Before moving to northern California in 1997, every place I had ever lived was within reach of the Atlantic Ocean. For over three decades, and from various locations across the eastern U.S., the Atlantic had always been within a short walk to a long day’s drive from my home. I was so accustomed to the presence of the Atlantic in my everyday life that I relied on it to determine which direction I was headed. If the ocean was to my right, I was going north; if it was to my left, I was southbound. I didn’t realize the extent of my dependence on it until I moved to California where, in the days before GPS (and as a navigationally challenged human being), the Pacific’s presence on the “wrong” side of the world disoriented me so profoundly that I took wrong turns for years.

The Pacific demanded other adjustments as well. The Atlantic had been swimming-friendly, and I’d spent my childhood seeking relief from the scorching summer heat in its temperate and generally placid waters. The Pacific, however, turned out to be ridiculously cold, dauntingly fierce, and disturbingly unpredictable. I learned there was such a thing as a “rogue wave” that could unexpectedly arise to take an unsuspecting child or dog out to sea. I learned to make a habit of bringing a jacket with me to the beach, even in summer. Only after years of complaining that the water temperature made it impossible to swim did I finally buy a wetsuit, amazed to find this simple adaptation made it possible to enjoy being in the water. Several years afterward, I wore that wetsuit to my first and only surfing lesson, where—after spending half a day falling, over and over again, into an endless series of crashing waves on an overcast and deserted beach—I felt as if I’d finally figured out the Pacific.

Searching for an Early American Pacific

But I had moved to California in the first place to take up a position as a professor of early American literature, and it took even longer to change the syllabi and research projects that defined my work as a teacher and scholar. My teaching and research had always engaged, I thought, with a fairly wide-ranging representation of the early American literary landscape: texts by and about early European travelers and explorers, indigenous peoples, the Puritans, settlers and creoles and citizens in New England and the South, the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world. These texts, however, rarely got me and my students—most of whom are from California and other western states—any farther from the Atlantic than the first three decades of my life had. If none of my students ever complained, I suspect it’s because they all shared the assumption that there was no early American literature from or about the Pacific (at least not until well into the nineteenth century, when a New Yorker named Herman Melville who had spent some time on whaling ships began to write and publish fiction).

It was when I was beginning a new research project on the early American novel in the context of the Atlantic during the age of revolutions that, ironically, my own assumptions about the early American Pacific began to change. At the time, my office was filled with library books on the revolutionary Atlantic waiting for me to read, and I was preparing to teach a selection of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels in a course on revolution and the American novel. That’s when one of my colleagues arrived at my office door with a handful of titles published by Heyday Books, a Bay Area press long dedicated to reprinting forgotten California writing. The title of one of these volumes in particular caught my eye, largely because of its date: Life in a California Mission: Monterey in 1786. Who was in Monterey in 1786, I wondered, and what exactly was life in California like then?

The slim volume turned out to be an account by the French explorer Jean-François Galaup de Lapérouse of his visit to the Spanish mission in Monterey. He described its priests and the mission system, as well as the animals and plants of the region. He also commented on the relationship of the Franciscan priests to the native population, going so far as to suggest that it would not be surprising if the latter were to rise up in rebellion one day. I wondered why a French explorer was on the coast of northern California at all in a period when revolutionary upheavals were taking place around the Atlantic. That question led me to discover that this small book was in fact only a tiny excerpt from Lapérouse’s journals describing his three-year circumnavigation of the globe, taken on behalf of the French crown—and in competitive response to the British expeditions by James Cook—to pursue scientific discovery and prospects for trade in the Pacific.

New Texts, New Maps

When I finally located a reprint edition of Lapérouse’s complete, two volume text, I found myself reading about places that no anthology or history of early American literature had ever taken me—the ports of Cavite and Manila, the island of Formosa, the peninsula of Kamchatka, the Ladrones, the Moluccas, the Society and Solomon Islands. Even when I recognized these names, I was hard pressed to identify where in the world they were actually located, much less where they were in relation to the Aleutian or Hawaiian Islands, to New Zealand or Indonesia, and to each other. My geographical confusion led me to order a large laminated Pacific-view map of the world from National Geographic, which I thumbtacked to the wall beside my desk and consulted repeatedly as I read. The map itself was a visual introduction to another view of the globe, for whenever I looked at it, I realized not only how incredibly watery the world looks from the middle of the Pacific, but also how remote, small, and marginal locations like Europe, New York, or Washington, D.C., appeared from this perspective. Even as Lapérouse’s journals introduced me to an entirely new eighteenth-century geography, the scholarly apparatus to the Hakluyt Society’s edition alerted me to a new eighteenth-century literary history made up of travel narratives by Spanish, English, Russian, French, Dutch, and American explorers and merchants, who documented their incredibly long voyages and often remarkable experiences in the Pacific.

