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.

 Soon after the Civil War ended, several former members of the Confederacy’s political and military leadership found their way to Havana, Cuba, and “plotted their new lives” at the city’s Hotel Cubano (76). It was not the first time that the island had served as a refuge for white Southerners facing challenges posed by the “Age of Emancipation.” During the war, James and Eliza McHatton relocated their Louisiana sugar plantation to Cuba, so they could use a labor force of slaves and Chinese coolies. And before the conflict, many Southerners had seen the island as “a future state in the slave power bloc” (20). Several historians have incorporated the Caribbean and parts of Latin America into studies of the South in the Civil War era. But in American Mediterranean, Matthew Guterl makes a compelling argument that the connections among these lands were more numerous and significant than earlier scholars have suggested. The Southern elite, he argues, was “Internationally minded…and self-aware within a larger pan-American master class” (9) and thus saw themselves as part of a community of “New World slaveholders” (1).

Southern sectionalism, in other words, was international. Southern elites saw themselves not just as part of the United States and, later, the Confederacy but also as part of the “American Mediterranean”—the ring of lands that surround the Gulf of Mexico. Guterl adapts the term from Commander Matthew Maury, who in 1854 characterized the gulf as being to America what “the Mediterranean is to Europe, Africa, and Asia” (12). The relationship was not static. While some white Southerners asserted that the establishment of the Confederacy should unite them with Spain and Brazil in their wish to preserve slavery, the connection was likewise weakened by emancipation and weakened further still by passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1866. But the region’s relevance remained strong even as the relationship changed. During the war, the Confederacy received British supplies via Matamoras, Mexico. Some white Southerners suggested selling American slaves to Brazil to ensure that a race war would not follow emancipation. And in the Reconstruction era, Southern newspaper editors suggested that readers heed the problems faced by those who oversaw Jamaica’s freedmen, so as not to repeat their mistakes. Some of the plantation elite moved outside the United States to continue to keep slaves, but these exiles found that they could not replicate what they had lost. The high price of slaves in Brazil, for example, made them doubt that plantation agriculture could be profitable there, and some were put off by the extensive intermingling of the races, let alone the Brazilian idea that “money whitens” (85).

Meanwhile, the American Mediterranean had aspects that white Southerners regarded as foreboding. Planters tended to assume that all slave societies followed the same trajectory, which enhanced the importance of their developments. They reacted with alarm to news of British emancipation in the West Indies, Jamaica’s Morant Bay rebellion, and most of all Haiti’s rebellion and republic. Overseas accounts could influence policy. Some expected that American freedmen would be “idle” (117), since former West Indian slaves reportedly were, and this expectation informed their writing of the Black Codes passed after the Civil War.

Racism also challenged the unity of the American Mediterranean. Some Southern belles did marry Cuban natives, but many white Southerners believed in their superiority to the rest of the Americas and tried to avoid appearing “Latin.” Guterl’s work thus locates the South within the hemisphere’s slaveholding diaspora while also identifying it as a middle ground. It was, he maintains, “a messy, complicated borderland of sorts between North America and the Caribbean” (11). Part of this messiness owed to the fact that the traffic went both ways. Judah Benjamin, who held multiple posts in the Confederate government, had spent much of his childhood in the West Indies, and his father-in-law was a “Saint Domingue exile” (53). After the Haitian rebellion, many whites on the island sought refuge in Southern U.S. cities and brought slaves with them. And there were many Cuban expatriates in late-antebellum New Orleans. 

At various points throughout the work, and especially in the epilogue, Guterl suggests that his subject fits not just within the historiography of slavery and the South, but also within the canon of business and labor history. He posits that Southern slaveholders, like modern businessmen, sought to relocate their operations outside the country in a quest for cheap labor and few regulations. And he connects the plight of coolies—who, though free, faced abuse and had little recourse if they were not paid—with that of many Latino immigrants who live in the Deep South today, legally and illegally.

