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 Orchestra as Social Utopia

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

Nancy Newman, Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in Nineteenth-Century America. Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2010. 332 pp., $80.

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 Newman rejects the simplicity of Levine’s argument, which she correctly claims is based on outdated research on the Germania.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Distinctive Nature of Dutch Tolerance

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

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

Coopering Lesson, c. 1855

In coopering, the device a cooper uses to hold the stave
is called a shaving horse, or mare.

There’s a rhythm to it,
as Father’s bare hands, arms,
draw the hollowing knife along each
riven stave, legs braced against the
mare’s length, cedar falling in commas
from his aproned waist. It’s the scooping
out that forms each stave’s curve, twenty
or more hollowed in equal arcs before heat,
hoops, windlass, rope bind them in round
certainty—the way parentheses hold in all
we don’t say directly. Next, Father sets
the cask ablaze, char sealing its pores,
flames’ height the clock by which he
gauges time, the line between
destruction and enough.

Commencement

Poem constructed from the words of Henry M. Pierce’s commencement address
to Grace’s class, the first graduating class of Rutgers Female College, 1867.

Of late, the public mind is agitated by the question
of woman’s true position and her proper education.

Equal, I would claim is woman’s place beside of man. I am persuaded
the time is near when we shall marvel this was ever seriously debated.

Along with reason, my opinion rests in Christ’s own Holy view.
How else, in his ideal of marriage, could one truly fuse from two?

It follows that in woman’s preparation for this station,
her schooling should be equal to man’s liberal education.

Graduates, yield not to mean spirits who protest each notch
of woman’s rise is cut from man’s God-given lot.

Civilization’s advance hereafter, or its like decline,
depends on the place each nation gives to womankind.

Stereocard, c. 1893

In the 1870’s, Grace moved to Richmond with her mother;
her sister Minnie remained in New York City.

Dear Minnie,

Thank you for the stereocard, dear sister. Wherever
did you find it? The House of Mansions gone a decade, yet
here, in double, those lancet windows (now rubble) where
once I peered into the heavens. How fast Rutgers outgrew
what seemed enough: crenellated towers, labyrinthine halls.
Moving the college, telescope and all. Do you remember
how, in summer, we’d spread a blanket on grass already
misted with night’s kiss, and I’d read you the stars?
Gazelle is what we saw in Ursa Major, galloping
across the sky (I still do). Why Great Bear?
This card truly transports me to your side.

Still, names recorded are what persist, lines drawn
what we insist on or resist. Take a ship’s register.
At each port, my bare fingers trigger the same label
under “calling”: spinster. As if men study a stereocard
in which a twin image of my spirit is split: half
with laughter, good works, this sisterhood absent
from their senses, pen declaring me only without.

I want to reply, but silence is the only kindness
(can you hear Mother too?). Instead, I recast spinster
to describe how I spin filaments of students’ dreams,
talents, and study into thread, perhaps for blankets
like the one under our heads when we were girls.

At least as Mrs. Young, you’re spared this word,
if not its measure. I recall the line in Mother’s obituary
that halted my tears: Only one of her daughters
is married—Joanna and I as marks against her reckoning.

Love,
Grace

P.S. I should
amend what I said earlier. There is another word
they record sometimes: none.

Böhme’s Theory, c. 1905

Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) was a Christian theologian and mystic.

Dear Minnie,

You mentioned Böhme in your letter, his theory that
God has pressed Himself into the world for us to discover. What if
He is pressed in human invention too? Clothing, buildings, machines.
What if, along with dahlias and the brush of sunrise on the Hudson,
He’s in these things? Then perhaps it’s in these signals combined
that God sends His most urgent messages. Consider those white flags
draped, motionless, on tenement doors, markers hung for children
smothered by summer’s heat—while outside, wind licked and licked
at sheets strung between alleys, nudging corners up like tongues.

  This isn’t the reply you expected.
It’s just, of late, I’ve noticed how much around us is designed
to look like something it is not: bloomers like skirts,
chemisette as blouse. Nature deceives as well. Near
Honolulu, the ocean kaleidoscopes with rose,
                                      emerald,
                              gold,
before settling back to blue.
                      Yet, it isn’t the sea changing,
                      but reflections of corals below.
What should we glean from this?
The poem about Death stopping—
you know the one. I rode in such a carriage with loneliness.
Still, I hope for love, companionship. Is this deceit?