But I was researching and planning to write a book on the novel and the revolutionary Atlantic. This new material was all terribly distracting—so much so, that I began to invent a future project on the Pacific even though I was only just beginning one on the Atlantic. It was as if I’d been pulled in by some kind of rogue research wave, and as this early Pacific writing began to exert an increasingly powerful rip-tide effect on my imagination, I even contemplated the possibility of abandoning the well-trodden ground of the revolutionary Atlantic altogether for its neglected Pacific counterpart. At moments, I found myself fantasizing about improbably creative ways of smashing these two projects together into a single one. Was there a way to integrate a chapter or two on the revolutionary Pacific into this book? How could I possibly bridge the thousands of nautical miles between the eighteenth-century Pacific and the eighteenth-century Atlantic?

I was forced to drop these worries in order to teach a course on the American novel in the Atlantic world and the age of revolutions—a course I had designed (and for which I had ordered books) many months earlier. Even if I had possessed the time or energy to redesign the syllabus at this point, there were no American novels I knew of set in the Pacific during this period, and as much as I loved reading and teaching Melville, I wanted to focus on these earlier decades and to work with texts that were less well known. As we read Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, my students and I discussed political radicalism, sexual seduction, the French and American revolutions, counterrevolution, and paranoia. But this time as I made my way through Ormond, I noticed a number of references to Ormond’s military and political activities in Russia that I had passed over before. Why would Brown bother to place his strange villain in such a far-flung location?

Finding the Pacific in the Atlantic

I had been taken to the Russian Pacific earlier by Lapérouse, who left Monterey to continue his voyage into the northern Pacific, including one five-day visit to Castries Bay on the far eastern coast of Russia. He described the Native peoples of Siberia at length, often comparing them to “American Indians” and remarking on the “despotic form of government” practiced there by the Russians. He was invited to a ball held by the governor of Kamchatka—a place name that had sent me to my new map to find a peninsula extending from Siberia into the northern Pacific. Could Brown have known about this part of the world? As it turns out, in the same year that Ormond was published, a magazine edited by Brown (The Monthly Magazine and American Review) included a review of the work of the German playwright August von Kotzebue that mentions his play Count Benyowsky; or, the Conspiracy of Kamtschatka. That drama stages the adventures of the Polish mercenary, Count Maurice Benyowsky, who fought (like Ormond) in the Turko-Russian war and was imprisoned in Kamchatka. (Kotzebue’s son, Otto, would go on to become a navigator who explored and wrote his own extraordinary narrative about the northern Pacific). In Kamchatka, Benyowsky seduces the daughter of the governor before escaping with other political prisoners into the Pacific with plans to head for Madagascar.

The play is based on Benyowsky’s own exciting if improbable memoirs, first published in French but later widely available in translation. In Kotzebue’s play, one of Benyowsky’s fellow prisoners keeps a copy of George Anson’s Pacific travel narrative, and the inmates fantasize about escaping to begin their own society on the island of Tinian, which Anson describes as a paradise of freedom where one might begin a new society. The Monthly Magazine article includes a footnote mentioning another play by Kotzebue titled La Peyrouse, which tells the story of the French navigator’s shipwreck in the Pacific, his Pocahontas-like rescue by a native woman named Malvina, and his marriage to her before his French wife arrives on the island, Miranda-like, after years of searching for him. The play ends with the two women proposing to live with Lapérouse in a series of three huts on the shores of this remote Pacific island, a kind of early modern south Pacific Big Love. 

Brown’s later interest in Pacific utopias has been well established by scholars, but it was starting to look like that interest was already embedded in the earlier Ormond, whose titular character began more and more to resemble Benyowsky, that globetrotting political and sexual radical associated with East Indian commercial schemes. There was a global and transoceanic awareness in Brown’s novel that resonated with a version of late eighteenth-century Philadelphia I would only later come to learn more about: as the North American port most identified with high-profile trade to the East Indies, and as a city filled with merchants who had made astonishing fortunes (and others who had suffered great losses) from that trade. If I’d never noticed these textual and contextual elements before, it was because I’d been so preoccupied with the novel’s—and the city’s—Atlantic dimensions.