This emphasis, most prominent in the epilogue, seems a bit abrupt, in part because earlier references appear infrequently and almost in an offhand fashion. Also, the large-scale relocation of factories and other operations outside the United States today seems far different from slaveholders’ efforts to move abroad, as those moves were the decisions of individual families, and their strategies frequently failed. (The high cost of slaves in Brazil would be a case in point.) In addition, Guterl, by describing the “cross-national cultural exchanges in the American Mediterranean” (6) is presenting a story that encompasses much more than moral debates and the bottom line. It is the exploration of how several groups of people from different lands interacted in an era of epic change. Yet the business comparison is provocative and can enhance understanding of both eras. Although people today condemn the nineteenth century’s slavery and overt racism, Guterl’s analogy suggests that it endures, in more muted forms, with regard to workers in today’s “global south.” And it reinforces the extent to which racism and financial concerns reinforced each other in nineteenth-century minds.

Guterl’s book is also a useful addition to the history of American foreign relations. Increasingly, scholars from several disciplines are approaching early America from a transnational perspective. Their studies demonstrate that significant, important connections existed, even in the absence of formal diplomacy, and that this broader approach is therefore necessary. They also can enhance more traditional diplomatic studies. Confederate Colonel John Thomas Pickett, for example, saw the Civil War as “emasculat[ing]” the Monroe Doctrine, because he and others saw benefits of European “meddling” in the New World (57).

Aside from one anachronistic reference to an antebellum West Virginia and a reference to James Monroe as the fourth president (he was fifth), American Mediterranean is error free. These minor quibbles aside, Guterl’s work is important, interesting, and well written. 

Further Reading:

For additional reading on the international context of the Civil War-era South, see Demetrius L. Eudell, The Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean and the U.S. South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002); Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, 2005); Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002); and Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861 (Athens, Ga., 1989).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.2 (January, 2009).

Elizabeth Kelly Gray is an assistant professor of history at Towson University. Her article “‘Whisper to him the word “India”‘: Trans-Atlantic Critics and American Slavery, 1830-1860” appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of the Journal of the Early Republic. She is currently writing a book-length study of opiate use in early America.

Like a hostess dusting off her gravy boat come Thanksgiving, Ronald Reagan would trot out Winthrop’s image of a city on a hill on special occasions throughout his political career.

—Sarah Vowell

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together…

—Samuel Johnson

I recalled Johnson’s criticism of metaphysical poetry often while reading Sarah Vowell’s latest contribution to popular history, a heartfelt if sometimes uneven exploration of Puritan foundations, wonderfully titled The Wordy Shipmates. Her insistence on precision in disentangling mythic traditions and historical record coexists with pop-culture reference and colloquialism. The juxtaposition alternately distracts and enlightens. When Vowell asks the reader to think of Ann Hutchinson as a seventeenth-century Oprah Winfrey in an attempt to communicate the Puritan woman’s grassroots influence, the yoking is jarring and ill fitting. On the other hand, the image of Ronald Reagan dusting off the gravy boat of manufactured American exceptionalism is a yoking that delights and instructs. The eclecticism of Vowell’s historical enthusiasm, her sensitive readings of primary texts, and her This American Life hip-folksiness make this work, in particular, difficult to categorize. In fact, at the local book superstore, the employees had a hard time helping me find a copy. Was it in History? No. Essays? Or perhaps Humor? No. Amazingly, one employee even suggested Fiction. We finally located The Wordy Shipmates on a table labeled simply “Thought Provoking.” Indeed!

The best and worst of Vowell’s book can be seen in a single, early passage. Before launching her explanation of the difference between those Puritan immigrants who wanted to remain part of the Church of England and those who wanted to separate from it, Vowell warns that

the theological differences between the Puritans on the Mayflower and the Puritans on the Arabella are beyond small. Try negligible to the point of nitpicky. I will also say that readers who squirm at microscopic theological differences might be unsuited to read a book about seventeenth-century Christians. Or, for that matter, a newspaper. Secular readers who marvel every morning at the death toll in the Middle East ticking ever higher due to, say, the seemingly trifling Sunni-versus-Shia rift in Islam, might look deep into their own hearts and identify their own semantic lines in the sand. (5)

I was impressed throughout by Vowell’s insistence on explaining fine points of seventeenth-century theology and politics for her non-specialist readers. But, like a Samuel Johnson, I was at first put off by the topical analogy. The suggestion stayed with me, though, and reading further I came to think that her contemporary analogies deserved attention, perhaps precisely because of their violent yoking with Puritan concerns. At least I am willing to go along with Vowell’s relentless topical references to some degree. Vowell loses me at the end of this same passage when she further elaborates her analogy of sectarian violence with an imaginary argument about the best movie of the The Godfather franchise. Fortunately this kind of gratuitous pop reference is more the exception than the rule in The Wordy Shipmates.

Vowell knows that to write the kind of history to which she aspires, it is not enough to offer a hip, adult reworking of School House Rock or even a needed corrective to this country’s shared Longfellow cum Brady Bunch conception of early American history. The first challenge is to write compellingly about history through the lens of the present without dumbing down or misrepresenting historical difference. Vowell’s writing is filled with cultural references and her own personal reflections. This style is not simply a spoonful of sugar to make the theological wrangling go down (although, according to my nonacademic friends, it certainly does work). Rather, humor is part of the methodology of Vowell’s historical analysis. When it works, it shocks the reader into recognition and reconsideration. And Vowell’s personal responses to historical events are just as strong a methodology of historical analysis. Vowell repeatedly confesses to being a sucker for the language of a City on a Hill—drawn in her heart even while repulsed in her head. Accordingly, the first and strongest part of her book orbits around John Winthrop. Her reading of the man and his world are simultaneously sympathetic and critical, hopeful and horrified. Winthrop does not exist only in his own time but rather lives on through reinvention and reimagining. Her close readings of Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” his journal, and court records lead her to reminiscences of Ronald Reagan’s funeral services and the events following 9/11 and then back again to pressing issues of seventeenth-century non-separating Puritanism. Her chronological shifts and topical allusions are part of the point. For Vowell, history is never done unfolding, and we are ethically obliged to see things from the perspective of both “ends of history,” as it were.

The Wordy Shipmates plots the non-iconic events of Puritan New England that occurred between the landing at Plymouth Rock and the witch trials at Salem. The Antinomian Controversy, the pamphlet war between John Cotton and Roger Williams, and the Pequot War are familiar fare to any scholar of the period, but to present these extraordinarily complicated events for a general audience in digestible form is a feat indeed. In many ways, however, this is a book about trauma as much as it is about Puritan foundations. Specifically, it is about the trauma of historical revelation that inevitably collapses past and present. This thematic framework provides a formidable narrative challenge. In Vowell’s wonderful Assasination Vacation, her own personal travel narrative gives form to the interconnectedness of past and present. The plots of three presidential assassinations dovetail elegantly with the major dramatic question, “will Sarah get to all her assassination sites?” In The Wordy Shipmates, the would-be major dramatic question about building a city on a hill is moot. The default narrative question then becomes “will Sarah be able to convince us that the difference between separating and non-separating Puritanism is important before we all lose interest in such theological fine points?” This ungainly narrative (and I would argue that all Puritan narratives tend toward the ungainly) unfolds in 248 pages with no chapter breaks. Vowell easily could have divided her book into more manageable, bite-size essays, divvying up her reflections by person (Winthrop, Williams, Hutchinson), by event (the Antinomian Controversy, the Pequot War), or by text (“A Model of Christian Charity,” “A Key into the Language of America”). Without such categorical divisions, however, the very structure of Vowell’s book argues against reading Puritan history as isolated events precipitated by a small group of seventeenth-century fanatics. For Vowell, everything is always happening and always all at once. Her explicitly ethical and transhistorical interpretive method accounts for her unapologetically anachronistic style.

