“The Dream” (1768, 1790) by Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson

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

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

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

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

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

The first page of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s “The Dream.” Note her elegant script, the catchword in the lower right corner, and her use of ruled pages. As it is first page, her writing is particularly legible, though some words are rewritten and blurry. Not one to waste space, she appears to have later transcribed another poem, “An Acrostic on a Celebrated Nymph,” onto the blank page below the title. The nymph’s name is “LIBERTY.” Image courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia (www.librarycompany.org). See Vol. 2, Poemata Juvenalia, of her papers (Ms. 13298.Q). — The first page of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s “The Dream.” Note her elegant script, the catchword in the lower right corner, and her use of ruled pages. As it is the first page, her writing is particularly legible, though some words are rewritten and blurry. Not one to waste space, she appears to have later transcribed another poem, “An Acrostic on a Celebrated Nymph,” onto the blank page below the title. The nymph’s name is “LIBERTY.” Vol. 2, *Poemata Juvenalia* (Ms. 13298.Q). Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Note on the Text

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

The Dream
A Poem

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

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

The Contents.

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

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

The Dream.
A Poem.[vii]

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

Laura[lxiii]

Graeme Park October ^th 15 1768

Usable Poetry

Michael C. Cohen, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 296 pp., $55. — Michael C. Cohen, *The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America.* Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 296 pp., $55.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recovering Rice

David Shields, Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 416 pp., $30. — David Shields, *Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 416 pp., $30.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catharine Brown, Cherokee Evangelist

Theresa Strouth Gaul, ed., Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown 1818-1823. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 312 pp., $40. — Theresa Strouth Gaul, ed., *Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown 1818-1823*. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 312 pp., $40.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Inevitable American Revolution?

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

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

Thomas P. Slaughter, Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 2014. 512 pp., $35.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A Natural Representation of Market-Street, in Philadelphia”: An Attribution, a Story, and Some Thoughts on Future Study

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

1. Previous attributions identified John Woodside (1781-1852), a prominent sign painter in Philadelphia, as a possible maker of the view. “Old Court House,” catalog number INDE14350. Courtesy of Independence National Historical Park.

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

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

2. Daniel Bowen sent his thanks to patrons in the form of this broadside and an accompanying ticket to his new Phoenix Museum. He addressed this one to William Paine of Worcester, Massachusetts. Broadside, “Address, to D. Bowen’s Benevolent Patrons and Friends” (Boston, 1816). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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

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

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

3. The announcement of the opening of Bowen and Kidder’s exhibit appeared front and center under the masthead of Boston’s Columbian Centinel. “Bowen’s Phoenix Museum,” Columbian Centinel, June 21, 1816. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — 3. The announcement of the opening of Bowen and Kidder’s exhibit appeared front and center under the masthead of Boston’s *Columbian Centinel*. “Bowen’s Phoenix Museum,” *Columbian Centinel*, June 21, 1816. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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

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

4. When they advertised their exhibition in Providence, Bowen and Kidder described their large paintings as “panorama views.” Advertisement, “New Museum. Bowen and Kidder,” Providence Gazette, November 2, 1816. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — 4. When they advertised their exhibition in Providence, Bowen and Kidder described their large paintings as “panorama views.” Advertisement, “New Museum. Bowen and Kidder,” *Providence Gazette*, November 2, 1816. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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

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

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

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

5. “A correct representation of Market street, Philadelphia from the Old Court House to Centre Square” received top billing when the exhibit of panoramic views debuted in Philadelphia. “Phoenix Museum,” Philadelphia Aurora, January 3, 1817. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — 5. “A correct representation of *Market street*, Philadelphia from the Old Court House to Centre Square” received top billing when the exhibit of panoramic views debuted in Philadelphia. “Phoenix Museum,” *Philadelphia Aurora*, January 3, 1817. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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

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

6. Bowen and Kidder sold these prints for a dollar. Captions credited Kidder as the painter, engraver, and co-publisher of the image. “A Representation of the Great Storm at Providence, Sept. 23rd, 1815,” by James Kidder (Boston, 1816). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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

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

7. James Kidder engraved a view of the First Church in Boston for a Boston periodical in 1813. The print says that his old drawing master, John Rubens Smith, drew the original view. Perhaps one of these men painted a similar view of the meetinghouse now in the collections of the Bostonian Society. “View of the Old Brick Meeting House in Boston 1808,” Frontispiece for The Polyanthos, Vol. 2 (Boston, July 1813). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — 7. James Kidder engraved a view of the First Church in Boston for a Boston periodical in 1813. The print says that his old drawing master, John Rubens Smith, drew the original view. Perhaps one of these men painted a similar view of the meetinghouse now in the collections of the Bostonian Society. “View of the Old Brick Meeting House in Boston 1808,” Frontispiece for *The Polyanthos*, Vol. 2 (Boston, July 1813). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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

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

8. In the early 1820s, James Kidder drew a view of a late-seventeenth-century building standing in Boston’s urban core. William Hoogland engraved it on a trade card for John K. Simpson, who kept shop under its roof and celebrated its antiquity. By the late 1830s, reproductions of this view earned the building notoriety as “the old feather store.” Trade card, “John K. Simpson, Importer of Upholstery Goods, No. 1 Ann Street, Boston,” by James Kidder and William Hoogland (Boston, ca. 1820). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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

Acknowledgments

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

Beyond Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

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

Padraig Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 328 pp., $45. — Padraig Riley, *Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America*. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 328 pp., $45.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Lafayette’s Footsteps

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

Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States. New York: Riverhead Books, 2015. 288 pp., $27.95. — Sarah Vowell, *Lafayette in the Somewhat United States*. New York: Riverhead Books, 2015. 288 pp., $27.95.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamilton, Burr, Livingston, Clinton, Van Buren: Building Banks, Canals, and a Political System in New York State

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

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

credit: Victor G Jeffreys II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Difference in Musical Nationalism

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

Ann Ostendorf, Sounds American: National Identity and the Music Culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1800-1860. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. 272 pp., $24.95.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Dream” (1768, 1790) by Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson

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

A Note on the Text

Further Reading

Usable Poetry

Recovering Rice

Catharine Brown, Cherokee Evangelist

An Inevitable American Revolution?

“A Natural Representation of Market-Street, in Philadelphia”: An Attribution, a Story, and Some Thoughts on Future Study

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Beyond Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

In Lafayette’s Footsteps

Hamilton, Burr, Livingston, Clinton, Van Buren: Building Banks, Canals, and a Political System in New York State

The Difference in Musical Nationalism