These intertextual discoveries opened up the prospect of writing a book chapter on Ormond in transoceanic context that would allow me to bring the Atlantic and Pacific together in the age of revolutions after all. But that was possible only because there were references to relevant geographical locations in Brown’s novel that I simply hadn’t noticed earlier, before dedicated reading in Pacific materials from the period had alerted me to their names, their significance, and the various texts and figures associated with them. The syllabus for my course moved from Ormond to William Earle’s 1800 novel Obi; or the History of Three-Fingered Jack—a novel about a slave revolt set in Jamaica which sustained an Atlantic awareness but which made absolutely no reference to and possessed no awareness whatsoever of the Pacific. I would have to seek out other novels instead if I wanted to pursue this new course.

It’s difficult for me to reconstruct exactly what happened as I read and taught Obi that quarter, and as a web of informing texts opened the novel up for me and connected it to the Pacific in completely unexpected ways over the following months. But I know it began with the novel’s curiously long footnote on the plantain tree, which appears in a description of the mountain hideaway of the heroic rebel Jack. The note was so disproportionately extensive that it eventually led me to notice the book’s other references to plant life and use of botanical language. I still wasn’t sure what to make of these when I noticed that one of the anti-slavery epigraphs on the original title page was attributed to a book by Erasmus Darwin called The Botanic Garden. I was intrigued enough to take a look at the complete text, and when I accessed it online via Project Gutenberg, I found what seemed to me an astonishing oddity: a two-volume poem, accompanied by a voluminous set of prose footnotes, that was at once a global encyclopedia of botanical knowledge, a manual to the sexual and reproductive lives of plants, and a searing environmental and political treatise about revolution. As I read more about this Darwin (the grandfather of Charles) and the eighteenth-century vogues in botanical collection and classification, my research quickly brought me to the Pacific. Numerous European transoceanic voyages (like that of Lapérouse) were spurred in part by the problems of revolution and slavery in the Atlantic, and they traveled to the Pacific in search of new products and markets. Among these were plants, highly sought after as profitable food, medicine, and luxury items.

The Pacific Breadfruit and the Atlantic Slave Trade

In the wake of the American Revolution, when Britain’s Caribbean sugar colonies were cut off from food imports from North America, Joseph Banks—who gained fame by returning from Cook’s first voyage with numerous new plant specimens (as well as sexualized accounts of indigenous women)—proposed to solve the problem of feeding the West Indian slave population by transplanting breadfruit from the Pacific island of Tahiti to the Atlantic’s plantation zone. He sent William Bligh on a ship named The Bounty on this voyage, a voyage which ended, of course, in what is perhaps the world’s best-known shipboard revolution. But Banks and Bligh tried again, and seven years before Obi was published, Bligh arrived in Jamaica with 66 breadfruit trees that were carried overland to the botanical garden of a planter named Hinton East. A 34-page catalogue of the contents of East’s garden was printed in several editions of Bryan Edwards’ popular History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, an acknowledged source for William Earle’s Obi in which Edwards also compares Jamaica with Tahiti by drawing on John Hawkesworth’s collection of British Pacific voyages. Which brings us back to plantain.

Most accounts of the breadfruit scheme end by wryly observing that the project failed because slaves refused to eat the food, preferring their regular fare of plantain instead. By the time the breadfruit plants arrived in Jamaica, slaves had long been maintaining provision grounds where they grew plantain and other foodstuffs. Earle describes provision grounds in another, shorter footnote in his novel, and the fact that Jack’s medicine, food, and furniture all consist of plantain products suggest that his hideout is at or near a provision ground, a location often associated also with practitioners of obeah, the hybrid medical-spiritual practice from which the novel takes its title and from which its hero derives his revolutionary political power. The Pacific may not have been anywhere in the text of Obi, but it was there in many of the books on which it relied, there in the Jamaica in which its story was set, and there in the Atlantic world in which it was written and read.

By now, I realized that even though I was reading the same novels I’d read earlier, I was reading them differently, with a transoceanic awareness developed from my immersion in a variety of scientific, commercial, ethnographic, literary, and historical texts about the Pacific. It’s not that I found the Pacific everywhere; it was nowhere to be found in Foster’s The Coquette, as far as I could tell, and it didn’t seem to be present in Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, either (although Rowson’s brother Thomas Haswell did travel on three transoceanic voyages from Boston which took him to the Pacific Northwest, the East Indies, and Canton, China). But I was seeing the Pacific in all kinds of places I had never noticed before. Even novels that did not engage with that ocean’s concrete particulars often reflected the anxieties, interests, pressures, and possibilities of a world in which the Pacific had taken on a new importance, both on its own terms and in relation to the Atlantic. I began to remember the Pacific dimensions of other eighteenth-century texts where its importance has been diminished or forgotten, largely because as teachers and scholars we’ve been so focused on looking in other directions. Although it’s set in the Atlantic, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is based on Pacific stories of shipwreck, including that of Alexander Selkirk, who lived on the Pacific island of Juan Fernandez. The fantastic locations of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels are set in a very real geography, where Brobdingnag is positioned as a peninsula extending into the Pacific from the coast of North America, a kind of geographical mirror to Kamchatka.  These canonical novels had forgotten counterparts, like the delightfully weird 1778 anonymous novel The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman, set in a series of imaginary south Pacific locations, including the continent named Luxo-volupto, where women sprout wings on their heads once they’ve seduced a man, and where the colony of Armoseria has risen up in rebellion against its indulgent and corrupt mother country—an obvious allegory for revolutionary America.

