The Bourgeois Frontier trumpets the role of French merchants, as traders in furs and builders of towns, in the making of the American West. The last sentence of Jay Gitlin’s book summarizes its author’s bold ambition: “Move over Uncle Sam and make room for Oncle Auguste” (190). With this assertion, Gitlin leaves readers to ponder how the history of the United States, especially the course of its westward expansion, looks different when French entrepreneurs are placed alongside (and maybe even put in place of) the Anglo-American adventurers who have typically dominated histories of the American frontier.

Gitlin offers a number of reasons why American historians have failed to connect these French traders to the history of national expansion in the nineteenth century. Heading Gitlin’s list is the pernicious legacy of Francis Parkman. More than a century ago, Parkman perpetrated the stereotype of French colonists in the New World as illiterate and primitive people. Few in number, French colonists, in Parkman’s depiction, were a motley crew of farmers clinging tenaciously to medieval ways and traders mingling promiscuously with Indians. The backwardness of French colonists left them unable to compete after Americans moved in. Accordingly, their impact on American development effectively ended with the defeat of France in the Seven Years’ War. Not so, retorts Gitlin. His portrayal emphasizes instead the “bourgeois” character of the French who settled in the interior of North America and set about developing the Mississippi Valley and the west beyond in the century after 1763. Putting the French in their rightful place in American history, Gitlin insists, requires “put[ting] Parkman behind us” (7).

In addition to blaming Parkman, Gitlin faults the east-to-west orientation that has long governed our historical vision for depriving the French of their rightful place. The world of the “interior French” in the middle of North America followed the flow of the Mississippi River and thus ran along a north-south axis. This region, which Gitlin dubs the “Creole Corridor,” was a crescent-shaped arc that stretched from Detroit to New Orleans. An inland archipelago of towns and villages, these amounted to a series of dots amidst a vast ocean of Indian lands. Part of the region came into the United States in the 1780s and 1790s, the rest transferred with the Louisiana Purchase. Yet many of the towns within the Creole Corridor and a good portion of the Indian countries around them retained a French twang well after Americans claimed control over the “Great West.” Gitlin acknowledges that the cultural hegemony of the French eroded during the first third of the nineteenth century. Still, he contends that this eclipse was less interesting than the “persistence” of French words and French ways “over so large a region for so many decades after the incorporation of that region into the United States” (1).

American historians have also failed to connect the French dots because the urban and cosmopolitan world of French entrepreneurs in the Creole Corridor stands at odds with the West of the American imagination. The firms, or “maisons,” that French merchants established had their base in towns and the “calculus of commerce” (27) that guided their operations and investments seemed to contradict the ideal of wide open spaces and the myth of Jeffersonian agrarianism that American historians long presumed defined the frontier. French merchants, most prominently Auguste Chouteau and his family, who hold the spotlight in Gitlin’s book, lacked the dashing qualities that Americans preferred in their pioneer heroes. That, though, should not diminish the importance of the Chouteaus of St. Louis or their like-minded French brethren in other towns within the Creole Corridor. “One might even claim,” proposes Gitlin, “that the Great West during this period was in many ways more an extension of Creole St. Louis than of Jefferson’s Virginia” (123).

No doubt, many will scoff at Gitlin’s revisionist propositions and dispute the greater importance of Creole St. Louis and Oncle Auguste. Some of Gitlin’s points do come across as overstated and others as assaults on straw men. Consider his attack on Francis Parkman, which parallels the salvoes that “new western historians” launched against Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1980s and 1990s. But where Turner remained relevant to scholarly interpretations of western history, Parkman’s shadow seems now to be a rather short one. Only specialists, and not many of them, read Parkman’s colonial epics. Focus on the Atlantic World and continental approaches to early America have dislodged Britain’s mainland colonists from the central place that Parkman assigned to them. Moreover, the French have gained new-found prominence, at least in colonial history courses. Thanks to Richard White, the middle ground, a co-creation of French and Indians, has emerged of late as the field’s most influential paradigm.

If the middle ground has made the French more critical to eighteenth-century American history, it offers little to explain their continuing activities and what Gitlin sees as their enduring achievements in the nineteenth century. For White, the middle ground survived beyond the Seven Years’ War (albeit in a bastardized form). Indians hoped for its true restoration, and some creoles wished for it too. But the French father did not return, and the middle ground, as conceived by White, suffered its final demise after the War of 1812. The disappearance of the middle ground as a political entity did not, however, end French influence in the Creole Corridor and across the Great West. To the contrary, in Gitlin’s account, French Creoles prospered precisely because they were “steeped in the process of middle-grounding, of occupying a cultural and social space of accommodation” (120). Their success rested as well on continuing creative adaptations and ongoing access to inside information. Not static enterprises, French houses profited first from the trade with Indians, then from the trade in lands made available by the dispossession of Indians, and finally from speculation in urban lots and engagement in the diverse portfolio of opportunities offered by the Great West, particularly to those who maintained the right connections.

Indeed, connections emerge here as the key factor. These included the traders’ ties to multiple Indian groups and to government officials, often representing multiple, shifting, and sometimes competing regimes. Above all were familial connections. In contrast with their “situational” political allegiances, French merchants understood that “their ultimate loyalty was to family” (114), which represented the “cornerstone of both business and society” (187). These tended to be extensive and multi-generational. As Gitlin explains, the long-term “success of the Chouteaus” and other French houses depended on “the way in which they gathered relatives” as much as “the way in which they gathered furs” (135).

As many people as the Chouteaus and other trading families incorporated and employed, they composed only a fraction of the interior French population. French communities in the Creole Corridor, Gitlin reminds readers several times, were “not simple or homogeneous.” The interior French included transplanted Canadians along with immigrants from “a variety of provinces and colonies in the Old World and the New” (9). Every settlement also boasted numbers of men, women, and children of African descent, slave and free, the exclusion of which renders any portrait of French culture in the region incomplete. But while Gitlin references the presence of diverse francophones, he pays only passing attention to them. The expectations and experiences of those who cultivated the soil, of slaves on plantations in Lower Louisiana and habitants on small farms in the Illinois Country, are not Gitlin’s concern. His focus falls almost entirely on those whose incomes derived principally from commerce. And even within this select group, his eyes fix on those at the top of the house, not the larger number of workers below, whose economic and cultural horizons were far more limited than Auguste Chouteau’s.

It is Chouteau and those most like him who are the principal subjects of The Bourgeois Frontier. That is fitting, because these men best make Gitlin’s case. Their enterprises helped to make the West American, even if their own national affections were never so fixed or single-minded. Their ways of living stamped them as “bourgeois to the core” (9), even if their pursuit of profit was ever entangled with familial concerns. We should be careful, however, not to mistake the core for the whole or to make Auguste Chouteau into Oncle Auguste and treat him as a synecdoche for the interior French.

If not the whole story of the Creole Corridor, The Bourgeois Frontier is an essential contribution that challenges and changes the way we think, teach, and write about the French connection to American expansion. That is what books that matter do, and The Bourgeois Frontieris certainly a book that matters.

The jacket of Douglas R. Egerton’s Death or Libertypromises a narrative that “brims with compelling portraits of forgotten figures.” The people who fill this book’s pages are certainly compelling, but the “forgotten” label—so often attached to histories of early African Americans—is misleading. Egerton’s elegant synthetic history was made possible by a decades-long explosion of scholarly interest in slavery, African American history, and ordinary people’s experiences in the American Revolution. Public historians and schoolteachers have worked hard to bring these stories to broader audiences, with plentiful books, public television series, Websites, and museum exhibits now available for those interested in learning about African Americans in the Revolutionary era.

I make this point not to diminish the significance of Egerton’s contribution but rather to underscore it. There is so much material out there on African Americans and the American Revolution that a synthesis has been sorely needed. The value ofDeath or Liberty is that it offers new revelations to readers familiar with this field, even as it provides a lucid and informative introduction to those not deeply immersed in it.

The book draws on two large and complex bodies of scholarship. The first is the social and political history of African Americans: their choices about taking sides in the conflict between Britain and the United States; their formation of families, communities, churches, and social institutions; their acts of resistance, self-assertion, and revolution against slavery and racism. The second concerns the relationship between slavery and the broader politics of the American Revolution: slavery’s significance to the various colonies’ decisions whether or not to rebel against Britain; its role in framing the Articles of Confederation and Constitution; its centrality in early national debates about westward expansion. The former body of scholarship tends to be organized around agency; the latter around power. One of this book’s strengths is that it brings these two analytical frameworks together. Most of the chapters begin with a vignette concerning one man or woman whose story sets in motion the major theme of that chapter. The focus on particular lives emphasizes the agency of African Americans—how they made their own history. But (to echo Marx) they hardly did so just as they pleased. Recognizing this, Egerton constructs intricate pictures of the worlds of power that African Americans lived under, participated in, and struggled against. To do so, particularly in the later chapters, he uses not only secondary scholarship but also records of the Constitutional convention, Congressional debates, and legal proceedings.

