One of the most enjoyable experiences of my initial visit to the American Antiquarian Society some years ago was an afternoon spent browsing through the library’s oversized broadsides and posters. Through a familiarity with the literature on circus history, I was well aware that there were some significant examples of early American show printing in the collections, but the inadequacy of these published accounts and illustrations became readily apparent when I arrived at an 1835 poster for a division of the “Zoological Institute” (fig. 1). The poster proclaimed the varied attractions of a traveling menagerie with a spectacular mix of display types and some three dozen woodcuts, but at just over 6 ½ feet across and over nine feet tall, perhaps its most noteworthy feature was its enormous size. While its measurements and extravagance were immediately apparent and impressive, what I soon began to appreciate was that the poster was “big” in many different ways.

For one, the poster reflected the size and scope of the venture for which it was commissioned, namely the Zoological Institute, an association of showmen and investors that effectively monopolized the menagerie business in the years leading up to the Panic of 1837. Various forms of commercial entertainment burgeoned in urban centers like Philadelphia and New York during the late eighteenth century. But it was not until the early nineteenth century that traveling shows developed to bring these novel forms to the broader, and still largely rural, national public. Menageries were the most prominent and perhaps the most profitable form of these emerging itinerant entertainments. Though there were certainly sporadic commercial exhibitions of wild animals in North America prior to the nineteenth century, it was the arrival of the first elephants in 1796 and 1804, and the success that attended their exhibition, which spurred the rapid expansion of the business. By the 1820s, a dozen or so menageries—collections of animals rather like a traveling zoo—were touring the country with ever-larger and more exotic combinations of creatures and attractions. During the 1829 season, for example, Charles Wright became the first keeper advertised as entering the cage of a big cat, and this popular feature was soon widely adopted. At the same time, leading menageries intensified their efforts to acquire more numerous and novel animals from around the globe. In 1830, one of the largest concerns, June, Titus, & Co., imported the first living rhinoceros for the edification and enjoyment of American audiences.

The culmination of a decade of development and consolidation in the menagerie business was the formation of the Zoological Institute in January 1835 at Somers, New York, a town about fifty miles north of New York City that was the center of the animal trade. Somers attained this distinction via the efforts of a resident named Hachaliah Bailey, who parlayed an early interest in the elephant that came to be known as “Old Bet” (1804-1816) into a small fortune. Bailey’s success led a number of other local entrepreneurs to become involved in various kinds of itinerant entertainment. By the late 1820s, a loose confederation of showmen from Westchester and Putnam Counties dominated the menagerie business and also played a defining role in the evolution of the American circus.

Although the menagerie was eventually subordinated by the circus, during the 1830s they were distinctly different forms of entertainment that were more often seen separately than in combination. The early American circuses were more or less equestrian shows and featured trick and acrobatic riding that involved dancing, posing, and jumping off and on a horse as it galloped around the ring. These equestrian feats were often interspersed with a comic song from a clown or some vaulting, rope-dancing, or other acrobatic acts, but the main draw was the riders. Companies usually consisted of some half-dozen performers, and until the turn to canvas tents in the late 1820s, they were generally limited to performing in semi-permanent wooden structures in urban centers. Menageries, on the other hand, proved much more mobile and, perhaps more importantly, they were much less susceptible to prevailing mores and concerns about their propriety. Everything from the use of female performers to the rough crowds that touring shows could attract made the circus objectionable to many Americans, leading some states like Vermont and Connecticut to ban the circus outright.

Menageries mitigated these concerns by presenting their attractions as edifying and in the words of the poster, “Embracing all the Subjects of Natural History.” The fact that the men who founded the Zoological Institute adopted the nomenclature of an “institute,” a term more common to learned societies than entertainments, suggests something about showmen’s attempts to alleviate potential public approbation by emphasizing the educational value of their exhibitions. While the appearance of such lofty motivations was important for publicity purposes, antebellum menageries were clearly driven by economic rather than educational imperatives. They were both capital-intensive and risky ventures: exotic animals were expensive to acquire and not easy to keep in good health. Although the itinerant mode adopted by most menageries proved profitable, travel was often difficult, and as the number of shows increased, competition was beginning to hurt everyone’s bottom line.

The answer to these difficulties was the Zoological Institute, a capital stock company formed on January 14, 1835, in Somers, New York. The “Articles of Association” were signed by a collection of menagerie and circus owners and outside investors, many of whom were local farmers. They established “an association denominated The Zoological Institute which it is proposed to maintain for keeping a large collection of rare and curious animals and exhibiting them for the joint benefit, interest, and advantage of the owners thereof at such times and places in such lots and such parcels and in such manner as shall best promote their interests and by means of which the knowledge of natural history may be more generally diffused and promoted and rational curiosity satisfied.” This language effectively married the pursuit of economic gain with public service, and in purely economic terms, it was an impressive venture. The Zoological Institute combined the resources of some dozen menageries and three circuses whose appraised value in conjunction with cash raised from investors gave the corporation $329,325 in total capital (fig. 2). A board of five directors managed the overall enterprise, and there were major menageries employing some variation of the Zoological Institute title in Boston, Albany, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati during the winter of 1835. The directors reorganized the constituent shows into thirteen units and proscribed routes for the subsequent touring season in such a way as to mitigate competition and maximize profits. Much like the posters that announced its presence, the Zoological Institute reflected an enormous investment of capital. As a purveyor of popular entertainment, it was unprecedented in its size and level of organization.

The grandest of the permanent venues, and the unit for which the American Antiquarian Society’s poster was produced, was in New York City, which was not coincidentally well on its way to becoming the center of the emerging popular entertainment and printing industries in the United States. A newly constructed building at 37 Bowery housed the association’s largest collection of animals until the show went back on the road in the spring of 1835. The Zoological Institute was located nearly opposite the Bowery Theatre one block north of Chatham Square at the intersection with Bayard Street, and it was one of many local attractions that turned the Bowery into a locus for commercial leisure (fig. 3). Entry to the Institute was twenty-five cents (twelve and a half for children), and it was open from ten in the morning through nine in the evening. The New-York Spectator of December 4, 1834, offered the following description of the new menagerie:

The saloon in which the animals are exhibited is a spacious and noble apartment—which is brilliantly lit at night by three magnificent cut glass lustres. The cages are contrived so as to form an architectural embellishment of the room, being divided by pilasters, which seem to support the large and commodious gallery which runs around the whole. The name of each animal is inscribed on a gilt label over its appropriate dwelling, thus leaving every visitor to learn and admire for himself. The gallery could probably accommodate seven or eight hundred persons, and is provided with cushioned seats—the orchestra occupying the entrance end. Branching from the gallery are two elegantly furnished retiring saloons for ladies; the whole forming an establishment unequalled in this, or, we may add, in any other country,—and which, will ever in future constitute one of the first and greatest attractions of our city.

 

A band of musicians further contributed to the refined atmosphere that the managers so clearly wanted to foment. The great draw, though, was Isaac Van Amburgh, a young keeper who entered the cages and violently toyed with the big cats (fig. 4). It was here that Van Amburgh began his ascent to transatlantic fame and fortune with acts such as prying open and thrusting his head into the jaws of a tiger and introducing a lamb into the cage to demonstrate his mastery over the ostensibly savage beasts. That the directors of the Zoological Institute invested such resources and apportioned many of their best attractions to the New York division was an apt indication of the extent to which that city had become the cultural and commercial capital of the United States.

The directors also clearly understood that the publicity for their signature division should be as large and lavish as the menagerie itself. In this they were aided by R. Hoe & Co., an innovative printing press manufacturer based in New York City that was also a signatory to the “Articles of Association” and thus had a vested interest in the Zoological Institute’s success. Along the bottom of the poster, a notice reads that it was “Printed by Jared W. Bell, Franklin Hall, 17 Ann-Street, New-York, on his Improved Napier Cylinder Press, the Largest in the World.” The cylindrical press that Bell bragged about was constructed and installed in his shop by R. Hoe & Co. in February 1835 expressly to produce bills for the Zoological Institute (fig. 5). The size and speed of the new machine was widely noted in contemporary newspapers, which indicated that it cost $4000 and was capable of printing an area of sixty by forty inches. As technological advances allowed for increasingly elaborate and high-volume printing at reduced costs, American showmen began spending more money on advertising in an attempt to boost profits and outdo their competition. Prior to the 1830s, most show printing in the United States was done by local job offices or newspaper presses, but in New York City, printers like Jonas Booth and Jared W. Bell began to specialize in posters for the growing commercial entertainment industry. By the early 1830s, Bell had found a niche producing large posters for menageries, several examples of which can be found at the American Antiquarian Society and at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin. But there were technical and no doubt financial limitations on these earlier efforts that rendered them far less impressive in terms of size and quality than the posters produced in the spring of 1835 for the Zoological Institute.

A close examination of the Zoological Institute poster offers a window into the technology that facilitated the nineteenth-century’s print and graphic revolutions. The most obvious change here was the new press designed by R. Hoe & Co., which was a single cylinder model based on a design by British manufacturer David Napier. Though crude by later standards, it used steam power and was much more efficient than the comparatively cumbersome letterpress. The use of a cylinder meant that it printed much more evenly and quickly, and across a much larger area than heretofore possible. Although Bell had produced some large multi-sheet woodblock posters prior to 1835, the new press allowed the work to be done in a much more efficient and presumably economical manner. The Zoological Institute poster is actually made up of four separately printed sheets that the advance agent or biller reassembled as it was posted. This manner of advertising using large or multi-sheet posters became the standard mode for menageries and circuses and, with the gradual introduction of color and lithography, drove the production of the magnificent posters for which the American circus is best remembered.

While I was certainly impressed on first viewing the poster, an antebellum viewer would have been astounded by the size and style of the typefaces and the magnitude of the illustrations. Even with the new press, the production of such a poster was a “big” process, the result of an enormous amount of labor on the part of the printers who assembled the text, illustrations, and decorations. The Zoological Institute poster has at least fifteen different typefaces, and the so-called display or large types employed here were particularly difficult to produce. It was only in 1827 that New York City printer Darius Wells had perfected a method that allowed for the mass production of wood type using a lateral router. It was this breakthrough that allowed Bell’s shop to use the mix of large and attractive wood type that got people’s attention. The header effectively mixes several different styles of big and bold type commonly known as “fat face” that heightened the contrast between thin and thick strokes and that was particularly forceful on the large formats advertisers demanded. Although somewhat crude and plain compared to the fancy types of the following decades, flourishes like the large Roman open shaded typeface used for the “MENAGERIE AND AVIARY” line, which was over four inches tall, were novelties. Other interesting notes concerning the type gesture toward the new demands that the press and format made on printers. The first observation is simply that some of the type, such as the Gothic (sans-serif) used for “IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK,” was both crudely fabricated and poorly set, which was likely due to the fact that there the poster required much more and larger type than was heretofore necessary. The last three rows of animal labels perhaps offer a further indication that the printer was running out of type in that they mix a Roman fat face with an italicized and an Antique typeface. The occasional unevenness of the text and illustrations also suggests that there was a learning curve with the operation of the new press.

With over three dozen individual woodcuts, undoubtedly the most arresting feature of the poster was the number and quality of its illustrations. The production of these images was a time-consuming and expensive process that would have required a team of skilled artisans. The illustrations set four across like the cage wagons at bottom would have required woodcuts measuring eighteen by twelve inches, and even the smaller appearing illustrations set eight across like the “Porcupine” were large at around nine by eight inches. As a matter of perspective, the “Dromedary” pictured just to the right and below center is the same size as a standard sheet of 8 ½ by 11 paper. Most of the work on these woodcuts was done anonymously and much of it was likely copied from natural history books like Thomas Bewick’s A General History of Quadrupeds (1790), but at least five of the engravers are identifiable. The most famous of these was undoubtedly Abel Bowen, a noted Boston printer, who cut the figure of the “Puma” (fig. 6) at the center of the second row from the bottom. The fact that his work appeared on a poster produced in New York City was an indicator of the way printer’s blocks circulated, though it may also have been a stereotyped (i.e. copied) version. Another of the engravers was Alfred A. Lansing, who had done work for Bell on menagerie posters as early as 1831. He was responsible for three of the illustrations along the top of the poster that depicted a keeper with various big cats (fig. 7). It is unclear whether this was new work produced specifically for this poster, as Bell frequently reused woodcuts. The “Leopard” (fig. 8), for example, was previously printed on an 1831 poster for the “American National Caravan” at the American Antiquarian Society, one that also features work by Lansing.

The other identifiable contributors were New York City-based engravers Charles P. Huestis, Samuel Childs, and Joseph W. Morse. The most significant figure among these few was Morse, whose three signed woodcuts on the second row consist of “The Emeu,” a “Cassowara,” and perhaps the most technically accomplished woodcut on the poster, that of an “Elephant with Saddle” (fig. 9). Morse was a singularly important figure in the annals of American show printing. He created an engraving method in the late 1830s that utilized pine blocks that made the production of lavish, multi-colored posters much more economical. Jared W. Bell printed some wonderful color posters using woodblocks in the 1840s, and this production method dominated circus advertising through the end of the 1870s, when it was displaced by lithography. Although the appearance of the illustrations on the poster is uneven due to the varying quality of the woodcuts and the aforementioned printing issues on the new press, the size and quantity of illustrations was unprecedented, and it was naturally an effective advertisement for the show.

The poster also makes use of a variety of decorative borders and bands that were fairly common in contemporary printing. The discerning observer will have noted that what Bell printed was not, in fact, the finished poster, as the manicules or “printer’s fists” at center right point to spaces where the advance agent wrote in the location, date, and time of the show. Though it seems likely that at least some of the bills were posted in New York City as they were being produced in early 1835, they were actually printed for the menagerie’s planned summer tour through New England. The particular copy that made its way to the American Antiquarian Society was inscribed as follows for a date in Maine: “Clinton on Friday the 12th day of June 1835” (fig. 10). Both newspaper advertisements along the route and an illustrated pamphlet Bell also printed that was sold by the menagerie advised that: “For time and place of Exhibition, see large Bills in the principal Hotels.” An advance agent traveling a few weeks ahead of the show would thus have placed this particular Zoological Institute poster in a hotel or tavern in Clinton or some other nearby town. This method of advance billing soon became the standard mode of advertising for touring shows and reached its apogee with the railroad circuses of the late nineteenth century, which covered the country with brightly colored posters every summer. In the 1830s, this was still a relatively new practice, but it was proving to be an effective way of attracting the largest possible audience to the Zoological Institute’s menageries.

As the weather and roads improved in the spring of 1835, “The Association’s Celebrated and Extensive Menagerie and Aviary from the Zoological Institute in the City of New York” headed north in a company that consisted of sixty-four men, including a band of fourteen musicians, several blackface minstrels, keeper Isaac Van Amburgh, and support personnel responsible for the difficult logistical work of caring for the animals and moving the show from town to town. Historian Stuart Thayer notes that this unit was the first show that is spoken of as traveling with pre-manufactured portable seating in the form of tiered bleachers, and its main tent was spacious enough to accommodate a ring in which it was advertised that patrons were able to ride the elephant on a “splendid” saddle “with perfect safety, and pleasure to themselves.” There seem to have been two main tents of roughly equal size that housed the principal attractions, while a separate smaller tent featured a museum of wax figures, the minstrels, and some of the smaller reptiles and birds. This might have been done in deference to the aforementioned concerns about the morality of such displays, allowing audience members to forgo these attractions and simply see the animals. Whatever the case, this menagerie was the biggest traveling show in the United States to date and was transported by a train of forty-seven wagons and carriages drawn by 120 gray horses. It displayed over 100 varieties of “birds and beasts” among its three tents. Although the precise animals displayed by menageries were often at odds with their advertised attractions (due in no small part to animal attrition), this Zoological Institute unit seems to have shown most of what was billed, including a polar bear, two elephants, kangaroos, three tigers, an ostrich, a buffalo, and the now extinct quagga (fig. 11). The range of animals pictured in the poster and displayed in the exhibition was a visual index of the transnational dimensions of, and the prominent role that menageries played in, the expanding American entertainment industry.

The star animal of the show as indicated by its advertising was the “Unicorn: or One Horned Rhinoceros,” which was featured on the poster front and center in a cage wagon drawn by a team of six horses. The rhinoceros was a relatively recent addition to American menageries, and this was perhaps why it received top billing over the two elephants, which were by this point fairly common. The rhino also provides a good example of the advantages the Zoological Institute structure extended to the menageries operating under its auspices. When the rhinoceros suddenly died only a few days out of New York City in April, the directors were able to replace it just weeks later with a fresh specimen; the new rhino arrived courtesy of an agent of the association who had just returned from a mission to South Africa with a ship full of animals. With control of thirteen of the twenty circuses and menageries that toured in 1835, the directors of the Zoological Institute were able to maximize their profits by effectively apportioning resources and proscribing routes for the various divisions.