In the introductory passages of the book, Vowell imagines Cotton’s notoriously exceptionalist “farewell sermon” to the Puritan passengers of the Arabella leaving England in 1630. “By the time Cotton says amen,” Vowell suggests, he has determined the entire course of American imperialism from the Mexican American War to Vietnam and beyond. “Then he smiles when Abraham Lincoln calls the United States ‘the last best hope of earth.’ Then he frees Cuba, which would be news to Cuba. Then he signs the lease on Guantanamo Bay” (1-2). Vowell’s historical trauma is deeply personal, and as such, this is at least as much the work of memoir as it is history. Her interest in seventeenth-century Puritanism informs her understanding of 9/11 as much as the trauma of those years kindles her interest in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There are no new historical details here for the specialist reader, but the very subjectivity of Vowell’s reflections is worthwhile for any early Americanist who ponders the complexities of history in the present tense.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.2 (January, 2009).

Meredith Neuman is an assistant professor of English at Clark University. She is currently working on a book about theories of language in Puritan sermon literature.

Of course, it had always been there, but my students brought Point Plantation into historical view by finding its one-time name, owner, some of its nineteenth-century residents, and its actual location. Pretty good for eleven undergraduates, in a 300-level history class, only one of whom was a history major. From my pedagogical perspective the transcription assignment that led to this result raised questions about the benefits and weaknesses of assigning a research project to non-history majors with no scaffolding in primary and secondary document analysis or accessing information in libraries and archives.

My Spring 2015 “History of North Carolina” class at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro was tasked with a survey of our state’s past. In addition to a review of critical themes in North Carolina history, I wanted to offer students an opportunity to perform historical research. But I have always been as uninterested as the students are in turning in individual assignments that will be graded and forgotten by the end of the semester. So, I turned to collaboration with a local historic site. Practicing history in public offered students an opportunity to apply their developing historical thinking skills outside of the history classroom. Doing historical work for a community collaborator also adds urgency and a sense of purpose that students—in my experience—recognize and respond to. I planned this project with modest goals: transcribe and provide an editorial introduction to an account book dated to the late 1850s and associated with John Motley Morehead, North Carolina’s influential antebellum governor. I could not guess how much this project—intended to be an adjunct to the survey—would grow beyond transcription and basic editorial work, or that it would turn into an ad hoc methods class for non-history majors, most of whom were enrolled in the university’s School of Education or the College of Health and Human Sciences.

Today, Historic Blandwood, the former Morehead residence, is home to Preservation Greensboro Incorporated, and is open for guided tours. Staff at Blandwood are acutely aware of the absence of enslaved people in their house tours and have for years sponsored historical and archaeological research for evidence of the enslaved population. But the scattered manuscript records for the Morehead family are frustratingly absent of any details about the family’s human property. Basic questions cannot even be answered: How many enslaved people worked there? What work did they do? Where did they live? When the Morehead account book—missing for fifteen years—emerged from Blandwood’s library, a quick perusal revealed to staff and docents exciting possibilities. In eighty-two pages, with entries beginning in 1856 and petering out in the late 1860s, the book recorded household expenses, receipts for sale of agricultural goods, costs of personal clothing, medical expenses, debts owed to and owed by Morehead family members, and taxes. It also listed the “hire in” and “hire out” of enslaved people. Clues within the book revealed that Letitia Walker, Morehead’s daughter, kept it, and it gave us the names of enslaved people like Rene, Jenny, and Ben. The small book offered the class the best opportunity to answer questions about Blandwood’s enslaved population.

To approach the task of examining this book, I divided the class into three teams. The transcription team tackled the account book itself, with the additional assignment of alerting the other groups of emerging information. The secondary source team began reading academic histories to contextualize the account book content. I dispatched the deeds team to the Guilford County Register of Deeds to search for bills of sale for enslaved people in the 1850s, anticipating that we would corroborate and elaborate on names that appeared in the account book.

The initial work of the secondary and deeds teams revealed two problems with conducting research without disciplinary scaffolding. The secondary team could not find relevant books and articles. Despite the university’s imperative to teach information literacy, many non-history major undergraduates lack the contextual knowledge to use library catalogs, JSTOR, EBSCO, and similar databases to find the most useful academic resources. For instance, they would not have used “slave hiring,” or “slaveholding widows” as historical concepts to search for, and would not have identified the most appropriate historiography to explain them. So, after a too-quick introduction to these tools, I told them which books and articles they needed to consult. Had this been a proper methods class, I might have better prepared for this and they—as history majors—might have anticipated and developed the contextual knowledge to perform effective searches.

The deeds team encountered roadblocks because of gaps in the historical record. While the Morehead family was among the largest slaveholders in Guilford County, they do not show up as either buying or selling a slave in the 1850s. The deeds group, then, was very early left with nothing to do. Several team members made valiant but unfruitful trips to the State Archives of North Carolina in Raleigh and the Rockingham County Register’s Office. This absence of evidence surprised me and frustrated them.

As transcription continued, items from the account book stymied us—for instance, the frequent appearance of receipts for “boat money.” We spent considerable class time employing historical imagination to ponder ways “boat money” could be earned in a landlocked county. We presumed that “boat money” related to Governor Morehead’s factory operations on the Dan River in Rockingham County. We looked to Rockingham, also, to account for the large amount of corn and hogs represented in the book. I and several students invested considerable time searching the United States Census’ agricultural schedules to locate evidence of Letitia Walker’s economic presence there. We found none. Yet the volume of agricultural exchanges exceeded anything that could have been produced at Blandwood, which was an urban estate, not a plantation.

The absence of firm evidence from the account book to tell us about the lives of enslaved people at Blandwood, combined with a surfeit of entries about agricultural exchanges, white people’s accounts, and doctor’s bills, forced my students to shift their research agenda away from the identification of enslaved people at the Moreheads’ Greensboro home. As my colleague Lisa Tolbert told the class, you must surrender your ideas to what the evidence tells you. We had imagined that the slave names might turn up in the deeds, or that Letitia Walker’s economic interests would mimic her father’s and turn up in Rockingham County records. Without the capacity to adjust our tactics to respond to emerging evidence, we might have succumbed to temptation to place Rene, Jenny, and Ben at Blandwood and leave everything else inadequately explained. That, we discovered, would have been a mistake.

No one expected the Yadkin River. Staff at Blandwood had heard family lore about a farm southwest of Greensboro in Davidson County, of which the Yadkin River forms the western border, but had no documentary evidence about it. Following notations about taxes paid in Davidson County, we shifted our gaze away from Rockingham County and Greensboro. We also developed a methodology that helped us organize how we described the account book’s contents that started with my intuition about rural nineteenth-century social and family life. (I suspect the professor’s intuition is more difficult to disentangle from the class research process than is commonly acknowledged.) Large family networks tended to cluster together in geographic proximity, and so family names can be uniquely identified to one part of a region using the United States Census, while occasionally ruling them out from other places. We noted that most of these names were associated with agricultural exchanges—particularly the buying and selling of potatoes, chickens, lard, or the borrowing of small amounts of cash. We similarly confirmed that many merchants and physicians that Walker paid were in Salisbury, neighboring Davidson County to the west, not in Greensboro, where we had assumed they had been. We called these clustering of names, locations, and types of economic exchanges “contexts.” These contexts, and the economic relationships they illuminated, confirmed that the account book was, indeed, for a plantation in Davidson County. But where?

Here the students learned the value of research by aimless browsing. We used the United States Census on Ancestry.com and local papers through Newspapers.com to confirm the identity of many white people in the account book. A common student habit in using keyword searches in databases is to abandon a search when an exact hit is not made. I encouraged them to not be dissuaded when an individual failed to turn up. Instead, I told them to search around. Read two pages ahead or behind in the census. Scan advertisements in the newspaper. Consider misspellings, or the census taker’s particular tics. That way, students develop contextual intuition themselves and mentally store information that may be useful later. This strategy proved remarkably fruitful. One student discovered a key Greensboro slave hirer, whose name Letitia had misspelled, by browsing the census. On another occasion, while searching the Davidson County slave schedule in the 1860 United States Census for Sarah Limpaugh’s human property, the class unexpectedly stumbled upon Letitia Walker’s own entry, which we had not found with a direct search. In the most memorable classroom moment of my career, I and the entire class simultaneously erupted with the excitement of discovery as we saw her entry, enumerating her ownership of thirty-two slaves, and realized its import. Another student discovered, by browsing, an 1865 newspaper advertisement placed by Walker announcing a “Large Sale of Valuable Property . . . at my Plantation in Davie County, known as the Point,” confirming what other evidence had hinted—that the account book represented not Blandwood, but a separate planation that Letitia Walker owned in a different county that we could now name, and situate on a map. Point Plantation property actually straddled the Yadkin River, with acreage in both Davidson and Davie Counties, and included franchise rights to operate a ferry on the Yadkin River, thus explaining the “boat money.”

In the excitement of discovering Point Plantation, we realized that our evidence had taken us rather far from the initial animating questions about the account book. Who were the bondspeople at Blandwood? What work did they do? How many lived there? The account book simply could not answer these questions and I spent considerable time enforcing (for my benefit as well as theirs) the idea of recognizing and acknowledging the limits of our evidence. Good historical thinking requires us to admit, We don’t know, even when the questions demand answers.

Admitting ignorance proved doubly frustrating. Too often, historic sites elide discussion of enslaved people by pointing to absences in the documentary record. We know they were here, but the documents don’t tell us anything about them so we can’t talk about them. Here we were with the account book that contained names of enslaved people, apparently positioned to consign Blandwood’s people of color to continued invisibility. Nothing about the contexts in which the names of enslaved people appeared positively identified them as being at Blandwood. In fact, some of their names—Rene, Mary, and Harriet, in particular—show up repeatedly in what we now called the “Point Plantation context.” Specifically, these enslaved people stood alongside Davidson County’s poor white population in 1864 and 1865 to barter chickens for lard to Letitia Walker and some, like Sally, may have actually borrowed money from Walker, her owner. But the account book simply did not provide enough evidence to tell us about the black presence at Blandwood.

Working through these opaque entries and their similarly unclear interpretive implications led students to a critical lesson about good historical thinking. They had to learn to be open to different, and unexpected, answers. They learned that history isn’t a mine for facts—but a source for nuanced, and complex, explanations. So while we still cannot offer particulars about who lived at Blandwood and what work they did, Blandwood docents can now tell visitors many other things. Bondspeople like Sally, Jenny, Rene, and Ben worked in contingent hired employment. They may have moved from Davidson to Greensboro and back, and they grew their own crops to sell to Walker. Walker herself was not a demure hostess in her father’s household, but an entrepreneur and manager of an estate of her own. Following the evidence proved far more satisfactory than simply finding names to fit into pre-existing stories within the Blandwood household.

Finally, we learned a key lesson about basic constraints in the historical research process. We had to make painful decisions about which clues to pursue and which to set aside. Though excited and engaged, students could not undertake further research once we began compiling our results at the end of the semester. The saying, we have to stick to what is in the account book, became a regular feature in class. We had ongoing discussions of what we knew, what we did not know, and why, which reinforced the main tenets of evidence-based argumentation.

The stories we drew from the account book—particularly those about the enslaved people—are based on fragmentary evidence. But, as my colleague Benjamin Filene has said about uncovering African American history in Greensboro, “when those fragments are all you have, they become worthy of a second look that can become illuminating.” Not only did our second looks force my students to consider historical topics in new ways—“I didn’t know that slavery was so complex!” exclaimed one upon witnessing the enslaved Rene sell potatoes to slaveowner Walker—but they ended up envisioning an interpretive scheme that explains the opulent life at Blandwood by tracing out a complex network of slavery far beyond Greensboro.

By the end of the semester, we had given up the survey portion of the class in favor of this more exciting work. Though never intended to be a methods class, this ad-hoc approach to teaching history in general had limitations and advantages that offer insights into teaching history to non-majors. For instance, my students did not learn to search libraries, plumb archives, deconstruct academic theses, practice critical reading of secondary sources, or construct argumentative essays of their own. Developing historiographical concepts and research contexts are a necessary part of history education, but because I had never intended this class to dive deep into this project, we did not do that. So the mechanical elements of historical methods and thinking went undeveloped. One result is that the entire process, from research question to final document, bears my own imprint far more than a similar project by history majors might.

Yet my students did have access to a less tangible, and no less important, suite of historical thinking skills. They learned that evidence has limits. They learned the value of browsing. They learned to restrict their claims to what the sources can support. They learned to adjust their question based on absences in the documentary record. They, in short, successfully confronted the iterative, revisionist, and flexible nature of information and research described by the Association of College and Research Libraries’ “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” In fact, to non-history majors, these skills are just as important as the ability to effectively use a history database or critique an academic monograph. Indeed, I frequently regaled the class with articles from business journals praising the capacity of liberal arts majors in technical and scientific fields to deal with complexity, ambiguity, and opaque evidence. In the future, then, I will be content to directly guide them to historical questions to ask, the best sources to consult, and let them fully engage with the intellectual exercise of grappling directly with history.

At the end of the semester we invited Blandwood staff and docents, as well as university faculty who had helped us along the way, to a roundtable discussion of our findings. We presented a binder that included an editorial introduction, a glossary of nearly 100 identified individuals, the transcription itself, and copies of relevant primary sources. Much to our satisfaction, the Blandwood staff were surprised by what we had found. My students were eager—aggressive, even—to press them about how these new findings would reshape interpretation at the historic house. I can’t imagine a better end to the class.

Further reading

Literature that addresses methodological and information literacy standards for history students include the Association of College and Research Libraries, “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education”; Carole Srole, “Scaffolding Research Skills in a Nonresearch Class,” Perspectives on History, 36:1 (January 1998); and Michael J. Galgano, J. Chris Arndt, and Raymond M. Hyser, Doing History: Research and Writing in the Digital Age, 2^nd ed. (Boston, 2012).

Doing history research with community collaborators as service learning projects is discussed in Ira Harkavy and Bill M. Donovan, eds., Connecting Past and Present: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in History (Washington, D.C., 2000). Benjamin Filene has written about doing African American history in Greensboro in “Power in Limits: Narrow Frames Open Up African American Public History,” in Max van Balgooy, ed., Interpreting African American History and Culture at Museums and Historic Sites (Lanham, Md., 2015). Kirsten E. Wood’s Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2004) and John J. Zaborney’s Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia (Baton Rouge, 2012) helped contextualize the account book. Blandwood’s Website is here.

Articles in popular journals about the value of liberal arts thinking in contemporary business environments proliferate. With this class, I relied heavily on Elizabeth Segran, “Why Top Tech CEOs Want Employees With Liberal Arts Degrees,” Fast Company, August 28, 2014.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

Christopher A. Graham, PhD, taught as a visiting assistant professor of history and museum studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of “Evangelicals and ‘Domestic Felicity’ in the Non-Elite South,” Journal of Southern Religion (2013). He is presently the Andrew W. Mellon Guest Curator at the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia.