As part of the Compromise of 1850, the new Fugitive Slave Law, a much more stringent version of its 1793 cousin, permitted African Americans in the North to be seized solely based on the affidavit of anyone claiming to be his or her owner or working on the owner’s behalf. It was without question the most intrusive enactment of federal authority prior to the Civil War. Black abolitionist H. Ford Douglas, who hailed from Cuyahoga Falls not far from where I teach at Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, declared at the Columbus gathering that after nine months of debate about how to settle the vexing question of slavery in the territories, Congress, with the Fugitive Slave Act, ended up striking “down the writ of Habeas Corpus and Trial by Jury—those great bulwarks of human freedom.” It was a law, according to Douglas, “unequalled in the worst days of Roman despotism.” Western Reserve Academy has a rich history in the abolitionist movement in northeast Ohio. By the late 1840s, a prominent group of young Black activists, including John Mercer, Charles Langston, William Day, and H. Ford Douglas were well-known figures in the area. 

Ironically, it was a call for federal power by white Southerners who had steadfastly opposed for decades the aggrandizement of the federal government out of fear that it would threaten their hold on the slave system. President Millard Fillmore, who had taken office after the death of Zachary Taylor, signed the act into law on September 18, 1850, creating a panic in African American communities across the North. Just days after the law was enacted, James Hamlet, a fugitive from Maryland living in New York City, was captured and brought to a jail in Baltimore. Abolitionists eventually secured Hamlet’s freedom by purchasing him for eight hundred dollars. Others were not so fortunate. Throughout the 1850s, thousands of African Americans fled the United States to Canada.  

Blacks, both enslaved escapees and long-term free residents, were now placed in considerable danger. A Black convention in Cincinnati opened with a harsh indictment against a nation that “hunted” slaves “like beasts from city to city, and dragged [them] back to the hell from which they fled—the Government which should protect them,” was instead “prostituting its powers to aid the villains who hunt them.” Personal liberty laws on the statute books in almost all northern states were set to be ripped away by the new federal business of slave hunting. “This enactment—unworthy of the name of law—reverses” the presumption of innocence by “prohibiting what is right, and commanding what is wrong,” declared John Mercer Langston at the 1851 Columbus convention. On a motion of John’s older brother Charles, a petition was drafted and sent to the U.S. Congress calling for the repeal of the “unconstitutional” law.

Black conventions in the early 1850s hosted a wide-ranging conversation about the crisis of constitutionalism that stemmed from the passage of the draconian Fugitive Slave Act. As legal scholar James Fox has persuasively argued, these Conventions “provided Black leaders and activists a forum to share ideas, debate strategies, and engage as a community in forming and reforming their identities as Black American citizens.” National Conventions met over a dozen times before the Civil War in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. The first Ohio convention was in 1837, with ten more prior to the Civil War. Ohio actually served as the catalyst for the first national Black Convention in Philadelphia in 1830 which stemmed from outrage over the attempt of Cincinnati officials to physically remove African Americans.

Over my many years in the high school classroom, I’ve spent considerable time on the story of obstructions to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, covering dramatic rescues in Boston, Massachusetts, and Syracuse, New York, along with abolitionists’ armed resistance against slavecatchers at Christiana, Pennsylvania. These cases were often referenced at Black conventions, including one held in Cincinnati in 1852 at the Union Baptist Church:

We Sympathize deeply with man Shadrach, of Boston, who fled from the American Fiery Furnace, to its contrast—the snows of Canada, with Jerry, who at Syracuse was transported from the American “Babylon” . . . with the men at Christiana who so honored a Christian name, by protecting their homes, and refusing to be made slaves; and have learned from their example that liberty is dearer than life, and eternal vigilance its only guarantee.

At the Cincinnati 1852 convention, a resolution was passed declaring the “law of God” over “human enactments” and the “duty to obey God rather than man” paramount. Several of my students recognized that this ideological position stood in stark contrast to the message in President George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address which we had spent time on when covering the political drama of the 1790s. Washington’s address set up the debate over the “duty of every individual to obey the established government.”

The formation of northern vigilance committees and committees of safety, which pledged to sound the alarm should slavecatchers appear, always provided ample opportunity for discussion in the classroom. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in September 1850, slavery was no longer an abstraction, limited in scope to the southern states, but was now a major local concern from New England to the Midwest. Captures and rescues under the Fugitive Slave Act provided real-life drama on northern city streets for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The political significance of rescues, along with federal trials for those who aided fugitives, contributed in substantive ways to the political crisis that severed the United States. For African Americans in the North the law, which provided the federal government with authority to reach into the states in unprecedented ways, made them more vulnerable than ever to kidnappers who were now aided by draconian provisions that removed rights to due process.

While white antislavery leaders attacked the legal apparatus protecting the rights of slaveholders to reclaim property, fidelity to the legal process and protections for African Americans was often not extended to the realm of civil rights and the complete removal of the odious Black laws passed by numerous northern legislatures. Ohio’s Black Laws, enacted in the early nineteenth century, required a certificate of freedom and bond for African Americans migrating into Ohio and forbade “black or mulatto” testimony in court cases where a white person was a party. They were largely repealed in 1849, thanks to the advocacy of Black leaders. As historian Kate Masur has noted, in Ohio “Black activists had persistently and creatively demanded repeal, and growing numbers of white people had become persuaded that racist laws were unacceptable and un-American.” But restrictions on Black voting remained, along with limitations and prohibitions on other aspects of life. Blacks enjoyed some ordinary rights and privileges but faced high levels of statutory discrimination in major areas of life, including marriage laws, housing, jobs, schools, and access to the ballot. 

The hardening of racist sentiment in the North corresponded with the rise of the two-party system. By the mid-1830s, a clear majority of white northerners began to perceive the nation’s basic problem as not just slavery but also the presence of Blacks in the country, free as well as enslaved. This is where the pathbreaking Colored Conventions Project served to open new doors for me as a teacher.

It was not until I read about P. Gabrielle Forman’s pathbreaking work on the Colored Conventions Project that I began to see a deeper history than high-flying rescues or dramatic courtroom dramas. The story that I now sought to present to my students centered on how the Fugitive Slave Act overruled a presumption of citizenship for free Blacks in the North. However, it was more than simply access to the writ of habeas corpus. Black abolitionists offered a profound re-reading of the text of the Constitution and the power of the Declaration of Independence that had far reaching implications. In the 1850s, the Fugitive Slave Act certainly raised questions relating to resistance, but it also helped to bring attention to the powers and prerogatives of the states when it came to the privileges and immunities of citizenship. State-level agitation in Ohio for civil rights mirrored state-level opposition to implementation of the law.

In reading the Ohio Black convention debates, my students began to see how the words of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the 1787 Constitution were turned into a new political creed by Black reformers. Southern white leaders, as historian William Wiecek noted long ago, were on record opposing Jefferson’s Declaration as rhetorical flourish in a political manifesto as early as 1821. But for Ohio’s William Howard Day, an Oberlin graduate and the editor of The Aliened American, Cleveland’s first Black newspaper, the Declaration and the Constitution were the “foundation of liberties” with coequal status.

What became clear to my students as our classroom examination developed was that “privileges or immunities,” “due process,” “equal protection,” and rights of citizens of the United States was something that Black activists had been talking about for decades. I was able to do an overview with my students of the free Black opposition to the American Colonization Society in the early 1830s that helped to illustrate this. It was clearly not something that first arose during the post-Civil War period. 

Across the northern free states, according to Kate Masur, Black “activists forcefully insisted that laws that made explicit race-based distinctions had no place in American life.” These activists “pressed new ideas about citizenship, individual rights and the proper scope of state power.” The discourse on the Constitution at Black conventions clearly demonstrated that the process of creating constitutional law involved more than lawyers in the courtroom. Ohio Black leaders declared that they would “continue to agitate” before “the people, to circulate petitions among the people, and memorialize” the state legislature. They would not stop until Ohio became a “true democracy, conservator of equal and impartial liberty.” By making claims to citizenship and invoking the founding documents, Black leaders expanded the reading of the constitutional text. Jefferson’s Declaration was viewed as having a direct link to the Constitution and creating an obligation for civic and political equality.

By the early 1850s, the privileges and immunities clause in the Constitution had an important place within antislavery constitutional ideology. The vast majority of Black abolitionists insisted that the privileges and immunities of citizenship in the Constitution were general and were enjoyed by all citizens. In a previous Commonplace article that I wrote about the 1842 Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island, I encountered Black abolitionists, including Ichabod Northup, who challenged both the Dorrites and their “People’s Constitution,” along with the Rhode Island government to allow Blacks into the body politic by eliminating an 1822 statute that barred them from the polls. Black northerners were free but far from equal. Black leaders petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly for an end of “that odious feature of the statute, which in making the right of citizenship identical with color, brings a stain upon the state, unmans the heart of an already injured people and corrupts the purity of republican faith.” I was able to draw connections between Black leaders in Rhode Island and Ohio since they both worked towards the removal of “white-only” clauses embedded into state laws. Rhode Island Black leaders made clear that it was through “birthright” that they deserved civil and political rights, a clear conception that the privileges and immunities of citizenship were also tied to being born on “native soil.” 

 William Yates’ remarkable 1838 pamphlet “The Right of the Colored Man to Suffrage, Citizenship and Trial by Jury” proved to be a great teaching tool and one that students enjoyed exploring in the classroom. Yates’ writings covered citizenship in a manner that would later guide radical Republicans after the Civil War, especially questions relating to birthright citizenship. “We are human beings, and we are Americans; we are entitled to the same rights as white Americans,” wrote Yates. “Free persons of color are human beings, natives of the country—for such of we speak—and owe the same obligations to the State, and to its government as white citizens.” They have an “equal right to liberty—to the enjoyment and security of home and family—and of a good name and character as white men; so, to all the rights of conscience—to read, write, and print—to speak, teach, and debate—to preach, and worship God according to its dictates—their title as the same as that of white men.” In the 1840s and 1850s, northern Blacks gained rights through agitation, legislation, and court decisions.

At the end of the 1851 Columbus convention, calls for removal of the Fugitive Slave Law did not come at the top of the list for the delegates as they assembled their resolves. The first resolution adopted was a clarion call for the elective franchise and a removal of the remnants of Black Laws from the statute books. The year before, at another state convention in Columbus, delegates decried how Blacks in the North were “only nominally free.” The right to vote was labeled a “birthright.” This was the focal point of William Day’s and Charles Langston’s powerful closing address at the following year’s Convention: “Those of us, therefore, who were born in the United States, and reside in Ohio, are citizens of Ohio. If citizens of this state, entitled by the United States Constitution, to all the rights and immunities of citizens of the several states. The elective franchise being among these rights.” In 1852, in Cincinnati, the “rights and immunities of American citizens,” in particular, “native born American citizens,” were on the table for discussion. Black activists were constantly trying to reshape the national debate.

My classroom is just a stone’s throw from the courtyard of our historic chapel where Frederick Douglass delivered a commencement address at what was then Western Reserve College. Douglass’ 1854 address, later published as a pamphlet and sold widely in the North and Europe, was his first address on a college campus. Douglass chose not to provide the students and families in attendance with a jeremiad on the constitutional crises that was gripping the nation with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act just weeks before, or the ongoing controversy over fugitive slaves. Douglass had actually written widely on the Anthony Burns affair in Boston and had openly defended the killing of a deputy U.S. marshal in the city during a confrontation with abolitionists attempting to prevent Burns from being returned to slavery in Virginia. He was on record encouraging free Blacks to move to Kansas to help prevent the territory from becoming a slave state. Rather, at Reserve, Douglass focused on “Human rights,” to get the young audience to understand how the corrupting influence of slavery spread in the North through racist sentiments and laws that led to the belief in the innate inferiority of Black Americans. Douglass reminded the audience that all Americans stood “upon a common basis.” All “mankind” has the “same wants,” arising out a “common nature,” proclaimed Douglass. God “has no children whose rights may be safely trampled upon.” Douglass’ speech was a clarion call to the student body—all white at the time—to not become caught up in the standard racial prejudices of the day. Douglass emphatically declared that he was a “citizen” of the United States, but nonetheless, a citizen “rolling in the sin and shame of Slavery,” a reference to racial discrimination in the North.

Douglass’ invocation of citizenship at Western Reserve College, along with the wide-ranging discussion of the meanings and prerogatives of birthright citizenship at Black conventions throughout the 1850s, helped students see the long and complex story of the public meaning of section one of the Fourteenth Amendment. By the end of the decade, after the notorious Dred Scott decision was handed down in 1857, Ohio’s Black leaders, including John Mercer Langston, continued to hammer home the importance of birthright citizenship. In the “name of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the ancient policy of the Fathers of the Republic, the well-established doctrine that nativity gives citizenship” is what Black leaders wanted to keep in the forefront of people’s minds. “We are here, and here we intend to remain,” proclaimed Langston in closing his Cincinnati address. Black abolitionists kept the citizenship question at the forefront of politics in the late 1850s. 

As a teacher, the Black convention movement in the 1850s has helped me to broaden my story of the origins of the Civil War, especially the pitfalls to avoid when it comes to focusing too heavily on the controversy over slavery in the territories. The demand of antislavery activists for accused fugitives to be guaranteed a jury trial was an implicit recognition of Black citizenship. In addition, delegates to Black conventions throughout the decade pushed for more than mere due process rights in the face of attempts to enforce southern law in northern states. Just as there was a militant obstruction of the operation of the Fugitive Slave Law on northern soil, Black leaders were militant in their call for fuller measures of equality. They helped to develop the concept of birthright citizenship, a later hallmark of the Fourteenth Amendment, and passionately promoted the understanding that African Americans had a fundamental right to the equal protection of their natural rights by the government. There was nothing the white South feared more.

 

Further Reading

My students and I benefitted greatly from engaging with historian Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021). It is a must read for any teacher trying to bring the long history of civil rights into the classroom. Masur’s chapters on Ohio worked well in the classroom in conjunction with documents from Black conventions in the 1850s in Ohio that can be found on the Colored Conventions Project website. With my students I focused on the following gathering of Black abolitionists: 1849 Columbus, 1850 Columbus, 1851 Columbus, 1852 Cincinnati, and 1858 Cincinnati. 

Selections from Manisha Sinha’s comprehensive account of the abolitionist movement, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), provided much needed context for the students. I learned a great deal from legal scholar James W. Fox’s superb lengthy article, “The Constitution of Black Abolitionism.” Fox’s underappreciated scholarship fills a large hole in the discussion of antislavery constitutionalism. Historian H. Robert Baker’s article, “The Fugitive Slave Clause and the Antebellum Constitution,” Law and History Review 30 (no. 4, 2012) helped my students understand the operation of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Paul Finkelman’s article, “The Strange Career of Race Discrimination in Antebellum Ohio,” Case Western Reserve Law Review 55 (no. 2, 2004) was very helpful. See also Paul Finkelman, “Prelude to the Fourteenth Amendment: Black Legal Rights in the Antebellum North,” Rutgers Law Review 17 (no. 1, 1985-1986).

Eric Foner’s Gateway To Freedom: The Hidden History Of The Underground Railroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), provided my students with an engaging overview of clandestine efforts in the antebellum period to escape from slavery. Selections from R. J. M. Blackett’s The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), Steven Lubet’s Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), and H. Robert Baker’s The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006) were also utilized.