The Zoological Institute also clearly delivered a first-class show. A review of the New York unit in the Newburyport Herald of May 12 praised the association as follows:

By this amalgamation of interests, the proprietors are enabled greatly to swell the number of animals in each collection, and to furnish their fellow countrymen with an occasional exhibition of unrivaled splendour, instead of frequent parades of a few minor quadrapeds. The system of management, too, is altogether on an improved plan; and the directors express their determination to purge this species of amusement of every thing to which the most rigid moralist could object, and to elevate the study of Zoology by living demonstrations, to a standard unrivalled in any age or country.

The level of organization and enterprise of the Zoological Institute celebrated by the Massachusetts newspaper was aptly reflected in the New York unit’s immense bills, and as its bandwagon rolled into Clinton in June 1835, it heralded the arrival of more than just a menagerie. The Zoological Institute represented a fundamental shift in the way that popular entertainment was being produced and consumed, and its poster stands as a visual and material expression of the market revolution in the United States.

Interested readers should note that the Zoological Institute poster will be on display as part of an upcoming exhibition, “Circus and the City,” at the Bard Graduate Center, from September 12, 2012, to February 3, 2013.

Further reading:

The best source on early circuses and menageries is Stuart Thayer’s Annals of the American Circus, 1793-1860 (3 vols., 1976, 1986, and 1992; combined ed., 2000); see also his Traveling Showmen (Detroit, 1997) for an invaluable study of how touring shows operated in the antebellum era. Janet Davis’ The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill, 2000) is the key academic text on the development of the circus in the United States during the nineteenth century. For a recent monograph that usefully employs a regional focus, see Gregory J. Renoff, The Big Tent: The Traveling Circus in Georgia, 1820-1930 (Athens, 2008). See also, David Carlyon, Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard Of (New York, 2001).

On early menageries, see Brett Mizelle, “‘To the Curious’: the Cultural Work of Exhibitions of Exotic and Performing Animals in the Early American Republic” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2000) and “‘I Have Brought my Pig to a Fine Market’: Animals, Their Exhibitors, and Market Culture in the Early Republic,” in Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America, 1789-1860, ed. Scott Martin (Lanham, 2005): 181-216. See also Richard W. Flint, “Entrepreneurial and Cultural Aspects of the Early-Nineteenth-Century Circus and Menagerie Business,” in Itinerancy in New England and New York, eds. Peter Benes and Jane Montague (Boston, 1986): 131-149. Joanne Joys’ The Wild Animal Trainer in America (Boulder, 1983) and “The Wild Things” (PhD diss., Bowling Green University, 2011) examine the history of animal acts. For a plethora of histories on specific animals, ranging from “Circus Rhinos” to “Circus Zebras,” see the many articles published by Richard Reynolds in Bandwagon: The Journal of Circus Historical Society. A broader look at the relationship between menageries and modern zoos can be found in R. J. Hoage and William A. Deiss, eds., New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1996).

For an excellent analysis of the evolution of circuses and show printing, see Richard Flint, “A Great Industrial Art: Circus Poster Printing in America” in Printing History 26 (2009): 18-43. Charles Philip Fox and Tom Parkinson’s Billers, Banners, and Bombast: The Story of Circus Advertising (Boulder, 1985) gives a good overview of the subject and includes many illustrations. Although largely focused on a later era when chromolithography was ascendant, a number of important essays about circus advertising can be found in Kristin Spangenberg and Deborah W. Walk, eds. The Amazing American Circus Poster: The Strobridge Lithographing Company (Cincinnati and Sarasota, 2011).

The literature on the printing revolution in the United States is vast, but for a useful introduction to the “circus atmosphere” that pervaded pre-Civil War print culture, see Isabelle Lehru, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 2000). On the R. Hoe & Company printing presses, see Robert Hoe, A Short History of the Printing Press (New York, 1902) and Frank E. Comparato, Chronicles of Genius and Folly: R. Hoe & Company and the Printing Press as a Service to Democracy (Culver City, 1979). On nineteenth-century New York printing houses and techniques, see Stephen O. Saxe, et al., Billheads & Broadsides: Job Printing in the 19th-century Seaport (New York, 1985). For more about woodcuts, see W. J. Linton, The History of Wood Engraving in America (Boston, 1882). Although ostensibly focused on a particular subset of the industry, Rob Roy Kelly’s American Wood Type, 1828-1900 (New York, 1969) offers a more or less comprehensive overview of nineteenth-century printing. For some fine recent work on the subject, see Doug Clouse, Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan: Typographic Tastemakers of the Late Nineteenth Century (New Castle, 2008) and, with Angela Voulangas, The Handy Book of Artistic Printing (Princeton, 2009).

Although there are many collections of circus posters and ephemera in various institutions around the country, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art has made a salutary effort to make their extensive holdings available online and interested readers can access those here and here.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.1 (October, 2011).

Matthew Wittmann is a postdoctoral fellow at the Bard Graduate Center, where he is curating an exhibition about the history of the circus in New York City and co-editing a book, The American Circus, which will be published by Yale University in 2012. He is also working on a transnational cultural history of U.S. entertainers who traveled around the Pacific during the nineteenth century.

1.

If ever there were the Work
of Grace wrought savingly
in my heart; the Time
when, the Place where, the manner how,
was never apparent.
I could not so find as others did
Terrors and Affliction.
It caused in me much Sadness.
Verily to Believe
that there was no Work of Grace,
this I could not do: for it was God
put it into my Heart
to Live abroad; and it was God
that made my Father willing.
God by his Providence
brought me near Mr. Warham
and knit my Heart unto him.
So God brought me out
of Plymouth the 20th of March
in the Year 1629,30, I being
then about the Age
of Twenty one Years.
Blessed be God that brought me Here!
—Yet how
to be in some measure assured?

2.

As a boy I had a Love
to see others Play.
On a Time when I was standing by
on the Lord’s-Day,
one Foot in the Temple
of the Law, one out, watching,
some Youths gave me Points
which they played for, to hold
until their Game was out.
Then God did cause my Conscience
to be out of quiet, and brought to Mind
how Saul stood by and kept the Garments
of them that slew Stephen.
But I did not put down
that which I had in keeping;
no, but turned my Back on God
and stood with Cherry Petals
falling in my hair,
and waited for those Boys
to acknowledge me,
so desperate was I
to serve a Purpose.
When they did not,
forgetting me as thoughtlessly
as they had plucked me from the Flock,
it was as though my Stomick
were that folded away
Accompt a Merchant pens—Aye,
even that very One we kept
for powder and Corn and Frost-fish
the first winter in our Tent—
only now the Columns
had fallen, the Points
bleeding one into the other. Only then
did Betrayal find me contrite.

3.

Consider the Tower
at Castle-Island, at the entrance
of this Port God granted
for our safekeeping:
made first of Mud-Walls,
then Pine Trees, Brick,
until finally
it Housed Family, Souldiers,
and, trained
on the Horizon,
the six good Saker Guns,
which nevertheless snatched from this
World my son, Supply,
in his Flower and Prime.
When the Body of Death presseth down,
we must watch without Surcease
those same Shoals, over which
God transplanted us—
without Surcease,
watching the Fishing Roads
for foreign Sails
or Storms shrouding the Islands
in green Wrath,
watching the tide
for Signs of the Despot’s
Rise and Fall, for Signs
of Persecution and Salvation.
The heart is ever in danger
of growing dull or lulled in the Duty,
like Moses his Hands
when they were lift up against Amalek.
Drop them but a little,
and the Horde rallies and gains,
and this, our Promised Land,
is in the Balance.

4.

I remember how, after Capt. Squeb
turned us ashore,
and left us to shift for our Selves
in this Indian Wilderness,
in that December,
which took half our Number,
I remember how, a mile in,
battered by Ice and Wind,
the River Charles narrowed
to a choked Braid.
We found some Wigwams
with some Store of Corn,
and one blasted House,
and in the House there was a Man
which had a boiled Bass
that did gleam with Promise.
So we sent back for the Governour
and his Assistants.
Yea, a little constant Stream
of godly Sorrow,
is better than a great Land Flood,
tho’ the Flood maketh the greatest Noise.

5.

In the dream I shoot Supply.
I have convinced him that it must be.
And so, like Isaac, he complies.
Twice I load, twice fire.
The second time at closer range.
How could I?
No wounds show through,
though we both of us know
he’ll be dead soon,
though we agree
it must be worse at closer Range.
He coughs up Lead.
It falls like Ryce from his coat.
He forgives me.
Back aboard the Blessed
Mary and John, which brought me Here,
on the Captain’s table, on a Chart
of the Atlantic, I let fall
a Handful of the Shot,
which scatters and arranges like a Fleet
of Sand-crabs I watched disembody once
as a Boy, as we rise and plunge
and the Good Ship
is handed down the waves.

6.

The Question to my Soul
was this (pitching upon that Sin
which I did confess my natural
Corruption most inclined me to)
the Question, I say,
which by God’s help, I put
to my very Heart and Soul
was Whether if God would assure me
that I should be saved,
although I should commit such a Sin,
would I commit it?
Satisfied—the word
pales, but I have no better—that I would not,
I felt as though (I do believe)
God’s Holy Spirit did witness
I was His Child,
and it did so transport me
as to make me cry out
upon my bed,
He is come, He is come!—
and to make, as I imagine,
the top Room of the Castle glow
with the startled Eyes of Tapers
struck at my Alarum,
at my Ecstatick fit,
shining down the Waters.
And I felt as I were back
in Devonshire,
when, first inclined
unto the Revd. Mr. John Warham,
I Covenanted with him,
and I had never
so much as heard of New-England.

Appeared originally in Western Humanities Review.

Statement of Poetic Research

            This is fore-runner of my after-clap
                                                —Anne Bradstreet, “A Dialogue between Old England and New”

When I was about twenty, my mother’s first cousin gave me a copy of the memoirs of our distant Puritan ancestor, Roger Clap. “You’re the family writer,” cousin George said, bequeathing me the legal size Xeroxed pages. I didn’t read it, of course, but by some inchoate sense of duty I kept it, eventually on the lower shelf of a wooden cabinet, one of several antiques I’d inherit—and inevitably scratch, stain, and break—after my mother’s death. She’d only recently inherited the furniture herself. I remember the dark-stained turn-of-the-century wingback chairs, dining room and side tables overwhelming her and her apartment. Likewise for me, the local sibling shouldered with all that stuff, the furniture became a kind of penance. My begrudging care/negligence of it rehearsed the bitterness and guilt of losing her.

There was more than just physical weight to such family “baggage.” Like the musty boxes of china that came with the haul, it must have been a constant reminder to my mother of growing up in Atlanta in the 1940s and ’50s—high-society Atlanta. While her father’s family had been wealthy (my grandfather grew up in a mansion on Peachtree Street), her mother’s family, the Clapps, had prominent roots going back to the early industrializing of Georgia, not long after the removal of the Creeks.

But the Clapp legacy was colonial as well as Confederate. Long before Julius Rowe Clapp—carpenter, cotton miller, and eventual owner of “Clapp’s Mill” in Columbus—moved south in the 1830s, our branch of Clapps had been in Massachusetts—Dorchester, and then western Mass.—for eight generations, beginning with Roger in 1630. My great-grandfather, Brainard Clapp, was the last male Clapp in our line; he had two daughters, my grandmother, Sue, and my great aunt, Mimi (which makes me an “after-clap”).  My information about their lives in Atlanta is sadly scant. Brainard, an Atlanta insurance man, died in a car crash and left a big house on “the Prado,” where “Big Mamma” Gertrude lived out her days. I suspect the Depression undercut any other inheritance. Sue and Mimi’s marriages proved destabilizing, to say the least. By the time my mother came along in the 1940s, the blue-blood class-prestige was a hard act to keep up. Sue and Mimi moved in together for a time, with five kids between them, my mother the oldest and cousin George the baby. I know Sue and Mimi did some seamstress work for income. Still, there was the name, about which the “old south” culture of Atlanta was making its last hurrah to care; there were the generations of passed-down stuff—the furniture and wedding silver; there was the lilting accent. As my grandfather lost job after job, and left and returned with his tail between his legs, my grandmother made the clothes and scrapped up exquisite meals, entertaining to great acclaim. As the oldest child, my mother helped shoulder the burden of the illusion. No wonder one of her biggest insecurities thereafter was feeling “like a fake.”  Growing up, we weren’t close with extended family. In some ways that void gets filled by my historical and creative curiosity about them. Just after graduating from college in Atlanta, I started waking up to my mother’s family’s history there. The sense of class and family importance, of expectation, disappointment, and sacrifice had all the markings of a good story—or so I thought. A rich source of tension in the narrative, but then of resistance within the family when I came seeking details, was propriety. But the ancient past, emotionally indifferent, cool to the touch, idealized: that we can all get behind.

I realize this sounds a little cliché, like a watered-down version—a generation late—of Blanche’s class-warped delusions in A Streetcar Named Desire. Lugging the furniture from house to house and city to city over the years, there’s been no little lamenting among friends, partners, and me—in a played-up Shelby Foote accent—over the loss of “the better sort of people,” or the regrettable changes “ever since that damn war.”

Appropriately enough, I kept Roger Clap’s memoir stacked in the cabinet with a copy of my mother’s Colonial Dames of America papers. Including faded copies of scrawled nineteenth-century family Bible lineages, as well as some faded copies of family letters, these papers tell us that Roger was born in Salcombe Regis, Devonshire, England on “6 April A.D. 1609.” He had two sisters and was the youngest of five brothers (he would convince many of them to migrate after him). As a teenager, he got swept up in Puritan preaching in and around Exeter, or “Exon,” as he calls it (short for Exoniensis, Latin for “of Exeter”), which was the nearest city, twelve miles west. His mother was dead and he and three other brothers (presumably the youngest) were living at home, in no doubt cramped quarters. It must have seemed extra-cramped in the coastal lowlands, busy not only with iconoclasts but also adventuring sailors and fishermen, who had a lock on New England trade and fishing.

Judging from Google maps, Salcombe Regis even now is a single crossroads a few thousand feet off the Devon coast, “bleak and desolate in the fall and winter,” according to Bernard Bailyn. A deep combe runs the distance south from town to the bitten, chalky cliff, much of which, no doubt, has been eaten away since Roger’s childhood. It makes me think of Edward Thomas’s “The Combe”:

            The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.
            Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar;
            And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk
            By beech and yew and perishing juniper
            Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots
            And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,
            The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds
            Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
            Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark
            The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,
            Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,
            That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

But to return to the papers: Roger “was a resident of Massachusetts and died in Boston, Massachusetts on 2 February A.D. 1691.” His “services upon which [the] claim of eligibility to membership is based are as follows: Lieutenant of Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company, 1655.” This company is the oldest chartered military organization in North America.

In the pages following, bracketed generations reach back in time, starting with my mother, Sue (everyone called her Su-Su). After Julius Rowe Clapp and Eleanor Milton Howard (married in Columbus in 1839), the place of doings switches from Georgia to Massachusetts and the names start to take on an unmistakable Puritan flavor: Winthrop, Preserved, Mehitable. In his preface to the first edition of Roger’s Memoirs (1731), the Rev. Thomas Prince of the Old South Church in Boston writes that Roger “was desirous that God should have the Glory of his Providence, in bringing Him with so many pious People into this hideous Land, in preserving & supplying them, increasing, prospering, and working wonderful Salvation for them.” In this typical depiction of the Puritan experiment, Prince manages to cover at least three early Clap(p) verb-names, tellingly colonial: Preserve, Supply, Increase.

So there was Roger in his Clapp arc, waiting.