  At Kenilworth, on our last trip with Uncle Lewis, I plucked holly
from its beautiful ruin and tucked it in my journal. It clings
to green. A pressing? But I worry I overlook more than I see.
Last week, on our block, I discovered steps
                          sunk into a bank. They led
to a lilac pendant with lavender, house fallen
(or taken) down long ago. How many stairways do we pass
that could lead to our flourishing?        Their fragrance lingers
in these halls, that without Mother or Uncle, lengthen. Another deceit.
  I miss you, dear sister.

How It Was

Grace Arents died on June 20, 1926. Announcements lauded her philanthropy, some noting surviving relatives. Although Grace left life-rights at Bloemendaal to Mary Garland Smith, her name was not mentioned.
This poem is in Mary Garland’s voice.

How the altar candle wouldn’t catch,
struggling to burn as I struggled for breath.

How people embraced your sister, nephews,
tears passing from cheeks to shoulder sleeves.

How the eulogy, brief as you’d requested,
bid students to mind their studies, parents, prayers.

How they wept into folded hands as I pictured you
kneeling to console each child—arms open, gaze warm.

How when my vision cleared, there was only emptiness
in the pew beside me—the hymns sung, the flame gone.

Walking with Grace: A Documentary Poetry Journey

My journey to learn about Grace Evelyn Arents (1848-1926) began when I moved into a home within walking distance of her last residence, Bloemendaal, now part of a botanical garden named after her uncle Lewis Ginter.

1. "What a Curious Thing," from a book of poetry of Grace Evelyn Arents, Mss1 G4355 a 26. Lewis Ginter Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia. Used with permission. www.vahistorical.org — 1. “What a Curious Thing,” from a book of poetry of Grace Evelyn Arents, Mss1 G4355 a 26. Lewis Ginter Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia. Used with permission. Virginia Historical Society

I quickly learned how Grace’s generosity and tenacity transformed the Oregon Hill neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia. Her philanthropy began prior to her uncle Lewis’s death and burgeoned after she inherited a substantial fortune from him in 1897. The mission work of her congregation at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church led Grace to Oregon Hill, a working-class community perched above the James River near Albemarle Paper Company and Tredegar Iron Works. Here, Grace Arents founded St. Andrew’s School and served as its first principal. She funded the building of St. Andrew’s Teachers’ House and a Gothic-style granite and limestone cathedral for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (the first in Richmond in which all pews were free), as well as playgrounds, parks, public housing, and public baths. She opened Richmond’s first public library, which later became a branch of the Richmond Public Library, donated money to the city for an elementary school, and helped establish the Richmond Education Association (REA) and Instructive Visiting Nurses Association (IVNA). Throughout her life, she gave of herself and her wealth quietly, and those gifts made a lasting impact. St. Andrew’s School, the church, REA, and IVNA remain active, as does the botanical garden established on land she bequeathed to the city. St. Andrew’s School and Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden (LGBG) continue to be supported, though not solely, by funds left to sustain them by Grace Arents. As I began to understand the extent of Grace’s influence, I realized I was moving about in the legacy of an important local historical figure, but one whose gender and sense of privacy had obscured her story. I was curious: how did a nineteenth-century woman of means accomplish so much, unhampered and unassisted by a husband, and what sort of life did this strong-willed woman live?

Research would not yield these answers easily. In keeping with her private lifestyle, Grace ordered her personal papers burned when she died. Two travel diaries, a commonplace book, and a handful of letters eluded this fate. When I read them, I was struck by the incomplete picture I’d formed of Grace from biographical profiles that depicted her as a prim, religious, shy, determined, private spinster who cared about public education, libraries, public health, parks, gardens, and architecture. I indeed found confirmation of the way she protected her privacy, such as in a letter in which she politely yet firmly declines a friend’s offer of assistance in regard to a scandal involving her niece Edna. Likewise, her diaries and commonplace book affirm her wide range of interests, including several social causes, and her devotion to her faith. Yet Grace also describes natural beauty with a sense of wonder in her diaries, and recounts the fun she had riding a donkey in a street race in Port Said, and times she socialized late into the evening. Alongside sermons, her commonplace book contains poems about love, loss, and friendship. The articles I’d read about her, even collectively, fell short of capturing this complexity.

