Levi was shocked and wounded by Ethan’s passing; it was just the final twist in their tumultuous relationship. After the British captured Ethan in 1775, Levi provided him with money and repeatedly petitioned George Washington for a prisoner exchange. He “was not only a brother,” wrote Levi to Washington, “but a real friend.” When Ethan returned in 1778, however, he damned Levi as a “fallacious” Tory and demanded the Vermont authorities confiscate his property. Levi criticized Ethan in the Connecticut Courant over the years and eventually challenged him to a duel, which he rejected. Yet when the two met in person again in the early 1780s, they embraced each other as if nothing had ever happened. To the Allen clan, familial survival transcended everything else. This was particularly true of Ethan, whose experience in the Age of Revolution was shaped by the importance that he attached to his family’s self-preservation. He held multiple allegiances during the Revolution, all of which were connected or stemmed from the importance he placed on familial self-preservation.

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on January 21, 1737, to Joseph Allen and Mary Baker Allen, Ethan belonged to an extensive New England family that arrived aboard the Mary and John as part of the 1630 Puritan Great Migration. The earliest Allens were staunch Puritans who stressed the importance of family because it formed the core of Puritan society. Decades passed, however, and the New Englanders’ religious stress on family was increasingly replaced by a more secular one that revolved around economic and social ideas. Rather than maintaining mankind’s relationship with God, family was now about ensuring the next generation survived and carried on the family’s traditions and values.

Those early Allens discovered that successful land speculation was the key to their family’s self-preservation. They were a risk-taking, ambitious group that traversed the Connecticut frontier, taking part in the creation of new towns, such as Windsor, Litchfield, and Cornwall. While some were successful, others were not. The successful accumulated land in these new towns. They left it to their children when they died and ensured that the next generation not only had a home, but an opportunity to enhance the family’s social status. It was a lesson that Joseph passed down to his sons. Early on, he taught them that “next to religion landed Property was the most substantial,” recalled Levi. Further, he raised them on tales of their ancestors’ bravery that inspired them to become leading communal figures. As the leader of the new frontier town of Cornwall, Joseph was an example for Ethan to follow. 

Joseph and Ethan had a close relationship. He taught Ethan how to physically survive the frontier and instilled him with liberal and Enlightenment ideals. Ethan was devastated when his father died suddenly in 1755. He placed familial survival over his own ambitions to become a gentleman and cut his education short to return home and look after them and the farm. Nevertheless, he attempted to lead an adventurous life in the decade after Joseph’s death. Adventures, however, turned into misadventures. The one solace from this decade was his discovery of Dr. Thomas Young, a New York and Yale physician and intellect, who continued Ethan’s education on John Locke and other Enlightenment figures. The teachings from his father and Young would form the bedrock of the beliefs that he expressed during his self-proclaimed leadership of the New Hampshire Grants from the early 1770s onwards. In addition to the importance he attached to his family, Locke and liberty were closely intertwined with the nucleus of his allegiance during the Revolutionary War.

As revolutions swept across the British Atlantic world in the eighteenth century, New York found itself in a unique position for the thirteen colonies. After the colony had argued with New Hampshire for years, King George III decided in 1764 that the land twenty miles east of the Hudson River to the Connecticut River’s western bank belonged to New York. This region, however, was filled with settlers who received land grants from Benning Wentworth, New Hampshire’s Royal Governor, and they were not willing to accept New York’s authority lying down because it demanded they pay exorbitant quit-rents, thus requiring them to pay for their land twice. Ethan, a man yearning to follow his father’s example and lead a community, arrived in the Grants in the late 1760s and led the settlers in a revolution against New York in the 1770s that eventually culminated in the Republic of Vermont’s creation in 1777.

It was during the Vermont Revolution that Ethan most demonstrated the close relationship between his belief in Locke and liberty and his inherent mission to protect his immediate family. In 1773 he created the Onion River Land Company with his brothers and cousin, while their wives and sisters remained at home to look after the families and oversee the farms with their children. By the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775, they had accumulated a land empire, namely in the west Grants, that amounted to some 70,000 acres worth more than $100,000. Such figures would ensure Allen’s immediate and wider family would be sustained for many generations to come. If New York, however, successfully brought the settlers to heel, then his empire, and, in turn, the future of the Allen family was in serious jeopardy.

As he led the Green Mountain Boys in a campaign of terrorizing the Yorker settlers and authorities on the ground, in the press and publications he expressed what J. Kevin Graffagnino calls a “backwoods reflection” of Lockeanism in property and liberty that was used to rally the settlers to protect his land empire. Self-preservation, he declared in his pamphlet A Brief Narrative of the Proceedings of the Government of New-York (1774), was “[t]he spring and moving Cause of [his] Opposition . . . to New York.” Although New York could claim jurisdiction over the Grants, he argued, their attempts to take the settlers’ land by “force without color or pretence of law,” consequently declaring war on the “numerous families settled upon the land,” meant that they forfeited their right to govern the settlers. Borrowing Locke’s social contract theory, Allen highlighted the binding natural agreement between the governed and governors that stipulated the subject’s right to rebel against the ruler if the latter clearly endangered the former’s natural rights of liberty, life, and property. To preserve these rights, Allen insisted, the settlers had to be attentive to New York’s Machiavellian designs, for to allow tyranny to go unchallenged “would [leave one] by law . . . bound to be an accessory to his own Ruin and Destruction, which is inconsistent with the law of Self-Preservation.” This stress upon self-preservation highlights the influence of the Allen psyche on his participation in the Vermont Revolution. He used it to portray himself as a populist leader, which would earn him support of the Grantees because he knew that he could not fight New York alone. The settlers’ land and liberty, therefore, supplemented his mission to secure his immediate family’s land and liberty. Nevertheless, in later years he evidently cared for the settlers and was sincere in his fight to defend them from New York, then Britain, and then the Continental Congress.

Until the Revolutionary War, he hoped George III would intervene and validate his and the settlers’ land. When the war commenced, he quickly joined the American cause because of his loyalty to liberty and his belief that it would best protect his and the settlers’ land. He had “felt a sincere passion for liberty” and Britain’s “first systematical and bloody attempts at Lexington [and Concord], to enslave America, thoroughly electrified [his] mind, and fully determined [him] to” fight with the Patriots.

Ethan’s Revolutionary War experience was short but eventful. After seizing Fort Ticonderoga on May 10, 1775, he served as liaison for the Continental Army during the summer, but the British then captured him on September 25 after he brazenly attempted to seize Montreal. For three years he languished in prison. He returned to Vermont in 1778 and immediately set about persecuting New Yorkers and Loyalists alike through the Courts of Confiscation. To him, they were one and the same. Simultaneously, he pushed the Continental Congress to accept Vermont into the Union.

Acceptance, however, was far from forthcoming. In 1779 and 1780, Congress appeared ready to decimate the region in the event of an American victory. It encouraged New Hampshire and Massachusetts, as well as New York, to submit their claims to the land. It also appeared willing to sacrifice the region to Britain by refusing Vermont access to the Continental Army’s arsenal at a time when Vermonters were growing increasingly fearful of a British invasion from the north. Trapped between a potential British invasion in the north and Continental Congress in the south, “Vermont,” Ira Allen remembered, “was in a forlorn situation.”

Determined to secure his family’s land and liberties, as well as those of the Vermonters, Ethan, with the aid of Ira and Levi, undertook negotiations with Britain about returning to the British Empire. Allen survived by playing both sides of the conflict against one another. He gave both the U.S. and Britain the impression that Vermont wanted to be on their side, therefore sowing confusion and buying the state more time to figure out how it could survive. He sincerely hoped Vermont would enter the union, but he was willing to explore other avenues to secure those things he cherished most: family, liberty, and Vermont. Allegiance in the American Revolution was highly fluid, especially among those regular colonists who experienced multiple occupations by both sides. In recent decades, historians have demonstrated that self-interest trumped patriotism in many cases: survival, family, community, and profits all transcended patriotism, dictating what side a colonist took during the Revolutionary War. In this respect, Ethan Allen was not unlike many other regular colonists.

Ultimately, Ethan retired from public life after the Revolutionary War’s conclusion and died in 1789. Imprisoned for high treason in Quebec in 1797, Levi Allen wrote a diary that contained many poems about his family and friendship, as well as an autobiography. In his diary, he insisted Ethan was “No Brother in the first place” and wrote a poem about his siblings that excluded Ethan. In Levi, there was an apparent firmness to stand by family through anything. Ethan, however, was not disinclined to sacrifice one member in the case of liberty, thus demonstrating his complex allegiance. Unfortunately for Levi, he was sacrificed on liberty’s altar, and it was evident that this still rankled Levi after Ethan’s death. Levi would die in a Burlington prison a financially-broken man in 1801.

 

Further Reading

The history of Vermont and Ethan Allen are not well known outside of the state. I hope that my research project will bring greater attention to the fascinating and complex history of both.

For the two best general works on Vermont’s early history, see: Chilton Williamson, Vermont in Quandary, 1763-1825 (Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society, 1949); Matt B. Jones, Vermont in the Making: 1750-1777 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939).

The historiography of Ethan Allen can be split into two groups: the traditionalists and revisionists. Whilst the traditionalists mythologize and canonize Allen’s character, the revisionists demonstrate Allen was a much more complex figure. For traditionalist work see: Walter Henry De Puy, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Heroes of ’76 (Buffalo: Phinney & Co. 1853); Willard Sterne Randall, Ethan Allen: His Life and Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Jared Sparks, The Life of Col. Ethan Allen (Burlington: C. Goodrich & Co., 1834). For revisionist works see: Michael A. Bellesiles, Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993); John J. Duffy and Nicholas H. Muller, Inventing Ethan Allen (Lebanon: University of New England Press, 2014); Charles Jellison, Ethan Allen: Frontier Rebel (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1969).

For edited writings by Ethan, Ira, and Levi Allen see: Levi Allen, “The Autobiography of Levi Allen,” ed. Michael A. Bellesiles, Vermont History, 60 (Spring 1992), 77-94; Kevin Graffagnino, ed., Ethan and Ira Allen Collected Works, 3 vols. (Benson: Chalidze Publications, 1992). 

 

This article originally appeared in May, 2022.

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Benjamin Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His project is titled “Loyalism in Vermont and the Northern Borderland, 1749-1791.” It aims to provide a comprehensive account of how Loyalists in the region experienced the American Revolution, as well as analyze the nature of allegiance during civil war and revolutions. He has also written for the United States Study Online (U.S.S.O.), Journal of the American Revolution, Borealia: Early Canadian History, and Historical Perspectives. Presently, he serves as Social Media Co-Ordinator for Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA) and is a tutor at the University of Edinburgh.

The guest lists are a sea of dinner dates and surnames. Their value for the president was to help him remember whom he invited and when. Their value for us lies in the names themselves. The inclusion of particular guests at any given dinner reflects what was happening in Congress, in the courts, in the military, and in foreign affairs. The lists confirm the presence of historical figures in the city and contradict assumptions (Dolley Madison was not his surrogate hostess and yes, Aaron Burr was at dinner several times after the Hamilton duel). They speak to the relationship between Federalists and Republicans, the place of women in political society, and the uniqueness of time and place. They do not, however, tell us anything about the dinners themselves: no menus, no hints of conversation, no stray comments on an evening’s success or failure.

This article attempts to remedy that absence by giving readers a look behind the scenes of a Jefferson dinner. If he were a lesser host with a lesser purpose, such details might be of little consequence, but Jefferson was a master politician who chose hospitality as a method for wielding power. For eight years, he skillfully combined traditional elite dining with an anti-monarchical ideology and Virginian sociability in a way that pleased his dinner guests and promoted his own agenda. For that reason, the mechanics of such an evening make a worthy study for readers interested in further exploring Jefferson’s social politics. For the rest of us, the particulars of a Jefferson dinner provide not only a primer on the art of entertaining but also offer a glimpse into what it was like to party with the third president. 

The Menu

The food served at the Jefferson’s table was prepared by chef Honoré Julien. Steward Étienne Lemaire supervised the staff and oversaw the grocery shopping. Assisting Julien was, first, fourteen-year-old Ursula Granger Hughes, an enslaved young woman who stayed for a year before Jefferson returned her to Monticello. He replaced her with fifteen-year-old Edith (Edy) Hern Fossett, who arrived from Monticello in 1802. Fossett’s sister-in-law, Frances (Fanny) Gillette Hern, joined her in 1806. Under Julien’s tutelage, both Fossett and Hern became accomplished in French cookery.

The kitchen staff did not leave a record of the food they served, nor did Jefferson, but occasionally a guest recorded their dinner in a journal or letter. Jefferson’s secretary, Isaac A. Coles, wrote of a dinner served in 1807 to the president’s cabinet: “Soup, Bouilllie Bear [boiled boar], a quarter partridge with sausage & cabbage a french way of cooking them. Turkey, potatoes, rice spinnage [spinach] Beans—salad pickles—a ham of bacon in the center of the Table—second course a kind of custard with a floating cream on it, & at the bottom of the table, apples in closed in a thin toast a french dish, on each side four dishes & three in the middle 3 course olives apples, oranges & 12 other plates of nuts &c.” Of a dinner given in 1802, Manasseh Cutler wrote that he and nine other Federalists were treated to rice soup, braised beef with gravy, mutton, ham, a loin of veal, “fryed Eggs,” “fryed beaf,” and a “Macaronie” pie that tasted of onions (and was not much liked by Cutler).

The main course never went without wine. One member of Congress counted eight varieties at his dinner. Guests drank what they wished while Jefferson played the benign host, neither encouraging consumption nor censuring it. As for dessert, it might be highlighted with ice cream in a warm pastry or a variety of pies, followed, after the cloth was removed, by a course of fruits, olives, and nuts. Sometimes the president brought out slices of the mammoth cheese, a 1,235-pound block of Republican goodness presented as a gift on New Year’s Day 1802 and showcased in a room of its own. 