I was on the lookout for raw material while doing my PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Missouri. A teacher liked a poem I’d written about President Truman and wondered if I had more “political” poems. Well, I thought, there is this memoir. I’d never known what to make of Roger’s zealotry, of which one got an unadulterated whiff just glancing at the memoirs. I was inclined to agree with the nineteenth-century Clapp family historian, Ebenezer Clapp, who, complaining 200 years after Roger’s testimony, writes, “[w]e would gladly exchange the well-filled pages of wholesome religious instruction, written by Mr. Clap for the benefit of his posterity, for an equal quantity of historical facts which his opportunities doubtless might have enabled him to record.” As with many an old text, what we call “unique details” tend to be swallowed up in generalization; personal experience and feeling in Providence. We want to know more about the Indians, the way the landscape looked, how he courted his wife, his idiosyncrasies, what, or if, he read.  With a BA in classics, I’d cut my teeth on old stuff—primary texts. And like any good poetry student trained in the post-Eliot, post-New Critical English tradition, I had a taste for the “sweete” tones and idioms of seventeenth-century English and the KJV. Still, it takes time (I can’t help but think of all the Wait, Waitstill, and Patience Clapps—named because their fathers thought they’d outlive the Anti-Christ!) to make our way through the dusty annals, for a mature interest to engross us.  Once I fought my way into the text (snapping my chinstrap and lowering my head), I was seduced by the sheer, sublime sense of history. As Rev. Prince writes, Roger was “an Eye-witness,” and “by the publick and continued Esteem his Country paid him in his Day, his Testimony comes with Power upon us.” At back of the primacy of the account was the legacy of the experiment, of the commonwealth, “the effects of which”—as Ebenezer writes in 1876 and Jim Sleeper has recently echoed in The Atlantic (both following the indubitable de Tocqueville)—“will be felt throughout time.” One of 140 emigrants from the West Country, Roger came over on the 400-ton Mary and John, the first ship in a big wave of Massachusetts Bay Colony ships, the biggest wave the new world had seen. When the ship captain landed at Nantasket and refused to navigate the perilous flats and shoals among the islands of Boston harbor, Roger, at twenty-one years of age, was one of about ten “able-bodied” men to venture forth on behalf of the Colony in a boat borrowed from “an old planter.” Braving the wilds and reconnoitering the proto-settlements of Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown, the expedition was led by a “Low Country Souldier, one Mr. Southcot, a brave Souldier.” Southcot was one of many tough spiritual and martial father-figures for Roger, who would never see his father again. “Grizzled” Lowcountry veterans, as Bailyn explains, were the go-to English captains for—to quote Elizabeth Bishop—“penetrating the interior.” This might have been Roger’s entrance into soldiering. In a rare instance of speaking of the exceptionality of his experience, Roger offers, “I my self was one of the Centinals that first night.”  Eventually, the party was recalled for the sake of the famished cattle, which, after great pains, were conveyed to Mattapan to pasture, selling the magistrates on the goodness of the place. In what became Dorchester, Roger joined the first church, immediately became a voting freeman, and over a long life served many tenures as deacon, town Selectman and Representative to the General Counsel in Boston, “commissioner to try and issue small causes,” military captain and Commander of the Castle, and authority to “join persons in marriage”; after 1663 “many persons were married by him.” He helped mete out policy for roads, bridges, and fences, the catechization of children, the containment of cattle, the killing of wolves, handling disputes, paying out wages, licensing town guests, setting fast days and days of humiliation and thanksgiving, setting up relief funds for the needy at home and abroad, acquiring and fixing church bells, punishing spiritualists and purveyors of lace… When the office of Captain of Castle Island—the “principal fortress in the province”—came open, the General Counsel chose Roger. The previous captain, Davenport, had died from a summer storm lightning strike while napping in his room at the castle. Providentially unpacking this tragedy, Roger notes that this was also the storm that blew the marauding De Ruither off course. He had been headed for Boston now that the English and Dutch were at it again. 

Roger lived on the island—then a short ride from shore—for over twenty years. Ever the last redoubt of retreating forces, first glacial and then English, the island served at times as a prison as well as a strategic station for monitoring ship traffic. The main threats in the seventeenth century were the Dutch and French. Ships, which had to pass east of the island through the deep channel to get to Boston, were forced at gunpoint to “strike their colors.” Roger was constantly writing the General Court for promised provisions: “there is raines sometimes no dry plase to lodg in, wee have been forced to rise out of our beds many times the beds have been so wet with rain, and wee have no plase also to lay a bed in, but are forced to go from the little house to the Castle to bed in Dark rainy nights, and sometimes in snow above my wife’s knees…” It was said that he treated his garrison as part of his already large family, serving as Castle minister, there being no funding for another. It must have been an interesting household. When he took ill in his seventies, the town fasted for his recovery and celebrated with a thanksgiving when he was restored to health.

Just before the mostly bloodless Glorious Revolution and its minor counterpart in Boston, a very old Captain Clap quit his post in protest of the colony losing its charter and of the new governor Andros’s demands on his captaincy. Not unlike the Magna Carta, the colony charter came to be regarded as nearly sacred (another “covenant”). Through it, the colony, and conservative Dorchester in particular, retained enough independence from England to rule and prosper as they saw fit. Thus, as recorded in the Dorchester record book, a fast was held around 1680 in response to “the danger of losing our liberties, both civil and sacred.” Roger’s refusal—part-and-parcel with the town’s various acts of noncompliance following the accession of James II—can be seen as one of many preliminary steps, as Ebenezer puts it, “in that onward march of events which finally caused the separation of the colony from the mother country.” Roger removed with his wife to Boston. At his funeral in 1691, there was a grand procession, “the Military Officers going before the Corps; and next to the Relations, the Governour and the whole General Court following after; and the Guns firing at the Castle at the same time.”

 Well, there was my “political” dimension.  

In digging the text out of its contexts, one striking revelation for me has been how much less wild than advertised the “hideous wilderness” was. Europeans, in particular fishermen and traders from southwest England, had been exploiting the New England coast for decades, contributing to the spread of smallpox that decimated the coastal Indians in the 16-teens. The common claim that there was “no white person between them and the Pacific Ocean” is refuted by the presence of several helpful “old planters” in Roger’s memoir. Familiar with white faces, communicating by way of sign language and pidgin English, the Indians were also often helpful to the colonists.

And another thing: that “there could have been no inducement but one of principle to tempt them to choose a wilderness for their future homes” is questionable. Ebenezer’s already on the defensive here because as a historian he knows the first stirrings of the colony were tied up in fishery adventure, the Puritan’s great concern for his inward “Estate” bound up in his outward. As de Toqueville expounds (and as John Smith exploits in his advertisements for New England), opportunity was a factor for non-eldest sons like Roger. With four vying brothers under one roof, it’s no wonder he asked his father’s permission to go “abroad”—first to apprentice a few miles away, and later to New England. It doesn’t seem like he was counting on inheriting any significant piece of the pie, whatever pie there was. Roger’s own will, which I came across in Ebenzer’s Clapp Memorial: The Family in America, illustrates the situation, first by showing the huge amount of land that Roger accrued over his long life as a first-generation settler, and second, by showing how Samuel, his “eldest,” was “to have a dobble portion in all.” It’s possible that all the big Clapp migrations by non-eldest sons leading to my mother being born in Atlanta—to New England, western Massachusetts, and finally, to Georgia—were similarly motived. First Roger, then his son, Preserved, and a few generations later, Julius, all went “abroad,” braving the frontier. Starting out afresh, they prospered.

 But tied up with the commonwealth of the New Jerusalem, Roger’s “inward Estate” was his animating concern, to a degree it’s hard to imagine any of his descendants meeting—at least from a historical perspective. I found myself drawn in his memoirs to the mysterious paraphernalia of the “relation” (the text, I would come to learn, is itself a kind of conversion narrative, not unlike Anne Bradstreet’s “To my Dear Children”). Without really knowing what a spiritual relation was, or how much rode on it, I started spinning a poem out of that voice of naked and embattled longing. If Roger was writing for the benefit of his “posterity,” wasn’t that me? Wasn’t he speaking to me, for me? It only seemed right, then, that I should speak for him, through him. Meanwhile, the conversion narrative as forerunner of heavenly translation, judgment, and church-state membership subsumed my doctoral research.  The mask of my persona poem is surely not that of the historical Roger Clap, who would not be comfortable, I think, in a lyric poem. Perhaps the biggest difference is that my Roger is evidently not so entrenched in doctrinal squabbling: no blasting of Quakers, etc. I freely borrow and often alter—supplement and lineate—his phrasings, moving and splicing parts as I see fit. A few times I even put words from the various layers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentary in his mouth. For emotional economy, I collapse several of young Roger’s Masters—Mr. Moissour and Rev. Warwick—into one object of affection, the Rev. Mr. John Warham.  Although it has been mocked by at least one critic, one of the most touching parts of the memoirs for me is Roger’s confession of his boyhood pastime of no longer playing—but nevertheless keeping the points for naughty children playing—on the Sabbath. Whereas the historical Roger sees the Saul-like error of this complicity, my Roger, “desperate…to serve a purpose,” sins boldly, with “Cherry Petals / falling in [his] hair”—that is, until he realizes he’s been used. Only then does “Betrayal find [him] contrite.” I also fabricate the nevertheless fact-based dream sequence and ratchet up Roger’s conversion ecstasy to a dangerous level of enthusiasm.  What did Warwick see in Roger that made that influential preacher—who, along with Warham, oversaw the first Dorchester church before Richard Mather took over—pay Roger’s father a visit and convince him to let Roger go to New England? Or, for that matter, what about Roger inspired the pious and rich Mr. Moissour to seemingly fund Roger’s voyage so that he wouldn’t have to start out as an indentured servant? Roger was not rich, well-connected, or university educated, so far as I can tell. What kind of apprenticing he had done is unknown. But he was young, seemingly robust, convicted, and willing—strong timber.  

Do I sympathize with him? I’m compelled by his Puritan intensity, self-scrutiny, and doubt: a forbearance that I fancy carried right up through to my mother. I sympathize with anyone who cares that much, who dirties their hands in the messy negotiation of charity and stricture. It seems to me part of our “American grain.” An inveterate thinker, I celebrate the doers and decision-makers. With Roger, I got to create a strong, flawed, yet delicate father figure.

Growing up attending a Christian summer camp, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of going off into the woods to found a community. Camp McDowell’s 100 percent majority consent “community meetings”—whether they should be mandatory or not was an issue—were in theory not unlike those early Dorchester meetings. Who doesn’t yearn for a new life, a new world? The economic and technological forces at work during the early modern period primed the pump: the upheaval, the sense of discovery. I especially relate as a writer. Just as words are my means for founding new worlds, Roger and his colony lived and died by words and the interpretation of the world through words, the Word, covenant upon covenant like a matryoshka doll.

As for the Puritans’ many shortcomings, I defer to Ebenezer: “In animadverting upon the acts of our ancestors, it is not to censure them as sinners above all others; on the contrary, they were far beyond their generation in all that exalts the human character. They were educated under the influence of many of the absurd superstitions of their age, and should not be condemned by the standard of our own. Those who so flippantly censure them as bigots, fanatics and persecutors, exhibit but little knowledge of the customs and prejudices of the generation by which they should be judged. This was probably the only land ever colonized, where conquest, plunder, gold or roguery, was not the moving cause. Although they whipped and banished, it was in a great measure to escape the contamination of the vicious and idle who invariably hover about all new settlements, and whose foothold here, they were early determined to prevent [such a one was I at summer camp!]. The great Christian doctrine of toleration, it must be remembered, had not been even dreamed of then, and they were the most tolerant of their generation.”

I don’t still have those long Xeroxed pages cousin George bequeathed me. In fact, I’m not sure I even used them to write my poem, as versions abound online. The original manuscript, passing from the Old South Church ministers to the Massachusetts Historical Society, was “irrecoverably lost.” A boon to Roger’s descendants as well as to advocates of conservative New England values, the memoir was printed three times in the eighteenth (1731, 1766, and 1774) and at least four in the nineteenth century (1807, 1824, 1843, 1854). There has been little modern scholarship on it or him. In her study of early New England conversion narratives, Patricia Caldwell notes the awkward, atypical nature of his late “relation.” In Puritan scholarship, he tends to be mentioned in passing, as if everyone already knows him. Ebenezer’s nineteenth-century histories are the best sources. Roger gets a page or two in William J. Reid’s Castle Island and Fort Independence (1995).

After these intervening fifteen years, I’m trying to get back in touch with cousin George. In the meantime, I’ve been e-mailing with his mother, my great-aunt Mimi. She reports from Atlanta that she’s ninety-four and in good health—and quite proficient with e-mail! She’s been snail-mailing me copies of family records; it’s nice to have a live family link for once. Keen to help with information about our storied past, she’s as silent as ever on the things I can’t learn from the Internet—about her past or current life in Atlanta, or how a family might reconcile both colonial and Confederate roots, or its low-church past with its high Anglican present. Was there a modicum of old northern sympathy?

I can see now that cousin George modeled himself on his great-great-grandfather, Julius, the southern Clapp progenitor, whose dashing portrait Mimi just mailed me a copy of, and which I remember seeing in George’s house fifteen years ago. The same visit yielded up a bill of sale for a Clapp’s Mill slave (obviously from before the mill was burned by Sherman and rebuilt by the Columbus engineer and former slave, Horace King). According to Julius’s 1876 obituary from The Columbus Enquirer, Julius, “from an humble starting point in life, by his own unaided energy and merit, rose to affluence and honour.” Not unlike Roger at the Castle, “[h]is office gave him control of a large number of persons [most of them girls and young women], who had to be disciplined and governed. These he ruled, and directed, not as an officer, but as a father whose word is law…” He also got religion in “the great revival which swept over Columbus in 1858.” We are assured that though “an undemonstrative Christian he had an experience.”

Cousin George followed suit business-wise, running a tile and stone company and coming to employ, among many others, my mother (which is how she ended up back in Atlanta). Starting with little but his wits and family pride, he’s done well enough to meet Julius’s gaze, I’d imagine.

Being only in touch with Mimi at this time, and only about ancient things, I can’t help but read her into Clarissa Rowe Clapp’s (b. 1808) undated letter from Montague, Mass., to her son, Julius, in Columbus.

My dear son,

Your long looked for letter was received few weeks since and thought I should have answered before this but Julia came to Montague soon after your letter came for a visit so mother accompanied her home to spend the winter as she was anxious to have me. I may say that kind and over ruling Providence has prolonged my unprofitable life till this time. My age is so far advanced I cannot nor ought not to expect to live in this world but short time longer. It matters not when we leave this world of sin and sorrow but it is of the greatest importance to be prepared to die in peace…[H]ow does Edward, Horace and Clara get along in their school? How is little Mary and Sewall? Tell them grandmother wants very much to see them. I hope little Sewall has recovered of his sickness when you last wrote. May this find you all in good health. Dear Julius how thoughtfull you are for your mother. It seems that I do not feel thankfull enough to God that given you so much of this worlds good and such kind heart to think of me at this time of cold winds and snow.

You wished to know if my change was getting low. I have enough for this winter. You wrote it has been very dry with you. There has been an abundance of rain here through the summer and fall; now pretty cold, some snow…give my love to Elinor…and all the children tell [them] not [to] forget grandma…

                                                                        CR Clapp

Further Reading

Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (New York, 2013) is a good source for the historical contexts of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And of course, Patricia Caldwell’s The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge, 1985) is the gold standard on early New England conversion narratives. On Roger Clap, see Ebenezer Clapp’s History of Dorchester (Boston, 1859) and The Clapp Memorial: Record of the Clapp Family in America (Boston, 1876).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Originally from Alabama, Austin Segrest teaches at Lawrence University in north-central Wisconsin. He got his PhD at Missouri, where he was poetry editor of The Missouri Review and studied Puritans, among other things. Find out more at austinsegrest.com.

Common-place talks with Jessica Choppin Roney, author of Governed by a Spirit of Opposition, about associational culture and living and researching Philadelphia.

In the introduction you describe the voluntary associations that sprouted in eighteenth-century Philadelphia as a “new civic technology.” Why did you select that particular term for them, and what implications does it have to understand these organizations as “technologies?”

I first came across the concept of a “civic technology” in Johann Neem’s fine book, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts. The concept resonated powerfully with me as an important intervention in how we think about voluntary associations.

Living in the early twenty-first century as a new generation of technologies make possible popular mobilization at a speed and scale never before dreamed of, it is easy to take for granted or find it self-evident that people organize together. The things they use to do so, and especially those instruments that make it possible—the Internet, cellphones, the many and ever-changing platforms of social media—those are the technologies. In a similar fashion in the eighteenth century, technological changes related to the rise of print culture facilitated and encouraged collective organizing in new ways and on a new scale. But if we step back and remember that the format of voluntary association itself had to be invented, that it was not self-evident, that it took time and trial-and-error, we can appreciate that the elaboration of successful forms of voluntary association was itself a kind of technological innovation.

The eighteenth-century men of Philadelphia I describe both borrowed and departed from an array of religious, craft, and political organizational strategies as they sought to find an effective way to organize toward a particular end, and to keep their members willing to invest their time, energy, and resources. Many of them failed. We know more about the successes because they left behind a better paper trail, but there in itself is another reason to think of voluntary associations as a technology.