In addition to these personal documents, I examined census records, historical newspapers, and passenger lists for traces of Grace, and interviewed people who’ve studied her life, like librarians Patty Parks and Janet Woody; Sharon Francisco and Fran Purdum, who portray Grace and her uncle for LGBG’s Heritage Days; Edwin Slipek, professor and editor; and Lewis Ginter’s biographer, Brian Burns. Of all the documents accumulated about Grace in public archives and private collections, photos are the most elusive. A handful taken in profile exist, and there’s a small portrait of her as a child, but because she refused photographs, there’s no front-facing photo of her as an adult, at least none that those I interviewed are confident is her. Yet last year, LGBG included a front-facing photo of Grace in an exhibit about the garden’s history. It could be her, but I’m not convinced. Perhaps I’m resistant to putting a face with her story since she worked so diligently to avoid photographs. Perhaps I’ve grown accustomed to hearing her voice through her words, witnessing her values through her works, and seeing her in that “beside” view of profile photos. Several times throughout this journey, when I might have studied her gaze eye-to-eye across time in a portrait, I’ve instead visited her gravesite in Hollywood Cemetery or walked along the streets and grounds where she lived and worked. With or without a face to picture in my mind, her story inspires me and has drawn me back, again and again, to sources that hold whispers of that story.

When the research process has frustrated me, as I anticipated it would, connective threads between her life and mine have deepened and sustained my motivation to keep searching, studying, and writing. Although Grace lived in a much higher social class than mine, and in a starkly different time, I’ve found echoes of my life in details of hers: her Dutch ancestry, her passion for education and libraries, her move from North to South, and the long-term companionship she found with another woman. And Grace lived and worked and dreamed a mile away from where I’m sitting right now. Let me share some highlights from my journey to create documentary poetry about Grace Arents, using the five poems included in this issue as markers. It’s my hope that the voice and persona in these poems, informed by both research and imagination, convey Grace’s tenacity, mystery, and complex humanity.

2. "Cooper Working at Shaving Horse," taken from The Panorama of Professions and Trades; or Every Man’s Book, by Edward Hazen (Philadelphia, 1836). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — 2. “Cooper Working at Shaving Horse,” taken from *The Panorama of Professions and Trades; or Every Man’s Book*, by Edward Hazen (Philadelphia, 1836). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

One of the first hurdles I encountered, along with the paucity of primary sources extant in Grace’s hand, was developing an authentic vocabulary with which to write the poems. By mining Grace’s words in her travel journals, along with those of poets, writers, and ministers whose lines she copied into her commonplace book, I gleaned lists of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Then, by delving into subjects on which she focused her energy: education (particularly in home and industrial arts), libraries, public health, horticulture, agriculture, and the Episcopal faith, I expanded this wellspring of words, images, and potential metaphors to form a Grace Arents lexicon. I also kept in mind her affinity for painting and drawing, talents for which she won honors in her graduating class at Rutgers Female College, an affinity reflected in diary entries in which she recorded details about the color, light, texture, and contours of her surroundings, and about the paintings, sculptures, and architecture she noticed.

As I immersed myself in the challenge of writing in Grace’s voice, I sensed the tension in the ways she resisted or pushed beyond society’s expectations of women, particularly by overseeing the construction of St. Andrew’s Church. Tension emerged as a recurrent theme in her life, a theme I wanted to introduce early in her story. Several passages she copied into her commonplace book resonate with the tension of things held back or held in, such as the one in fig. 1: “What a curious thing the real, secret history of a man’s or woman’s life is! . . . it is never written or told. There are secret vices, or wishes, or schemes, or crimes, which are never whispered or put into words; and there are hidden virtues and hopes and plans and goodness which cannot be told.”

Her father’s work as a cooper provided an apt metaphor for holding things in, inspiring the poem “Coopering Lesson, c. 1855,” which demanded another layer of vocabulary: the language of barrel-making. Public records show that Stephen Arents died in 1855 when Grace was seven or eight, a fact that established a boundary as to when I could place this poem in time. Fortunately, a verse that Grace copied into her sister Mary’s commonplace book circa 1855, containing lines like “Be thy spirits ever unshrouded,” suggests Grace could read and write formal texts by this same year. It seemed reasonable that she would also have some familiarity with the terminology of her father’s trade. As I revised “Coopering Lesson,” I shaped the form to evoke a barrel so that the poem’s appearance amplifies the tension pressed into its lines.