To understand African American experience under slavery, it is imperative to consider region, and not just in northern versus southern terms. Egerton is attentive to the difference geography made in Revolutionary African Americans’ lives. In his stage-setting first chapter, the narrative moves north to south, from Canada to the Caribbean, describing the history, demography, economy, and culture of slavery in each zone of British America. Three chapters at the center of the book highlight the regional variation in African Americans’ wartime and post-war experiences by focusing on three overarching areas of the colonies that declared independence: the North, where the Revolution ushered in a gradual end to slavery, if not to racism; the Upper South, where the antislavery sympathies of influential whites never materialized into emancipationist policy; and the Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, where slavery’s grip remained firm throughout the Revolutionary period and beyond.

Interwoven with these geographically focused sections is a narrative of change over time. The second and third chapters chronicle the 1770s as a time of relative opportunity, when black men and women took advantage of the swelling natural rights rhetoric and the dislocations of war to seek better lives for themselves and their families. The 1780s, by contrast, were a period of “counterrevolution” (247). Virulent racism curtailed the freedoms even of the emancipated; politicians from both North and South joined forces to protect the interests of slaveowners. In his gripping final chapter, Egerton traces how these challenges to black freedom developed until, late in 1796, “political and international realities coincided to give new hope to antislavery activists and reverse the counterrevolutionary trend under way in much of the Republic since 1783” (265). But a full turnaround was not to be. The chapter closes in April 1803 with the death of Toussaint Louverture and the Louisiana Purchase, two events signaling how African Americans would struggle to achieve the liberation symbolized by Toussaint even as slavery expanded for six decades to come.

Readers interested in learning more about Egerton’s material may find the documentation frustrating. The citations for quotations from primary sources often lead only to secondary works. A bibliographic essay would have been a welcome addition to a book likely to be many readers’ entrée into the subject. The methodology of early African American history is innovative: it has had to be, given the limitations of the sources. Saying more about the ways that scholars have gotten around the limitations and biases of the written record might have helped readers better understand possible distortions or omissions in the narrative Egerton has pieced together.

Given the depth of Egerton’s research, I wish he had offered more assessment of the major debates and problems in the relevant scholarship. Perhaps the most vexing question likely to linger in readers’ minds is this: would black men and women in the colonies that became the United States have been better off if there had never been an American Revolution? Like all counterfactuals, this question is perhaps unfair, and impossible to answer decisively, yet it rankles. Some have argued that even if the Revolution did not liberate most African Americans from slavery and racism immediately, it at least gave them the tools and language to fight for their freedom in the decades—and centuries—to follow. Egerton seems dissatisfied with this argument, or at least with the suggestion that the long-term value of Revolutionary rhetoric can somehow make up for the short-term inadequacies of the event itself. He cautions us against judging “the Revolution by what it meant to antebellum reformers, to the Civil War generation, or even to us”; he wants us instead “to judge it by what it meant to people such as William Lee, or Colonel Tye, or Elizabeth Freeman, or Richard Allen, or Gabriel,” all of whose stories appear in this book’s pages (12).

It’s hard to determine what the Revolution meant to this cast of characters, who took different sides in the military and political struggle and experienced divergent fortunes in its aftermath. What is clearer is how Egerton himself regards the Revolution. At one point, he calls it “a Revolution that spoke in bold terms but at best limped slowly down the path of human rights” (12); at another, he notes that “for most former slaves, the pursuit of happiness and freedom, ironically, was available only in British colonies…and not in the Republic that trumpeted its support of natural rights” (197); he laments “the majority of Africans and African Americans who were betrayed by the failings of the American Revolution” (221). The language of failure and irony may actually serve to soften Egerton’s critique of the Revolution. In this framework, the problems of African Americans in the nascent republic stemmed from the incompleteness of the Revolution, from its leaders’ blindness, excessive caution, hypocrisy. This is a persuasive argument, and an appealing one, for it preserves our sense that the Revolution was fundamentally about liberty and equality. But this interpretation glosses over the ways in which the hardships endured by African Americans in the new nation stemmed from less celebrated aspects of Revolutionary ideology—including what Egerton calls in passing “the darker side of Lockean theory…its emphasis on the sanctity of property” (159). If we take the alternative view seriously, we might understand the expansion of slavery in the early republic not as the ironic result of a fight for natural rights but instead as the logical outcome of a white settler rebellion.

The earliest histories of blacks and the Revolution were written to root African Americans in the nation’s primary historical narrative, thereby securing their claims to equal citizenship with whites. Egerton makes this point with respect to Benjamin Quarles, whose influential The Negro in the American Revolution (1961) coincided with the integrationist phase of the twentieth-century black liberation struggle. A similar observation could be made of black historian-activists a century earlier, notably William Cooper Nell, author of The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855). In putting before skeptical white audiences figures such as Crispus Attucks, Elizabeth Freeman (“Mum Bett”), and Prince Whipple (all of whom appear in Death or Liberty), one of Nell’s principal goals was to change the way his readers thought about people of color. But the synthesis of Revolutionary and African American historiography also has the potential to change how we think about the Revolution itself. Today, with Revolutionary-era African Americans making their way into school curricula, popular histories, and public commemorations, the challenge is to ensure that these representations do not simply reinforce triumphant narratives of heroic progress but instead invite people to think about how revolutionary the Revolution really was. Death or Liberty doesn’t resolve that persistent question, but this learned, textured, and sobering narrative provides ample fodder for debating it in new and nuanced ways.

Insightful and lucid, Leonard Tennenhouse’s The Importance of Feeling English addresses the clean division of English and American literary traditions reflected in the structure of English departments at many American universities and perpetuated by the field’s major anthologies. Tennenhouse begins this project by asking an important question: when did anglophone literature begin to “divide internally into recognizable British and American traditions?” (1).

Looking for a model that “acknowledge[s] a perplexed but continuing relationship between nation-state and national culture,” Tennenhouse draws on what he calls a “culturalist view of diaspora” (3). Where the classic concept of diaspora maintains the connection between home and migrant community and expresses that community’s desire to eventually return home, Tennenhouse’s adoption of a “looser concept” of diaspora displaces the homeland—which, in the case of British North Americans after the Revolution, had “disappear[ed] as a geopolitical site to which the diasporic group can entertain the possibility of actually returning”—with a set of cultural practices that effectively reproduce the mother culture outside of the homeland (5). The Importance of Feeling English explores the fascinating reproducibility of English culture in North America; asks how it achieved hegemony over other diasporic cultures; and asks how, and under what conditions, its literary output became a national literature.

The focus throughout the book is largely on literary form—from captivity narratives to sentimental novels to gothic fiction—and the models of nation building each form presents in both its British and American incarnations. For example, Tennenhouse takes up the ideological divergence between the English and American versions of Samuel Richardson’s seduction novels and asks how the American Richardson addresses American interests. Americans dispensed with the British focus on letter writing and literary cultures. In the process, they shifted readers’ attention from heroines’ inner lives to their bodies. American-authored seduction stories, like the American redaction of Clarissa, Tennenhouse argues, “used the European libertine to think about the new nation as an aggregate of individuals capable of resolving differences of rank, status, and region through marriage,” through the exchange of women between households (71). Contrary to the captivity narrative, which typically insists on the captive daughter’s sexual purity and, therefore, “insists on preserving the group’s purity in the face of potential pollution” (119-20), these stories suggest that diasporic communities, replete with “fractured and makeshift families,” were not so much interested in the “loss of purity as [in] one’s fidelity to an idea of a home one imagined to be English” (63).

Americans reworked the gothic, just as they reworked the sentimental. Tennenhouse convincingly demonstrates how Americans replaced the Europeans’ signature convention—the castle or ruins—with a “secret history.” This plot device renders characters fundamentally unknowable to others (or to themselves) and inhibits them from forming an affective community. Where American sentimental novels imagined affective communities based on sympathetic identification, gothic fiction created communities based on contagion, coalesced by paranoia (115). Along these lines, Tennenhouse displaces Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” as the consummate American gothic tale in favor of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” Tennenhouse reads Hawthorne’s short story as a revision of Adam Smith’s widely read theory of moral sentiments and concludes, “According to Hawthorne, Smith’s model fails brilliantly in a community of dispersed individuals cut off from a place of origin and a collective history, because the coherence of such a community will depend on whom that group excludes rather than on how far it can extend its capacity for sympathetic identification” (115). In these terms, Tennenhouse views the gothic as a model for nation building that rethinks the terms of the originary community and patriarchal family in diaspora.

In a chapter that he claims will give us “a sense of what a literary history might look like were its goal to reveal how the two different national traditions developed in relation to each other rather than each in its own terms from different points of origin” (74), Tennenhouse traces the transatlantic origins of America’s unique brand of masculinity. To tell this story, he turns to the publication history of Charles Brockden Brown’s Clara Howard (1801). A reworking of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771), Brown’s epistolary novel revised its European prototype’s depiction of the relationship between masculinity, sensibility, and literacy. Instead of fashioning a protagonist so burdened with sensibility that he is incapable of action and unable to acquire social position, Brown’s “man of feeling” is “empower[ed] … to act on behalf of ‘moral causes.'” Indeed, it is precisely this capacity for action, rather than his exalted prose, that enables him to marry a woman of superior birth and navigate a complicated social hierarchy (79). This idealized masculinity moved back and forth across the Atlantic: Tennenhouse reconstructs the publication history of Clara Howard to suggest that it prompted Jane Austen to transform her presentation of masculinity. The men who finally win the hands of Austen’s heroines “demonstrate that intense feelings unknown to the heroine lurk behind an exterior of paternal concern, extreme reserve, lukewarm affection, and even dislike” (85). Austen’s version of Brown’s “man of feeling”—the quintessentially American strong, silent type—then makes its way back across the Atlantic and into the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper. This compelling literary genealogy, which Tennenhouse traces through to Twain and Hemingway, suggests that American masculinity owed less to the frontier than to transatlantic exchange.

Perhaps the most valuable question this book raises is how English culture achieved hegemony over other diasporic cultures in North America and whether, as Tennenhouse puts it, it is “reasonable to call the English in America a ‘diasporic’ group,” given that the English (along with their American literature) become the basis of a new, more powerful nation (127). His answer is yes and no. On the one hand, the group that establishes the legal language and the terms of citizenship surely cannot be considered subordinate—the status usually associated with diaspora. On the other, as Tennenhouse argues throughout, in America, the English were but one transplanted group among many. They were in no way preordained to dominate the cultural field.

Despite Tennenhouse’s modest claims that “we stand to learn something new about American literature and its curious relation to English culture by thinking of it in terms of a diasporic literature,” his book helps revise the way we construct literary histories and challenges critics who attempt to locate something distinctly “American” in the literary output of the United States well before the 1850s (8). There is, obviously, much at stake in recognizing the diasporic relationships in North America. English departments at American universities and the leading anthologies in the field have been organized around a clean division of British and American literary traditions more or less coeval with America’s political independence. Tennenhouse urges us to look beyond the political schism of the Revolution toward a generic English culture that was reproduced and adapted in colonial North America and that ironically became even more English after the colonists won political independence.

This important book has implications for a far wider account of cultural exchange than Tennenhouse himself focuses on here. He uses a focused exploration of literary genealogy to ask questions about the development of American culture in the United States as a particular brand of Englishness. But there are limits to the kinds of things that literary history narrowly defined (the history of books and their publication in America and abroad) can tell us about culture more generally. Tennenhouse mentions the “rise in consumption of English goods” and the “re-Anglicization” of America after the Revolution but does not describe how these goods and processes influenced and functioned in the everyday lives of Americans (8). What else, for example, contributed to American masculinity and Cooper’s particular definition of manhood other than Jane Austen’s novels? Tennenhouse’s literary genealogies are compelling in their own right, but they cannot represent the totality of cultural development in the United States over the course of one hundred years, especially when we remember that the United States was a rapidly expanding nation that brought disparate diasporic cultures into contact with one another. In short, the transformation from diasporic to hegemonic was not accomplished by British Americans alone. The Importance of Feeling English encourages additional consideration about the relationships among diasporic cultures, including Spanish and African, in frontiers far away from the Northeast, which might be more sensitive to spatial and regional differences in an expanding United States.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4 (July, 2009).

Spencer Snow is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation is entitled, “Reading the Map: The Nationalization of Geographic Space, Reading Publics, and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century American Identity.”

Adam Smith never attached the invisible hand of the market to a fully formed body, but he and his fellow philosophers (along with some more recent historians) assumed that body was free, white, and male; financial interactions, they supposed, only happened between independent, self-interested actors. Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor’s convincing new book proves without a doubt that such a vision was pure fiction. Her analysis of women’s experiences in the marketplace completely dismantles any lingering ideas that the eighteenth-century economy was a place of pure liberal individualism. Rather, all economic transactions—from washing clothes to shopping with cash—were embedded in social networks that were created and sustained by women as much as men. By looking at the small port cities of Newport and Charleston at the end of the eighteenth century, Hartigan-O’Connor definitively demonstrates that women were fundamental to the expansion of capitalism through the period of the American Revolution.

The gendered nature of classical economic theory has obscured the workings of these port cities. The basic urban economic unit, for example, was not necessarily the patriarchal household marked by the obedience of women, children, servants, and slaves to its male head. Instead, it was a more flexible, changeable, and disparate unit that Hartigan-O’Connor cleverly dubs a “houseful.” In a houseful, authority was fragmented. Legally speaking, for example, a woman’s wages might belong to her husband, but she was the one who negotiated prices with borders and customers. A houseful was not simply a married man’s domain. Women moved between housefuls as renters, shop owners, servants, and family members. The idea of the houseful embodies the dynamic, energetic, and often unstable nature of an urban economy with women at its center.

Women were the linchpins for these urban transactions because they bore the responsibility for earning money as well as spending it. Their work not only bridged the distance between production and consumption but between home and work, unpaid and paid labor, and even on occasion the local and the international. In port cities like Newport and Charlestown, women’s chances to exploit their few resources and marketable skills were correspondingly greater than in the countryside. Enslaved women in particular found ways to earn discretionary income through skilled labor such as washing. Paying close attention to work also exposes some of the more intriguing differences between Charleston and Newport. While Newport hewed to a traditional ideal of “covering” married women’s financial activities under the name and responsibility of her husband, Charleston did not. Instead, officials there believed that it was beneficial for both the state and for individuals to allow even married women to trade on their own accounts. These different approaches to women’s property reveal the variety of strategies women needed in order to succeed—and the ones available to them. Although the larger economic world of the Atlantic basin provides a backdrop for these port economies, Hartigan-O’Connor’s careful attention to place gives local environments the greater explanatory power.

In the company of other historians, Hartigan-O’Connor compellingly demonstrates that the expansion of formal and litigated credit in the consumer market at the end of the eighteenth century did not push women out of financial activities. Instead, the demand for credit pulled women still further into complex economic relationships. Whether they received credit in their own names or through third parties, women continued to participate in the market economy throughout the upheavals of the revolutionary era. Because credit remained a hybrid economic instrument, drawing on both personal ties and impersonal exchanges, women’s legal limitations were no more significant than their social networks when it came to racking up debt. Indeed, debt was as likely to create useful market relationships as it was to create pernicious economic and legal dependence. Hartigan-O’Connor’s meticulous reconstruction of family credit networks also reveals the lived experience of the marketplace in all its confusion of unpaid meal tabs and enslaved proxy shoppers.

The accelerating shift from book credit to cash did not detach women from the personal associations that structured their relationship to the market. Likewise, the transition from pounds to dollars that accompanied American independence from Britain did not mark any watershed moment in women’s economic lives; as Hartigan-O’Connor shows, “The fact that social relationships always shaped the cultural significance of money was an important continuity in women’s lives from the colonial through the early national period” (102). While the social embeddedness of these urban market economies did not shift, women’s abilities to rationalize and quantify their social and labor interactions in monetary terms did. This was not necessarily much of a boon for women; because the American Revolution did not sweep away coverture, women’s work could become even more vulnerable to exploitation when it was translated into money. Yet (in contrast to Mary Beth Norton’s 1980 findings in Liberty’s Daughters), the extensive experience that women, both free and enslaved, had with money during this period did create in them a sense of competence about their ability to manage their financial affairs.

Prescriptive writers tried to deal with this paradox of women who understood money by emphasizing an imagined sexual division of labor: men owned money and women spent it. These writers were right that women shopped, but their casual dismissal of women’s purchasing practices as trivial or self-indulgent completely overlooked the vital commercial and cultural work inherent to buying goods in late eighteenth-century port cities. Like other commercial transactions, shopping was labor structured by social networks. Recent studies of consumption have tended to emphasize the liberating potential of consumer choice. Hartigan-O’Connor satisfyingly demolishes the gendered and presentist implications of this interpretation by fitting shopping back into its proper historical context. Her significant contribution is to show that many of women’s purchasing decisions were made long before they entered a store to select goods. Much more than simple consumer desire, it was women’s access to credit (such as third-party reimbursements and other financial intermediaries) that determined where they shopped and what they bought. Attitudes of sellers, including slaves, also had a significant effect on where and how women shopped. Although Hartigan-O’Connor is careful throughout the book to bring in the experiences of enslaved women alongside those of free ones, it is in her work on shopping that the relationship between slavery and economic networks emerges most creatively and persuasively. Enslaved women developed a sense of the consumer market similar to that of free women, since they too shopped for others. As people who were themselves commodities, their own experiences with shopping revealed the unequal power relationships that underpinned the seemingly impersonal consumption of goods. Although satirists attempted to package shopping as consumption, for the purpose of sustaining markets, it was as productive—and exploitative—an activity as the growing of any staple crop. Thus was “‘choice’—economic and cultural—for free white men and wealthy women produced by the shopping labors of the people who made up the web of any consumer’s network” (160).

The continuity from 1750 to 1820 of a socially embedded economy means that the American Revolution itself—despite the book’s subtitle—is essentially irrelevant to the central place that women held in urban economies. Endless debates over the corrupting nature of luxurious consumption had little impact on women’s economic importance. Newport and Charleston emerged from the upheavals of the Revolution with very different opportunities for women, but the essential collaborative network of family, friends, and housefuls remained the same.

The Ties That Buy is not the flashiest book about early America, but it is one of the soundest. Much like the tangle of relationships that created port economies, the threads of Hartigan-O’Connor’s argument emerge and disappear across chapters. Her deep and careful research into legal records, personal letters, account books, and newspapers reveals tantalizingly brief snippets about how the men in these marketplaces understood the gendered nature of financial activity. Were they just as smart and pragmatic as the women Hartigan-O’Connor has uncovered? Reflecting on this fine book, I am not sure whether it is much of a service to women to put them at the heart of the first capitalist expansion of the United States, but we can no longer doubt that they were there.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4 (July, 2009).

Serena Zabin is associate professor of history at Carleton College. She recently published Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (2009).

In 1800, John Coakley Lettsom, leader of a host of London’s learned and charitable societies, counseled an American correspondent that “it would be the most beneficial, that all literary [i.e., learned] Societies should be conducted by private individuals.” “[F]or,” he thought, “where they become State institutions, numbers are often introduced from favour rather than from abilities.” Three decades later, another observer of the American scene, Alexis de Tocqueville, commented that “‘Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all minds are constantly joining together in groups.'” Yet Tocqueville—and many in the scholarly tradition he helped create—overlooked the fact that citizens of the early republic had not automatically embraced voluntary organizations as beneficial to the polity. Rather, they had battled over just the issue that Lettsom had identified: what is the correct relationship between the state and civil society?

In the colonial era, middling and (especially) elite urban Americans had belonged to a larger British Atlantic associational world. Had the American Revolution never taken place, Americans would nevertheless have set up many of the voluntary organizations that were founded in the early republic, if perhaps not in such great numbers. The Revolution, however, did take place, and it changed the political context of associating.

The post-Revolutionary Federalist leaders of Massachusetts, like their counterparts in other states, did not anticipate (much less hope for) a vibrant sphere of voluntary associations separate from the state. Rather, as Johann Neem explains in his excellent study Creating a Nation of Joiners, they expected that “civil society was to be created and managed by the state in the service of the people” (11).

Based on a vision of a republican commonwealth where governors pursued a unitary good, Massachusetts’s 1780 constitution sought to foster morality and social bonds through its support for religion, namely the Congregational church, and education. In addition, it permitted the organization of only those groups that were deemed to promote the public welfare. Citizens had the communal freedom of assembly (to protest government abuses) but not the individual right of association. Through its power to grant charters of incorporation enabling groups to hold property, sue and be sued, and otherwise act in law, the legislature controlled which institutions gained legal standing. In the Federalist view, “self-created” associations—that is, those operating without charters and government sanction—were illegitimate because they divided the community instead of uniting it, as the agencies of civil society should do.

The Federalist conception of the polity did not go unchallenged. During the 1780s, 1790s, and 1800s, political leaders from Western Massachusetts, Republicans, minority religious groups, and others contested state oversight of the public sphere. As they defended their political activities or fought the established religious system, they began making the case for a civil society based on the freedom of association. But what led Massachusetts Federalists and Republicans to countenance that novel idea, Neem reveals, was the rise of partisan politics. In 1810, Republicans won both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office and broke the Federalists’ control over the state’s government and civil society. The Republicans’ power over the direction of the Federalists’ favored public institutions—most of all, Harvard—worried the now-minority party, and Federalist thinking began to evolve. In the emerging view, corporations were understood to be private entities that should be free from political meddling rather than public bodies subject to close government supervision; the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1819 Dartmouth decision on the inviolability of corporate charters hurried that notion along. Meanwhile Republicans, long concerned that mighty corporations would undermine the public good, responded to their shifting political fortunes and to Dartmouth with a developing preference for a proliferation of voluntary associations in the belief that competition would prevent concentrations of power. 

Critical to the rising acceptance of an independent civil society were battles over the established religious system that left orthodox Congregational ministers wary of state authority over their churches. At the same time, these ministers rued the way society was changing and sought to reform it morally. Realizing that voluntary associations offered a means of guiding public opinion, they spearheaded the founding of the first wave of grassroots groups. Moreover, they taught everyday Americans how to organize, and they spread that “technology” (to use Neem’s apt term) through societies’ annual reports.

In spite of the clergy’s crucial role in the proliferation of voluntary associations, it is these organizations’ average members who are the heroes of this story. “The men and women who joined voluntary associations,” Neem writes in the book’s central claim, “defined new roles for citizens in a democracy. In learning how to volunteer, ordinary people learned to think and act as citizens” (82). Moreover, this “social transformation of civil society dramatically altered America’s political culture” (82).

At the end of an especially smart chapter on grassroots organizing, Neem takes up historians’ longtime preoccupation with reform associations as vehicles for the middle and upper classes to discipline the lower classes. He rightly comments that these groups did aim to control society: “They were openly and loudly seeking to shape American culture and politics” (113). In his telling, what others have viewed as baneful social control endeavors become commendable forms of civic activism, the right and responsibility of citizens in a democracy. Yet, as Neem shows in his discussion of the Antimasonic movement of the late 1820s and 1830s, activists’ efforts to repair society not only might target elites but also could threaten minorities’ freedoms—for instance, when Antimasons used state power to harass the Boston Masonic Grand Lodge. (It is worth noting that Freemasons also occasionally upset Antimasonic gatherings; the nascent freedom of association was indeed fragile.)

As movements such as Antimasonry and Sabbatarianism revealed the political power of mass organizing, elites, especially Whigs, worried that public opinion endangered their conception of the common good. The Whigs’ Federalist forebears had envisioned a state-managed civil society, but “Whigs now desired to sever those ties [between state and civil society] in order to protect the autonomy of their own institutions” (116). Over the decades, well-placed citizens of Massachusetts built an “elite public sphere” with institutions such as the Boston Athenaeum, Harvard (progressively more independent of the state), professional associations, and state-appointed, expert-run regulatory boards. Because they were immune from popular influence, these institutions were free (in their proponents’ minds) to pursue the public good. Democrats, however, disputed the idea behind this elite public sphere. They feared the undemocratic power of corporations and voluntary associations, preferring instead “limit[ed] state power and weaken[ed] civil society” as part of an effort to put power in the hands of the many (142).

Neem illuminates Democrats’ views and allows that they focused attention on “the cost of permitting well-organized minorities disproportionate influence” (171). His sympathies, nevertheless, lie more with the Whigs’ anxiety about the tyranny of political or religious majorities over minorities (such as well-heeled Whigs) than with the Democrats’ concern for an egalitarian society (for white men). He acknowledges the exclusive nature of elite institutions and the self-interested nature of Whig reformers’ claims to serve the common good. Those claims warrant greater skepticism than Neem shows. As he notes, Harvard’s “tuition and other regulations effectively priced out poorer persons” (121), and the Boston Athenaeum’s early nineteenth-century membership fee was three hundred dollars, “well more than most citizens could afford—even today” (119). Whigs may have “sustained the worthy idea that citizenship is premised on devotion to the common good,” but it is not hard to understand some of the Democratic animus to the Whigs’ vision of civil society and the common good (138).

While not in the slightest presentist, Creating a Nation of Joiners is imbued with a moral urgency because of what Neem sees as being at stake. He cares about the state of the American democracy and, through his nuanced analysis of the contested evolution of civil society in the early republic, he makes a compelling case that well-functioning democracies depend on more than mere voting by citizens. Ironically, as Neem shows, it was Whigs with their anxieties about the power of the people, not the Jeffersonians with their more democratic bent, that lay the groundwork for civil society. In his conclusion, he sketches out the long-term ramifications of the United States having become a nation of joiners, finding both positives and negatives. Activist citizens have in recent decades shaped politics through the civil rights movement and through popular conservatism. But, he points out, interest group lobbying—which, thanks to the money involved, benefits the powerful much more than the powerless—rests on the same organizational tradition. Neem has written not only an essential study about a key development in the early republic but also a thoughtful book that anyone concerned about the workings of democracies will want to read.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4.5 (September, 2009).

Amanda Bowie Moniz is a Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University and is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Empire of Humanity: Transatlantic Philanthropy in the Age of Revolution.

Michael Chaney’s Fugitive Vision emphasizes the relationship between the literary character of slave narratives and the iconic images that often accompanied those narratives in the form of frontispieces, illustrations, or panoramas. His attention to both the visual and the verbal elements of African American culture challenges and complicates the now-classic studies of slave narrative that tend to highlight the mastery of literacy as the key to self-mastery and, thus, liberty.

Fugitive Vision begins with an icon of black subjection, the generic graphic image often attached to print advertisements for the capture and return of runaways. Several scholars have suggested that these icons and their attendant texts did more than serve as a means to repossess fugitive property; they also served to help define the relations between fugitives and their putative owners as relations of mastery and subordination. Such images, Chaney argues, also typify public representations of black bodies by white abolitionists who rely on the paired tyranny of slaveholders and subjugation of the enslaved to further their otherwise noble aims. This representational strategy poses a predicament for ex-fugitives seeking a “more appropriate symbol for either the slave or slavery” (3). Chaney asks, how could ex-fugitives help to create an abolitionist public without making themselves “permanent subjects of subjection” (6; emphasis in original)?

Chaney answers these questions in six chapters. Rather than constructing an elaborate theoretical underpinning for the book as a whole or for each chapter individually, Chaney restores the texts and images under consideration to rich and specific contexts. By dispensing with the notion that there is a master text or a master figure capable of standing for fugitive or free African-America, Chaney’s analytic strategy parallels the experiences and perspectives of his subjects. He reveals multiple freedoms and multiple Americas, African and otherwise.

The point is most clearly articulated in the last chapter, on Dave the Potter, an enslaved artisan in late-antebellum South Carolina whose wares were—and still are—valued for their function and their beauty. Chaney shows how Dave used his craft to offer an ironic commentary on his own position as a commodity. While each of the jugs (themselves commodities) produced by Dave bears the initials of his owner Lewis Miles, they also carry Dave’s signature and poetry in the form of couplets. Here Dave couples the verbal (poetry and signature) with the visual (the jug itself) to turn the jug from mere commodity into art and himself into simultaneously slave and master. By mastering his craft and signing his wares, Dave effectively claims the status of an artisan who exists in addition to and in tension with “the slave” possessed by Lewis Miles. As Chaney’s subtle argument suggests, Dave challenges his own commodity status by embracing commodity production and exchange. “Dave’s jars—to riff on [Frederick] Douglass—seem to say, ‘Now you will see how a thing can turn nothing into something and back again’,” Chaney writes, blurring the boundaries between thing and nothing, between Dave, his craft, and his pots (208).

Taken together, Chaney’s case studies suggest that African American identities emerged in part out a series of verbal and visual substitutions and redirections, processes through which individuals redefined their own experiences and the larger worlds in which they lived. Each of Chaney’s figures masterfully combines spoken or written words with visual figures (images, bodies, pottery) to create new identities for themselves, while troubling the old identities largely imposed upon them. For example, Dave, through his signature, redirects the gazes of consumers from his slave status to his status as master craftsman. Likewise, Chaney claims that Frederick Douglass employs maternal memories as an “act of self-creation” (18). He points out how Douglass recounts the death of his mother in his infancy in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) but claims to remember his mother in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). More important for Chaney’s purposes is the fact that Douglass frames his later memory of his mother by citing an image of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II from the American School ethnologist James C. Pritchard’s The Natural History of Man (1848). Douglass substitutes the ethnologist’s image of Ramses II for his mother, ironically remembering her and revising white supremacist ethnological classification. Chaney argues that Douglass ultimately claims a connection to a historical past that the ethnologists typically deny.

Throughout Fugitive Vision Chaney foregrounds African American strategies of substitution and redirection of the kind exemplified by Douglass’s citation. In Chapter Two, for example, he describes how William Wells Brown demolished sentimental Anglo-American images of female slavery at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, pairing a satirical cartoon, The Virginian Slave alongside Hiram Powers’s classically rendered statue, The Greek Slave (1844). Where contemporaries suggested that The Greek Slave served as an allegory of the appropriate moral response of women to tyranny generally, Brown attempts to redirect their imaginations to the United States particularly (54). In forcing viewers to contend with a black female body next to a column draped with an American flag on a pedestal decorated with whips and chains and the Latin inscription “e pluribus unum,” he satirizes the classical gestures of both Powers’s statue and antebellum U.S. democracy.

Chaney’s reading of William and Ellen Craft’s slave narrative, Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), further explores these strategies. The two fugitive authors recount how Ellen takes on the identity of a white slaveholder traveling with “his” slave (William) in order to ensure both Crafts’ fugitive journey to freedom. The narrative (and their actual escape) is full of ironic substitutions. The frontispiece of the book portrays Ellen in drag as a white man who, we learn from the narrative, is illiterate. When Ellen’s identity as a white slave-owner is questioned while the two attempt to board a north-bound train, the presence of her husband (passing as her slave) supports her claim to white masculinity and, Chaney argues, her right to mobility. Again Chaney focuses on the productive tension between the narrative, which emphasizes William’s practical mastery of literacy, and the frontispiece, which embodies Ellen’s physical mastery of the codes of white masculinity. Though they operate on quite different registers, Chaney argues that they are complementary performances. He writes, “Although the planter Ellen Craft pretends to be [is illiterate] … the authenticating power of proximity to blackness nonetheless ensures resemblance to patriarchy … suggesting that racial privilege depends more on upon difference and the appurtenances of domination than on essentiality” (109). Ironically, it is the Crafts’ mastery of mastery that undoes the putative logic of racial mastery itself.

As may be indicated by my citations of Chaney’s text and description of his analysis, Fugitive Vision is by no means an easy read. It cites a number of French theorists and is trenchantly interdisciplinary, relying on insights from scholars of literature, history, and visual culture and critical theorists of race and African American identities. In engaging in this kind of wide-ranging scholarship, Chaney takes seriously the imperatives of “fugitive vision.” Remembering that “fugitive” is an adverb as well as a noun and that one of its meanings is “moving from place to place” (OED, 1989), Chaney moves to wherever is necessary to see how African American fugitives struggled to gain freedom for themselves as individuals, families, and a people. At the same time, he resolutely attends to the multiple strategies and positions they adopted to do so. Through both moves he complicates monolithic notions of African American (or, implicitly, any other American) culture and identity, while also foregrounding a shared African American struggle for freedom. In Chaney’s Fugitive Vision, “e pluribus unum” means a common goal and shared strategies—not uniform voices or identities.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4.5 (September, 2009).

Corey Capers is assistant professor of history and African American studies at University of Illinois, Chicago. He is working on a manuscript entitled Public Blackness: Racial Practice, Publicity and Politics in the North, 1763-1832.

Lucid, accessible, succinct, and richly illuminating, Martha Tomhave Blauvelt’s The Work of the Heart considers the emotional life of young, white, single, northeastern women of the middle and upper classes in the early American republic. Blauvelt focuses in particular on diaries, which are especially revealing in that they were a new genre in which to represent the self. “Between 1780 and 1830,” Blauvelt writes, “the journal of sensibility emerged and flourished as a distinctive category of first-person narrative for young American women” (15).

In her reading of these first-person narratives, Blauvelt finds that women displayed the new manners redolent of the new selfhoods they fashioned. Drawing on British conduct books, expurgated versions of Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son chief amongst them, the women’s diaries document how they performed the values of the new gentility of the early republic. Blauvelt argues that gentility for these women could be “summed up in three popular and interlocking eighteenth-century words: delicacy, sensibility, and taste. ‘Delicacy in the larger sense meant the capacity for fine discriminations and an appreciation for all that was refined and gentle,’ while sensibility was the emotional expression of delicacy, and taste comprised the indefinable but crucial ability to convey delicacy and sensibility in beautiful forms” (18). The material and emotional aspects of gentility fused into one, and refinement in manner and material possessions began to connote sympathy rather than selfishness. As “warmhearted gentility succeeded coldhearted aristocracy,” the young women managed to hold onto their republican identities even as they modeled themselves on British etiquette (20-21). The journals illuminate the various ways in which the women negotiated the myriad social roles and functions they embodied and the “emotional communities” the women inhabited. Moreover, the journals provide an opportunity to observe two types of social “acting” directly related to what Arlie Russell Hochschild has called “emotion work”: “surface acting” (purposeful body language) and “deep acting” (the construction of authentic feeling, of feeling itself).

One of the most crucial contributing factors to the special character of the women’s “emotion work” was sentimental literature, especially the novel but also verse and essays. Such writing facilitated both the women’s own interior emotional discussions and those that they had with one another. This common literature informed the lives of women, crucially enhancing the new peer culture of the republic, a hallmark of which was the exchange of works of sensibility. Novels in the sentimental and also the gothic genres were especially irresistible and compelling; several journal entries cited by Blauvelt describe the women’s inability to put such books down. The novels reflected the women’s fantasies and feelings, but they also enabled “young women to more fully possess feelings of sensibility,” potentially easing “the conflict between spontaneity and performance” (32). Reading was a moral activity even as it gave license to the expression of often skeptically regarded passionate responses. The women of sensibility were expected to feel but not to feel too much—”emotion work involved suppressing feeling as much as producing it”—and late-eighteenth-century culture, despite all of its variegated thinking, united on the belief in the crucial importance of self-control (34). It was important not just to control but to eradicate the self.

Sensibility allowed women to negotiate both their romantic (heterosexual) relationships and their same-sex friendships. But it also, perhaps most powerfully, allowed them to negotiate their perceptions of themselves. “The core of sensibility,” Blauvelt writes, “was not in fact empathy, but the use of others’ experiences in order to stimulate and admire one’s own feelings and, in that sense, it required its devotees to be attentive to themselves, not just to others” (47). The diaries assert the importance of the self as subject; such “self-admiration suggests another metaphor for sensibility: it acted not just as a theater, but as a mirror” (48). Such narcissistic self-regard would be strongly curtailed in American culture from its beginnings. Sarah Pierce, founder of the Litchfield Female Academy in Connecticut, would write that “selfishness is the great destroyer of human happiness” (53). Concomitantly, the journal writing of her students entailed “self-suppression rather than self-expression: ‘Do not let great I occupy too great a share of your Journals,’ Sarah Pierce cautioned” (54).

Perhaps the most ambivalent aspect of women’s intellectual training was its ineluctable trajectory into the one available future for women: the marriage plot, as Carolyn Heilbrun termed it (associating the “quest plot” with men). The art of finding a husband challenged women to exercise “all their emotional skills” and also “promised women more agency than in any other period of their lives” (81). Blauvelt illuminates the hazards of courtship, in which young women had to put all of their finely honed skills to the ultimate test, distinguishing good and loving men from hypocrites—or worse. Far from being a halcyon time of tender passions and fragrant flatteries, courtship necessarily transformed women into shrewd appraisers of men’s worth. The woman who succeeded in the peculiar ars erotica that led to marriage in the early republic was the woman “who recognized that often emotion was no more than a performance, especially for men” (92).

“Unlike the fluid shifting of their girlhood,” Blauvelt writes, “irrevocable events marked the world of mature womanhood.” She highlights four paths that marked this emotional transition: “religious commitment, marriage, motherhood, and traumatic encounters with death” (147). Blauvelt argues that these signal events in women’s more mature years led to a loss of interest in the novel, the literary genre that seemed to speak most urgently to them in their teenage years. The later diaries (when time permitted these women to write), also evince a “lack of anger, sarcasm, and wit” (163). Along with conscription into normative roles appeared to come a loss of the tools of distinctive personality, to say nothing of the fires that fueled it. And religion provided ambiguous comfort for the loss of personality. Conversion, writes Blauvelt, “provided no lasting assurance of emotional congruity.” Instead, it “inaugurated a lifetime of emotion work rather than the ease of identity they sought” (179). Throughout their lives, women experienced emotion as work; even a child’s death called for the expression of grief that pointedly did “not give way to intense feeling” (179).

Blauvelt provides us with a moving, insightful, and valuable study of women’s emotional management in the early republic that reenergizes the field of early American women’s history. I do, however, have some reservations about her work. For a study that devotes so much time and attention to emotion as a performance, the book never engages with performance studies save for its uses of Erving Goffman, whose 1959 study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is widely considered the foundation of the theory. It would have been interesting and more intellectually daring to see Blauvelt push the theoretical boundaries of her study further.

But this lacuna also reveals another gap: for a study concerned with courtship rituals, Blauvelt’s book pays very little attention to the question of female sexuality and certainly very little to the question of same-sex desire, which would seem relevant not just in terms of the homosocial atmosphere of environments such as the female academy but also in terms of the scholarship that has been done on same-sex ties in this era. Blauvelt raises the scholarship on same-sex ties only to retreat from it. Yet how can one talk about emotions and not consider the role sexuality might play in shaping these emotional responses? In relegating the discussion of sexuality to the sidelines, Blauvelt leaves her study frustratingly incomplete; it is a measure of her success that Work of the Heart survives this considerable lapse.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

David Greven is an assistant professor of English at Connecticut College. He is the author of Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (2009) and Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (2005). His essays have appeared in such journals as American Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, Refractory, Genders, Poe Studies, and The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. His current book project is called Oneness Inscrutable: Hawthorne’s Fiction and Freudian Theory.

Smugglers were perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of the era of salutary neglect in colonial North America. All along the eastern seaboard, authorities allowed breaches of the Navigation Acts to occur openly or covertly. New York City was no exception. Contraband trade thrived in the city during King William’s War (also known as the Nine Years’ War), when Governor Benjamin Fletcher (1692-97) connived at various sorts of dubious or illegal transactions. He even permitted the city’s food supply to deteriorate in order for provisions to be sold to a Dutch ship that was in port for several months. Not every governor was willing to look the other way. Soon after he arrived as Fletcher’s successor, Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, ordered the arrest of some East India goods that came off a suspected smuggling vessel, provoking an uprising. Bellomont also failed in later attempts to root out an established practice.

Conditions had not changed by the time another new governor stepped off the ship sixty years later, shortly after the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War (or French and Indian War). Charles Hardy carried instructions to end all commerce between New Yorkers and French America, and he had every intention to succeed in his mission. His most obvious target was the commerce in flour and other provisions to the French at Cape Breton Island, although other forms of contraband trade flourished as well, facilitated by lax enforcement of existing laws. Archibald Kennedy Sr., the customs collector of New York City’s port since 1722, firmly believed that British restrictions on North America’s trade harmed the empire and only served metropolitan interests.

New Yorkers did not mend their ways. The provisions trade with French subjects was simply too profitable. Nor did the French contemplate a cessation of trade with British Americans. Their war effort, writes Thomas Truxes in his eminently readable Defying Empire, depended upon access to North American provisions and “warlike stores.” Both sides, nonetheless, fervently supported the war effort. The French captured dozens of New York ships, and numerous Americans volunteered to fight the French at sea, though nowhere as many as in New York, whose privateers outdid all other ports. Not only did smuggling and privateering coexist, the very New York shipowners whose mainstay was the contraband trade with the French fitted out privateers.

Using a great variety of primary sources, Truxes describes the permutations of New York’s trade with the enemy as the war progressed. After the provisions trade with Cape Breton had been reduced to a trickle following its prohibition by the New York General Assembly, the French enemy was supplied by way of the neutral Dutch and Danish islands in the West Indies. The Flour Act, adopted by Parliament in 1757, may have forbidden the export of provisions to non-British places; however, the trade with the French Caribbean islands reached massive proportions, involving also the exchange of dry goods, lumber, and naval stores for French plantation crops.

This trade had to take place in circuitous ways. Dutch intermediaries were especially active, their sloops carrying North American flour to the Dutch islands of St. Eustatius and Curaçao, where French ships were waiting to transship the cargoes. But North Americans also sailed themselves to St. Eustatius, enabled by forged certificates. As captures by the Royal Navy made this trade increasingly difficult, Monte Cristi, a neutral port on the north coast of Spanish Santo Domingo, emerged as the premier place of exchange between North Americans and the French. New York City’s entire elite took part in it, sending provisions and bullion to buy French American sugar, much of which came from neighboring Saint Domingue. Merchants took precautions to camouflage this business, involving ports in Connecticut and New Jersey where lenient enforcement was the rule. But in the end, the Royal Navy caught up with them, disrupting but not ending the Monte Cristi trade.

Truxes makes wartime New York come to life by spotlighting a number of colorful protagonists. One of them is well-connected Irish merchant Waddell Cunningham, who was up to his neck in illicit commerce but did all he could to cover his tracks, including bullying informers. With a dozen like-minded merchants, he singled out for punishment George Spencer, an English-born merchant who had presented evidence to the city’s authorities of illicit dealings with the enemy. To frighten other potential whistleblowers, Cunningham and his friends incited a mob of sailors to cart Spencer around town before having him put behind bars on false bankruptcy charges. When Spencer was released after twenty-seven months, he was silenced by a bogus accusation of treason. At war’s end, Cunningham, who “approached the legal system with a boldness characteristic of [his] trade with the French” (161), faced prosecution himself. New York’s attorney general regarded the trade that Cunningham and his business partner conducted with the French as high treason. Although the jury returned with a guilty verdict, the judgment was eventually arrested, and the defendants were discharged after paying a fee of one hundred pounds. Spencer never gave up, traveling to London to report in great detail about New York contraband practices, pleading incessantly for vigorous action against those who broke the trade laws, and finally devising a scheme to tax tea sent to the North American colonies.

This is one of the best books ever written about contraband trade in the colonial Americas. Truxes not only does justice to the subject’s significance and complexity, he also hints at the long-term effect of British attempts to eliminate smuggling. In the war’s aftermath, he writes, “the odor of autocratic rule lingered” in New York, “as did a newly acquired taste for defiance. Its origins were deep and complex and, surely, manifest in the city’s brazen trade with the enemy during the Seven Years’ War” (198-199). This defiance, kept alive by the succession of metropolitan acts, would soon develop into revolutionary fervor.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3.5 (May, 2009).

Wim Klooster is associate professor of history at Clark University. His latest book is entitled Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (2009) and his latest publication on smuggling is “Inter-Imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600-1800,” in Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, eds., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830 (2009).

In this fascinating and provocative study about mortuary politics and culture in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, Vincent Brown illuminates the powerful ways death shaped the everyday life of white and black Jamaicans. In The Reaper’s Garden, Brown presents more than a history of Jamaican slavery. He describes a world where mortality penetrated nearly every aspect of Jamaican society and arguably everywhere the Atlantic slave trade reached its lethal tentacles, structuring political, economic, and social relationships in the process. Significantly, Brown demonstrates how attitudes about death produced Afro-Jamaican cultural practices and rituals that in turn created “new worlds of meaning” (58). In other words, eighteenth-century Jamaican mortuary culture reveals the creative cultural adaptation and blending among Afro-Caribbean slaves that became the foundation of a hybridized culture unique to the Atlantic world.

Vincent Brown begins his narrative with four black Jamaican women who encounter a British ship bringing European travelers to the island colony. As the women leave the European ship, they sing, “New-come buckra, He get sick, He tak fever, He be die; He be die [sic]” (1). This provocative encounter and astonishing verse reflects multiple aspects of colonial Jamaican culture and society, as well as death’s pervasive and extensive reach. As Brown reminds us, the Caribbean (and arguably other parts of British North America at different moments in time) “was the grave of the Europeans” (2). Yet the dreams of riches from plantation slavery, particularly sugar production, attracted entrepreneurial Europeans to the Caribbean. Where common sense might deter one from risking his life, Englishmen (and they were primarily men) came to Jamaica, dreaming of potential wealth and social mobility. In this regard, eighteenth-century Jamaica had much in common with other Anglo-American colonies such as seventeenth-century Virginia and South Carolina. Where the mortality rate eventually declined in those North American British colonies by the early eighteenth century, it remained high for English and African Jamaicans, perpetuating social instability and fueling the Atlantic slave trade. Here, Brown’s study connects with recent historical scholarship such as Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic, which describes the interconnected relationship between the Atlantic slave trade and the rise of modern finance capitalism. In this context, the profitability of British Caribbean plantation slavery enabled these colonies to maintain outsized influence in British imperial politics, helping us to understand the near delirious pursuit of wealth among the English who came to the Caribbean. In this regard, Brown illustrates a significant point about the ways in which white and black Jamaicans tried to make sense of the pervasiveness of death. For whites, death was perpetually connected to property and commercial exchange—yet another feature of a worldview centered upon economic transactions. For blacks, death became a way to create a culture that actually celebrated life by recognizing the interrelationship between the living and the dead. The latter could comfort the former by reminding them of their humanity in a world that considered them property and without human value.

As Brown moves beyond his study of mortality and the political economy of slavery in the initial chapters, he interrogates the mortuary politics and culture of eighteenth-century Jamaica. Drawing upon anthropological studies of Caribbean slave culture and society, particularly Sidney Mintz and Richard Price’s The Birth of African-American Culture, Brown points out the ways diverse Africans drew upon common cultural traditions to make sense of their New World environment, adapting and creating a slave culture shaped by the ever-present reality of death. Death informed kinship structures and socio-political relationships in the Caribbean, as mortality generated and regenerated families, marriages, and entire slave communities. In this context, Jamaican slaves could negotiate political and economic relationships among themselves (and sometimes with whites in powerful positions) to stabilize their communities and kin-networks whenever their lives were disrupted by death. Whites, for their part, also produced and reproduced a colonial culture, one that was also powerfully shaped by mortality. As with most other things in Anglo-American life, funeral rites and mortuary culture were influenced by the omniscient values of property and commercial exchange. For white Jamaicans, death was also a relationship between the living and the dead, but one that valued the worth of one’s kin relations in financial terms, most notably in the economic transaction we know as inheritance. Reading Brown’s study of white Jamaican colonial culture, however, one would wonder if the English ever viewed their children and family relations beyond economic terms.

Yet, it is questionable whether Anglo-American values of economic exchange, property, and mortuary culture were any less spiritually and culturally significant for white Jamaicans than the dynamic colonial culture shaped by Afro-Jamaicans. If we think about other anthropological studies that have examined the culture of gift giving and if we frame Anglo-Jamaican attitudes about death and inheritance in terms of gift exchange, perhaps we can see the rich emotive qualities that signify the importance of bequeathing property and money to one’s descendents. Moreover, when we further interrogate the spiritual value of land and property in terms of the ways early modern English people imparted profound meaning to the productive capacities of their labor, we can better understand the importance they attached to land as a significant means to provide prosperity and bounty for their kin and community. The “gift” of an inheritance may have materialized as a kind of emotionally detached financial transaction, but perhaps this could not have been further from the truth for white Jamaicans given the centrality of property in Anglo-American religious cosmology. As numerous studies of Puritan New England have reminded us, property had profound cultural and spiritual value that sustained powerful relationships across generations and between the living and the dead. We only have to consider the cultural significance of financial donations toward college and university endowments in our recent history to understand the power of inheritable or “legacy” gifts. The memory and honor of these magnanimous donors continue to “live” in college buildings, fellowships, endowed chairs, and other kinds of “gifts” that remind us of their valuable past contributions. These forms of inheritable gifts have cultivated and perpetuated human relationships between the living and the dead for generations in this academic universe.

Undoubtedly, the brutality and terror of plantation slavery produced a destructive world that dehumanized master and slave alike, and mortuary culture was one venue to rescue their collective humanity. However, we should remember that Anglo-Jamaican culture was as dynamic and full of spiritual meaning (however misplaced and disturbing we believe their values and cultural priorities to be) as that created by Afro-Jamaicans. This certainly was not a world in which white and black Jamaicans produced a cross-cultural, multicultural society in the ways scholars such as Mechal Sobel describe in accounts of biracial cultural development in eighteenth-century colonial Virginia. However, it must have been a colonial society where white Jamaicans brought a rich spiritual tradition about land, death, and the afterlife that was as significant to them as the colonial mortuary culture was to black Jamaicans.