As organizers throughout the Atlantic world sought to mobilize men (and by the end of the eighteenth century, women) outside the parameters of church or state, they borrowed heavily from the strategies of earlier voluntary associations that worked. In Philadelphia, men found it easier and faster to adopt a model that had already been tested, rather than generate their own from scratch. All twenty or so colonial Philadelphia fire companies, for example, copied, often verbatim, the articles of association from the first successful company, the Union Fire Company, founded in 1736. The blue-print, as it were, circulated freely, allowing a diverse range of men over a long time span to adopt and adapt the technology to their own needs. Innovations along the way then became available to still-later groups as they studied the available models and selected those strategies their organizers thought would best meet their objectives and keep the membership energized. The civic technology of voluntary associations, then, was never proprietary. Philadelphians borrowed from England and Scotland, from their churches, from joint-stock companies, and from one another as they created their own innovative strategies tailored to their own needs.

That this technology was indeed civic stems from two sources. First, the preponderance of organizations—at least in Philadelphia—that were the most effective at mobilizing and retaining members over long periods of time had at least some explicit desire to contribute to the public good. Second, even where organizations were less focused on explicit civic functions, their members understood their associations still to contribute to a civil society—meant both in the sense of one characterized by polite sociability and as a collection of citizens operating outside the scope of church or state.

We often think of voluntary associations as a supplement to government activities in colonial Philadelphia, but you argue that they eventually came to supplant government functions as well. How did that transition take place?

When William Penn founded his city, he paid extravagant attention to the street layout and almost none at all to pesky matters like how those same streets would be kept clean. Who would collect taxes, pave and light the streets, authorize scavengers to clear rubbish, and prevent townspeople who brazenly tried to extend their houses and shops out into the public thoroughfare?

For twenty years Philadelphia had no formal local government at all. When elite Pennsylvanians finally sought and gained a municipal charter for Philadelphia in 1701, they did so less from a concern for self-government than as another way to stick it to Penn in a moment when his star was in descent.

The Philadelphia charter these elites gained in 1701 was most significant as a negative document; it prevented Penn or his heirs from meddling in city-residents’ property and carved away the power of their governors. It did not set up an institution that could govern. The municipal corporation—I hesitate even to call it a government—did not have the power to tax, wrote laws that it never published through any medium and thus of which Philadelphians remained blissfully unaware, and could not provide basic needs like fire protection, education, social welfare (poor relief), or even self-defense. It did perform judicial functions, but unfortunately most of those records are lost, so we have an incomplete picture of its work there.

In this context, Philadelphia’s earliest civic voluntary associations were at no point “supplementary.” Association founders and members saw themselves as explicitly tackling problems that local and/or provincial authorities had failed to address. By 1701, the year the city gained its charter, a voluntary association had already supplanted formal authorities in education, despite Penn’s original intention that government would play a role here. By 1740, voluntary associations had taken over fire protection; by 1750 self-defense in wartime; by 1760 Indian diplomacy; by 1770 all public poor relief in the region; and by 1776 all the functions of representative government altogether.

I do not mean to suggest a clear teleology here or that the abdication of responsibility for fire protection etc. by local authorities led in a clear, unbroken line to the supplanting of the Pennsylvania Assembly by the extra-governmental Military Association in the summer of 1776. The story is considerably more complicated than that. A long history of ordinary Philadelphia men taking up responsibility for local governance, however, helps explain how Philadelphia radicals were able to act so decisively in the wake of Lexington and Concord—and why they met with so little resistance even from moderates and conservatives who deplored independence. They all—radicals forming the Military Association and conservatives resisting them—conformed to a long history allowing and even respecting extralegal organizations usurping governmental authority. None of the actors at the time initially understood how off-script the Military Association would be able to go as relations with Britain deteriorated, that it would eventually declare the sitting government void and hold elections for a constitutional convention that produced a new government altogether. Philadelphians, who had long supplanted government functions through their voluntary association, in 1776 supplanted the government itself.

Governed by a Spirit of Opposition focuses heavily on voluntary associations with a civic function, but you’ve also conducted extensive research on social organizations in Philadelphia—you mention several in the book, in particular the Dancing Assembly. Can you expand on their role in the development of Philadelphia and its civic culture?

In Philadelphia, civic and social organizations evolved in tandem and often mutually reinforced one another. The city had a vibrant assortment of formal associations dedicated to convivial purposes: the Freemasons; hunting and fishing clubs; the Jockey Club, which organized horse races; the Dancing Assembly, which hosted balls each winter; and ethnic societies celebrating respectively Welsh, Scottish, German, Irish, and English identity.

These associations placed all or much of their focus on sociability, linking their evolution in two important ways to organizations which focused more explicitly on civic aims. First, sociability played a role—and often a central one—in all associations, whether they were “social” or “civic” in their primary objectives. Fire companies held their monthly meetings in taverns and only discussed business after members had eaten supper together (and consumed copious quantities of alcohol). The celebrated Junto of Benjamin Franklin and his associates held their philosophical debates over successive pints of wine. Even the seemingly straight-laced Quaker managers of the Pennsylvania Hospital incorporated alcohol occasionally into their meetings.

Second, Philadelphia organizations across a wide spectrum ascribed to the ideal and pursuit of “improvement.” Some groups worked to improve the conditions of their city—think of the fire companies protecting lives and property or the Defense Association building a fort against marauding privateers. Some groups worked to improve their neighbors, that is to say others, rather than themselves—think of the Contributors to the Relief of the Poor, whose members believed they could root out urban poverty if only they could reform the morals and habits of the impoverished.

And many groups offered their members an avenue toward self-improvement. The Junto would provide its members with the equivalent of a college education; the Library Company offered self-improving literature to its subscribers; and in much the same vein, the Dancing Assembly offered a space to engage in polite conversation and perform highly structured and specific dances. Dancing and conversation were in themselves forms of self-improvement and required much the same kind of dedication, education, and practice-at-home as did the education touted by the Library Company.

Many organizations improved on more than one register. The American Philosophical Society, for example, explored inventions and ideas that would improve American agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce, at the same time that members pushed and improved their own intellectual capacities. Meanwhile the St. Andrew’s Society of Philadelphia provided charity to destitute Scots in the city, improving conditions for others, and at the same time its members indulged themselves in quarterly feasts during which they consolidated their own ethnic identity, and honed their polite conversation and sociability.

In the face-to-face social and economic community in which these men operated, of course, among the most important forms of self-improvement—and this was a key component to every single organization—was networking. Philadelphia’s formal associations of all types facilitated the creation of social and information networks that were crucial to political mobilization, business transactions, family formation, and friendship. Convivially oriented organizations often aligned with or contributed to social clusters within the city because they tended to be expensive and exclusive, but the same could be said of many civically oriented organizations as well—for example the Pennsylvania Hospital, College of Philadelphia, and Friendly Association. In my book I chose to focus more on what Daniel Defoe would have called projecting societies, but these organizations were in fact linked in their structure, aims, and membership with Philadelphia’s formal convivial clubs.

What role did women play in these government-oriented associations?

In the colonial period women hover at the edges of our vision of voluntary associations. They were there, but they are hard to find. Philadelphia’s formal organizations were founded by and for men. They were so heavily inflected as masculine that not one group bothered to specify that membership be restricted to men; and indeed it seems never to have occurred to them, or to women in the city, that their wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters might join too. So, with the sole exception of the Library Company, which had a scant handful of female subscribers in the colonial period, no formal voluntary association, civic or convivial, had formal members who were women.

That said, women informally played a vital role in Philadelphia’s associational world. Women participated in civic organizations through their male kin—usually their husbands—contributing in much the same way that men did: with their time, effort, and labor. Wives and widows of fire company members sent their family’s fire equipment to fires and probably assisted in carrying and guarding goods out of burning houses; wives and daughters borrowed, read, and discussed books from the Library Company; and the money that built a hospital, raised two forts, provided firewood for the poor, and formed a prize for local horse races came from women and men.

This is a crucial point to understand. No married man acted alone when he participated in an organization or gave money to it. He acted as part of a family economy. Every hour that he spent outside of his home or his business was an hour that his wife and other female kin expanded their efforts to make up his absence, caring for the shop, serving the customers, fulfilling the chores of the house. Israel Pemberton, leader of the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with Indians, understood this fact explicitly. He recognized that only through the extra work of his wife, Mary, was he able to devote so much time to a cause in which they both believed passionately. Whether Deborah Franklin believed as deeply in her husband’s firefighting through the Union Fire Company as Mary Pemberton did in her husband’s pursuits, we do not know—but Deborah did dutifully send Benjamin’s fire equipment to fires throughout his long diplomatic mission to England from the mid-1750s until her death in 1774. Mary Pemberton and Deborah Franklin were never listed as members of their husbands’ organizations, but they contributed to them nevertheless, and their husbands could not have done what they did without their wives’ participation—enthusiastic or otherwise.

If formal voluntary associations were a civic technology, a form that had to be experimented with and developed over time, women’s formal participation did not register as a possibility, let alone a salutary idea, in the colonial period. Only at the end of the eighteenth century did changing notions of women’s capacity for reason, education, and moral action converge with now more solidly established forms of organizational structure to carve out space for women, first in organizations with men and then in organizations of their own.

The research for this book required you to spend extensive time in Philadelphia. How did your residence in the city—and doing research at the current incarnations of some of the associations you study—shape your thinking?

It was a delight to spend so much time in Philadelphia working on this book, and then to end up living here permanently around the time the book came out. The first thing I would say about living here that influenced the book is how much I walk when I live in Philadelphia. Penn really did create a walking city. The year I spent here on fellowship I lived at 2nd and Spruce, and most days I walked to the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, where I had my fellowship, at 34th and Walnut. Tracing out daily that long walk from where “my guys” were living in the eighteenth century, past the Center Square they rejected, and all the way across the Schuylkill River into what for them would have been countryside, helped to make real for me something about what it may have been like over generations of occupation to live in and shape this space. It was that year living in Old City/Society Hill that the physical space of the city came to play a much more important role in my understanding of how the political and civic culture of the city depended on and was shaped by the spatial realities of the city and its environs.

Closely related, I got to spend that fellowship year (thanks to the facilitation of Patrick and Laura Spero!) living in the Man Full of Trouble Tavern, a colonial-era tavern that was saved from demolition in the late 1950s and opened for a time as a museum. The ground-floor interior of the tavern has been restored to fit its description in an early nineteenth-century probate, so I was living in a space that echoed the spaces in which the activities I wrote about occurred. Sitting in that space, sipping rum punch from the recipe of the Colony in Schuylkill, a Philadelphia convivial society, made by my husband who was eager in this respect to further my historical exploration, was an unparalleled privilege and pleasure—and certainly it influenced my historical imagination.

The city I have occupied since I first started doing research here over a decade ago, right up to the moment I write these words, has always been for me a city shaped by associations and dense networks not unlike the ones I study. Some of them are literally the same organizations. I did research at the archives of the Library Company of Philadelphia (where I am also a proud subscriber), the American Philosophical Society, the Pennsylvania Hospital, the University of Pennsylvania, St. Andrew’s Society, and the City Archives of Philadelphia.

The current scholarly community in Philadelphia forms another dense network that influences and improves my scholarship in the direct way you would imagine—over the years I got to present and receive feedback on much of my dissertation and then book manuscript—but also through the example of what it means to be part of a voluntary, collective enterprise. I inhabit a dense associational world where people contribute their time, energy, and, yes, their money. The tightly overlapping networks that center around the McNeil Center, Library Company, Program in Economy and Early American Society, and American Philosophical Society today serve both convivial and civic purposes—they involve food and drink, and they provide discursive spaces to interrogate history, literature, art, and material culture. They foster self-improvement through direct intervention (seminars, conferences), but also by modeling scholarly service and community. I am deeply indebted to and influenced by the examples of service of so many Philadelphia-area scholars who make the academic community of Philadelphia the thriving place it is.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Jessica Choppin Roney is an assistant professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is currently working on a project examining settler societies of the 1780s and ’90s, expanding upon her interest in the interaction between voluntary organization and governance, this time outside an urban northeastern context.

Scholars researching the life and career of Frances Harper have long lamented the loss of her early volume of poetry, Forest Leaves. With Johanna Ortner’s recent discovery at the Maryland Historical Society, we can now celebrate the book’s return to life. Discovery, however, is one thing, interpretation another. What should we as scholars do with this rediscovered volume? Where to begin?

Infected by Ortner’s archival fever, I decided to follow up on a reference to Harper’s early life in the papers of Daniel P. Murray, an early twentieth-century African American bibliographer who had amassed a manuscript collection with the (unrealized) goal of writing a Historical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race. What I found was a brief sketch based on correspondence between Murray and Harper late in her life that adds a few details to Ortner’s findings. I had hoped Murray’s comments would allow me to grow closer to this formidable nineteenth-century figure about whose public career we know so much, but private life so little. I came across a few—but only a few—clues, and so returned to the poems. Rereading them led me to imagine at least three different approaches that might give us greater insight into Harper’s world.

Publication

Although he provides no evidence whatsoever, Murray states twice and without equivocation that Forest Leaves was published in 1852. How could that be? Critical tradition has assumed that the volume was published in 1845; Ortner’s research pushed the date forward to the late 1840s, after Harper’s printer James Young had moved to his new Baltimore location but before Harper had left for Ohio in 1851. I wondered whether someone else had taken on the task of seeing Forest Leaves through to publication.  

In his sketch, Murray mentions that after leaving her uncle’s school—the Watkins Academy—around age fourteen, Harper went to work in the home of a bookstore owner, Mr. Armstrong, who was so impressed with her “unquenchable thirst for knowledge” that he gave her “free access to the family library where she gathered a fund of information.” In 1852, Armstrong’s bookstore was located at the corner of Baltimore and Calvert Streets, a mere couple of blocks away from Young’s print shop at Baltimore and Holliday. Might Armstrong have chosen to be Harper’s intermediary? Might we then see the actions of these two men as a hidden “authenticating preface” that tells a very different story from that of more conventional white-authored ones, such as William Lloyd Garrison’s preface that inaugurates Harper’s Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects?

Forest Leaves and the World of Private Emotions

Thinking about this later volume—separated from the first, if we are to believe Murray, by a mere two years—led me to speculate about Harper’s early title and whether it might provide a window into the poems.   Forest Leaves is strikingly different from the titles that grace Harper’s later collections. Those are either purely descriptive to the point of being bland—Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects or simply Poems, for example—or refer to historical figures or objective situations—Moses: A Story of the Nile, Sketches of Southern Life, etc. It’s only toward the end of her literary career in the mid-1890s that Harper indulged in somewhat more evocative titles—The Sparrow’s Fall and Other Poems, Atlanta Offering: Poems.

What to make of Harper’s early title? Leaves was a popular word in titles of collections of short pieces—poems, sketches, short stories—ranging from Coleridge’s early Sibylline Leaves (1817) through to later American writers—for example, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Grace Greenwood’s Greenwood Leaves, Lydia Sigourney’s Olive Leaves, and Fanny Fern’s Fern Leaves, all published between 1850 and 1854. A long literary tradition links leaves to writing. In the classical era, the Latin word for leaf was folium. Its ablative form, folio, came to refer to the surface on which poets wrote since it was said that they originally penned their verses on the leaves of beech or palm trees. In the Renaissance, folio signified a sheet of written or printed text, and by extension the manuscript or book itself.

In the nineteenth century, leaves accrued increasingly romantic and sentimental connotations. Rejecting any semblance of the artificial, the constructed, the contrived, poets invoked leaves to associate their writing with the natural and the organic. Leaves suggest growth, blossoming, flourishing. But they also intimate a sense of fragility and delicacy and, beyond that, of transience, fading away, dying, death. Like poetry finally, leaves may also evoke sound—the rustling of leaves or the song of birds sitting on branches.

Could an approach to the collection through its title allow me entrance to the private emotional world of Harper’s early life? Do the poems offer any clues?

Murray’s sketch suggested more. Noting that composition was a daily requirement of the Watkins Academy curriculum, he remarked that “in this work Frances excelled and was regarded as the brightest pupil in her composition work.” He then wrote the following: “To acquire proficiency and stimulate her imagination she would visit the woods, listen to the birds and gather the leaves in Autumn when the golden gleam of the Sun tinted by the hoary frost of winter makes their gathering an unalloyed pleasure.” Switching to direct quotation, he continued: “Said Mrs. Watkins in a letter to the writer touching this period of her life, ‘it came as natural to me to attempt to express my thoughts in verse, as natural perhaps, as it is for the trees to blossom in Spring; the birds to sing in Summer, or the fruits to mature in Autumn.’”

These early poems, Harper intimated, were simply the natural and spontaneous expression of her thoughts. Nature—specifically the woods—was her muse. Harper’s gathering of fallen leaves in autumn may thus be seen as a metaphor for the composing and gathering of poems into one volume. It might also account for the title Autumn Leaves that biographers such as Hallie Q. Brown mistakenly gave to the collection. The gathering of fallen leaves thus becomes yet a second metaphor that gestures towards the autumnal quality hovering over the collection; its poems are suffused with sentimental expressions of suffering, despair, and death, mitigated only by a deep-seated Christian faith and belief in God’s redeeming power.