3. “The Rutgers Female Institute, Fifth Avenue,” Twenty-Second Annual Catalogue and Circular of Rutgers Female Institute (New York, 1860). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

In contrast to the opening poem’s reflection of a broad theme, the spark for “Commencement” came from a specific source, one I found shortly after discovering where Grace attended college. Her 1867 class was the first to graduate after the institution’s name was changed from Rutgers Female Institute to Rutgers Female College. After I uncovered this fact in an article in the June 27, 1867, issue of New York Observer and Chronicle, I found the full text of the president’s address that Henry M. Pierce gave at her commencement in the HathiTrust Digital Library. I had wondered how Grace developed the confidence to operate in spheres typically dominated by men. Pierce’s address provides a glimpse into the educational environment that helped instill such confidence, as reflected in this passage: “I am fully persuaded that the time is not far distant, when it will be thought incredible that the question of the inferiority of woman should ever have been seriously debated. For it is not without higher warrant than that of human reason, that I would claim for woman an equal place by the side of man.” Pierce goes on to assert a faith-based defense for women’s equality and equal liberal education, at one point saying (in relation to an interpretation of Proverbs), “yield not to the mean spirit, that thinks that whatever is conceded to woman, is so much taken from the birthright of man.” As a woman deeply committed to the Episcopal faith (values reflected in her diary and life work), this biblical argument would have resonated with young Grace. The first time I read Pierce’s words, I caught myself holding my breath as I imagined what it must have been like to be a young woman hearing this message nearly 150 years ago. I constructed the poem “Commencement” in the spirit of Pierce’s message, drawing most words for the poem directly from his text.

At this point in the project, my writing stalled. For the manuscript to work, I needed a form that could move the narrative further in one poem than the half-dozen poems I had written so far, a form that could also reveal more of Grace’s personality and language. Taking cues from collections like Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Anna, washing by Ted Genoways, as well as advice from my poetry mentor Laure-Anne Bosselaar-Brown, I began to write epistolary poems addressed to the sibling who outlived Grace: her sister Minnie. By addressing Minnie, the poems in Grace’s persona could follow the full arc of Grace’s life. Since Minnie and her daughter Edna accompanied Grace on an overseas trip with their uncle Lewis (as documented in Grace’s 1896 travel diary and in passenger lists) this choice could also provide opportunities to make direct references to their shared experiences. “Stereocard, c. 1893” and “Böhme’s Theory, c. 1905” are among the letter poems that emerged.

4. Stereoviewer, ca. 1890. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

“Stereocard, c. 1893” centers on a metaphor evocative of a photographic method familiar to Americans in the Progressive era, particularly to travelers like Grace. Through historic images and newspaper articles about Rutgers Female College and the elegant House of Mansions where the college was located when Grace attended, I learned about the towers, windows, and telescope referenced in the first stanza. Given the building’s stature, it’s likely that a stereocard of the House of Mansions actually exists, although I haven’t found one yet. Ship’s registers in genealogical databases revealed the words “spinster” and “none” listed beside Grace’s name under “calling.” In the third stanza, the italicized text “Only one of her daughters is married” is excerpted from an obituary for Grace’s mother, Jane Arents, that was published on the front page of The Richmond Dispatch on July 30, 1890, a document available through Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

Similarly, “Böhme’s Theory, c. 1905” knits together period details with documentary traces of Grace. Given her wide reading on a variety of topics, Christianity among them, Grace would likely have known of Böhme. Likewise, considering her dedication to improving living conditions for the working-class Oregon Hill community and her continued ties to New York City through family members who remained there, Grace would likely have been aware of tenement conditions. Her frequent inclusion of poems in her commonplace book makes it likely she would have read Emily Dickinson’s poems after they were published in 1890. Along with these historical contexts, Grace’s 1888 travel diary provided details about clothing items like bloomers and the description of shifting colors in the waters near Honolulu, an excerpt which appears in fig. 5. It reads, “I do not know when I have seen anything more wonderfully beautiful than the colors on the water as we left these islands—This ocean itself is always of a wonderful blue sometimes of an inky blackness and then of every stage to a blue white—but in the harbor of Honolulu it changed to a deep green—as we left this faded to a paler shade then took a rosy hue & gradually through many tints almost rainbow like we passed back to blue again. I was told these colors are the effect of the water on the coral reefs.”

Later in the poem, the story about plucking holly from the Kenilworth ruins is drawn from Grace’s 1896 diary, while the phrase “pendant with” echoes her 1888 diary description of forests near Monterey “where for the first time [she] saw. . . Florida moss pendant from the branches of the trees.” Other epistolary poems in the manuscript reflect a kaleidoscope of source material as well.

Along with my desire to understand Grace’s life, ever since I first read about her, I’ve wanted to know more about the companion to whom she left a modest inheritance and lifetime rights to reside at Bloemendaal: Mary Garland Smith. Unfortunately, the last name Smith has made tracing her story even more frustrating than finding fragments of Grace’s life in public documents and historic records. Yet I’m grateful that even this search has yielded a few tiny bursts of research joy. School and census records confirm details commonly recounted in articles about Grace, such as Mary Garland Smith succeeding Grace as principal of St. Andrew’s School. The 1910 census shows that Mary Garland Smith was residing at St. Andrew’s Teachers’ House and “Principal” was noted as her occupation. In 1920 and subsequent census records, she lived at Bloemendaal. The 1920 and 1940 census records also indicate that she was born in Virginia and suggest she may have preferred being called Garland rather than Mary. The 1920 census lists her as Garland M. Smith, the 1940 census as M. Garland Smith. Even if she did not go by Garland with everyone, the codicil to Grace’s will includes this statement: “I have left the Farm with everything on it to Garland for her life.” When I extended my search to genealogical databases, I found her 1922 passport application and a passenger list for the SS Scythia’s voyage from Liverpool to New York that August. In case you’re wondering (as I was), Grace’s name does not appear on the same passenger list. Still, the application reveals Mary Garland’s birthplace as Essex County, Virginia, and includes a photograph and a description of her appearance.

5. Travel diary of Grace Evelyn Arents, Mss1 G4355 a 23 (1888). Lewis Ginter Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia. Used with permission. www.vahistorical.org — 5. Travel diary of Grace Evelyn Arents, Mss1 G4355 a 23 (1888). Lewis Ginter Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia. Used with permission. Virginia Historical Society

When I make presentations about Grace, people often ask whether Grace and Garland were a couple in the sense that some women, like my wife and me, are today. It’s certainly possible, but since there are no records that suggest romantic ties, I’ve chosen to imagine them as close friends and companions who loved each other, shared a passion for education, and who knew each other for at least 19 years, from 1907 when Mary Garland Smith became principal of St. Andrew’s School until Grace’s death in 1926. In their era, intimate friendships among women sometimes sparked scrutiny; however, women in Grace’s social class were less often subjected to such critical examination. Along with Grace’s fierce protection of her privacy, their choice to live together outside the city on a farm at Bloemendaal further shielded them. It did not surprise me when I discovered that despite their companionship and the life rights Grace granted to Garland in her will, none of Grace’s obituaries mentioned Mary Garland Smith. Although it’s impossible to know how Garland felt about this omission, I expect it mattered little to her compared to the absence of Grace. It is this loss of a dear friend and the sense of emptiness that follows that I’ve tried to capture in “How It Was,” a poem from Garland’s perspective.

My journey with Grace and Garland is still in progress. I’m grateful that my work has already connected more people with their story and augmented the details in the Grace stories that are told, such as the inclusion of her graduation from Rutgers Female College in an LGBG display about the garden’s history. The five poems published here represent part of the narrative arc for a book-length manuscript about Grace Evelyn Arents. Yet questions remain. Where did Grace stand on suffrage? Did she correspond or work with Maggie L. Walker, a famous contemporary of hers? Was she involved in responding when the 1918 influenza epidemic reached Richmond? Did Grace and Garland ever travel together? What did Garland do before she became principal of St. Andrew’s and after Grace’s death? Several poems I envision in the arc of their story require additional research before I put pen to paper. I continue to research, learn, and write, and to walk with Grace—and Garland.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3.5 (July, 2016).

Wendy DeGroat’s poetry has appeared in U.S. and U.K. publications, including Raleigh Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, About Place, Mslexia, and TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism. With roots in northern New Jersey where her ancestors’ 1865 cabin was restored by Montclair State University to serve as a site for teaching early American history, she is currently a librarian in Richmond, Virginia, where she also teaches writing workshops and curates poetryriver.org, a resource site for reading and learning about documentary poetry, and for diversifying the poetic voices taught in high school and undergraduate classrooms.