In preparing to teach the class over the summer, I benefited from reading Van Gosse’s The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), along with Christopher James Bonner’s, Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). For a number of years now, James Oakes’ scholarship has informed my thinking about a host of topics, including issues of race and citizenship, antislavery politics, and the antislavery constitutionalism. Teachers should read Oakes’ The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021) along with The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). Oakes’ groundbreaking scholarship builds upon arguments first introduced by William Wiecek in his classic work, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).

 

This article originally appeared in March 2023.

 

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Erik J. Chaput, Ph.D., teaches at Western Reserve Academy in Ohio and in the School of Continuing Education at Providence College. He received his doctorate in early American History from Syracuse University. He is the author of The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (2013) and has edited multiple letter collections with historian Russell J. DeSimone on the Dorr Rebellion Project website. This is his fourth teaching article for Commonplace. His previous articles, including a piece on the 1864 Black Convention in Syracuse, can be found in the archive section.

Of Levi Lincoln’s five sons, Levi II and Enoch would go on to become governors of Massachusetts and Maine respectively. Another son, John, became a sheriff and merchant in Worcester, and the youngest, William, became a lawyer and historian. His two daughters, Martha and Rebecca, married civic-minded lawyers. Indeed, before his life dissolved into unredeemable dissolution, Daniel Lincoln, the second son, had everything a man needed to make a good and distinguished life for himself. He had the Lincoln name, the education (Harvard Class of 1803), the occupation (lawyer), and the talent (orator and poet). But it wasn’t enough to save him from his addiction and the disastrous consequences that came with it.

The letters that make up Daniel’s story begin with his arrival at Harvard College in August 1801, forty miles from his beloved hometown of Worcester. Admitted as a junior, Daniel bypassed two years of hazing, complaining, and bonding with the other forty-three men in his class. His latecomer status to Harvard culture might have been but a minor handicap and socially negotiable, but Daniel was saddled with a different label that was harder to transcend—political outlier. Conservative Harvard had deep ties to the Federalist Party of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, the political nemeses of Levi Lincoln’s new boss, Thomas Jefferson. To make matters even stickier, just weeks before Daniel’s matriculation Levi had published a series of impenetrable essays entitled “A Farmer’s Letters” in which he excoriated Federalists, earning Levi the reputation as a “violent” Republican.

The fallout from Levi’s fevered attacks on Federalists cast Daniel into a netherworld of Harvard’s social untouchables. Other students avoided him. Social clubs either ignored or rejected him. He wrote to his mother that perfidious schoolmates who smiled at him had teeth like “whited tombstones.” He endured long, solitary walks pondering the place of self-interest in a country that both celebrated and feared it. He fantasized painful comeuppances to his enemies. “At college one may see all the subtle folly of the world & learn to fence with villains,” he observed to his brother. He wrote long dark poems about the ultimate leveler—death and graveyards. “Pow’r wealth and beauty are short-lived trust / Tis virtue only blossoms in the dust.” He missed the respect and recognition he got from his Worcester neighbors. “No one salutes me,” he moaned. Most of all he longed for his sweetheart and intended, Charlotte Caldwell.

By his second and final year at Harvard, Daniel had found a way to relieve his unhappiness, albeit temporarily. A classmate, William Sewall, who would go on to occupy a singularly undistinguished career as an attorney in Portland, Maine, introduced him to a more enticing life that featured “buxom girls with bosoms bear” and nectar from a “cheery vial.” Daniel was a changed man. Instead of bleakly attending coma-inducing recitations, Daniel accumulated fines for sleeping in chapel, ignoring deadlines, and leaving campus without permission. Even so, the Harvard government recognized his poetic talents and awarded him a coveted part in the 1803 commencement—to deliver a poem in English. They likely regretted their decision. The president, Joseph Willard, refused to sanction the piece, requested revisions, and threatened to withhold his diploma if Daniel refused to comply. But in a final nose-thumb to the school, Daniel delivered his poem “Benevolence,” a celebration of all things Jeffersonian in its original, unredacted form with this penultimate stanza:

The wretched sufferer they will never shun,

Whether he worship “twenty Gods or one:”

The rights of others never will refrain,

Who think with Watson, or agree with Paine.

Tis thus some phenix worthies erst have done.

Thus, too has Franklin, thus great Jefferson.

Their noble deeds elude the vulgar ken:

Sages in wisdom, as in feelings men.

Papists had sainted those of half their worth,

Applied their maxims as the tests of truth. . . .

The ode delighted Daniel’s father who immediately forwarded a copy to the third president.

After Harvard and while studying law with Levi, Daniel’s preordained path as Republican steward began well enough, but it soon took a tragic detour. Disease took Charlotte Caldwell when she was only seventeen, devastating Daniel and pitching him into an alcoholic abyss so deep and so public that the only remedy to preserve the family’s honor was a soft banishment to Portland in the District of Maine. Chastened and repentant, he arrived there in August 1806. He passed the bar exam, tried to dry out by living with Quakers, set up an office in the new Portland Bank Building, and was given the post of Cumberland County Attorney by his father who had become the state’s lieutenant governor when James Sullivan was elected governor in 1807. Pleased to have a Lincoln heir in their midst, Portland Republicans sent him clients, invited him to speak at political events, and introduced him to local notables. He befriended other young elite Republicans, among them the son of Jefferson’s Secretary of War Henry A. S. Dearborn. “He appears to be a man of pretty talents & polished manners,” he reported to his brother Enoch of Dearborn. But Daniel’s praise was qualified. “His literary acquisitions are not extensive, & I fear his fondness for amusements will interdict professional eminence.” Not all the up-and-comers merited Daniel’s even conditional approbation. He scorned Portland’s parvenues who, in his view, were interested only in padding their wallets while ignoring their civic responsibilities. To him, this was self-interest dangerously run amok. “Nothing is good which is not profitable to them. They chide every wind of heaven which wafts not their cargoes to the port of destination. Their feelings are as callous as an Osnaburgh executioner,” he grumbled. Acting as his father’s eyes and ears on the ground, he dutifully reported the vagaries of Portland politics that became especially pitched during the Embargo of 1807 that sent Portland’s shippers into bankruptcy and into the arms of Federalists. Sullivan and Lincoln won reelection in 1808, but Daniel’s new home of Portland flipped Federalist. 

In spite of all the political turbulence, Daniel fell in love again, this time with fifteen-year-old Mary Hodges. “Her friends discover in her, uncommon quickness of perception & veracity of thought,” he excitedly wrote to his sister. “She has a delicacy of mind & goodness of heart which cannot fail to attract and secure regard.” Here was Daniel’s path forward to a stable, respectable future.  At last. But between periods of productive sobriety, there were also some blowout benders so discreditable that even the folks in Worcester got word of them. The bacchanals soon cost him his reputation and the affection of Mary Hodges. Embittered and disparaged, Daniel cast himself as a misunderstood victim of a brutal rumor mill and a coquette’s cruel machinations. It was everyone’s fault but his own. Down but not out, if a thorough rehabilitation couldn’t happen in Portland, he would try again in Boston. He was, after all, still a Lincoln and a Republican and with that pedigree he could make his way. His family thought otherwise. They viewed the move as a leap from the frying pan into to the fire. Boston would not welcome him. Daniel’s struggles would be more difficult and more public there. There would be pernicious rumors and mutterings. But Daniel went anyway. “I shall leave Portland & endeavor in the vicinity of my friends to revive their dormant, if not alienated & estranged regards,” he pronounced. If he couldn’t live up to his name, as he had so spectacularly failed to do, at least he could trade on it.

“My father has consented to his coming to Boston as the only means of saving him, believing that any place is better than Portland as he has yet some reputation to lose . . .” wrote Daniel’s brother John Lincoln in a heads-up letter to his Boston cousins. Clearly unhappy with his son’s decision, Levi was not yet ready to give up on Daniel entirely. He would do what he could to launch his son into Republican politics in the land of feral Federalism. Through Levi’s connections with the Bunker-Hill Association, the sponsors of Boston’s Republican July Fourth celebrations, Daniel was tapped to deliver the 1810 Independence Day oration. Occupying the front pews of the Third Baptist Church that day were John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, and Elbridge Gerry among many others. It was an auspicious start but before too long his association with other young Republicans frayed and his law practice fizzled when his old Harvard classmates continued to shun him. “No professional acquaintance has favored me with a call since my arrival in town. Bestrew their little souls,” Daniel snarled. “Civility to me would not alienate their clients.” With the exception of some wealthy Waldo cousins who retained him in a Maine land claim dispute that they lost, only ordinary people, often without much money, sought his counsel. These common misfits and petty criminals were not the stuff of fame and fortune. Stymied, he looked to Governor Elbridge Gerry to deliver him a high-level patronage appointment that would rescue him. Eventually, after months of delay and foot-tapping, Gerry came through with a position suitable for the lawyer son of Levi Lincoln: judge advocate. 

But by 1812, with the exception of his youngest brother William, then eleven years old, the family was through with Daniel’s bingeing, flirtations, and erratic ways. They thought it foolish when he once again uprooted himself and returned to Portland after Mary Hodges signaled she might be interested in renewing the relationship. “I should have become bankrupt in health, happiness, & estate in Boston, & have escaped an evil fate by removal hence,” he declared. Unfortunately for Daniel, the family in Worcester wasn’t buying it and correspondence faded to a trickle. He fired off indignant letters but received no response. His brothers ignored him, moving on and up in their political careers, not wishing to be burdened with a problem like Daniel. Their silence wounded him: “Am I so entirely exfamiliated that domestic concerns, of so interesting a nature, are to be known by me only through the medium of public prints? If such be the case, let me be assured of it, that I may return future letters (if perchance I should receive any) from former friends unopened.” Even Levi was tapped out. Citing his fading vision, Levi Lincoln had retired from public office in 1811, his influence over patronage now as dim as his eyesight. Only when Daniel became too sick and worn out to care for himself, after the relationship with Mary failed for a second time, did Enoch intervene and insist he go home to regroup and recover. 

Daniel expected his convalescence to be brief, but months later he was still coughing, frail, and fatigued. “I consider it quite an equal chance that I never leave this town, that I find my settlement among those who have been,” he told Enoch. “I am incapable of the thought of business, a walk of one quarter of a mile is beyond my reach & a ride of a half-dozen miles length, should exhaust me to faintness.” Occasionally, however, he rallied. He was well enough in November 1814 to assist at the National Aegis when its editor, long-time friend Edward Bangs, left to defend Boston from a rumored British attack that never came during the War of 1812. “Our friend Danl W. Lincoln, has, to the astonishment of everyone, not only survived to this time but is regaining his health and strength so as to take exercise and employ the powers of his well-storied mind in the editorial department of the Aegis,” wrote Bangs. “Should God spare his life, I trust that a thorough reformation from his imprudencies, will prepare him for high usefulness in life and for the publick honours which he is qualified to obtain.” Bangs’ optimism was misplaced. In the early months of 1815, Daniel weakened, unable to leave his bed. He died in his sleep six weeks after his thirty-first birthday, on April 17, 1815. His fulsome death notice in the Aegis concluded with the forbidding phrase, Vitae summa brevis spem nos inebrare longam. Loosely translated means “Life is too short to spend it drunk.”

Would life had turned out better for Daniel Lincoln had he been born with a different name?  Perhaps. Daniel certainly thought so. Without the privileges, without the expectations, without the advantages that shaped him, he would have had to find his own way and rely on his God-given talents and smarts to get there. He knew he failed his father’s expectations of what it meant to be a Lincoln and it pained him. Perhaps if alcoholism hadn’t claimed him when it did and made of him a “victim of intemperance” he would have used his gifts and privileges more beneficially for himself and everyone else. But he could not break free and when he crashed and burned, his name was all he had left. By then it was a façade, and he knew it. He lamented to his brother that he should never have been born a Lincoln. It was all a terrible blunder. “I believe our souls must have been strangely bewildered in their passage from heaven or they never could have strayed so far toward the North Pole and stopped amid a moral winter where selfishness locks up all social feeling and interest petrifies every pulse of the heart . . . Neither you nor I were intended to be Lincoln or Waldo,” he commented. “There have been mistakes & it is too late to correct them. Providence slept perhaps.”

Further Reading

This essay was based on the Daniel Waldo Lincoln papers at the American Antiquarian Society. Other sources include: Bangs Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society; Robert Hallowell Gardiner, Early Recollection of Robert Hallowell Gardiner (Hallowell, Maine: White & Horne, 1936); Mark Lender and James Kirby Martin, Drinking in America: A History (New York: The Free Press, 1987); Martin Junior Petroelje, “Levi Lincoln, Sr., Jeffersonian Republican of Massachusetts,” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1969); William Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); William Willis, History of Portland from 1632 to 1864 with a Notice of Previous Settlements, Colonial Gains, And Changes of Government in Maine (Portland: Bailey & Noyes, 1865).

 

This article originally appeared in February 2023.

 

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Rebecca M. Dresser, Ph.D., has been an adjunct professor of history at Hunter College and Marymount Manhattan College’s Bedford Hills College Program for incarcerated women. She is the author of The Life of Daniel Waldo Lincoln, 1784-1815: Letters from a Wayward Son (New York: Routledge Press, 2023).

Despite John’s dalliance in the play with Abigail Williams, John and Elizabeth, as Miller portrays them, are strong-minded individuals who still love and support one another. In one courtroom scene Elizabeth pleads with John to cast aside his pride and confess to witchcraft and thereby save himself from execution. The Salem court, Elizabeth sobs, is unjust and not worth dying for. Confession, they both know, will save his life, at least for a time. In 1692 individuals who confessed to acts of witchcraft were deemed to be harmless and were not regarded as a danger to the public. Indeed, in 1692 fifty-eight individuals offered confessions in which they named other suspects and only five confessors were convicted. None were executed.

In The Crucible, Elizabeth is ensnared when she is forced to testify about her knowledge of John’s affair with Abigail Williams. Elizabeth was aware of what had taken place, but she denies it in court out of her love for John and to save his good name, even though she had told Judge Danforth about it. Danforth quickly proclaims that Elizabeth had given false testimony and he upholds the charge of witchcraft against her. Elizabeth was caught in a lie, one of the court’s traps in 1692, to force self-incrimination and turn unwitting defendants into frightened confessors who were then required to name other suspects in order to save themselves, thus becoming accomplices of the court in ferreting out other suspected witches. This was the precise parallel that Miller saw between the efforts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which grilled him about his acquaintances in the Communist Party, and the purpose of the Salem court.

In his close reading of some of the 1692 court records, Miller also picked up on an intriguing detail about the timing of Elizabeth’s pregnancy which kept her from the gallows. In the play, Elizabeth knows that she is pregnant well before she is arrested. In 1692 the witchcraft complaint against her is dated April 4, 1692. She was arrested seven days later on April 11 and examined by the Salem magistrates in court where John was also present. The next day both she and John were transferred to jail in Boston. Both were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death on August 5. John was sent to the gallows two weeks later on August 19, together with five others. But Elizabeth was not among them. Like John, she had refused to confess, but she had been granted a reprieve because she was pregnant. As the court did in such cases (there was one other in 1692), it agreed to postpone Elizabeth’s execution until after the birth of her child. Taking the life of an innocent unborn child was against the Puritan sense of God’s justice. The Salem court was closed at the end of October. In early February 1693, the newly established Superior Court was about to send Elizabeth to the gallows after she had given birth in jail in late January, but the governor stepped in and ordered her reprieved for a second time. She and her son remained in jail until May 1693, when she and the last of the remaining prisoners of the Salem debacle were freed.  