Could an approach to the collection through its title allow me entrance to the private emotional world of Harper’s early life? Do the poems offer any clues? According to William Still, Harper was haunted by the early death of her mother and her loneliness as an orphan: “Have I yearned for a mother’s love? The grave was my robber. Before three years had scattered their blight around my path, death had won my mother from me. Would the strong arm of a brother have been welcome? I was my mother’s only child.”  Hence, we could read the biblically inspired poem “Ruth and Naomi” as a reference to Harper’s own grief over the loss of her mother: as Naomi begs her daughters to leave her and flee, Ruth insists that she will never abandon the aging woman. In another poem, “The Dying Christian,” the suffering woman who longs to go “home” might again suggest Harper’s dying mother.

In contrast to “Ruth and Naomi” in which mother and daughter figure as third-person characters in a story, the “I” of the “Dying Christian” is surrounded by the “we” of loved ones. Singular and plural first persons inhabit many other poems as well, leading readers to wonder whether we can identify Harper with the “I” and interpret the feelings of loss, despair, and death invoked in them as hers. “That Blessed Hope,” “Yearnings for Home,” “I Thirst,” and “The Presentiment” address the different ways in which the “I” confronts death: with fortitude, with longing, with resignation. Still other poems, “Farewell, my Heart is Beating” and “Let me Love Thee,” seem to intimate romantic love; this love, however, is not fulfilling but to the contrary, fearful of inconstancy, deception, loss.

The trope of dreams—equally sad and despairing—structures several of the poems.   In “Let me Love Thee” and “I Thirst,” the speaking “I” evokes the evanescence of past events in her life through the metaphor of mournful dreams. Somewhat differently, “A Felon’s Dream” and “A Dream” narrate the dreams of the poems’ protagonists. In the former, it is the illusory dream of happiness of an imprisoned criminal abandoned by his once-loving family. In the latter, the dream is the “I”’s nightmarish vision of the terrors of Judgment Day. Two other poems, “He Knoweth not that the Dead are There” and “A Dialogue,” suggest that God visits his wrath most especially on those who commit the sin of worldliness, indulging in wanton pleasure, sexual seduction, intemperance, and greed.

Forest Leaves and the World of Books

Despite the “I”’s outpouring of autumnal emotions, however, the poems only hint at the travails that might have plagued Harper’s early life, refusing to yield any specific details. They are at once private and impersonal. Finding myself at an impasse, I decided to try a second approach, one that would situate Harper in a broader literary field and examine her prosody in relation to contemporary poets. Indeed, although Harper claimed that her inspiration came from nature, her chosen themes and language suggest that she might have been familiar with the conventions of early nineteenth-century women’s poetry. Indeed, it’s quite possible that Harper’s English curriculum at her uncle’s academy or the many books in Mr. Armstrong’s library gave her access to the work of contemporaneous women poets. If so, Harper might well have sought her poetic voice through imitation of poets such as the British Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or Americans Lydia Sigourney, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and Frances Sargent Locke Osgood.

Two poets in particular—Browning and Sigourney—might well have served as Harper’s guides throughout her poetic career. Themes of grief, despair, suffering, death, and Christian faith suffuse their verse. Browning’s poem “Grief” suggests that hopeless grief is as passionless as death. Sigourney’s “The Volunteer” is a narrative of despair that bears resemblance to “The Felon’s Dream”; it tells the story of a volunteer who, despite the pleas of loving family members, goes off to war only to return a broken man to a home emptied by death. In many of Sigourney’s other poems, for example “Not Dead, but Sleepeth,” Christian faith alleviates the sting of death. Similar poems, among them “Consolation,” abound in Browning’s juvenilia.   As in Forest Leaves, several of the British writer’s poems are also cast as dreams; in “The Dream: A Fragment,” the “I” goes back in time and sees once-illustrious historical personages—famed for their beauty, worldliness, and power—now dead.

Forest Leaves as Poetic Beginnings

In her letter to Murray, Harper singled out the poem “Ethiopia” to support her contention that if she had accomplished anything of literary or intellectual merit, “it was because of the power within me, born of the surrounding circumstances which fettered my race and called forth my religious impression.” One wonders what Harper thought of the other poems in her volume. To probe this question, we could attempt a third approach to Forest Leaves, which would be to trace the fortunes of its poems and, more broadly, the evolution of Harper’s long poetic career.

Of the twenty poems that make up Forest Leaves, Harper reprinted eight in later volumes (according to Ornter, two others, “The Soul” and “A Dialogue,” were published in newspapers).   Only three of these poems fall into the category of private, impersonal poems—“That Blessed Hope,” “I Thirst,” “The Dying Christian”—while the rest are objective: two poems—“Ruth and Naomi” and “For She said If I May but Touch of his Clothes I Shall be Whole”—retell biblical stories while the other five address historical topics, slavery in “Ethiopia” and “Bible Defence of Slavery,” the sin of worldliness in “He Knoweth Not that the Dead are There” (as well as in “The Soul” and “A Dialogue”). By discarding the other poems, it seems that Harper was still searching for a distinctive poetic voice that would eventually emerge in her later collections.

Harper’s choice of titles for the volumes in which the eight Forest Leaves poems later appear are, as I noted earlier, remarkable for their very blandness. Paradoxically, this very banality might well indicate her growing self-assurance, evidenced by her refusal to indulge in the autumnal emotions of Leaves, her shift to increasingly radical political subject matter, and perhaps even a canny move to hide the boldness of her politics from the unsuspecting reader.

Indeed, although biblical musings and narratives continue to infuse Harper’s later volumes, private verse gradually gives way to poems about slavery, intemperance, the plight of women, emancipation, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction. In this shift, Harper might have followed the example of African American poet Sarah Louisa Forten, who composed such abolitionist poems as “The Grave of the Slave,” “Prayer,” “The Slave,” and “An Appeal to Women.” But she might also have continued to draw inspiration from Browning and Sigourney, both of whom were well-known for their political poems: Sigourney for “The Suttee,” “The Cherokee Mother,” and “Indian Names,” and Browning for “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and “Hiram Power’s ‘Greek Slave.’”

Still Searching

A nagging curiosity, however, led me back to Forest Leaves still seeking clues to the private Harper. I reread two republished poems in which Harper made additions to the later versions. “He Knoweth Not that the Dead are There” appeared in Harper’s 1854 volume as “The Revel,” with an added verse that makes specific reference to the “wine cup.” Given Harper’s repeated references to intemperance in other poems of the 1850s as well as in her short story “The Two Offers,” I wondered: was intemperance—perhaps that of a lover—the hidden source of grief and despair in her early life, so raw that she could not directly address it at the time? Does the addition of a second, accepting voice to the 1872 version of “I Thirst” signal a final coming to terms? “Within, in thee is the living fount,/ Fed from the springs above;/ There quench thy thirst till thou shalt bathe/ In God’s own sea of love.”

Maybe one day the archives will tell us.

Further Reading:

Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911 (Detroit, 1994).

Hallie Q.Brown, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.” In Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (1926, reprint, New York, 1988).

Daniel P. Murray Papers, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.” Microfilm, reel 5. Moorland-Spingarn Center, Howard University.

William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia, 1872).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Carla L. Peterson is professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of Maryland.   She specializes in nineteenth-century African American literature, culture, and history and has published numerous essays in this field.   She is the author of “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880), and more recently, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (2011), a social and cultural history of black life in nineteenth-century New York City as seen through the lens of family history. It was awarded the 2011 prize for the best book on New York History by the New York Society Library and was a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman 2011 Frederick Douglass Prize.

For much of the seventeenth century, when regions outside of the Delaware Valley erupted in violence, the valley itself, home to the Lenape Indians, experienced comparatively peaceful times. Jean R. Soderlund explains that when Quaker William Penn gained the charter for Pennsylvania in 1681, there had already been decades of overcoming disagreements, finding common ground, and building a society together among the Lenape, Swedish, and Finnish inhabitants of the valley. When English Quakers arrived, Soderlund stresses, they stepped into this pre-existing social framework. In Lenape Country she provides a fascinating and detailed view of the phases of the valley’s history on both sides of the river and goes far beyond the more familiar story of the west side.

This book offers readers a chance to learn much about intergroup relations; Soderlund portrays the Lenapes as taking the leading role for a significant part of the seventeenth century. Her estimates of population sizes for various dates are helpful. These estimates strengthen her case, especially when she shows how greatly Lenapes outnumbered Europeans before the influx of Quakers to the valley (86). Even after their population decreased—especially because of outbreaks of disease—Lenapes maintained influence through ties they had earlier created with the local Swedish and Finnish population.

Lenapes came from many different groups. One of these groups, the Sickoneysincks, lived at Cape Henlopen on Delaware Bay, and Soderlund presents them as shaping a pivotal moment in the history of the region. In 1631, Sickoneysinck interests collided with those of Dutch patroons, who dreamed of controlling Delaware Bay and making profits from both the land and the sea, including through tobacco cultivation and whaling (35-36). Matters went terribly wrong for the Dutch colony, Swanendael, close to Cape Henlopen. The Sickoneysincks destroyed it, killing all thirty-two colonists and their livestock, not long after the Swanendael colony had been established (38-40). Soderlund explores the possible motivations of the Sickoneysincks, investigating what was reported about the event and putting it within a framework of developments on the Chesapeake. She argues that Lenapes would have learned through their Native contacts about the destructive effects of English colonization in the Chesapeake region and would have sought to stop similar impacts on their homelands. Particularly alarming to Lenapes, she notes, was that the Dutch claimed a greater amount of land than was needed for just a trading post (38). Soderlund admirably succeeds in considering a broader context for this event and examines other explanations for the attack, including a statement about the Dutch treating Lenape women poorly (43-49).

This book convincingly highlights the complexities of the valley’s past.

Although Swanendael receives detailed attention here, its significance goes beyond the violent outcome. Indeed, the Lenapes gained a reputation for relating to others peacefully.   Soderlund significantly claims that the attack cast a long shadow as memories of the incident shaped future actions, including later choices that promoted peace (10, 71, 199). “During the seventeenth century, prior to William Penn’s arrival,” she writes, “the Lenapes and early European colonists created a society in Lenape country that preferred peaceful resolution of conflict, religious freedom, collaborative use of the land and other natural resources, respect for people of diverse backgrounds, and local governmental authority, all facilitating the business relationship the residents sought for profitable trade.” Despite these examples of mutuality, she points out that constructing “this society was difficult, uneven, and tenuous” (7-8).

The Lenapes and the Dutch pulled back from conflict after the Swanendael attack, with both concerned to keep trading channels open along the Lenapewihittuck, the Lenapes’ name for the river; nevertheless, Lenapes continued to assert their sovereignty.   Soderlund refers to the Lenapewihittuck as “Main Street,” the “main artery” for Lenapes and a place where they accepted diverse European traders, particularly around midcentury. Although Lenapes permitted Dutch, Swedish, and English traders, their trading posts were often not well stocked. Thus, she indicates, by allowing competing Europeans to set up different posts, Lenapes could improve their chances of obtaining goods (57).  

Along with her stress on groups and their interrelationships, Soderlund brings individual Lenape and European actors into focus, carefully examining the few sources that are left to us from these long-ago encounters. She depicts the frustrations of Johan Printz, one of New Sweden’s governors, whose appeals for more colonists and need for more supplies went unsatisfied (67, 72). In 1651, after Peter Stuyvesant left Manhattan with 120 soldiers to reassert the Dutch presence along the Lenapewihittuck, Printz’s problems magnified (76). Neither man, Soderlund stresses, was in charge of the situation. Each found a “tough match” in the Lenape sachem Mattahorn (81). Soderlund discusses the important role that Mattahorn played in negotiations (77-79). Despite the arrival of the soldiers, the Dutch came to negotiate, not fight with the Lenapes for the land upon which to place a new post, Fort Casimir. The Dutch depended on the help of Lenapes to support them against Swedish counter land claims. Soderlund discusses how, even after the defeat of New Sweden, Armegard Printz, Johan’s daughter, remained in the valley and played a key part in strengthening ties between Swedish inhabitants and Lenapes (90-91).

Lenapes objected to outsiders trying to assert authority over them. Soderlund describes how many of their European neighbors came to object to these same authorities and how this opposition helped create bonds among Lenapes, Swedes, and Finns. “At midcentury,” she writes, “Lenapes and Swedes remained separate communities, divided by lingering suspicions yet tied by individual relationships, mutual commercial interest, and awareness of external threats” (86).   The first major cause that drew them together was opposition to the Dutch, who took over New Sweden in 1655.   Within months after the conquest, an alliance of Lenapes, Swedes, and Finns stopped the Dutch from turning away a Swedish ship with goods and over 100 passengers (97-99).   Swedes and Finns continued to exert independence, rejecting Stuyvesant’s call to create defensive villages for protection against Indians and preferring to remain in dispersed spots close to Lenapes, in whom they showed greater trust than in the Dutch government (104-5).

Soderlund shows how discontent with officials grew after the English conquered the Dutch in 1664. Confronting the hated policies of Governor Francis Lovelace was yet another bonding experience for Lenapes and the “Swedish nation” or “old settlers”—collective terms that included Swedish and Finnish inhabitants and a few from other European backgrounds (113). The English tried to control the land strictly—for example, selling off areas that inhabitants had been using in common. Lovelace disregarded traditional practices that Lenapes used for reconfirming agreements. More Lenapes succumbed to diseases, such as smallpox, and Soderlund lays out evidence indicating that they blamed their suffering on the increasing European settlement. These various complaints contributed to unrest in the late 1660s and early 1670s, including rebelliousness among the “old settlers” in an event known as the “Long Swede revolt” and in small-scale attacks by Lenapes; tellingly, these attacks were not aimed at Swedes and Finns, who had grown closer to the Lenapes over the years (113, 120-126).

For different phases of the valley’s history, this study shows changes, continuities, and statuses of intergroup relations and their interplay with individuals and governments. Although violence tended to be infrequent and localized, it threatened to worsen significantly, especially in the mid-1670s when warfare was erupting in New England and the Chesapeake. As she discusses this era, Soderlund again shows the importance of understanding this wider context. The next English administration, under Edmund Andros, showed a readiness to adapt to Lenapes’ practices and defuse tensions (133, 137-40). Once William Penn and other officials of Pennsylvania began the process of setting up a new government, Quakers recognized the advantage of working with both Lenapes and Swedes, although relations were not always smooth. Then, “after the first years of transition,” Soderlund writes, “when Penn and his colonists became less dependent on help from the Swedes and Lenapes, the new regime learned that the pre-1681 inhabitants could still exert power” (176). “Despite their new status as minority groups,” Swedes influenced events, in part, by “using their churches as a political base” and Lenapes asserted themselves through both negotiations and threats (150, 160, 176, 178).

This book convincingly highlights the complexities of the valley’s past. For example, Swedes and Lenapes became close allies yet maintained separate identities. When Lenapes and Swedes expressed their opposition to restrictions by authorities and sought ways to cooperate, they laid down patterns that continued to shape the valley after 1681.   Another complexity is that the peace established after the Swanendael attack was far from firm and “would be renegotiated throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by different groups of Europeans and Lenapes” (8-9).   The fragility of certain of these relations showed clearly in the eighteenth century. Euro-Americans’ fraudulent treatment of Delaware Valley Indians through the Walking Purchase became one of the most notorious symbols of the strain. A thought-provoking and well-researched study, Lenape Country successfully weaves together significant themes and rich historical details about people and places in the valley of the Lenapewihittuck.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Amy C. Schutt is an associate professor of history at the State University of New York College at Cortland and author of Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (2007).

When did the United States become a global force? The answer lies in the nineteenth century, notably before the American Civil War, but this is actually an unhelpfully teleological way of asking the historical question. A more historicist version of the question might be: In the aftermath of national independence, what did various constituencies of Americans strive to do in the wider world, and at what point did such overseas activities attain a global scale?

While curating an exhibit for the special collections library at Indiana University, I unexpectedly found myself undertaking a digital history project aimed toward answering this question. I worked with a technical team at the university and beyond to create an interactive digital map designed to trace American activity throughout the world in the formative and transformative era between the Revolution and the Civil War. The exhibit Website, Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861, centers on this map.

Many other digital mapping projects have focused on the spread of networks, but my “globalization map” hinges as much on overlap as it does on reach. Reach: What kinds of activities happened where, and when? Overlap: When did multiple kinds of activities happen in the same place, out in the wider world?