The Guests

Jefferson reserved the majority of his dinners for members of Congress at tables of between ten to fifteen guests. Sometimes seated among the legislators were high-ranking officials, a personal friend, or a distinguished visitor to the city. Not recorded, but at the table on any given night, were his secretary, any residing houseguests, and his sons-in-law during the years when they served in Congress. The president invited congressional wives and grown daughters to dine at least once a season, sometimes twice. Women of the cabinet, of the judicial courts, and of the foreign legations also received invitations during the congressional season, as did the wives of prominent federal and district officials. On occasions of mixed company, Jefferson extended his hospitality broadly. He invited, for example, not only Secretary Robert Smith and his wife to dinner on January 11, 1805, but also their three houseguests. At that same table sat John Quincy Adams, his wife Louisa Catherine Adams, her mother, and three of her sisters.

Each year, Jefferson left for Monticello after Congress recessed in the spring, returning within six weeks to handle business and host his annual Fourth of July reception. During this time, he held a round of dinners for prominent residents of the city. Of the twenty or so dinners given each summer, about a half dozen included women, some of whom had dined with Jefferson during the congressional session. Summer and winter combined, the president’s staff served well over 700 guest “plates” spread across eighty-nine dinners in the first twelve months of the records alone.

The Invitation

Jefferson normally sent invitations out a few days before an upcoming dinner, although he was not averse to issuing last minute requests to refill seats left vacated by declining guests. Congressman William Plumer noted one such incidence in 1803, and in 1807, local elite Anna Thornton wrote in her diary: “Had the carriage at the door to go to farm, [but] Dr. T received an invitation to dine with the president, therefore we staid.” The invitations asked for an arrival time of “half after three.” On congressional invitations, Jefferson added “or at whatever later hour the house may rise.” His relaxed hospitality differed from that of the first president whose dinners began promptly. “I have a cook,” General Washington told late-arriving congressmen, “who never asks whether the company has come, but whether the hour has come.” 

Whereas “The President of the United States” requested the pleasure of one’s company on invitations issued during the Washington and Adams administrations, it was “Th: Jefferson” who did so during the third president’s terms. Republican William Branch Giles maintained that Jefferson addressed invitations under his own name so as not to be obligated to invite “gentlemen of different politic’s” or those who “abuse him in speeches in Congress,” but Federalist Plumer thought the format excessive. “It is Th: Jefferson not the President of the United States that invites,” he wrote, but “were he not the President I presume I should not be invited.”

Jefferson sent out one, maybe two, invitations a season to Federalists who waited on him at the start of the congressional session. Republicans routinely received multiple invitations. Because he took pains to keep a peaceable table, the president initially invited Federalists and Republicans on separate evenings. Later, when there were fewer Federalists, he sprinkled them among tables of congenial Republicans.

The Dinner

Jefferson’s guests entered the President’s House through the north portal, which led directly into a large entrance hall. Francis Few, whose Uncle Gallatin was secretary of the treasury, dined at the executive mansion in 1808. She wrote that upon arrival, a servant showed them into a room where they were greeted by Jefferson’s secretary. “After a while the President made his appearance he bowed and the strangers present were named to him—he then took a seat himself and his example was followed by the gentlemen who since his arrival had been standing—he joined in the conversation but did not monopolize it—in about half an hour dinner was announced and we were handed into another room.”

Jefferson designated two rooms of the President’s House for dining, the “Public Dining Room” to the west of the north entrance and the “Common Dining Room” on the east side of the south portal (today’s Green Room). Jefferson referred to the latter as the “Small Dining Room,” although at approximately 28 by 23 feet it was large enough to hold, among other pieces, an “elegant side board,” two glass cases for storing the silver and tableware, an “extra large Mahogany Dining Table in 6. pieces,” fifteen dining chairs in black and gold, with thirty-four similar chairs awaiting use in an unfinished room. 

Much has been said about the president’s use of dumbwaiters and round dining tables. The dumbwaiter that Jefferson employed was not the mechanical service elevator that we think of today. It was a free-standing tiered tray that acted as a portable sideboard for food and dinnerware, and a common feature in genteel homes. The small dining room included a large mahogany dumbwaiter and four smaller ones. At working dinners, a dumbwaiter near each guest cut down the flow of servants and helped ensure privacy. Later, Jefferson requested the installation of a revolving set of service shelves in a door frame near the state dining room and there may have been a set built for the Common Dining Room.

Jefferson’s friend, Margaret Bayard Smith, wrote three decades after the fact that the president’s dinner guests “encircled a round or oval table where all could see each others faces.” She may have meant the “oval breakfast table” recorded in the 1809 President’s House inventory, but that is the only dining table, of several, designated by shape on the list. This author found no other guest who wrote of eating in the round. To the contrary, guests referred to the “foot” and “head” of the president’s table in their writings and sometimes mentioned their being seated “above” or “below” another guest, both indicative of a traditional dining table.

At the dinner Frances Few attended, fourteen guests dined with Jefferson. They sat where they might at a large mahogany table prepared with an array of food and wines. “—without the least ceremony,” wrote Few, “[the president] seated himself at the head of the table and immediately began to help himself and those around him.” There was not “a profusion of Dishes on the table,” wrote Catharine Akerly Mitchill of another dinner. “He gives, however, plenty of food, well cook’d, and served up in elegant stile. All the vegetables were in silver Basins or Dishes with covers. The rest was on China Dishes.”

Benjamin Henry Latrobe reported that Jefferson had but three rules at his table: “no healths, no politics, no restraints.” The first rule contradicted the dinner practice of President Washington who raised his glass “with great formality [and] drank to the health of every individual” round the table. “Everybody imitated him,” wrote one guest, “. . . and such a buzz of ‘health, sir,’ and ‘health, madam’ . . . never had I heard before.” In contrast, Jefferson neither issued toasts nor encouraged formalities. His relaxed style of entertaining, although less ceremonious than one might expect of a presidential dinner, encouraged intimacy and put guests at ease—a term used repeatedly by those describing their evening. 

As to a rule of “no politics,” John Quincy Adams wrote of a dinner conversation that moved from the contrariness of the French Revolution to the difficulty in finding fit characters for federal appointments. William Plumer, at a dinner in late 1806, listened as Jefferson commented on topics ranging from the Aaron Burr conspiracy to diplomatic affairs with Spain. It was not political conversation that Jefferson disapproved of at his table, but political arguments. He found no joy in a lively debate, either with his meals or elsewhere.

Louisa Catharine Adams recalled that after dinner everyone retired to the drawing room “in the french fashion, Ladies and Gentlemen together.” More often, the ladies withdrew to the sitting room first, leaving the men to linger at the table before joining the women for tea and coffee. The crowd thinned at dusk, hastened by Washington’s dark and ungraded streets. Evenings at the President’s House were then reserved for a domestic time. During these hours Jefferson might be found playing on the floor with his grandchildren or discussing lunar observations with Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt—peaceable hours “in the society of my friends” before a new day and a new addition to his dinner records began.

Further Reading

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson introduced the dinner guest records in Volume 44 (1 July to 10 November 1804) and it continues to run portions of the records as they align chronologically with each volume. The papers of Samuel L. Mitchill and his wife, Catharine Akerly Cock Mitchill, are available online through the Clements Library, University of Michigan. The Anna Maria Bordeau Thornton papers are available online through the Library of Congress, as is “The President’s House, February 19, 1809, Furniture Inventory.” Three more sources, The Diary and Autobiographical Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams: 1778-1850, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale, and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, are not available online as of publication date. Information on the White House interiors was found in Patrick Phillips-Schrock, The White House: An Illustrated Architectural History. Information on Jefferson’s staff, free and enslaved, was found in Lucia Stanton, “A Well-Ordered Household: Domestic Servants in Jefferson’s White House,” White House History (Winter 1806). The same issue includes Charles T. Cullen’s “Jefferson’s White House Dinner Guests,” illustrated with scans of the dinner guest records.

 

This article originally appeared in May, 2022.

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Merry Ellen (Melly) Scofield is an associate editor with the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University. Her research centers on nineteenth-century social Washington and includes work on the power of women in early Washington, the social politics of Thomas Jefferson and Dolley Madison, and the first ladies of the Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison administrations.

When facilitated responsibly, historical role-play can be an invaluable educational method because it encourages empathy and taking ownership of one’s participation in the classroom. Historical role-play enables students to imagine themselves in the role of historical actors, envisioning issues that faced them from a first-person perspective.

Creating a Space for Nuance, Complexity, and Representation

Before the pandemic and before my time at the institution, our American Revolution unit featured a role-play simulation where classes spent two days on the Boston Tea Party, adapted from the Old North Church’s simulation of the Sons of Liberty. Each girl role-played a white man, and they debated independence. The sides of the discussion were Patriots seeking independence versus Tories loyal to King George III. Students gained an understanding of the unfair taxes that helped motivate revolution, and they learned surface-level arguments for and against independence. Since my colleagues, students, and I always worry about finding enough time to cover a wide range of diverse perspectives, this academic year the senior U.S. History teacher encouraged me to adapt the early American historical role-playing simulation from the Boston Tea Party into something new.

I created an early American women’s tea party where students role-play from a diverse list of Revolutionary-era women. For each woman, I provided one secondary source and one primary source. For example, for Abigail Adams I provided a biographical webpage from FirstLadies.org and her “Remember the Ladies” letter to her husband, digitized by Massachusetts Historical Society. For Phillis Wheatley, I provided a biographical webpage from the National Women’s History Museum and Wheatley’s poem on tyranny and slavery in the colonies from 1772. The assigned topic of discussion remained independence, and we also considered how American independence affected an ideologically and racially diverse group of women. 

White Patriots included Abigail Adams, Margaret Corbin, Mary Katherine Goddard, Mercy Otis Warren, Hannah Winthrop, and Penelope Barker. Penelope Barker spearheaded North Carolina’s equivalent of the Boston Tea Party. White Loyalists included Mary Dowd and to a limited extent Theodosia Burr. African Americans included Phillis Wheatley, Peggy Gwynn, Elizabeth Freeman, and Margaret Thomas. Native Americans included Konwatsi’tsiaienni, also known as Molly Brant, and Madam Sacho.

The assignment asked participants to write out answers to the following questions in preparation for the simulation:

First, what is the name of your assigned role, and what is her position in British colonial society?

Second, what are your role’s interests in supporting/opposing America’s move to independence and nationhood in 1776? How does this person stand to benefit or lose from a separation from Great Britain? For those of you whose roles are women who were more active during the war then before, try to project back from their experiences to what they might be concerned about at the war’s onset? How might they anticipate the advantages or challenges that emerged during their life?

Third, what are the broader interests for the British colonies in building a new nation? Or why might it be better to stay part of the British empire?

Fourth, what would be an acceptable outcome to the crisis for your role? What would your role like to happen?

The early American women’s tea party assignment enables learning outcomes that the previous Boston Tea Party had prevented. The girls learn that Black, Indigenous, and white early American women played integral roles in politics and society. Including Black and Indigenous women’s perspectives illuminates the lives of people in early America for whom American independence was not beneficial. Thus, these diverse experiences matter for shaping historical narratives. For instance, Black women did not all either oppose or support independence. Due to the realities of either enslavement or emancipation, early American Black women’s interests were highly nuanced. Neither white colonists nor white Britons intended to aid African Americans substantially. These dynamics add scholarly sophistication to the classroom.

I facilitated this simulation twice during the 2021-2022 academic year and watched my colleague facilitate a third. Whenever possible, my colleague and I both let students choose their parts, hoping that this approach would enable agency and empowerment.

In one of my simulations, Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren passed notes across the room. The notes, which I was still finding days later, didn’t have real words on them, just scribbled lines. They used the resources that I provided from Massachusetts Historical Society’s online primary sources to discern that Adams and Warren were friends in real life. As material culture, the notes suggested the girls’ enthusiasm for this activity.

The previous Boston Tea Party simulation likely made independence seem more automatic by presenting a traditional narrative. The early American women’s tea party, however, frames independence as not inevitable and not even necessarily as a good idea. For example, in one of my classes, Mercy Otis Warren relayed a story about how a British Loyalist physically beat up her brother. She rambled on about it. After a long pause, a Mexican exchange student playing Loyalist white woman Mary Dowd quipped, “What did he do?” The room erupted in appreciative laughter. Essentially, rather than assuming that the beat-up Patriot was an aggrieved victim as the American colonists often perceived themselves, this student conveyed the possibility that maybe the British aggressor had valid motives. Beneath the laughter lay an understanding that the Patriot did not have to be in the right. This signified a new way of thinking. We were questioning the assumptions built into national mythmaking regarding the inevitability and even righteousness of American independence.  

The four Black women historical figures are Phillis Wheatley, who was enslaved; Peggy Gwynn, who self-emancipated in part thanks to British efforts but returned to enslavement after the war; Elizabeth Freeman, who filed a lawsuit to win her freedom in Massachusetts in 1781; and Margaret Thomas, who was a free Black woman working in Valley Forge. Through the role-play, students absorb that while all enslaved people sought freedom, some were more likely to receive it from Americans and others from the British, suggesting that neither American nor British empires protected the interests of African Americans. Neither independence nor Loyalism promised their rights. 

While some students feel less inclined to participate in daily classroom discussions, and in graded ones they might participate only for the sake of their grade, some students comment that role-play can be less intimidating than sharing their own opinions. Indeed, most students participate repeatedly throughout the simulation. A few speak only once or twice. Even if a student elects not to speak, the written component would protect their grade, and at minimum they would be treated to lively historical nuances unfolding around them.

Navigating Historical Trauma 

The early American women’s tea party comes with at least one serious challenge: how can educators use role-play to teach vast early America and incorporate diverse voices without retraumatizing students of color? What if a white student role-plays as a Black person? What if a Black student role-plays as an enslaved person? The first time that I facilitated this new activity, for example, a white student playing Phillis Wheatley repeatedly debated a Black student playing Mercy Otis Warren. The Black student found herself representing a white woman, ill-equipped to advocate for African Americans within the setting. I messed up here. After recapping as a class, however, I dare presume that everyone directly involved ended up feeling okay. I learned a significant amount, too, and with subsequent simulations I initiated transparent discussions about problems that might arise. Due to the traumatic nature of history itself, the risk of retraumatizing already marginalized students looms over role-play.

Before I facilitated the simulation a second time, I inquired what problems my students foresaw. My students are brilliant, compassionate, and thoughtful. In many cases their insights stem from their own diverse geographical and racial backgrounds. I never received pushback about doing a role-play exercise likely due to a combination of the lead U.S. History teacher’s previous experience with them, my students being driven to follow instructions and earn top grades, and the sense of trust that I built with them over time. After I explained the assignment and before we decided who would play each part, I facilitated a discussion that took seriously the possibility of reproducing historical trauma. Further, asking students what problems they anticipate seems more effective and empowering than telling them. I ask them what could go wrong. For example, a Black student might consider whether they want to take on the perspective of a white Patriot who might be complicit in enslavement, an enslaved person, a British Loyalist, or an Indigenous person before they choose. Having many options helps. One student told me afterward that acknowledging and discussing potential problems beforehand was helpful for making an opportunity for learning rather than miscommunication. Considering these dynamics before they unfold is a best practice.

Yet, responding to my question about possible challenges, one student asked whether we might miss out on the important perspectives of the “Founding Fathers.” To the contrary, these pedagogical decisions aim in part to combat dominant narratives about the almighty white male Founders. The question of independence signified much more than a discussion between Loyalists and Patriots. The higher goals of representation and nuance were worth the challenges that accompany integrating diverse voices.

Historical narratives consist of more than a few people in the same place at one time carrying out actions. Students understand that these early American women were never all in the same room together at the same time. Some were more active in the years leading up to the American Revolution, while others were more active during the war. The early American women hailed from Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, both Carolinas, and elsewhere. A few were enslaved and not free to travel on their own. The challenges of communicating across geographies, perspectives, and time reinforce the fact that those historical narratives and perspectives are complicated and not linear.

Although the course of history is not necessarily decided in a room of teenage girls sipping tea beneath their KN-95 masks, neither is it determined by a singular mob of white colonists (or colonizers) appropriating a Mohawk identity while throwing tea from a ship into the sea. Only the former dispels myths and resists homogeneity. The early American women’s tea party creates a space for nuance, complexity, and representation. After all: no taxation without representation.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the lead U.S. History teacher Larry Pratt for copiloting this new activity with me. Thank you, Brandon Graham, Matthew Sudnik, Lauren Lassabe, and Tim Lacy for reading early drafts of this article. Above all, thank you more than I can express to my students for exploring vast early America with empathy and nuance.

Further Reading

For reasons why many enslaved Africans, Loyalists, Native Americans opposed American independence, see Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 2016).

For a condensed history of the role of racism in declaring American independence, see Robert Parkinson, Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

For the importance of centering Black and Indigenous perspectives when teaching vast early America, see Karin Wulf, “Why the history of vast early America matters today,” Aeon (15 July 2021).

For best practices for historical role-play in the classroom, see “How to – and How Not to – Teach Role Plays,” Zinn Education Project (15 September 2019).

 

This article originally appeared in May 2022

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Rebecca Brenner Graham is a History Teacher at the Madeira School. She earned her Ph.D. in history from American University in 2021. 

Whatever it was called, Central America possessed a unique geographical position that had attracted the attention of merchants, politicians, and men of science for three centuries. Cartographically, it was often located near the middle of world maps, literally at the center of the Americas. On some hemispheric maps of the era, the land linking the continents tapered so severely that the isthmus almost disappeared. Squint and it vanished. 

That was the point. Here was land that could become water. To some outsiders and regional elites, the narrowness of the terrain coupled with the existence of rivers and lakes turned isthmian land into aqueous treasure. Spanish imperialists recognized this value immediately. After all, Christopher Columbus’s voyages—which led to centuries of Spanish colonialism in the Americas—had been motivated by the search for a fast sailing route between Europe and Asia. As early as the sixteenth century and continuing until independence in the early 1820s, Spanish cartographers emphasized cities, coasts, lakes, and rivers on otherwise nearly empty maps of the region. Despite its global imperialism and interest in existing Central American waters, the Spanish Empire never constructed an interoceanic waterway.

The end of Spanish rule of the region coincided with a spike in U.S. interest in canal construction. In the 1820s, canal projects sprung up all over the U.S. Inspired by the Erie Canal’s linking of the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic seaboard, some men of business and politics expanded their canal dreams beyond U.S. national boundaries.

No longer constrained by the limits of natural waterways, canal dreamers of the 1820s believed they could apply the latest scientific knowledge and engineering techniques to “improve” nature anywhere. A deep waterway that connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans appealed to merchants looking to increase U.S. trade with China, India, and the western coast of the Americas. Having overhunted the Atlantic populations of marine mammals for their blubber and oil, New England whalers envisioned shortening their lengthy voyages to find surviving Pacific pods. And U.S. politicians eyed a shortcut to sovereignty over the Oregon Territory and other desirable west coast lands. The project of constructing Columbus’s interoceanic water route, they believed, would transform world history, and prove very profitable.

Perhaps the most popular interoceanic canal plan of the era involved the reengineering of the same Central American bodies of water that had captured Spanish cartographic attention for three centuries. Just north of the land’s narrowest point, Lake Nicaragua (or Lago Cocibolca) occupies about half the width of the isthmus. This large freshwater lake drains to the Caribbean Sea through the winding eastbound San Juan River. In the other direction, the enormous Pacific Ocean looms only about twelve miles away from the lake’s western edge. The combination of so much water and such little landmass offered what many interpreted as the ideal location for a canal. For elites in Europe and North America, Central America became an X on a hemispheric treasure map.

But the precise terrain for the potential canal—let alone the history, politics, demographics, hydrology, geology, and biology of Central America—remained an unknown variable in determining the waterway’s physical and financial feasibility. The more foreigners coveted Central America’s treasure, the more they wanted to know about the region. What other assets did the unknown isthmus hide? Did it harbor silver mines like its northern neighbor Mexico, or nurture medicinal herbs like the quinine of Peru to the south? More than just the nation’s name proved mysterious.

In his instructions to the first U.S. diplomatic agent assigned to Guatemala City, Secretary Adams conveyed the U.S. government’s lack of knowledge of the region: “of all the countries of the Southern Continent, it is that with which we have, hitherto, the fewest relations, and concerning which we have the least information.” Determined to remedy this lack of data, Adams ordered, “The first and constant object of your attention . . . will be to obtain and to communicate to this Department . . . information, as well respecting the physical condition of the country, as the moral and political condition of its inhabitants.”

Retrieving this information proved deadly. The first recipient of the instructions died in Norfolk, Virginia, before ever departing for Guatemala City. The second man died mid-journey in the Florida Keys. When the third diplomat to receive this order finally arrived in Central America, he blamed Spain for consigning “this fair portion of the earth to oblivion” and for keeping the region “shrouded from the eye of science.” No data could be obtained; it had to be made.

Some Central American leaders wanted the new nation to support the scientific work that would reveal the region’s value to the world. “To know if the opening of the Canal is possible,” one Guatemalan representative argued on the floor of the national Congress, “it is necessary to survey all the land through which the canal line must pass from the north coast to the south coast: it is necessary to do leveling, to determine heights and set degrees: it is necessary to establish the general map of the State, and the special one of the San Juan River, of Lake Nicaragua, and the dividing land between it and the Pacific Sea.” He confirmed, “None of this has been executed so far with the necessary accuracy. No leveling has been done: no heights have been calculated: no positions have been determined. We do not yet have maps, plans, or exact sketches.”

True, Central America might not have the kinds of maps, plans, or surveys that Adams or this legislator would have liked canal engineers to evaluate, but Central America was not quite “shrouded” from science. In her fascinating new book, The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks and Practical Enlightenment, 1784-1838 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Sophie Brockmann offers significant evidence that Central America had a long tradition of producing useful knowledge. Brockmann argues that, from the late colonial period through the first decade of independence, Spanish officials and elite Central Americans pursued a “practical Enlightenment that would offer prosperity by applying scientific knowledge to the management of landscapes” (1). Although these efforts “did not succeed in completely transforming Central America’s economic fortunes,” Brockmann insists that “we should take seriously many scattered short reports from across the kingdom, mainly in matters of agriculture or natural history, sometimes infrastructure, geography, or medicine, which reported attempts at improvement, progress, and pride in members’ achievements” (7).

The kinds of data that could lead to Central American canal construction were precisely the forms of “practical” knowledge sought first in the eighteenth century by closed Spanish administrative circles and later by a broadening swath of the population. With the 1790s foundation of the Real Sociedad Económica de Amantes de la Patria de Guatemala (referred to by Brockmann as the Economic Society) and its weekly newspaper the Gazeta de Guatemala, Central American merchants, government officials, priests, and other elites began to publicly circulate their own knowledge about botany, demography, geology, climate, geography, and more.

But this data was often not rendered legible to the outside world. Prioritizing local use over European standards, the Gazeta rejected Latin taxonomies in favor of local terms for plants and animals. As Brockmann explains, the use of Indigenous names “might make it easier to identify plants in the future with the help of local informants” (96). This made the Central American case studies of rice, red-dye-producing cochineal beetles, and the medically useful herb rox iyuin umùl (a Kakchiquel term) less universally comparable but more actionable in a system dependent upon the knowledge and labor of Indigenous people who did not necessarily speak Spanish (let alone Latin). The rejection of European scientific standardization coupled with the occasional royal shutdowns of the society and its press obscured the knowledge production of the region to outsiders. As Brockman concludes, this meant that information produced in the region became distinctively and often exclusively Central American.

The priority of producing locally useful knowledge extended not only to agricultural experimentation but also to geography. Although Spanish administrators participated in “a lively geographical tradition,” the documentation they produced was cloistered in Spanish archives (121). Trying to fill what they perceived to be a “geographical vacuum,” the Economic Society began gathering geographical information in the 1790s (121). Society members, however, emphasized prose description over mapmaking and local use over universal norms. To make its articles accessible to its readers, the Gazeta renounced the use of “mathematical abstraction”—latitude and longitude—in geographical descriptions (123). This meant Central American geographical knowledge could not be easily mapped onto the globe.

By the era of independence, the society and the Gazeta had been producing and circulating geographical descriptions for decades, but the prioritization of local usefulness over adopting universal methods made the existing data inscrutable to outsiders. As the new nation’s political and economic leaders sought investment from foreign capitalists, “cartographic representations were in short supply” and “existing maps of Guatemala gained a rather frosty international reception” (222).

Quenching this geographical demand would not be easy. Colonial era attempts suggested some of the issues that continued after independence. In the 1790s, Nicaraguan elites sought precise maps of the potential canal route, but their proposal was rejected by Guatemalan merchants who did not want their trade monopoly challenged. These sorts of interregional rivalries continued after independence, and by the 1830s, contributed to what Thomas L. Karnes described as the region’s “failure of union.”

But even if the Guatemalans supported the charting of a Nicaraguan canal in the 1790s, crown officials likely would have refused permission for the project because Spanish officials feared conflict with the Indigenous residents of the proposed route (150-51). Although the canal route was technically in the province of Nicaragua, much of the eastern side of the isthmus—including the San Juan River—had never been fully conquered by the Spanish.

Often referred to by their British allies as the “Mosquito Indians,” several Indigenous nations (including Miskitú, Mayangna, and Rama communities) controlled this territory. While elites in the cities of Léon, Granada, and Managua may have advocated for the construction of a canal, they did not know the land and water as well as the people who inhabited and controlled access to the proposed route. This meant that the creation of scientific information—the kind of topographical calculations, geological surveys, and climate studies necessary for engineering a canal—demanded not only the deployment of trained scientists to the region but also negotiation with people who quite understandably might not want engineers planning how to turn their land into water.

Throughout Central America, what looked like uncharted yet potentially fertile “wilderness” to European-descended reformers remained, in their view, “the precious secret of the Indian population” (159). Brockmann explores perceptions of Indigenous people’s “secret knowledge of the countryside” primarily in terms of “roads and paths” (207).  Nonetheless, the Indigenous men and women who inhabited the would-be canal route surely possessed riverine and lacustrine knowledge even though they did not record this information in the forms most useful to Madrid, Washington, or Guatemala City. Why would they? Miskitú sovereignty over the region had not been recognized by the Spanish or by the new country forming in Guatemala City. The Federal States of Central America did not include the State of Miskitú; the new nation hid vast Indigenous territory within the provinces of Nicaragua and Honduras. As this suggests, empty spaces on Central American maps often reflected not a vacuum of knowledge but purposefully hidden politics.

And as the imprecision of the country’s name at its moment of U.S. recognition suggests, the politics of Central America were unstable in the mid-1820s. Later in the decade and into the 1830s, as civil war destroyed the Central American union, foreigners mined the colonial archives and traveled the countryside producing and circulating scientific data that conformed to European conventions and would be more useful to foreign capitalists than local farmers. Science in Central America became less provincial just as the provinces became their own nations with the familiar names we know today.

Foreign canal dreamers from the U.S., Netherlands, France, and Britain would employ this scientific knowledge to promote interoceanic waterway projects in the Republic of Nicaragua throughout the nineteenth century. In the early twenty-first century, more than a hundred years after the opening of the Panama Canal, interest in constructing a waterway through Nicaragua persisted. Reversing the direction but not the dream, the most recent canal contractor sought a waterway to link his nation, China, with its Atlantic trade partners.

Plans for a Nicaraguan waterway have a long history, but there’s something special about the 1820s quest for a Central American canal. Without access to the types of scientific data that informed later proposals, the would-be canal constructors of this era blindly and optimistically envisioned the creation of a world-changing waterway. They proceeded despite their ignorance. In place of information, they relied on their imaginations. Dreams substituted for data. Ultimately, their canal dreams proved impractical, but quite influential. The idea that an interoceanic waterway could and should be constructed shaped international diplomacy, launched scientific investigations, and contributed to speculative enterprises on both sides of the Atlantic.

Unknown to them, the region was not quite as mysterious to everyone. Before I read Brockmann’s book, I was inclined to agree with Adams and the authors of my other primary sources who argued that the isthmus was an obscure place that was scientifically unexplored. Brockmann’s research and her insightful arguments taught me not only that plenty of knowledge production occurred in Central America before the 1820s but also that this “practical” information was designed to serve locals rather than foreigners. Applying these conclusions to my own research, I realized that the people who best knew the isthmian land most valued by the rest of the world likely protected their knowledge. The inhabitants of Central America’s aqueous treasure might want to keep their lands a mystery to keep their lands.

The early nineteenth-century systems of knowledge creation and dissemination that served Central American locals rather than foreigners provides an answer to the question of why an intriguing place central to the Americas and a thousand miles closer to Washington, D.C. than San Francisco was so unknown in the early U.S. republic. Moreover, because this terra was intentionally incognita, its significance to U.S. history has also been obfuscated. The primary sources claimed ignorance, and the secondary sources generally looked no further.

But what can we know from what early Americans didn’t know? It is hard for historians to see the significance of something unknown and unbuilt. We tend to truck less in undoable dreams and more in the definitively done. The Panama Canal incontestably made history, but could history also be made of imagined waterways? I think so. If we squint, we can see treasure hidden in the absence of firm historical ground.

Further Reading

Sophie Brockmann’s The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks and Practical Enlightenment, 1784-1838 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a thorough investigation of early Central American science. For Central American political history in the era of independence, see Jordanna Dym’s From Sovereign Villages to National States: City, State, and Federation in Central America, 1759-1839 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006). For the collapse of the Central American republic, see Thomas L. Karnes, The Failure of Union: Central America, 1824-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961). The older historical literature on the Indigenous nations of Eastern Nicaragua often focuses on British influence in the region. For example, see Craig L. Dozier, Nicaragua’s Mosquito Shore: The Years of British and American Presence (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985). Recent journal articles by Damian Clavel, Matthew P. Dziennik, and Caroline A. Williams center the Miskitú in the region’s history. For a current map of the homelands of Miskitú, Rama, Mayangna, and other Indigenous communities, see https://native-land.ca/. My thinking on the cartography of Central America owes debts to many of the essays in Jordana Dym and Karl Offen, eds., Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); I am especially drawing on essays by Dym, Offen, Matthew Restall, W. George Lovell, and Christopher H. Lutz. For U.S. hemispheric diplomacy and popular perceptions of the new Spanish American nations, see James E. Lewis, Jr., The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783-1829 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (New York: Liveright, 2016).

The quotations from State Department documents can be found in various microfilms at the National Archive at College Park, Maryland. John Quincy Adams’s narrative account of Central American Recognition can be found in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s John Quincy Adams Digital Diary for August 4, 1824. The Central American legislator who argued for canal data was later the president of the post-independence Economic Society; his speech can be found in José del Valle and Jorge del Valle Matheu, eds., Obras de José Cecilio del Valle (Guatemala, 1929). I am grateful to James Irving for his eloquent Spanish to English translations and to Michael Dube, Julia Rodriguez, Joshua Greenberg, Jordan Taylor, and an anonymous Commonplace editorial board member for their insightful suggestions.

 

This article originally appeared in April 2022.

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Jessica Lepler is associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Her first book, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2013), won the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is currently writing a book on the 1820s quest for a Nicaraguan interoceanic canal.

On August 30, 1895, May Bragdon and her friends enjoyed “a perfectly delightful day” in and around Rochester, New York. After dinner, the group mounted their bicycles and rode to Ontario Beach Park, arriving just at sunset for a performance of “Pinafore” at the pavilion, where they also relished “the stars & gorgeous moon & colored lights & flowers & sweet air!” Afterward, May and her companions returned home on their “wheels.” “After the first long hill it was simply inexpressibly fine,” May gushed in the pages of her diary that night. “The still, dewy night—the out door odors—the white smooth ro[ad]. The gorgeously bright moon & stars & the sense of freedom & exhilaration of the wheel’s motion!” 

Thanks in part to the widespread adoption of the bicycle, the late nineteenth century represented a new era of “freedom & exhilaration” for American women, especially well-to-do white women like May Bragdon and her friends. Although a few intrepid athletes had experimented with the “pennyfarthing” bicycle earlier, in the late 1880s, the introduction of the “safety” bike—featuring pneumatic wheels of the same size—vastly expanded the popularity of “wheeling.” By the mid-1890s, estimates of the number of US bicyclists ranged between 2 and 4 million.

The cycling craze crisscrossed the nation, with cycling clubs and events clustered in western cities such as Denver and Phoenix as well as in eastern cities such as New York and Boston. Enthusiasm for cycling also crossed racial lines—to a point. Although affluent African Americans took up cycling in the 1890s, wheeling remained a racially segregated activity. Even so, Black women eagerly adopted cycling—and excelled at it. Boston native Katherine Towle Knox joined the League of American Wheelmen in 1893, a year before that organization officially excluded African Americans. Knox gained acclaim for her competitive racing, trick riding, and cycling costumes, and she used her unique status to challenge racial segregation. Boston also was home to Irish, Italian, and Chinese cyclists.

Whatever their race or ethnicity, only well-to-do Americans could afford to take up cycling. The high cost of bicycles in the 1890s—between $25 and $50 for a new “wheel,” the equivalent of $800 to $1600 today—was prohibitive for working-class Americans. But above all, cycling was a quintessentially feminine pursuit; indeed, the “safety” bike featured a dropped frame that accommodated women’s long skirts.

Although members of other groups certainly cycled, the prototypical cyclist in Victorian America was a well-to-do white woman. Public discussions of cycling revolved around the “New Woman,” invariably depicted as young, white, and attractive. Illustrator Charles Dana Gibson popularized the image of the turn-of-the-century’s liberated woman with his drawings of the “Gibson Girl,” who eagerly engaged in sports. Popular publications reinforced the association between women and cycling. “The typical girl of the present period is the bicycle girl,” announced Ladies’ World in 1896. That same year, Bicycling for Ladies offered both practical and fashionable tips for female cyclists. 

Victorian social commentators often remarked upon the ways in which bicycles transformed women’s lives. Suffragist Susan B. Anthony proclaimed that the bicycle has “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” More cautiously, gynecologist Robert L. Dickinson warned against the sensual possibilities of cycling. While feminists and physicians debated the benefits of the bicycle, the diaries and photographs of one quintessential “New Woman,” May Bragdon, provide greater insight into how this social trend affected daily life.

In the mid-1890s, May and her friends—all middle-class, white, single professionals in their twenties and thirties—went “bicycle-crazy.” They eagerly purchased and compared bicycles, wholeheartedly adopted new fashions adapted to cycling, and enthusiastically supported new spectator sports featuring bicycles, such as races and expositions. But most of all, they thoroughly enjoyed the new freedoms offered by bicycles, which granted them increased mobility, offered new opportunities for outdoor recreation, and led to more spontaneous socializing in both mixed-gender and same-sex groups. 

The cycling craze affected both men and women in May’s social circle, which included her brother Claude and his coworker John Constantine “Con” Hillman; her friend Helen Elizabeth “Ned” Dutcher and her fiancé, Will Orchard; sisters Alice, Emma, Mary, and Nellie MacArthur; siblings Charlotte (“Chat”), Frank, Hamilton, Helen, and Katharine (“Kate”) Davis; sisters Agnes, Florence, Mabel, and Mary Rogers; and neighbors Mary “Matie” Hawley, Edith Joiner, and Lura Davis. But it is clear from May’s diary and photographs that cycling most profoundly changed women’s lives, offering them unprecedented opportunities for physical mobility and social freedom.

May acquired her first “wheel,” dubbed “Isabella,” in 1893, but while she enjoyed a few “lovely” rides on her own, she confessed that she rode “so seldom” that she “got pretty tired.” This changed in 1895, when her friends began to borrow, rent, and finally purchase bicycles of their own. By that time, May had a new mount, christened “Diana.” She and her friends celebrated their purchases by having May, the group’s unofficial photographer, take Kodaks of them with their steeds. 

Although May initially donned “an old shirt waist & skirt” to ride, she and her friends soon saw the benefit of specialized cycling attire: “short skirts” for women and knickers for men. May and her female friends did not go so far as to adopt the loose trousers worn by “bloomer girls,” although May apparently wore bloomers beneath her skirt. Perhaps she adopted this style after a challenging ride she took with Kate Davis, who “had a good deal of trouble with a ‘floppy’ dress—against the wind.” 

Instead of donning cumbersome clothing, avid cyclists “dressed for freedom.” While some enterprising young women, like the “Rainy Daisies” of New York City, adopted knee-length skirts, and some dress reformers advocated split skirts or even bloomers, May and her female friends rejected what she deemed the “funny costumes” of the “Bloomer girls.” Instead, they wore modest, but tailored, A-line skirts that stopped a few inches above the ground, just above the tops of their boots. Even so, this style offered women considerably more freedom of movement than skirts that dragged on the ground. 

It is likely that May and her friends also dispensed with corsets, rendered unnecessary by the loose-fitting shirtwaist blouses that helped define the “New Woman” in turn-of-the-century America. Certainly May’s photos of herself and her friends sprawled on the ground during breaks from their rides suggest that they were relatively unencumbered by restrictive undergarments. 

But for May and her friends, fashion was just as important as freedom of movement. The women each sported a “bicycle hat”—a flat-brimmed straw hat with a ribbon —and May splurged on “a new tailor made bicycle skirt & coat” made from a fine brown wool and a “new silk waist” in a brown-and-cream plaid fabric. Men were not immune to bicycle fashions. One “beautiful warm spring day,” Con Hillman arrived at May’s in “a stunning new bicycle suit—cap to shoes,” which “looked fine.” Con’s ensemble included tall boots, knickers, a turtleneck, a jacket, and a wool cap with a brim.

Fashion was important, at least according to official tastemakers, because cycling was intended as a courting activity. Certainly for some in May’s circle, this was the case. May remarked that during one cycling trip with a mixed-gender group, Helen “Ned” Dutcher and John Stull “‘jollied’ each other, as usual about ‘matrimony’ and we all ‘bon-mot’ed’ for an hour.” 

On another occasion, May, Con, Ned, and Will Dutcher, Ned’s fiancé, loaded their wheels onto the train to Niagara Falls, then rode “into town by the loveliest river road,” where “Will pointed out his and Helen’s future home.” They spent the morning at Goat Island, “riding up and down beautiful woody paths and roads,” and then Horseshoe Fall, “where Con & I left Ned & Will at the top & walked down to the brink for half an hour or so of enjoyment of the glories.” In the afternoon, “Mary & Warren appeared,” and the three couples “went across Suspension Bridge & flying up the Canadian shore on a broad—flower-bordered path—Then a duck’ thro the spray—a board-walk & a nice cinder path for a mile or two or more . . . a most thrilling ride on a narrow board ‘Lover’s walk’ that turned at right angles and wound around and about a lovely isle . . . and finally across a funny little Suspension Bridge which ended in a summer house.” After admiring the views, “finally we collected ourselves and rode back again—fast—thro’ the pretty places we had seen, looked at the falls—got drinks of the water & finally reclined on the cool grass in the Park till about train time.” All told, they clocked “about 18 miles wheeling.” 

But the day was not over. After arriving at the Rochester train station, the group still had a long and “very beautiful” ride home:

First the beautiful gorge and a glimpse of Lake Ontario shining under the sun and the beautiful Lewiston Valley. Then fair fields & a cool sweet breeze and lovely sunset—a clear pinky sky & few little blue clouds—and soon after a beautiful—almost full—moon which came up and sailed forth to make a night of it—and such a night!

May’s account of this excursion—which began at 7 a.m. and did not conclude until 11 p.m.—showcased beautiful scenery, outdoor exercise, and pleasant company (“We amused ourselves variously—but well,” May remarked). What it did not include was any mention of chaperonage, a staple of nineteenth-century courtship among white, well-to-do Americans. For courting couples, the cycling craze helped to usher in an era of informal socializing, a sort of transition between the restrictive courtship rituals of the Victorian era and the modern practice of dating.

Cycling culture offered individual women, as well as couples, greater freedom in daily life. Although amenable to men’s company, May also thoroughly enjoyed single-sex gatherings. One “fine day” in June 1896, May rode to the Davis house along a new cinder path. “The view is gorgeous all along Highland Ave. and the path runs under the trees very delightfully,” she thrilled. At the Davises’, May dined with Helen, Charlotte, and Frank Davis as well as with their friend Lura Baker. After dinner, Lura went home, Frank went out for the evening, and Helen “Ned” Dutcher joined the group. “Charlotte, Ned & I tried each other’s wheels and saddles &c. &c.” May explained, and the women discussed creating an all-female bicycle club, “The Little Sunbeams,” with Helen as president, Lura as pacemaker, Charlotte as “Lady,” Ned as treasurer, and May as carpenter.

The following day, May recorded another leisurely afternoon that revolved around cycling with other women. “I had a desire to ride today,” she remarked, and so at noon, she took a solo ride through Strathallen Park, then “rode home with Mary [MacArthur].” After dinner, she went back out:

I rode ‘Diana’ to Ned’s & found Edith just arriving . . . We sat around—out doors & in & upstairs & down & talked & finally Ned & I rode & walked down with Edith & I treated them to phosphate on the way. Didn’t get home till considerably after 10—15 miles today.

On yet another occasion, although too much of “a sleepy-head” to accept Mary MacArthur’s invitation to ride in the morning, May found herself unable to resist later that day.

I was just about to settle down to reading when the day was so lovely & Diana so [al]luring that I got on & rode away down to Mary’s, to find her & Alice most willing to come too . . . We rode out to beautiful Genesee Valley Park. We got off on the hill & I took the girls’ pictures under a tree. Then we sat on the grass & listened to the orchestra . . . & then rode out to Sunset seat (thro’ “Lovers’ Lane”) and there I took their pictures again . . . We were going home but I couldn’t bear to leave the beautiful sunset behind, so I suggested we go down Genesee St. . . . Then we rode around those streets & down Chili Avenue into the glorious red West.

The following year, beginning mid-afternoon, May, Helen Davis, Ned Dutcher, and Edith Joiner rode from the Davis home to Sea Breeze Park, 7.5 miles along the Culver Street trail, picking up two other acquaintances, Susan Hoyt and Grace Holmes, along the way. As usual, May enjoyed the ride immensely: 

The path is much improved and is beautiful—especially the last three miles or so—one rides under the trees beside the grain fields and with whiffs of pure air from over the bay and fields of wild flowers the other side.

At the turnaround point, the group joined the YWCA’s “Bicycle Tea,” and enjoyed “sherbet and cake &c.” “The grounds overlook Ontario the Beautiful—which was calm & blue,” May described the scene. 

The adventure continued:

Helen took us by winding ways thro’ beautiful places & at last emerged on a point overlooking the lake . . . [where] we lay prostrate and watched the lake . . . & told fortunes (a little) and were happy. Then we walked back by the railroad and a pretty bridge and a bit of picturesque road. Then lemonade . . . and started for home about 6:15—and it was a gorgeous ride. The sun was low enough so that the sky & clouds & fields took colors of blues & purples and rose & green—and the air was sweet and it was good to be alive. We rested again near the poplar tree and ate Ned’s sandwiches & Edith’s cookies . . . Helen Davis invited us all home with her to have ‘scrambled eggs &c.’ and Ned, Edith & I accepted . . . We sat about an hour at table (“Chat” with us) recounting our experiences and having a talk. Rode home together about nine o’clock.

In these and other accounts, May highlights the freedom that she and her friends enjoyed. They went out on their own as well as in pairs and groups, with no chaperone and no curfew. They reveled in natural beauty, fresh air, and the feeling of “flying” on their wheels. They set their own schedules, making spur-of-the-moment decisions to meet up with friends, to stop to enjoy refreshments or other entertainments, or to extend their excursion or try a new route. 

May Bragdon’s diaries and photographs demonstrate how bicycles liberated well-to-do white women in Victorian America. Suffrage veteran Susan B. Anthony declared that a woman riding a bicycle was the perfect “picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”  May expressed the same sentiment more succinctly: “Wheels are fun.”

Acknowledgment

This piece could not have been written without access to the digitized version of the May Bragdon Diaries, Rare Books, Special Collections & Preservation, University of Rochester River Campus Libraries. Special thanks to Andrea Reithmayr for her assistance with this collection.

Further Reading:

For overviews of cycling in the US in the 1890s, see Margaret Guroff, The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016); Heather S. Hatch, “The Bicycle Era in Arizona,” Journal of Arizona History 13, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 33-52; David V. Herlihy, Bicycle: The History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Mark E. Pry, “’Everybody Talks Wheels’: The 1890s Bicycle Craze in Phoenix,” Journal of Arizona History 31, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 1-18; Robert A. Smith, A Social History of the Bicycle (New York, NY: American Heritage Press, 1972). For statistics on cycling, see Michael Taylor, “The Bicycle Boom and the Bicycle Bloc: Cycling and Politics in the 1890s,” Indiana Magazine of History 104, no. 3 (September 2008), 215.

On women and cycling, see especially Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990); see also Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Reframing the Bicycle: Advertising-Supported Magazines and Scorching Women,” American Quarterly 47, no. 1 (March 1995): 66-69; Sue Macy, “The Devil’s Advance Agent,” American History, October 2011, 42-45; and Lisa S. Strange and Robert S. Brown, “The Bicycle, Women’s Rights, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Women’s Studies 31, no. 5 (2002): 609-626.

On Katherine Knox, see Grace Miller, “Breaking the Cycle: The Kittie Knox Story,” May 26, 2020, Unbound, https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2020/05/26/breaking-the-cycle-the-kittie-knox-story/#.YfwryvXMIwT. On African Americans and cycling, see Andrew Ritchie, “The League of American Wheelmen, Major Taylor and the ‘Color Question’ in the United States in the 1890s,” Culture, Sport, Society 6, nos. 2-3, (2003): 13-43. For ethnic and racial diversity among cyclists, see Lorenz J. Finison, Boston’s Cycling Craze, 1880-1900: A Story of Race, Sport, and Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).

On cycling and fashion, see Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021), especially ch. 1. Quotations from Susan B. Anthony and Ladies’ World may be found on pp. 34-35. I am indebted to Dr. Rabinovitch-Fox for corresponding with me about cycling fashions.

On fears that cycling would encourage masturbation, see R. L. Dickinson, “Bicycling for Women from the Standpoint of the Gynecologist,” American Journal of Obstetrics 31, no. 1 (1895): 24-37. Many thanks to Dr. Donna Drucker for sharing her forthcoming essay on Dr. Dickinson with me. Donna J. Drucker, “Shaping the Erotic Body: Technology and Women’s Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century American Medicine,” is forthcoming in Histories of Sexology: Between Science and Politics, ed.  Alain Giami and Sharman Levinson (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, n.d.), 139–52.

On changing courtship practices among middle-class white Americans, see Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Lisa Lindquist Dorr, “Fifty Percent Moonshine and Fifty Percent Moonshine: Social Life and College Youth Culture in Alabama, 1913-1933,” in Manners and Southern History, ed. Ted Ownby (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007); Heather Ashley Mulliner, “Between the Lines: Friendship, Love, and Marriage in the Progressive-Era Correspondence of Robert and Louise Line” (M.A. thesis, University of Montana, 2012); and Christina Simmons, Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

 

This article originally appeared in April 2022.

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Anya Jabour is Regents Professor of History and Director of the Public History Program at the University of Montana. The author, most recently, of Sophonisba Breckinridge: Championing Women’s Activism in Modern America (University of Illinois Press, 2019), she currently is writing a biography of Katharine Bement Davis (1860-1935).

Britain was at war with France, and the Browns knew that their vessel would be in constant danger of capture. They had thus prudently acquired an insurance policy through a Philadelphia broker shortly after the vessel departed Providence in early 1760. While it was possible to acquire an insurance policy that covered only the natural and typical hazards of a sea voyage (such as storms, rocks, or water damage), the Browns instead opted for a more comprehensive (and more expensive) policy that covered them against “all Risques, English, &c.” This meant that their underwriters would indemnify them for losses occasioned by the capture of their merchant ship by any vessel whatsoever—French enemies or British compatriots. The policy’s coverage against British capture was important, as it turned out, since the Browns’ brig was in fact taken, on its return from Saint Domingue, by a British privateer: a schooner carrying a letter of marque from the British government that allowed it to legally capture and claim certain oceangoing vessels and their cargoes.

Why would the Browns’ own compatriots capture their vessel? The British captors discovered that the vessel was carrying molasses and sugar, which it had evidently purchased from the French at Saint Domingue in exchange for provisions and naval stores. Far from virtuously recovering British prisoners, then, the Providence vessel had actually been peddling strategically important supplies to the French enemies, paying duties, to boot, that supported the French war effort. The captors were unable to produce paperwork documenting this transaction, but they argued that the presence of French molasses and sugar was sufficient proof that such a trade had taken place, and further noted that the Browns’ vessel suspiciously lacked “all the legal, necessary, and customary Papers, which all fair Traders ought to have and carry.” During the trial, several of the brig’s mariners confirmed that New England provisions had been landed and molasses and sugar taken in. Under prevailing doctrines of international law, the captors argued, the Providence vessel was therefore engaged in “illicit and contraband Trade” and was fair game for British seizure. 

To legally claim their prize, the captors conveyed the Browns’ brig to the British vice admiralty court at Nassau, in the Bahamas. The court examined the evidence and confirmed the Brown’s vessel as a lawful prize, granting it to the captors as their property.

The Browns believed this loss was covered by their insurance policy and demanded compensation from their underwriters.

Two of the Browns’ underwriters, David and William McMurterie of Philadelphia, balked. They had insured only a small portion of the Browns’ vessel (£100 in Pennsylvania currency) and they had received a premium of £23 for doing so—which was high, but far from exceptional for a wartime insurance policy. Still, the McMurteries did not think they were obligated to pay. The Browns took them to court.

When the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania decided that the McMurteries were obligated to pay the Browns, the McMurteries took the case to the British Privy Council, which heard appeals from the American colonial courts. The underwriters contended that the Browns had violated both the specific terms of their insurance policy and the implicit terms of every insurance policy by trading contraband goods with their nation’s enemy. The underwriters argued, in addition, that the Browns’ vessel’s flag of truce was “specious”—that is, that that the Browns had no real intention of making a prisoner exchange. There had been no French prisoners on the voyage to Saint Domingue, and there had been only two “English subjects” on the returning voyage. The McMurteries told the court that the capture was therefore “not a Loss within the Meaning of the Policy in Question, the Appellants having no Knowledge of the Intention of the Respondent, and his Partners, to carry on such illicit and contraband Trade.” 

The McMurteries’ argument, on its face, seems compelling, and the Browns did not counter the facts put forward. But the Browns’ defense of their actions tells us a great deal about the conflicting legal regimes of the British Empire in the middle of the eighteenth century, as well as the ways that conflict vested authority in the marine insurance business and rendered it profitable.

The Browns justified their behavior by pointing to two sources of authority. The first was the Governor of Rhode Island. They affirmed that the vessel was “in the actual Employ” of Stephen Hopkins, “Esquire, Governor, Captain-General, and Commander in Chief” of Rhode Island. Their flag of truce was his genuine issue, they asserted, and they had the paperwork to prove it. What this meant was that the precise number of prisoners on their vessel, headed in either direction, was irrelevant—by the authority of Hopkins’ papers, they were genuine flag trucers.

The second source of authority by which the Browns defended their actions was their insurance policy itself. The Browns pointed out that their policy was a comprehensive one, which not only covered capture by British vessels, but also included a specific wartime proviso that the underwriters were not allowed to argue about the legality of capture. “The Assurers,” they pointed out, “promised to pay the Loss, without further Proof, than the said Policy; and to prevent any Dispute thereafter about the Legality of the said Insurance, they promised to pay at the usual Time without any Delay, or intention to plead the Goods were not lawful Seizures by Custom-house Officers in Providence only excepted, as by the said Policy of Insurance more fully may appear.” In other words, it was irrelevant whether or not the Browns’ activities were adjudged in the end to be legal. They had purchased an insurance policy that explicitly protected them against the inconvenience and cost of a lengthy dispute about whether their activities were legal or not. The matter was not supposed to get to law in the first place.

What would the Privy Council decide?

Britain’s Privy Council had been taking an increasing interest in commercial law over the course of the eighteenth century. Like the British admiralty courts, which operated as a distinct system, the Privy Council grappled with the colonists’ boundless enthusiasm for illegal trade, and with various legal complications brought about by the expansion of privateering. In aggregate, increasing numbers of cases appealed from the American colonial supreme courts were overturned by the Privy Council, demonstrating the Council’s newfound inclination to assert its own control over enforcement of the Navigation Acts.

This, then, seems to be a familiar story of expanding imperial authority—one of the sort that seems to prefigure the American Revolution. One might assume the Privy Council would leap at the chance to support underwriters who, in this instance, were actually trying to force merchants to adhere to a stricter interpretation of the law. To take the McMurteries’ side would seem to bolster the authority of the empire, to affirm strict interpretations of the laws of truce, to help stamp out contraband trade with the enemy, to support the privateers who helped enforce the laws of trade, and to encourage the alignment of insurance policies with British law. In short, it would seem to be a great opportunity to assert the authority of the empire over unruly traders who placed profits over loyalty.

However, matters were not so simple as a unified empire opposing conniving free traders, because the empire had many component parts and many different interests. Flag trucing was an extremely useful practice for cash-strapped colonial governments, in that it allowed them to offload expensive prisoners and recover subjects, at the price only of a private shipowner’s for-profit voyage. To support trade under flags of truce, then, was to support a prospering trade for the empire’s own colonies. The revenue produced by this trade stabilized and empowered local imperial administrators, who generally operated under a great deal of pressure.

The captors of the Browns’ vessel, moreover, did not have the purest of patriotic motivations. They were privateers—which is to say, they were involved in a public-private partnership in their own right. They hunted disobedient merchant ships and made it harder for their fellow subjects to engage in contraband trade, but they only did this because it profited them personally to do so. Public and private were already intertwined in many ways on both sides of this imperial dispute.

Marine insurance itself was a business that flourished during periods of war and uncertainty. It had a complex relationship with the British state. On the one hand, it allowed British merchants to pool the risks they took in trading, and to share these risks deliberately with their fellow subjects. Britain’s maritime trade had been extraordinarily successful during the eighteenth century, and Britain’s maritime insurance business deserved some of the credit for this success. On the other hand, and more troublingly, the thriving British insurance business also brought security to the French enemy, who could legally purchase British insurance policies throughout the Seven Years’ War. To make matters worse, insurance was particularly profitable whenever Britain appeared vulnerable and wherever the empire was weakest. And as the Brown’s case demonstrates, insurance facilitated mercantile maneuvers in the legally murky spheres of the empire at war—which was where the greatest profits were often to be found.

In the end, the power of the insurance contract prevailed. The Privy Council upheld the decision of the Pennsylvania court, dismissing the McMurteries’ appeal and requiring them to pay the Browns, heedless of their questionable flag-of-truce trading and the strong evidence that they were trading with the enemy. While no documentation survives to explain this particular ruling, we can surmise that the Privy Council apprehended the importance of confirming the legitimacy of a business contract—even, paradoxically, a contract that asserted its right to supersede the question of legality.

The Privy Council’s decision sheds light on the extraordinary power of maritime insurance, not only as a business that allowed merchants to mitigate their risks and profit from hazard but also as a mechanism for merchant self-governance alongside or outside the state. To put this another way, insurance provided merchants with a framework for sidestepping questions of legality altogether, and this framework was so secure that the British legal system itself acknowledged it.

As histories of the American Revolution often tell us, the eighteenth-century British Empire possessed an extraordinary administrative and juridical apparatus that grew more powerful over time. This empire also hosted hordes of self-interested private traders, who sought out every possible opportunity for profit, testing or crossing the physical and legal boundaries of their empire. But one cannot merely imagine this conflict as one between a unified empire and its unruly individual subjects. For the empire was, itself, made up of many different component institutions, with distinct and competing aims. To the extent that we can think of the British Empire as a unified force at all, we must acknowledge that it needed its unruly traders, and the unruly traders needed their empire. And if we trace the productive but frequently strained relationship between traders and empire, we will find that it ran through yet another peculiar and unruly institution, one that lay only partly within the purview of the British Empire. That institution, of course, was the marine insurance business.

Further Reading

The Privy Council case from which this story is drawn is M’Murtrie [McMurterie] v. Brown[e] (1765). The cases of the appellant (McMurterie) and the respondent (Brown or Browne; the spelling evolved) and other relevant records are digitized in Appeals to the Privy Council from the American Colonies: An Annotated Digital Catalogue: Part 1, ed. Sharon Hamby O’Connor and Mary Sarah Bilder, with the assistance of Charles Donahue, Jr. (Ames Foundation, 2014). The appellant’s case, respondent’s case and other documentation is available here. For more on the Privy Council in the eighteenth century, see Mary Sarah Bilder, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). On trading with the enemy during the Seven Years’ War, see Thomas Truxes, Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). For the verdict in this case, see “At the Council Chamber Whitehall the 16th day of July 1765…” Privy Council Register, 1 Oct. 1765 to 27 Aug. 1766 (PC 2/111), 277, in Anglo-American Legal Tradition: Documents from Medieval and Early Modern England from the National Archives in London. This source is digitized and displayed through The O’Quinn Law Library of the University of Houston Law Center, Aug. 2015.

 

This article originally appeared in April, 2022.

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Hannah Farber is an assistant professor of history at Columbia University. Her research focuses on political economy and commercial culture in early America and the Atlantic world. Her first book, Underwriters of the United States (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/UNC Press, 2021) describes how the transnational business of marine insurance influenced the establishment and early development of the American republic. Additional areas of research include early modern globalization, money and finance, commercial ephemera, interest rates, and civil court.

Whitman surprises the reader by portraying himself as a boy, despite the fact that he turned forty in 1859 and had long sported a gray beard. The word “boys” does many things in the poem. It signals that the poem is a poignant dream, a wish-fulfillment, a foray into the imagination. It makes the lovers fully equal—not prophet and acolyte, or poet and reader. It makes the armed thieves less menacing, suggesting that their excursions are more playful than destructive. It makes the lovers less erotic—more “innocent” of lust—than if the poem read, “We two men together clinging.”

Whitman creates a beautiful tension between the images of marauding lovers, armed and fearless, and two boys clutching each other’s fingers and clinging to each other. To cling is to hold together, to adhere as if glued firmly, or to have a strong emotional dependence. When people “clutch fingers,” it is often because they are afraid. In “We two boys,” love is aggressive and yet frail. A “foray” can mean a raid, a sudden invasion, but also a tentative attempt to do something in a new field.

If the boys are fragile, they are, nonetheless, outlaws who mock statutes, wrench cities, and alarm priests, menials, and misers. It is interesting that Whitman disdains “menials,” given his lifelong embrace of working men. Perhaps he associated menials with feudal serfs, rather than with democratic workers. Whitman seemed to love certain types of working men—young, white firefighters, drivers, mechanics, sailors, and farmers—more than menial laborers stuck in factory jobs, domestic service, and other less autonomous roles. 

Whitman wanted to “alarm priests” and become the prophet of a new religiosity, centered on American democracy and loving camaraderie; he wanted Leaves of Grass to be something of a new Bible.  The Book of Genesis, in describing the creation of Eve out of Adam’s rib, has Adam say, “This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh,” and then editorializes, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” The Hebrew word for “cleave,” dabaq, can also be translated as “cling.” The Book of Deuteronomy uses the same word in demanding that people cling to God, as in the command “Him shalt thou serve, and to Him shalt thou cleave.” Instead of clinging to a wife or to God, Whitman is clinging to a fellow “boy”—fervently, deeply, and spiritually.

But if “We two boys” evinces Whitman’s spirituality, the lovers’ physicality—the clutching, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving, and dancing on the beach—gives the poem an erotic and antinomian charge. To wrench means to twist violently, injure with violent twisting, snatch forcibly, cause to suffer mental anguish, or change, especially distort or pervert. As with Whitman’s other images of twisting in the Calamus poems, his word choice hints at violence and even depravity, indicating, perhaps, a lingering uneasiness with his own homoerotic rebellion.

Although he wanted passionately to be “natural,” in his poetry and in his life, Whitman feared sometimes that he might be “unnatural.”  Nature plays a dual role in the poem. Associating the boys’ love with birds singing, fish swimming, and trees leafing makes it more natural and less alarming. Unlike much of Whitman’s nature imagery, these three images are not particularly sexual, and yet they emphasize that the boys’ love is wild and free from artificial social conventions. The singing birds and “leafing” trees also link the love to Whitman’s poetry, his wild “leaves.”

Whitman specifies that the armed, soldiering boys are making their excursions “North and South.” John Brown made his famous foray to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in October 1859 and was executed that December. Clearly, the two boys are not like John Brown—a puritanical rebel whose scorn for American statutes came from his sense of higher, sacred laws. They own no law less than their selves; they are seeking their own freedom, not anyone else’s. But by writing “North and South” Whitman creates a fantasy world in which North and South are united, not by laws and morals, but by amoral adhesion and passion.

Whitman wants love among men to become our primary civic virtue, the glue that holds the nation together—stronger than laws or government—but he also recognizes that passionate love can be exclusive and lawless. The loves of Antony and Cleopatra, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Thelma and Louise are thrilling because, even though the lovers are inevitably defeated by law and order, they free themselves for a few glorious moments. To be great means to be greater than something else; and love, they make us feel, is greater than virtue.

Several of Whitman’s great contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville, were, like Whitman, moralists with strong anti-moralistic streaks. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson praises the “nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one.” He claims that “society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” In response, he vows to follow his own god-like genius and conscience. It will not be immoral, he claims, because he will be obeying his own higher law, even if it appears like sin to others:

[M]y friend suggested, – “But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.

Thoreau, too, claims freedom from conventional morality, and links freedom to youth, gladness, and nature. As Whitman says admiringly, “One thing about Thoreau keeps him very near to me: I refer to his lawlessness—his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses.” Thoreau writes in his notebook:

Methinks that these prosers, with their saws and their laws, do not know how glad a man can be. What wisdom, what warning, can prevail against gladness? There is no law so strong which a little gladness may not transgress. I have a room all to myself; it is nature. It is a place beyond the jurisdiction of human governments. Pile up your books, the records of sadness, your saws and your laws. Nature is glad outside, and her merry worms within will ere long topple them down. There is a prairie beyond your law. Nature is a prairie for outlaws.

Thoreau sometimes feels that he owes his success to his vices, and if he repents of anything, it is his good behavior. The so-called wisdom of elders is mainly an impediment: “I have lived some thirty years on this planet,” he writes, “and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.”

Like Emerson, Thoreau emphasizes that the self-reliant man must be prepared to spurn even familial duties. Emerson says, “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me.” Thoreau adds friends to the equation: “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again . . . then you are ready for a walk.” To walk is to learn “sauntering,” the American art of going on the road or into the woods to escape from oppressive society. Thoreau needs to spend at least four hours a day sauntering through the woods, and he marvels that mechanics and shopkeepers who have to sit at work all day long do not commit suicide.

For Melville, the equivalent of sauntering is setting out to sea. As Ishmael says in Moby Dick, “I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” For Emerson and Thoreau, escaping convention is at its root a solitary venture, much as they prize their walks with each other. For Melville, part of sailing’s allure is camaraderie and the alternative society furnished by the shipmates (or, in Typee, a tribal society on “barbarous coasts”), but in Moby Dick, tragically, that alternative society falls prey to Captain Ahab’s tyrannical mania, and Ishmael ends up as he started, alone. Melville may have valued friendship more than Emerson and Thoreau, but he was no more sanguine about its powers of salvation. Ishmael and Queequeg cling together for a time, but then Queequeg vanishes into the abyss.

Whitman values his solitude, but when he sets out on the open road or strolls the city’s streets, he often wants a friend or lover to hold his hand. His rebelliousness stems from individualism, but also from passion. Because he partially suppresses the eroticism in his Calamus poems, the theme of antinomian love appears more powerfully in another sequence from the late 1850s: the Enfans d’Adam poems, which announce their theme as heterosexual love, rather than love among men. In “O furious! O confine me not,” for example, he longs to “drink the mystic deliria:” to find a “new unthought-of nonchalance;” to have the “gag removed” from his mouth, and to “court destruction,” if need be, for “one brief hour of madness and joy.”

The three poems that follow “O furious! O confine me not” in Enfans d’Adam are some of Whitman’s most powerful love poems. All three seem directed at men and could have been placed in the Calamus section, had he chosen to more fully eroticize it. “You and I—what the earth is, we are” is particularly reminiscent of “We two boys together clinging.” Whitman uses a long list to characterize the lovers, beginning 19 of the 21 lines with “We.” As in “We two boys,” the freedom of the lovers is linked closely to the freedom of nature: he compares them to plants, rocks, oaks, fishes, blossoms, suns, and clouds. Again, he uses aggressive images: predatory hawks soaring and four-footed animals prowling and springing on prey. The lovers are equal, even identical; at no point does he differentiate them (which, given Whitman’s usual patterns of language, strongly suggests that they are both male). In many of the images, the lovers are parallel—oaks growing side by side, fishes swimming in the sea together—but in one crucial line they mingle: “We are seas mingling—we are two of those cheerful waves, rolling over each other, and interwetting each other.” As in “We two boys,” love achieves liberation by spurning society; as he writes in the triumphant last line: “We have voided all but freedom, and all but our own joy.”

Perhaps because “We two boys” is explicitly about male love, Whitman does not imbue it with quite the electrifying, erotic physicality of “You and I.” In some ways, that seems a distinct loss, but the fact that “We two boys” can be read to encompass friendship and camaraderie, and not just romantic love, creates additional meanings and tensions; the poem has an electricity all its own, and, in its perfectly realized cadences, its own kind of prophetic freedom and joy.

 

Further Reading

Betsy Erkkila, ed., Walt Whitman’s Songs of Male Intimacy and Love: “Live Oak, with Moss” and “Calamus” (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011).

Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, Rescripting Walt Whitman an Introduction to his Life and Work (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

Jason Stacy, editor, Leaves of Grass, 1860: the 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009).

 

This article originally appeared in March 2022.

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Sam Magavern is senior policy fellow at Partnership for the Public Good, a community-based think tank that he cofounded in 2007 and directed until 2019. He teaches at University at Buffalo Law School and Cornell University ILR School, where he served as the Visiting Activist Scholar in 2019-2020. He received his BA from Harvard University and his JD from UCLA Law. His publications range from scholarly articles to comic books; they include a non-fiction book, Primo Levi’s Universe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and a book of poetry, Noah’s Ark (BlazeVOX, 2014). His poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Paris Review, and Antioch Review, and he is one of the poets featured in Four Buffalo Poets (Outriders, 2016). He wrote the screenplay for an independent feature film, The Last Word (Firelight Films, 2003) and worked with musicians to create a “musical novel,” Ooh La La (Mockingbirds, 2002).

The First Barbary War, also known as the Tripolitan War, pitted the United States against the kingdom of Tripoli. Shortly after Americans gained their independence, Tripoli, along with the other Barbary States of North Africa (Algiers, Morocco, and Tunis), threatened to attack American shipping unless the U.S. government paid them annual tribute in the form of money, gunpowder, and naval supplies. The United States reluctantly agreed. But in 1801, Yusuf Karamanli, the Bashaw (or monarch) of Tripoli, increased his tribute demands. When the American government refused, Karamanli declared war. President Thomas Jefferson dispatched the American Navy to deal with the crisis. The First Barbary War had begun. 

After two years of war, Jefferson realized the United States needed to change its strategy. He had hoped that a naval blockade of Tripoli harbor would be enough to compel the Bashaw to seek peace. But in 1803, the blockade weakened dramatically when the frigate USS Philadelphia grounded on a reef within Tripoli harbor, and all 307 American crewmembers were taken prisoner. To reverse America’s misfortune, Jefferson turned to William Eaton, the American Consul to Tunis. Eaton had previously lobbied the administration on a plan to attack Tripoli from land and sea simultaneously. In Eaton’s plan, the U.S. would invade North Africa and depose Bashaw Yusuf, replacing him with his brother, Hamet Karamanli, who had been exiled in a political struggle. Once on the throne, Hamet would free all American prisoners and renounce American tribute payments. Jefferson initially viewed Eaton’s plan as too risky, but in the aftermath of the Philadelphia debacle, the President approved it. 

In November 1804, Eaton and eight U.S. marines landed in Egypt, where Hamet was living in exile. Within weeks Eaton had rendezvoused with Hamet and formed an alliance with several hundred local Arab mercenaries. Eaton then led his “marauding militia” as he called them, along with the families of his Arab allies, over six hundred miles across the deserts of North Africa from Egypt into the territory of Tripoli. In a brief but intense battle, Eaton’s soldiers captured Derne, a fortified city within the domain of the Bashaw, and proclaimed it in the name of Hamet. Decades later, U.S. marines were so proud of their role in the victory that they added the line “To the Shores of Tripoli” in their now-famous hymn.

Shortly after the battle, forces loyal to Bashaw Yusuf surrounded Derne and laid siege to Eaton’s army. Yet Eaton was confident that he could easily defeat the besieging forces, march to Tripoli and free the American captives, all in as few as fifteen days. Eaton never had the chance to put his boast to the test, however, for after hearing of the fall of Derne, Yusuf agreed to begin peace negotiations with the United States. A war-weary Jefferson administration consented, and within a few days, Yusuf and the American negotiator in Tripoli agreed on terms: Yusuf agreed to free every American prisoner and to forgo all future attacks on American ships. In exchange, the United States agreed to pay $60,000 to ransom their prisoners, and to withdraw all forces from Tripolitan territory and cease cooperating with Hamet.

On May 19, 1805, the commander of the U.S. fleet sent Eaton a letter ordering him to withdraw all American marines to the U.S. frigate Constellation anchored off Derne, which would evacuate them to Syracuse, Italy. Hamet could leave with the Americans if he chose, but the Arab soldiers and their families were on their own. The terms of peace arranged between the United States and Yusuf ensured no Tripolitan soldiers would attack Americans but made no such promise when it came to the Arabs under Eaton’s command. Eaton briefly refused to comply with the order and begged his superior officer to reconsider, cautioning that if the Americans abandoned the Arabs and their families, “havoc & slaughter will be the inevitable consequence—not a soul of them can escape the savage vengeance of the enemy.” When his superior officer repeated the evacuation order, however, Eaton begrudgingly complied. Hamet saw the writing on the wall and agreed to leave.

Carrying out the evacuation proved challenging. Derne was still besieged by forces loyal to Yusuf, and Eaton feared that a panic would ensue should his Arab allies or the residents of Derne, who had not yet heard of the peace agreement, learn of the coming American retreat. To cover their withdrawal, Eaton lied to the Arabs and to the residents of Derne, telling them the U.S. frigate anchored off the coast was delivering supplies and reinforcements. To further distract his Arab soldiers from the impending evacuation, Eaton ordered them to their posts to prepare for an attack the following morning. Then, under cover of darkness on the night of June 11, 1805, Eaton, Hamet, the marines, and a handful of Hamet’s servants, quietly got into rowboats and headed out towards the USS Constellation, leaving much of their equipment, and every Arab ally behind.

Just as the final rowboat left the shore, the Arab soldiers and residents of Derne realized what had transpired. From his vantage on the ocean, Eaton described the panic that ensued:

. . . the shore, our camp, and the battery were crowded with the distracted soldiery and populace. . . . Some uttering shrieks—some execrations. Finding we were out of reach, they fell upon our tents and horses, which were left standing; carried them off, and prepared themselves for flight. . . . Before break of day our Arabs were all off to the mountains, and with them such of the inhabitants of the town as had means to fly. . . . In a few minutes more we shall lose sight of this devoted city, which has experienced as strange a reverse in so short a time as ever was recorded in the disasters of war; thrown from proud success and elated prospects into an abyss of hopeless wretchedness . . . this moment we drop them from ours into the hands of this enemy for no other crime but too much confidence in us!

Some of Eaton’s former allies scattered into the countryside, desperate to evade the besieging army, while others barricaded themselves inside the city and pledged to fight to the death rather than surrender and face likely execution. As the Constellation sailed away, Eaton lost sight of Derne and its inhabitants; the fate of those left behind remains unknown.

Just as with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the evacuation from Tripoli generated political controversy in the United States. President Jefferson had hoped the end of hostilities would cause jubilation amongst the American public. But some of the enthusiasm for the war’s end was sapped when news leaked of Eaton’s sudden retreat just as he appeared to be on the verge of victory. Some Americans were also incensed at the terms of the treaty mandating ransom to Tripoli. Federalists, the opposition party to the administration, seized on the ransom payment and the retreat from Derne as a convenient way to condemn Jefferson. In February 1806, a newspaper from coastal Maine, a Federalist stronghold, criticized ransoming the prisoners instead of letting Eaton rescue them: “How much more gratifying to the prisoners, how much more glorious to America it would have been, to have seen the strong arm of yankee bravery, breaking the iron bars . . .” In January 1806, Jefferson defended his actions to Congress in a written address, declaring that he had always envisioned the alliance with Hamet to be limited in scope. “We certainly had never contemplated,” declared Jefferson somewhat facetiously, “nor were we prepared to land an army of our own, or to raise, pay, or subsist an army of Arabs, to march from Derne to Tripoli, and to carry on a land war at such a distance from our resources.” Jefferson blamed Eaton for being too “zealous” and for misconstruing the administration’s intentions to Hamet. 

Hamet never forgave Jefferson nor the American government for what he considered a betrayal. He knew his chance of reclaiming the Tripolitan throne with the aid of the United States had passed, but he wrote several letters from his exile in Syracuse to Americans, including President Jefferson, begging for compensation “for those comforts lost by uniting my fortune to [the United States].” Eaton lobbied Congress on Hamet’s behalf, and in 1806 Congress formed a committee to investigate Hamet’s claims. Federalists seized the opportunity to publicly shame Jefferson for precipitously abandoning Eaton’s expedition. Members of the committee solicited testimony from American naval officers declaring their opinion that Eaton could have easily conquered Tripoli had his expedition been allowed to proceed. In April 1806, the committee authorized a one-time payment of $2,400 to Hamet, but Congress subsequently ceased all future assistance, closing the door forever on their relationship with the exiled Barbary prince.

Like Hamet, Eaton maintained a grudge against Jefferson. He resigned his government post and returned to America, where he publicly criticized the administration for ending the war before achieving total victory. Even in 1808, Eaton was still complaining in public about the “disgraceful treaty” that left “an ally [Hamet] . . . starving in the wretched ruins of Syracuse.” Many Americans viewed Eaton as a hero and praised him for his exploits in North Africa, but his outspoken criticisms of Jefferson earned him enemies. Federalists defended Eaton’s reputation in the hopes that his fame would act as a blot on Jefferson’s presidency, and even attempted to grant him land and a medal, but Jeffersonians in Congress voted both down. Meanwhile, Jefferson’s allies circulated stories about Eaton’s supposed involvement with Aaron Burr’s treasonous conspiracy. Eaton’s public reputation never recovered, and he died in 1811, perhaps from alcoholism-related maladies, with some evidence of having suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his campaign in Tripoli.

Studying the aftermath of the evacuation from Tripoli provides perspective on the current fallout from the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Given the intense partisanship of the Jeffersonian Era, the political attacks for the hasty peace and withdrawal from Tripoli were to be expected, but the criticisms died down within a few years as other domestic and foreign policy issues captured the nation’s attention. Over time, the retreat from Derne and abandonment of Hamet and the Arab allies became lost to history, overshadowed by a memorialization of the Tripolitan War which emphasized America’s military achievements. To apply this precedent to the current day, Republicans will do all they can to keep the ugly scenes of the evacuation from Afghanistan at the front of voters’ minds, but over time, the tragic final days at the Kabul airport may become just another sad footnote in a longer history of the war.

Comparing the withdrawals from Afghanistan and Tripoli also reveals a historical lesson: it is far easier to start a war than to end one. Neither Jefferson, nor the various presidents who oversaw the Afghanistan War, seemed to have adequately planned for the optics and related fallout of a withdrawal from their respective war zones, and the outcome of both evacuations was similarly tragic. Both conflicts also ended calamitously for the local Muslims who allied with the United States, only to be abandoned once the Americans unilaterally decided to cease fighting. As the insight commonly attributed to Mark Twain cautions us: History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme. Let us hope we do not hear this particular rhyme again anytime soon.

 

Note on Sources and Further Reading

Most of the primary sources for this essay come from Naval Documents Related to the United States War with the Barbary Powers, a six-volume edited collection of letters and journal entries of American naval personnel, compiled by the Department of the Navy in the 1930s and 1940s. Another helpful source was Charles Prentiss, Life of the Late General William Eaton (Brookfield, MA: E. Merriam & Co., 1813). Prentiss, a close friend of Eaton, published this biography two years after his death in which he detailed Eaton’s post-war criticisms of the Jefferson administration and the resultant drop in his popularity.

In the last few decades, especially after 9/11, scholarly interest in the Tripolitan War has increased dramatically. For a military history of the conflict, see Chipp Reid, Intrepid Sailors: The Legacy of Preble’s Boys and the Tripoli Campaign (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012), and Joshua London, Victory in Tripoli: How America’s War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Built a Nation (New York: Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005). For scholarship focusing on Eaton’s expedition, see Chipp Reid, To the Walls of Derne: William Eaton, the Tripoli Coup, and the End of the First Barbary War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2017), and A. B. C. Whipple, To the Shores of Tripoli: The Birth of the U.S. Navy and Marines (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991). I highly recommend Frank Lambert’s The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005) in which he expertly contextualizes the First Barbary War within the early history of the United States. Robert Parker, former American ambassador to Algeria and Morocco, provides the most thorough overview of American diplomacy with the Barbary States in the decades before the Tripolitan War in Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004). Lastly, for a thorough examination of the Tripolitan War’s impact on American politics, consult Lawrence Peskin, Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Republic, 1785-1816 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009).

 

This article originally appeared in March 2022.

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Matthew Goetz is a doctoral candidate in the history department at The George Washington University. His dissertation examines the impact of the Barbary Wars on American politics and race relations.

These publications continued to be written throughout the nineteenth century, which fed the hunger of those who were interested in the “underworld.” In addition to the flash press, other forms of 1840s and 1850s print culture that exposed the underbelly of New York included several books by journalist George G. Foster. Foster’s New York by Gas-Light included an entire chapter on the subject of sex workers titled “No. IV Prostitution in General – The Fashionable Brothel – A Description that Thousands Will Recognize – Personal Histories of Two Cyprians.” The section is quite detailed, noting how attractive the women were and some of the women’s backgrounds. For example, it describes a sex worker known as Princess Anna who began working after (apparently) consensual sex with her cousin led her to feel guilty and ask for forgivingness from her minister, who then coerced her into having sex with him. She then confessed her actions to her parents, which caused her mother to become ill and die. It also drove her father to drink, which led him to sell his farm, lose his credit, and end up in to the county poorhouse. Princess Anna’s story, whether true or false, depicted an erotic tale that could have been torn from the pages of the flash press or a brothel guide.

Another contemporary influence on the development and presentation of brothel guides were publications printed by reform organizations. Reform literature stressed the importance of staying away from vices—gambling, drinking, and sex work. They sometimes noted detailed stories of individuals who were reformed or presented horrific stories of those who were not. Some reform publications could be just as racy as brothel guides or other forms of illicit print. For example, in 1831 Rev. John R. McDowall, a reformer who published a weekly newspaper titled the McDowall Journal that spotlighted sex workers, was accused of causing arousal in young men. As historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz has discussed, McDowall’s writing caused the Third Presbytery in New York to not only convict him for misuse of funds but also to question the purity of his motives to reform sex workers.

The 1839 New York City brothel guide Prostitution Exposed, housed today at the American Antiquarian Society, adopted a reform literature persona not only to hide its contents, but also as a tongue-in-cheek joke. The guide was dedicated “To the Ladies’ Reform Association For the Suppression of Onanism” [masturbation]. The introduction claims, “Vice stalks abroad in the community – the young and the thoughtless are its victims, and how awful are its effects!” The guide switches to mocking language while portraying the writers as truly being concerned for the welfare of those who visit sex workers. The guide also stressed the dangers of visiting the houses and women in the listings, while detailing the attractive nature of the women and their friendliness in addition to their price value. The language of danger shifts from focusing on the danger of prostitution in the introduction to exposing the danger of visiting particular brothels and sex workers in the remainder of the guide. Prostitution Exposed adopted the language and fears of reformers who tended to be members of the middle and upper classes, reflecting not only moral language, but class language as well.

In addition to borrowing the language of the middle and upper classes in city guides or reform literature, publishers of brothel guides also adopted the cultural practices of the middle and upper classes. In the second half of the nineteenth century, brothel guides became more simplified and seemingly began to mimic visiting or calling cards that the middle and upper classes used to request visits among one another. Like calling cards, brothel guides such as the Gentlemen’s Pocket Directory (1876) and Visitor’s & Citizen’s Guide, or Pleasure & Amusement in the City of New York (1880), only included the madams’ name, address, and the class of the brothel. This printing layout spoke to those of the upper classes who used calling and visiting cards as a part of their communication process. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century etiquette books described the correct process, design, and name use in calling cards. Unmarried women, for example, would list their name beginning with “Miss.” Brothel listings possess a mixture of both “Mrs.” and “Miss,” as sex work was not exclusive to single women, but was also an occupation for married women. The guides targeted middle- and upper-class men by mimicking their class’s calling card practices.

Men would open the Gentlemen’s Pocket Directory (1876) or Visitor’s & Citizen’s Guide, or Pleasure & Amusement in the City of New York (1880) and see pages upon pages of calling cards—women calling and beckoning them to visit. The reader potentially did not just see a guide of brothel listings, but saw female desire in the form of cards waiting to be answered. Feeling desired would have reinforced the reader’s masculinity. That went beyond just describing houses of beautiful women for the gentlemen’s pleasure. Because the women seemed to be reaching outside of the guide—calling and desiring him—added to a false sense of domesticity as it appeared that the women were reaching out to readers on an individual level. The question was not only whose card to answer first, but also whose card could be answered. Brothel guides designed to appear like calling cards blurred the line between sex workers and middle- and upper-class women.

Poverty-stricken areas of the larger cities continued to pique the interest of the middle- and higher-classes of the late nineteenth century. Books like How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York by Jacob Riis used photographs of the tenements to magnify middle-class society’s interest in the poor. Taking tours of slums was also popular among the bourgeoisie, who fetishized and shamed those they witnessed in poverty. This was similar to the books by George G. Foster that gave detailed accounts of the sex workers and their stories of how they had “fallen” into sex work as well as the stories found in the early brothel guides and flash press. The tours went a step further than the brothel guides that gave readers the knowledge of sex workers they could potentially visit. Now bourgeois men and women were able to enter these spaces with protection and witness how “the other half lived.” The tours brought New York by Gaslight to life.

Brothel guides borrowed from other forms of print such as calling cards and guidebooks. Arguably, some guidebooks and newspapers were similar to brothel guides potentially due to the same authorship. By mimicking other forms of print that they were accustomed to seeing in their everyday world, such as city guides, brothel guides attracted the middle and upper class or those who aspired to become part those classes. The brothel guides, penny press, flash press, and guidebooks that highlighted the “underworld” of the cities magnified the already piqued interest in titillating tales as seen with the popularity and sensationalism of the murder of sex worker Helen Jewett. Brothel guides connected middle- and upper-class men to a world potentially dangerous to their reputations, but at a safe distance.

 

Further Reading:

Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840’s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)

Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).

Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Eliza Bisbee Duffey, Our Behaviour; a Manual of Etiquette and Dress of the Best American Society, (Philadelphia: J. M. Stoddart & Co., 1876)

Natasha Frost, “For Decades, New York’s Chinatown Duped ‘Slum Tourists’ with Faked Danger and Depravity Opium dens, gunfights, and poverty theater,” Atlas Obscura, accessed March 10, 2021, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/slumming-chinatown-new-york-history-fake-opium-dens.

Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

Katie Hemphill, Bawdy City: Commercial Sex and Regulation in Baltimore, 1790–1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Katie Hemphill, “Selling Sex and Intimacy in the City: The Changing Business of Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore,” in Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Wolson, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2015).

Katherine Hijar, “Brothels for Gentleman: Nineteenth-Century American Brothel Guides, Gentility, and Moral Reform,” Commonplace: the journal of early American life, accessed March 10, 2021, http://commonplace.online/article/brothels-for-gentlemen/.

Helen Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002).

Philip Sutton, “Direct Me NYC 1786: A History of City Directories in the United States and New York City,” New York Public Library, accessed March 10, 2021, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/06/08/direct-me-1786-history-city-directories-US- NYC.

Judith Walkowitz, “Urban Spectatorship,” in The Nineteenth-century Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).

 

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Andrew Ingersoll and Patricia Martinelli for proofreading and feedback, to Dr. Wendy Woloson for the many discussions on this research topic, and to Dr. Joshua Greenberg, Dr. Jordan Taylor, and board members of Commonplace for their edits, feedback, and suggestions.

Special acknowledgment to Katherine Hijar for her article “Brothels for Gentleman: Nineteenth-Century American Brothel Guides, Gentility, and Moral Reform,” Commonplace: the journal of early American life.

 

This article was originally published in March 2022.

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Brittney Ingersoll is a Historian and the Curator of the Cumberland County Historical Society in Greenwich, NJ. She received her Master’s degree in American History with a Certificate in Public History from Rutgers University–Camden. Ingersoll’s historical interests are in nineteenth-century gender, sexuality, and material culture, as well as social and cultural history.

Although deemed the dullest child of his famous preacher-father Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) possessed a Whitmanesque talent for loafing, chatting up, and playing the ham with all classes of society. When he assumed his first pulpit, he quickly appreciated how religious authority intensified his emotional and sexual appeal. (Figure 1) During the hardscrabble years of his early career and marriage, the structure of patriarchal marriage fortified his social freedom and sexual appetites. His fiancée, Eunice Bullard, had waited anxiously in her father’s house for seven years while Henry finished his education, traveled, and started his career. When he appeared unexpectedly on her Massachusetts doorstep one afternoon in 1837, he gave her three days to prepare their wedding, after which he brought her to a dismal, malaria-ridden town in Indiana. For two weeks he found it amusing to help her set up house in two dilapidated rooms above a warehouse, but after that Eunice was on her own to manage their personal life. She cleaned, cooked, took in sewing to pay the bills, and survived one pregnancy and child death after another while fighting bouts of malaria. The conditions were so harsh that when she returned to Massachusetts for a visit after four years, her own mother did not recognize her and a stranger on the train mistook Beecher for her son rather than her husband. 

Eunice’s condition did not garner sympathy in a society that prized women for their beauty and sweetness. Henry himself soon found her repugnant, a “half-wilted flower” and a martyr who was “always eager to cast herself as a victim.” When he whiled away hours chatting with fishermen on the wharf or stopping by a tavern, he was admired by townspeople, not judged for neglecting his family, while the same people heaped contempt on Eunice, dubbing her “a miserable woman.” When she complained, they assured themselves that “no one believes a word she says.” Illustrating the cultural dynamic that Cornell philosopher Kate Manne calls “himpathy”—an apt term for the misogynistic emotional economy in which sympathy is reserved for men and withheld from women—Beecher was seen as shining more brightly in juxtaposition to his dreary wife. He was charming, eloquent, and entertaining; she was a whining shrew.

Fast-forward a quarter century to August 7, 1863. Civil war was ravaging the United States, but the country’s most famous preacher was on holiday in Switzerland. As usual, Beecher was unencumbered by a wife or children, and his head was in a romantic haze. “My dear Mrs. Shaw,” he rhapsodized, “Last night as I was lying in the grass . . . & pulling crocuses . . . of a delicate pink color, they, in some subtle mode of suggestion brought you to my thoughts.” (Figure 2) 

His dear Mrs. Shaw was Sarah Blake Sturgis Shaw, whose only son, Col. Robert Gould Shaw, had been killed three weeks earlier. (Figure 3a/b) Sarah and her husband were ardent abolitionists who had encouraged their son to accept command of one of the Union’s first black regiments, the Massachusetts 54th. At the age of twenty-five Col. Shaw was shot in the chest during a battle at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. (Figure 4) 

Condolences streamed into the Shaw household from around the world, while Beecher, physically and emotionally disconnected from the war’s suffering and horror, continued his letter on Aug. 12 from Lake Como. He mused that “a mountain, like a friend, needs to be known in all its moods. . . . The joys and sorrows that are symbolized by such mighty imagery cannot sink down into the pool of little things. The loves, and worship, the enthusiasm & noble passions of a patriotic soul that, in such scenes, have been associated into these sublime forms & phenomena, must be grander, & more elevated.” Beecher bore witness to his noble, patriotic, grand, and elevated soul for seven pages, confessing in his final paragraph that the

“thunder of war at home . . . seems to me afar off, like a dream! At times, it seems unworthy to be [in] this land, worried every day with my enjoyment, while my country is in her agony! Nor am I quite eased, when I say to myself, that it is that I may the better serve her, that I am resting here. Excuse the length of my letter. Indeed, I ought to ask excuse for writing at all. But I follow my feelings. I go tonight to Milan, thence Venice, & then to France & Germany. I think [to] be in England by the middle of Sept.”

The tension he articulates between guilt and pleasure was characteristic of Beecher. Grappling with grief and suffering was not his thing. He specialized in maudlin theatrics that staged his emotions at the center of every drama. His church in Brooklyn had sent him on a six-month European holiday, all expenses paid, because in March 1863 he had shown signs of a rare depression. (Figure 5) The church board may or may not have understood that his emotional state was provoked not so much by grief over the recent death of his father as by escalating rumors about his sexual misbehavior and threats of public exposure following the death of his longtime mistress, Lucy Bowen, wife of a powerful church founder. On her deathbed, Lucy had confessed to her husband, Henry Bowen, the details of how Beecher had seduced her into an affair that they carried on in his private church study for more than a year. She also noted that she had discovered another woman slipping into Beecher’s study with a private key of her own. 

Since the earliest days of Beecher’s career, a stream of young women had declared their adoration for their pastor. In many cases, experience transformed adoration into accusations of seduction, rape, adultery, and blackmail. Evidence suggests that he fathered at least one child out of wedlock and covered the expenses of more than one abortion. Beecher had a special habit of seducing the wives of his closest friends, patrons, and protégés in the church. The husbands often suspected but were reluctant to know what they did not want to know. When they did confront Beecher, he typically cried copious crocodile tears and threatened suicide, but he banked on the sexual economy that incentivized husbands not to sully their families with stories that would bring more dishonor to their injured wives than to Beecher and would cost the husbands dearly in social capital. Nonetheless, rumors could not be suppressed; angry husbands and distraught women proliferated, and Beecher feared that reality might penetrate his fakery.

On November 2, 1872, an outspoken women’s rights activist named Victoria Woodhull, who was almost as gifted in theatrics as Beecher, published a front-page story detailing Beecher’s longterm affair with Elizabeth (“Lib”) Tilton, the wife of his former protégé, Theodore Tilton. An international sex scandal and court case ensued. Many books have described and analyzed the Beecher-Tilton affair, and I do not have space to delve into it here. Suffice to say, Beecher was acquitted while Woodhull was convicted of obscenity and sent to jail for having dared to break the code of silence that empowered white men to wear the garbs of righteousness in public while indulging every type of sexual predation in private. (Figure 6)

At the end of the Civil War, Henry Ward Beecher, like many other powerful white men North and South, was embedded in a misogynistic regime of gender and sexuality that played as central a role as racism in re-establishing white male supremacy. While David Blight has incisively analyzed the racial dynamics that doomed Reconstruction and re-established white brotherhood under the guise of post-war “healing,” I want to highlight how Beecher participated in and deployed misogyny in the white male halls of power. From 1863 onward, Beecher was obsessed with forgiveness. The most influential preacher in the country, he aggressively agitated for the Union to extend complete forgiveness to Confederates. Preaching what his detractors called “the gospel of gush,” Beecher ricocheted between contradictory positions. He publicly called for suffrage for women as well as black men, but publicly and privately promoted the political and economic interests of white men who exhibited sexual and racial machismo.

Lincoln was not his idea of a strong man; Andrew Johnson was. Just hours after Lincoln was assassinated, Beecher declared: “Johnson’s little finger [is] stronger than Lincoln’s loins.” When Johnson reversed Lincoln’s policies and revealed himself to be an all-out racist, many northerners were incensed, but not Beecher. He asserted that the war had freed blacks and now they could fend for themselves. According to historian Debby Applegate, when Johnson “offered blanket amnesty to all but the very highest-level Rebel leaders and ordered all land in federal hands returned to its former owners, evicting the freedmen who’d been settled on them and sparking a series of violent confrontations,” Beecher supported him. When in February 1866 Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill in order to undermine federal protections and actions on behalf of southern blacks, Beecher supported him.

Performing what Frederick Douglass described as “that maudlin magnanimity that is now our greatest danger,” Beecher deployed evangelical tropes of love, forgiveness, and self-pitying brotherhood that upended political visions of justice, compassion, and equality. Dismayed by Beecher’s betrayal, Douglass perceived that white men’s self-pity was a key factor in the resurgence of anti-democratic forces. Douglass’s incisive phrase interlinked Beecher’s hyper-sentimental theatrics with Johnson’s well-known (maudlin) drunkenness to underscore the danger to the republic of white male supremacy masquerading as moral generosity: a politics of “forgiveness” intended to re-establish the pre-war status quo, at the expense of African Americans, women, and everyone who had suffered and died in fighting for a more perfect union. (Figure 7)

Harriet Beecher Stowe was horrified by her brother’s advocacy of political forgiveness. Her son Frederick had suffered a head injury at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 while Henry was amusing himself on the Swiss mountainside. In 1866 she explained to him why his sermons advocating forgiveness aroused so much ire: “the reaction against you personally . . . has for its secret the soreness which comes when a dear friend turns his sympathy from us, to our enemies.” She continued: “Mrs Shaw says to me — ‘My husband was going the way Henry is but the girls said ‘Father if you do feel so . . . don’t disgrace your family by saying it.’” Harriet advised Henry to display more understanding of grief and desolation. She reminded him that they were fighting for “national justice.” (Figure 8)

Meanwhile, Sarah Shaw’s closest friend, Lydia Maria Child, was appalled by Beecher’s political betrayal. She ranted to Sarah that Andrew Johnson was restoring to slaveholders “their thousands of acres, and will not let the freedmen have an acre.” She continued: “To think of a man like H. W. Beecher lending himself to the unprincipled schemes of the tippling traitor, that boozy boaster, that devilish demagogue! What can be his motive?” (Figure 9)

What indeed motivates “forgiveness” as a social policy when it is disconnected from admission of wrongdoing and the quest for justice? From the earliest days of his marriage, Beecher learned to treasure the pleasures of looking away from suffering, injustice, and death. His society granted expansive permission for white men to avoid behaving like adult members of a moral community. “Boys will be boys” at the expense of everyone else. The process through which the Confederacy won the peace included a postbellum northern culture where prominent leaders like Beecher fortified misogyny and racism through sanctimonious tropes of evangelical love and forgiveness. Extending facile, unearned forgiveness to self-pitying and unrepentant men, Beecher undermined accountability and justice. He became the flagbearer for an aesthetic and theatrics of gender and race that flirts with maudlin dictatorship.

 

Further Reading

Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday, 2006).

David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018).

David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1998).

Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Simon Stow, “Agonistic Homegoing: Frederick Douglass, Joseph Lowery, and the Democratic Value of African American Public Mourning,” American Political Science Review 104, no. 4 (Nov. 2010): 681-97.

Henry Ward Beecher’s letter to Sarah S. B. Shaw (August 7, 1863) is located at the Boston Athenaeum, Shaw Family Letters received 1859-1940, Mss. .L613. I am grateful for their permission to quote.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s letter to Henry Ward Beecher (Oct. 1866) is in the E. Bruce Kirkham Collection at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut. The original is at the Sterling Library, Yale University. Lydia Maria Child’s letter to Sarah Shaw (Sept. 7, 1866) is included in Lydia Maria Child, Selected Letters, 1817-1880, ed. Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982). Additional letters by Lydia Maria Child are collected in A Lydia Maria Child Reader, ed. Carolyn L. Karcher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).

 

This article originally appeared in February 2022.

 

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Kari J. Winter is a Professor of American Studies in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her books include The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader;  The Blind African Slave: or, Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nick-named Jeffrey Brace (a scholarly edition of a long-lost 1810 slave narrative), and Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865.