In the play, Miller portrays the moment when John fully realizes the implications of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, that she will be spared the gallows until after the child is born. It is a poignant, almost silent scene in the last act, just before John is sent to the gallows, when he sees Elizabeth fully pregnant. They are alone, and their affection for each other transcends the traumatic circumstances of the moment. Miller gives the following stage instructions: “He reaches out his hand as though toward an embodiment not quite real, and as he touches her, a strange soft sound, half laughter, half amazement, comes from his throat. He pats her hand. She covers his hand with hers. And then, weak, he sits. Then she sits facing him.” Proctor: “The child?”  Elizabeth: “It grows.” John then asks about their young sons, if they are safe, and she tells him they are well cared for. John replies, “You are a—marvel, Elizabeth.” She is pregnant, and he is amazed at her good fortune. His smile and comment that she is a “marvel” appear to suggest that he knows she will be reprieved and possibly escape the gallows altogether, which is what happened.

But was there more to it in 1692? Local Salem historian and genealogist Sidney Perley indicates that Elizabeth gave birth to a son on January 27, 1693. Knowing the date when Elizabeth gave birth and assuming a normal forty-week gestation period, it is possible to calculate the probable date of Elizabeth’s conception, which may indicate an untold story (see pregnancy wheel gestation calculator). Elizabeth was in her early forties. She had been married to John for seventeen years and had given birth to six children. Given a gestation period of forty weeks (April 22), conception would likely have taken place in late April or early May, when both were in the Boston jail where they had been transferred from the Salem jail on April 12, the day after Elizabeth’s hearing. Conception would have occurred before shackles were placed on the witchcraft suspects in late May to prevent them from afflicting their accusers. Conjugal relations in jail may seem unlikely to us today, but seventeenth-century colonial jails did not serve the same purpose as jails today. They were supervised locked houses where suspects were held for a short time before trial. John and Elizabeth might also have paid for a private room, which was possible in the Boston jail house, or as a married couple they may have been granted makeshift privacy. Given Elizabeth’s age and her previous six births, pediatricians consulted about this question say that a longer gestation period would have been highly unlikely. There was in fact a one-week period between Elizabeth’s accusation on April 4 and her incarceration in the Salem jail on 10 April, when she and John and might have attempted conception, but this would have involved an unlikely forty-two week gestation period before Elizabeth gave birth. Either way, however, Elizabeth’s conception while in jail or just before was likely attempted in hopes of a reprieve. Against all odds, they succeeded. John and Elizabeth managed to have Elizabeth become pregnant so that she could escape being hanged.

By August 19, John’s and Elizabeth’s execution date, Elizabeth would have been well over three months pregnant, and her condition would have been obvious to the court and to John. Even if they did not meet together in jail for the last time, as Miller portrays it, John would still have known that Elizabeth was temporarily reprieved because she was not in the ox cart that took him and four others from the Salem jail to Gallows Hill. Elizabeth’s execution was postponed by temporary reprieve until after she gave birth. Then the new governor stepped in and gave her a second reprieve, overruling Chief Magistrate William Stoughton’s demand that she be sent to the gallows in early February. The evidence suggests that despite the awful circumstances involved, John and Elizabeth tried to make it work out that way while in jail or just before. In either case her pregnancy was a “marvel” indeed.

 

Elizabeth named her newborn child John. Her husband had already fathered another son named John by his second wife, forty-one-year-old Elizabeth Thorndike who died in 1672. Unfortunately, the older John Jr. and his stepbrother Benjamin, by John’s first wife, would become a source of conflict for Elizabeth.        

In February, 1674, John wrote out a will in anticipation of his marriage to Elizabeth whose family name was Bassett. He divided his Salem estate equally among all of his children, and gave his land in Chebacco, which was then part of Ipswich, to Elizabeth Bassett as a dower gift. Elizabeth and John were married in April of that year. Fourteen years later in January 1688, he wrote out a new will which gave Elizabeth a share in his Salem house and lands, about fifteen acres, together with his sons and their families. This large properly would be “made over and give[n] unto my beloved wife Elizabeth [Bassett] Procter and all my children,” together with all livestock and household furniture.

Later when Elizabeth and her infant son were released from jail in May 1693, and Elizabeth returned to the Proctor farm in Salem, she discovered that stepsons John and Benjamin were in possession of the Salem house and land as well as her land in Chebacco. Moreover, the stepsons had denied Elizabeth the traditional “widow’s third” of the estate. In May 1696 Elizabeth wrote out a complaint and submitted it to the General Court in Boston disputing the settlement of John’s will and also the loss of her widow’s third.

[I]n that sad time of darknes before my said husband was executed, it is evident somebody had Contrived a will and brought it to him to signe wherin his wholl estat is disposed of not having Regard to a contract in wrighting mad with me before mariag with him . . . . sinc my husbands death the sd will is proved and aproved by the Judg of probate and by that kind of desposall the wholl estat is disposed of; and although god hath Granted my life yet those that Claime my sd husbands estate by that which thay Call a will will not suffer me to have one peny of the Estat nither upon the acount of my husbands Contract with me before mariage nor yet upon the acount of the dow[e]r which as I humbly conceive doth belong or ought to belong to me by the law for thay say that I am dead in the law and therfore my humble Request and petition to this Honoured Generall Court.

Elizabeth believed that her stepsons had cheated her out of her prenuptial inheritance as well as her widow’s third, although she admitted that she knew she was still “dead to the law” and could not inherit.

In 1692 just before John was to go to trial, his two sons from previous marriages, Benjamin and John Jr. had made out a new will, written in a clerical hand, and brought it to the jail for their father to sign. It was dated August 2, 1692, three days before his trial and conviction. The will’s key clause (at the center of the document) gives all of John’s property to Benjamin and John, Jr. as executors to distribute among their families:

I will and Bequeth equal . . . proportion of my whole estate when justly valuated unto each of my children . . . my two [eldest] sons shall have all my lands unto their shares; and they my two sons, namely Benjamin Procter & John Procter Junior, I do hereby constitute and appoint to be my lawful Executors.

Two years later, the will, which John had signed while still in shackles, was accepted by Bartholomew Gedney, Salem’s Judge of Probate, on December 3, 1694, and attested by Proctor’s friends James White and Philip Fowler, and John’s younger brother, Joseph Proctor. Both White and Fowler confirmed that John was of “disposing mind,” that is, that John was rationally capable of making a will. But Joseph took issue with this assessment and wrote a dissenting view, “I doth think that he [John] was not of disposing mind” in the bottom right of the document. What was the issue here? Perhaps Joseph believed that his brother did not fully apprehend that his previous will, which included Elizabeth as one of his heirs, would still have been valid. 

Elizabeth clearly suspected that John’s two oldest sons deprived her of her rightful inheritance. On the other hand, when the sons prepared John’s will and brought it to him to sign, they rightly assumed that both he and Elizabeth would be convicted, as indeed they were three days later. Thus Elizabeth, although reprieved because of her pregnancy, would still be officially “dead to the law” and barred from all its benefits, including the right to inherit property, until her attainder was lifted. But what they may not have realized is that their father’s previous will of 1688 would still have been valid, hence Elizabeth’s petition. Either his sons had convinced him otherwise or they were simply following their father’s anxiety about the possible loss of all his property to his heirs if Elizabeth remained as one of the heirs in the will. Already in July, John believed that his right to convey his estate was in doubt, as he lamented in his petition to several sympathetic Boston ministers. The Salem magistrates, he believed, “have already undone us in our Estates.” Time was of the essence, so John assumed, and he enlisted the help of his two elder sons to make out a new will in early August just three days before in would be put on trial. On the other hand, the sons themselves may have taken the initiative to cut out Elizabeth (should she survive) and preserve the whole of John’s estate for themselves, as she later charged.

In 1696, when Elizabeth submitted her complaint, she was still under legal attainder which she acknowledged in her petition. Nevertheless, she asked the General Court to change that status and “put me into the capacity to mak use of the law to Recover that which of Right by law I ought to have for my necessary supply and support.” But there were not enough members of the Court who were sympathetic to her cause to make any change. Governor Phips, who had previously granted her a second reprieve and stopped Stoughton’s plan to execute her after she gave birth, had died unexpectedly while in London in 1694. The zealous Stoughton, who wanted “to clear the land” of witches, became the acting governor and was apparently not willing to support Elizabeth’s request to lift her attainder and restore her legal status.     

A year later, however, Salem magistrate Bartholomew Gedney, as Probate Judge, tried to move Elizabeth’s case along, declaring that she was now “alive in the law, whereby to Recover her Right of Dowry,” that is, the Chebacco property, and Gedney may have informed the stepsons of his ruling. But by this time, the estate had already been apportioned according to John’s new will. Not until 1703 was Elizabeth’s attainder finally lifted allowing her to be “reinstated in their just Credit and reputation.”

In 1710 the General Court in Boston finally recognized that the Salem trials were a miscarriage of justice and authorized compensation for the families of those who had been executed and those who had been temporarily reprieved but were still under the death sentence. The government appears to have acknowledged that although Elizabeth had been condemned, she had been unfairly disinherited, and it awarded to “John Procter {wife}” £150 pounds, the largest amount conferred on any of the Salem victims, in recognition perhaps of the unfair way she had been treated. The funds were distributed to John Proctor Jr. and his brother Thorndike (another son of John’s second marriage) and to Elizabeth, who was not named but referred to indirectly as “persons Condemned & Not Executed.” How much of this sum she received is not indicated. In 1712 she appears by name, now as remarried “widow alias [Daniel] Richards” on a separate record as the recipient of these funds, together with twelve other names of Proctor family members who shared in the settlement. Still loyal to John’s memory, she may have continued to believe that he would never have stripped her of her inheritance, especially her dower. She died the same year at the age of sixty-five. For her steadfast loyalty to her husband and her persistence in seeking justice and gaining it, the John Proctor of 1692 might agree with the words of Arthur Miller’s John Proctor that Elizabeth was indeed a “marvel.”

 

Further Reading

For general account of the Salem witch trials, see Benjamin Ray, Satan and Salem (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015); for the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 court records pertaining to John and Elizabeth, see The Salem Witchcraft Trials Digital Archive; Arthur Miller’s “Why I Wrote The Crucible,” was published in The New Yorker, October 21-28, 1996; for John Proctor’s will of 1692, see Essex County Probate Court Papers, no. 22851:9 accessed from American Ancestors Essex County Probate Files; for John Proctor’s previous wills, 1688, 1674,  accessed from Salem Deeds, Deed Book 8, pages 388-40. 

Note: Seventeenth-century documents use the spelling Procter, while modern sources and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible use Proctor.

 

This article originally appeared in February 2023.

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Benjamin Ray is the Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Emeritus, University of Virginia. He is the author of Satan and Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), an associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, gen. ed. Bernard Rosenthal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Director of The Salem Witch Trials Digital Archive.

But the puzzle reshapes Stowe’s story. When her massively popular novel was translated into other forms, including theatrical productions as well as a whole slew of material objects, the story was adapted to suit its new forms, audiences, and purposes. The puzzle, aimed primarily at a child audience, gives Stowe’s story a happy ending, weakening the original political message of the story. But the idea of an “ending” relies on linear order, and the jigsaw puzzle form wreaks havoc on the narrative structure by which an ending is made meaningful by virtue of its position. Where does a story “end” when its pieces lie in a jumbled pile?

The puzzle represents Stowe’s story in some detail, capturing famous moments such as Eliza crossing the river ice, Topsy dancing, and little Eva’s death. But the ordering of the puzzle’s scenes does alter Stowe’s story in an important way. Stowe had originally placed the successful escape of Eliza, George, and Harry Harris to Canada before Simon Legree’s assault of Tom and his subsequent death. In a move with significant narrative repercussions, the final two scenes of the puzzle reverse Stowe’s order, positioning the Harrises’ arrival in Canada after Tom’s death. (The final scene of the puzzle seems to show two men and a girl being welcomed to the “Land of Liberty,” but this reflects Eliza and Harry Harris’ cross-gender disguises during their escape.)

By placing the successful escape after Tom’s murder, the puzzle transforms Stowe’s disquieting and ideally galvanizing tragedy into a narrative ultimately about triumph. The puzzle features Eliza in both the first and last scenes and thereby emphasizes her narrative arc, from enslavement and familial insecurity to freedom and a reconstituted nuclear family. The puzzle omits Stowe’s fraught colonizationist coda to the Harris story, in which the family decamps to Africa. It also brackets Tom’s story—featured in the second and second-to-last scenes, among others—within Eliza’s, subordinating tragedy to triumph.

A happy ending may well have seemed more appropriate in an object aimed at children. Jigsaw puzzles were originally invented as educational playthings. More specifically pinpointing the age of this puzzle’s target audience, educator Maria Edgeworth’s Early Lessons (1801) tells the fictional story of Frank, a six-year-old boy who struggles but ultimately succeeds in assembling a fifty-two-piece map jigsaw puzzle, presumably with a similar level of difficulty to the fifty-two-piece Uncle Tom’s Cabin puzzle. The puzzle’s level of difficulty could theoretically have been increased for older users, particularly by flipping it over and assembling it according to the abstract pattern of wavy red and black lines on its backing paper. But a series of stray pencil marks on the Uncle Tom’s Cabin side indicate that it usually faced up, capping the puzzle’s difficulty and solidifying children as its probable primary users.

Like the puzzle, book adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for child audiences altered Stowe’s narrative. For example, Pictures and Stories from Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) also ends on a reassuring note. It concludes with Tom’s death but casts it as a spiritual success story: “His Lord knows where he [Tom] lies, and will raise him up immortal, to appear with Him when He shall appear in his glory.” Then, following the conclusion of the narrative proper, the book reproduces the “Little Eva Song,” inspired by Stowe’s novel. This song, which contains lines like “All is light and peace with Eva” and “Weep no more for happy Eva,” presents Eva as “Uncle Tom’s Guardian Angel.” Thus the book ends with the image of a beneficent white girl enjoying her heavenly rest rather than a black man’s unjust death.

Pictures and Stories thereby reflects a trend in nineteenth-century books for children. As Barbara Hochman observes about a turn-of-the-century children’s version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “the new finale, which brings Tom back to Kentucky alive, participates in the growing tendency to end children’s books on the upbeat.” The puzzle also conforms to this tendency, and in fact, other Uncle Tom’s Cabin puzzles make the same change to Stowe’s story. These adaptations feed children a happy ending, arguably undercutting the original narrative’s point.

However, Hochman also discusses “how easily children discount narrative endings, features often taken (by literary scholars) as important arbiters of meaning.” She cites evidence showing that children can fixate on elements from the beginning and middle of stories, in some cases forgetting about happy endings while remembering more engagingly conflictual story elements. We might therefore question whether child users would necessarily have been significantly impacted by the puzzle’s reshaping of Stowe’s narrative arc to culminate in triumphant freedom. As with much material created for children, this puzzle may reveal more about what adults in the 1850s believed about (white) children than about children’s actual experiences.

Furthermore, an interpretive emphasis on endings assumes a linear consumption of narrative, with a book’s ending possessing particular reverberation due to its status as the final element consumed by the reader. But as Hochman points out, “linearity does not always govern reading.” And linearity definitely does not govern jigsaw puzzles, which represent a fundamental challenge to linear order, epitomized by a jumbled pile of puzzle pieces. 

Understanding puzzles as agents of disorder runs counter to a common interpretation that associates puzzles with the quest for and ultimate affirmation of order. Megan A. Norcia writes with regard to map puzzles that “the activity of puzzling grew out of . . . an eighteenth-century desire to tabulate, catalog, classify, and order the world into meaningful hierarchies.” To solve a puzzle successfully, one must connect the scattered pieces into a perfectly ordered whole, with all of the sense of control and chaos overcome that this process affords.

But the project of achieving order presupposes states of disorder. William Cowper, writing to the Reverend William Unwin in 1780, described a young boy who had “been accustomed to amuse himself with those maps which are cut into several compartments, so as to be thrown into a heap of confusion, that they may be put together again with an exact coincidence of all their angles and bearings, so as to form a perfect whole.” The satisfaction of forming the “perfect whole” depends on the prior action of throwing the pieces into “a heap of confusion.” For the puzzle to remain fun—an object to play with, rather than one just to look at—it demands disassembly, and the word “thrown” suggests a playful vigor and abandon to the act of disassembly. Destruction can be exciting, especially for children. If a jumble of disconnected puzzle pieces urges a player to assemble them into an orderly whole, the assembled puzzle, with its still eminently visible cuts, begs to be taken apart and jumbled up again.

A hint at the dynamic history of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin puzzle can be found in one of its center pieces. Given matching marks on its front and back sides, this piece may well have been chewed on: a different way to digest Stowe’s story. The lack of similar damage to surrounding pieces indicates that this piece’s misadventure occurred when it was separated from its neighbors. This reveals the formative portion of the puzzle’s life spent in disassembly, with the Uncle Tom’s Cabin story lying in detached pieces, untethered from Stowe’s sequencing. Whereas a book’s binding secures narrative cohesion and therefore a prescribed order, a puzzle allows the parts of a narrative to break apart and function independently, in a variety of potential configurations. 

In some ways, the pieces of the puzzle resemble the piecemeal character of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin story when it was first serialized in the National Era newspaper, broken up into weekly installments. But serialization’s leveraging of suspense, in which readers eagerly awaited the revelation of what would happen next, relied on a particular narrative order. And whereas puzzle users had significant agency over the ordering and disordering of the puzzle’s pieces, Stowe and the newspaper publisher controlled the order of the serialized novel’s parts. Readers could have shuffled the newspaper issues featuring the story, but the ordinal logic of the chapter numbers and of each masthead’s date and issue number would have discouraged such behavior. 

Serialization particularly constrained children, through the additional control exercised by their families. Stowe, in a note included with the final newspaper installment, lauded the “pleasant family circles” who had been consuming the story. She modeled the pedagogical thrust that she expected of these gatherings as she urged her child readers to “learn from this story always to remember and pity the poor and the oppressed.” Even if a family failed to embody the pedagogical ideal, adults likely mediated children’s engagement with the serialized story, given children’s reading levels and the multiple household demands on a newspaper with content not limited solely to the story. The puzzle, in contrast, put children in charge of the story, no longer bound to the pedagogical and productive, and empowered them to seek the pleasures of disorder as well as order.

Beyond the energies that children might therefore have unleashed on the puzzle, the puzzle itself has a kinetic and centrifugal quality. Like many British-made puzzles of its era, only its edge pieces interlock. The inner pieces have a “push-fit” design that provides no stable coupling, making them highly prone to being jarred away from each other. In puzzle form, Stowe’s story tends to come apart at the seams. 

Given this design of cuts, users could help themselves by assembling the edges of the puzzle first, which would then act as a frame to corral the unruly inner pieces. However, if a user took this approach, strange deformations of Stowe’s story would occur. The content depicted on the edge pieces—the sides mostly blank, the title “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” blazoned across the top, and the lower half of the lowest row of scenes stretched along the bottom—means that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” would for a time be primarily associated with strangely mutilated human forms, cut off at the waist, as well as Tom’s dead body splayed on the ground (see previous figure). This mode of assembly would thus entail a sustained contemplation of Tom’s corpse, potentially mitigating any reassuring effect of placing the Harrises’ happy ending in the final spot of the assembled puzzle image, as the story’s culmination. A user might or might not spend significant time studying the fully assembled image, given that the compulsion to solve the puzzle would at that point have been satisfied. So the greatest intensity and duration of engagement for many puzzle users might well have been with the contingent, unsettled, and sometimes unsettling configurations that the story took in its various stages of disassembly.

Narratives do significant cultural work in how they communicate stories and to whom, including their ways of managing narrative closure and its potential for reassurance. But ideological interventions made within a narrative—such as rearranging Stowe’s story to give it a happy ending—have to contend with the potentially more radical interventions that the jigsaw puzzle form visits upon that narrative. Whatever logics of tragedy or triumph might structure a narrative when consumed in its prescribed order, the materiality of the puzzle form gleefully destabilizes them.

 

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Elizabeth Burgess, Director of Collections & Research at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, for her assistance.

Further Reading

On the history of jigsaw puzzles, see Megan A. Norcia, “Puzzling Empire: Early Puzzles and Dissected Maps as Imperial Heuristics,” Children’s Literature 37 (2009): 1-32; Anne D. Williams, The Jigsaw Puzzle: Piecing Together a History (New York: Berkeley Books, 2004); and Linda Hanna, The English Jigsaw Puzzle (London: Wayland Publishers, 1972), where the William Cowper quote can be found. On the relationship between games—including puzzles—and nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture, see Douglas A. Guerra, Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Many aspects of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s reception history are covered in Barbara Hochman, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). For more on Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the nineteenth-century construction of childhood, see Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

On narrative, including the function of endings, see Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984); and, more recently, Brian Richardson, A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2019). For an analogue to jigsaw puzzles’ disruption of linear narrative, in the phenomenon of so-called “puzzle films,” see Warren Buckland, ed., Hollywood Puzzle Films (New York: Routledge, 2014).

 

This article originally appeared in January 2023.

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Patricia Jane Roylance is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University, and author of Eclipse of Empires: World History in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013). Her current book project, The Textures of Time in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Media, explores the temporalities associated with various media forms, including jigsaw puzzles.

Before we get to the future, it might be helpful to look back at how Commonplace has attempted to engage its audience from the very beginning. In the last editor’s note, we examined how Commonplace has made numerous front-end and back-end changes over its more than twenty-year history to respond to technological developments as well as reader preferences. Part of that narrative highlighted several iterations of message boards (Republic of Letters and Common-place Coffeeshop) and blogs (Public Occurrences 2.0) that tried and failed to create an active conversation space in the early years of the publication. Eventually, the work of communicating directly to readers largely migrated to third-party social media platforms.

This movement followed the wide embrace of smartphones and a change in how internet users used their time online. In a recent article in The Atlantic entitled “The Age of Social Media is Ending,” Ian Bogost details a shift from social networking sites such as Friendster, Myspace, and others that focused on connecting users to one another to social media sites like Twitter that served more as a “channel through which to broadcast.” Some social networking sites like Facebook or Instagram straddled the social networking/media line by relying on connections but evolved to focus primarily as a method to distribute content. 

Commonplace never had much luck creating our own network of users through message boards and blogs, but even if we had, there was a powerful pull toward privatized platforms in these years. Commonplace joined most of our peer publications in the social media universe with a Facebook account in 2011 and one on Twitter in 2012. For many years, we did not make full use of these accounts and only sporadically posted information about new issues and articles. On the eve of our 2019 relaunch as Commonplace.online, we had fewer than 1,900 followers on Twitter and under 500 on Facebook. The relaunch proceeded in two phases. First, we spent over a year bringing the entire back catalog to the new site while highlighting several articles and reviews through weekly themes. Next, in the fall of 2021, we began publishing brand new material with two to three articles a month making their debut. During both phases, we have used social media to announce new pieces and remind readers of previously published articles that they may have missed or forgotten about. While these posts do not often generate a lot of discussion, they have been successful in helping to drive readership to the site and a 50 percent jump in followers. 

Of course, some of our outreach in recent years has come not through social media. We realized that many of our readers would not be Facebook or Twitter users, so Commonplace created a subscriber list in 2015 that has grown to over 4,500 members, more than all of our different social media followers combined. In the last few years, we have put that list to use and developed a monthly newsletter to highlight recent articles and tease upcoming publications. (If you are not already signed up, you should do so by submitting your email here).

That is not the end of the story, however. The choice for a publication like Commonplace to use third-party social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter means that we are implicitly supporting those companies and the decisions of their leadership team. In an era when the political statements and technological whims of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg do not always align with our own, many of us are trying to figure out how to best use social media. How can we make use of these powerful tools in a way that satisfies our personal desires and professional goals, while not leaving a bad taste in our mouth because of the feeling that we compromised our ethical standards? You might still have a Facebook account to check in with some friends from high school and see pictures of their children heading off to their first day of a new school year, but have also stopped checking it too often because the posting about politics was distressing (especially coming from that old friend from sophomore English class). Maybe you are just hoping that Friendster comes back or that Tom finds a way to revamp Myspace.

This is not the first time that Commonplace confronted questions about our use of social media. A few years ago, we wrestled with how to handle the surge of Covid misinformation, troll farm posting about the Black Lives Matter protests, and a burgeoning Cambridge Analytica scandal related to Facebook. We followed the lead of one of our sponsors, the Omohundro Institute, as they reassessed their use of social media. The OI statement released at the time explained that “information integrity is at the heart of the Omohundro Institute’s mission. Sharing scholarship and the scholarly process with the public is so important to us because we know that understanding how we get to high quality scholarship is key to that integrity.” We wholeheartedly agreed and suspended new Facebook posting for Commonplace in June 2020.

With the recent ownership change at Twitter, we have been confronted by similar questions and have been discussing if another change is required. Whether it is the decision to re-platform white nationalist accounts or broadcast homophobic and antisemitic posts from the highest levels, the site has very quickly come to feel like a different social media space. Also contributing to my sense of unease is the chaos that the new ownership has manufactured by rapidly changing rules and policies. In just the time that I have been working on this piece, several high-profile journalists have had their Twitter accounts suspended for questionable reasons, which led to another call for people to leave the site and move to alternatives like Mastodon or Post.

The size of Twitter and its reach means that there is not necessarily an easy replacement right now for most people and organizations (if there was, I think a much greater number of people would have already left). The leading options right now seem to be Post, which is still in beta form and currently places prospective users on a waitlist, and Mastodon, a collection of independently run, federated social media servers called “instances.” For some users these sites are not as easy to navigate as Twitter and they may be unwilling to take the time to learn. Another question that users have been asking is if the audience on these sites will be as diverse as Twitter. Just a few weeks into the movement of people from Twitter to Mastodon, critics have questioned whether the site will host similar numbers of people of color and how those accounts will be treated. One recent and reassuring piece of news for history-minded social media users interested in Mastodon is the launch of an instance called historians.social by Karin Wulf, Joseph Adelman, and Liz Covart, current and former OI colleagues who clearly spell out their moderation philosophy in their code of conduct.

We have also been paying close attention to what other members of the early American history community have been doing and saying. A recent piece by historian Seth Cotlar (on Post) about why he was stepping back from Twitter and moving to Mastodon and Post at a time when he had over 55,000 followers noted that he has been thinking carefully about the relationship between the medium and the message and it became harder and harder to contribute his content to a medium that is controlled by someone enabling bad and dangerous behavior. This is a powerful argument for moving on from what sometimes seems like a toxic environment. Likewise, the Omohundro Institute recently set up a Mastodon account on the historians.social instance and will begin posting there moving forward. Maybe adding to our existing social media profile rather than entirely moving to another platform is a better option. We have a lot to consider as we figure out our own path.

So, what is the right decision for Commonplace when it comes to choosing a social media strategy? Should we stick with Twitter, move to a new site like Mastodon, or just expand our efforts and post on both platforms? Is it worth getting out of the social media game all together? A return to blogging? We would love to hear if our readers have any ideas or suggestions for a model of engagement that they would prefer. It is end of our New Year’s address about Commonplace and social media, so now we are asking you to contribute. Please let us know your thoughts by reaching out here.

 

This article originally appeared in January 2023.

 

Special thanks to Commonplace production editor Jordan Taylor for his insight and thoughts on this piece. His new book, Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America (2022) is a vital read on truth, politics, and the media.

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Joshua R. Greenberg is the editor of Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life. He is the author of Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic (2020) and Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840 (2008).

The night shirt was carefully cut into sections, presumably by Colman. For those who might have revered the piece of clothing as a sacred relic, this common act allowed for multiple people to experience the object as a site of history and memory. The shirt’s fragmentation and distribution also worked to multiply the object’s possible monetary value. Although it can be assumed that Lucy Colman simply gave Carrie Day the sleeve due to their personal connection, she may have sold the remaining pieces. Indeed, Lincoln’s murder, and his subsequent transition in national memory to becoming a “Martyred President,” transformed any objects associated with the president into powerful and valuable relics. Commemoration, commerce, and complex social connections combined to dictate the paths and diversions of this obscure object and others. But with the provenance uncertain for this particular object, how is it still valuable to us today? 

The night shirt’s first career as a utilitarian object emphasizes just how ordinary it was across both class and race. By the mid-nineteenth century, northern textile mills were spinning cotton into cloth and streamlining clothing production with the help of sewing machines, participating in the growing industry of mass-production and what historian Michael Zakim terms “ready-made democracy.” This “ready-made commodity” embodied the social mobilization possible because of the Industrial Revolution. The standardization of the making and selling of (mostly men’s) clothing provided a wide variety of consumers with money-saving convenience. 

To further unravel the shirt’s history, we must acknowledge that this cotton night shirt exposes the relationship between the period’s mass-producing textile industry and the slave society of the American South. To be sure, the delicate materiality of the night shirt, itself seemingly representative of a democratic republican culture of civility and gentility, is at odds with the human cost of cotton’s production. The social relationship between the labor of cotton production and the commodified cotton shirt, between the laborer and consumer, mirrors a complicated contest between opposing ideas of civilization in nineteenth-century America. 

If the night shirt did in fact previously belong to the president, its purpose, meaning, and value were dramatically transformed after Lincoln took his last breath. The nation, already in mourning following a bloody Civil War, now had to also reconcile with the sudden death of the president. In Mourning Lincoln (2016), historian Martha Hodes writes that “by gathering and preserving relics, the bereaved sought confirmation of the cataclysmic event [of his death], wrote themselves into the history they had witnessed, and enshrined the past for the future.” Lincoln-related relics became representations of national loss, tangible evidence of the national trauma that Americans struggled to come to terms with. Trophies, souvenirs, keepsakes, sacred relics—objects became a bonding agent between a troubling past and an uncertain future.

In Behind the Scenes or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), Elizabeth Keckley, a seamstress for Mary Lincoln, claims that Mary gave her several keepsakes following the president’s death. She recollects two objects in particular—a comb and brush: “With this same comb and brush I had often combed his head. When almost ready to go down to a reception, he would turn to me with a quizzical look: ‘Well, Madam Elizabeth, will you brush my bristles down to-night?’ ‘Yes, Mr. Lincoln.’ Then he would take his seat in an easy-chair, and sit quietly while I arranged his hair.” Keckley was “only too glad to accept this comb and brush” from the hands of the president’s widow. Her memory of this intimate interaction exemplifies why personal, everyday objects are so valuable for historians and anthropologists. Objects such as these offer an intimate sensory experience, allowing us to feel what the person felt. A shirt and a comb provide us with a sense of the man that we cannot access by reading written documents. As historian Teresa Barnett points out, nothing permits us to engage with the past quite like the “substance of the past itself, materially identical to what it was in that other time and yet equally here and participating in our present.”

Sacred relics provided a material means of engaging with loved ones and memorializing events. For Mary Lincoln, the shirt might have functioned as a material continuation of Mr. Lincoln’s existence after his death. However, according to Keckley, Mary Lincoln gave away all objects that were “intimately connected with the president,” as she “could not bear to be reminded of the past.” After the shirt was transferred, the object-subject relationship and experience changed, as well as the object’s value. 

If the documentation is accurate, Mary passed the night shirt to Lucy Colman, the abolitionist who had escorted Sojourner Truth to the White House in 1864. After the war, Colman possessed several relics that we might find reasonably strange today: tufts of grass from the yard of Jefferson Davis’s Richmond home, a whipping post and slave whip, and a piece of Lincoln’s coffin. Yet, she had given all of these objects away by the time she wrote her 1891 memoir Reminiscences. The only relic still in her possession at the time was the night shirt. In the memoir, she describes the night shirt (and Mary Lincoln) as “strange.” Her ambivalence toward the object echoed her skeptical attitude toward the president. Colman did not shy away from critiquing the controversial president in her publication. Her ambiguous feelings about Lincoln and his legacy might explain her decision to cut and distribute the night shirt. Also, this ambiguity is illustrative of a fragmented and fraught relationship between Americans and the “Great Emancipator.”

Regardless of how she viewed Lincoln’s ethics, Colman must have sensed the intensifying historical value of the night shirt. By carefully and deliberately cutting and distributing objects, Americans shared and created new memories of the national trauma. Moreover, the act also provided individuals with an opportunity for recognition and trade. Circumstantial evidence reveals that it was through her sister, Aurelia (Danforth) Raymond, that Colman likely met Carrie Day. Raymond and Day both studied medicine and both were living and practicing at the same time in Onondaga County, New York. Carrie Day’s family eventually settled in Castana, Iowa, and her own feelings about the president may be understood through her decision to name one of her daughters Cornelia Lincoln Day. What happened to the shirt sleeve following Caroline’s death in 1904 remains unclear. The complicated journey and negotiations of Civil War era relics, like this very night shirt, illuminate the complex evolution of memorializing the Civil War. The transfer of objects, and the resulting social networks, continuously reanimated and reinvented meaning and value. Why would Caroline’s children sell or give away an object that clearly had deep meaning for her? Could ambivalent feelings about Lincoln have contributed to this decision? One obvious possibility is that the economic value of the shirt may have outweighed its sentimental value. Just as it is feasible that Lucy Colman sold the remaining pieces of the shirt, Caroline Day’s family may have also profited from selling the sleeve.

Abraham Lincoln’s violent death added a complex dimension to collecting presidential  memorabilia. The national tragedy enhanced both the material and immaterial value of all Lincoln-related objects. In Stuart Schneider’s Collecting Lincoln (1997), he acknowledges that collectors began their work “even as Lincoln lay dying.” As collecting grew, the focus began to shift from an emphasis on commemoration to an investment opportunity. An obsession with the monetary value of Lincoln-objects by some collectors began to hinder an important relationship between collecting and scholarship. Therefore, not only has collecting and preserving been vital to the ever-growing scholarship on the Civil War era, but so has the willingness of collectors to open up their collections to scholars for study or even give their collections to educational institutions.

The Frank and Virginia Williams collection of Lincolniana was donated to Mississippi State University in 2017 and is housed alongside the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library. Both collections are prime sources for Civil War research and, surprisingly, are located in the state that was only second to secede from the Union. The Lincolniana collection consists of over 30,000 items, approximately 16,000 of which are pamphlets and books. In a recent interview, Williams explained that his decision to give this collection to the southern university was rooted in his own hope that the collection’s presence in this location would aid in the continued process of healing between the North and the South, suggesting that the fight for freedom did not end at Appomattox but “is an ongoing process even today.” 

This night shirt, now displayed in a glass case, is valorized into a decommodified value system. Its fragmentation is evidence of the object’s complex value, while its careful preservation now as a museum object also indicates that it is historically invaluable. The night shirt began as an ordinary shirt—a common product for any common man. But after the president’s death, the object transformed into something much different and much more powerful. If truly believed by its various holders to be a sacred relic, an extension of Lincoln himself, then it may have provided a means for coping with the complex wounds of war. 

Despite the object’s ambiguous provenance and journey, it continues to facilitate important social relationships; this is proven through the valuable interactions that were prompted by this very project. It continues to provoke important questions about what material objects can tell us about our nation’s history: what other stories can be embodied in historical objects? We are continuously compelled to weave together the complicated story of our nation. Written texts can only provide us with a limited understanding of our past. Maybe it is through the medium of material objects that we can work to secure the missing pieces.

 

This article originally appeared in December 2022.

 

Further Reading

Teresa Barnett, Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Lucy Colman, Reminiscences (Buffalo: H.L. Green, 1891).

Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (New York: G.W. Carleton & Co., 1868).

Stuart Schneider, Collecting Lincoln (Atglen: Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 1997).

Frank J. Williams and Mark E. Neely Jr., “The Crisis in Lincoln Collecting,” Books at Brown—Lincoln and Lincolniana (Providence: The Friends of the Library of Brown University, 1985).

Michael Zakim, “A Ready-Made Business: The Birth of the Clothing Industry in America,” Business History Review 73 (Spring 1999): 61-90.

Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

 

Acknowledgments

Special thank you to Chief Justice Frank J. Williams and his wife Virginia, Mississippi State University archivist Dr. Ryan Semmes, and independent historian Jake Harding of Castana, Iowa.

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Amber Morgan Gill is an English Literature and Composition lecturer at Mississippi State University, as well as a part-time History Ph.D. student there. She studies the Civil War era with special interest in republican motherhood, sentimental nationalism, and the value of material objects.

The 1693 Royal Charter for the College of William & Mary identifies multiple lines of funding to support the planned school, including what today appears as a seemingly innocuous designation of quitrents from 20,000 acres in Pamunkey Neck and below the Blackwater River: “tenn [sic] thousand Acres of Land not yet legally taken up or possessed by any of our other subjects lying & being on ye South side of ye black-water Swamp, as also other tenn [sic] thousand Acres of land not yet legally taken up or possessed by any of our other Subjects lying & being in ye neck of land commonly called Pamunkey Neck between ye forks of Yorke River . . .” However, these were the same indigenous lands of the Nansemond, Nottoway, Weyanoak and Pamunkey identified and “Confirmed” in the 1677 Articles of Peace. 

The founders’ intent to propagate the Christian faith “amongst ye Western Indians” is clearly outlined in the first lines of the charter. What is less well known is that the College funding needs resulted in the transfer, survey, and patenting of 20,000 acres of trust lands from Native jurisdiction to the Trustees of the university. Even though the survey of multiple Native territories was decreed by the 1677 treaty, it took nearly 25 years to establish the boundaries for what would later be known as ‘Indian reservations’ and to open the remainder of Indian lands to English plantation. The delay was, in part, because of the need to establish and maintain peaceful relations between Englishmen and Indians through multiple regional conflicts of the 1670s and 1680s, but also because colonial officials, churchmen, and gentry argued about the dispensation of the quitrent taxes from the patenting process. Accommodation among the colonials was reached by 1705, and the survey and development of Southside lands that followed partially fulfilled the fiduciary lines identified in the 1693 Charter. Two areas of “College Lands” were formed out of Native territory in Pamunkey Neck (King William County) and below the Blackwater River (Surry County). King William lands above the Pamunkey Indian reservations were known as Upper College, and those university lands closer to the confluence with the York River, Lower College.

The Reverend James Blair, as the Commissary in Virginia for the Bishop of London and the first president of the College, was the primary colonial agent behind the Charter’s funding streams. Blair’s intent to funnel the Virginia quitrents towards ecclesiastical salaries and College purposes was thwarted by the colony’s elites. They favored maintaining the quitrents for the colony’s administration. King William approved the use of several thousand pounds of Virginia quitrents to construct the College. The 20,000 acres of Indian lands granted to William & Mary became Blair’s only reliable source of quitrent income for the school. To placate Blair and further support the university, additional monies were appropriated in 1718 for the purchase of patented lands which led to the College’s acquisition of a fledgling 2,119-acre Southside plantation from colonist Thomas Jones. Thereafter, this large property was known as the “Nottoway Quarter” due to its recent origins as indigenous land and its adjacency to the Nottoway River. These lands straddled the river within the recently formed Prince George (1703) and Surry counties, and after 1720, 1752 and 1754, Brunswick, Dinwiddie and Sussex counties; by 1780, a portion of the Nottoway Quarter rested in the newly created Greensville County. Combined, the granted and purchased lands provided the collegiate institution with rents and income from tobacco harvests on College-owned plantations. A significant portion of the annual budget for William & Mary was derived from the combination of tobacco tariffs, land rents, and yields of tobacco production and thus directly linked the College to enslaved labor and colonized indigenous lands.

The financial records of the College, while fragmentary, indicate that rents from “college lands” were paid in hogsheads of tobacco, shipped to England, and sold by the university’s agents in London markets at the going price of the day. “Surry Rents” yielded £50 to £70 annually or as high as £183; “King Wm. Rents” also ranged from £60 to £100 or possibly £150 or more during a good year. College-owned farm yields in tobacco, such as from the large plantation at the Nottoway Quarter, produced similar sums. The market and crop yield impacted the annual revenue, which typically produced less than £500 for the College in London tobacco clearing houses.

The Virginia collection points for tobacco tariffs due the College were located at warehouses along the waterways in the Tidewater. These points of collection were known as “warehouse districts.” William & Mary collected duties from the river districts of the Lower and Upper James, York, Rappahannock, Potomac, Pocomoke, and Accomack, with the heavier tonnage of tobacco leaving the lower tidewater. Collectors were assigned to each warehouse district and port, with collections returned to the Bursar at Michaelmas, Lady Day, and Christmas. Tobacco was taxed a pence or “penny” per pound for shipments destined for ports other than England; ships such as the Dear Betsey, Ogechee, and Friendship hailed from Liverpool, Georgia, and Virginia and were bound for British ports in Antigua, Barbados, and Granada, among others. Leading up to the midcentury, College accounts recorded less than a £300 per annum average for tobacco tariffs. From 1755 to 1765, the institution earned £3334.3.5 or “communibus annis £333.8.4.” However, in 1768, the total tax yielded more than £846. Tobacco tariff duties were added to the College ledger alongside crop yields from the Nottoway Quarter and rents from King William and Surry paid in tobacco.

Managing the College monies and lands was complicated and required the services of managers and overseers on both sides of the Atlantic who were skilled in the merchant practices of the day. The proximity of the school to the colony’s capital likely facilitated the construction of the necessary bureaucracy. In Williamsburg, a network of scribes, bookkeepers, clerks, note takers, and agents functioned in support of College and mercantile efforts. There were networks of managers and accountants associated with the Brafferton Estate in Yorkshire; tobacco agents in London; Virginia collectors of taxes on furs, skins, tobacco, and liquor; and managers of the properties in King William and Surry as well as the Nottoway Quarter. All received a commission or fee for their administerial efforts. These functions were needed on both sides of the Atlantic—at the ends and origins of the commodity chains in England and Virginia.

The “Nottoway Plantation,” as it was sometimes referred to in the documentary record, was subject to annual quitrents and poll taxes. Not part of the “College Lands” granted by the Royal Charter, the Nottoway Quarter was taxed, which contrasted with the university land grants in King William and Surry. Other taxed lands yielding rents and or produce were College-owned parcels in Isle of Wight and Elizabeth City counties, among other locales.

In addition to the rental income, annual tobacco yield, and some minor crops in wheat, the Nottoway Quarter and grant lands provided the College with fuel for cooking and heating, which reduced the cost for this necessary expense. Extant bursar records confirm that there were payments for specialized services, sometimes involving enslaved labor. This included a 1740 payment to Gabriel Maupin for cutting and hauling “33 Load of [fire] Wood.” Likewise, College President James Horrocks hired “two Negroes” in 1768 for “Cutting and Carting Wood on the College Lands for the Use of the said College.” In 1770, the College determined that “the sum of £5 be annually allow’d to Mr. Nicholson while he overlooks . . . the College wood.”

Most Nottoway Quarter expenses charged to the College involved the table fare and support of the enslaved plantation population, as well as the oversight of farm productivity. During the 1740s, a “Mr. Dempsey” was compensated annually for managing the plantation and acquiring various “Sundrys,” clothing for the laborers at the College Quarter and submitting bills for “Ferryages” to cross the James River between Williamsburg and Swan Point. In 1760, “Mr. Robert Walker” was “to overlook the College Quarter at Nottoway, & that he be allow’d the Rate of twenty Pounds [per] ann. for his Trouble.” A “Mr. Withers” took the position in 1768. Walker, Withers, and other College overseers kept accounts of “goods sent them,” “Goods imported per Mr. Nicholson’s” and nondescript “Expenses” charged against Nottoway Quarter yields. Tobacco harvests were carted by enslaved persons with “2 work oxen from thence” toward the James River warehouses for “Inspection . . . at Bolling’s point” before the crops’ “Voyage to G. Britain,” received under the care of College agents “Capel & Osgood Hanbury” in London.

The annual income of the Quarter was used by the College to support the plantation, as well as to fund the “Nottoway Foundation,” which typically provided four scholarships for White students of William & Mary. Recipients of the support were identified and recommended by the “President & Masters.” Thereafter, the students were called “scholars” and received financial support for their education. Some scholars of the Nottoway Foundation during the third quarter of the eighteenth century included William West in 1757, James Marshall in 1760, Thomas Davis in 1768, William Leigh in 1769, William Dawson in 1770, Walker Maury in 1770, James Innes in 1771, David Stuart in 1771, Thomas Hughes in 1772, William Starke in 1772, Thomas Clay in 1773, and Thomas Dixon in 1774. While sometimes called “Nottoway Scholars,” these individuals were not Nottoway Indians, but rather came from upper-class White families, most of whom had fathers and siblings of distinction within colonial society. Marshall served as the Second Usher of the Grammar School in 1770. Innes also became an Usher and, later, Attorney General of Virginia. It is noteworthy that some Nottoway Indian students in attendance at the Brafferton Indian School adopted the patronym “Scholar” and were doubtless aware of the connotation and the origins of the land that supported the Nottoway Foundation.

Less is known about the enslaved individuals who resided at the Nottoway Quarter during the eighteenth century. Like the Native students residing at the Brafferton Indian School, who many times were unnamed and listed only as “Indians,” the enslaved were described anonymously as “Negroes belonging to the College.” The names of the enslaved were rarely recorded prior to the American Revolution. The names that do appear in parish records are notations of births and baptisms: Bruton Parish for enslaved peoples in Williamsburg and Bristol Parish for any enslaved persons residing at the Nottoway Quarter. Only one birth and one baptism were recorded between 1718 and 1777, the years enslaved persons worked at the Nottoway Quarter for the College. In 1734 the Bristol Parish listed “Ben, male Slave belongg [sic] to the Colledge [sic] of Wm & Mary”—although many more individuals resided, had families, and toiled on the Nottoway tract of land. When the original acquisition of the land was finalized, President James Blair allocated £467 for the purchase of seventeen slaves to work the new venture. While the documentary evidence does not record the purchase of any additional bound labor for the Nottoway Quarter, expenditures recorded by the Bursar are large enough to assume that the enslaved workforce increased throughout the eighteenth century. By the late 1770s, over thirty enslaved individuals resided on the plantation, most likely the children and grandchildren of the original laborers.

Scholars who have researched the relationship of William & Mary to slavery have assumed the original seventeen slaves purchased for the Nottoway Quarter were all of African descent. However, Virginia slave purchases, taxes and legal records of the period indicate enslaved Indians were commonly found on Tidewater farms and plantations and in Williamsburg. It is possible that James Blair’s initial investment in founding a College slave population may have included Native peoples. The actual number and percentage of enslaved Indians in the colony from 1718 through 1723 remains unknown, but “Indian slavery was ubiquitous” in Virginia, with thousands of Natives ensnared in chattel slavery. Between 1670 and 1715, it is estimated that 50,000 Southeastern Native peoples were sold into slavery. In comparison, approximately 10,000 enslaved Africans were imported into North America, including the Caribbean and New Spain, prior to 1700. Most Native captives from the North American interior were transferred to South Carolina, then exported to the West Indies. However, records indicate Native “Carolina slaves” were traded northward to Virginia and New England. As late as 1718, Indian slaves composed 28 percent of imported laborers along the Upper York River, adjacent to College Lands in Pamunkey Neck. Similarly, Surry County had the highest number of Native forced laborers during the period from 1680 through 1703, according to the tithes paid in the county register. It is therefore reasonable to speculate that in the earliest years, the rented College Lands in King William and Surry counties were worked, at least in part, by enslaved Indians. Their labor, along with an increasing number of Africans, paid the College rents in tobacco.

The settler colonialism of the early eighteenth century promoted the use of Native labor where possible and indeed, an association existed between cultivating tobacco and American Indians. Map engravings and tobacconist advertisement iconography of the era also conflated trappings of Native peoples with laborers in tobacco fields, so that both enslaved Africans and Native Americans appear adorned with Indian-esque attire, feathers, and tobacco leaves. Furthering the mindset of potential planters from the upper South, those colonizers who read John Norris’ treatise Profitable Advice for Rich and Poor (1712) took note of his recommendation for establishing an enslaved agricultural workforce, composed of American Indian and African laborers in equal numbers. Norris suggested purchasing less-expensive enslaved Native females alongside African enslaved males to “work in the field” and “settle him a Plantation,” where after several seasons “the Slaves and Stock [would be] yearly encreasing [sic].” Additional female Indian slaves were recommended “as Cooks for the Slaves and other Household-Business.” Scholars of collegiate institutional slavery have recently suggested that James Blair may have considered “breeding women” as part of his plan “when he purchased slaves for the Nottoway plantation.” In this reading of the documentary record, the original seventeen slaves “reproduced themselves” for approximately three generations. 

It remains unclear if Blair included enslaved Natives in his initial purchase of human labor for the Nottoway Quarter, but it is not an unreasonable supposition. The Virginia legal category of “slave” included “negroes, mulattoes, and Indians” in slave-related Acts passed by the House of Burgesses until the American Revolution. The 1772 watershed “freedom suit” of Robin v. Hardaway confirms that enslaved American Indians were present in the Nottoway Quarter’s Dinwiddie County after 1718. George Mason argued the case, which emancipated twelve individuals matrilineally descended from Native American laborers enslaved illegally. These twelve individuals were not known to be connected with the Nottoway Quarter, but as an early plantation in the vicinity during a period of heavy Indian slaving, the presence of enslaved Natives there is plausible.

Nottoway Quarter records rarely identified the exact nature of plantation “Expenses,” but instead focused on the export and yield of tobacco and scholarship bills for “table.” Examples of specific allocations to the Quarter include a bill in 1755 that “paid Nottoway Negroes for Hops £2.17.6” and another in 1775 “To Nottoway Quarter for pork, beeves, Mutton & Butter £84.10.” The degree to which these College expenditures represented individual acts to supplement subsistence on the part of enslaved people is unclear. Later records indicate enslaved laborers of William & Mary were allowed to privately work garden plots and sell their produce to the College. The specificity of the inventory—beyond the Plantation “Sundrys,” “Expenses” or “Table”—suggests that these slim notations may be interpreted as the ability of enslaved laborers of the Nottoway Quarter to sell and grow comestibles for the table. Other identified purchases for the Quarter came in the form of textiles for clothing for the enslaved. A note in 1740 recorded “87 ½ Yrds Cottons £9.9.7.” A more detailed 1773 “Clothing” document listed “Pleans [Plains],” “buttons,” “Osnabrugs,” “Shoe buckles,” “Knee buckles,” “hatts,” “stockings,” “shoes” and “Dowlass” for approximately thirty individuals of the “Nottoway Quarter,” priced at “£30.18.2.” 

Bills for “ferryages” appear to be listings of overseers or the enslaved coming to the College on business. Conversely, the records suggest that faculty members rarely visited the Nottoway Quarter. A document from 1742 notes two enslaved individuals, “runaway from Nottoway,” arrived in Williamsburg with a complaint to the faculty about conditions on the plantation. President James Blair and the College Masters appointed Thomas Dawson and John Graeme to “Visit the Plantan:, to enquire into the Matters of Fact, and to endeavour [sic] to put things to rights.” No further information was recorded concerning a resolution of this matter. It appears faculty oversight of the Nottoway Quarter was minimal. The only instance of a Nottoway manager being ordered to make a report on the state of affairs at the Quarter was in 1768. Aside from the 1742 occurrence, no other eighteenth-century documents have been found referencing Nottoway Quarter runaways or those who were reported as absent without leave and nor were any runaway ads posted in The Virginia Gazette. However, one Bursar record from 1765 notes the payment of a charge of thirteen shillings and four pence to the Nottoway Plantation “For takng up a runaway.” It is unclear whether this amount was directed at compensating Nottoway residents for tracking a locally escaped slave or expenses associated with recovering a Quarter laborer.

The Nottoway Quarter was thus firmly situated within, and a product of, settler colonialist ideology. Returning to the extant documents—the bursars’ ledgers, faculty minute books, and College papers—allowed us to look more deeply into these processes. While the documents of William & Mary are not obscure, by using the lens of political economy to evaluate the College’s historical finances, new details emerged about the institution’s reliance on expropriated Native treaty lands and enslaved agricultural labor. The dispossession of Native lands for the purposes of organizing English tobacco plantations was a deepening and broadening of merchant capitalism in Virginia. Colonial taxation of tobacco grown by forced labor on colonized Indian lands, conjoined with quitrents derived from treaty lands transferred from the Crown’s trust to the College were added to yields from William & Mary tobacco sales in London. In nearly all instances, College tobacco was grown and harvested by enslaved peoples. Examining the positionality of the Nottoway Quarter to the early financial support of the fledgling College of William and Mary makes clear the deeply intertwined social relations of slavery, political economy, and settler colonialism. Presently, The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation and the Bray School Initiative are efforts underway at William & Mary to study and respond to the College’s troubling history as it relates to slavery and its legacies. A new consideration of the interconnectedness between the Charter’s call to educate “the Western Indians” and the phrase extolling efforts for the “maintenance and support of the College in all time coming” also requires an acknowledgment of that troubling history and a response to Indigenous communities.

 

Further Reading:

Gregory Ablavsky,  “Making Indians White: The Judicial Abolition of Native Slavery in Revolutionary Virginia and Its Racial Legacy,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 159 (no. 5, 2011): 1457-531.

C.S. Everette, “‘They shalbe slaves for their lives’: Indian Slavery in Colonial Virginia,” in Indian Slavery in Colonial America, ed. Alan Gallay (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

Alan Gallay,  The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

Susan H. Godson et al., The College of William & Mary: A History, vol. 1: 1693–1888 (Williamsburg, VA: King and Queen Press, 1993).

The Lemon Project, William & Mary.

Danielle Moretti-Langholtz and Buck Woodard, eds., Building the Brafferton: The Founding, Funding and Legacy of America’s Indian School (Williamsburg: The Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2019).

E. Morpurgo, Their Majesties’ Royall Colledge: William and Mary in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Washington, D.C.: Hennage Creative Printers, 1976).

Jennifer Oast, Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1680–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Kristalyn Shefveland, Anglo-Native Virginia: Trade, Conversion, and Indian Slavery in the Old Dominion, 1646–1722 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018).

Buck Woodard, “Indian Land Sales and Allotment in Antebellum Virginia: Trustees, Tribal Agency, and the Nottoway Reservation,” American Nineteenth Century History 17 (no. 2, 2016): 161-80.

 

This article originally appeared in December 2022.

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Buck Woodard is a Professorial Lecturer of Anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. and chair of the Virginia Indian Advisory Board’s Workgroup on State Recognition for the Secretary of the Commonwealth. Recent work includes “An Alternative to Red Power: Political Alliance as Tribal Activism in Virginia” (2020) and as co-author of Building the Brafferton: The Founding, Funding, and Legacy of America’s Indian School (2019).

Danielle Moretti-Langholtz is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at William & Mary in Williamsburg. She is also the Director of the American Indian Resource Center and the Director of the Native Studies minor. As well, she is the Curator of Native American Art at the Muscarelle Museum of Art and the co-author of Building the Brafferton: The Founding, Funding, and Legacy of America’s Indian School (2019).

Pushing his way through the crowd was the British consul general to the United States, Sir John Temple, Bt. Having left his horse at a stable, Temple was walking to his Queen Street home carrying his riding whip under his arm. Suddenly, a large man assaulted him with a club. This “ruffian” was nearly thirty years younger than Temple, who was about sixty-five years old. Nevertheless, he had picked on the wrong man. As Temple reported it to Lord Grenville, the British foreign secretary, he “exceedingly well horsewhip’d” the assailant until his whip broke; then he used the butt end to knock the man “down in the dirt his proper place.”

“Had I been but a private Gentleman,” the consul general told the foreign secretary, this “suitable & proper chastisement” would have been sufficient. But because Temple held a “high and important Commission under his majesty in this Country,” he felt compelled to swear out a complaint against “the said large ruffian,” so that “some legal punishment . . . for the high indignity so offered to one of the Kings Servants . . . may forever deter any ruffianly attempts of the like kind in the future.”

Assaults were not rare in New York City, especially during the hijinks associated with Guy Fawkes Night. What makes this one noteworthy is that the “large ruffian” the British consul general had horsewhipped was a United States senator, John Rutherfurd of New Jersey.

What could have caused the senator to attack the elderly diplomat? It is improbable that the Guy Fawkes Night set-to had politics behind it. There was no reason for them to be political enemies. Indeed, they were logical allies. Rutherfurd’s family had been at best lukewarm in its support of the American Revolution, and John spent the war as a Princeton student (class of 1779) and studying law. The Rutherfurds and Temples attended the same social functions and were even guests at each other’s tables. John Rutherfurd, like John Temple (who was the son-in-law of James Bowdoin, the Federalist governor of Massachusetts), was a firm Federalist. Rutherfurd had been a presidential elector in 1788, and the New Jersey legislature sent him to the U.S. Senate in 1790, re-electing him in 1796. In the Senate, he consistently supported better relations with Great Britain. 

John Rutherfurd has been ignored by the major reference works, though he does have entries in Princetonians: A Biographical Dictionary, in the National Cyclopedia of American Biography, and in the online Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress 1774-Present. None of them mentions the Temple horsewhipping nor tells why Rutherfurd left the Senate. Almost the only historian to mention the incident is Joanne Lowe Neel, biographer of Temple’s rival Phineas Bond. She says it is an example of one of Temple’s “notorious temper tantrums.” This seems unfair; even diplomats have a right to self-defense.  

Less than three weeks later, on November 23, 1796, a New York grand jury, after hearing eyewitnesses, duly found that Rutherfurd “with force and arms an assault did make, and . . . did then and there beat, wound, and ill-treat and other wrongs and injuries . . . to the great damage of the said Sir John Temple.” No motive was given. The most logical explanation is simply that Rutherfurd was drunk and spoiling for a fight and Temple was handy.  

The grand jury’s quick action was certainly not influenced by deference to Great Britain; New York was virtually serving as a French naval base and a prize court for French privateers. (Much of Temple’s consular activities involved captured British seamen.) I do not know, but would bet, that the grand jurors knew that Rutherfurd had done this sort of thing before and had used his wealth and prestige to avoid consequences.

Rutherfurd fled back to New Jersey and never showed up for his trial—a more serious offense than the assault for which he had been indicted, and for which Temple believed the U.S. Senate would be compelled to expel him. He never returned to the Senate, to which the New Jersey legislature had re-elected him in 1796. After leaving New Jersey with only one senator for two years, Rutherfurd finally resigned as of December 5, 1798, and thereafter stayed out of national politics. He seems to have learned his lesson. Afterward, he appears to have led an exemplary public life (he lived to be eighty), making donations to worthy causes and serving on many important commissions.

Lord Grenville must have been appalled that Temple had sought the indictment. Whatever his private feelings about the United States, the foreign secretary certainly did not want anything to exacerbate the already chilly relations between the two governments. Britain was in a desperate war with revolutionary France, and Grenville was trying to keep the United States neutral. A Senate hearing on an incident in which a British diplomat had horsewhipped one of its members was not what the foreign minister needed. Nevertheless, Grenville never mentioned the matter in his official letters to Temple nor to the new British minister to the United States Robert Liston.

His silence was not out of support for his distant relative John Temple, whom Grenville concluded had outlasted his usefulness to his majesty’s government. Temple had, in fact, been something of an embarrassment to the British government and the Temple-Grenville family throughout his nearly forty-year career. It is possible that the crafty Grenville saw an opportunity to demonstrate cooperation with the United States when the Senate should denounce Temple. But the U.S. Senate ignored the incident as well. The senators, like the grand jurors, knew their man, and probably conceded that Temple had given him the hiding he had been asking for. 

As for Sir John Temple, we may applaud his spirited defense against an attack by a much younger assailant, but why didn’t he leave it at that, instead of filing a formal complaint? Temple knew better than most that Anglo-American relations were strained, and diplomats are supposed to be able to turn the other cheek when policy requires it. After looking at Temple’s long career, however, no one should be surprised; it was filled with similar ill-advised moves.  

When Temple’s appointment as Britain’s first diplomatic representative to the United States was announced in April 1785, John Adams remarked “He is not a prudent Man, and has the most confused Conceptions of public opinion and of the Reasonings upon which it is founded, and of the real Springs and motives of Events of any Man of so much sense and experience I ever saw.” Adams, himself not the most prudent of the founding fathers, had known Temple for all of his public life. He described his man very well.

John Temple was born in Boston around the end of 1731, the third son of a wealthy Anglo-Irish family related to the powerful Temple-Grenville clan. As a young man, John Temple spent a good bit of time in London, using his family connections to obtain a government appointment. His persistence paid off in 1761, when he was named surveyor-general of customs for the northern district of North America. Despite a complete lack of experience, he did his job reasonably well, in the face of mercantile opposition to the new imperial program of Temple’s patron, Prime Minister George Grenville. But in the process, he got into a bitter quarrel with the royal governor of Massachusetts, Francis Bernard, whom he accused of collusion with a crooked customs officer. Bernard, who also had a powerful British protector in Lord Barrington, succeeded in getting Temple called back to England.

There, in 1771, Temple used the threat of publishing his letters on the Stamp Act to blackmail Thomas Whately (who had taken the followers of the late Prime Minister George Grenville over to Lord North), into creating the post of inspector-general of customs for England for him. Temple enjoyed this sinecure until 1773, when the Massachusetts House of Representatives published sixteen private letters between Thomas Whately (who had died in 1772) and Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor Andrew Oliver. The letters were political dynamite. The Massachusetts legislature petitioned the king to dismiss Hutchinson and Oliver. In England, Thomas Whately’s banker brother, William, suggested that Temple might have taken the letters from his late brother’s files. Temple took umbrage at this and challenged the banker to a duel. It was bloody and inconclusive. To head off another duel—and to protect his real source—Benjamin Franklin published an admission that he had been the one to purloin the letters. The result was that both Franklin and Temple lost their government jobs, and Parliament was in a vindictive mood when news arrived of the Boston Tea Party.

During the War for American Independence, John Temple went back and forth between England and America, trusted by neither side. He landed a post on the Carlisle Commission, created to end the war by granting America all its demands except independence. The commission failed, and Temple was notably dilatory in his duties to it. Lord North’s government decided that Temple had not earned a promised baronetcy. And in America, John Hancock, a bitter political rival of Temple’s father-in-law, James Bowdoin, got Temple placed under a heavy bond to behave properly. The debate over Temple’s status filled the Boston newspapers for nearly two years. 

Realizing he had no political future in America, Temple took his family back to London. The British government was in no hurry to establish diplomatic relations with its erstwhile colonies, but merchants on both sides of the Atlantic were anxious to get trade moving again, which required the services of a consul general. Temple lobbied hard for the job and once again used his family connections (Prime Minister William Pitt was also related by marriage). He was greatly assisted by the fact that the man the government really wanted, Phineas Bond, was under sentence of death for treason in Pennsylvania, and the Confederation Congress was highly unlikely to accept him. The government likely saw Temple’s main value as a stalking horse. (If so, it worked: Bond was quietly accredited as the second British consul general in 1786, and he soon took over many of Temple’s responsibilities.) Congress accepted Temple as the first British diplomatic representative to the United States in December 1785. He styled himself “His Majesty’s Principal Servant” in the United States, and when shortly he succeeded to the Temple family baronetcy, his self-importance knew even fewer bounds. Thus John Temple was acting completely in character when he sought the indictment of Senator Rutherfurd.

John Adams rather liked Temple (a sentiment Temple did not reciprocate) and was hopeful but wary about Temple’s appointment as the king’s representative. Adams feared that Temple would forget his primary responsibility to the king and try to be an American at the same time, causing conflict between the two nations. In this Adams was as prescient as he has proved to be in most things. In the perennial dispute between England and America over impressment of seamen, Temple took the American side. Lord Grenville ran out of patience in 1798 and ordered Temple back to England, undoubtedly to dismiss him. Before Grenville’s letter arrived, however, on November 17, 1798, John Temple died of an aneurysm. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan, the church where George Washington had been inaugurated as the first president of the United States.

And to date, however much deserved, no other representative of a foreign nation has horsewhipped a U.S. senator.

 

Further Reading

Despite his lengthy and important career, John Temple has no full-length biography nor an entry in the Dictionary of American Biography or Dictionary of National Biography. The basic details of his life are in the American National Biography, s.v. “Temple, John,” by Neil R. Stout. The sources for this article are mostly in manuscript, particularly in the British Public Record Office, FO/5, especially 5/15. Other sources come from Neil R. Stout, ed., “The Missing Temple-Whately Papers,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 104 (1992): 123-47 and Warren-Adams Letters: Being Chiefly a Correspondence Among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren vol. 2: 1778-1814 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1925). See also Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); Jordan D. Fiore, “The Temple-Bernard Affair,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 90 (1954): 58-83; Joanne Lowe Neel, Phineas Bond: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1786-1812 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); and Lewis M. Wiggin, The Faction of Cousins: A Political Account of the Grenvilles, 1733-1763 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).

 

This article originally appeared in November 2022.

 

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Neil R. Stout was Professor of History emeritus at the University of Vermont. He was past president of the New England Historical Association and sometime editor of Vermont History, the journal of the Vermont Historical Society. His books include The Royal Navy in America, 1760-1775 and The Perfect Crisis. He passed away in February, 2023 (1932-2023).

In the 1830s, the new science of geology was enjoying considerable worldwide interest, and Charles Lyell’s three volume Principles of Geology (1830-33) challenged biblical accounts of ancient history with its own creation narrative rooted in a “deep time” that far outstretched previous estimates of the earth’s age. Like the fascinating stories that rocks could now share with scientists, the study of shells—as similarly striated deposits of minerals—was also gaining momentum. Wyatt jumped on the opportunity to assemble his own American textbook on conchology, and in 1838 Harper & Brothers, a leading publishing house, snapped up the chance to publish his Manual of Conchology, according to the system laid down by Larmarck, with the late improvements by De Blainville. 

As its title suggests, Wyatt’s textbook compiled existing scientific materials, and, as John Tresch outlines in The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, the author also incorporated ideas from famed naturalist Georges Cuvier and Philadelphia publisher-scientist Isaac Lea. (Given the lack of strong international copyright laws, Wyatt also plagiarized large sections of text from Captain Thomas Brown’s The Conchologist’s Text-book that had recently been published in Glasgow in 1836.)  Nevertheless, as historian of science Steven Jay Gould has documented, Wyatt’s textbook was still rather expensive (eight dollars) and unwieldy. “Sales were predictably slow, and Wyatt wished to produce a shorter edition with uncolored plates at a much lower price,” Gould notes. Wyatt’s publisher was not convinced, however, and “objected, citing a reasonable concern that its fancy edition would then become entirely unsellable. Wyatt, still wishing to proceed, but fearing legal action . . . sought a surrogate to help with his new volume and to serve as name-bearer for a flat fee.” 

Although Edgar Allan Poe might seem like a strange choice for “surrogate man of science,” he had retained a fascination with (and training in) various branches of applied and theoretical science throughout his impressive schooling in England and Richmond, and later at the University of Virginia and West Point. Indeed, just before Poe arrived in Philadelphia, he had published a novel that provided its own unique blend of timely scientific speculation and (similarly plagiarized) primary source material: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). It wasn’t unusual for Poe to review recent books of interest in natural history for the many journals he was associated with during his lifetime. For example, like many of his fellow Americans, Poe was intrigued by John Cleves Symmes Jr.’s theory that the earth was hollow at both its poles; and in a lengthy Messenger article of 1837 he wrote in support of funding an expedition to be led by J. V. Reynolds that would explore these and many other mysteries surrounding the polar extremes of the globe. When Poe composed his only novel the following year, he drew on some of these same polar fantasies while imagining Pym’s own bizarre expedition to the South Seas, and he incorporated (sometimes verbatim) reports from explorers such as Benjamin Morrell who had recently returned from these same alluring aqueous spaces.

Poe’s work reminds us that the separation of “Arts” and “Sciences” into discrete discourses of knowledge is itself a quite recent invention. Indeed, what the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries understood by the term “natural history” incorporated a remarkably heterogenous array of enterprises and obsessions. In addition to Symmes’ hollow Earth theory that inspired the topography of his only novel, Poe’s fiction is filled with references to—and engagements with—an array of what today would be called both “scientific” and “pseudo-scientific” knowledge. For example, while Poe relied on (and footnoted) Archimedes when describing the fluid dynamics of the whirlpool swallowing up his protagonist’s ship at the conclusion of “A Descent Into the Maelström” (1841), his tales were also inspired by contemporaneous “pseudo-scientific” debates concerning mesmerism (animal magnetism) and phrenology (the study of skull shapes). Indeed, Poe even extended the central logic of phrenology in order to advance his own unique and playful “science”: published in a popular series of articles in Graham’s Magazine, Poe’s work on “Autography” interprets and analyzes the peaks and valleys found in the signatures of famous nineteenth-century literary figures, drawing cheeky conclusions about the character of the person behind the script. Viewed from our twenty-first century perspective, then, Poe’s fiction finds its home in the nebulous middle ground between hoax and official truth that existed before modern science could emerge as its own respectable and distinct discipline of knowledge.

From the perspective of Thomas Wyatt in 1838, however, Edgar Allan Poe was a perfectly suitable, affordable, and eager prospect who could help steer the new edition of his shell book into publication. While the full extent of Poe’s involvement as surrogate editor of Wyatt’s text isn’t easy to discern, scholars generally agree that, at the very least, Poe wrote a new introduction to the abridged textbook, reshaped the taxonomic categories under which it was organized, and likely added some of his own translated material (thanks to his schooling in French) from Cuvier. The abridged version of Wyatt’s textbook, now “authored” by Poe and published in Philadelphia by Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell, was titled The Conchologist’s First Book: A System of Testaceous Malacology. Unlike the vast majority of Poe’s work (Pym included), it was a considerable success. No other work attributed to Poe was reprinted during his lifetime: his shell book, however, sold out in two months and was reprinted twice in six years.

The Conchologist’s First Book remains something of a footnoted curiosity for most Poe scholars, noteworthy because of its relatively successful publication history and for the charges of plagiarism that would later be levelled at Poe regarding its composition. More recently, however, Poe’s shell book has gained renewed attention from prominent scholars in the history of science, as well as from specialists in a particular branch of science that Poe is now credited with helping to originate: malacology. I’ll close by giving you a sense of why Poe’s involvement in what Maxim Vinarski calls the “birth of malacology” is important not only because it brings to light an important moment in the development of American science but also for how it helps us to connect Poe’s vision of the natural world with the aesthetics of his gothic fiction. 

What is malacology, and how did Poe help to create this branch of modern science? When The Conchologist’s First Book was being assembled by Poe, a few scientists had recently begun to question why taxonomies of shelled animals tended to ignore the creatures that lived inside, instead focusing on the specifics of shell structure to organize and differentiate between these invertebrate animals. As Vinarski notes, before Cuvier “internal anatomy as a tool for classification of invertebrates was commonly ignored.” Indeed, it was only after Cuvier’s work in the 1790s that shelled and unshelled invertebrates were incorporated under the classificatory term we still use today: mollusks. (Malacology is the science of the study of mollusks.) When Poe was given the task of abridging Wyatt’s textbook, he not only cut some of its text and color plates (many of which had been plagiarized from Brown); he also decided to reorganize its decidedly shell-centered pages to foreground instead the “internal anatomy” of the animals inside the shell. Poe then translated descriptions of these animals from Cuvier to include alongside the descriptions of their shells, effectively converting Wyatt’s textbook from a conchological to a malacological study. 

Poe was quite explicit about his intentions. “The common works upon this subject,” he wrote in the introduction to The Conchologist’s First Book, “appear to every person of science very essentially defective, inasmuch as [they ignore] the relations of the animal and shell, with their dependence upon each other” (3), choosing instead to focus their attention solely on the intricacies of the animal’s shell. As malacologist Matthias Glaubrecht notes, Poe “was among the first to recognize and comment that a reliable classification of mollusks requires a combined analysis, which meant in his times reconciling a system based on hard shells . . . with evidence from soft body anatomy” (3). What seems most important to Poe, then, is not so much the isolated complexities of either shell or animal: instead, he focuses our attention on the “relations” each forms with the other—a shared “dependence” that is capable of transforming the earth’s crust into a living and moving protective shell. Quoting another contemporary scientist who shared his renewed emphasis on the relations between animal and shell, Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Poe is fascinated with the ways that these seemingly micro-relational processes produce significant “changes upon the surface of the earth [that, in turn, alter] the superficial structure of the globe” (7-8).

As I have argued in more detail elsewhere, Poe’s own fascination with mollusks—and, in particular, with the micro-relationships animals establish with inert matter—is registered throughout The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. (It is also hard not to think of The Conchologist’s First Book’s colored plates when Poe describes an eel-like sea monster with protruding eyes and tentacles in “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” (1845).) Pym, for example, contains a famous extended digression concerning the importance of the echinoderm known as the “sea cucumber” to the economy and health of one of the islands its narrator visits. Although it lacks a shell, Poe is drawn to the way in which this mollusk still manages to move itself through the play of oppositional forces, and how the gelatinous material that can be harvested from within the mollusk’s body (typically by the sharp bill of a swallow) itself mobilizes a lucrative Chinese economic trade in edible birds nests that, in turn, are thought to heal and energize the human body when ingested. And even the form and plot of Poe’s novel is shaped by incidents through which inert, shell-like materials and vulnerable human animals enter into relationships of protection, even communication, with one another (such as the striations of rock found in mountains that collapse into hollowed out caves, or the space of vacant hulls created by the chaos of shipwrecked timber).

In a similar vein, the fifty dollars Poe is thought to have made from his shell book might also be said to have provided its own vulnerable “author” with some temporary—but nevertheless extremely welcome—protection from the vagaries of life as a professional writer in 1830s Philadelphia. In the remaining years before his untimely death a decade later, Poe’s work continued to flourish in the murky spaces in which theoretical science becomes indistinguishable from science fiction and the campy excesses of gothic horror. Indeed, his 1848 prose poem “Eureka” (considered by Poe to be his masterpiece) proposes numerous theories concerning the origins of the universe that have been viewed by some as legitimate precursors to Einsteinian science and Big Bang cosmology. Einstein himself was impressed, at least at first. But then, so the story goes, he realized he didn’t want to be scooped, and so wrote Poe off as a hack. As the epigraph to “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” puts it, sometimes “Truth is Stranger than Fiction.”

 

Further Reading

Matthias Glaubrecht, “On ‘Darwinian Mysteries’ or Molluscs as Models in Evolutionary Biology: From Local Speciation to Global Radiation,” American Malacological Bulletin 27 (no. 1-2): 3-23.

Stephen Jay Gould, “Poe’s Greatest Hit,” Natural History 102 (no. 7, 1993): 10-19.

James D. Lilley, “Poe, Movement, and Matter: The Malacological Aesthetics of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Arizona Quarterly 73 (no. 4, 2017): 1-31.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Conchologist’s First Book: A System of Testaceous Malacology (Philadelphia: Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell, 1840).

John Tresch, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021).

Maxim Vinarski, “The Birth of Malacology. When and How?” Zoosystematics and Evolution 90 (no. 1, 2014): 1-5.

 

This article originally appeared in November 2022.

 

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James D. Lilley is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University at Albany, New York, where he teaches and publishes work in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British, American, and transatlantic studies. He is currently working on a number of Poe projects, including a book on Poe and philosophy.

Much was written about the “Jewish Frontlet” in the following years, and numerous scholars attempted to consult it at the AAS, where it was housed alongside other early donations such as an “Antique Indian Axe of the Choctaw Nation,” an “Indian pounder” from West Boylston, and cloth “manufactured by the Natives of the Sandwich Islands.” The “strange incident” in Pittsfield stirred the imaginaries of theologians and antiquaries alike because it supported millennialist Christian nationalism. Indeed, the phylactery allegedly provided physical proof that America’s Native peoples were “ancient Jews,” and this in turn offered empirical confirmation of the Bible’s “eternal truths.” This was an old trope: Atlantic scholars since at least the sixteenth century had proposed an Old World origin for America’s original peoples, including one that saw Indigenous ancestors trekking from the “Holy Land” across Asia and the Behring Strait to America, all the while “adhering to the rites of the Jewish Religion,” as Watson explained. Historians Eran Shelav and Shalom Goldman, moreover, have documented the ubiquity of “Hebraic” political rhetoric in early America, while Andrew Lewis, Sarah Rivett, and others have documented the significance of Old-New World theories to transatlantic colonialism and science.

Given the popularity of the “lost tribes of Israel” hypothesis in colonial America (as recently described by historian Elizabeth Fenton) and its revival during the Second Great Awakening, the phylactery’s inclusion in the AAS Cabinet—as a suspected “aboriginal” item—is unsurprising (it was rumored to have been buried with an “old Indian chief,” which is not true). AAS member and president of the American Bible Society Elias Boudinot (who was also the sponsor and namesake of Cherokee Phoenix editor Buck Watie/Elias Boudinot) expounded on “Hebraic Indians” in his influential A Star in the West, Or, a Humble Attempt to Discover the Long Lost Ten Tribes of Israel: Preparatory to Their Return to Their Beloved City, Jerusalem (1816). Boudinot’s words were repeated in Ethan Smith’s best-selling View of the Hebrews; Or, The Tribes of Israel in America (1823) (and later reworked re-worked by Pequot minister William Apess in the Appendix to his 1829 memoir A Son of the Forest), and Smith’s 1825 edition referenced the Pittsfield phylactery in detail. The phylactery’s inclusion in the AAS collection thus illustrates a larger ideology in which Anglo-American settler society is positioned within a divinely-sanctioned order and helps create what historian William N. Goetzmann called “a religious vision of American prehistory.”

The phylactery’s inclusion in the AAS cabinet tells us more about early US antiquarianism than just its exclusionary anti-Indigenous and anti-Semitic origins, and a consideration of the early collection provides a wider angle on its political project. When the AAS was established in 1812, it was with the mission “to discover the antiquities of our own Continent . . . as well as to collect and preserve those of other parts of the Globe.” The “Jewish Frontlet” was accessioned along with Indigenous heritage items and other donations including an inscription from a Babylonian ruin, a lock taken “from the church of the holy sepulcher in Jerusalem,” “Relicks of a real Egyptian mummy,” and a Canton trade passport from the ship John Jay, these latter items evincing the conflation of the non-Christian Mediterranean world with the large mass of non-Christian Asian lands stretching from Persia to China. Certainly, the allegedly “backward” non-Christian world has long been a crucial foil to the United States’ conception of its own modernity, and it is thus unsurprising that an item for Jewish worship would have been unceremoniously held next to a preserved body and trading papers. This interchangeability and desacralization of non-Christian materials was part of the point, for it allowed US Americans to portray “their” (Indigenous) past as equal to all ancient global cultures and their national present as best. Symptomatic is an exchange between Elias Boudinot and AAS president Isaiah Thomas in 1819: when Boudinot requested to examine the phylactery and Thomas was unable to locate it among the cabinet’s boxes, he reportedly showed Boudinot an “ancient” Arabic manuscript instead. But the collapse of (Indigenous) American and Mediterranean “natural history”-style collectables here is not only about the intellectual pursuit of Indigenous origins: it is an expression of the United States’ early global and imperial ambitions, both with regard to the North American continent and to world markets, as well as an indication of the value of natural history collections to US political salvation. An exclusive focus on US settler colonialism without a critique of Orientalism, however, distracts from the imperialist context for US natural, and national, history.

Massachusetts-born Thaddeus Mason Harris, one of the founding members of the AAS, spent as much of his life studying the history of the American continent as he did about the ancient world of the Israelites. Harris trained for the ministry at Harvard and served as the College’s librarian from 1791 to 1793 before becoming pastor at First Parish Church in Dorchester, a position he held until his death in 1836. As early as 1789, Harris began to explore his interests in “the first peopling of America” (although none of these interests saw publication until his 1805 Journal of a Tour Into the Territory Northwest Of The Alleghany Mountains, in which he suggested that America’s aboriginal peoples were descended from the “ancient Scythians” of Siberia). His commonplace book, titled “Ancient Inscriptions, Hieroglyphics, &c.” and held at the AAS, is a compilation of Orientalist studies, natural history, and antiquities that includes sections on customs, manners, and literature as well as Egyptian hieroglyphics, “Siberian languages,” Mexican history, and Indigenous American artifacts. While working on this project, however, and serving as Harvard’s librarian, Harris published something seemingly far afield from his North American speculations: The Natural History of the Bible, or, A Description of All the Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Insects, Reptiles, Trees, Plants, Metals, Precious Stones, &c. Mentioned in the Sacred Scriptures (Boston, 1793). True to the title, the entries focus on the plants, animals, and minerals mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Taking the dictionary as its type—complete with a reference to Samuel Johnson in the introduction—each entry provides definitions, usage, and cross-references similar to a contemporary lexicon. Harris’s Natural History demonstrates a decidedly philological and ecological approach to biblical criticism, attempting to save Old Testament landscapes from European ignorance and restore them to new life in North America. 

 

Harris belonged to a long line of Atlantic theologians who believed that the “Book of Nature” complemented the “Book of Revelation,” a common contemporary starting point even with the increasing secularism of late eighteenth-century transatlantic scholarly culture. He also believed that God’s Truth was reflected in human language. This particular kind of biblical scholarship, later known as “Higher Criticism,” was a form of Christian hermeneutics that embraced empiricism as the basis for biblical interpretation. During his theological studies, Harris had come to believe that previous English translations of the Old Testament had distorted Scripture’s true meaning due to insufficient knowledge of the natural landscape of the “Holy Land,” which at the time included all the areas of greater Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Nubia, and Abyssinia. Previous mistranslations of the Bible, Harris contended, obscured not only metaphors and felicities of ancient phraseology but had transmuted entire ecologies. Indeed, the authorized King James edition was so full of creatures with which “the Jews must have been wholly unacquainted”—like the badger and unicorn—that the effect was, at best, befuddling. Dragons, whales and apples, appearing in the place of crocodiles and citrons, placed the reader in seventeenth-century England, not ancient Palestine, and effectively miscommunicated God’s truth. Harris found, however, that consulting Hebrew etymology and the foundational Greek and Latin sources in combination with European naturalists’ reports from the East, “serve[d] to clear up many obscure passages . . . and open new beauties, in that sacred treasure.”  To Harris, reconstructing a word’s relationship to climate and geography—as a cipher for the ancient Hebrews’ relationship to place—could restore previously uncommunicated knowledge. Just as the Pittsfield phylactery would, almost two decades later, the environment of the Holy Land would prove the “eternal truths of Scripture” and, crucially, America’s place in it.

Traditionally, the two projects to “clear up” the natural history of the Bible and the ancient history of the Americas have been understood as expressions of the universalism inherent to Enlightenment-era science, or seen in terms of typological exegesis wherein the United States is read as a latter-day Israel. But the coincident methods of biblical criticism and salvation antiquarianism on display in Harris’ life’s work trace a knowledge-making project that transmitted US exceptionalism across the continent and across the oceans: what he called the “natural history of the East” runs crosswise, not parallel, to contemporary efforts to establish an ancient American history.

At the time, there was little in the European naturalist tradition that supplied the sought information aside from Lemnius’ An Herbal for the Bible (1587), Rudbeck’s Icthyologia Biblica (1705), and Rauwolf’s Flora Orientalis (1755). The great Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, who was concerned with expanding the natural history knowledge of the globe in the pursuit of a universal system for ordering Nature, personally encouraged his students to travel and gather widely. One of his students, Fredrik Hasselquist, traveled to Arabia from 1749 to 1752 (when he perished) for the Levant Company; his papers, “Containing observations . . . particularly on the Holy Land, and the Natural History of the Scriptures,” were published by Linnaeus in 1757 and translated into English in 1766. Another of Linnaeus’s students, Pehr Forsskål, traveled to Arabia from 1761 to 1763—in the employ of the Royal Danish Expedition—and his Flora Aegyptiaco Arabica was also published posthumously, in 1775. Harris relied on these works for his own Natural History, and also consulted travel narratives such as the one published by Scottish traveler James Bruce in 1790.

Indeed, as philosophers and economists such as Montaigne and François Quesnay studied “Asiatic stagnation” and “Oriental despotism,” eighteenth-century naturalists and travelers sought to add the southern circum-Mediterranean world to Europeans’ stores of plant knowledge—all taking advantage of the Ottoman Porte’s weakening control of the eastern (Levant) and western (African) lands in the mid-eighteenth century. Bruce, for example, collected specimens during his attempts to find the source of the Nile from 1768 to 1773. Natural history, certainly, has long been a strong arm of imperial power: collecting information about the Levant, for example, was a way for France and Britain to assert imperial control over the Mediterranean—explaining the vast collections of flora and fauna taken by Napoleon I during his 1798-1801 campaigns in Egypt and Syria—or to imaginatively “domesticate” disputed territory, as with Lewis and Clark’s 1804 Corps of Discovery over the far western expanses of the American continent.

Largely influenced by the popularity of Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (at least four American editions of which were published before 1800), British, French, and American travelers flooded the circum-Mediterranean in the eighteenth century, taking souvenirs and leaving behind travel narratives. From 1773 to 1775 Ward Nicholas Boylston, of the wealthy Massachusetts merchant family, traveled through Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and along the Barbary Coast to escape the war coming to Boston. He brought his souvenirs and self-proclaimed expertise back to his home state (and, in 1819, to the AAS cabinet). After the Revolutionary War, the growing crisis with the Barbary States and the situation of US captives in the Mediterranean continued to attract US attention eastward. Under President George Washington, Congress pledged $100,000 in annual tribute to Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis to protect US ships attempting to access the Levantine trade. In 1793 alone, eleven US ships and 100 US sailors were captured by so-called Barbary pirates. This conflict in the Mediterranean would result in the US’s first overseas military action in 1801—which Jefferson had been pushing for since 1785—and the establishment of a US Navy in 1794. Into the nineteenth century, news and literature inspired by the themes of the Barbary Wars competed and combined with “redemptive” interest in the Holy Land.

The outlines of “salvation antiquarianism”—with the emphasis on “saving” both in terms of preservation and Christian redemption—appears particularly clearly in the AAS’s inaugural 1813 address. Delivered by founding member William Jenks, Professor of Oriental Languages at Bowdoin College, it reiterated that the role of the antiquary was to “search out, preserve and transmit the discoverable traces of ancient knowledge” and to rescue Biblical knowledge from skeptical secular degradation by disproving accounts that tried to invalidate, scorn, or ridicule. And this goal of saving Scripture was never far from the rescuing of supposedly forgotten American history. Jenks expanded, “it may be found, that etymological enquiry, cautiously and diligently pursued, with a careful investigation of religious rites and ceremonies, and the prevailing manners, will connect the history of our Indian population with the ancient achievements of the early descendants of Noah.” With Jenks’s address as reference, it is easier to see that Harris’ use of etymology and his collection of all animal, vegetable, and mineral references in The Natural History of the Bible was meant, as sure as “Ancient Inscriptions,” to provide a universal account to bring America and the Holy Land together.

In 1816, the same year the “Jewish Frontlet” was sent to Worcester and Boudinot’s A Star in the West appeared in print, Harris delivered a sermon to the Female Society of Boston and the Vicinity for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. In the early nineteenth century, transatlantic Christians increasingly advocated for the conversion and “restoration” of Jews just as their ancestors had done for Natives since the seventeenth century. In Harris’s sermon, “Pray for the Jews,” he seems to compare the “saving” of conversion to antiquarians’ “saving” of history, counseling: “While zealously engaged in sending out into the wilderness to collect into the fold of Christ the sheep that are scattered abroad; let us cast a look after the lost sheep of the flock of Israel; and at least pray that Jew and Gentile may be brought to hear the voice and own the care of the same divine shepherd.” Indeed, the members of the newly founded women’s group, many of whom were involved with contemporary missionary organizations such as the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM), also considered themselves “collectors” in a way not altogether different from their antiquarian friend Harris (the Boston Female Society raised money to send Hebrew translations of the New Testament on the ABCFM’s 1819 “Palestine Mission”). While the Second Great Awakening is the usual context for this project of “collecting” Jewish souls and Holy Land “spiritual conquest,” it was also the period that saw the first coordinated attempts to remove the Israelites’ supposed descendants from their American homelands by “collecting” them into reservations or western lands, all to make way for the new Jerusalem in old Indian Country.

As Harris intensified his own studies of the “ancient Israelites” in the early nineteenth century, he updated his Natural History in 1820 (although most of the copies were destroyed in a fire at the publishing house). A transitional and transhistorical text bridging theology, philology, naturalism, and antiquarianism, Harris’s Natural History of the Bible—which enjoyed a long life in pirated and abridged editions—helps explain the coexistence of Indigenous heritage items, natural history specimens, and souvenirs from the Mediterranean world in East Coast learned society collections, collections that themselves trace a zealously exceptionalist relationship between America and “the East.” In the period signaled by Harris’ two editions—1793 and 1820—the United States was urgently trying to figure out its policy with regard to the (eastern) Barbary States as well as the (western) Native nations living on lands increasingly claimed as US territory. In this context, studying ancient natural history and establishing natural history cabinets isolated “East” and “West,” sequestering these areas and their histories from the contemporary world order, domesticating them as intellectual topics rather than polities representing existential threats to the early nation. The Natural History of the Bible reveals the ideological, rather than the philosophical or exegetical, collapse of Mediterranean and American geographies, and it provides an opportunity to reframe understandings of antiquarianism and natural history within a global exceptionalist model. Harris’s salvation antiquarianism was a divinely-driven hermeneutic that insisted God’s Truth would be made manifest through its application across the Americas and the Bible’s lands. For Harris, the true version of ancient history would be the one saved by the United States. 

Further Reading

Robert Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Charles Crawford, Essay on the Propagation of the Gospel, in which there are Numerous Facts and Arguments Adduced to prove that many of the Indians in America are descended from the Ten Tribes (1799).

Elizabeth Fenton, Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel (New York: New York University Press, 2020).

Pliny Fisk, The Holy Land an Interesting Field of Missionary Enterprise: A Sermon Preached in the Old South Church, Boston, Sabbath Evening, Oct. 31, 1819, Just Before the Departure of the Palestine Mission (Boston: 1819).

Lee M. Friedman, “The Phylacteries Found at Pittsfield, Mass.,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (no. 25, 1917): 81–85.  

William N. Goetzmann, “The Case of the Missing Phylactery,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 95 (1985): 69-79.

Shalom Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

William Jenks, An Address to the Members of the American Antiquarian Society, Pronounced in King’s Chapel Boston, on Their First Anniversary, October 23, 1813 (Boston: 1814).

Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Andrew Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylania Press, 2011).

Hilton Obenzinger, “Holy Land Narrative and American Covenant: Levi Parsons, Pliny Fisk and the Palestine Mission.” Religion & Literature 35 (no. 2/3, 2003): 241–67.

Sarah Rivett, Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Stephen Salaita, The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006).

Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution; Or Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, Including His Journals of Travels in Europe and America from the Year 1777 to 1842 (New York: 1858).

 

This article originally appeared in October 2022.

 

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Christen Mucher is Associate Professor of American Studies at Smith College. Her recent publications include the co-edited volume Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021) and Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022), part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot. Mucher was an NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society in 2015. The author would like to thank Laura Costello, Cynthia Mackey, Nan Wolverton, and Joshua Greenberg.