The “globalization map” features ten variables of historical data which plot American diplomatic, military, commercial, missionary, and other activities onto a series of five historical world maps. The digital map is fundamentally interactive so that users can choose from a menu which data to project onto the map, while a timeline enables users to follow data over time. Users can zoom in for more tightly focused views of the five historical maps, and they can click on any data point for background and source information.

Utilizing historical “basemaps” was the first great technical challenge in constructing the digital map: I needed to determine how to project historical data onto world maps from the nineteenth century, rather than onto a modern basemap like Google Maps. This ambition first arose when I sought to produce a map illustration for an academic talk, and I was quickly confronted by the gap between historical places and modern maps. Places existed in the nineteenth century that no longer exist today. Because their world was not our world, a modern basemap simply could not convey the past in its integrity. Sequencing a sample of five historical basemaps through an interactive digital map seemed an apt way to portray Americans’ constantly changing understanding of a constantly changing wider world. The “globalization map” would, through modern digital technology, be able to display a vast array of data, but it would have the appearance of historical maps from the period.

But how could I project data onto historical maps? To utter this question is to recover the depth of my technical ignorance when I embarked on this digital history project. I had to learn—emphatically from ground zero—about “basemaps,” about “historical GIS,” about “georeferencing,” about “tiling,” about database software, about “centroid” “lat-long,” about mapping visualization software, about “CSS” code for timelines and menus, about “back end” engineering, about data management. In other words, I had to learn about what now in retrospect feels like a zillion technical resources, processes, and steps toward creating an interactive digital map for a Website that finally went public after two and a half years of historical research and technical labor.

The “globalization map” and its surrounding Website were all produced on a shoestring budget, alongside constructing a library exhibit, on top of an already heavy academic workload (hence largely on borrowed time), while coordinating an expanding coterie of technical collaborators. There was the reality of numerous steep learning curves, there was the reality of an already onerous workload, and there was the reality of relying on collaborators with their own onerous workloads.

I certainly never foresaw the magnitude of the demands generated by such a digital project when I first undertook it. Yet given what I know now, why continue to develop the “globalization map” as an ongoing labor of love? The project has forced me to rethink my work on multiple levels: to rethink the organization of research, to rethink analysis of evidence, to rethink the representation of history. And to rethink the discipline of history itself. All of that has been tremendously intellectually rewarding.

One responsibility of historical inquiry is to discern in the past what people did not see at the time. No American mapmaker in the nineteenth century ever produced a map comparable to my “globalization map.” At the same time, one burden of historical inquiry is to reconstruct how people in the past understood their own world and what they strove to do in that world. Such an essential tension between their historical time and our historical inquiry lies at the heart of the “globalization map.” It is the reason the digital map utilizes historical basemaps meant to convey past understanding of the world—what people in the past could perceive. And it is the reason the digital map assembles numerous data variables: to examine the multitudinous undertakings pursued by many Americans, all having particular purposes, which would ultimately accumulate into a phenomenon that can retrospectively be labeled “globalization”—but which people in the past did not perceive as such.

Globalization emerged from undertakings not intended to be global. No United States government office orchestrated all this activity, neither the Department of State, nor the Department of War. Yet, the evidence of the current set of data variables for the digital map suggests that, by the late 1830s, the manifold activities of sundry Americans reached both an extent and a saturation level to operate not just on a transatlantic or hemispheric scale but on a truly global scale. Without any imperial plan, the pre-Civil War United States had already been transformed from its marginal colonial and national origins into a significant world power, albeit one considerably short of the then-formidable British empire.

Until recently historians have tended to narrate the nineteenth century—the era before the “American century”—as one of nation building, continental conquest, and sectional conflict, not global expansion. The “globalization map” is meant to contribute to a more multi-dimensional view of the nineteenth century by appreciating Americans’ pursuits at the “global” level beyond the national, beyond the transatlantic, beyond the continental, and beyond the hemispheric.

The data underlying the “globalization map” comes from many sources. The nineteenth century saw a growing array of American social constituencies invest in producing cartographic, geographical, historical, statistical, and other representations of the wider world—both in its parts, and as a global whole. For instance, 1839 saw the formation of the American Statistical Society; 1851, the American Geographical Society. While the textual record of this vast global history is in fragments scattered across innumerable archives, those fragments can be assembled into a research database driving a digital map in order to interrogate how the United States “globalized” across the first half of the nineteenth century.

This points to one way that working on this digital history project has obliged me to rethink the organization of research and the analysis of evidence. Many other digital mapping projects have focused on the spread of networks, but my “globalization map” hinges as much on overlap as it does on reach. Reach: What kinds of activities happened where, and when? Overlap: When did multiple kinds of activities happen in the same place, out in the wider world? Reach can tell us about serious ambition, initiative, and effort, whereas overlap can tell us that much more about serious capability, interaction, involvement, and intervention. The data overlaps on the digital map indicate that the late 1830s is when the United States became a fledgling global force capable of interacting and intervening throughout the world. It was not yet capable of inflicting the kind of damage on the world that the United States would do throughout the twentieth century, but the country had nevertheless become one of the nineteenth century’s few world powers.

Might this be considered globalization, in advance of global imperialism? That is one of the many thorny interpretive questions that can be asked of the “globalization map.” Because the digital map is fundamentally interactive, I can ask my own historical questions of the map, but users can apply the map to their own historical questions far beyond my personal research agenda. Such open-endedness of historical inquiry is the future potential of the project.

Much remains to be done on the “globalization map.” There are representational dilemmas to be overcome, and there are new technological opportunities to be embraced. Some new elements are already in the works. For instance, the number of historical basemaps is being expanded beyond the initial sample of five to one for every year in which an American-produced world map was available. This is meant to deepen the map’s ability to immerse users in historical time—in changing nineteenth-century understandings of a changing world.

And it is meant to slow down the map’s mode of historical inquiry, to linger over sundry overseas activities year by year, so as not to hasten toward any teleological threshold of global saturation. What came before such global saturation was not self-conscious or unified “globalization.” Deliberately slowing users down might help the digital map recast globalizing as a grounded, arduous, and fraught process, rather than as some kind of timeless human condition. In this way “the global” can be interrogated, rather than presumed, as a category of historical analysis.

Additional data shall be plotted onto the “globalization map” beyond the ten initial data variables: American-sponsored scientific expeditions, for example. But how much more data can be projected onto the digital map before it becomes cluttered and opaque? To what degree can this representational dilemma be overcome by a technical solution?

Further representational dilemmas lurk. A future ambition is to juxtapose global activity against continental activity by the United States. Of course, what is now thought of as “American” continental space was foreign and not sovereign for an extended time period in the nineteenth century, even if it was not overseas. It would seem extremely useful to examine not the scale but the scope of continental versus overseas activity of the United States, in order to determine their relative cultural importance measured along various data variables. In other words, when did “globalizing” become important not only with respect to American reach into the wider world, but within the full range of American life? Precisely what activities can be deemed commensurable across continental and overseas domains to gauge this?

New opportunities beckon as well. It has recently become technically possible to employ the same research database to generate sophisticated digital charts, graphs, and tables in dynamic conjunction with the digital map. As the digital map moves, so can these other data visualizations. A nice coincidence is that the nineteenth century, as an age of statistics, saw tremendous interest in the presentation of data in charts, graphs, and tables. We are in the very early phases of developing data visualizations to complement the digital map by contextualizing data along additional axes of analysis. So, for instance, if an overseas military action appears on the map, the user can choose to see everything else that might appear on the map in the same moment: the global extent and saturation level. But another data visualization could simultaneously show all other military actions for the same place over time, so that the user might in the same instant be lured down alternative research paths, perhaps the geographical, perhaps the chronological, or perhaps another context made available in a dynamically linked chart, graph, or table (one paying homage, ideally, to nineteenth-century graphic creativity).

All this continues to be very much a collaborative undertaking between me, a historian with some augmenting technical skill, and a set of collaborators with professional technical skills. There are other exquisite “historical GIS” projects on the Web, but our “globalization map” has definitely been a collective act of creation. And mine has not been the only learning curve. Instability that comes from filigree complexity and ceaseless innovation is simply inherent to the digital universe, I have come to realize. Mastery is not a condition so much as a continuous process, even for those who work primarily in the digital realm. This has obligated continual collaboration between the historical and the technical, the kind of collaboration that has stretched me far beyond the training of a dissertation or the task of a monograph.

There is another kind of collaboration at play—a collaboration with the unknown. We are mindfully developing and designing the “globalization map” to be both a model and a platform. First, its digital code will be shared as a model for projecting historical data onto historical maps, in contexts far beyond the nineteenth-century United States. Second, its database will be turned into a Web-based platform able to display data contributed by other scholars, because there is now so much exciting new scholarship being undertaken about the global activities of the United States in the nineteenth century which far exceeds my own humble research agenda.

There are things a digital map cannot do, of course. It can discern hidden patterns, but it cannot explain them. It cannot see ideologies or discourses. It cannot see domestic opposition or foreign resistance. It can show limits to imagination and action much better than it can show disputes or contests. It can show only the surface of conflicts.

But a digital map can process data, display data, and interrogate data on a significant scale and in striking and eye-opening ways. We hope that the “globalization map” can be a useful new tool with which to investigate early American history and the history of globalization; the proof lies in the users who employ it for research and for teaching.

We encourage Common-place readers to add to our list of digital resources for the study of early American history and culture by contributing to the Zotero group Suggestion Box for Common-place Web Library or by emailing suggestions to Web Library editor Edward Whitley (whitley@lehigh.edu).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Konstantin Dierks is associate professor of history at Indiana University. Author of In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (2009), he is currently working on a book about the globalization of the United States between the American Revolution and the American Civil War, from which this digital history project derives.

The relationship between slavery and capitalism has reemerged as a popular topic of examination among historians of nineteenth-century America. Though Eric Williams first introduced the mutual inclusivity of capitalism and slavery in 1944, in recent years, there has been increased scholarly interest in capitalism’s rise as the guiding economic framework that characterized antebellum slavery in the United States. Calvin Schermerhorn’s The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 adds to this exciting and growing body of new literature. Schermerhorn explores how slave traders, shippers, and bankers situated themselves at the forefront of American economic growth between the end of the War of 1812 and the beginning of the Civil War. He argues that slave financiers and shippers leveraged cycles of credit and debt and in the process influenced the trajectory of American capitalism more directly than any other group of entrepreneurs during the antebellum era.

Ultimately, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 is an investigation of slave trading firms and the financial strategies that slave traders used to capitalize on the buying, transportation, and selling of human property. And in each chapter, Schermerhorn keeps his hand on the domestic slave trade’s pulse by connecting the drain of enslaved people from the upper South, specifically Virginia and Maryland, to the most popular slave markets in the United States between 1815 and 1860: Louisiana, the Mississippi River Valley, and Texas.

Schermerhorn begins by examining Baltimore and the slave trading pursuits of Francis Everod Rives and Peyton Mason and Company, small-time slave traders who took advantage of rising demand for slaves in newly acquired lands in the southwestern United States. He notes that in the 1810s and 1820s, “[s]laveholding agriculturists found themselves in possession of a surplus of bondspeople at just the moment their countrymen were demanding slaves on a distant cotton frontier” (12). The opening of new land, stolen from indigenous people during the War of 1812, offered adventure-seeking planters, bankers, and slave traders from the upper South opportunities to make money. Rives and Peyton Mason and Company set their economic sights on Natchez, the burgeoning entrepôt located northwest of New Orleans and brimming with economic promise in the late 1810s. Their ventures revolved around selling slaves from the Chesapeake to greedy buyers in the lower Mississippi Valley and negotiating their transactions in human chattel through cultivating trust and confidence with local financial institutions.

Schermerhorn emphasizes the importance of trust and confidence in the domestic slave trade, especially during the American banking boom in the 1820s and early 1830s. The slave trading adventures of Baltimore entrepreneur Austin Woolfolk demonstrate how important upper South slave traders’ reputations were to expanding their lower South business enterprises. Woolfolk developed the reputation in Baltimore as a beguiling and ruthless salesman, ready to do whatever was necessary to procure as many enslaved people as possible for sale in the lower South. And he linked business ventures—i.e. his trade and traffic in enslaved people—to trans-Atlantic commercial enterprises, which funneled money into his coffers to continue the same cycle over and over again. Schermerhorn discusses how Woolfolk’s slave trading business was linked to the House of Brown, a trans-Atlantic financial institution, which in 1825 had branches in Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Liverpool, and London. The importance of trust and confidence in early national banking extended far beyond the grips of regional slave traders. Indeed, as Schermerhorn articulates, the financial relationships that slave traders and financiers cultivated were only as good as the human chattel or bank notes that each party brought to the table. For this reason, the Panic of 1837 had the potential to completely destabilize the interregional trade of human property. As credit contracted and banks closed, slave trading firms and planters attempted to liquidate their assets to stay afloat, and their greatest assets were enslaved people.

One of the most impressive aspects of Schermerhorn’s analysis is the way he incorporates slave smuggling into chapter three, “Sweet Dreams and Smuggling Schemes,” and chapter six, “Chains of Violence.” In these chapters, he delves into the economic and legal complications of slave smuggling for traders in the upper Atlantic, specifically in New Jersey and New York. In chapter 3, Schermerhorn examines the ways in which New York merchants-turned-slave traders John Marsh and William Stone took advantage of the growing demand in the 1810s and early 1820s for bonded workers on sugar plantations in Louisiana to coerce conditionally free African Americans in New Jersey to leave their homes for employment. In chapter 6, Schermerhorn deploys Solomon Northup’s narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, to investigate slave-abducting as a byproduct of slave traders’ avarice to fulfill demand for black slaves in the lower South.

One cannot fully understand the domestic slave trade without considering the nexus between slave trading and sexual violence. In chapter five, “The Slave Factory of Franklin & Armfield,” Schermerhorn examines the economic pursuits and violent sexual exploits of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice C. Ballard, the three partners who comprised Franklin & Armfield, one of the most infamous slave trading firms in the lower South during the antebellum era. Tales of Franklin & Armfield’s exploits reached far beyond the money that they made trading in enslaved bodies. Schermerhorn rightly devotes considerable time to investigating how they wrote about their sexual exploits (and exploitation) of enslaved women and how they cultivated broad networks of connections from Virginia to Louisiana to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in slave-trading profits. Schermerhorn delves into how Franklin & Armfield’s interest in profit was built on mismanagement of slave cargoes, which adds a macabre layer to their capitalistic quest to make as much money from their trade in enslaved people as possible.

In the final chapter, Schermerhorn focuses on New York shipping magnate Charles Morgan and how his steamship line profited during the 1850s after he expanded his enterprise into the deep Southwest after the United States’ annexation of Texas. This borderland perspective of economic expansion and entrepreneurship broadens our understanding of how slave trading, transportation innovations, and American imperialism were interconnected in the decade before the Civil War. Moreover, Schermerhorn shows that one of the most provocative aspects of slavery’s capitalism was how federal support for improved transportation and monetary policies helped to augment the trade in slaves.

Calvin Schermerhorn’s analysis on slavery and American capitalism adds a layer of complexity to our understanding of how slave traders, financiers, and slaveholders manipulated complex financial instruments to profit from their traffic and ownership of human chattel. If one thinks that the crash of worldwide financial markets is a thing of our modern reality, one only needs to examine antebellum American finance to be disabused of that idea. Investors on both sides of the Atlantic bought mortgage-backed securities—similar in theory to the explosion of complex financial products that played a role in tanking the American economy in 2008. Yet, during the antebellum period, instead of packaging financial products based on houses and other real estate, investors sought mortgage-backed securities based on human property.

Ultimately, these various entrepreneurs and financiers constructed lucrative businesses on the suffering of enslaved African Americans. Through delving into the banking policies, cycles of credit and debt, and the financial hedging by a resolute group of American businessmen, Calvin Schermerhorn shows the ways in which American capitalism and American slavery were mutually constitutive. Schermerhorn’s The Business of Slavery and the Rise of  American Capitalism, 1815-1860 is important reading for anyone interested in the undeniable relationship between capitalism and slavery. In addition, he reveals how American banking, economic expansion, trans-Atlantic fiscal policies, and the domestic slave trade all worked in concert to commodify the bodies of people of African descent enslaved in the United States between 1815 and 1860. Schermerhorn’s work is a great addition to this literature.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Justene G. Hill received her PhD in American history from Princeton University in 2015. She is working on a manuscript entitled Felonious Transactions: The Legal Culture of Slave Economies in South Carolina, 1787-1860.

That Forest Leaves had been discovered was very exciting news. The first book of poetry by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper provides a critical piece to the puzzle in the reconstruction of her bibliography and, perhaps, a bit of insight into her life. As the author of a bio-critical study of her life’s work, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911, I made assumptions based on existing documents, which included Harper’s poetry, novels, essays, speeches, newspaper clippings, and library facsimiles, as well as from comments by her contemporaries, such as William Still, William Lloyd Garrison, Anna Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass.

I knew Forest Leaves existed because William Still referenced it in his review of her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) in The Provincial Freeman, September 2, 1854. Indeed, it is important to recognize and incorporate such verifications of works by legitimate witnesses to a subject’s experiences and production. One reviewer of my manuscript stated that I should not even reference the title because I had not actually seen it, and therefore I had no material evidence of its existence. I ignored this preposterous stance and snide dismissal of the book. As a scholar of African American culture, I was ever hopeful that another researcher might one day uncover Forest Leaves, like the recovery of Our Nig. During my research for Discarded Legacy, I visited the Library of Congress. Certain titles of Harper’s books were listed, but were absent. A librarian explained that the disappearance of early African American literature was an unfortunate reality. He then directed me to Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, which contained a far more extensive collection of Harper’s writings.

In Discarded Legacy I propose that the genus of Harper’s oeuvre was represented in her second poetry book, whereby recurring thematic patterns appear in subsequent poetry books, as well as in her essays, short stories, and novels. For the most part, Harper’s writings focused on abolitionism, woman’s rights, temperance, and Christianity. These topics more often than not intersected, such as in “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” written from the perspective of fugitive slave Margaret Garner; or in her serialized novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice, a portrayal of a free black woman who protested slavery and advocated for women’s suffrage.  

Religious and morality poetry dominate Forest Leaves. There is only one antislavery poem, “Bible Defense of Slavery,” which, as is the case for half of the poetry in this first collection, is reprinted in her second book. Though Harper’s second book contains religious verse, it also ventures into broader social topics that she engages as a lecturer as she toured the northern United States and Canada.

But during my research for Discarded Legacy, I never found any love poems or love letters—missing elements that I found most curious. References to romantic love in Harper’s poetry were ambivalent at best. Indeed, in Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, “The Contrast“ portrays a failed romance that ends in suicide. Another poem found in that same volume, “Advice to the Girls,” hints that Harper did engage romance, as she urges caution and discretion; however, the poem is written in the third person. Her first published short story, “Two Offers,” which appears in the Anglo-African Magazine, in 1859, contains a dialogue between two young women: Laura, who feels she must marry or become an old maid; and Jane, who pronounces her independence and seeks financial security as a writer. The latter appears to represent Harper’s own life’s direction, and this character warns against marrying for financial gain.  

“The Mission of the Flowers,” which appears in her book Moses: A Story of the Nile in 1869, deploys flowers as metaphors for women in order to critique the oppressive objectification of woman’s sexuality. As I wrote in Discarded Legacy, a “most interesting feature of the story is Harper’s symbolic manipulation of the rose’s sexuality. The intoxicating allure of the rose—which throughout Western literature has been symbolic of woman’s sexual power—entices, seduces, and even rapes some of the flowers until they all agree to become roses.”

Protagonists in Harper’s novels marry, but these unions are political, and sexual attraction is presented as less important than admiration, respect, and friendship. No gushing or swooning appears in the plots, and certainly there are no allusions to sex or sexual metaphors, except in the novel Iola Leroy, when the protagonist repels disrespectful advances during her enslavement.

Harper’s later writings about romance contrast significantly to the two love poems, “Farewell, My Heart Is Beating” and “Let Me Love Thee,” found in Forest Leaves. These poems are very emotional and proclaim undying love for the object of her affection, which is in form and content consistent with nineteenth-century romantic verse. There is a mournful tone to both love poems, which configures a sense of sadness. “Farewell, My Heart Is Beating” is about loving and leaving: “And now when almost bursting,/ And ‘mid my tears to smile.” Tantalizingly, the opening stanza in “Let Me Love Thee” suggests romantic disappointment in Harper’s past:

Let me love thee I have known
The agony deception brings,
And tho’ my driven heart is lone
It fondly clasps and firmly clings.

Judging from photos and written descriptions, Harper was certainly an attractive woman, and one can speculate that she probably had admirers, even suitors. Conversely, she was an intellectual and an artist, a combination that deflects male attention even today. Two hundred years ago, such characteristics would have intimidated most men. Because of her stature as an antislavery lecturer, rallying audiences to oppose the inhumane institution of slavery, while exposing the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and advocating equal rights for all women, Frances Harper had to maintain an uncompromised posture. It was the nineteenth century, the Victorian era, and she was a black woman representing her race before integrated audiences composed of men and women. As a public figure, it might have been impolitic to reveal romantic interests in her writings. She was, after all, considered “the bronze muse” of the abolitionist movement, and had to maintain a posture that would not jeopardize her stature or her activism.

Until Frances Ellen Watkins becomes Frances E. W. Harper in 1861, when she married the widower Fenton Harper, she was probably considered a spinster. She was thirty-six years old. In Discarded Legacy, I speculate that she met Fenton Harper when she was teaching at the Union Seminary in Wilberforce, Ohio, when he was possibly still married to his first wife. But this is pure conjecture based on Frances Harper’s residence there, because I have not discovered any evidence of their meeting to substantiate this. Moreover, no love poems appear in any of her subsequent publications about this short marriage, only a poem written about the birth of their daughter, Mary.

Forest Leaves was published when Frances was only twenty-one years of age, which suggests she was infatuated with someone(s) before the book was published, before she ventured away from Baltimore to teach in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and long before she became a popular writer and lecturer. The absence of romance in her later writings or in her correspondence was a missing link in her life until now. In any case, I was delighted to find romantic verse in her first collection of poems because it supplies a human dimension to her persona that until now was a mystery.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Melba Joyce Boyd is the author of Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911 (1994) and Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (2004). She is also the author of nine books of poetry. She is a distinguished professor at Wayne State University in the Department of African American Studies.

I can still recall perfectly the day Johanna Ortner walked into my office, asking me to be her doctoral advisor, and in search of a dissertation topic. I told her that someone ought to write a historical biography of the relatively forgotten abolitionist-feminist, writer, poet, and temperance advocate, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Having already expressed her interest in black women’s history to me, Johanna was up to the challenge. With a historian’s passion for archival research, she made a brilliant discovery: she found Harper’s first book of poems, Forest Leaves, thought until now to be lost to history. My interest in Harper stemmed from the book I was writing, now complete, which centers on African Americans, free and enslaved, in the history of the abolition movement. In my research, I came across a host of black writers, mostly ignored by historians, but whose work had been carefully recovered by literary scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Vincent Carretta, Jean Fagan Yellin, Robert Levine, Joanna Brooks, William Farrison, and most recently, Ezra Greenspan, to name a few.

Black women writers, as Gates argues in his essay, “In Her Own Write,” have been central to the genesis and development of African American literature, starting with Phillis Wheatley. We are still in the process, he goes on to note and as Johanna’s discovery makes clear, of “unearthing the nineteenth century roots” of black women’s literary tradition. Harper, the “bronze muse of the abolitionist movement” in the apt words of her biographer, Melba J. Boyd, is one of them. With her too, I turned to the work of literary scholars like Boyd, Carla Peterson, Frances Smith Foster, and Maryemma Graham to fully appreciate the breadth of Harper’s oeuvre, poems, short stories, novels, and not the least, her speeches, many of which went unrecorded in the abolitionist and black presses. After the Civil War, her speeches were neglected in the temperance and women’s rights press. Indeed, it was Harper’s skills as an orator and activist that has led Peterson to include her in a group of black women “doers of the word” and Graham to call her a “supremely oral poet.” I suspect that we have yet to recover the full range of Harper’s writings and words.

My own interest in Harper was piqued not so much by her now well-established authorial reputation in African American letters but by her work as a forgotten activist and polemicist for abolition, women’s rights, and black citizenship. My encounter with her began in the pages of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, which contained accounts of her accomplished and persuasive antislavery speeches in the 1850s. According to an admiring John Stephenson, on one occasion, Harper spoke “eloquently of the wrong of the slave” for two hours “in a soul stirring speech.” He reported to Garrison, who knew Harper’s abolitionist uncle William Watkins well, that “Miss Watkins is a young lady of color, of fine attainments, of superior education, and an impressive speaker, leaving an impression, wherever she goes, which will not soon be forgotten.” (Garrison, along with the Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, had lived with black abolitionists Jacob T. Greener and Watkins in a boarding house in Baltimore, when he briefly co-edited The Genius of Universal Emancipation with Lundy in 1829.)

On the eve of the Civil War and her short-lived marriage to Fenton Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins (fig. 1) was a well-established presence in the abolitionist lecture circuit. She was hired as a lecturing agent by the Maine Anti Slavery Society, went on lecture tours as far west as Michigan, according to the black abolitionist William C. Nell, and assisted the adroit secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, William Still. As she wrote succinctly to Still, her first biographer, who recalled how generously she had contributed to the abolitionist underground: “My lectures have met with success.” She added proudly, “I took breakfast with the then Governor of Maine.”

As an abolitionist lecturer, Harper honed to perfection a polemical political style that appears to differ with the seemingly sentimental and religious form of Forest Leaves. In her lectures, she pointedly contrasted the reality of black suffering with popular antislavery fiction: “Oh, if Mrs. Stowe has clothed American slavery with the graceful garb of fiction, Solomon Northrup comes up from the dark habitation of Southern cruelty where slavery fattens and feasts on human blood with such mournful revelations that one might almost wish for the sake of humanity that the tales of horror that he reveals were not so.” Harper powerfully makes clear that Northup’s unvarnished story of the harsh labor regimen and commodification of black bodies in the Cotton Kingdom is a truer depiction of slavery than Stowe’s best-selling novel saturated with the tropes of romantic racialism. As an ardent advocate of the Quaker-led free produce movement, Harper argued that she would rather pay for a coarse dress and “thank God that upon its warp and woof I see no stain of blood and tears; that to procure a little finer muslin for my limbs no crushed and broken heart went out in sighs, and that from the field where it was raised went up no wild and startling cry unto the throne of God to witness there in language deep and strong, that in demanding that cotton I was nerving oppression’s hand for deed of guilt and crime.” Cotton, as Harper realized, was the fabric of slavery. Her lecture combined literary sentimentalism with an acute perception of the political economy of slave labor-grown cotton.

Harper’s abolitionist imaginary of bloodied bodies and soul-crushing oppression presents an obvious contrast to the lovely imagery of the poems in Forest Leaves. But even in this initial literary endeavor, Harper deploys abolitionist rhetoric. In her first poem, “Ethiopia,” she writes,

Yes, Ethiopia, yet shall stretch
Her bleeding hands abroad,
Her cry of agony shall reach
The burning throne of God

Based on an oft-quoted Biblical saying deployed by early black abolitionists, Harper repeats this first paragraph at the end of her poem with added emphasis, “Oh stretch” and the conviction that Ethiopia shall “find redress from God.” Black abolitionists from Richard Allen to David Walker often evoked divine vengeance against the crimes of slavery and racism. William Watkins, who had brought up his orphaned niece and was a teacher and clergyman himself, no doubt provided her with a political education in abolition as well as a conventional education in reading and arithmetic.

Harper’s lectures combined abolitionist polemics with literary romanticism, the hallmark of her popular poems like “The Slave Mother.” Some of her poems from Forest Leaves, for instance the “Bible Defence of Slavery,” encapsulated the abolitionist critique of proslavery theology and Biblical literalism. Perhaps her most overtly political poem was the one that she sent to Senator Charles Sumner in 1860 praising his abolitionist speech, “The Barbarism of Slavery.” That caught my attention. While writing an article on the caning of Sumner, I discovered that African Americans corresponded frequently with the Radical Republican from Massachusetts and most, like Frederick Douglass, anointed him “our Senator.” But it was Harper’s poetic tribute to Sumner that remained with me. Harper’s poetry eloquently captured black sentiment, demonstrating the political power of her art. Like another black woman abolitionist, Charlotte Forten, Harper idolized Sumner. But she was one of the few African American women to directly engage him and the politics of slavery and antislavery.

Thank God that thou hast spoken
Words earnest, true, and brave;
The lightning of thy lips has smote
The fetters of the slave.

……………………….

Thy words were not soft echoes
Thy tones no siren song;
They fell as battle-axes
Upon our giant wrong.

Clearly, in a nineteenth-century literary style, Harper, as Graham argues, like writers associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, rejected the conceit of art for art’s sake. For her as for many African American authors, the art of writing was a profoundly political act.

My third encounter with Harper, the polemicist, came through an essay that she wrote for the only black newspaper that was published continuously during the Civil War, the Christian Recorder. While researching an article on Abraham Lincoln and black abolitionists, I found a treasure trove of essays, letters, and editorials written by African Americans on the war, the president, emancipation, and black citizenship here. Eric Gardner’s recent work with this newspaper resulted in his discovery of a chapter of Harper’s novel Sowing and Reaping, and the later—and until now, unknown—writings of black abolitionist-feminist Maria Stewart. Such remarkable finds highlight the Christian Recorder’s significance as a source of early African American literature. Yet Harper’s article on colonization in the Recorder has escaped the attention of scholars and is not included in Foster’s 1990 collection of her poems, fiction, speeches, and letters. I discovered this essay published in the Christian Recorder on September 27, 1862 (fig. 2) under the title “Mrs. Francis E. Watkins Harper on the War and the President’s Colonization Scheme.” Harper’s essay opens with a radical abolitionist condemnation of the nation at the high tide of Civil War nationalism:

I can read the fate of this republic by the lurid light that gleams around the tombs of buried nations, where the footprints of decay have lingered for centuries, I see no palliation of her guilt that justifies the idea that the great and dreadful God will spare her in her crimes, when less favored nations have been dragged from their place of pride and power, and their dominion swept away like mists before the rising sun. Heavy is the guilt that hangs upon the neck of this nation, and where is the first sign of national repentance? The least signs of contrition for the wrongs of the Indian and the negro? As this nation has had glorious opportunities for standing as an example to the nations leading the van of the world’s progress, and inviting the groaning millions to a higher destiny; but instead of that she has dwarfed herself to slavery’s base and ignoble ends, and now, smitten of God and conquered by her crimes, she has become a mournful warning, a sad exemplification of the close connexion between national crimes and national judgments.

After penning this philippic, Harper issues a stinging critique of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime colonization schemes: “The President’s dabbling with colonization just now suggests to my mind the idea of a man almost dying with a loathsome cancer, and busying himself about having his hair trimmed according to the latest fashion.” The playfulness and skill of the mature Harper’s critique here stands in contrast to the earnest tone of her first literary production, Forest Leaves. Schooled by her uncle William Watkins’ anti-colonization articles in the abolitionist newspapers Freedom’s Journal and The Liberator, which he published under the nom-de-plume “A Colored Baltimorean,” Harper vigorously made the case for black citizenship anew. She advised,

Let the President be answered firmly and respectfully, not in the tones of supplication and entreaty, but of earnestness and decision, that while we admit the right of every man to choose his home, that we neither see the wisdom nor expediency of our self-exportation from a land which has been in large measure enriched by our toil for generations, till we have a birth-right on the soil, and the strongest claims on the nation for that justice and equity which has been withheld from us for ages—ages whose accumulated wrongs have dragged the present wars that overshadow our head.   

She mocked the notion that the United States could part with “four millions of its laboring population.” Harper’s anti-colonization piece, unlike her later well-known speeches on women’s rights, has not received any sustained scholarly analysis. While Johanna’s recovery of Forest Leaves allows scholars of literature to further develop their criticism and understanding of Harper’s literary productions, as is evident in other essays in this issue, her activist speeches and writings, lying hidden in plain sight, help us reconstruct the nature of her forgotten activism. These two acts of recovery and discovery help us view Harper as somewhat of a renaissance woman, a woman of many parts and ideas.  

Recent historians of black women have recast Harper as a pioneering African American feminist. Her well-known speech during the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1866 has made her a black feminist icon, her work read as an early iteration of intersectional analyses of race and gender: “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.” Later in the speech, Harper drew attention to her own property-less and right-less state as a widow and famously critiqued white suffragists for ignoring the particular oppressions of African American women. “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man’s hand against me.” Born from the abolitionist schism over “the woman question,” the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement met in national and state conventions in the 1850s and 1860s. Before the emergence of an independent suffrage movement, Garrisonian and women abolitionists like Harper participated in them regularly. (See the calls for the National Woman’s Rights Conventions of 1858 and 1866 illustrated here [figs. 3, 4].)

For the rest of her life, Harper continued to draw attention to the plight of the “Coloured Woman” and became a spokeswoman for Frances Willard’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which was closely allied with the women’s suffrage movement. Black women’s labor, Harper said in her speech to the Women’s Congress in 1878, along with their education, “energy and executive ability” entitled them to equality. Historically, black women, like most working class and immigrant women, had always worked outside the home, she reminded her audience:

In different departments of business, coloured women have not only been enabled to keep the wolf from the door, but also to acquire property, and in some cases the coloured woman is the mainstay of the family, and when work fails the men in large cities, the money which the wife can obtain from washing, ironing, and other services, often keeps pauperism at bay…They do double duty, a man’s share in the field, and a woman’s part at home.

In alluding to the “double duty” performed by working class black women, Harper anticipated the “second shift,” one of the pivotal metaphors of modern feminism.

Recent scholarship has given us a heretofore unknown archive of black women’s writings: Jean Fagan Yellin’s authentication of Harriet Jacobs’ narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s discoveries of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative. Crafts has been identified as Hannah Bond, a fugitive slave from North Carolina, by the literary scholar Greg Hecimovich. Historians, philosophers, and political theorists have also sought to recover black women’s early intellectual history. If Harper has long occupied a pride of place in African American literature, she surely deserves a similar place in African American intellectual and political history. I have a hunch that many still undiscovered nuggets await Johanna Ortner in her quest to write a historical biography of by far one of the most interesting American women writers and activists of the nineteenth century.

Further Reading

On early African American women’s literature see the multi-volume The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African American Women Speakers and Writers, 1830-1880 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995), and Frances Smith Foster, Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892 (Bloomington, Ind., 1993). On Harper see Melba Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E.W. Harper 1825-1911 (Detroit, Mich., 1994), Frances Smith Foster, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York, 1990), and Maryemma Graham, Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (New York, 1988). On the Christian Recorder see Eric Gardner, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (New York, 2015). On my encounters with Harper see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, Conn., 2016), “Allies for Emancipation?: Lincoln and Black Abolitionists,” in Eric Foner ed., Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World (New York, 2008): 167-196, “The Caning of Charles Sumner: Slavery, Race and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War,” Journal of the Early Republic 23 (Summer 2003): 233-262. On black women’s intellectual history see Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway eds., Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds (Burlington, Vt., 2007) and Mia Bay et al eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2015)

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Manisha Sinha is professor of Afro-American Studies and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (2000) and The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016).

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

Translated from the French by Michel Lavoie.

One more time, in this summer of 1633, a ship brought Samuel de Champlain back to Québec. The travellers spent more than two months at sea before reaching Percé where, finally, they were able to stock up with fresh water and be on their way towards Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay River, the destination beyond which sailing ships did not dare to venture. With its squalls, reefs, and fogs, the St. Lawrence River was seen to be far too dangerous. Four to five days were necessary still to navigate against the current in small crafts over a distance of 180 kilometres before reaching Québec, this small post so close to salt water and yet so far from the sea, and obstructed by ice five months a year. Champlain singled out this site as early as 1608, one reason being that from a cape, cannons could be installed to control the narrows of this river leading upstream to the Great Lakes (“Quebec” means “narrows” in the Micmac language). Hazardous for the great sailing ships, Québec opened up the whole continent to the legendary canoe. By 1633, Champlain had already drawn detailed maps of the Saguenay and three of the Great Lakes, as well as the waterways leading to Hudson’s Bay and even those that could potentially open the passage to China.

With a group of approximately fifty men, Champlain was taking over the small post left in a neglected state after its capture, in the name of the English Crown, by the Kirke brothers in 1629. The town he returned to was an establishment by the waterfront, composed of a few buildings in the lower part of the city, and, in the upper part, Fort St. Louis armed with a few cannons to block the entrance of the river to rival merchants. How many men had scurvy and winter cut down in the previous years? Champlain had only survived because, at the expense of his own men, he had saved for himself a more balanced diet. Game barter with the nearby Montagnais and the settling of a few French families had finally allowed residents to escape the initial hecatombs.

Champlain had dreamt earlier to make out of Québec the Ludovica of the New World, but misfortune had plagued the newborn colony. He understood the necessity to look beyond the simple logic of commercial interests expressed by merchants in the fur trade, for whom the arrival of new settlers meant increased competition. But who, rather than taking the direction of the West Indies, would prefer venturing into such a cold, harsh country? The Protestants? Had not a handful of them commanded or participated in the very first voyages in the seventeenth century? Could this have changed? Futile hopes, since the Catholic party had finally prevailed in France. The resumption of the religious wars led to the siege of Larochelle in 1629 and to the death of 80 percent of the reformed residents. If the Protestants no longer had the right of establishment in the colony, they could, however, scuttle its foundation: eight ships and five hundred immigrants on their way to lay the basis of a new French and Catholic society were captured by English Protestants demonstrating solidarity with their counterparts in La Rochelle.

How to revive a French and Catholic Ludovica in the absence of French settlers? Worse still, how to do this while the very few men who immigrated decided to leave quickly, failing to find French wives? Champlain hoped that a solution, indeed, would present itself. Wasn’t the small colonial post located within Indian country? To be sure, there were no more sedentary Indians; not since the 1580s, when the St. Lawrence Iroquois vanished, even before the French settled, probably under the combined effects of wars, climatic changes, and epidemics. However, every summer Québec played host to approximately fifteen hundred Algonquins and Montagnais. They came to fetch birch bark for their canoes, chase wildfowl, fish salmons and sturgeons, but above all to catch the phenomenal quantities of eels that they smoked and stocked up for winter. These Indians were gathering at the mouth of the St. Charles River, immediately downriver from the French post, and, upriver, at Ka-Miskoua-ouangachit, which would become Sillery (now a district of Québec City). This is not taking into account those six hundred Hurons and Nipissings that a one-month trip and fifteen hundred kilometres from the Great Lakes brought annually to Québec for a one-week stay at the fur fair. They arrived in flotillas of canoes, up to one hundred and forty at the same time, wearing bear, beaver, or moose skins. They were, the Jesuits said, “well made men of splendid figures, tall, powerful, good-natured, and able-bodied.” Their encampments, in close proximity to the establishment, easily outnumbered the French residents settled in the whole colony.

The various native groups held councils with the governor to renew friendship and alliances between brothers, as each and everyone considered themselves. The Jesuits were fascinated by the proceedings of these councils, especially those between French and Hurons. They who vowed the greatest admiration to Greco-Roman civilization, who mastered Indian languages, who could easily follow debates and decode rituals, wrote in 1633 regarding a talented Huron orator that he “arose to answer, but with a keenness and delicacy of rhetoric that might have come out of the schools of Aristotle or Cicero.” The councils debated alliance conditions, warfare plans against the Iroquois, conflict settlements, and even alliance-threatening murders. Murder was not punished in the French manner–by the hanging of the murderer–but by redress and compensation in the form of presents handed out by the aggressor’s family to the victim’s family in accordance to the country’s custom.

The Huron visitors traded their furs with the French for “blankets, hatchets, kettles, capes, iron arrow-points, little glass beads, shirts . . . and many similar things.” They also traded their tobacco and their fishing nets with the Montagnais. They visited the chapel, admired holy images and had access to the Jesuits’ carpentry workshop–although always under surveillance, for the fathers were afraid their tools would be stolen. The Indians even sampled European delicacies, including a lemon they tasted in the presence of the French, who were bursting with laughter. The visitors were scandalized by the chastisements imposed by the French upon their children. French authorities of the then small village of Québec knew very well that they were guests in an Indian country over which they had yet to impose their control.

How to establish a French province in America without immigration? A solution presented itself in the transformation of Indians into Frenchmen. Would those “miserable pagans” renounce darkness in order to rise to the lights of faith through the missions? Wouldn’t these poor nomads become sedentary farmers as soon as they were taught the ways of the trade? In fact, weren’t they expressly asking for this transformation to happen? And, furthermore, why limit “progress” to the sole close neighbors? Hadn’t Québec been allied to the powerful Great Lakes Huron since 1609? These Hurons would certainly recognize the pope as their spiritual father and the king as their temporal father and in this way become French naturals. They would doubtlessly be able to achieve this so much more easily since they were sedentary and some of them had already been converted to Catholicism.

For the French, generally intolerant of religious differences, the multiplicity of cultures, statuses, and traditions among the natives did not constitute an obstacle to integration. The successes of their colony in Paraguay, where Indians accepted collective protection under Jesuit patronage, showed that all that was needed were missionaries to preach, to teach children, to regroup and settle nomads within defined boundaries. There was also a need for the presence of a few good devoted Catholic families to set the example of faith and hard work, and to conclude matrimonial alliances. No heretics, no people with morally reprehensible habits such as the young single pregnant woman who, after she arrived in Québec in 1658, was immediately returned to France, presumably to give birth on the ship taking her back across the Atlantic. Soon, Montagnais, Algonquins, Hurons, and French, and how many more, would form a single people. Champlain formally affirmed this notion to the allied Montagnais and Huron chiefs in 1633 and 1635 when he said that “our young men will marry your daughters, and we shall be one people.” While in agreement with Champlain’s ideals, the Montagnais chiefs found the pledge amusing, since that promise had probably been vainly reiterated many times in the previous thirty years.

Sometimes they did seem to be one people. A few native interpreters had married in Huronia. Why then did the young Frenchmen at the post fail to act in a similar fashion? Perhaps they rejected the obligation of a Catholic marriage, over which priests in Québec and in the Sillery and the Huronia missions exercised a very strict control. And for this first generation of Frenchmen in America, getting married and becoming hunters must have been as remote and unimaginable as it was for young nomad Indian women to transform themselves into sedentary peasants.

The Jesuits took leadership of the project both in the distant Huronia and on site in Québec. They built a house beside the two principal Indian encampments, the main one being in Sillery. With funding from a devoted donor, Noël Brûlart of Sillery, they supervised the clearing of lands and the construction of houses where two Christian Montagnais chiefs–Noël Negabamat and François-Xavier Negaskoumat, both reputed for their loyalty–and their families could settle and experience sedentary life. Furthermore, considering that they occupied ancestral Indian lands, the Christian newcomers were awarded a seigneurial concession that stretched for five kilometres along the river, and ran back fifty kilometres into the woods. While the Jesuits maintained a tutorial role, the few French settlers established in Sillery were in fact under the jurisdiction of Indian chiefs seigniors. Still missing were “three batteries” of French priests and nuns committed “to destroy the empire of Satan and unfurl the banner of Jesus Christ in these regions.” Providence supplied them in 1639 with the arrival in Québec of “a college of Jesuits, an establishment of hospital nuns and a convent of Ursulines,” that is to say, approximately a dozen religious figures. Taken to Sillery the very next day, the newcomers fell into tears at the sight of these Indians devoutly praying and melodiously singing Christian hymns in their own languages. The hospital nuns settled in quickly, treating patients that were already affected by fast-travelling epidemics, and helping the poor, homeless, and itinerant people who were, in their view, those indigent hunter-gatherers.

Very soon, little boys and girls, for the most part chiefs’ children, were studying in the Ursulines’ and Jesuits’ boarding schools established in Québec. The teaching was trilingual, in French, Montagnais, and Huron. Negabamat, elegantly dressed in the French fashion, receiving all ceremonial honours, presented himself as an ambassador of the French while travelling to Tadoussac and further down the river to negotiate commercial agreements. He even went to Boston and Plymouth to consolidate an alliance with the Sokoquis, the Pennacooks, and the Mahicans against the Iroquois.

Approximately forty families from various nations settled in Sillery, but the epidemics overwhelmed them quickly, bringing doubt in their wake. Weren’t Indians dreadfully dying since the arrival of the French? Couldn’t the latter be responsible for the deaths? On the other hand, weren’t the French here to resuscitate Indian nations, weren’t they caring for Indians, weren’t they constructing houses for them? Should Indians be cured with blessed water or the sound of drums? How and by which criteria should the chiefs of this small cosmopolitan universe be selected: according to heredity, secret vote, the intensity of their religious practice? Was it necessary to expel pagans from the mission, to punish polygamy, to chain adulterous women? Should Indians get closer to the French settlers who were established on the seigneurial lands, or move away from them because they were not equally possessed by the neophyte fervor, and, above all, because they did not dislike alcohol?

In some ways, the different peoples did indeed become close. Regularly, Indian parents chose French people of note as their newborns’ godmothers or godfathers, but the Jesuits were not very favorable to marriages between native converts and French: in thirty years (1638-68) only five ceremonies were held. The fathers also watched over morals and forbade “night visits” between unmarried couples. A final obstacle was the Jesuits’ great deception from which the sedentary way of life and conversion could not be dissociated: it was impossible, in a few seasons, to transform–or “reduce,” in the language of the day–a hunter-gatherer into a farmer. In fact, the reduction encouraged the nomadic way of life: couples entrusted, for the winter, their elderly and their young children to the missionaries and the nuns, which facilitated their travelling. And merchants encouraged Indians to keep trapping. They had no need for an Indian farmer who could not supply them with furs. Moreover, there was the threat of the Iroquois, whose warriors patrolled the St. Lawrence, laid ambushes, even threatened Sillery, which was weakly protected by a frail palisade erected on the riverbanks. Many families fled while the nursing nuns took refuge in the higher part of the city. Almost deserted, the mission burned down and was transformed into a refugee camp: for the Abenakis who were driven back by the English settlers, for the Hurons who were annihilated by the Iroquois and who were hounded down as far into the colony as Québec and l’île d’Orléans.

Over time, however, most of the refugees left and settled somewhere else. Finally, only approximately 150 Hurons remained in Sillery while, gradually, French families–roughly sixty in 1663–took over the seigniorial lands and settled permanently in Sillery. By that year, the French population approached three thousand. The project designed to create a French province peopled with peasant Indians having failed, the king took over control of the colony in 1663 to people it with immigrants and to conduct a war offensive against the Iroquois.

With the Indian depopulation and the French repopulation, Québec gradually emerged as the capital of a small French and Catholic colony along the St. Lawrence River from Montreal and downstream, while the Upper Country–the country of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi–remained Indian country. Immigration continued, however, to be heavily dominated by men, despite the arrivals of ships transporting numerous “Filles du Roy,” orphans to be married. There were easily, in this Lower Country, seven suitors for each woman. The small colony could not survive without the links established with the Upper Country, which it had lost after the Iroquois raids and the defeat of its allies and intermediaries in the fur trade. The arrival of French regiments in 1665 to conduct warfare against the Iroquois permitted the reopening of the Great Lakes trail while the men that could not marry in the colony and who did not wish to return to France became wayfarers or fur traders and went out to meet the Indians in the interior of the continent. Two very different types of Frenchmen embodied the bipolarity of the colony: the settled peasant and the nomad traveller. In the Upper Country, the latter took wife and “indianized,” the native societies transforming these Europeans into Indians where the reverse had proven impossible. But those marriages also gave birth to a new people: the Métis.

Why did intermarriages, not very frequent prior to 1663 despite the gender imbalance, later become an ordinary practice? Because following the disappearance of the Indian merchants due to epidemics and fur wars, a new intermediary function in the fur trade opened up for the settlers’ sons. This third generation, already designated as Canadian rather than French, appropriated the country, travelled the rivers to go out and meet the interior Indian nations, hence slipping out of political and religious controls. Furthermore these travellers and fur traders acquired in Indian country the prestigious function of suppliers of European staples. The marriages conducted according to the country’s fashion, that is to say in the Indian fashion, became the norm in the Upper Country.

As he sailed up the river in 1633, did Champlain know that the new phase of Québec’s history he began would be a history of an original encounter, of a religiously monolithic but ethnically and culturally pluralistic project, of alliance and interbreeding rather than apartheid?

Further Reading: For further reading on Québec and early New France, see Marcel Trudel, The Beginnings of New France 1524-1663 (Toronto, 1972); Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers (Montreal and Kingston, 1985); Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal and Kingston, 1976); Denys Delâge, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-1664 (Vancouver, 1995); Nathalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), Dean Louder and Eric Waddell, eds., French America: Mobility, Identity, and Minority Experience across the Continent (Baton Rouge, 1993); Rémi Savard, L’Algonquin Tessouat et la Fondation de Montréal: Diplomatie Franco-Indienne en Nouvelle-France (Montreal, 1996); François-Marc Gagnon, La Conversion par L’Image: Un Aspect de la Mission des Jésuites auprès des Indiens du Canada au XVIIe Siècle (Montreal, 1975); Paul-André Dubois, De L’Oreille au Coeur: Naissance du Chant Religieux en Langues Amérindiennes dans les Missions de Nouvelle-France, 1600-1650 (Sillery, 1997). For several articles related to the history of French-Indian relations, consult the journal, Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4

Denys Delâge, professor of sociology at Laval University, Québec, has written on the history of the French- and English-Indian alliances. He is associated with the GETIC research center on native peoples.
Mathieu d’Avignon is completing a Ph.D. in history at Laval University, where he is a member of the CELAT research center; he is also a member of the Groupe de recherche sur l’histoire, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi.