The world was rife with risk and uncertainty for early America’s urban middle classes, facing as they did the caprices of the nascent market economy, evolving rhythms of work, shifting cultural and gender norms, and disconnection from the land and networks of supportive kinship that typified pre-capitalist, agricultural economies. Added to these concerns was the ever present possibility that a family’s main provider might meet some untimely end, leaving the survivors destitute in a city of strangers.

As Sharon Ann Murphy ably demonstrates in her recent book Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America, life insurance emerged as a “market solution” for these “market dislocation[s]” brought about by the evolution of capitalism in early America, growing from a virtually non-existent industry in the early nineteenth century into “a pillar of modern middle class life” in the years following the Civil War (131, 300). In uncovering this history, Murphy provides a thorough and engaging account of the business of insuring lives, examining the innovations in marketing, corporate structure, and actuarial science pioneered by the industry’s early firms, while also mapping the contours of state regulation and public perception that channeled the industry’s early progress. Moreover, Murphy offers a novel perspective from which to view the anxieties and ambitions of America’s precocious middle class, using life insurance to bring fresh evidence and analysis to their complex social, cultural, and financial lives.

Most insurers were forced to blend statistical rigor with educated guesses, striving to avoid pitfalls ranging from adverse selection to outright fraud.

From its first pages, Investing in Life sets out to upend the well-worn narrative of the life insurance industry’s early history; namely, that life insurance, hampered by ineffective management and religious opposition, foundered before mutual insurance firms penetrated the market in the mid-1840s. By contrast, Murphy argues that a cadre of early stock companies, organized in northeastern cities between 1812 and 1830, sustained dynamic and continuous growth, giving form to the inchoate industry and laying the foundation for the mutual companies’ later arrival. Murphy supports this reassessment with the rich archival records of several early insurers, documents that enable her to convincingly quantify industry trends and provide vivid glimpses of the everyday people who bought and sold life insurance. By complicating this story, Murphy is then able to reappraise the rise of the mutual insurers in the 1840s, examining these businesses’ success vis-à-vis the established stock firms while also tracking the industry’s ascendance into the decade following the Civil War. While this approach enables Murphy to clearly stake out her historiographical territory, her often reflexive references to previous scholarship occasionally hamper what is in its own right a compelling and original story.

What Murphy conveys exceptionally well is the intimate and vexed connection between the emergence of life insurance and the advance of the so-called market revolution. The geographic expansion of capitalism and rise of cities that marked this period disrupted community-based social safety nets and created a market for alternative means of providing security in an uncertain world. Insuring life offered a solution to this problem, Murphy shows, but the conditions that enabled the industry’s rise also challenged early insurers. To accurately measure and price the risks they proposed to underwrite, insurers needed to attain specific knowledge about each applicant as well as aggregate data on mortality trends for the population as a whole. Yet while death was inevitable, the availability of such information was limited by the increasing mobility and anonymity of antebellum society—the very problems insurance was intended to overcome.

Firms met this challenge head on, relentlessly pursuing mortality statistics and often collaborating among themselves and with state and national governments to secure the most accurate information available. Murphy demonstrates that insurers could hedge their bets by carefully selecting healthy individuals employed in safe occupations, but this too proved difficult, especially as companies spread from their home cities into distant markets where a policy purchaser’s fitness was harder to reliably determine. Consequently, insurers developed networks of trustworthy local agents in the cities where they conducted business as a way, Murphy writes, to “repersonalize the connection between corporate headquarters and the individual applicant” (50). Still, most insurers were forced to blend statistical rigor with educated guesses, striving to avoid pitfalls ranging from adverse selection to outright fraud.

Compounding these difficulties, life insurers positioned themselves as intermediaries between middle-income families and the marketplace, a strategy that held important economic and regulatory consequences for the industry. On the one hand, insurers ostensibly existed to shield middle-class widows and orphans from the vagaries of the emerging market, while at the same time these firms exploited middle-class fears as a means to market life insurance. In this period, families of middling status often depended on the salaried or wage work of a sole male breadwinner, and insurers used overdramatized advertising “to drive home viscerally the idea that the average middle-income family was a mere heartbeat away from being reduced to the ‘horrors of poverty'” (126). Initially, however, restrictive nineteenth-century coverture laws did not guarantee that a widow would be the benefactor of her husband’s policy. Consequently, insurers lobbied to set life insurance apart from a husband’s estate, thereby freeing the widow’s remuneration from the clutches of her husband’s creditors. Ironically, as Murphy shows, by protecting these women from the calamities of the market, states gave them a more active role in the marketplace as likely purchasers of insurance, helping to more than triple the value of life insurance underwritten from 1840 to 1845 (6).

Yet this process unfolded unevenly, and as the agency system spread firms further afield, differences in state law at times gave some firms advantages over others that happened to be headquartered in states with more restrictive regulation. States disliked such regulatory arbitrage, especially since they often invested their domestic insurers with certain public responsibilities as a condition of incorporation; New York, for instance, charged the New York Life and Trust company with the guardianship of all state-administered estates of orphaned children (99). By ceding such responsibilities to private enterprises, state governments assumed an interest in the firms’ long-term stability and viability. To combat the advantages of out-of-state firms, many states enacted protective regulation to shield their local insurers, a strategy which, again ironically, served to destabilize the industry by stymieing geographic diversification of risk, while also constraining the choices of consumers.

While playing to middle-class fears proved an effective, if regulatorily complex, strategy for both types of firms, Murphy reveals that mutual insurers were able to outpace their stock rivals in the 1840s and 1850s by marketing their insurance products as investments. Unlike the older stock firms, mutual companies distributed their profits directly to policy holders, whether through cash dividends or reduced premium payments. In this way, the mutuals capitalized on both halves of the dualistic, middle-class mentalité: “removing the risk attendant to premature death as well as providing investment opportunities during the policy holder’s lifetime” (153, emphasis added). Importantly, this innovation occurred as the middle classes were increasingly excluded from savings banks—institutions restricted to petty savers—but not affluent enough to purchase expensive stocks and bonds. By creating a channel of investment, mutual firms enabled middle-class Americans to engage more deeply in the webs of finance that undergirded industrial capitalism.

This is a point that cannot be overemphasized, and perhaps marks Murphy’s most important contribution: While insuring life began as a way to shield families from the dangers of the market, as the industry developed, life insurance soon became a means by which middle-income families could capitalize on it as well. Thus, life insurance in general, and mutual insurance specifically, bridged a crucial gap between aversion to and acceptance of capitalist values for many middle-class Americans.

In this process, the Civil War marked an important watershed. First, the conflict interrupted insurers’ business in the southern states, the most important aspect of which was the insurance of slave lives. Industrialization and slave hiring, both linked to the penetration of capitalism into the upper south, created a ready market of Southerners hoping to secure their human property. Murphy demonstrates that Southerners eagerly embraced insurance, adding an intriguing wrinkle to our understanding of the relationship between slavery and capitalism. Though drawing her away from her focus on the urban North, this analysis deepens her account while also pointing to promising avenues for further study.

In the northern states, the public interest embodied in antebellum insurance companies achieved new significance as hundreds of thousands of Americans marched to their death benefit. Though insurers had long avoided war risk—inserting clauses to the effect “provided if he be killed in Battle the Policy is void”—they could not stay clear of the conflict, and most accepted their patriotic duty by insuring interested soldiers, though at substantially higher premiums (33). Each death claim insurers paid bolstered the public perception of the industry, which, when coupled with the new awareness of mortality created by the war, launched a period of manic growth following the war’s end. Though the industry would struggle through the depression in the 1870s, these developments firmly established life insurance as a mainstay of modern middle-class life.

All told, Investing in Life is a well-written, well-argued book that makes a number of important contributions to the history of business and capitalism in antebellum America. Murphy does an admirable job of making complex actuarial and legal concepts accessible to readers not immediately inclined toward the intricacies of insurable interest or the problems of mortality probabilities. She also provides impressive analyses of the anxieties embodied in insurance applications—think about the handwringing a question like “Is he of temperate habits?” might inspire—and of relationships between firms and the state. Indeed, Murphy’s work deserves a wide audience, especially anyone with an interest in the histories of business or middle-class life in antebellum America.

In 1806, the American caricaturist James Akin (1773-1846) published a satirical print that depicted the interior of a barbershop, with a barber and his client set against a wall filled with caricatures. Titled “All in my eye!” (fig. 1) this caricature was published in reaction to a specific event that would have been familiar to the citizens of Newburyport, Massachusetts, where Akin was at this time working as an engraver. The event struck a personal chord with Akin. In March 1806, Akin’s friend, the engraver Jacob Perkins (1766-1843), was targeted by an anonymous pamphleteer. Although Perkins retaliated in a newspaper editorial, it was Akin’s talent as caricaturist that would not be silenced. Sometime after March 1806, Akin published “All in my eye!” in defense of his friend.

We might assume that caricatures like Akin’s belonged in London, England, rather than Newburyport, Massachusetts. After all, caricatures satirizing specific events and personages were in great demand in Britain. The abundance of impressions that resulted formed a ubiquitous part of eighteenth-century British visual culture. The appetite for this particular genre crossed the Atlantic more slowly than other kinds of images. Certainly, some eighteenth-century satirical prints portraying both political and social subjects were exported from London to cities along the East Coast, where they would have been seen by Americans. William Cobbett, for example, advertised the arrival of a batch of satirical prints for sale in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Nevertheless, caricatures were slow to gain such acceptance in the United States. As late as the 1800s, caricatures like Akin’s, published in reaction to an event or as a personal or political attack on an individual, were uncommon.

Yet evidence suggests that if such prints were unusual, they were starting to come to the attention of a growing American consumer market. In cities such as New York and Philadelphia, printers began to issue small runs of caricatures, often similar in design and format to English satirical prints. These early American caricatures, usually unsigned, were often political in nature; anonymous artists attacked presidents, government representatives, and local politicians. And if they appealed to some buyers, they also generated a fair amount of suspicion. An opinion piece published in 1802 in the New-York Evening Post announced that, “It is with great pain we observe a species of libel has already appeared in our country in imitation of the abominable and licentious practice of the lower English, commonly called caricature, in which the unhappy object of abuse is exposed to vulgar derision… it is a species of attack equally cowardly and brutal.” This was the market that Akin entered and helped transform in the early 1800s. He published both political and social caricatures and he prominently displayed his signature on impressions, taking full ownership of his visual attacks.

In “All in my eye!” Akin represents a barber in his shop conversing with his customer. The barber haphazardly attends to his client, although it is clear that his thoughts are otherwise engaged. The barber’s head is turned away from his client, towards the window. His gaze and the words within his speech bubble direct the viewer to a newspaper and a pamphlet on the windowsill. The pamphlet titled “An Examination of the Method of making Bills from the Stereotype” was written by a “Philotechnus,” a nom de plume for an author not yet identified. The pamphlet attacked the methods invented by Perkins for the detection of counterfeit bills. Akin includes the newspaper in which Perkins issued his defense, clearly providing the title of the paper, Newburyport Herald, as well as the date of March 7, 1806, the edition in which the rebuttal was published. On the wall behind the barber are seven prints, set in two rows of three and a single print below them (fig. 2). Three of the prints are known to have been published by Akin in 1805 and are biting satirical images on two well known figures in Newburyport. Two of the caricatures depict Edmund Blunt, Akin’s former employer, and the third depicts the eccentric Newburyport character Timothy Dexter. The other four prints may have been published, but there are currently no records of these images that survive in archives or graphic art collections.

By including references to three of his previously published satirical prints, Akin reminds viewers of “All in my eye!” that this was not the first time he had used caricature to assault his so-called enemies and foes. Indeed, Akin was actually quite successful at it. In 1805 and 1806, Akin published several caricatures that depicted, Blunt in less than flattering positions. Two of these impressions are seen on the wall of the barbershop. The widely circulated caricature, titled “Infuriated Despondency!” (fig. 3) can be seen in the middle of the wall, in reverse, while the second caricature of Blunt, “An Edict from Saint Peter” (fig. 4), is seen to its right.

In the caricature “Infuriated Despondency,” Blunt is depicted holding a three-pronged skillet, alluding to an event that occurred on October 27, 1804 between Blunt and Akin. The two men, no longer working professionally together, had a violent encounter in the Newburyport shop of Josiah Foster. Akin reportedly slapped Blunt, and Blunt retaliated by picking up the nearest heavy weapon, a skillet, and hurling it at Akin. However, instead of hitting Akin, the skillet went through the shop window, hitting an unsuspecting (and unfortunate) passerby. Akin first published this image of Blunt with the skillet as a broadside, alongside a damaging description of the event. The caricature was advertised in the Newburyport Herald in 1805 and in 1806, and Akin sent the design to England, where the caricature of Blunt and the skillet was placed on Liverpool pottery, including chamber pots. The pottery was sent back from England to Newburyport, where it was distributed amongst the local citizens. Blunt’s family and friends bought as many pieces of the pottery as they could find, although there are a few rare examples known to exist.

The other satirical print of Edmund Blunt is entitled “An Edict from Saint Peter” in which Blunt is shown being sent away from St. Peter’s Lodge, where Freemasons met in Newburyport. Blunt was a freemason before resigning in 1802 for unknown reasons. This caricature is rare and does not appear to have been as widely circulated at “Infuriated Despondency.” However, it most likely would have been seen in Newburyport, and the incident of Blunt’s removal as a freemason and the circumstances surrounding such an event would have been the source of much gossip.

The third caricature represented, also shown in reverse, “The Most Noble Lord Timothy Dexter” (fig.5) is the first caricature in the first row on the wall. This image depicts the eccentric Newburyport man Timothy Dexter, known in the town for faking his own death and for claiming that his wife, very much alive and living in his home, was in fact dead. Akin first published this caricature in 1805, depicting Dexter in his bizarre costume, carrying his cane and shown walking with his hairless, short-legged dog. Dexter’s famous words, “The First in the East,” are made prominent in this caricature within a caricature, shown above the head of the man and his dog. While it is not known what their relationship may have been, Akin’s critical design of the man was a successful one. It was reprinted several times in 1805 and 1806. Like “Infuriated Despondency” this satirical print appears to have been widely circulated and was advertised in the Newburyport Herald.

When “All in my eye!” was published in 1806, James Akin already had a reputation as an engraver and caricaturist. Akin was born in South Carolina in 1773 and travelled to London in 1798 for a short period, where he claimed to have studied with the Royal Academy’s President, Benjamin West. Upon his return to America, Akin worked as an engraver in Philadelphia, before moving in 1804 to Newburyport, some forty miles northeast of Boston, to work with Blunt. Sometime before Akin journeyed north to Massachusetts, he made the acquaintance of Jacob Perkins in Philadelphia, although details regarding their meeting are not known. In 1799, Perkins placed advertisements in newspapers announcing his invention that could detect counterfeit bank paper, and included a list of “eminent artists in Philadelphia,” including Akin, who had tested his invention. An opinion piece published in a New York newspaper that same year also noted that Perkins had enlisted the “the most celebrated engravers in the United States” to test his invention. Although it is known that Akin left Philadelphia to work with Blunt in Newburyport, it must have been a relief for Akin to know that his good friend Perkins lived in the same town. When Akin and Blunt parted professionally in 1804, Akin relied on his Newburyport friend, often referring to Perkins in his advertisements.

The caricature “All in my eye!” is an important document for the study of the early history of American graphic humor. It is the earliest known caricature to have been published that includes within its impression an artist’s previously published work, an early form of marketing. The closest related caricature is by David Claypoole Johnston in 1831 of “An Exhibition of Cabinet Pictures” (fig. 6), in which Johnston represents his own work within the larger print. There is evidence found in contemporary accounts that prints of landscapes and portraits of political figures were displayed in shop windows. However, we do not have any visual evidence of American audiences viewing caricatures in this manner. This is in contrast to the subject matter of satirical prints that dominated London during the so-called “Golden Age of Caricature.” British caricaturists depicted how the London public came to view caricatures by satirizing shop windows filled with social and political satires, contributing a commentary of mockery on the British social classes. One example can be seen in “Caricature Shop,” published by P. Roberts in 1801, in which the exterior of the publisher’s shop and the crowds that have come to view the new prints displayed in the window are represented in caricature. As Akin was in London in the late 1790s, it is likely that he not only would have seen such caricatures, but he would have stopped to look at publishers windows and attended print exhibitions, examining the newly printed caricatures.

“All in my eye!” is thus an American example of early nineteenth-century marketing techniques. Akin was incredibly adept at marketing his own caricatures, frequently advertising new impressions in local newspapers. Advertisements published in the early 1800s indicate that at least one of Akin’s political caricatures was on at least one barbershop’s walls in New York City: John Richard Desborus Huggins, a New York City barber, advertised that his shop walls were adorned with caricatures, and included a description of a satirical print published by Akin representing Thomas Jefferson. Akin also sought larger, more far-flung audiences. In 1805, he explored the possibility of binding his caricatures in a portfolio. It isn’t clear whether he succeeded, but he went as far as submitting a title for a book of plates to be published, including the references to 25 specific works. Although “All in my eye!” is not one of the works mentioned (it had not yet been published) the three caricatures discussed here are named on the list. While there is more to be gleaned from such a caricature, like so many other satirical prints of this period, allusions made by the artist are often lost to a modern viewer. Akin provides an excellent study in marketing his own prints, while also attacking a contemporary enemy, two things Akin was clearly successful at achieving.

Further reading:

For a survey on the caricaturist James Akin, see Maureen O’Brien Quimby’s article “The Political Art of James Akin” in Winterthur Portfolio (January 1972). For more on Akin’s time in Newburyport, consult “James Akin in Newburyport” by Lewis C. Rubenstein in Essex Institute Historical Collections (1966): 102. For more on the specific caricature “Infuriated Despondency!” and its representation on pottery, see Nina Fletcher Little’s article “The Cartoons of James Akin upon Liverpool Ware” in Old-Time New England, (January 1938): 28.

For an overview of American caricature consult William Murrell’s A History of American Graphic Humor (New York, 1933), especially volume one, and Frank Weitenkampf’s American Graphic Art (New York, 1924). An excellent study on British caricature from this period is Diana Donald’s The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (London, 1996).

The only book dedicated to the life of Jacob Perkins is Jacob Perkins: His Inventions, His Times, & His Contemporaries, by Greville and Dorothy Bathe (Pennsylvania, 1943). Further information on Edmund Blunt and Timothy Dexter, as well as a short biography of Akin, can be found in volume two of the History of Newburyport, 1764-1909 by John J. Currier (Newburyport, Mass., published for the author, 1909).

This article originally appeared in issue 10.2 (January, 2010).

Allison Stagg is a graduate student in Art History at University College, University of London. She will be submitting her Ph.D. in 2010 on political caricature published in the United States between 1787 and 1830.

When my history classes meet, there sit my female students, virtually every one of them wearing jeans, a clothing choice that was once understood as transgressive crossdressing, but which now scarcely invites comment. But as many of them report, even though high school girls are allowed to wear pants, school authorities discipline girls for perceived sexuality in their clothing, while peers often brutally punish boys for signs of femininity. Clothes have been and remain key to identity, and issues of identity of multiple kinds are in the forefront of our students’ minds. In Revolutionary, Alex Myers recounts an early chapter in the history of crossdressing by imagining the life of Deborah Sampson, a woman who disguised herself as a Continental soldier. In choosing to tell that story through the historical novel, he challenges the boundaries between fact and fiction as well as between male and female. For teachers, Myers raises the question: what is the place of fiction in history pedagogy?

As a literary work, Revolutionary is highly capable, a good read that creates believable characters, employs telling detail and maintains suspense: will Deborah Sampson be accepted as Robert Shurtliff? It begins with her determination to enlist despite an initial failure to fool recruiters, an attempt for which she may be prosecuted. After a rape that captures women’s physical, sexual and legal vulnerability, Sampson runs away and convinces a Continental recruiter to accept her. Appropriately, she serves mainly in New York’s “neutral ground,” an area notable for shifting loyalties and the difficulty of determining Loyalists from Patriots. Deborah/Robert bonds with other soldiers, kills and is wounded, falls in love with a comrade who accepts her masquerade, has her secret exposed during an illness, and is last seen, years later, on the popular stage, where she tells her story as a woman, but brings down the house by performing military maneuvers.

The marketing of Myers’s novel has emphasized that he is a transgender author and activist, but he is careful not to project contemporary identity categories and assumptions onto his fictional account of the past. Initially, Sampson does not so much perceive herself as or want to be a man as to have men’s opportunities. She thrills to the Patriot cause, but her motivation is essentially personal and proto-feminist. No man wants to marry her and she senses “a world out there . . . beyond weaving, beyond housework,” beyond women’s “proper sphere” (3). But to get those opportunities, she has to transform her person, a “thrilling, head-spinning” metamorphosis that in Myers’ expert telling is detailed, complex and riveting (23). Each aspect of her new appearance—short hair, bound breasts, lower voice, Continental uniform, lengthened stride—is transgressive and dangerous. “How easily they accepted her as another recruit … how quickly they would turn on her if they knew. Her clothes were like an eggshell about her, a thin layer of protection, a veneer that both kept out and held in” (55).

This transformation prompts the newly created Robert Shurtliff to repeated musings on what makes a man a man. Initially, she sees men as sure of themselves, a mix of cockiness and competence, but her fellow soldiers include traitors, cowards and hotheads, as well as those cool under fire. During their first engagement, Shurtliff proves the first to kill. “That soldier is a man,” her officer declares (124). Shurtliff becomes the man others want to imitate, even as he is imitating others. Having definitively asserted manliness in battle, he enjoys male camaraderie: same-sex dancing, drinking, and sharing a bed. After a contest in which Robert turns out to spit like a girl, a soldier shrugs, “You may not know how to spit, but you can kill” (131). For Myers, gender identity is not interior and fixed, but a combination of who you decide to be and who society assumes you are. “A cantankerous woman equaled a mild man,” Sampson quickly finds (75). The army seems to literally build men: “He was strong or smart, naïve or helpful, because of what the corporals or sergeants asked of him, because of what his fellows thought of him,” Myers writes (155). But as Deborah’s sense of competence and entitlement expands, she becomes someone else, her own creation, both Robert and Deborah.

In seeing identity construction as a negotiated performance, Myers reflects the historical literature, as does his representation of eighteenth-century friendship, masculinity, soldiering, and material culture. Revolutionary’s plot necessarily draws on earlier histories, such as Alfred F. Young’s Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (2004). The temptation to move beyond history and imagine Sampson’s experience appeared early in his subject’s life, as witness Herman Mann’s 1797 The Female Review: or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady, which was as much novel as memoir. While largely avoiding anachronisms (excepting overly modern letters interspersed in the narrative) and accurately incorporating the historical context, as a novelist Myers engages in wholesale re-imagining. Sampson’s rape and her love affair might have happened, but no documents confirm that they did. Similarly, we know that Sampson/Shurtliff fought and was injured in engagements, but we don’t know that she killed anyone, despite Myers’ emphasis on that experience. Even well-researched fiction is still fiction, and, setting aside academic debates about the instability of meaning and student propensity to call all texts “novels,” why read or assign historical fiction? If Myers gains from historical accounts such as Young’s, what do historians and students gain from his fiction?

As classroom texts, Masquerade and Revolutionary have very different uses. Young’s book reveals the process of constructing historical knowledge from equivocal sources. He is himself a character in his book, as he searches for, collects, and comments on each document he finds, and often admits that he doesn’t know what happened, and that no one ever will. Masquerade’s great excitement is the historical chase, and Sampson emerges through that superbly told story. By contrast, Myers’ interpretive choices are hidden from the reader and he asserts imagined experiences and feelings as if they were given realities—a temptation to students. The careful historian and the presumptuous novelist would seem at odds, but Myers uses his imaginative skills with a purpose immediately recognizable to any scholar of eighteenth-century fiction: to stimulate his audience’s “affections” through participation in another’s experience. Myers proves remarkably adept at shaping and shifting the reader’s feelings and reactions to Sampson’s gender. Sampson is “she” and Deborah when she is a frustrated weaver and servant victimized by men and just beginning her masquerade; then becomes “he” and Robert Shurtliff/Bob as an enlisted soldier; and is Deborah/she again when her biological gender is revealed. During the long middle section, Deborah so thoroughly becomes Robert that I initially perceived his love for a fellow soldier as a same-sex relationship. Their mutual attraction and hesitant daydreams of a postwar life together suggest that Sampson’s initial desire for men’s opportunities has become something more. Appropriately enough, Young calls his book Masquerade and Myers calls his Revolutionary. Both, however, end with Deborah contracting a disappointing marriage and wistfully recalling her brief interlude as a man.

It is a mark of this book’s richness that it suggests so many possibilities for use. While it is part of a very recent national conversation on identity and transgendering, it reminds us of the many earlier fictions that explored crossdressing, such as Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life or, Lord and Master: A Story of To-Day (1874), a women’s rights tale with a jaw-dropping conclusion. Crossdressing is only a small part of a larger American concern for deception, as witness everything from seduction and betrayal novels to paranoid politics to etiquette books to the confidence man. Is anyone as he—or she—seems? And if clothes can “make” a woman a man, however briefly, what can make a man a woman? We know that in religious conversions, men often acted and spoke a woman’s part, a metaphorical if not sartorial crossdressing. War might also complicate gender. As Revolutionary ends and Robert becomes Deborah again, Myers seems to be suggesting a third gender or identity: soldiers, whose violent experiences separate them from most men as well as women. In a sense, they could never remove their uniforms. Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, that staple Civil War fiction, conveys much the same message. How could life be the same after Gettysburg? Ulysses S. Grant himself commented on how battle might upend gender when he spoke of General Joshua Chamberlain having “the soul of the lion and the heart of the woman.” There seems to be no end of possibilities for how we clothe our identity.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2.5 (Spring, 2016).

Martha Tomhave Blauvelt, author of The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780-1830 (2007), is professor emerita of Gender Studies, College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University.

Brian Murphy’s aim is to argue that the seeds of business corporations were planted during the early republic. Writing from the perspective of institutional state theory, Murphy has no use for the tired old Jeffersonian narrative that republicanism was built on virtue, hostility to all things British, and a faith that the natural riches of a grand continent would protect the young nation from corruption. Dubious of the antigovernment thesis in general, he turns his attention to the activities of “adventurers” and “projectors,” as they were called. This cadre of men––Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, Robert R. Livingston, and DeWitt Clinton figure prominently––did not acknowledge a strict division between public and private interest; no man of either party, Murphy writes, could claim to have “clean hands.”

In New York, men of wealth with the kinds of political connections that made it possible for them to mobilize capital were able to redefine state power; in doing so, they were arguably as influential as others of the founding generation who drafted state constitutions and/or the federal Constitution. Murphy’s principal figure in the book is Robert Livingston, who helped to draft New York’s constitution and who also secured a steamboat monopoly. He was not just a man of words, but an ambitious entrepreneur.

Through a series of actions taken at the state level, New York’s political apparatus significantly expanded. By corporate charter, the state gave certain powers to private individuals, but that model was rejected when the Erie Canal came under discussion. Its construction would be financed by selling bonds. According to Murphy, creating alliances between private investors and public officials did not challenge the republican credo of checking excesses of power. The canal was simply too big a project to vest in private hands alone. One of the strengths of Murphy’s study is his way of unpacking the processes of securing financing and forging alliances, showing that business adventurers actively sought state involvement and regulation. In that sense, this book could have been given a snazzier title, such as: The Republican Art of the Deal: Making the Empire State into the Entrepreneurial State.

The book is a series of case studies. Murphy begins with the Bank of New York (ca. 1784), and proceeds to the Northern and Inland Lock Navigation Companies, the Manhattan Company (1799), Robert Livingston’s and Robert Fulton’s steamboat monopoly, and finally, the Erie Canal (1817). For the author, the art of collaboration was everything, demonstrating how powerful men used various strategies to appease rivals, persuade legislators, lure investors, and outmaneuver opponents to complete large-scale ventures. Without such collaboration, Murphy insists, there would never have been an Erie Canal: the project required a long list of canal commissions, petitioners, bond holders, and politicians.

Internal improvements were never simply technological advances. Steamboats, canals, and railroads all required granting unelected men state privileges. Murphy explains that a corporation was not a fixed concept, but an entity that evolved as Federalists and Democrats alike used corporate privileges. The real contest was that of creating a marketplace of interested parties able to raise capital in order to advance a project through the tortuous process of legislative and constitutional approval. None of these adventurers saw the state as the enemy, and the notion of a purely free market enterprise was foreign to their thinking. The state was, Murphy writes, a necessary “catalyst” for commercial growth; corporate institutions, shareholders, directors (and the web of capital and legal instruments) “collectively constituted ‘the state’ itself” (220).

            Murphy’s book excels at detailing the maneuvering needed to secure state approval and funding. Nevertheless, the author is so intent on showing the constructive side of corporations, or such instruments as state bonds, that his story marginalizes other political, cultural, and social forces at play. Collaboration was indeed crucial to the early republic, but Murphy misses one of its most central, if destabilizing, byproducts: that ever-present dynamic of debt. It was not by accident that as a state assemblyman, Aaron Burr simultaneously sought debtor legislation and acted to revise the language in the charter of the Manhattan Company, enabling the water company to become a banking institution. Nor was it at all unusual that Alexander Hamilton died deeply in debt, and Hamilton’s close friend and associate at the Treasury, William Duer, ended up in debtor’s prison after the panic of 1792. Prominent men loaned money to their confidential friends, a practice that created potential pools of collaborators, but also engendered high risks when projects failed. The personal costs involved in state building are mysteriously absent from this study.

Murphy seems to disregard the often foolish and irrational side of human behavior. He apparently has no use for Joanne Freeman’s notion of honor culture or “paper wars,” nor does he have much use for political associations such as the Tammany Society and Democratic-Republican clubs. He is also not interested in party rituals and the adversarial model of partisan politics that defines the early republic. Instead, he makes the case for “distributive politics,”­ emphasizing how political actors used economic institutions to provide material and civic benefits. In the end, he claims, state perks had a far more lasting impact on the party system than other measures of influence.

Perhaps this picture is too rosy, as Murphy glosses over the unequal distribution of benefits. In New York the post-colonial reality was that powerful families shaped (and distorted) the process of state building. Partisanship and collaboration alike relied upon kinship networks. Hamilton married into one of the most powerful families in New York and his principal collaborators were his father-in-law, Phillip Schuyler, and his brother-in-law, John Barker Church. Strangely enough, Murphy only mentions Hamilton’s family ties late in the text, indicating that the author doesn’t really want to admit that an Old World political institution of the great families could yet be a part of business in the U.S. The New York ruling elite were far less republican––or modern––than he acknowledges. As troublesome as the absence of real analysis of powerful families is, “class identity” is a concept that Murphy’s study almost entirely neglects.

Here is where the insightful work of Ric Caric on John Fitch, Jessica Lepler on economic panics, and Bruce Mann and Edward Balleisen on debt and bankruptcy would have come in handy. All paint a very different portrait of the marketplace. Almost as an aside, Murphy mentions that Fitch, the first American steamboat adventurer, committed suicide after “successive failures.” Yet Fitch’s revealing story makes the opposite point to Murphy’s account of rational calculation and collaboration. Fitch failed because he lacked a rich backer like Livingston, who established a promising partnership with Robert Fulton. As a man from the ranks of artisans, Fitch was hardly welcomed by the ruling elite as he pitched his steamboat design. In his Memoirs, he showed himself to be consumed by a need to protect his reputation; the class-defined gap between him and his superiors made the desired collaboration strained. He likened begging for money from backers to torture and dismemberment; instead of finding patrons and allies, he had to fight off men trying to steal his design and destroy him. State support actually ruined him, when Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson forced Fitch to share patent rights with a rival who lacked his proven expertise. The messy, unfair, class-inflected nature of the marketplace needs to be part of the historical narrative––but Murphy resists going there.

The human element––irrational behavior––was always present in the state-corporate relationship. Motives were never pure. Amid the controversy surrounding Burr’s Manhattan Company, one angry New Yorker sent a bogus letter to Nicholas Low, a key investor and stockholder in a rival bank, pretending to be Aaron Burr and challenging Low to a duel. (This was a new twist on killing off the competition.) Robert Livingston wasn’t satisfied simply by making Robert Fulton his partner in their steamboat enterprise; he had to seal the deal by marrying off Fulton to his niece Harriet. Murphy does mention the marriage, but he refuses to analyze its deeper meaning. Livingston was not just relying on state power; he was linking his corporate venture to a much older system of dynastic power.

That said, Murphy’s study is a valuable addition to the literature. He is best when he shows that prominent men like Burr and Hamilton defined their understanding of state power within the corporate nexus of building quasi-private and public economic institutions. But as James Madison wisely counseled, men were not “angels,” nor were they solely rational actors when operating in a highly unstable and unfair marketplace of corporate favors. It was not an open marketplace, but a place for “Big Wigs,” to use a term favored by one observer who appears in Murphy’s book. Collaboration, then, was as much a class tool as it was part of a pragmatic strategy to harness state power.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2.5 (Spring, 2016).

Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor of American History at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (1998); Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (2007); and Madison and Jefferson (with Andrew Burstein) (2010).

2014 saw the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of George Whitefield, the great eighteenth-century Anglo-American evangelical itinerant. The tercentenary included a major conference hosted at Pembroke College, Oxford, and the appearance of scholarly works by Thomas S. Kidd and Jessica M. Parr, the subject of this review. A third volume, essays derived from the Pembroke College conference, entitled George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in May 2016. These works offer valuable reconsiderations of Whitefield that will be of interest to scholars of evangelicalism and the eighteenth-century British Atlantic more broadly.

The interest in Whitefield should not be surprising. Renewed scholarly attention paid to the Great Awakening over the past twenty-five years has transformed a field once the domain of church historians into a vibrant arena for interdisciplinary explorations. As a result of these studies we have come to understand and appreciate new aspects of Whitefield’s experience and success. In The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (1991), Harry Stout revealed how Whitefield’s early interest in the theater informed his preaching style and primed him to be “Anglo-America’s first religious celebrity.” Frank Lambert’s study of Whitefield’s masterful use of modern media, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals (1994), recovered how he skillfully deployed print—newspapers, sermons, pamphlets, and his published Journals—to generate publicity for his ministry before, during, and after his tours. Peter Charles Hoffer demonstrated how illuminating it can be to compare and contrast Whitefield and his longtime friend Benjamin Franklin as “representative men” of their time in When Benjamin Franklin Met the Reverend Whitefield: Enlightenment, Revival, and the Power of the Printed Word (2011). Whitefield has even been credited with being a “central figure” in creating unity among the diverse colonists of British North America in the lead-up to the American Revolution in Jerome Mahaffey’s The Accidental Revolutionary: George Whitefield and Creation of America (2011).

But there is much more to know about the enigmatic Whitefield, as new books by Kidd and Parr amply demonstrate. They offer different takes: one provides a comprehensive biography that seeks to restore the theological motivations that undergirded the decisions Whitefield made in executing his transatlantic ministry; the other, a more focused study of the contested fashioning of Whitefield’s image by the great itinerant himself, his supporters, and his critics. The authors are in agreement on the broader contours of their subject’s significance. They see him as a pivotal figure in the series of mid-eighteenth century revivals throughout the United Kingdom and the British North American colonies that have come to be known as the Great Awakening. They credit him with popularizing the importance of a conversion experience—of being “born again”—in order to achieve salvation. They engage with his voluminous archive of printed sermons, journals, and letters, as well as the extensive coverage that followed him in colonial newspapers. The Bethesda Orphan House in Savannah features prominently in these studies, acknowledging its place as an important “vehicle” by which Whitefield could express his religious message and justify his missionary travels. They also agree that it opens up a troubling chapter in the preacher’s history as a slaveowner and proslavery advocate. Despite these stances, Whitefield inspired the admiration and affection of those at the center and on the fringes of colonial society, including domestic slaves like Phillis Wheatley, indigenous clergy like Samson Occom, and turncoats like Benedict Arnold.

Thomas Kidd appreciates the recent work of scholars to place Whitefield in the context of important developments in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, but feels they have missed the point of his primary significance. In George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father, Kidd argues that the well-known and travelled itinerant was the “key figure in the first generation of Anglo-American evangelical Christianity” (3). John Wesley might have been the nascent religious movement’s great organizer and Jonathan Edwards its great theologian, but it was the peripatetic Whitefield that tied it together and gave it coherence (260). Whitefield functioned as the common denominator—opening him up to both favor and scorn—in linking mid-eighteenth century Arminian Methodists (under John and Charles Wesley), Calvinist Methodists (under Whitefield and Howell Harris), Moravians, and numerous dissenting churches scattered across the United Kingdom and the British colonies of North America into a unified evangelical movement. Kidd pays special attention to the theological motivations and developments underlying Whitefield’s preaching and publishing, providing a valuable explanation of the doctrines and practices that united—and divided—evangelicals. Running throughout the volume is an argument for considering the importance of the Holy Spirit to the experience of evangelicalism. Kidd even goes so far as to propose a modification to David Bebbington’s influential definition of evangelicalism to include—as a fifth criteria alongside conversion, activism, Biblicism, and crucicentrism—the Holy Spirit’s ministry (36). The “power and presence” of the Holy Spirit, Kidd argues, would be the most “novel aspects” of converts’ new lives, but also would open Whitefield up to charges of enthusiasm and fanaticism. Over the course of twelve chapters, readers follow the itinerant’s rapid rise to transatlantic fame, and a much longer period spent reconciling himself to never again matching that success while having to make amends to those with whom he butted horns along the way.

Jessica Parr takes a more topical approach. In Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon, she argues that Whitefield must be understood as a “religious icon of the British Atlantic World” (5), a model for imitation in response to the Great Awakening’s need for a central figure to unite its masses. Whitefield’s lifelong refusal to limit his ministry to any single denomination is interpreted as a commitment to religious toleration and a service to a burgeoning evangelical community that newly (and radically) crossed not only sectarian lines, but also those of gender, class, race, and ethnicity. Toleration became a practical necessity given the varied religious landscape of the North American colonies and, as Kidd details more fully in his volume, England, Wales, and Scotland. The first two-thirds of Parr’s book explore the initial North American tours where Whitefield had his greatest impact and achieved his most lasting fame. In these chapters we see Whitefield shift from being on the offensive in the construction of his image to the defensive against critics from a range of stations and theological standpoints. Throughout Whitefield provided supporters and critics alike with all the fodder they needed. Ultimately, Parr argues, Whitefield was unable to exert complete control over shaping his image. Her last two chapters reveal how the appropriation of Whitefield accelerated in later life and especially after his death in 1770 in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

In both of these books, Whitefield is often at odds with his friends and his foes. To what extent did he bring this upon himself? Was he his own worst enemy? Kidd and Parr offer different interpretations of Whitefield’s character. Parr’s Whitefield aggressively marches into American port cities and acts dismissively toward the Anglican establishment, despite being an Anglican himself. His motivation, she explains, derives from an early vision of himself as a reformer within the church rather than as a schismatic (16). “He made a public example of those who failed to live up to the pious model that he set in his autobiographies and his journal,” she writes, “particularly in contrast with the image he presented of himself as an indiscrete youth who had found ‘true religion’ as an adult” (32). In Whitefield’s broadly circulated Journal, William Vesey of New York is portrayed as an “out-of-touch interloper” (47) and the Protestantism of Alexander Garden of Charleston is called into doubt in an era when anti-Catholicism fueled serious slights with political implications (53). (Neither Kidd nor Parr pull any punches when it comes to detailing Whitefield’s rabid anti-Catholicism and devotion to British Protestantism.)

Kidd takes a more conciliatory stance on Whitefield’s character. He tends to interpret Whitefield as the victim of overbearing Anglican commissaries and competitive fellow leaders of the evangelical movement. Vesey is portrayed as waiting with “hostile reaction” (90), Garden “ready to put Whitefield in his place” (102), and back in London, “Whitefield renewed his clash with Anglican authorities—or rather, they renewed it with him” (177). Whitefield was perennially in tension with John Wesley, who often comes off as the instigator in Kidd’s telling, such as when we are told, “Wesley intended to cause a public rift with Whitefield” (80). At another point, Jonathan Edwards fell afoul of Whitefield when he told him “he should be more cautious about ‘judging other persons to be unconverted’” (128-129), a warning that theological disagreements should not be couched in terms of personal attacks. Whitefield did not take kindly to Edwards’ advice. “This was a delicate issue,” Kidd admits, “one that Whitefield did not handle delicately” (92). But Kidd blames Edwards and Wesley for the fallings out—“they were eleven years older than Whitefield, strongly opinionated, and inclined to correct the headstrong itinerant’s perceived errors” (129). The real Whitefield—who once stated “The more I am opposed, the more joy I feel” (117) and on another occasion argued that the great seventeenth-century Anglican divine John Tillotson “knew no more of true Christianity than Mahomet [Muhammad]”—probably lies somewhere between these characterizations (107). Certainly some Anglican clerics and evangelical leaders were plotting their own strategy to try to contain the brash young preacher, but it is important to identify culpability on both sides.

Perhaps the greatest revelation to readers will be the extent of Whitefield’s conflicted relationship with slavery in the British North American colonies. On this point Kidd and Parr agree. (Parr, in fact, states in her introduction that she had originally intended her book to be a study of Whitefield’s relationship to slaves and slavery [4].) The crux of the problem comes down to a disjuncture between Whitefield’s early vocal criticism of slaveowners in Charleston for their ostentatious lifestyle and failure to catechize their slaves, and his later aggressive championing of the institution of slavery and his transformation of the Bethesda Orphan House into a slave plantation. Both studies confirm that less than a decade after castigating slaveowners, Whitefield was looking to enter their class as much out of paternalistic concerns as from a desire to reap its economic rewards. He aggressively advocated for the removal of a ban on slaveholding in Georgia, a key feature of James Oglethorpe’s original plan for his holy experiment, by pushing for legislation that would make slavery legal. (This legislation would finally pass in 1751.) On top of this, Whitefield also illegally brought slave labor into Georgia to work at the Bethesda Orphan House at least two years before slavery was legalized there.

How could someone who preaches the equality of souls before God simultaneously endorse the biblical right to profit off those bodies at the same time? Kidd equivocates on the implications of this disjuncture. To understand Whitefield’s position on slavery, he explains, we need to understand his conviction that heaven and hell are real and that slaves would receive their reward in the world to come. (Of course, as a Calvinist, he would have expected only some of them to receive that reward.) “Blinded as [Whitefield] was by the prejudices of the time, and by the quest for financial stability, the itinerant did not see slave ownership the way we do,” writes Kidd. “Instead he viewed his plantation as another means of advancing the gospel among orphans, and among the slaves themselves” (200). Whitefield’s paternalism provides a common thread for Parr, predating his efforts to achieve financial stability by expanding the holdings of his South Carolina plantation or his Georgia Orphan House and extending to his pastoral relationship with others of different ranks and ethnicities. But in the end, Whitefield became more rather than less invested in slavery over time—unlike fellow evangelicals John Newton and John Wesley. It is not hard to conclude that he ultimately acted in self-interest. After his death, Parr reminds us, both proslavery and antislavery evangelicals invoked his memory in support of their arguments about the compatibility of slavery and Christianity (80).

These books remind us that the challenge in interpreting Whitefield goes back to the sources that he left us. Our knowledge of him is largely dependent upon what he wanted his audiences to know. Whitefield’s thoughts and life were always filtered through print media. As soon as he began preaching, he published copies of his sermons for sale. Even before he departed for his first trip to North America, he hired William Seward as his publicist. Paid advertisements alerted readers to his impending arrival, or reprinted selections from his other works. Few of Whitefield’s manuscript personal papers have survived to allow us to compare his original drafts and printed versions. Kidd uses the manuscript draft of Whitefield’s life at Cambridge to read against the published account, but one is left wishing that he had given the text a close explanation akin to what Norman Pettit so illuminatingly did to the manuscript and printed versions of David Brainerd’s journals in the introduction to the Yale edition of the Life of David Brainerd (1985). The difference here, of course, is that Whitefield edited himself—Brainerd was already gone from this world when Jonathan Edwards produced his edition—yet how Whitefield fashioned himself for print remains a key point.

The most extensive and problematic sources for reconstructing Whitefield are the various journals that he published in almost real time during his preaching tours of the late 1730s and early 1740s. Parr identifies them as an “essential part of his public relations campaign” that “enabled him to assert considerable influence over his public image and to counter criticism” (28-29). The journals lived on after he left town and sometimes played a pastoral role in his absence. But they were unstable documents: they were frequently reprinted, testament to Whitefield’s ongoing popularity, and their contents changed as Whitefield edited them over time. The authors know firsthand that the Whitefield that emerges in them is at times ambiguous and contradictory. Kidd notes at several points in his study where Whitefield later revised the journals, often by excising passages or by changing their wording and meaning. For example, early on, Whitefield had a tendency to draw parallels between his life and the life of Christ, but as he grew older and more moderate, he downplayed or removed such comparisons. Unfortunately, the reader has to wait until the start of chapter 11 for a sustained discussion of Whitefield’s editorial practices. An examination of such practices at the start of these volumes would have been helpful not only for scholarly readers but also for the undergraduates who will undoubtedly be assigned them.

Finally, the titles of both books seek to make larger claims for Whitefield’s legacy. The subtitle of Kidd’s book—America’s Spiritual Founding Father—is a bit perplexing given the story that he tells inside. Evangelicalism, as the book beautifully demonstrates, was at its heart a transatlantic phenomenon. If we must indulge the current cultural need to proclaim founders, then Whitefield seems to stand first and foremost as a Founding Father of Atlantic Evangelicalism, alongside, for example, Rebecca Protten, as recovered so masterfully by Jon Sensbach in Rebecca’s Revival (2006). To limit Whitefield to American evangelicalism, alongside, say, Sarah Osborn as detailed by Catherine Brekus in Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (2012), denies his important impact in Scotland, Wales, and England. If the title is meant to imply Whitefield’s contribution to the founding of the American nation, then it contradicts the arguments of both authors. Parr flat out rejects any consideration of Whitefield as an American founding father (4), identifying such a belief as a co-option after his death, while Kidd finds such claims “overstated, but … hardly surprising” (255) and shows that Whitefield’s increasing interest in politics during the Seven Years’ War and after was grounded more in his anti-Catholic concern for British Protestantism than any nascent interest in a Revolution that he could not have known was coming six years after his death. The most challenging and least elaborated claim—of Whitefield as a father of American spirituality—is perhaps the hardest sell. If the implication is that the spiritual essence of America has always been evangelical, then that is going to require significant unpacking, certainly more than the brief mention it receives on pages 249-250.

In many ways, it appears that the title of Kidd’s book exemplifies the point Parr is trying to make in Inventing George Whitefield. Playing off Frank Lambert’s Inventing the Great Awakening, Parr reminds us that the Whitefield we know is as much a product of choices he made during his lifetime as those of his supporters and detractors in the intervening centuries. Her argument about his iconic status is grounded in what she sees as the malleability of his public image, one that allowed him to be “co-opted for a variety of purposes,” and to be continually reinvented (105). Both Parr and Kidd amply document these appropriations in forms as diverse as bawdy theatrical productions, polemical pamphlets, and material artifacts. As Parr rightfully points out, Whitefield, of all the first generation of evangelical leaders, left himself the least tied to any particular memory and the most open for interpretation. He founded no denomination, like the Wesleys, and his own denomination, Anglicanism, often seemed not to want him. His body of writings remained open to revision and interpretation in his own life, a trend that continued with the writing of pious biographies for different audiences after his death. Even his physical remains were repurposed into talismans for good luck and seemingly un-Protestant religious relics. (Some even survive in archives today, like his desiccated thumb at the United Methodist Archives & History Center at Drew University.)

In the end, would Whitefield actually mind what happened during his journey in this life and after? Both Thomas Kidd and Jessica Parr confirm that Whitefield would gladly have accepted the modern-day dictum that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Whether we are convinced that this was because it allowed Whitefield to portray himself as a heroic reformer, attempting to save his church from the theologically corrupt within and the persecuting and heterodox without, or as simply a pragmatic reflection that more publicity meant larger crowds and more opportunities to make conversions, is up to the individual reader to decide. In death, as in life, Whitefield continues to be many things to many people. As the recent spate of publishing demonstrates, there is no indication that this is going to change anytime soon!

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2.5 (Spring, 2016).

Kyle Roberts is assistant professor of Public History and New Media and author of the forthcoming book, Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (October 2016)

The prolific painter and illustrator of early Americana Eric Sloane was born Everard Hinrichs—a name that was reminiscent of a different slice of early America than the New England that he so fervently embraced. Although Sloane’s paintings are still actively collected, and enthusiasts of early American culture are familiar with his books, he has been the subject of very little scholarly attention. Yet no visual artist of the second half of the twentieth century had a larger impact on how we envision the material life of early America. His nostalgic representations of the American past are so familiar that few people today know who created them, or why.

Born in New York City in 1905, Sloane studied art and calligraphy, and for a time was a student at the Art Students League of New York, where he met the painter John Sloan, whose name he would later borrow. But his first name he took from the middle letters of what would become his sole object of artistic fascination: AmERICa.

Eric Sloane spent years leaving his mark on the American landscape before he took up his calling to study the traces of others. He traveled as a sign painter first, lettering everything from mailboxes to advertisements to planes at Floyd Bennett Field, New York City’s first municipal airport. He painted on barns and on taverns, intentionally traveling to locales that most needed someone with his outdated calling. He traveled to places, like the Pennsylvania Amish country, that were assertively resisting change, and he grew fond of them. In that region of the country he adopted the German Blackletter style of writing, which even then was seen as old-fashioned. In his book Recollections in Black and White, he expressed regret over the generations of folk art collectors who, when they found works signed by “Herr Everard Hinrichs,” believed themselves to have stumbled upon an example of true Amish craftsmanship. It was on these sign painting expeditions, as he was scattering his drawings and text from Vermont to Taos, that he first grew fascinated by the structures that would provide fodder for his art and writings for the remainder of his long career: barns, covered bridges, and any building or mode of construction that signaled a connection to a vanished agrarian past. By the end of his life, he had written 38 books, produced over 15,000 paintings, amassed a giant collection of antique tools, built a barn according to instructions he found in the diary of a nineteenth-century boy, and settled by an abandoned pig iron furnace in Connecticut. Although in a number of ways the pervasive nostalgia of Eric Sloane’s writings is as problematic as his spurious fraktur work, a broad view of his life and art reveals a man who single-handedly invented an entire taxonomy for representing the history and built environment of early America.

Both stylistically and thematically, Sloane’s most obvious precursor might be Daniel Carter Beard, one of the founding members of the Boy Scouts of America and the author of such manuals as The American Boy’s Handy Book (1882) and The Field and Forest Handy Book (1906). Both authors exploit the form of the diagram for more than purely instructional purposes. The diagram becomes an illustration of the virtue of making something the old-fashioned way, and thus the right way. Beard helped create a “cult of the pioneer,” a form of American nostalgia that many readers found more acceptable than nostalgic images of Native Americans of the “noble savage” school, which tended to offer a history too divorced from the European tradition. Sloane, like Beard, created a generalized pioneer ancestor whose self-sufficient ways he wanted his readers to both admire and emulate. Sloane’s target audience, however, was not children, who according to Beard led modern lives that were sorely in need of virtuous outdoor activity, but instead midcentury adults seeking a nostalgic connection to the past. His books—the best known of which include A Reverence for Wood (a celebration of hand tools and traditional woodworking, published in 1965), Once Upon a Time: The Way America Was (1982), and Diary of an Early American Boy (1962)—praised early Americans’ expertise and self-sufficiency, but also acted as pleas for the preservation of material culture (and an aesthetic embrace of its pleasing decay). A desire to keep the trappings of this yeoman history close at hand and to appreciate and understand even the most obscure customs permeated all his work.

Following an early series of books that focused on depicting weather, with Our Vanishing Landscape, published in 1955, Sloane embarked on a career rooted in a full embrace of early American (and primarily New England) history and material culture. These publications helped set the stage for many of the celebrations of the U.S. bicentennial in 1976—celebrations that were full of reenactments, historical restorations, and nostalgia (whereas the centennial celebrations a century earlier had been primarily focused on progress). The celebration of the bicentennial in the United States was marked by its disparate nature. Unlike the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the bicentennial had no central fair. Instead, the country exploded with local festivals, many of them emphasizing an antic or “old timey” quaintness. Much of the material culture that accompanied the bicentennial focused on artifacts of the colonial period, stripped of their classical symbolism and replaced with more ephemeral signifiers. The founding fathers were far less likely to be represented as marble busts, as they were on the centennial stock certificate; instead, the visual emphasis of bicentennial depictions often fell on the novelty of their breeches and buckles, and the ruffled cap of Betsy Ross. Popular housewares companies, from Pyrex bakeware to Kay Dee dish towels, featured motifs that were not depictions of colonial events or patriotic symbols, but instead drew from catalogues of antiquated objects. The items that frequently appeared in the “early American” motifs that adorned bicentennial-era consumer goods ranged from weathervanes, to bed warmers, to grinders, to oil lamps, to flame bellows. Patterns like these created graphic “curio cabinets” of early Americana that were heavily indebted to the works of Eric Sloane, and offered ways of displaying the trappings of the picturesque past without being burdened by them. These types of motifs, though, were stripped not just of context, but of text. Here the tendency diverged from Sloane’s intentions, as such objects took on the popular form of ephemera rather than artifact.

While Sloane did not approve of the vast commercial opportunism of the bicentennial, as he complained in his 1973 text The Spirits of ’76, he had already spent decades publishing books that claimed that there was greatness to be found in the lost artifacts and attitudes of America’s past. Sloane’s decoding of American artifacts, of ancestral works and ways, was so deeply rooted in patriotism that, as noted above, he chose the first name Eric because it was contained in the very word America. But Sloane’s embrace of the past ran counter to a stream of thought that was prominent from the beginning of European settlement in North America, one that held that the “New World” represented an opportunity to turn away from the past, and from the ruins and relics of Europe in particular. Alexis de Tocqueville praised America for the newness and spirit of reinvention that each new generation possessed. Europe was seen as a collection of societies in decline, while the new nation’s ascent was unencumbered by the past. While nostalgia was certainly present, many people were criticized for building their houses in “Old World” styles, even for “embalming the founding fathers in Greek garb.” As is by now familiar, early American thinkers like Jefferson and Charles Willson Peale advocated for a transcendent view of the past that could be found in the sublimity of landscape and the enormity of New World natural history.

The centennial celebration in Philadelphia took place without any historical display, and instead focused on the fact that Ulysses Grant’s America was “bigger, richer and stronger than Washington’s.” The refrain of John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Centennial Hymn” ended with the lines: “And cast in some diviner mould, / Let the new cycle shame the old.” In fact, the centennial celebration was much more another world’s fair among a string of world’s fairs than it was in any sense a celebration that was local or particular to Philadelphia or even to the United States. In Frank Leslie’s Historical Register of the United States Centennial Exposition, a contemporary catalogue of the grounds and displays, the first quarter of the text is devoted to a history of fairs throughout the world, followed by detailed entries and engravings describing and depicting all of the nineteenth century’s various world’s fairs. The United States had plenty of opponents of the centennial celebration—Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts argued that it would not be worth having because no foreign monarch would agree to participate in a celebration of a revolution. In 1871, Congress agreed that the country would hold a celebration to mark the nation’s declaration of independence and in the act that they passed referred to it as an “international exhibition of the arts, manufactures and products of the soil and mine.” After Congress created the Centennial Board of Finance in 1872 to raise money for the exhibition, even the image on the certificate for the $10 shares featured at its top people of the world paying homage to the goddess Liberty, while below were smaller figures representing industry and exploration in contemporary America. Figures from early American history play several peripheral roles: some are ghostly essences faint in the background, some take the form of classical busts at the feet of living figures, while the signers of the Declaration of Independence are hemmed into a boxed tableau looking more like a seal or coat of arms than a living history.

The Centennial Exposition’s linkage of the Declaration of Independence with material and technological progress ran counter to Sloane’s every instinct. In Sloane’s 1966 book The Sound of Bells, he complained about modern celebrations of Independence Day, and the loss of an old tradition—the ringing of bells to celebrate the Fourth of July. He dedicated his book to the cause of reviving the original Independence Day tradition of ringing bells rather than setting off fireworks. In the postscript, he wrote, “And if the revival of the early American custom of ringing bells on Independence Day will have become established, I would consider this one thing the most important occurrence connected with my life.” This comes from someone who served in the Air Force, illustrated manuals for pilots, and painted the great mural in the foyer of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, and had by this point already published more than a dozen books. The Sound of Bells was not the only book he wrote that served as a plea for the preservation of past relics. For example, in Mr. Daniels and the Grange (1968), Sloane wrote about the state of disrepair into which Alexander Hamilton’s house in upper Manhattan had fallen. He described the neighborhood (where he grew up), the house and its history, and the caretaker, who had the power to do little but cohabitate with ghosts. A contemporary reviewer in the 1971 issue of Forest History complained of Sloane’s tendency towards quaintness, not just for reasons of taste but because of its likely inefficiency. The review’s author believed that such a presentation would turn off those developers, officials, and preservationists who would be in a position to save the Grange.

In his art and writing, Sloane was unabashedly whimsical, a quality that allows many readers to delight unquestioningly in his praise of the past and twee trivia. Yet Sloane is without doubt also guilty of all of the negative caprice that the term “whimsy” connotes. In a 1984 letter to the editors of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Journal, Sloane wrote both to compliment an article on John Singer Sargent and to rail against another on Marcel Duchamp. After reminding the editor that he is both an admirer of and a contributor to the Smithsonian’s collection, he asserted, “I am sure Sargent would cringe knowing his work was classed within the same pages featuring a man’s urinal and bicycle wheel. I feel sad that such bad taste is kept alive by such as the otherwise beautiful Smithsonian and hope history will start honoring sanity by forgetting insanity.” These lines demonstrate not just Sloane’s general rejection of the modern, but also his tendency to make himself a mouthpiece for the people of the past. The books in which Sloane focused more on antique customs and attitudes than on antique structures and tools are perhaps his ugliest pieces of work. In books like American Yesterday (1956), Our Vanishing Landscape (1955), or The Do’s and Don’ts of Yesteryear (1972), the shrill tone of his letter to the Smithsonian comes through. In The Little Red Schoolhouse (1972), no sooner does he move on from interesting chapters about these buildings and their interiors than readers find him tangled in a series of easy justifications and dismissals: of corporal punishment, creeping liberalism, and separation of church and state.

Much like an ethnographic historian, Sloane relied on the contradictory beliefs that a particular culture was rapidly and inevitably disappearing, and that reliable sources could be gathered about it. Salvage ethnography—or here perhaps rescue archaeology—is a form of whimsy in its own right, in that it requires a suspension of disbelief, a faith in vision or project over method.

Sloane’s oeuvre is without question problematic, yet his best work has an undeniable appeal. A Reverence for Wood (1965) and A Museum of Early American Tools (1964) both have drawn innumerable readers to the study of early Americana. In a recent conversation, Gregory Landrey, a director and furniture expert at Delaware’s Winterthur Museum and Library, told me that when he was eleven, A Reverence for Wood changed his life. Typography designer Dave Nalle has not only designed a number of fonts around Sloane’s book lettering, he also calls A Reverence for Wood “remarkable and almost mystical.” It is one of those unclassifiable classics with a bit of a cult following among lovers of popular histories, those who work with wood, and those who embrace bygone things, from barns to bells to introspection. Sloane’s work is nearly ubiquitous, yet the sum of his legacy remains in many ways unknown and unexplored. He was an artist who was resolutely unfashionable, yet his importance in shaping how generations of readers thought about what early America looked like must be acknowledged—he is the Norman Rockwell of things, of technology and industry. Like Rockwell, he embraced certain specific modes of nostalgia long before the public did. Rockwell might have seen the soda fountain’s connection to town squares and meeting houses, but Sloane praised a barn door and fashioned it into his kitchen table long before the current mania for reclaimed woods took hold. Sloane’s work is plagued by a too-fixed backwards stare, but it is not clear that this is the same as blind nostalgia. His work is full of material that is clear-sighted and powerful enough to salvage his reputation from sentimentality.

One of the most remarkable things about Eric Sloane’s work across genres is its consistency of vision. In the Sloane-Stanley Museum in Kent, Connecticut—a museum featuring Sloane’s artwork and his collection of early American hand tools, which is housed in a building built to mark the 125th anniversary of the Stanley Tool company—a visitor is immediately struck by the exactitude with which Sloane’s displays resemble his books in layout and presentation. The entryway is a passage full of diagrammatic drawings brought to life with light. Little red bulbs are staggered in their igniting behind a piece of plexiglas that represents a iron furnace. In the section of the museum dedicated to the display of tools, every scrap of text is printed in a font identical to the one that Sloane used for the headings and captions of his books. In clusters where the crowded tools become confusing, little wire arrows carefully point from title to referent, just as sketched arrows do on the page. From book to book, Sloane’s style was unchanging. In his late work Recollections in Black and White (1974), he expressed regret about the time he devoted to color illustrations; this preference even takes on a moral tone when he writes “the coloured painting is meant to deceive the eye, but black ink cannot.” This is no revisionist interpretation of his career, nor is it the rueful realization of an old man. The inspiration for the book lay in his discovery of an old art school project titled “A Manuscript for Shapes in Black and White.” He writes that his first venture away from home as a sign painter was an excuse to use up some batches of black ink and white paint that he had mixed but was unable to sell. In this early work he argues against the outlining of sketches, favoring the method of shading basic shapes first to assemble an image. The book became a paean to the pen and ink drawing, to the black and white image. If the well-hewn tool or the efficiently designed barn stood for the lost virtues of an imagined American past, then the simply rendered illustration and its informative captioning were media that he saw as valuable correctives to the changed cultural landscape of mid-century America.

In addition to its visual nostalgia, Sloane’s writing also works to create memory of lost bodies of knowledge through what often seems to be brazen repetition of material. While this is a natural product of his prolific writing and the narrow scope of his studies, the number of times specific facts come up across his works is surprising. Because it is stated in at least four of his books, readers are given the impression of great certainty that it was the responsibility of the “snow warden” to sweep and pack fresh snow onto the roadbeds of covered bridges in order to ensure that sleighs could cross the bridges in the winter. This debunking of the snow-shielding purpose of the covered bridge is not the only tidbit that appears multiple times throughout Sloane’s work—some of his books are thinly restated versions of each other. His bibliography includes The Weather Book (1952), Look at the Sky and Tell the Weather (1970), and The Folklore of American Weather (1963), all three of which have understandable areas of overlap. His oeuvre includes American Barns and Covered Bridges, An Age of Barns, and A Reverence for Wood, again sharing many of their most interesting pieces of material. Upon broad reading of Sloane’s works, such repetition can be frustrating, but these redundancies have a deeper impact. Arcane facts which were at first odd pieces of ephemera to be noted and forgotten become through the sheer act of repetition fixed more permanently in the reader’s mind. Previously obscure and trivial rules of life become established as the foundational and essential knowledge that they were to those who lived by them. While this mnemonic property may not necessarily have been Sloane’s intention, it certainly worked to fulfill his vision in the sense that it served to elevate bits of information from the status of obscure and quaint to important evidence of the way people lived in early America. Rather than stripping artifacts of their context, Sloane went to lengths to over-contextualize the things about which he wrote. We see this phenomenon not only in his writing, but in his style of living. When he read an early American diary of a boy building a barn, he not only illustrated it for his Diary of an Early American Boy, he followed the directions he found there and built his own barn.

Yet Sloane’s better works achieve their transcendence not through detailed descriptions of plows and planes, nor from painstaking recreations of early American work practices, but through their description of natural phenomena: the skies and the weather. When comparing the attitudes of Americans celebrating the bicentennial to those who observed the centennial, David Lowenthal writes, “That Nature is America’s greatest architect is perhaps the only proposition with which Americans would still concur.” When one takes a step back from Sloane’s work as a whole, one finds that in all his writing, he has respect first and foremost for any artifacts or practices that are designed to cooperate with the weather. Even when he does not write directly about the weather, it is a force that is never absent from his descriptions of buildings, travel, or customs. One of the things that he admired most about old barns and old houses was the “air plot” or the “atmospheric acreage” on which they were built, and the expertise with which people chose the sites for their structures. He writes: “the fact that many old barns still stand is a tribute to the pioneers who built them. You can usually remodel an old barn into a pleasant and comfortable home, but not even livestock could live well in some of our modern homes if they were remodeled into barns … a house is built not so much upon a piece of land as it is built upward into a section of the atmosphere.” His oeuvre, for all its cranky rejections of modern life, strives to demonstrate the ongoing interaction between the natural world and the built environment. If Eric Sloane was able to find the timelessness he longed for by looking at the blank slate of the sky, he made it his project to translate that exhilaration into his crisp, clean sketches. There is every reason to believe that his work will endure for us as one very carefully scrubbed bit of bottle-glass window into a bygone era.

Further Reading

For examples of Sloane’s narrative archives, see his A Reverence for Wood (1965), A Museum of Early American Tools (1973), and The Sound of Bells (1966), all three of which are re-issued by Dover. For information on his life, the Sloane Stanley Museum in Kent, Connecticut, is a good place to look, along with Recollections in Black and White (1974) and Eighty: An American Souvenir (1985). For more on the distinctions between the centennial and the bicentennial celebrations, refer to David Lowenthal’s “The Bicentennial Landscape: A Mirror Held to the Past,” The Geographical Review 67.3 (1977) as well as The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985). For more reading on the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, see John Maas’ The Glorious Enterprise: The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and H. J. Schwarzmann, Architect-in-Chief. (New York, 1973) as well as the contemporary catalogues Frank Leslie’s Historical Register of the United States Centennial Exposition (New York, 1877) and James McCabe’s The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia, 1876). Finally, for information on Daniel Carter Beard and the creation of a generalized and idealized pioneer ancestor, see Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian (New Haven, Conn., 1998).

This article originally appeared in issue 13.4 (Summer, 2013).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.

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

2.

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

3.

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

4.

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

5.

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

6.

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

Appeared originally in Western Humanities Review.

Statement of Poetic Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there was Roger in his Clapp arc, waiting.

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

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

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

 Well, there was my “political” dimension.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dear son,

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

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

                                                                        CR Clapp

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publication

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

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

Forest Leaves and the World of Private Emotions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forest Leaves and the World of Books

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

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

Forest Leaves as Poetic Beginnings

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

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

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

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

Still Searching

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

Maybe one day the archives will tell us.

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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