-Atlantic anti-Catholicism to the stage, illustrating the ways its tropes and anxieties moved across genres and into sentimental stage comedy. The 1832 opera dispenses with villainous priests and nuns of the Gothic drama, instead using the convent setting to dramatize gender gone wrong when women are kept from men and boys are raised in a world of women. Paul’s case highlights the dangers of over-feminization for boys and men, exemplifying how ambivalence about aspects of Protestant culture was often worked out through anti-Catholic imagery, as Susan Griffin and Jenny Franchot have shown in their analyses of nineteenth-century literature. If much anti-Catholic literature of the period presented the priest and the convent as a dark mirror reflecting Anglo-Protestant anxieties, this farce mined those anxieties for comedic effect while offering audiences a reassuring moral conclusion.

Anti-Catholic literature, which crested in the 1830s and 1850s in relation to expanding Catholic communities, mobilized views of Catholicism to grapple with questions about Anglo-Protestant culture, particularly the status of women and the family. A turning point was the 1834 Charlestown riot, when a working-class mob attacked the Ursuline convent, founded in 1827, that was home to student boarders from elite Boston families. The fate of a disaffected nun, who had left and then returned, inspired the attack. Rebecca Reed’s unpublished account of her years as a charity student also fueled suspicion of the convent and its role in the community. An estimated two-thousand spectators watched the rioters systematically destroy convent property. In the trial that followed, only one man was found guilty. The victims received no damages, and the convent was never rebuilt.

These events mobilized competing views of new Catholic institutions and communities, but the convent also became a target because it symbolized how America’s democratic promise was being corrupted by elites, as Jenny Franchot has argued. The convent represented a danger to American purity in the guise of elite education, an anti-democratic force in America’s competitive market society, and a threat to the patriarchal family. The fixation on the tyrannical masculine figure of the Mother Superior found in trial testimony and Reed’s account policed the boundaries of female authority, which were at the time being reshaped by the Protestant cult of domestic femininity. The year after Reed’s account appeared, ghostwriters published Maria Monk’s more sensationalistic (and false) account of a Montreal nunnery where priests prostituted novitiates and illegitimate infants were buried in quicklime. This narrative engaged the politics of sexual virtue catalyzed by the moral reform movements of 1830s, asking how women might protect their virtue and secure class stability. Pet of the Petticoats spoke to these themes in the form of an English breeches comedy.

Pet exemplifies the transatlantic character of early U.S. theater (and print culture more broadly). It debuted in 1832 as a vehicle for London-based actress-manager Fanny Fitzwilliam adapted by John Baldwin Buckstone. Like many of Buckstone’s comedies, Pet derived from a continental European source, a French vaudeville based on Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset’s poem “Vert-Vert,” about a bird who disrupts a convent with the blasphemy he learns from sailors. The bird learns reform, as does the boy protagonist at the center of the French original, in Buckstone’s version an actress-boy role. In England as in America, the piece was popular, enjoyed for its “wit” and “excellent moral lesson,” according to the London Theatrical Observer. Pet was initially marketed as “The Convent of St. Eloi, or the Pet of the Petticoats,” though by the time it reached the United States in 1835, it was usually billed simply as “Pet of the Petticoats,” which highlighted the problem of the protagonist’s upbringing in a world of women.

In the absence of dramatic copyright law in the U.S., English plays were regularly imported, adapted, and produced by American theater companies. Pet first began appearing in U.S. theaters in 1835, usually selected by leading actresses for their benefit night, when performers could decide the repertoire and take a cut of the house. Benefit nights gave actresses an opportunity to try new roles and were often used to debut a new piece, like the English comic opera recently published in London. Pet was deemed the “sensation of the season” in Boston and New York in the spring of 1835, but it received little critical attention as it was not literary drama. This is unfortunate given the ways it surely resonated in the aftermath of the Ursuline riot and American convent captivity narratives, which might have been a factor in its selection.

Pet is representative of comic opera and breeches drama in this period, mobilizing essentialist gender roles in a plot celebrating sentimental domestic ideals. The setting is a vaguely foreign, vaguely historical past. Though adapted from a French original, in the American context it spoke directly to concerns of Anglo-American Protestant culture with legitimate family structure, courtship, and sexual virtue. In this play as in broader anti-Catholic literature, the convent represents a threat to the institution of marriage and raises questions about legitimate female authority. Its boarders have been separated from their husbands and must live behind high walls and locked gates under control of the Mother Superior. The “under governess,” Sister Vinaigre, whose name evokes the dried-up spinster deprived of marital sexuality, “does nothing but watch and torment the poor young girls from morning till night.” All is not as it seems: Vinaigre is carrying on a clandestine romance with the dancing instructor, Monsieur Zephyr.

By casting the protagonist, Paul, as a breeches role, the piece highlights the convent as a site of gendered disorder: wives kept from husbands, and a boy raised as a girl and infantilized by the convent borders. Paul’s mother has sent him to the convent to be “educated in innocence, and brought up as pure and as virtuous as a girl” because “his father was a sad rake.” The result, the convent gardener jokes, is that “he don’t know whether he is a boy or girl.” Paul evokes the androgyne prominent in anti-Catholic imagery but also in Protestant writing concerned with the proper way to raise sons. Alas for his mother’s intentions, he tries to emulate the arts of seduction, producing a comedy of gendered errors where the actress likewise tries but ultimately fails at manhood. Actress Charlotte Watson was praised for her chaste performance as Paul, an indication that she conveyed innocence rather than knowingness, enhancing Paul’s feminine youth.

 The allure and humor of actress-as-boy roles like Paul relied on the association of youth and immaturity with femininity. Though Pet is unusual in following Paul through a coming-of-age tale and hints at his burgeoning manhood, the character fails in his approximation of adult masculinity. For the audience at least, Paul’s essential femininity is never in doubt. (Some dramatic actresses did take on adult male leads like Hamlet, Romeo, and Ion to critical acclaim, roles otherwise intended for actors.) While breeches acting had a clear heterosexist allure, resting on fixed notions of gender difference and infantilization of women, these roles gave actresses new realms of expression and stage business, like combat. And while male theatergoers were avid fans of actresses who played roles like Paul, the excitement of watching a young women wear the breeches and, in the case of Paul, satirize male libertinage also entertained women in the audience. Roles like Paul were innocuous, if somewhat racy fun, because their morals reinforced contemporary gendered order. Pet reassured viewers of the natural desire for domesticity even as it titillated audiences with a ribald celebration of male libertinage.

Paul’s failed attempt at sexual conquest shows the consequences of his innocence, a product of over-feminization. Paul arrives at an inn, where he discovers the soldiers entertained by opera star Madame Bravura. Paul has no context for the world of adult sexual vice and cannot even explain his attraction to Bravura. He overhears the soldiers discussing the arts of seduction and decides to win Bravura by attempting “love a la militaire.” He follows the advice of Chevalier St. Pierre: “the cooler she may appear, the warmth of your fervor should increase; if she repulses you, charge again—hem her in—take her round the wait—kiss her—she’ll scream—never heed that—but call for a delicate dinner and a dozen of Champagne” and “the victory is yours.” When Paul tries to caress and kiss Bravura, she is “repulsed.” The scene made light of seduction techniques practiced by male libertines yet gave its actresses a rare opportunity to satirize male sexual aggression. (In one of the French versions, Paul’s love interest Mimi finds and intercepts him in successful pursuit of the opera singer. He becomes the caged parrot rather than an innocent cupid reuniting lovers.) 

Pet pokes fun at efforts to discipline urban sexual culture. Soldiers separated from their wives by the convent’s “squadron of governesses”—note the masculinization—were expected to pursue illicit romance. The play assured audiences that while male libertinage could not be prevented, neither was it a threat to domesticity. The play concludes with a tidy moral: Paul offers to help the soldiers liberate their wives but only if they agree to “no more assignations with ladies.” The bonds of marriage to a virtuous woman will properly channel male sexual desire. Paul asks for forgiveness from the Mother Superior by affirming the natural order disrupted by the convent: “I have but restored husbands to their wives, and wives to their husbands; and those who have been once united in Hymen’s bonds, we are instructed never to put asunder.” The play also resolves the problem of Paul’s “feminine education.” He promises himself to the boarder Mimi but asks her to wait for him while he joins the army. With Paul destined to a proper masculine education prior to marriage, all sing “the conqueror love smiles on us now.”

The convent as a site of mystery, seduction, and illicit authority are present in Pet but rendered ineffectual rather than sinister, like the bumbling gardener or the repressed Sister Vinaigre. For audiences steeped in the dark salaciousness of convent captivity literature, Pet represented a lighter fantasy of revolt against elite conspiracies that threatened men’s legitimate access to American women. With actress-as-boy Paul at the center, the play also spoke to anxieties about over-feminization in middle-class Protestant culture. Paul is a failed boy in a world of cloistered girls and a failed seducer among worldly men. His character both celebrates youthful innocence and satirizes the feminization of American culture, but the revolt of the convent promises to restore him to his proper role.

Pet of the Petticoats was titillating but not offensive, prescient enough to excite laughs of recognition without inciting outrage or scandal. It celebrated a sexual double standard associated with American theater culture that was being challenged by Protestant reform, while still delivering a satisfactory moral lesson. If few found offense, this was because so much of its themes were so familiar to Americans steeped in anti-Catholic tropes, convents as sites that disrupted the natural order of things, where women exercised a masculine authority, and men were emasculated androgynes. Pet made ridiculous what convent captivity literature cast as dangerous, while assuring Americans that marital domesticity “conquers all.”

 

Further Reading

After first learning about Pet of the Petticoats in Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), I rediscovered the play through the discussion in the Missouri Republican in March 1838 while I was researching theater culture in St. Louis, Missouri.

Unfortunately, many of the pieces appearing on American stages from the 1810s to the 1850s, especially short comic afterpieces, never found their way to print. John Baldwin Buckstone’s The Pet of the Petticoats was unusual in this regard, first published in London in 1834 because of its popularity and then anthologized in Popular dramas by John Baldwin Buckstone as performed at the Metropolitan theatres, vol. 1 (London: William Strange, 1835), available through the Internet Archive.

Understanding the play in relation to contemporary anti-Catholicism led me to the following key works: Susan Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Marie Anne Pagliarini, “The Pure American Woman and the Wicket Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 9, no. 1 (Winter, 1999); Timothy Verhoeven, Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism: France and the United States in the nineteenth century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Thank you to Kara French for encouraging me to write about this play for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Annual Meeting.

 

This article originally appeared in September, 2022.

 

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Sara E. Lampert is an Associate Professor of History at the University of South Dakota and coordinator of the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies program. She is the author of Starring Women: Celebrity, Patriarchy, and American Theater, 1790-1850 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020). Learn more at Saraelampert.com and follow @slampie2. 

Few of the nineteenth-century stories on Ferguson failed to mention that the “sainted Isabella Graham” had regularly invited Ferguson’s “scholars to her house, to say their catechism, and receive religious instruction.” Graham, likewise devout, was a groundbreaking philanthropist. At a time when some clergymen railed against the women beginning to found and run charities, Graham led the creation of New York’s first female-led charity, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children. And that was just the beginning of her charitable leadership in New York. When she died in 1814, she was eulogized for “awaken[ing] the charities of a populous city, and giv[ing] to them an impulse, a direction, and an efficacy, unknown before.”

Recognized in their day as leaders thanks to their piety and benevolence, these women shared an evangelical faith that enabled them to work together. Yet their cooperation was unlikely in their time. It has been remembered or ignored by their biographers according to the racial politics of the era.

Ferguson and Graham’s paths crossed in the 1790s through their church. Graham had only just moved to New York. Two decades earlier, her husband died while they were living in Antigua, leaving her with three young girls and another child on the way and not much by means of support. She returned to her native Scotland and struggled to provide for her family. In 1789, hoping to get out from under “the debt hang[ing] over [her] head],” she reluctantly left Edinburgh to open a school for girls in New York. Soon George and Martha Washington, John Jay, and other prominent families were sending their girls to “Mrs. Grahams boarding school.” 

Meanwhile, Catherine was determined to be free. Around age fifteen, she was born again and sought out the Rev. John Mason, a white Presbyterian minister whose church she attended, for spiritual counsel. When she “found [herself] in the minister’s presence, [she] trembled] from head to foot. One harsh word would have crushed me.” But Mason welcomed the conversation and accepted her in the congregation. Within a couple of years, the girl, now in her mid-teens and at growing risk to possible sexual abuse, forged a deal to buy her freedom with the help of her church members. A woman, evidently Graham, purchased Ferguson for $200 with the understanding that Ferguson would labor, likely at domestic work, for six years to pay off the cost of her freedom. In time, though, Graham’s new son-in-law, Divie Bethune, raised $100 to discharge the debt while Graham herself reduced the time Ferguson owed her to eleven months.

Around this time, with “no less than four new boarding schools” opening and Graham’s business “at a stand,” she retired, and in 1797, she and other white women in her circle launched the Widows Society. Most charities at the time gave aid based on religious or ethnic affinity. The Widows Society innovated by helping white women without ties to sectarian charities, though it excluded Black women. Graham had been a mover and shaker in charities in Edinburgh in the 1780s so with her experience, as well as her stature as an older, respected woman, she was a natural choice as leader. That didn’t mean the path was easy. Initially, the Widows Society was “the jest of most, the ridicule of man, and it met the opposition of not a few,” she explained to a group of young women volunteering to teach at a new school for poor children. “The men could not allow our sex the steadiness and perseverance to establish such an undertaking.” But she had stood up to sexism before, even having excoriated a man behind in paying his daughter’s school bill, for not treating her the same as he would “any ordinary correspondent in the mercantile line.” Facing the challenges to establishing charities to aid needy women and children didn’t daunt her. 

Meanwhile, Ferguson had begun taking vulnerable children into her home. She had married at eighteen and had two children, but the children had died (contemporaries were silent on her husband’s fate). In the Black community, it wasn’t unusual for others to care for children when their parents couldn’t, though forty-eight kids, both white and black, was a lot. And expensive! So generous was she that when asked if she’d managed to save up any money from her successful career as a cakebaker, Ferguson replied that “I gave away all I earned.” Ferguson was the wedding cakebaker of choice for New Yorkers’ nuptials and, similar to other Black women who vended foodstuffs at street markets, she also sold her “small, delicious” “pound and sponge” cakes around the city from a market basket, according to the recollections of a city resident. Producing baked goods that were “past belief in toothsomeness” for both special occasions and everyday treats, she did well enough that her monetary donations amounted to “much money,” as an observer put it. In addition to succoring children in the here and now, Ferguson cared about their fates in the hereafter. She prayed for her charges and brought them into Graham’s home weekly. On Sundays, she “regularly collected the children in the neighborhood, who were accustomed to run in the street on the Lord’s day, into her house,” where she arranged for “suitable persons” to teach them the fundamentals of Christianity. Sometime around this point, Ferguson began holding weekly prayer meetings for adults with African Americans and whites attending. Ever politic, Ferguson “always secured the aid of some good man to conduct these meetings,” and that was how a former enslaved woman gave Isaac Ferris, a future chancellor of New York University, his start in public preaching. 

As a Black woman, Ferguson faced even greater obstacles to public leadership than Graham did. African Americans in New York, as in other cities, worked to establish institutions free of white control. Ferguson had created an endeavor that involved whites, but she ran it. Until, that is, sometime in the 1810s when her pastor folded it into the church. “We must not leave you to do all this,” he told her when he learned of the effort. Concerned about her workload though he may have been, the end result was that the school was now under his control.

Willingly or not, she must have acquiesced to her pastor taking over her school, just as she’d turned to Graham to help instruct her students and to white male ministers to lead her prayer meetings. All those decisions were either savvy moves or reluctant bows to reality. Graham had used her evangelical networks to launch her boarding school and her charities. Ferguson did the same with her endeavors.

So maybe the women’s cooperation was born of pragmatism, yet it was still notable. Not only was women’s and African Americans’ public leadership new and controversial, but also, well into the 1800s, Black and white women didn’t typically cooperate in charitable activity or reform efforts.

Back in the 1760s and early 1770s, when Graham, her husband, and their little girls had been living at Fort Niagara, the family had two enslaved Native girls, Diana and Susy. Graham taught them reading, sewing, and Christianity, so teaching children of color wasn’t new to her. But this was different. These children weren’t her chattel. They were “scholars” coming to her under the supervision of a Black woman of some standing in their community.

White evangelical antislavery writers writing in the mid-1800s about Ferguson loved to remember the connection between the women. Here was a story about a Black woman leader that could be told in a way that highlighted the cruelty of enslavers in separating Black families while assuring white Americans that racial harmony was possible—on their terms. 

Ferguson played the game she knew she had to. But there was another, more assertive side, one that harked back to the young girl who tried to bargain for her freedom. When the city directory writers came calling, she defined herself by her skilled occupation—first as a silk dyer, then, emphasizing expertise with a specialty textile, as a merino shawl washer, and finally, in the field she would be best known, as a cakebaker. She made sure her name appeared in the newspaper when she brokered a donation to the prominent American Bible Society on behalf of her prayer group. And when a group of well-to-do white men in the city took up a collection to buy the freedom of an imprisoned fugitive enslaved man, Jack, she donated too. Newspapers publicized the effort and the donors: hers was the only female name listed. Public memory of Ferguson never referred to her donation for Jack. Maybe Tappan or other writers didn’t know about it or maybe the incident didn’t fit the story of the influential but nonthreatening Black woman of faith. Either way, her contribution lets us know that she gave independently in the cause of Black freedom. 

For their part, Graham’s son-in-law and daughter didn’t mention the women’s relationship in the biographies they crafted of Graham at all. One reason for the silence may be because the family told a selective story about Graham and slavery, presenting her as a slaveholder with moral qualms about slavery. New research in original documents has turned up more enslaved people in Graham’s life than the family revealed and likewise raises questions—possibly irresolvable—about the story her daughter Joanna Bethune, who was firmly antislavery, told about her mother’s views. Graham’s son-in-law also had a nephew who was a “colored lad.” Perhaps sensitivity about that relationship was another reason the family avoided a story about an interracial partnership, even one involving religious friendship. As sectional tensions over slavery rose, newer editions of Graham’s biographies cut out references to Graham’s reported opposition to slavery. Critics of the change charged Graham’s grandson, the Rev. George Bethune, with trying to “conciliat[e] slaveholders with silence upon the evils of slavery. By 1860, when George Bethune came to write a memoir of his mother, Joanna Bethune, he credited her with being “The Mother of Sabbath-schools in America.” “[T]he facts and dates,” he insisted, “show that Providence intended for Mrs. Bethune the distinction” birthing the Sunday school movement in the United States. Joanna Bethune, an influential philanthropist in her own right and indeed a key leader of the Sunday school movement, had long been in her mother’s shadow and now her son wanted to put her in the limelight. There was no room in this origins story for a formerly enslaved Black woman.

Hailed by some and ignored by others, in both cases because of the politics of race, Ferguson and Graham’s unlikely cooperation to spiritually educate underserved children was one dimension of each woman’s role as a founding philanthropist.

The Widows Society was fading by the mid-1900s. But one of its spinoffs, a child welfare agency originally known as the Orphan Asylum Society of the City of New York and now known as Graham Windham, remains in operation today and has been supported by the cast and crew of Hamilton: An American Musical. Over two centuries after Ferguson and Graham, separately and to some degree together, cared for New York’s vulnerable children, Graham Windham has a Black women president, Kimberly Watson, an ordained minister.

 

Further Reading

Anne M. Boylan, “Benevolence and Antislavery Activity among African American Women in New York and Boston, 1820-1840,” in Jean Fagan Yellin and John Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

Anne M. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (New York: Knopf, 2010).

Jane E. Dabel, “‘I Have Gone Quietly to Work for the Support of My Three Children’: African-American Mothers in New York City, 1827-1877,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 27 (no. 2, 2003).

Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Allen Hartvik, “Catherine Ferguson: Black Founder of a Sunday School,” Negro History Bulletin 35 (no. 8, 1972): 176-77.

Robert J. Swan, “John Teasman: African-American Educator and the Emergence of Community in Early Black New York City, 1787-1815,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (no. 3, 1992): 331-56.

Kyle B. Roberts, Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Margaret Washington, “Going ‘Where They Dare Not Follow’: Race, Religion, and Sojourner Truth’s Early Interracial Reform,” Journal of African American History 98 (no. 1, 2013): 48-71.

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts of Ferguson and Graham include:

[Divie Bethune], The Power of Faith Exemplified in the Life and Writings of the Late Mrs. Isabella Graham (New York: J. Seymour, 1816).

[Joanna Bethune], The Power of Faith, Exemplified in the Life and Writings of the Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. A New Edition. Enriched by Her Narrative of Her Husband’s Death and Other Select Correspondence (New York: American Tract Society, 1843).

Joanna Bethune, The Unpublished Letters and Correspondence of Mrs. Isabella Graham: From the Year 1767 to 1814; Exhibiting Her Religious Character in the Different Relations of Life (New York: Theological and Sunday School Bookseller, 1838).

Memoirs of Mrs. Joanna Bethune, by her Son, the Rev. George W. Bethune, D.D. With an Appendix, Containing Extracts from the Writings of Mrs. Bethune (New York: Harper Brothers, 1863).

“Catherine Ferguson” in “City Items” section, New-York Daily Tribune, July 20, 1854. This obituary was republished, in modified form, in various antislavery and evangelical periodicals. Later in the century, writers retold the story in religious periodicals. See, for example, “Katy Ferguson,” New York Evangelist 62:5 (January 29, 1891).

Mrs. John W. Olcott, “Recollections of Katy Ferguson” in The Southern Workman 52 (1923): 463.

Primary sources on Ferguson include:

“For the Commercial Advertiser,” New-York Spectator, July 14, 1821.

“The donations for the slave Jack, amount to $937 50,” New York Journal of Commerce, August 27, 1835.

See also listings for Catherine Ferguson in the Longworth’s New York City Directories from 1814-1850 (available digitally from the New York Public Library).

 

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Modupe Labode, Crystal Moten, Kyle Roberts, and Sarah Jones Weicksel for helpful conversations about Ferguson and Graham.

 

This article was originally published in August 2022.

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Amanda B. Moniz, Ph.D., is the David M. Rubenstein Curator of Philanthropy at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Her book, From Empire to Humanity: The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism, was awarded ARNOVA’S inaugural Peter Dobkin Hall History of Philanthropy Book Prize. She is currently working on a biography of Isabella Graham.

Coining entailed producing metallic currency that would pass at face value despite lacking the full amount of silver or gold in favor of some combination of base metals such as copper, brass, or lead. “Bad Money,” as the sheriff called it. Coining differed from other eighteenth-century monetary crime, such as clipping or shaving, because it resulted in a new coin rather than altering a preexisting one. In this case, the coiners endeavored to make Spanish gold and silver coins in a range of values rather than any British silver coins. Given the scarcity of coin across the British North American colonies those pistoles and pesos would have been just as useful, if not more so, than any pounds or shillings. North Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century experienced an acute specie shortage (meaning of both paper and metallic currency) adding further incentive and opportunity to pass bad money. Credit and barter systems helped facilitate trade in the absence of specie, but cash was still needed for some tasks including inter-imperial trade, settling debts, or paying taxes. In such cases, colonists lacking British coin relied on Spanish, Portuguese, French, and other foreign coin in addition to the paper legal tender issued by colonial governments. Perhaps the coiners set out to produce something familiar enough in the Spanish coins but not so familiar as shillings or pounds that might have been more easily identified as spurious. Either way, their enterprise offered the prospect of profiting from the variability, complexity, and scarcity of colonial currency. 

Depending on one’s relationship to the monetary regime, coining could either appear a heinous offense that threatened the ruling order by undermining public trust in its currency, or a creative solution to the shortage of specie across much of the Atlantic world. Capital statutes passed in England from the 1690s to 1742 made many monetary crimes, including coining, punishable by death. In 1749, only three years before Johnson was apprehended, the North Carolina Assembly enacted three statutes from England that classified coining and clipping as capital offenses. Previous punishments for counterfeiting, forging, altering, defacing, or knowingly passing counterfeit bills in the colony had included two hours in the pillory followed by having one’s ears cut off. At the same time, counterfeit coins became integral to day-to-day economic life, sometimes in blatant violation of British law following Parliamentary statues passed in 1751 and 1764 prohibiting further issues of legal tender paper money in the continental colonies.

The common problem of currency in the British Atlantic world led to creative workarounds such as paper currencies, the plugging and holing of existing foreign coin, new theories of value, and counterfeiting as other historians have shown so well. Individuals could choose to accept underweight coins at face value or deal in suspect coins. Colonial responses to the shortage of specie provoked Parliamentary legislation, notably the Currency Act of 1764, and local insurgencies like the North Carolina Regulators, whose grievances included tax policy and the lack of currency, little more than a decade after the example discussed here. The case of Johnson, Moore, and Jillet also shows that the condition of scarcity could catalyze a vernacular substrate of chemical know-how to appear in the historical record.

At the most basic level this example expands the range of characters, motivations, and skills included in studies of the shadowy practice of coining. It adds the coiners’ work of making coins to the kinds of labor understood to have contributed to knowledge and value production in histories of medicine, science, and money. Over the past decade artisans and tradespeople have reappeared in scholarship as knowledge makers, eroding extant divisions between philosophers and mechanics, and recovering the connections between the head and the hands in histories of innovation or industrialization. For Johnson, making coins was a matter of chemistry that would ultimately determine the success or failure of their enterprise. Such an idea raises questions of who detected coins and thereby enforced monetary policy, as well as the role of subjective, seemingly irrational things like the senses in that enforcement. At its broadest, considering coining as a chemical act suggests the many interactions between productive arts and knowledges in the science of everyday life and points to the potential of examining together the realms of medicine and money.

William Jillet’s trade as a blacksmith would clearly have been helpful to the metallic work that constituted the early stages of making coins. Perhaps less obvious, though no less crucial, were Daniel Johnson’s contributions to the coining process as a chemist. The later stages involved pastes and mineral acids that were standard features of any apothecary’s or chemist’s practice. His training would likely have included hands-on experience with silver’s chemical properties and familiarity with mineral acids, such as aqua fortis and vitriol, that dissolve metals (which was exactly the technique used by coiners to bring small amounts of silver to the surface of the coins they made to make them appear entirely silver). Johnson also probably would have known the steps to produce such reagents with his own equipment. The laboratories and warehouses of London’s merchants of medicines brimmed with these chemicals because they were frequently used in the production of popular medicines and were exported to colonial medical practitioners in significant quantities. 

The dense forests and nearly impassable swamps of the mid-Atlantic and upper South were favorites of counterfeiters because, in essence, they provided natural laboratories outside of colonial authority. More generally, swamps offered liminal space for marginalized or illicit groups to establish communities and pursue their own goals. The Great Dismal Swamp to the north, for example, supported a multigenerational maroon settlement dating to the early 1600s based on recent archaeological evidence. Others seeking freedom or survival, such as indigenous people or indentured servants, drew upon the natural resources of the region’s swamps, while self-emancipated people used the Neuse River to reach New Bern and the coast from plantations in the Carolina Piedmont. Johnson, Moore, and Jillet ferried their materials and equipment (including hammers, molds, and chemicals) south from Virginia, up the Neuse River, and into the swamp that would have masked the fumes and smoke from the coiners’ fires while offering supplies of water and wood fuel for the metalwork. With the proper setup coining could become quite efficient, as one printed account suggested that a team of two could finish upwards of 500 shillings in two days’ time. 

Though counterfeiting cases involving medical practitioners like Johnson are difficult to find, contemporary accounts of tradespeople supporting coining operations and what we know from Carl Wennerlind’s work about who was charged, tried, and ultimately punished for monetary crimes suggests that there existed a broader infrastructure for counterfeiting in Britain and its Atlantic colonies. The exploits of Seth Hudson, a coiner and forger who had worked as a doctor, captivated Boston during the early 1760s. In Rhode Island, Samuel Casey sold medicines before his inventory burned in a fire, likely prompting him to begin coining in the 1760s. 

Other medical practitioners in New England, such as Benjamin Stockbridge (1704-1788), tried their hand at making gold and silver legally by conducting alchemical experiments alongside their medical practices. In another case, Gershom Bulkeley (1635-1713) took notes about medico-alchemical experiments in his home laboratory in Connecticut. Bulkeley possessed a Harvard education and owned copies of European medical and alchemical texts to aid his pursuits, while Stockbridge had received formal medical training and also read European texts. In general, however, we know little about the development, circulation, and adaptation of early modern chemistry practices, but the presence of the key techniques for coining—coloring base metals like copper, iron, and brass—in widely available printed texts suggests that those methods were not particularly esoteric or secret. For example, Godfrey Smith’s The Laboratory, or School of Arts included directions “to silver all sorts of metals” using aqua fortis, a key mineral acid for chemical remedies and coining alike.

Far from extraordinary, many eighteenth-century ideas about credit, value, and medicine could trace their roots to prior strains of European alchemical thought. More practically, many of the chemicals used in making medicines and coins had attracted the attention of tradespeople for centuries and were already associated, at least tangentially, with ideas of value and money creation before they entered mainstream medical practice in the form of chemical remedies that required practices that could be categorized as metallic transmutation or pharmaceutical production depending on one’s interpretation. The takeaway being that for a long time there existed little practical distinction between the alchemical, medical, and industrial arts.

We don’t know if Johnson, by comparison, had access to any such texts or if he could even read. Had he apprenticed or learned from someone in a port city with connections to the wider Atlantic world? Regardless of his training, he believed he possessed sufficient chemical skill to attempt to make coins that would pass as legitimate, a level of experience acknowledged by the Virginia Gazette and several other newspapers when they described him as “a Chymist, or Doctor.” This convergence of titles at once reflects the fuzziness of pre-professional occupational categories but also the integration of chemical techniques and remedies into accepted pharmacology by the eighteenth century. There had emerged a vibrant trade in chemical remedies and, importantly for our purposes here, the substrates required to make them that had its roots in alchemical experiments of previous centuries. Mineral acids and other chemicals filled the official pharmacopoeias and dispensaries that nominally structured medicine manufacturing during this period.

The early modern Americas feature less prominently in studies of chemical knowledge production given their perceived distance, both physically and intellectually, from Europe’s hubs of formal experimentation, but they still boasted robust interaction with chemistry in a variety of applied guises in response to common problems of labor and scarcity. Perhaps the most obvious example is in the silver mines at Potosí in New Spain where metallurgical techniques drew upon a long tradition of Paracelsian chemistry that combined aspects of alchemy, pharmacy, and medicine. By the close of the eighteenth century, sugar production too began to be described in chemical terms, often to “improve” production and discredit the experiential knowledge of enslaved laborers. Chemical techniques, such as distillation, saw everyday use in homes and kitchens across North America, while medical practitioners crossing the Atlantic carried chemical training into new contexts. Specie and health were both in short supply across the British Atlantic world.

From one perspective, we can interpret these chemical activities as responses to scarcity (of money or labor, for example) and precarity (of health, for example) seeking to solve common problems. The chemical approach to money in the Americas illustrates the circulation of experiential knowledges across the Atlantic world as well as local configurations of those knowledges that arose out of necessity both in accordance with imperial law and not. A range of approaches emerged because though the eighteenth century was a period of quickening transatlantic commerce and increased commercial value placed on accurate descriptions of nature, it lacked widespread forms of verification that made truth-claims tricky and embodied despite assertions to the contrary. In the cases of medicine and money, the possibility of counterfeits shaped specific routines of detection and credibility that could have life-or-death consequences.

While some counterfeit coins deceived the eyes, ears, fingers, and tongues of even the most experienced evaluators, most of the cases that remain for us today are of those that were detected. In other words, they likely failed a physical test as Johnson’s did. Contrary to the assumption by historians that many colonists, and Londoners even, would have lacked sufficient familiarity with genuine coins to recognize fraudulent ones, extant examples suggest a wider fluency in coinage and the sensory indicators of their veracity.

When the sheriff found the coins at the forge in the North Carolina swamp, he noted they were “so badly done as not to be easily imposed upon any Body; which may be owing to the timely Discovery of the Plot, which prevented their finishing them in the Manner they intended.” The finishing process he refers to included achieving a realistic silver or gold coloring on the coin’s surface that would have been Johnson’s job as the chemist. After the metallic disc was removed from its mold, it had to be brought to the color of a silver coin even though in actuality it was not entirely silver. To do so, the coiner would first apply vitriol (sulfuric acid) or aqua fortis (nitric acid) that dissolved whatever silver was in the new coin (often filed off another coin) and forced it to the surface. Mineral acids like vitriol and aqua fortis were used broadly to dissolve metals in various manufacturing processes and make spirituous tinctures for stomach ailments, for example. Next, tartar was added to the silver and acid mixture to form a paste that could be rubbed into the coin’s surface to give it the color of a true peso or pistareen. Forms of tartar were commonly used to make the pastes and mashes that were rolled into pills using similar hand motions to the process of coloring a coin.

Any number of physical characteristics related to the finishing process could suggest that a coin was bogus, besides being found near a forge set up in a swamp, of course. The sheriff who uncovered Johnson’s cache noted that the coins appeared to be of correct size but were “wanting in Colour.” Perhaps Johnson’s coins showed some of the brass underneath the silver coating like the counterfeit pesos mentioned in the October 6, 1760, issue of the Boston Gazette that “if rubbed they will look brassy.” Other bogus coins appeared coppery or bluish rather than silvery white, the surface providing physical clues to their internal composition akin to the role of the skin in medical diagnosis as a screen showing what occurred underneath. Or maybe they still felt wet or smelled of the tartar paste like several counterfeits reported from New Hampshire in 1774 that emitted a chemical odor giving away their recent production. People bit their coins to determine if they seemed too soft (indicating lead content) or rang them against a hard surface to evaluate the metal’s resonance against how they thought silver should sound.

Without standardized testing, except in certain circumstances, identifying coins remained a form of artifice requiring experience and embodied knowledge of using the senses to evaluate a coin’s characteristics. The references evoked to determine genuine appearance, texture, smell, sound, and taste remained flexible and quite local, such as the example of the blue hue of the local slate used in grave markers. Combined with the usefulness of circulating coin, whether suspicious or not, this meant that counterfeiters often avoided punishment due to acquittal or escape, though many others across the Anglo-Atlantic world suffered physical injuries and death for their actions, including Daniel Johnson.

News about the coiners caught outside New Bern spread quickly along the Atlantic coast during the autumn of 1752. There remains no record of what defense they offered, though alleged coiners in London pointed to their trades in related fields, including as apothecaries and belt buckle makers, as reasons for possessing suspicious equipment or materials. Still others claimed the difficulties of telling good coin from bad as the reason for their working with coins to learn the distinctions. Whatever their assertions, North Carolina’s General Court sentenced William Jillet and Daniel Johnson to death for treason after one of their group, Patrick Moore, the tailor, turned evidence against them to avoid a similar fate. Despite several attempts to escape the jail in New Bern, which quite a few seem to have been able to do, Johnson and Jillet arrived at gallows erected outside New Bern in October 1752 where they both died by hanging according to accounts.

The case of Johnson, Moore, and Jillet at once reflects the patchwork enforcement of imperial monetary law in British North America and the conditions of scarcity underpinning it, but their failure underscores the complexity of the ideas and practices involved in making veracious coins at the time. Success involved craft skill, chemical knowledge, sufficient materials, a suitable place to work, and quite a bit of luck—not all of which the men ended up having. The remaining traces of their story help us reframe currency as a chemical art in addition to a political project and to think about it in terms of work at the margins of the law at a time when concerns about money occupied the minds of so many across the Atlantic world. By pairing the study of medicine and money, the labor of artisans, including those experienced in the vernacular chemical arts, can be made a bigger part of histories of knowledge and value production, especially in spaces or by people usually invisible in narratives of monetary development or scientific innovation. The embodied components of detection, likewise, encourage us to consider the role subjective qualities played in practices of enforcement that have been made to appear more objective or standardized over time.

 

Further Reading

Newspaper accounts of the New Bern coiners can be found in the Virginia Gazette, October 12, 1752, and the Boston Post-Boy, December 5, 1752, as well as in other regional newspapers from around that time. Kenneth Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957) and Philip Mossman, From Crime to Punishment (New York: American Numismatic Society, 2013) offer detailed background on the histories of counterfeiting and coining in British North America, while articles including Carl Wennerlind, “The Death Penalty as Monetary Policy: The Practice and Punishment of Monetary Crime, 1690-1830,” History of Political Economy 36 (no. 1, 2004) and Katherine Smoak, “The Weight of Necessity: Counterfeit Coins in the British Atlantic World, Circa 1760-1800,” William and Mary Quarterly 74 (no. 3, 2017) give nuanced analyses of the enforcement, hierarchies, and variability of money across the British Atlantic world. On chemistry in the Americas, see Annals of Science 77 (no. 2, 2020); and for the connection between alchemy and medicine, see William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). The move toward uniting the head and the hands in studies of science is exemplified by Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear, eds., The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the late Renaissance to Early Industrialization (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007). The New Dispensatory (London: 1753) offers examples of the practical overlap between making medicines and making coins, while the broader context of merchants of medicines in this period can be found in my book, Zachary Dorner, Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp has been the subject of renewed interested over the past decade, including Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York University Press, 2014) and Daniel O. Sayers, A Desolate Place for Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014).

 

This article originally appeared in August 2022.

 

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Zachary Dorner is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His work blending histories of health and commerce has appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of British Studies, and Boston Review; while his first book, Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020.

Cathcart kept a diary during his ordeal and, many years later, adapted the diary into a narrative entitled The Captives: Eleven Years a Prisoner in Algiers. This narrative is also remarkable. In addition to relaying the details of Cathcart’s experience and his transformation from young captive to influential leader, the narrative demonstrates the power of words to change and even to create reality, not only through the story it tells but also through the public personality it forms. For the James Cathcart evoked in its pages is at odds with other historical evidence, demonstrating Cathcart’s ability with and belief in the power of words.

The Mediterranean practice of seizing ships and holding the crews for ransom or hard labor was common. In fact, the practice dated back centuries, and went in multiple directions. In the heyday of galley ships, European nations captured North Africans to work the oars; and the Catholic Church engineered an entire enterprise of “redemption” for Catholics seized by the ships of Barbary. By the late eighteenth century, European nations signed treaties with the Barbary States to protect their shipping, and these treaties were renegotiated frequently. After the American Revolution, American ships were no longer protected by British treaties, and Cathcart and his shipmates quickly learned the consequences.

The Dey (or governor) of Algiers demanded ransom for the American sailors, but the U.S. was far too poor to meet the demands, so, despite occasional attempts to free the American sailors, Cathcart, his fellow crew members, and the crews of several additional ships, were held captive until 1796. During this time, the sailors endured neglect, forced labor, abuse, and the plague. Many died.

Despite this harrowing situation, Cathcart managed to find extraordinary success. He rose from the position of a menial slave to become the “Christian clerk” of the Dey, the highest position a captive could attain, in which position he was also allowed to operate “taverns” that were apparently quite profitable. Because of his position as clerk and a remarkable facility with languages, Cathcart was instrumental in assisting the envoy from the U.S. who finally negotiated the release of the remaining captives in 1796. At that point, Cathcart himself sailed with the articles of peace back to the U.S. for ratification. 

Cathcart later adapted the diary that he managed to keep during his experience in Algiers he into a narrative that his daughter subsequently saw into publication. The Captives is a complex, detailed narrative. It is part captivity narrative and part travel narrative, and also part immediate experience, shared through excerpts from his diary, and part reflective observations, filtered through the vantage points of time and later experiences in Barbary. While most Barbary captivity narratives are short and were hastily compiled when the captives returned to the U.S., Cathcart’s account is different. It was edited over several years and is longer and more well-developed than most. The text occasionally states that “Words are insufficient to describe my sensations” or that “Silence describes our feelings better than the greatest eloquence” (269), but Cathcart actually used many, many words in deliberate ways. And both the text and the events it relates demonstrate the power of words. 

Cathcart’s moves through the slave hierarchy to a position of relative comfort and prosperity were accomplished partly through his ability to navigate—or manipulate—complex relationships and partly through the power of literacy. He mentions early on in his account that he read Spanish and French, later adding Portuguese to the list, and he acquired proficiency in Turkish. These abilities, as well as his acquaintance with the Dey’s clerk, led to his move from physical labor to working as the clerk’s assistant and later the chief clerk. His linguistic ability then positioned him to serve as interpreter when Joseph Donaldson arrived from the U.S. to settle a treaty and secure the captives’ release. 

Cathcart’s depiction of the negotiations demonstrates his abilities both to translate between languages and to navigate relationships. While waiting for Donaldson to arrive, Cathcart asked the Dey for a written document to secure Donaldson’s safe passage. The Dey was reluctant to provide such a document for appearance’s sake, but Cathcart convinced him “that it need not be made out in Turkish, that [Cathcart] would write one in English which . . . [they] would keep . . . a profound secret from every person but those immediately concerned” (160-61). Cathcart found a way to ensure Donaldson’s safety while allowing the Dey to save face. During the negotiations, Cathcart’s role as interpreter gave him some power over the proceedings, and he occasionally took liberties to smooth the relationship between the two men. According to his telling of the event, the negotiations succeeded because of Cathcart’s understanding of Turkish and his understanding of the personalities involved.

In addition to his spoken words, Cathcart makes it clear that he considered his written words of concrete value to others. After depicting how he narrowly avoided being “converted” to Islam “accidentally,” Cathcart insists that his experience “ought to serve as a warning to all who read this journal and travel in those countries” (150). More immediately, Cathcart describes how he offered his “journal . . . and that part of [his] correspondence which would be useful” to Donaldson to assist him in his work (171). Cathcart, other captives, and some allies among the Europeans in Algiers told Donaldson everything that occurred in earlier attempts to free the American captives, but Cathcart insisted that his written account was necessary as well. 

Thus, in the experiences depicted, The Captives demonstrates its author’s belief in the power of words to accomplish things. Similarly, in its construction, the narrative reveals Cathcart’s belief in the power of words to create something.

Early Americans understood and were deeply invested in the power of words. The new nation was literally created by a written document, the Declaration of Independence being a “performative utterance” that didn’t just describe a desire but established a new reality. When coining the phrase “performative utterance,” J. L. Austin indicated that this kind of speech or writing, in contrast to description, is itself an action that does something. The treaty that Cathcart translated from Turkish into English and then delivered to the U.S. government, for instance, was a “performative utterance.” By declaring “From the date of the Present Treaty there shall subsist a firm and sincere Peace and Amity between the President and Citizens of the United States of North America and Hassan Bashaw Dey of Algiers his Divan and Subjects,” this document created the “Peace and Amity” between the two nations more than it described them. 

Cathcart’s narrative is, likewise, a written document that creates something: specifically, it creates a public James Leander Cathcart. As should be clear already, The Captives paints Cathcart as intelligent, even scholarly. It shows his command of many languages, shares his understanding of European-Barbary relations, and relates how he debated the tenets of Islam with a Muslim leader! Despite the title, Cathcart often comes across less as a captive and more as a world traveler, interested in learning about his unfamiliar environment and bringing his considerable knowledge to bear in making the best of unusual circumstances. 

In demonstrating how he made the best of things, the narrative also relates Cathcart’s generosity. According to The Captives, he used his success to help his fellow Americans: “I believe those who survived will do me the justice to acknowledge, that they never wanted a good meal while I had it in my power to give it to them; that they were attended in the hospital when sick, and that those who died were buried in a decent coffin at my expense” (136). Looking back, the author goes so far as to “thank God that He used me a captive under a despot who many times have risked my life for the enslaved and welfare of my country” (219).

In addition to being intelligent, philosophical, and philanthropic, the Cathcart in the narrative is deeply patriotic. He recounts how he declined an offer of ransom from a British acquaintance, which would have meant freedom but would have required leaving the other Americans and living in Britain. He claims he never “once doubted the liberality of the country whose cause I voluntarily espoused when at large, but am firmly resolved to wait with fortitude becoming a Christian and an American, until my captivity expires by an honorable redemption” (153). The patriotic and long-suffering Cathcart preferred imprisonment to treason. 

Finally, in this attachment to his country and the frequent comingling of the fates of the American sailors with the fate of the United States, Cathcart’s words turn his personal misfortune into a national tragedy and make Cathcart into a national hero. He refers to himself and the other captives as “the only victims of American independence” (145). While their capture did result from the new nation having no treaty with Algiers, Cathcart’s wording suggests the merchant sailors were prisoners of war, rather than victims of circumstance. In the story of leaving Algiers in 1796 to bring the articles of peace to the U.S., Cathcart claims, “From this day I date my freedom” (271), and the image of Cathcart commanding his own ship in the interests of his nation suggests he is freeing his country all over again.

All of this self-presentation in the narrative would not be especially noteworthy were it not for the different picture of Cathcart painted through other historical records; in the contrast, it becomes clear just how cleverly Cathcart crafted his image through this account. Other documents—such as letters written by or about Cathcart and descriptions of events by other witnesses—suggest Cathcart the man was argumentative, stubborn, manipulative, and pompous.

Joel Barlow, who took Donaldson’s place to implement the treaty with Algiers, wrote to the U.S. Secretary of State: “I am told that Mr. Cathcart has hopes of obtaining the consulate to this place. He has neither the talent nor the dignity of character necessary for the purpose.” It’s interesting that Barlow denounces his “talent” and “character,” while Cathcart’s narrative is at great pains to demonstrate both. Several years later, when Cathcart was again hoping to be named U.S. Consul General to Algiers, the Dey (not the same ruler for whom Cathcart worked as a captive) refused to accept his appointment, writing to President Thomas Jefferson that Cathcart’s “character does not suit us as we know wherever he has remained that he has created difficulties.” 

Cathcart’s claims to patriotism are also problematic. At one point, he sought freedom by writing to Member of Parliament William Wilberforce, claiming, on the basis of his Irish birth, that he wanted to return to Britain, his “long lamented Patria.” For Cathcart was born in Ireland, though he was raised in the British Colonies by an uncle. During the Revolutionary War, he served on a frigate captained by his uncle. In his narrative, Cathcart claims the frigate was seized and the sailors held on a prison ship in New York harbor, from which he and a friend escaped. This striking and adventurous story cannot be corroborated, and it’s at least equally possible that Cathcart claimed his British citizenship when he was seized and then served in the British Navy in order to escape being a prisoner of war. Naturally, neither of these events shows up in The Captives, in which any hint of split loyalty is hidden behind stirring claims to American patriotism.

Cathcart’s abilities to understand and manipulate people, his capabilities with words, and his belief in the power of words are all clear in his experiences in Algiers in the late eighteenth century. And those same beliefs and capabilities influenced the creation of The Captives: Eleven Years a Prisoner in Algiers and of the hero at its center. Though Cathcart’s contemporaries dismissed him as, at best, a mediocre diplomat, the use of words in his personal narrative suggests a political understanding we still see today—if I write or speak something, it just might make it “real.”

 

Note on Sources:

Cathcart’s narrative was brought into print by his daughter, J. B. Newkirk, in 1899, and is available in online archives. It is also available through reprint services; the reprint referenced here is the unedited 2017 printing by Andesite Press. Some of Cathcart’s letters and original journal were also consulted, by way of the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 64 (April-October 1954), pages 303-436, and additional letters were accessed through Naval Documents Related to the United States Wars with the Barbary Powers (1939-1944).

This essay was informed by the theoretical work related to the concept of “performative utterance” of J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977); and Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). It was also informed by the reading of sea narratives in Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). And finally this essay built upon several scholars’ treatments of the historical Cathcart: Lawrence A. Peskin, Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785-1816 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Richard B. Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); and Martha Elena Rojas, “‘Insults Unpunished’: Barbary Captives, American Slaves, and the Negotiation of Liberty,” Early American Studies 1 (Fall 2003): 159-86.

 

This article originally appeared in August, 2022.

 

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Julie R. Voss is Professor of English and coordinator of the English and American Studies Programs at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky, where she first encountered Barbary captives while researching her dissertation on Islam in early national American texts. In addition to this topic, she writes and speaks on women writers and on pedagogy.

She ushered me into her office, and I ticked off the clues I had assembled. Lanah was a seventeen-year-old from a modest New York family who worked as a seamstress. She had dressed to go for stroll with a “fine beau” on a mild late summer evening in 1793. Later that night, according to Lanah’s trial testimony, Bedlow dragged her into a brothel, “threw off her hat, tore the pins out of her gown, and placing her before him, drew it off her shoulders.” Then, she went on, “he tore the strings of her petticoats, and kicked them off with his feet.”

Other details about her dress appear in an editorial note: “In the course of the testimony, the gown of the Witness was produced, (a calico, made with drawn frill round the neck;) two or three strings were torn off—-a few places were torn in the gown, but mended, which the Prosecutrix did the next day, to walk in the streets decently.” Later in the trial, Mother Carey, in whose brothel the assault took place, testified that she “could not recollect the dress of the Prosecutrix, but the gown had a frill round the neck.” 

From another reference in the trial Report, we know that Lanah was wearing gloves that evening. And she was likely wearing a shawl, too. From a subsequent newspaper account, we know she had one.

Having laid out what I knew, I paused.

Baumgarten sighed.

1793, she explained, is difficult.

Five years earlier—or five years later—Lanah’s gown would be much easier to imagine. But 1793 fell in the midst of a major transition in women’s fashion. In the years after the American Revolution, women typically wore highly structured gowns with fitted bodices, funnel shaped torsos, low waistlines, and voluminous skirts. By the turn of the century, women—especially young women—were turning toward the high-waisted, loosely draped, neoclassical gowns familiar from Bridgerton or Jane Austen productions. Even the term “calico” came with caveats. In his Compendious Dictionary (1806), Noah Webster defined calico as a “printed” cotton cloth—but plain white was increasingly fashionable.

Still, Baumgarten went on, there are some things we can safely assume about how a seventeen-year-old sewing girl would have dressed for an evening stroll with a gentleman. And the mention of pins and multiple strings helped narrow down the possibilities.

Foundations

In the early 1790s, any gown would have been worn over several basic undergarments.

First, was a shift: a long, loose, plain, white linen or cotton garment rather like a modern night shirt. The chemise dress (or, in English, shift dress) made fashionable—and notorious—by the French queen Marie Antoinette, took its basic form and color from these humble undergarments. In a portrait from the mid-1790s, the young New Yorker Frances Harison (who was married to one of Henry Bedlow’s lawyers) wears a billowing white chemise dress ornamented with a drawn frill at the neckline and given shape by a ribbon tied under the bust. For rich women like Harison, a white shift dress represented a daring break with the conventions of the past—and the life of leisure that allowed them to wear such delicate, easily marred garments. 

For ordinary women, a traditional shift had far more practical purposes—among them to absorb sweat and other body fluid that might otherwise stain her gown. Thus, when Lanah was sleeping the night after the assault—and her cousin pulled up her skirts to examine her “linens”—it would have been her shift that was stained with blood.

Over the shift, a woman wore garments designed to support the gown, shape her body, and give the finished outfit the desired silhouette. That was one of the primary purposes of the petticoats women tied around their waists with “strings”—typically sturdy cloth tabs or tape. Multiple petticoats were often worn to support a gown’s voluminous skirts. To this end, a woman might also strap on a pair of pillow-like bum rolls to pouf her skirts out even further in the rear and create a distinct cleft. 

Around her torso, a woman wore stays—a sturdy corset reinforced with baleen or wood that, when laced tight, created a smooth cone shape from her waist to her breasts.

Over this foundation came the gown—which was typically tailored (with high armholes and a tight waist) in such a way that it had to be partially dismantled to get it on and off.

The bodice usually opened down the front. And because of the support provided by the stays, it could be both closely fitted around the torso and also held in place with nothing more than straight pins. Sometimes other fasteners—and sometimes drawstrings—were used to fit the bodice around the neckline. In any case, necklines were generally cut low; the exposed décolletage was covered with a kerchief or fichu, often a fine white cloth tucked into the bodice.

The gown’s skirts were generally sewn to the bodice around the waist at the back and sides and secured in front with strings. In 1793, this was typically done in one of two basic ways. 

An “open” gown—or a “round” gown?

Baumgarten reached for a pencil and in a series of swift, smooth strokes sketched out one option: an open gown or robe a la anglaise. A few years before 1793, she said, this would have been the obvious choice.

Open gowns echoed the traditional look for women’s gowns: the skirts wrapped around the back and sides but were open at the front to reveal a coordinating petticoat. The gown could thus be slipped off the shoulders like a bathrobe once the pins securing the bodice were pulled out and the strings securing the skirts were untied. 

Reaching for another Post-it, Baumgarten explained that the main alternative in 1793 would have been a “round gown.”

This style of dress was called “round” because the skirt wrapped all the way around the body and was stitched closed with vertical seams, entirely covering the petticoats underneath. The skirt was generally constructed with a drop panel in front, secured at the waist with strings. This was necessary to get the whole thing on or off because the gown’s waist was typically fitted so closely around a woman’s waist that it couldn’t just be pulled down over her hips. To get a round gown off, you released the bodice and slipped it over your shoulders, untied the drop panel, and stepped out of the skirts. 

This, Baumgarten said, was the more likely option in 1793—especially for a young seamstress who, presumably, had a sense of changing fashions. Cotton calico was both less expensive than silk and more durable. When it got dirty, cotton could be laundered––especially if it were printed. A working woman needed a gown that could withstand the routines of her daily life and not show every stain and speck of dirt.

Laura Johnson

A few years later, when the time came to find a surviving gown from Lanah Sawyer’s day to use as an illustration in The Sewing Girl’s Tale, I knew what I wanted: a round gown made of printed cotton. To examine a particularly compelling example, I made an appointment at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware.

On a crisp September day, textile curator Laura Johnson ushered me through a warren of offices, work rooms, and galleries into a textile storage area lined with cabinets, shelves, and drawers. On a big table, in a big box, was the gown.

It was, Johnson observed, a late eighteenth-century round gown fastened, like Lanah’s gown, with a combination of straight pins and drawstring. The fitted bodice pinned together down the front. The voluminous skirts featured a drop panel at the waist secured by a drawstring and partly covered up by the points of the bodice.

The gown had likely been made around 1785, Johnson noted, but there were signs that it had been refashioned twice. First, probably around 1795, the bodice had been partially dismantled and the skirts reattached to give the gown a newly fashionable high-waisted silhouette. Then, around 1900, it had been hastily, indeed somewhat crudely, returned to its original appearance—probably for a woman looking for a “colonial” costume. That’s probably when the gown acquired the sweat stains apparent under the armholes, Johnson observed. Whoever had been playing dress-up hadn’t worn the kind of undergarments that had protected the gown in its early days. 

The drawstring holding up the skirt’s drop front was a modern replacement, she noted; the original would have been a length of sturdy tape.

These strings, Johnson pointed out, represented the puzzle of Lanah’s gown. A round gown could be constructed with a single drawstring at the waist; but, according to the trial report “two or three strings” had been ripped out. Perhaps there were additional strings at the neckline. Or, perhaps Lanah was actually wearing a robe a la anglaise—which might well have had two separate strings at the waist.

Repair

Mention of the gown’s torn-out strings brought the conversation to the various accessories Lanah Sawyer probably took with her for that walk on the Battery. The gloves. The hat. The shawl she likely wore. And, most significantly, her sewing case. 

The fact that Lanah repaired her damaged gown the next morning indicates that she was carrying some kind of sewing kit with basic tools, including a needle and thread. Perhaps she carried it in a reticule hanging from her wrist or in a pocket under her skirts.

Pulling open a drawer, Johnson showed me half a dozen sewing cases from the period—long narrow rolls fastened with strings, many of them made by carefully piecing together scraps of cotton. They are both signs of thrift and of the pride women took in their needlework. 

 

The story the gown told

Finally, I asked Johnson about the two most surprising things Linda Baumgarten had told me. Neither had much to do with what Lanah’s outfit looked like. But both cast disturbing new light on the nature of Henry Bedlow’s assault.

First, Baumgarten had told me that Bedlow didn’t need to remove Lanah’s gown in order to rape her. In that period, Baumgarten explained, almost nobody wore drawers. Beneath her gown, Lanah would have been wearing petticoats and stays over a long, plain night shirt-like shift. 

Bedlow could have simply pulled up the skirts of her gown and her petticoats. The fact that he didn’t—and this aspect of Lanah’s testimony was not disputed—indicates that his sexual aim involved removing her clothing, seeing her naked, making her feel exposed. Perhaps he felt this would add to his sense of possession, increase her sense of vulnerability, or simply make it harder for her to escape. In any case, it was not about her outfit; it was about his emotional needs and desires.

Second, Baumgarten went on, the fact that the gown was damaged—the fabric torn in places and more than one “string” ripped loose—indicates that Bedlow’s assault had been forceful and that Lanah resisted physically.

For a young woman like Lanah Sawyer, clothing was expensive and labor-intensive. She probably didn’t own more than a few dresses—which she may very well have bought used or received as hand-me-downs and remade to fit her form and suit the current fashions. Lanah had likely worn her best gown that evening: a garment not only too costly for her to damage casually but also, quite possibly, an object of pride—a demonstration of her skill with a needle and her eye for fashion.

The prosecutor had been right, Baumgarten concluded. The damaged gown was strong evidence of a sexual assault.

It remains a haunting image. It has returned to me many times over the years as I’ve worked on Lanah Sawyer’s story: her calico gown with the frill about its neckline, hanging limp and disembodied as it was held up in court, its usually private interior exposed for the inspection of the jurors, so that they could look, under carefully stitched repairs, for evidence of violence and damage.

I asked Laura Johnson if she agreed with Baumgarten’s analysis. Actually, I asked that question every time I spoke with an expert on eighteenth-century clothing and needlework. And they all responded the same way.

Yes, Johnson said, all of that is true.

In fact, that’s exactly why the gown was relevant to the trial: it showed that Lanah had endured, and resisted, a violent assault that met even the unreasonable legal standards for rape proposed by the defendant’s attorneys.

But that didn’t mean that the all-male jury—who took only fifteen minutes to return a verdict of not guilty—actually had ears to hear the story the ripped, torn, and imperfectly repaired dress had to tell.

Further reading

For more on Lanah Sawyer, see John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2022).  Quotations in this essay are from William Wyche’s Report of the Trial of Henry Bedlow (New York: n.p., 1793), the first published report of an American rape trial; the two surviving copies are at the American Antiquarian Society and the New-York Historical Society; a modern edition is available at www.johnwoodsweet.com. On sexual assault in Early America, a good place to start is Sharon Block, “Bringing Rapes to Court,” Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life (April 2003), http://commonplace.online/article/bringing-rapes-to-court/. See also, Marybeth Hamilton Arnold, “‘The Life of a Citizen in the Hands of a Woman’: Sexual Assault in New York City, 1790-1820,” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989, 35-56); Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).

The most authoritative work on eighteenth-century American clothing is Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (New Haven: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in association with Yale University Press, 2002). A terrific resource on changing fashions and the practical construction of garments is Lauren Stowell and Abby Cox, The American Dutchess Guide to 18th Century Dressmaking: How to Hand Sew Georgian Gowns and Wear Them with Style (Salem, Mass.: Page Street Publishing Co., 2017). On sewing as work, see Marla Miller, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006) and Susan Burrows Swan, Plain & Fancy: American Women and Their Needlework, 1700-1850 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1977). Eye-opening analyses of eighteenth-century clothing include Kimberly Alexander, Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Mary C. Beaudry, Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); and Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

 

This article originally appeared in July, 2022.

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John Wood Sweet is a professor of Early American history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the former director of UNC’s interdisciplinary Program in Sexuality Studies. His books include Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) and The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2022).

Only it wasn’t. While the apparatus of the book declared it to be an edited historical document, it was actually an elaborate ruse that served a particular purpose—to bolster the character of a man Tom McEnery intended to be the historical mascot for a revitalized San Jose. Fallon’s was an American story, inspiring in much the same way that the Broadway smash hit Hamilton is inspiring: an immigrant makes good. Fallon emigrated from Ireland as a child. Embracing his new nationality, he Americanized his name from O’Fallon to Fallon. He traveled west, worked as a fur trader, joined John C. Fremont’s second expedition, arrived in California just in time to raise the American flag over the Juzgado in San Jose, befriended leading Latino citizens and business leaders, and married and raised a family with Carmel Castro Lodge, daughter of a prominent Californio landowner. To McEnery, Fallon appeared to be the perfect unifying symbol for the multicultural city of San Jose. Under his direction, Fallon’s historical monuments in San Jose would grow to include the restored mansion, a proposed educational curriculum, and a heroic-sized bronze sculpture of Fallon on horseback, carrying the American flag. (Figure 2 side)

But not everyone shared McEnery’s conviction that Fallon was an apt mascot for the town. Between 1987 and 2022, controversy over Thomas Fallon roiled San Jose repeatedly, twice leading the city council to banish the statue to storage. McEnery’s concocted journal, based on historical research and meant to flesh out the story of Fallon, helped spark this controversy, providing a modern fable about the uses—and abuses—of history.

McEnery pulled his readers into the deception from the book’s cover onward.  Beneath the title “The Journal of Captain Thomas Fallon” was the attribution “edited by Thomas McEnery.” In the preface, the “editor” detailed the discovery of the manuscript, commented on the condition of its pages (smudges obscured the left edge of the manuscript, and some entries were “damaged” by water and time), and recounted McEnery’s growing realization of the “immense value of the document I held in my now dusty hands.” The preface also laid out McEnery’s editorial choices (“I have not taken any liberty, nor would I desire to, with the actual text”), and the authoritative “Ed.” preceded his emendations and speculations throughout the book.

Few casual readers would guess that the journal was an invention, but there were hints throughout, some subtle and some playfully overt. In McEnery’s preface, he noted the tedium of plowing through the manuscript: “Boredom quickly turned to skepticism, and for a moment the idea of a ruse casually crossed my mind.” Later, McEnery (as Fallon) bemoaned the death of his mother-in-law’s third husband, writing an entry tantalizingly similar to a line from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: “To lose one husband is a misfortune. To lose two a tragedy. But to lose three seems to be a case of pure carelessness.” Then, with tongue firmly in cheek, McEnery (as editor) noted the fact that Oscar Wilde was touring the Bay Area at the very time Fallon wrote the journal entry and was likely the “British lad” of a “ready wit and a good knowledge of Dublin” who Fallon mentioned chatting with in his next entry. Thus, McEnery claimed that the source of the famous line Wilde would pen a decade later was Thomas Fallon himself. The broadest hint McEnery left was in the book’s Afterword, page 106 of the 112-page publication, where he wrote, “All of the major events both local and national actually happened just as this Journal has recorded it. Perhaps there might be a question as to whether the lost leather-bound Journal actually fell from its hidden compartment early in the summer of 1978. This is quite normal. And to those skeptics I can only say that if it did not—it certainly should have.” 

By and large, McEnery’s ruse seems to have been successful. Research and public libraries responded to the book’s 1978 publication with immediate orders, shelving it beside other primary sources of early Californiana, even securing it in their Special Collections. No one seemed to have suspected it was not genuine until 1987. In that year, according to one newspaper report, an opponent of the plan to erect a statue of Fallon challenged McEnery to produce the manuscript. Soon afterward, a second edition of California Cavalier was published with “by Thomas McEnery” on the cover and title page rather than “Edited by Thomas McEnery.” This edition also included a small text box on page 106 stating, “Although as firmly based on an exploration of Thomas Fallon’s life and personal letters as possible, this Journal is a work of fiction.” Even then the ruse showed remarkable staying power. According to WorldCat, only twelve libraries purchased the second edition published by the San Jose Historical Museum Association. The remaining fifty-eight libraries owning the book had the first edition, which lacked the acknowledgement. As late as 2022, despite the fact that WorldCat cataloged the book as fiction, many research institutions, including the Huntington Library, Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley, continued to list it as a historical document on their own library websites. It is hard to keep a good forgery down.

It is no surprise, then, that some of my own relatives were taken in. In 2002, my cousins found the first edition of the published journal in their local library. Thomas Fallon was a name they recognized. He was the man who killed Baptiste Exervier, our fourth-great grandfather. The murder was no secret to anyone who knew anything about Fallon. Three witnesses—Rufus Sage, John C. Fremont, and Theodore Talbot—mentioned it in their journals, and it was described in my third-great-grandmother’s obituary. But I’d never heard of a Thomas Fallon diary before. My relatives made copies of the first few pages of the journal and gave them to my grandmother, who showed them to me. The journal’s very first entry described the murder:

4th July 1843  Fort Lancaster

Xervier was nearly turned completely around by the bullet as it tore into his back. He was lifted off the ground and crashed into a chair smashing it into several pieces. As he lay flat staring up at me I felt a strange exhilaration—I was breathing heavily and my heart pounded against my chest. I knew it was right to kill him and I had killed before but never at so close a range. The shirt he wore was steaming with powder burns.

As I read the pages, reason and emotion played tug-of-war in my mind. Fallon’s words were so self-consciously literary, even stagey, that I immediately questioned whether the journal was a legitimate historical document. At the same time, I was horrified by the account, which not only described the killing but justified it. Fallon wrote, “It is well known to all the character of Xervier and the size of the welts on the Shoshoni woman’s back attest to it. I would do it again.”

The Shoshone woman, Exervier’s wife, was my fourth-great grandmother, Sally Exervier Ward.

Distance is an important tool in a historian’s study of the past. We are trained to remember that our worldview, preconceptions, and values are not shared by our subjects, who are distant from us in time, geographic space, and culture. But distance is also a barrier to a historian’s study. While we strive to approach our discipline objectively—to maintain distance—we also want to bridge the gap between ourselves and the past. We want to understand it, to feel it, and distance makes that empathy difficult. Being biologically, culturally, or sympathetically connected to people we study in the past intensifies the desire to bridge the distance, but that sense of connection—of identification—can threaten objectivity. I am a historian; I strive to be objective, but it is not surprising that my first reading of the entries in Fallon’s journal hit me like a slug in the gut. 

Even now, knowing that the journal is a fake, I feel sick when I read “the size of the welts on the Shoshoni woman’s back.” I suspect that the reason for my visceral reaction to the fictional beating is that it is plausible. A generation of scholarship, including Karen Anderson’s evocatively titled Chain Her By One Foot, made it clear that many Native women suffered abuse at the hands of their Euro-American husbands. Indeed, that history is what made McEnery’s literary choice believable. It created a possible past painful for me to contemplate because of my family connection to Sally and to Exervier.

I never found any corroboration of that fictional claim. Over the years, I tried several times to reach Tom McEnery through email, with no success. Finally, in 2016, I located a business address for him and sent an old-fashioned letter in an envelope asking if I could interview him about his work on Fallon. A week or so later a message appeared on my answering machine: “Tom McEnery in San Jose, you know, Capt. Fallon’s last disciple out here in the Far West.” He invited me to call and left a phone number.

Among a number of questions I asked McEnery when I called him back was the one that had been gnawing at me for years: Had he uncovered any evidence that Baptiste Exervier abused his Shoshone wife?

No, he replied. That was just literary license. In what sounded like a rueful voice, McEnery said he never imagined he would be speaking to a descendant of Exervier.

For Tom McEnery, the choice to depict Exervier as abusive was not about Exervier, but about Fallon, a man for whom he had developed a self-confessed “obsession.” Both men shared Irish heritage, both were charismatic mayors of San Jose, and both had a strong commitment to civic improvement. It didn’t make sense to McEnery that such a man would kill someone in cold blood.

All of us construct narratives, whether we are writing history or fiction. As historians we select the details that help us make sense of the past. McEnery was convinced, from his reading of history and of letters provided by Fallon’s grandson, that Fallon was an honorable man. The trope of the abused fur trade wife offered a compelling explanation for the violence that, not coincidentally, placed Thomas Fallon in a heroic light. He had killed Exervier to protect a Native American woman. Given the prevalence of the abused Native wife trope, this certainly could be true, and it was decidedly more heroic than the explanation fur trapper Rufus Sage gave, that Fallon had shot Exervier “in a drunken frolic on the 4th [of July].” 

The journal placed Fallon’s killing of Exervier, and his justification of the deed, front and center. It appeared in the first entry and the final one (“Did I kill Xervier and start this journal for this moment?”). In McEnery’s hands the murder in defense of Exervier’s wife operated as a pivot point in Fallon’s life, turning him from the casual violence of the fur trade to his purposeful new life in California. Fallon’s entries thereafter display a sense of compassion and fair play, especially toward oppressed people. Passing Pike’s Peak on his westward journey, Fallon wrote, “Indians have used this land as a crossing for years and years—the center of the world, they call it, Crow, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Sioux and others. Perhaps we should have left it so.” When a white boy’s head was shaved as punishment for cutting off the tail of a horse, Fallon opined, “I find this judgement more to my liking than the twelve lashes . . . laid on the Mexican last week for fighting. Few friends are made with a whip.” And when he witnessed protests against Chinese laborers in San Jose, Fallon lamented, “out with the Chinese! There are any number of people I would rather have out than those poor souls.” Fallon was admirably—even anachronistically—tolerant.

He was also deeply respectful of the Californios who lost power when he raised the American flag over the Juzgado. Repeatedly, the journal references his relationship with the Californio leader whose humble adobe house sat across from Fallon’s Italianate mansion: “Don Luis Peralta, my friend.” At one point, Fallon recorded a conversation with Peralta that reads like a patriarchal transfer of birthright from the Californios to the Americans: “Don Luis took me aside and in a moment of confidence told me not to put my faith in gold but in the land. Of his sons and his Rancho San Antonio he expresses great fears. Keep the land, Don Tomas . . . keep it always.” Here Peralta honors Fallon (“Don Tomas”) as a more wise and worthy steward of the land than his own sons. McEnery included these reflections as examples of Fallon’s “true” character: “It is by what one creates and what one writes that we best know them.” The journal would allow readers “to view him not as history or contemporary prejudices would have us do, but as he really was.”

Notwithstanding the sympathetic depiction in the journal, both the stubborn facts of Fallon’s personal story and a growing demand for the untold stories of early California became major obstacles for Tom McEnery’s project to make Fallon a unifying symbol for San Jose. By the time McEnery became mayor in 1983, he had already participated in the restoration of Thomas Fallon’s and Luis Peralta’s houses. McEnery’s next plan was to restore the plaza at the heart of San Jose, and its centerpiece was to be a bronze statue of Thomas Fallon on a horse, carrying the American flag that he had raised over the Juzgado. The statue was commissioned in 1987 and was scheduled to be erected in 1990 in the central plaza of the city. It was to be the first in a series of three statues celebrating San Jose’s multicultural history, one of Thomas Fallon, the next of Luis Peralta, and the last of Saint Joseph, the city’s namesake. McEnery envisioned an educational curriculum centered on these figures that would teach San Jose students about their local history.

If McEnery had chosen Peralta as the first subject of his sculptural troika, things might have turned out differently. When news broke that the $711,000-dollar statue of Fallon was completed and on its way from an Italian foundry to San Jose, all hell broke loose. Latinx residents of the city, many of them descendants of the Californios or more recent immigrants from Mexico, saw the Fallon statue as an insult, deeply disrespectful to the cultural heritage of half of the city’s population. In response to the plan, they packed City Council meetings with protesters, picketed the proposed site of the statue, and lined up support for blocking the statue from teachers’ associations, labor organizations, and the Pueblo Unido de San Jose. Protesters’ objections to the statue were both general—the statue celebrated an “immoral war of conquest” that privileged a “white supremacist” narrative—and specific—Thomas Fallon was peculiarly undeserving of immortalization in bronze.

It hadn’t taken much research for opponents of the statue to uncover the unsavory aspects of Fallon’s character that McEnery had tried to explain away in the journal. Not only had Fallon shot my grandfather Exervier in the back, but he had cheated on and abused his own wife, resulting in divorce proceedings reported in lurid detail in the newspapers. These stories included accusations of habitual drunkenness, deceitful land dealings, and verbal and physical abuse.

It is hard to miss the irony of the last charge: Fallon had been abusive to his own wife, a woman of color. That was precisely what the fictional Fallon of the journal accused Exervier of doing. Fallon’s murder of the fur trader—“I would do it again”—was presented in the journal as an honorable act in defense of an Indigenous woman. By placing that rescue on the front page of the journal, McEnery anticipated and rebutted the charge that Fallon himself was abusive to women of color.

McEnery and San Jose historian Clyde Arbuckle did their best to counter the charges against Fallon. Arbuckle downplayed the reports of Fallon’s abusive behavior, fraudulent land dealings, and drunkenness, claiming that nineteenth-century newspaper reports had been “magnified.” McEnery insisted that his “one objective regarding Fallon and the other planned commemorative statues was to achieve an accurate portrayal of past history.” How, he asked, could Fallon represent oppressive white conquerors when he didn’t even arrive in San Jose until after Mexican troops withdrew from the city? McEnery also emphasized Fallon’s strong friendships with Luis Peralta and other Californios, declaring that “opposition to the statue . . . was fomented by opportunists who ignored the fact that Fallon was a positive symbol of the joining of the American and Californio communities.”

For opponents, “accuracy” was not the point. Once Fallon had been enshrined in bronze, he stood for all settler colonialists and was accountable for their acts of dispossession, violence, and oppression.

Contentious council meetings, protests, and letters to the editor continued for months, forcing City Hall to delay erecting the statue. In a conciliatory move, Mayor McEnery appointed a Historic Art Advisory Council to come up with a plan of action. The council decided that before the Fallon statue could be displayed, the city would commission and erect four other pieces of art that better reflected the city’s diversity. One by one over the next decade these works of art appeared throughout San Jose. During all that time, Fallon and his horse were moldering in an Oakland storage facility, at a cost exceeding $200,000.

In 1999, after the last of the four art-committee-planned sculptures was erected, modern San Jose’s first Latino mayor, Ron Gonzalez, decided to end Fallon’s exile. Removing the statue from storage, he placed it in an obscure pocket park in a run-down section of town. Picketers still appeared at the dedication, but it was a relatively tame affair. In acknowledgment of the controversy, the art council placed a plaque alongside the statue that briefly summarized the views of both supporters and opponents, concluding with the bland understatement: “This artwork is a reminder that a community’s historic events can be interpreted in many ways, depending upon one’s perspective.” Fallon’s statue was on display, but so were the four more diverse sculptures, providing a balance in artistic representations of the past that city leaders hoped would mollify protesters.

The approach worked for a time; the statue attracted neither protests nor much attention from 1999 to 2020. Then two developments reignited the controversy: the revitalization of the area around the statue, making it much more visible; and the nationwide reckoning with police brutality and white supremacy in the aftermath of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd. Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other groups with histories of oppression identified with the revitalized Black Lives Matter movement, and Fallon’s statue became a target once again. Every week protesters doused it with red paint symbolizing “the blood on Fallon’s hands during the Mexican American War,” spray painted words like “genocide” across it, or attempted to burn it. While most protests focused on the statue as “a deeply offensive example of systemic racism,” some of the more personal charges also resurfaced: Fallon was a murderer, a wife-beater, a land swindler, the very worst sort of white settler colonialist.

Costs for cleaning and protecting the statue piled up along with protests. By 2021, San Jose’s government had become much more representative of its diverse population; when Latina City Council members Maya Esparza and Sylvia Arenas joined those in the community calling for the statue’s removal, they met little opposition. After two traumatic years of isolation, political division, and reckoning with racism, city leaders wanted a more unifying message. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo wrote, “Since this is a public work of art, in a prominent, public place, we should ask ourselves whether it’s really worth tormenting our neighbors with a daily reminder of an image that they view as oppressive.” In November of 2021, the City Council voted unanimously to remove the statue and return it to storage.

*          *          *

The Fallon statue controversy revolved around competing ways of remembering the history of San Jose and clashing versions of Thomas Fallon’s life. The history of San Jose that Tom McEnery promoted was a “master narrative,” which, as Daniel Richter defines it, is a story that explains “who a people are, where they have been, and what they hope to be.” It is “a serious, essentially mythic business of defining group identity.” 

For McEnery, San Jose’s identity, and his own, was linked to the myth of the great American melting pot, in which diverse peoples came together to form something new and better. In his view, the historical events that supported this myth included a peaceful transfer of power from Mexican to American governments and cooperation between Californios and Americans afterward. Such a story laid a firm foundation for modern San Jose’s vibrant multicultural community.

Of course, that narrative, like all master narratives, was selective. Supporting details were chosen by people with the power to impose their version of history, leaving out details that would, if told, support different stories and different identities.

The selective process of historical mythmaking is universal. It is vividly illustrated in the Confederate monuments dotting the South, which represent white Southerners’ power to impose a master narrative—the “Lost Cause”—and to exclude other narratives, such as the suffering of enslaved people and their efforts to free themselves. The nation’s reckoning with the continuing violence against and untold stories of Black Americans is now shifting that master narrative. About a tenth of the more than 700 Confederate monuments in existence have recently been or are in the process of being taken down.

That same process of historical reckoning led to Fallon’s statue being removed. For descendants of Californios and more recent Latinx immigrants, the Fallon myth whitewashed the violence of the Mexican-American War and a century and a half of exclusion from political power. The majority of San Jose’s citizens wanted a different narrative, one that acknowledged that painful history and included Latinx stories. It is entirely appropriate that communities get to decide which aspects of history they will embrace at particular times and what their master narratives will be. 

But what about the real individual behind the heroic bronze? Let’s face it, had Fallon’s story not been put in service of a myth, no one but his descendants and the descendants of those he wronged would remember him. For such people—people like me—the accuracy of the story does matter. When the narrative clashes with the memories of family and community members, whether because of selection bias or outright invention, we owe it to them to listen and revise.

Tom McEnery seems to have had good intentions. His Fallon, had he existed, would have been an admirable figure to include in a multi-cultural curriculum. But McEnery’s characterization of Fallon collapsed under the weight of the personal and community stories that made it unbelievable, for good historical reasons. Triumphalist tales of white heroes on horseback deserve to be complicated, and there are few better ways to do it than telling the long-overlooked stories of people who lost their power, land, and lives. People like the Californios and Indigenous people of early California, and like my grandparents, Baptiste and Sally Exervier.

 

Further reading

The first version of the “journal” of Thomas Fallon was published in 1978: Thomas McEnery, editor, California Cavalier: The Journal of Captain Thomas Fallon (San Jose, CA: Inishfallen Enterprises, 1978). The second was published nine years later: Thomas McEnery, California Cavalier: The Journal of Captain Thomas Fallon (San Jose, CA: San Jose Historical Museum Association, 1987). The second version lacks a publication date, but it can be inferred from information on the book jacket, contemporary news accounts, and WorldCat.

Numerous articles on the Thomas Fallon statue controversy appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other news outlets in 1990, 1999, and 2020-2022. Thomas McEnery’s daughter Erin McEnery produced a documentary film about the controversy in 2004: “The Search for the Captain,” Impulse Films, San Jose, CA, 2004. Sam Liccardo, the current mayor of San Jose, published an overview and commentary on the controversy on his blog in 2021: Sam Liccardo, “Viewing Yesterday’s Symbols with Today’s Eyes,” Feb. 1, 2021.

On historical forgeries and the culture surrounding them, see Alea Henle, “Theodore Dwight and the Publication of Sarah Kemble Knight’s Journal: Establishing Historical Authenticity in the Early United States,” Early American Studies (Winter 2022): 152-84; and Mary Beth Norton, “Hetty Shepard, Dorothy Dudley, and Other Fictional Colonial Women I Have Come to Know Altogether Too Well,” Journal of Women’s History, 10 (Autumn 1998): 141-54.

On history, memory, and cultural identity, see Daniel K. Richter, “Whose Indian History?”  William and Mary Quarterly 50 (April 1992): 379-93; Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Carol Gluck, “Memory in Hypernationalist Times: The Comfort Women as Traveling Trope,” Global-e: A Global Studies Journal, 12 (May 2, 2019): 1; and Lisa Blee and Jean O’Brien, Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

On Indigenous women and their white fur trader husbands, see Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980); Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983 [1980]); Karen Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (New York: Routledge, 1991); Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); and Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).

Primary accounts of Thomas Fallon’s murder of Baptiste Exervier appear in Leroy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, eds., Rufus B. Sage: His Letters and Papers, 1836-1847, vol. 5 of The Far West and the Rockies Historical Series, 1820-1875 (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1956), 268; John Charles Fremont, Report of the exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the years 1843-‘44 (Readex Microprint, 1966), 120-21; and Charles H. Carey, ed., The Journals of Theodore Talbot, 1843 and 1849-52: With the Fremont Expedition of 1843 and with the First Military Company in Oregon Territory, 1849-52 (Portland, OR:  Metropolitan Press, 1931), 24.

 

This article originally appeared in July 2022.

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Jenny Hale Pulsipher is Professor of History at Brigham Young University. The author of Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest of Authority in Colonial New England (2005) and Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England (2018), she is currently working on a biography of her Shoshone foremothers, Sally Exervier Ward and Adelaide Exervier Brown.

This chest wound up playing a role in “The Afterlives of Objects,” a course I regularly teach about early American material culture and its ongoing meanings. Working with original items—furniture, clothing, personal adornments, cookware, the built environment, and much more—opens different windows onto social histories, including the lives, aspirations, and actions of people who may not have left behind many, or any, written documents in conventional archival formats. As generations of scholars and communities have attested, these items are not distant or isolated “artifacts,” or static entities suspended in the past. They are materials intimately woven into the experiences and emotions of real individuals and collectivities. 

The course, as I teach it, also consistently grapples with matters of power, ownership, stewardship, and knowledge production, prioritizing non-Eurocentric topics and methodologies. I have offered this course several times before coming to Williams College as a faculty member in history. In the Kwinitekw River Valley of western Massachusetts, my experiences at Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst made apparent how many interventions are happening across different institutions about “campus collections.” Almost every institution is now grappling with and needs to foundationally re-assess how to frame and handle belongings that have been amassed within college and university walls over the centuries, through channels ranging from voluntary donations to coercion and outright theft. 

Running this course entails special considerations around colleagues’ labor. It is logistically complex and time intensive for museum staff members to retrieve bulky items like furniture from a remote storage space, pack them in protective materials so they don’t become scuffed, dinged, or torn, and arrange their transport to the main campus museum. Then staff must situate them in a busy building so that students and faculty can view them. The items pulled for the “Object Lab” installation developed in conjunction with this course in spring 2020 required a high level of planning and coordination. The one furnishing present—a wooden chair with woven seat—was included partly because of its relative lightness and portability. Items’ very materiality helps shape what is visible and accessible. 

With these labor matters foremost in mind, in very early 2020 I decided my class should instead visit additional furniture pieces that are already more accessible outside the walls of WCMA. I learned that the chest at hand presently resides in the house of the college president.  Indeed, multiple early American furnishings are in this location rather than being neatly contained within art museum galleries or storage.  

The house is itself a material culture trace. Perched at the crest of a hill in a highly visible campus location, it dates to the early 1800s. It was built for Samuel Sloan, a white settler colonizer, general in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, and tavern owner. This Federal-style building features elaborate woodwork said to have been imported from Boston, making it an expression of aspirational genteel architecture in rural western Massachusetts. The college acquired the structure in the nineteenth century and transformed it into a formal residence for the president, and it has since been expanded and renovated. Having taken my seminar members on a walking tour of the local vicinity in a prior week, for which we read essays on counter-tours and other critical vantages on memory-in-place, we were inclined to go deeper into this site and its contents. We had also delved into documentary and visual records about the house and its surroundings in the Library’s Special Collections/Archives—such as picture postcards and photographs—which attest to its iconic presence in the local built environment. 

Can you invite yourself over to someone’s house? Under the aegis of “experiential learning,” certain doors do open. The college’s current president, Maud Mandel, is a historian and Jewish Studies scholar by profession who is interested in memory, and she was receptive to the prospect of a class visit. Even with a generous invitation to bring my class over, entering this space involved other kinds of social maneuvering. While a campus art museum at a liberal arts college is expressly understood to be a learning space open to inquiry, the president’s house is, well, a private residence. It’s a place of retreat and respite for a family, set apart from the fishbowl of campus offices and outdoor greens. 

Yet it does have a semi-public face as a place that hosts events for members of the campus community and visitors. Adding to these complexities, such houses can be viewed by campus members and town residents as architectural embodiments of institutional authority and privilege. For these reasons—as at many colleges and universities—presidential dwellings and other key campus structures (like the administration building) have been focal sites for student-led demonstrations, protest, and activism. Campus communities frequently engage with matters of power, equity, and justice through the highly articulated, symbolically rich terrain of the wider physical campus itself. When tangible belongings like a chest of drawers are situated inside these charged spaces, they’re inevitably interwoven with these larger spatial dynamics.

Being inside this house thus created a specific environment for critically approaching early American material culture. Our visit in early March 2020 (note the date) gravitated around a constellation of furnishings: several late eighteenth or early nineteenth-century chests and tables, a tall case clock, a multi-sectioned desk. The group’s energy centered not on a rarified colonial connoisseurship conversation, but on using these items to probe wide-ranging social and cultural experiences. 

Sitting around them in a semicircle, students examined them as entry points into a dialogue about artisan labor, natural resources, wealth and property accumulation, and the politics of collecting. Who produced a chest like this? Were the people who used their skills and hands to harvest its materials and fashion it free, enslaved, indentured, or otherwise in bondage? African American people in Portsmouth, inhabiting a wide spectrum of bondage and liberation, were integral to that town’s rise in the eighteenth century, as Valerie Cunningham and other collaborators on the community-led Black Heritage Trail public history project have powerfully demonstrated. Their lives and labors must be accounted for in discussing material production in this time and place. Where was the wood coming from, considering contexts of colonialist resource extraction from Indigenous homelands, and the violence of Atlantic World enslavement of African people and commodity trading? Portsmouth is located in the homelands of Pennacook-Abenaki communities, where intricate human-land relations were deeply disrupted by colonization starting in the seventeenth century, including Euro-colonial logging of white pines, birches, and other trees. The harvesting of mahogany, prized by furniture makers for its hardness and tight grain, occurred through the extreme suffering and exhaustion of enslaved Afro-Caribbean woodcutters and processors—men, women, children. Their knowledge and forced toil is not credited or visibly acknowledged in the finished chest, yet they constitute the essential context for its very existence.

Who purchased and owned such an item, and what did they intend its display to communicate in their houses? What do its tiny keyholes indicate about evolving concepts of privacy and security? How may gendered processes of colonial familial inheritance and property ownership have shaped the intergenerational transits of this chest? Why did this item eventually wend its way from the Piscataqua River region of the Atlantic seacoast to the comparative rurality of western Massachusetts? Comparisons with similar furnishings from the region’s workshops (some of which are sold privately at antiques auctions today or featured on the PBS Antiques Roadshow program) may provide one avenue for deepening our contexts for this particular piece and the capitalist marketplaces in which it exists. In addition, we might reflect on how individuals’ own positions and interests shape the salience of such items. I know that this chest caught my attention partly because I grew up in New Hampshire, and recognize that the northern parts of “New England” have been comparatively less well represented in many historical accountings and collections than the southern reaches.

Our close-looking session brought in many voices and perspectives on material study. Special Collections/Archives staff members shared how manuscripts and printed records held in those sites provide additional information about histories of accessioning and deaccessioning. The Charles M. Davenport Collection of furniture at the college, for example, coalesced in 1943 from the commitments that collector had to a particular vision of early America, closely focused on Anglo-American New England. The Davenport Collection illuminates how alumni networks and bequests have fed into campus collections. Davenport graduated in the class of 1901 and was an avid supporter of as well as donor to the growing college art museum. Head of Special Collections Lisa Conathan and Archivist Sylvia Brown underscored the importance of holistically researching across several types of repositories, rather than being limited by oftentimes artificially imposed boundaries of material types.

Gathering in this space also provided a vivid look at how items’ meanings shift depending on the social and cultural settings where they are situated. This private home is not an art museum, even though certain of the furnishings here inhabit a kind of liminal space of affiliation with WCMA. It’s not a house museum, either—there hasn’t been a curatorial effort to recreate a certain moment in time. There are artworks on the walls that have been selected for display for the family currently in residence, not unlike U.S. Presidents’ assembling of pieces in the White House that signify many personal, public, and political meanings. But overall, there are not pre-formulated interpretive labels to tell you what the items in it are, or to suggest how to think about them. Its contents are not sequestered in glass cases with security alarms. They are not organized chronologically, thematically, by maker or consumer, or with a specific scholarly argument in mind. It’s a living space shaped by the aesthetic tastes and identities of its twenty-first-century inhabitants, as well as the happenstance of which furnishings are available for loan. 

Inside this active home-space, residents and staff members may develop any number of relationships with the objects that populate its rooms. They may store picture frames, or flowerpots, or computer gear on the surfaces. Lauren Barenski, a presidential office staff member who oversees events at the house, described to us her regular winding of the tall clocks. This testified to a nuanced form of care-work and technical knowledge required to maintain the functionality of these historic items. Steve Simon, presidential spouse, related to us how housecats and their claws may pose challenges to the material integrity of, say, sofa upholstery. (A solution: scratching posts.) These commentaries cast the space of an art museum, with its specialized hands-off protocols and climate-controlled conditions, in a different light and helped our group consider the wider range of settings in which objects may be activated.

This up-close encounter with early American furnishings in situ also prompted a complex discussion about presence and absence. What kinds of material items are amassed, stewarded, and prominently featured in a private, wealthy institution like this? What narratives and values do they propound? What of the enormous world of objects or belongings is not represented—discarded, dismissed, built over, deemed irrelevant, relegated to storage? “Campus collections” are by their nature uneasy sites of inquiry, never innocent or neutral. As Craig Steven Wilder exposed in his pathbreaking Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (2013), North American colleges and universities have arisen through historic and ongoing processes of accumulation that are inextricably intertwined with settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Williams College, founded in 1793, is no exception. Its campus collections reflect these realities in countless ways, as multiple colleagues and students have explored over the years. Some of these inquiries have arisen through academic endeavors (ranging from American Studies to Art to History and many additional fields), while others have been propelled by activism, organizing, curatorial and creative interventions, community projects, and other forms of engagement with the past.

To put it otherwise, we cannot naturalize or uncritically center the extant assemblage of materials. We must historicize and contextualize why certain belongings, stories, and memories are visible, and others much less so. This particular institution has begun to reckon with its location in the historic, ongoing, and future homelands of the sovereign Stockbridge-Munsee Community, and to formally partner with this Native nation, which has long engaged in caretaking and stewardship of its cherished eastern homelands, as well as restoration of ancestors and belongings through repatriation. Students, faculty, and staff are also beginning to account for the colonizing Williams family as dispossessors of this nation and enslavers of African-American people, and with the legacies of college-affiliated Christian missionaries in Hawaiʻi and other Indigenous places. Such multi-faceted “memory work” has direct bearing on how a campus and communities well beyond it frame conversations and actions around “collections.” Moreover, these dialogues are never only or even primarily about the past in itself, but also about how pathways forward can and ought to be different. WCMA, for instance, has begun to formulate transformative acquisition priorities that center BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists, among others, planting seeds of change for the future form of the collection. The wooden chest thus can be a springboard for broader critical dialogues about how collections form and transform, and are rendered legible and valuable.

Having this in-person encounter with the ongoing transits of early American furnishings brought tremendous momentum to our seminar. . . and then everything shut down as the severity of COVID became evident. All classes went virtual with barely a moment’s notice, as so many educators experienced across North America and globally. From a pedagogical perspective I despaired. For a subject and methodology so intimately grounded in the tangible, the in-person, and the experiential, how could we migrate online? Is there anything in my teaching portfolio worse suited to Zoom than material culture, when all has seemingly become immaterial?

But we adapted. Through the remainder of spring 2020, and across additional classes in the following academic years, we explored virtual alternatives. Students and colleagues deserve enormous credit for improvising and inventing as we went, while I investigated alternate modes of engagement. Along the way we found that the digital domain presented unexpected opportunities for re-assessing materiality that were incisive and thought-provoking. I have no desire to transmute a horrific global crisis and intersecting social inequities into a smoothed-out lesson about COVID-era pedagogy. These impacts are devastating, ongoing, and very unequally experienced, as many have attested to with eloquence and urgency. Some forms of associated loss and social rupture remain unspeakable. With that always in mind, this experience has caused me to reflect on what we have been processing and reassessing, and what we may carry forward.

Consider the piggins. The college art museum has two of these wooden vessels in its collection (one plain, one decorated), both attributed to the late seventeenth century (whether accurately or not). They are typically considered utilitarian liquid or dry-goods storage objects—not dissimilar from firkins, wooden tankards, and other containers for household use—rather than high-art pieces, and they do not regularly come out on view inside the galleries. Two museum specialists invited me to work with them to make digital three-dimensional scans of selected objects available to students. Drawing upon her longstanding expertise in braiding together technology and the arts, Beth Fischer, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, used photogrammetry to digitally render several items, including one of the piggins, an eighteenth-century coffee grinder, and others. She then made them accessible in SketchFab, a 3D modeling platform that enables the renderings to be published online and shared. 

Under the lighting of the scanner, the piggin revealed a lively floral design that is harder to see in person. During our group Zoom sessions for the seminar, Elizabeth Gallerani, Curator of Mellon Academic Programs, adroitly walked us through exercises for close looking and interacting with this digital object. We were able to zoom in to see its hinge mechanism more clearly, and rotate it for scrutiny from multiple angles. Both actions would have been difficult as a group gathered around a table, even with a magnifying glass. 

The critical insights presented through this virtual transition were surprising. Beth explained how the photogrammetry process operates, affording insights into just how many decisions and subjective selections are made at every step to render the object. Objects that are too shiny or transparent do not make good candidates for scanning, so the very choice of materials to digitize is influenced by their physical properties. A glass flask bearing Benjamin Franklin’s visage, produced at Kensington Glass Works in the 1830s and illustrative of the popular commodification of the “Founding Fathers” in the early U.S. Republic and antebellum era, was thus regrettably off the digital table. But the piggins’ wooden surfaces worked well. This helped us understand scanning as interpretive work rather than “mere” mechanical replication. It is every bit as bound up in matters of judgment and analysis as other forms of inquiry. 

The limits of the digital also prompted discussion. In a different, pre-COVID seminar of mine a student who encountered the piggin in person approached it to smell it. That inclination opened a rich conversation about multisensory experiences and the still-overwhelming emphasis on the visual in art museum contexts. In the virtual realm that type of olfactory engagement is not possible (unless 1960s Smell-O-Vision technology comes back in vogue). In addition, working in the digital domain caused the physical campus setting in which these collections currently exist to recede substantially from our discussions. The campus did not go away entirely, but it held a less prominent place in how we approached these materials. That subsuming of institutional context may benefit certain seminar dynamics. Students may feel freer to interact with items from the comfort of their own spaces, as compared to inside a museum classroom or presidential living room. Or they may be more able to take a camera-off moment for quiet reflection in the midst of weighty topics. The digital space may constrain other aspects, including a sense of class cohesion and shared investment in dialogue, which can be difficult to cultivate across a grid of Zoom squares.

We also used the 3D replica as a springboard to discuss digital surrogates, repatriation, and sensitive ethical considerations that Indigenous and other communities have had to navigate as they work with—or contest—museums that still lay claim to ancestors, valued belongings, and cultural patrimony. Is “digital repatriation” a process that can meaningfully serve communities’ goals of caretaking for and interpreting their own belongings? There are potent examples of sovereign Indigenous nations proactively mobilizing technology and collaborations with external institutions. In other instances, this emerging practice can be yet another version of colonialist gatekeeping and an excuse for institutions to maintain possession. This, despite the requirements of federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) law to facilitate returns, bolsters what Rae Gould, a Nipmuc community member and repatriation specialist, has described as “retentive philosophies.” 

Not least of all, engagement with the digital material culture world underscored how all of this was possible because of existing human expertise and technological resources at WCMA, such as the photogrammetry studio space. The financial and personnel infrastructure required for digital humanities work of a serious kind relies on institutional capital. That in turn is interwoven with fraught histories and presents: where do college resources come from and how are they allocated? And it is entwined with the asymmetries and contingency of the employment landscape in the arts and humanities.

When I first tried to conceptualize the transition to Zoom teaching with early Americana, I imagined it as a placeless experience. We were no longer all convened in a single campus space but dispersed in some nowhere-ether. We’d lose the ability to work with the materiality of the built environment and tangible things, right? Not quite. I soon realized that the class became an emplaced experience in a very different register, with its members now immersed in multiple locations. Hastily sent away from their campus residences, students returned to their home locations, or to other sites where they could continue their studies for the remainder of the spring. These transitions have been arduous. They have thrust students into precarious situations, exposed longstanding structural inequities, exacerbated mental health crises, and removed the potentially more equalizing terrain of a seminar room. 

Faced with these tremendous challenges, students nonetheless organically reoriented themselves to connect with their own local settings. They explored commemorative landscapes (monuments, markers, cemeteries) in their midst that they knew well, or maybe explored for the first time, framing them through different interpretive lenses and methods. They entered dialogues with family members, community neighbors, and friends about their own forms of knowledge and memory related to material culture, shifting well beyond textual archives or museum collections into other modes of relating and being. They deftly handled belongings in their own lives to ask probing questions about memory, inheritance, representation. The resulting final projects that each member produced were reflective, inventive, and capacious. Many interleaved the academic and the personal in moving ways, and sought different voices and formats in which to communicate. 

For example, Isabel Cushing explored traditions of scrapbooking by weaving together items from a personal archive—ticket stubs, receipts, “I Voted” stickers, newspaper clippings—to address “the radical potential of ephemera to tell history.” In a colorful project that took the form of a collage rather than a standard academic essay, the work meditated on how tangible mementoes, which may be only partially legible to outsiders, can serve as “markers of relationships, carrying meaning and memories.” Eugene Amankwah drew upon digitized objects in collections beyond campus, like a violin covered with written inscriptions at the National Museum of American History, to investigate musicians’ roles during the U.S. Civil War. These items provided a springboard to a larger social history about how “drummer boys” and others took part in this pivotal conflict, and how these items can shape remembrances of this time.

The relations among people, materiality, and places anchored other projects. A painted, collaged tilt-top table at the Bennington Museum in Vermont became a focal point for Andrew Kensett, who had worked closely on conservation of this piece through the Graduate Art program. Examining the landscape representations that Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses created upon its surfaces, the project reconsidered how this work by a Northeastern “folk” artist and entrepreneur can be a lens for critically re-examining “origin stories” rooted in local, regional, and national forms of identity-formation, mythology, and nostalgia. Focusing on California and the homelands of Tásmam Koyóm, Dylan Syben analyzed initiatives to repatriate land to Indigenous people such as the Maidu community. This digital project embraced multimedia and interdisciplinarity, bringing together historical sources, poetry, journalism, photography, and more to contextualize how tribal nations, the PG&E power company, and the state are relating through specific places of significance. 

The local built environment of campus and the surrounding town also provided grounding for research and interpretation. Leah Rosenfeld contextualized the “1753 House” (a twentieth-century wooden replica of an early colonizer structure) to critically examine which histories this town icon lifts up, and which it erases or treats as marginal—as well as considering how future iterations of local narratives and structures may be made more inclusive and accurate. Delving into the memory terrain at Williams College that has accreted through monuments and markers, Nicholas Goldrosen traced how certain of these installations “resist the usual incorporation into the College’s collective memory.” Such features are on the college grounds but not “of” the institution, the project argued, bringing in site photographs taken just before students abruptly had to leave campus. Both projects drew readers into closer scrutiny and understanding of seemingly familiar locales.

All exceeded and expanded the definitions of “early America” and “material culture” that I had envisioned at the semester’s outset. More than anything, participants in this co-learning endeavor leaned into the concept of “afterlives” to interrogate what we do with these stories in the twenty-first century, amid powerful calls for reckoning with history’s violences and exclusions, and moving toward greater justice in the present and future.

For myself, the pandemic shutdowns pushed me out onto the land. What began as fresh air-seeking walks and hikes soon morphed into more intentional visitation of regional terrain, including historic sites, cemeteries, and small museums, many of which have been able to carry on despite unprecedented staffing and operational challenges. The shutdowns have accelerated my engagement with the very local, and deepened my understanding of the importance of growing connections with the webs of people—in museums, archives, historical societies, tribal nations, and more—who caretake and steward these resources. 

Now that our campus (like so many others) is resuming in-person living and learning, I continue to ruminate on what lessons from the sudden remote turn will we carry forward, and which elements we will gladly leave behind. I recently discarded the hand-sewn mask I clumsily fashioned from a dishtowel in the spring of 2020, using the sewing kit I inherited from my late grandmother. Others are similarly deaccessioning—or preserving—the material traces of pandemic time. And they are delving into the pedagogical implications of the transformations we have experienced. 

What this means for the future of early America, and of the meaningful materials that endure today, is a matter still unfolding. The experiences of encountering tangible items in real space, as part of an in-person community, are not interchangeable with virtual approaches. But nor is this a simple case of “less than.” Instead, there are striking possibilities for different insights and methods, and even greater attunement to the many people needed to carry forward collaborative learning. I will likely continue to incorporate digital forms of material engagement in my classes in the future because they carry us into alternate relations: with significant items, with the spaces we inhabit, and with each other.

 

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the many colleagues, students, and community members who have collaborated on these topics and offered insights into the practices, politics, and ethics of engaging materiality and the peoples linked to it. Partners at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Five College Consortium, and Williams College have been especially instrumental in the work described here. Ned Cooke, furniture historian at Yale University, taught a graduate seminar on New Haven and American material culture that helped lead me to these fields. Colleagues at American Antiquarian Society and Commonplace previously helped me think through the transits of materiality and heritage items in Indigenous-colonial contexts, and the need for continuing restorative work around repatriation to Indigenous nations in and beyond New England. The work of Akeia de Barros Gomes, Senior Curator of Maritime Social History at Mystic Seaport Museum, has also shaped my thinking.

 

I am especially grateful to members of “Afterlives of Objects” in Spring 2020 for their patience, care, and permission to reference their work. While space constraints prevent discussion of each project that seminar members created, I wish to acknowledge that every member of that collective learning space contributed insights, critiques, and creativity.

 

Further reading

These are a few resources from the “Afterlives of Objects” syllabus that shaped our in-roads into furnishings and other material items, and their contexts both inside and beyond museums: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, et al., “Introduction: Thinking with Things,” in Tangible Things: Making History through Objects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1-20; Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, “Mining the Museum,” Grand Street (no. 44, 1993): 151-72, including three page contextual explanation of the exhibition (170-72); Howard Mansfield,  “In the Memory House,” in In The Memory House (Golden CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1995), 5-20; Nina Simon, selections from The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010): “Preface: Why Participate?” and excerpts from ch. 4, “Social Objects”; D. Rae Gould, “NAGPRA, CUI and Institutional Will,” in The Routledge Companion to Cultural Property, ed. Jane Anderson and Haidy Geismar (New York: Routledge, 2017), 134-51; James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, “A Few Things Needful: Houses and Furnishings,” in James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (New York: Anchor Books, 2000); Elaine Sesma, “‘A Web of Community’: Uncovering African American Historic Sites in Deerfield MA,” Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage 2 (May 2015): 121-36; R. Eric Hollinger et al., “Tlingit-Smithsonian Collaborations with 3D digitization of Cultural Objects,” Museum Anthropology Review, 7 (Spring-Fall 2013): 201-53; Yale University Art Gallery, film clip, “Studying American Furniture in the Present,” 49 min.

On Portsmouth material culture, and the social lives of enslaved, indentured, and free people in this town, see Mark J. Sammons and Valerie Cunningham, Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004); Valerie Cunningham Papers, MC 321, University of New Hampshire Library, Milne Special Collections and Archives; Brock W. Jobe, Portsmouth Furniture: Masterworks from the New Hampshire Seacoast (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1993); Rick Russack, “Four Centuries of Portsmouth Furniture,” Portsmouth Historical Society, May 16, 2017.

Critical engagements with “campus collections” across New England, North America, and globally are wide and growing. Students, faculty, curators, and community members are doing essential interdisciplinary work to revisit, contextualize, and transform these spaces and practices. For a small sampling of initiatives just in the Northeast, at a range of private and public institutions, see Americas Research Initiative, Rhode Island School of Design Museum; “Dialogue with the Collection Program” and collaboration with Fred Wilson, University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts Amherst; The Lost Museum: The Jenks Museum of Natural History and Anthropology, Brown University; Dorothy Wang and Kevin Murphy, “Uncovering Williams” class and WMCA exhibition (2019); Sonnet Kekilia Coggins and Kailani Polzak, “‘The Field is The World’: Williams, Hawaiʻi, and Material Histories in the Making” (2018); Horace Ballard, Kevin M. Murphy, and Elizabeth Sandoval, “Remixing the Hall: WCMA’s Collection in Perpetual Transition”; Destinee Filmore, Jordan Horton, and Nicholas Liou, “Curatorial Close Looks: Remixing the Remix”; Lisa Conathan, Lori DuBois, Anne Peale, “Teaching with Primary Sources at Williams College” (2020); Places, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art, Yale University Art Gallery (2019-2021); Christine DeLucia, “Fugitive Collections in New England Indian Country: Indigenous Material Culture and Early American History Making at Ezra Stiles’s Yale Museum,” William and Mary Quarterly 75 (Jan. 2018): 109-150; Ethan W. Lasser, ed., The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766-1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

Communities and institutions are partnering in new ways, such as an innovative museum endeavor by the Tomaquag Museum in conjunction with the University of Rhode Island and RISD. Foundational ethical and human rights matters involving repatriation and restoration of belongings to communities remain major concerns at museums, despite important steps forward.

 

This article originally appeared in July, 2022.

 

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Christine DeLucia is Associate Professor of History at Williams College and the author of Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in The Journal of American History, The William and Mary Quarterly, Commonplace, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and other publications. She researches and teaches in areas including Native American and Indigenous Studies, early American history, material culture and museums, and community-engaged work.

The fifth letter of the Memoir comprises the author’s history of the New England region, and what immediately caught my attention as I read was this quote: “Had that valuable library of domestick history, collected by the friends and associates of Belknap and Minot, survived the troubles of civil war, it would have been needless for me to leave you any hints of the antient history of New England.”

I was at the time an Assistant Reference Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and was reading the Memoir while sitting in the reading room of the very “valuable library of domestick history” mentioned in the text. Jeremy Belknap and George Richards Minot were two of the Society’s key founders and early donors. And here we get to the absence of a footnote. Had there been one, outlining the reference to the MHS, that probably would have been the end of this whole thing. I would have kept reading and moved on. But because there wasn’t, I thought this tiny little reference would make an interesting post for the MHS blog, which I ultimately ended up titling “If only MHS had ‘survived the troubles of civil war.’”

It helped that just a couple floors above me in the stacks were more than fifty boxes of the papers of the author of the Memoir, the Reverend William Jenks. A 1797 graduate of Harvard, Jenks was active in historical, charitable, and religious organizations in Massachusetts and Maine, taught at Bowdoin College, served as the MHS librarian for nine years, and studied and wrote widely on numerous topics of antiquarian, historical, linguistic, and religious interest. So I thought it would surely be worth looking through the papers to see what I could find there that related to the Memoir. I also did a quick JSTOR search, which brings me to the presence of the second footnote: my search returned an article by Harold S. Jantz: “German Thought and Literature in New England, 1620-1820: A Preliminary Survey,” in the January 1942 issue of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, which I thought quite an unlikely source. 

In Jantz’s footnote 114, about Jenks’s work on a translation of a German poem, he writes “As yet I have found no further mention of Jenks’s translation of the Messiah. His papers at the MHS include nothing earlier than the manuscript of his extraordinary fantasy of the future, Memoir of the Northern Kingdom (1808).” Ooooh, I remember thinking, the manuscript of Memoir is just upstairs, that will be fun to have a look at, and maybe I can get a picture from it with which to illustrate the blog post. Little did I know. . . .

In spare moments over the next couple weeks or so, I began looking through the Jenks papers, drawing on the basic but perfectly thorough and accurate guide to the collection created in 1985 when the papers were rehoused (I must note here that the wonderful MHS collections staff have since reprocessed the William Jenks Family Papers and posted an even more thorough online guide).

Unfortunately, Jenks’s diary for 1808 is missing (if you know where it is, please let me know), but his 1809 diary volume was present, as were many folders of dated correspondence, and a letterbook containing copies of much of his outgoing correspondence for the years 1806 through 1811. Among the relevant things I found there were the fascinating text of the letter Jenks anonymously sent to the Boston publishers of the Memoir, in which he outlines precisely how he wants it to appear, gives ideas for publicity, and even suggests that “if it should prove sufficiently advantageous to you, & should bring in more than might be necessary to defray your expenses & give you a comfortable profit, you would, in such case, deposit a sum, of whatever amount beyond $100 you please, with the Selectmen of the town of Boston, to be awarded to the writer of the best ‘Essay on the best means of perpetuating the Federal compact of the United States of America.’” (Incidentally, this scheme very likely went unrealized, as there is a newspaper advertisement for a December 14, 1811 sheriff’s sale of the publisher’s stock, at which 532 copies of the Memoir in sheets were sold off at auction, probably destined to be used as wastepaper).

I also found Jenks’s diary entry for the day on which he received the first printed copies of his pamphlet and its first review, which appeared in the December 1808 issue of Boston’s Monthly Anthology. “The reading of these,” he wrote on January 21, 1809, “& the several readings & reflections consequent upon them & connected with them banished from my mind those pious efforts, to which alone I had before attended. The world, literary refutations, scientific labor, & learned research became again interesting.” 

What I did not find, though, was the manuscript of Memoir. I wrote up the blog post without it, and published that on December 22, 2010, just a few days before leaving the MHS to take up a new job. But that footnote continued to bug me. Without it, again, I probably would have just assumed that the manuscript had been sent to the printers and not returned, and that no manuscript copy existed. But Jantz reported that he’d seen it, in 1942. So where had it gone? From December 2010 through May 2016, whenever I was in Boston, I returned to the MHS and spent some time with the Jenks papers, looking through a few boxes each time. Since I hadn’t found Memoir in the likely places based on the finding guide, I began going systematically, folder by folder, through the fifty boxes, more than a few of which still at that time contained bundles of Jenks’s many sermons inside, wrapped in wastepaper exactly as they had been when deposited at the library.

I went through the entire collection at least three times, first forwards, then backwards, and then again somewhat in a random order. I examined the several smaller collections of William Jenks’s papers acquired at different times. I talked to the Curator of Manuscripts, who I knew had files in her office relating to the acquisition of many of the manuscript collections, and we looked through those to see if maybe some pieces of the Jenks papers had been removed by the family after 1942. We learned then that various tranches of the papers had been deposited by Jenks’s heirs at different times, though there was no indication about which parts came at which time. But there was nothing to indicate that any relevant material had been removed.

By 2016 I was getting fairly sick of this search, to be honest. I had other things I needed to be using my infrequent MHS research time for, and we had the text of the Memoir in published form, so what did it really matter about the manuscript anyway? But the question kept gnawing away at me: what had Jantz seen, and where was it? I still wanted to find the answer, or at the very least to confirm one way or the other whether the Memoir manuscript was in the MHS collections.

On Tuesday, May 10, in Boston to give an entirely unrelated talk, I spent the morning strategically calling up boxes and looking carefully through them. Still nothing. I went to lunch with my friends from the collections department, and asked the curator then if I could come upstairs after lunch and have another look through her office files to see if I had overlooked a clue when I examined them some years prior. And that last look through the curatorial files was what made me rethink my whole process and start looking at it crossways. It was unclear at which point some of the papers had been deposited at the library, so . . . what if none of the fifty boxes of what we knew as the Jenks Papers were at the MHS when Jantz had done his research in the early 1940s? I had thought that at least some portion of them were, but perhaps that was completely wrong. If so, then it was back to square one, since I had already looked at all of the items cataloged under William Jenks’s name in the MHS collections.

I turned next to the many volumes of the MHS Proceedings, shelved along the walls of the library’s reference room. They are an invaluable resource for many things, but I wasn’t at all sure that they would help me. I started looking through the several index volumes for references to Jenks, and in the 1928 index to the third series of Proceedings, there appeared a reference to certain papers of William Jenks, on the first page of Volume 55. That led me to the minutes of the Society’s October 13, 1921 meeting, at which the Librarian “reported the following accessions: From the family of Rev. Henry F. Jenks, through his brother Charles W. Jenks, of Bedford, Mass., the manuscript papers of Rev. William Jenks, of his son John Henry Jenks, and of his grandson Rev. Henry F. Jenks, from 1800 to 1903.” The papers were a bit more fully described, though there is no specific mention of the Memoir.

Back to the online catalog, then, where I entered Henry F. Jenks as an author, and pulled up the record for the collection referenced in the Proceedings. No mention of William at all, except as included in “and family” in the scope note. But as soon as I saw the first date in the title field, 1808, my fingers started tingling. This must be it, surely. I requested the boxes through the online portal, and gave fair warning to my former colleagues staffing the reading room that I might well make more noise than is typically allowed if my hunch proved correct. They had all heard me going on at length about this manuscript for years, by that point, so they well understood how excited I was that it might finally reveal itself. And reveal itself it very much did. As could only be expected from the fact that it was the first date on the collection, the manuscript version of Memoir seen by Jantz was the very first document in the very first folder in the very first box.

While I didn’t exactly whoop in the reading room, I most definitely came close. It had been there the whole time, just a few feet away from the main body of Jenks’s papers, waiting for me to hit upon the key that would unlock the mystery: that 1928 volume of the Proceedings. Once I had alerted the catalogers, they were able to update the online records and finding guides for the various Jenks family collections to note the presence of the manuscript, and they have since mounted a hi-resolution digital version on the MHS website.

While the manuscript of Memoir differs in no substantial way from the published version, I have no regrets about spending the time I did trying to locate it. Being able at last to fit that missing piece back into the Jenks puzzle was a profoundly satisfying experience, and the strategies and techniques I used throughout have served me well even as I have moved on to other projects and different mysteries. Archival perseverance paid off, in the end.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Ed White for bringing the Memoir to my attention, and to Brenda M. Lawson, Kathy Griffin, Nancy Heywood, Laura Lowell, Susan Martin, and Peter K. Steinberg at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Portions of this paper were given as a talk at the biennial meeting of the Society of Early Americanists in 2019; thanks also to my colleagues on that panel Vera Keller, Sandra Dahlberg, and Anne Baker. Additional thanks to antiquarian booksellers Garrett Scott and Brian Cassidy, who have both shared my interest in Memoir from the beginning.

Further Reading

Ed White’s edited version of Memoir of the Northern Kingdom is in Journal of the Early Republic 30 (Summer 2010), 301-31. His accompanying article, “The Ends of Republicanism,” appears earlier in the same issue, on pages 179-99.

The author’s copy of the original edition of Memoir is scanned and available on the Internet Archive.

 

This article originally appeared in June 2022.

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Jeremy Dibbell is a Special Collections Librarian at Binghamton University. He was previously the Director of Communications and Outreach at Rare Book School, Librarian for Social Media and Rare Books at LibraryThing, and an Assistant Reference Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Along with ongoing work on early American private libraries, Jeremy is researching the history of books and printing in Bermuda, and the public auctions of loyalists’ libraries in Boston during the American Revolution. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 2022.

Annie Cridge, born Annie Denton in England in 1825, emigrated to the United States with her brother, William Denton in the 1840s. In America, Annie met her husband, Alfred Cridge. The couple were political firebrands driven by a desire to remake the world into an equal, healthy, and socialist paradise. In the 1850s, Annie and Alfred put their zealous reform spirits to good use by editing a reform periodical, called The Vanguard, with Annie’s brother in Dayton, Ohio. The Vanguard was a spiritualist periodical with a socialist tint. The Cridges filled the pages of the paper with articles about socialist communities, gender equality, and spiritualism.

Annie and Alfred cautiously embraced the new religion for most of the 1850s. However, by 1857 their faith in spiritualism was resolute. Annie’s conversion occurred in 1857 following the death of her child, Denton. When Denton passed away, Annie claimed that she witnessed his spirit leave his body. She also claimed to be a psychometrist, a person capable of not only communicating with departed spirits but of seeing the past historical life of an object by touching it.

The Cridges’ interest in spiritualism was not surprising considering the support the movement gave to the women’s rights movement. Spiritualism recognized the equality of the sexes and carved out a space for women’s leadership within the religion. In her 1989 book Radical Spirits, historian Ann Braude demonstrated the intimate relationship between women’s rights and spiritualism and even the extensive participation of spiritualists in the abolitionist as well as health and dress reform movements. The Cridges were part of this radical circle that championed some of America’s most remarkable causes.

Annie’s spiritualism and self-proclaimed psychometry were not her only unconventional features. Annie and her husband were both committed socialists and vegetarians who envisioned a world colonized by hygienic communes. The two were inspired by the Associationists of the 1840s and 1850s, America’s most popular nineteenth-century communal movement.

Associationism was a utopian-socialist campaign inspired by the writings of French philosopher Charles Fourier. Fourier’s American followers believed they could remake the world into a utopian paradise by creating a series of joint-stock communities called phalanxes. Associationism was one of the many utopian-socialist campaigns that flowered in the antebellum period. However, unlike other utopian movements such as the Shakers or the Oneida community, Associationism was not grounded in religious belief or headed by a charismatic leader. It followed Charles Fourier’s radical philosophy which admonished industrial development, criticized the anarchy of the capitalist economy, and rebuked repressive gender and sexual norms that perpetuated women’s oppression. Most importantly, Fourier posited a theory of psychological development where complete liberation relied on the fulfillment of individual passion. 

In Fourier’s phalanx, diversity, democracy, and difference were obligatory. Societal harmony relied on balancing various passions and embracing political, class, and personality differences. This embrace of difference attracted a cadre of reformers to the movement, including abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, peace reformers, vegetarians, and socialists. From the 1840s to 1860s, Associationists founded dozens of phalanxes around the nation, including the popular Brook Farm community outside of Boston. 

Of course, in practice, not all phalanxes were the same. Alfred Cridge, for one, had a clear, though not universally shared, vision of a phalanx that combined Fourier’s commune with vegetarianism and water-cure. He never succeeded in establishing the phalanx, but the Cridges sustained their utopian dream through The Vanguard, where they created “connection spaces” and wrote columns on “Reform Communities” to help readers join established communes and unite with other community-minded friends. 

Even after The Vanguard ceased publication, Annie and Alfred contributed pieces on the benefits of clean and communal living to reform periodicals in the 1860s and 1870s. Eventually, they found a home at Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly where Alfred penned a series of columns on Fourier’s utopian-socialism and Annie published her most famous work of fiction—Man’s Rights.

Man’s Rights was an impressive work of satire and utopian fiction that combined her various reform interests into a single utopian vision. In the story, Annie retells a series of dreams she experienced about a city in a faraway land. In these dreams, she visited a sublime city on the planet Mars where contemporary gender roles were reversed. In every house and every kitchen, Cridge encountered overworked and restless men responsible for the housework, cooking, and childrearing. The men were disenfranchised and lacked equal political and economic rights. While women served as the heads of households, the family’s breadwinners, and occupied all positions of government, men occupied the private sphere of the home.

When the city’s gentlemen housekeepers left their residence, Cridge observed that they were dressed in the most fantastic outfits. Many were dressed in ruffles from collar to pantleg and others wore delicate lace headdresses decorated with glitter and tinsel. As she walked past them, she listened to their conversations. They gossiped about fashion and romances. Cridge cringed at their degraded position.

For several more nights, Cridge returned to the city where she witnessed its men gradually protest their unequal condition. One night, Cridge attended a rally where the men of Mars demanded “men’s rights” and objected to the system of housekeeping that women forced them into. Eventually, the men’s rights reformers achieved partial success when their city adopted a system of collective housekeeping.

This system included large-scale kitchens with autonomous meal-making technology, caravan machines used to deliver meals to every household, and new washing and ironing machines. As opposed to an isolated domestic system where each individual man labored in the home, collective housekeeping saved time and money. It also freed men of the arduous domestic drudgery that their lives previously revolved around.

Significantly, an important appeal of the Associationist movement was its emphasis on the benefits of collective housekeeping for American women. Associationists emphasized the value and importance of domestic work but argued that housekeeping was forced upon women and used to restrict their social and economic freedoms. In an Associationist phalanx, residents cooked, cleaned, and laundered collectively to avoid waste and save resources.

Members of the phalanx performed labor according to their individual interests and their natural enthusiasm toward specific types of work. Fourier understood that some work was less desirable than others. To make up for this imbalance, laborers who performed unseemly work, such as cleaning, earned higher dividends than their fellow utopians. However, Fourier was not the Elon Musk of the eighteenth century. He largely eschewed technology and was suspicious of its role in liberation. He viewed the dirty and dangerous factories of the eighteenth century as detrimental to one’s mental and physical health and did not believe individuals could find joy in factory work. Fourier even imagined that most of the work performed in the phalanx would be agricultural, not industrial. He embraced collective housekeeping and large-scale communal laundries and kitchens because it emancipated women from the seclusion of the private sphere and provided more choice and freedom for individuals to pursue their vocational interests. His “labor-saving” technology did not provide more leisure time for the utopian. It merely saved the worker from unappealing work. Clearly this aspect of Associationism influenced Cridge as she made it an important part of her fictional vision of male emancipation on Mars.

Although the utopia of Annie’s dreams existed on another planet, her eighth dream transported her to a more familiar place: New York City ten years in the future. Within ten years, America elected its first woman president, half of the Senate were women, and prostitutes were no longer arrested and punished for participating in sex work. Instead, their male companions were arrested and placed in reformation houses.

When she returned to this new progressive New York in her last dream, she could not find any women in the city. The factories, workshops, businesses, schools, and hospitals were filled with men, but few women could be found. It was only after Cridge came upon a festival celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the women’s agricultural fair that she realized where America’s women had gone.

Fifty years earlier, the city struggled with a large population of impoverished women with little land, few opportunities, and no support. To remedy their circumstances, a large class of widows, wives, and single women moved out of the city to a vast space of uncultivated land. There, they started their own farms and made agriculture women’s work. Over the years, the grain, fruit, and vegetable farms they cultivated became their source of happiness and health. When Cridge awakened from her final dream, she hopefully asked “may not this dream, after all, be a prophecy?”

In Cridge’s story, America’s women embarked on an agricultural quest to achieve happiness, health, and control over their futures. Even after they achieved political and economic equality, laboring in unsafe and unhealthful factories harmed their physical and spiritual well-being. Cridge’s American utopia did not singularly hinge on technological innovation or economic equality. It was a comprehensive achievement that combined political and economic equality with women’s autonomy and health.

In 1870, Cridge acted upon her agricultural dream and left the East Coast for an agricultural colony in Riverside, California, where she remained until her death in 1873. Like many other vegetarian socialists, Cridge believed women’s emancipation and healthy living for all humans required a large-scale reorganization of societal relations. A sanitary agricultural farm where families and individuals could live cooperatively and grow fruits, vegetables, and grain was a means to achieve a better world. In this regard, Man’s Rights was an individual prophecy for Cridge. Unwilling to wait for the day when the utopia of her dreams finally appeared, she took matters into her own hands and spent the last years of her life attempting to make her work of fiction a reality. In an obituary published by Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, her husband Alfred wrote that “believing that occupation on the land was the keystone of woman’s independence,” his wife spent the last of her lifeforce sustaining the colony.

Read: Annie Denton Cridge, Man’s Rights; or, How Would You Like It? Comprising Dreams (Boston: William Denton, 1870).

Annie was not the only woman who published powerful works of utopian fiction in the mid-to-late 1800s. Decades before Charlotte Perkins Gillman published her popular work of utopian fiction, Herland, in 1915, utopian authors Marie Howland, Jane Sophia Appleton, Elizabeth T. Corbett, and Zebina Forbush published their own visions of a more equal, healthier, and perfect future on earth. Marie Howland, like Cridge, was also a utopian-socialist who participated in the Associationist movement and lived in several communes throughout her life.  Cridge and her fellow utopian authors were part of a vibrant community of women authors who used their literary prowess and access to periodicals such as Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, and Godey’s Lady’s Book.

Cridge’s short story, not to mention her illustrious reform career, represents a more radical but influential side of mid-nineteenth-century politics. Existing alongside America’s more traditional reformers who advocated single-issue causes such suffrage and abolition, and the moral and bureaucratic reformers who looked to clean up America’s cities and political system, a cadre of radical socialists worked to reorganize America’s social and economic institutions and remake society into a second Eden. From the 1860s to the 1880s, Americans founded multiple utopian-socialist communities that highlighted the importance of a vegetarian diet and clean living such as Hygieana, Cedar Vale, the Lord’s Farm, Societas Fraternia, Joyful, Israelites, and various Brotherhood of Light and Theosophist communities. Cridge was a pioneer within this group of reformers who, from the 1840s to the 1870s, persisted in their efforts to remake the world, starting with the United States, into a happier and healthier utopia.

Further Reading:

Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

Carl Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).

Justyna Galant, “Ruptures in Separate Spheres: Deconstruction of Cross-Gender Solidarity in George Noyes Miller’s The Strike of a Sex and Annie Denton Cridge’s Man’s Rights,” Utopian Studies 29 (no. 2, 2018): 176–196.

Alfred Denton Cridge, Utopia; or, The History of an Extinct Planet (Oakland, Cal.: Winchester & Pew, 1970).

 

This article originally appeared in June 2022.

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Ashley Garcia is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. She researches the history of utopian socialism in the United States and her dissertation examines the Associationist movement of the 1800s.

Accompanying the map was a letter by an unnamed parent to his or her children delineating the “various paths to happiness” that Friends walked from early childhood to old age. The letter warned Quaker offspring to remain on the straight and narrow, lest they find themselves in “Off Guard Parish” where “Alluring Bower” and “Sorrow Chamber” were found. The letter counseled Quaker youth to remain watchful. Those who attained “Knowledge Pastureland” to reach “Promotion Mount,” could still make a stop at “Flatterer’s Haunt,” which led to the town of “Braggington” and “Vanity Fair.” Starting out well in life did not guarantee spiritual safety. One could easily be diverted from the “narrow path” and find themselves in “Knave’s Lure, and in great danger of going by Forger’s Hole, to Detection Crevice, and, to the great grief of parents and friends, they have been brought into Conviction Court, sent to Dungeon Bottom and narrowly escape Gallows Hill.” This was one of many pitfalls outlined in the parental letter. The dangers posed to young men were especially highlighted. A sharp turn at “Pausing Window” would land them in “False Rest Common,” where “Idleman’s Corner” led to “Seduction Play-house” and “Bully’s Brothel.” Yet there was hope for salvation. If a Friend reached “Mending Quarter,” they could go from “Faltering Alley” to “Good Resolve Turnstile” and “Bear Cross Road.” Friends confronted a panorama of pathways that meandered from comfort and danger to solace and sin. Choosing the “path of righteousness” would ensure the believer’s journey through life. The letter ended by advising young Quakers to avoid the “many strange and crooked paths” evident in Dillwyn’s map.

Dillwyn’s map and letter were manufactured by William Darton and Joseph Harvey, English Quaker printers and booksellers whose firm would become a leading producer of juvenile ephemera by the nineteenth century. Dissected maps became popular during the eighteenth century when the expanding English empire and improved travel fueled consumer demand for geographical books and maps. It led to an emerging trade in children’s games and puzzles, with themes ranging from history and literature to science and ethics, with geography the most popular topic. Children learned geography by copying and coloring maps, embroidering globes, and memorizing cards. They played with dissected maps, which were usually hand colored on thin sheets of mahogany and housed in a wooden box. At a cost from seven shillings six pence to £1.10 when they first appeared, these items were only affordable to the middling and better sort in England and the United States. The production of Dillwyn’s allegorical map was unusual for Friends who disdained the visual arts as worldly and pernicious. Quaker abhorrence of art makes this image singular at the same time it demonstrates their adaptability to a new mode of educational instruction. Yet Quaker plainness was retained. Dillwyn’s map made use of little color, had few illustrations, contained no human figures, and relied heavily on the written word to convey meaning.

Dillwyn’s map detailed an imaginary world that Friends traversed during their time on earth. It visualized the common Quaker practice followed by believers, or “fellow travelers,” as they journeyed down the “tribulated path.” Friends endorsed a faith based in mindfulness. Religious practice came through prayer and meditation, reading and writing, conversation and worship to enforce the need to live every day in a state of spiritual awareness. Whether dressing in the morning, traveling to meeting, or talking to family members, Quakers strove to be mindful in all aspects of daily life. To maintain conduct consistent with their conviction, Friends deferred to what they called the “still, small voice” within to implant proper demeanor. This phrase exemplified the interior nature of Quaker spirituality and was a guiding principle as Friends labored to sustain their faith. The Quaker spiritual journey, often invisible due to its silent, humble and individual nature, is illustrated in this map.

Dillwyn was likely influenced by John Bunyan’s 1678 book, Pilgrim’s Progress, which was made into a dissected version during the cartography craze of the eighteenth century. Christian’s journey, as outlined in Bunyan’s book, includes place names similar or the same to those encountered in the “Map of the Various Paths of Life,” such as “Vanity Fair.” A second inspiration was Stephen Crisp (1628-1692), a first-generation English Quaker who wrote a less well-known tract entitled A Short History of a Long Travel from Babylon to Bethel in 1691. This work documented the travails of an unnamed Friend, who followed “the Light” through a landscape teeming with diversions. Upon reaching Bethel, the traveler attained peace and comfort in his “heavenly habitation.” This book embodied the Quaker approach to piety, which dictated mindfulness to infuse the proper internal state and corporeal behavior. Spirituality as a daily, even hourly activity, required diligence, humility, and patience. 

The map of Pilgrim’s Progress was not part of the original book; an enterprising printer produced a version of Christian’s journey in map form in 1778 to meet the commercial demand for geographical representations. While Dilwyn’s map is an imaginary of Quaker practice detailing an empire of the soul, Bunyan’s allegorical vision was based in the Bedfordshire landscape where he was born and bred. A tinker by trade, Bunyan traveled extensively, and his preaching activity took him to villages and hamlets throughout Bedfordshire. Local landmarks became the backdrop to Christian’s journey. One scholar asserts that the “Delectable Mountains” described in Pilgrim’s Progress were the Chiltern Hills; the “Sepulchre” was the Holy Well at Stevington church; and the “House Beautiful” was based on Houghton House built by the Dowager Countess of Pembroke in the early seventeenth century. With Bedfordshire as his template, Bunyan imagined Christian’s pilgrimage teeming with spiritual import. The “Slough of Despond,” similar to the boggy places common to rural England, represented the fears and doubts that mired individuals in sinfulness as they struggled to find the path to salvation. 

The Religious Society of Friends advocated a “guarded education” for their children. This format taught them basic skills (reading, writing, and ciphering) but protected them from worldly influences. The education of Quaker children was to be “useful” and “practical” based in moral instruction. Students learned to “regulate every thought and action” to comply with Quaker ideals of plainness in dress, speech, and deportment. Young Friends were to respect their parents, guardians, and teachers and to live harmoniously with their siblings and schoolmates.

The Friends safeguarded their children by founding Quaker educational institutions in England, British North America, and the United States from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Sarah Tuke Grubb, a Quaker minister and educator embodied the Friends’ approach to a “guarded education.” She asserted that “a religious improvement in the minds of youth” was the principal aim of Quaker schools. Quakers published specialized books for children both for instruction in the classroom and at home. These publications used Quaker theology and practice to teach basic skills. Lindley Murray, an American Friend, wrote English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners in 1795, which combined “moral and useful observations with grammatical studies.” By learning grammar, young minds would be exposed to the “animating views of piety and virtue.” For example, in the section on parsing, he presented phrases such as “let us improve ourselves” and “virtues will be rewarded,” to merge ethical instruction with language acquisition.

Lockean theories of education also impacted Quakers. John Locke’s treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, became a standard text for childrearing, and it had a profound impression on English and American parents in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Locke believed learning for children should be based in play. This prevalent theory of education initiated the production of material objects specifically for children’s use, and maps became a primary teaching tool in the eighteenth century. Booksellers and printers responded to the growing demand for maps by specializing in products for young consumers, such as atlases, map games, playing cards, and puzzles. Thus, children acquired knowledge by playing with geographic objects.

Children’s interaction with the map is evident in the copies made by scholars at the Westtown Friends School in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1799 by Philadelphia Quakers, Westtown was a “select” institution that only admitted Friends who were taught by Friends. The school’s archives contain copies of the map made by scholars. In 1826, Matilda Hogdson, a student from Philadelphia, drew the map; in 1828, Mary Hoopes copied the letter in the wake of the Hicksite Schism, possibly to remind her fellow students of the need for tolerance and unity. In the 1860s, Edwin Thorpe attended Westtown as a teenager. He stayed on at the school as an instructor of Writing and Drawing and, at some point, he sketched a copy of the map. In 1872, he became the first faculty member hired to teach fine art at Westtown. As Quaker institutions evolved, and with their entry into higher education, Friends’ attitude toward art changed. As a visual representation of spiritual practice, Dillwyn’s allegorical map, as a successor to the map of Pilgrim’s Progress, drew upon a popular format to expand the means of the moral instruction for young Quakers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Sarah Horowitz and Ann Lipton at the Quaker Collection of Haverford College, Andrea Immel at the Cotsen Children’s Library of Princeton University, Mary Brooks at the Esther Duke Archives of Westtown Friends School, James Kessenides of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, Alison Clague at Leicestershire Museums and Galleries, and Andrew King of the Nottingham City Galleries and Museums for their help in locating these images as well as background information.

Further Reading

On dissected maps, see Jill Shefrin, Neatly Dissected for the Instruction of Young Ladies and Gentlemen in the Knowledge of Geography (Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press, 1999); Jill Shefrin, The Dartons: Publishers of Educational Aids, Pastimes & Juvenile Ephemera, 1787-1876 (Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press, 2009); and Linda Hanna, The English Jigsaw Puzzle (London: Wayland Publishers, 1972). On Bedford geography, see Vera Brittain, In the Steps of John Bunyan: An Excursion into Puritan England (London: Rich and Cowan, 1928). On Bunyan’s life, see Tasmin Spargo, John Bunyan (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). On Quaker children and maps, see Judith A. Tyner, Stitching the World: Embroidered Maps and Women’s Geographical Education (Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2015) and Carol Humphrey, Quaker School Girl Samplers from Ackworth (Guildford: Needleprint, 2006). For more on Dilwyn’s map and Quaker education, see Janet Moore Lindman, “‘The pleasures of traveling in Liberty Plains’: Practical Piety and Childhood Education Through Material Culture in the American Quaker Community,” Quaker Studies (forthcoming 2022).

 

This article originally appeared in June, 2022.

 

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Janet Moore Lindman is Professor and Chair of the History Department at Rowan University. Her book, A Vivifying Spirit: Quaker Practice and Reform Antebellum America, will be published by Penn State University Press in the spring of 2022. Her current research project is on gender and transatlantic Protestantism during the long eighteenth century.