Vincent Brown asks readers not to imagine the grim reaper as a harvester using his scythe to cut down the flourishing wheat of humanity at the zenith of life. Rather, he wants us to imagine this icon of death as a gardener cultivating the life of the living with the bounty of the dead, especially in eighteenth-century Jamaica. As he states, “In Jamaican slave society and its transatlantic hinterlands, at least death tended and nurtured the activities of the living, cultivating their understanding of the world and their struggle to shape it. In the reaper’s garden, death helped to constitute life, and the dead were an undeniable presence” (255). Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden is a penetrating and thought-provoking book that is a valuable contribution to the study of early America and the British Atlantic world. As mortality was a central fact throughout colonial American life, for blacks and whites, historians will find that after reading Brown’s book, they may never look at the world of colonial British America the same way again.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3.5 (May, 2009).

W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz is an associate professor of history at the Colorado College. His Making the Black Atlantic Modern: Rhode Island, Nova Scotia, and the Black Atlantic, 1750-1850 will soon be published with University of Pennsylvania Press. He is currently writing a book about Charleston, South Carolina, and the Atlantic world for University of Georgia Press.

You do not need to read a newspaper to know that the newspaper industry is presently in a state of crisis. As major metropolitan dailies abandon their print editions, cut staff, scale back content, and tumble into Chapter 11, we are increasingly warned that newspapers must be saved in the name of democracy. Without the objective reporting they provide, citizens will become less informed, the electorate will grow more polarized, political corruption and corporate malfeasance will flourish, and public discourse will sink further into the mire of rumor mongering and partisan ranting found on cable news networks and the Internet. In this regard, calls to “save the newspaper, save democracy” seek not only to rescue a medium but to defend a particular mode of professional journalism taught in universities and codified in the prim language of the AP stylebook.

A book entitled Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy might appear to offer a timely perspective on this crisis. But the title is slightly misleading: the democracy birthed here is somewhat premature. And Marcus Daniel is too careful a historian to provide any talking points for those who lament (or, for that matter, cheer) the death rattles of the newspaper. Revisiting the “paper wars” of the 1790s by examining the lives of six prominent editorial combatants (Federalists John Fenno, Noah Webster, and William Cobbett, and Republicans Philip Freneau, Benjamin Franklin Bache, and William Duane), Daniel contends that “the political journalism of the 1790s helped to connect citizens to the new nation-state and to create a more democratic and participatory public culture.” But it did so by violating most every available standard of editorial conduct and by flouting established norms of civility, deference, and decorum (16). As they insulted and scandalized politicians (and each other) before a growing reading public, newspaper editors challenged the traditional belief that political discussion was best left to prominent and refined gentlemen.

This sort of behavior—particularly the practice of casting aspersions on the private character of public men—led previous generations of journalism historians to conclude that the early republic was a “dark age of partisan journalism” wherein newspapers offered little news, and editors took orders from party leaders, who regarded newspapers as mere instruments of propaganda—which, presumably, readers swallowed uncritically. Beneath this interpretation lurks a teleological assumption that newspapers have but one true destiny: to become politically independent commercial enterprises that supply the public with professionally reported news and balanced opinion. For more than thirty years, proponents of a “new” journalism history have assailed the dark-age thesis as a legitimating myth of professional journalism. Emphasizing the historicity of “news,” they have found plenty of it in early national newspapers. With an assist from the “new” political and cultural histories, they have shown that parties were less regimented than previously imagined, that newspaper editors were more likely to be party leaders than lickspittles, and that readers took their papers with a dose of skepticism.

Echoing this scholarship, Scandal and Civility quickly dispenses with the dark-age myth and turns its sights instead to the more enduring myth of the Founding Fathers. In this version of events, newspapers appear as platforms for the anonymous essays of Madison, Adams, and Hamilton, and their editors are depicted as little more than political clients and ideological ciphers. Daniel’s finely drawn and sympathetic portraits of Fenno, Freneau, Bache, Webster, Cobbett, and Duane, who managed to edit their newspapers with considerable degrees of independence, suggest otherwise. Indeed, Daniel aims to rescue them “from the condescension of both their own time and posterity and restore them to their rightful place in the politics of the early Republic: center stage” (6). This is no mean ambition. And while readers may remain unconvinced that Fenno or Duane should share the spotlight with Thomas Jefferson, this book makes it abundantly clear that they were not bit players.

Daniel believes that the editors of the 1790s are best understood as “men of ideas” equipped with an “almost limitless faith in the influence of the press” (30). He is not especially concerned with the quotidian business of editing, publishing, and circulating a newspaper. The role of editors in party organization and electioneering is acknowledged but not explored in much detail, and the economic conditions and public policies (the Post Office Act of 1792, for example) that allowed newspapers to flourish are passed over in silence. Daniel instead focuses on the distinctive rhetorical strategies of his journalists, and the specific political contexts in which they were developed and deployed. The result is a narrative that revisits the familiar partisan controversies of the 1790s—the debate over Hamilton’s finance system, the Genet mission, the Whisky Rebellion, the XYZ affair, etc.—from the perspective of six prominent controversialists. In less skilled hands, such an approach would tend to exaggerate the severity, incivility, and partisanship of the Federalist era. But Daniel is careful to emphasize the contingency and fluidity of partisan divisions and to show how this could both inflame and moderate journalistic rhetoric.

Put another way, the “paper wars” of the 1790s were not fought by political elites and their ink-stained mercenaries on clearly marked ideological terrain: the maps were sketchy, the rules of engagement unclear, and the weapons often backfired. For example, Scandal and Civility opens with a biography of the much-neglected John Fenno, whose Gazette of the United States is commonly described as a partisan organ of the Washington administration. But Daniel shows that Fenno was a rather hesitant and unreliable partisan. His reluctance to take sides in the rivalries between Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson impelled the latter to patronize the more “Republican” newspapers of Philip Freneau and Benjamin Franklin Bache. As party feelings intensified, Fenno was less inclined to attack the opposition than pen panegyrics to the nonpartisan character of Washington.

Daniel’s portraits of Freneau and Bache reveal a comparable hesitancy and ambivalence in the face of partisan battle. The former preferred poetry to newspapers and spent much of his brief career at the National Gazette casting around for an effective rhetoric of opposition. Taking a page from Paine’s Rights of Man, he learned to assail Federalists as the party of “aristocracy.” But his unwavering support for the French Revolution and Edmond Genet soon cost him the vital support of Jefferson. Daniel’s chapter on Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora tells a similar story. The favorite grandson of Benjamin Franklin is usually remembered for his bold attacks on President Washington. But if Bache viewed the reverence bestowed on Washington as anti-republican, he did not say so until opposition to the Jay Treaty exposed cracks in the president’s popularity. And if his use of antimonarchical rhetoric against Washington helped to “desacralize” the presidency, it did collateral damage to the political fortunes of the Republican opposition—something Bache himself seemed to realize.

American responses to the French Revolution and the writings of Thomas Paine play a pivotal role in Daniel’s narrative. His portrait of Noah Webster and the American Minerva provides a case study in how enthusiasm for French republicanism and Rights of Man could turn into anti-Jacobinism and revulsion for The Age of Reason. But this is also the weakest chapter in the book: Webster’s peculiar and theoretical cast of mind was not well suited to journalism, and his pretensions to owlish wisdom made him a frequent target of abuse—even from fellow Federalists like William Cobbett, the subject of Daniel’s liveliest chapter. Staunchly British, unremittingly coarse, and unstinting in his hatred of Jacobins and democrats, Cobbett was also one of the most widely read journalists of the 1790s. His Porcupine’s Gazette, first issued in 1797, gleefully mocked standard professions of editorial impartiality. But his success would be short-lived. Cobbett soon came to symbolize “the political degeneracy and disorder that many Americans believed had engulfed public life” (190). By the summer of 1800, a barrage of libel suits orchestrated by Pennsylvania Republicans forced him to flee the country he so despised.

The Federalist response to licentious newspapers and their editors—the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798—is well known, and Scandal and Civility closes with its most effective Republican critic, William Duane, Bache’s successor at the Aurora. Duane’s critique had less to do with libertarian principles than partisan spin: the acts allowed him to unmask Federalists as the true party of Jacobin misrule and position Democratic-Republicans as champions of law and order. But to execute this rhetorical volte-face, he disowned his Paineite radicalism and deism, decried the incivility of the (Federalist) press, and vouched for the sincere Christian beliefs of Thomas Jefferson. If the Jeffersonians of 1800 restored the political principles of 1776, they did so by accommodating a more conservative public mood. The result, Daniel concludes, was a “more organizationally disciplined, less ideologically creative, and in many ways less democratic and open political culture” (283).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3.5 (May, 2009).

Mark Schmeller is an assistant professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University.