Is the Pacific American?

While I had found the Pacific in some surprising textual locations, I often faced a question posed to me as an Americanist working with this array of international texts written in (and translated from) multiple languages. In what possible sense were these American texts? Brown’s Ormond might seem unarguably American, but what about its sources? These included the narrative of a Polish-Hungarian count imprisoned in Siberia, written in French. English translations were published in book form in London and Dublin, in abridged and serialized form in a New York periodical, and advertised in Boston for potential subscribers. Benyowsky’s story was also turned into a play by a German playwright, translated and performed in London, reviewed in Philadelphia, and later performed in Baltimore on the same night that the Star-Spangled Banner debuted. Why Baltimore? Likely because that was where Benyowsky established a mercantile firm for commerce in slaves, and from which he sailed on his way to Madagascar—where he would be killed by the French. This isn’t an American text, but is it a Polish one? A French one? An English one? We might ask the same questions of the Pacific travel narratives by Lapérouse, Cook, Bougainville, and many others, which were similarly translated, abridged, serialized, and adapted into a variety of languages and forms. Many of those narratives and voyages are cited in the footnotes that populate Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden, revealing his reliance on an international archive of travel narratives and natural histories that spanned the globe by crossing its oceans. Darwin’s book was published in London in 1791, and its first American edition was edited by Elihu Hubbard Smith, the physician who was also the close friend and onetime roommate of Charles Brockden Brown, whose novel Ormond appeared a year later.

Like the seeds of plants or radical revolutionary ideas, these texts traveled—they were translated, transplanted, renovated, revised. Labeling these texts with a single national marker, or limiting their identification to a single language or version, actually prevents us from following their routes of travel and transformation. Many of these texts will never make their way into American literature anthologies, nor should they. They represent an understanding of literary history that really can’t be represented by the form of the anthology, much less by any national, linguistic, or even continental designator. In fact, such designators often help to ensure that scholars and students of American literature will never encounter or engage with texts like these at all, much less venture into the tangled webs of their textual and intertextual histories. Anthologies and readily available editions might be thought of as home ports, familiar shores, from which students should be encouraged to depart in order to explore connections that can bring them to unfamiliar archives and unexpected locations. Sometimes we find new ways of seeing by facing the wrong direction.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Juliana Chang, Jackie Hendricks, Claudia McIsaac, and Robin Tremblay-McGaw.

Further Reading

The Pacific Routes issue of Common-place offers an excellent introduction to the early Pacific in the context of American studies. The two-volume Journal of Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse, 1785-1788 has been translated and edited for the Hakluyt Society by John Dunmore (London, 1994). Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond is available in an exceptionally well-documented edition prepared by Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro (Cambridge, Mass., 2009). The two best introductions to Benyowsky are his own two-volume Memoirs and Travels of Mauritius Augustus Count de Benyowsky (Dublin, 1790), and August von Kotzebue’s Count Benyowsky; or, the Conspiracy of Kamtschatka, 2^nd ed., trans. William Render (London, 1798). James R. Fichter’s So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 2010) and Jonathan Goldstein’s Philadelphia and the China Trade 1682-1846: Commercial, Cultural, and Attitudinal Effects (University Park, Penn., 1978) provide fine introductions to America’s and Philadelphia’s early involvement in the East Indies trade. Srinivas Avaramudan’s edition of William Earle’s Obi; or the History of Three-Fingered Jack (Peterborough, Ontario, 2005) is usefully read alongside Erasmus Darwin’s two-volume 1791 Botanic Garden (New York, 1978) and Edward Long’s 1774 History of Jamaica (New York, 1972). Beth Tobin’s Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1820 (University Park, Penn., 2005), Jill H. Casid’s Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis, Minn., 2005), and Glynis Ridley’s terrific Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe (New York, 2010) provide excellent studies of botany, plant collection, and transplantation in transoceanic context. And look out for the forthcoming reprint of The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman from Broadview Press, edited by Lance Bertelsen.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

Michelle Burnham is professor and chair of the English Department at Santa Clara University. She has published widely on early American literature, and is currently completing a book on transoceanic American writing and the revolutionary Pacific.

Still a Prologue? The Stamp Act Protests at 250

Ask the Author typically features an interview with the author of a newly published work. However, because this fall marks the 250th anniversary of the protests against the Stamp Act in Britain’s North American colonies, we would like to do something a little different. Rather than profile a new book, we offer instead a reexamination of a classic work: The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution, by Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, first published in 1953. Ask the Author invited a group of distinguished scholars of Revolutionary America to participate in a forum on the continuing importance of The Stamp Act Crisis and where study of the Stamp Act crisis may move in the future.

What has The Stamp Act Crisis meant for your scholarship in thinking about the protests of 1765 and 1766?

Gould: When we think of the Stamp Act Crisis (in capital letters), we usually mean the parliamentary act and the American protests that greeted it—in provincial assemblies, along urban waterfronts, and in the colonial press. This was the crisis that the Morgans wrote about sixty years ago, and it is the crisis that still predominates in writing on the Revolution’s origins. But the Stamp Act was also part of a much larger crisis, one driven by the escalating cost of Europe’s colonial wars and the vexed question of how to pay for them. As befits the Act’s global scope, the consequences were not limited to Britain and eastern North America but affected British India, North America’s Indian Country, and the Caribbean, as well as France, Spain and, eventually, the United States, along with many other places. In The Persistence of Empire (2000), I focused on the British dimensions of that larger crisis, especially the role that English riots during the Seven Years’ War played in building support for the Stamp Act after the war was over. Among the Powers of the Earth (2012) follows the story into the early years of the American republic. In an irony that I think the Morgans would have appreciated, the memory of the Stamp Act ensured that the United States would be a far looser, more localized union than the British Empire, yet in attempting to turn that union into a “treaty worthy nation,” Americans had to grapple with the same fiscal problems that bedeviled Parliament in 1765.

Skeehan: Rereading Edmund and Helen Morgan’s The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution in 2015—over sixty years since its original publication—I was struck by an uneasy tension at the work’s center: while it sets out to tell the story of the Stamp Act crisis through the eyes and pens of a handful of Loyalist stamp collectors and officials, the “mob” continually disrupts this narrative and even threatens to destroy the very documents such a history would rely on. To put it another way, the tension enacted between the preserved nature of the written letters and printed documents that traditionally serve as scholarly “evidence” (in this text and in scholarship more generally) and the fleeting nature of the bodies, symbolic objects, and ritualized performative protests that, taking place in the streets of North American cities in 1765 and 1766, perhaps constituted the center or theater of action when it came to the lived experience of the Stamp Act crisis. Burned effigies, pillaged and dismantled homes, secreted stamp paper, confiscated and renegade vessels, unnamed and undifferentiated bodies acting en masse, and the Liberty Tree (itself symbolically felled by British soldiers in 1775) are the other actors in the Morgans’ 1953 work. The evidence and anecdotes at the periphery of the Morgans’ text show that resistance to the Act took place on the street as well as in newspapers, that colonists animated objects as well as words to vocalize their discontent, and that so-called mobs instigated by the Sons of Liberty borrowed cues from the theater as well as Enlightenment-era discourses. In my own work, I’ve been drawn to the “stuff” of the Stamp Act, and the Morgans’ text has helped extend the ways I think about the textuality of material objects, actions, and bodies as well as the materiality of texts.

Carp: No book on the events of 1765–66 has emerged to supplant The Stamp Act Crisis, and any investigation of this period must start with the Morgans’ analysis. The book’s principal argument (that Americans never made a distinction between internal and external taxes) occasionally resurfaces as a controversy, but nowadays we mostly appreciate the book for its complex portrayal of an important moment in the origins of the American Revolution.

The Morgans illuminated a broad cast of characters: the British politicians who argued over how best to fund the empire, the radical Americans who “stood Bluff” against the Stamp Act, and “the men who had urged submission and faith in the ultimate justice and wisdom of the mother country.” The authors call on us to empathize with all of these groups (though not the crowds who also mobilized against the Stamp Act).

I still marvel at the organization of the book. Rather than attempt a comprehensive (and “tedious”) chronology of Stamp Act resistance in every colony, the Morgans focused on particular people who wrestled with big ideas and their consequences. We can criticize their blind spots but I think we also ought to appreciate the artistry of the result.

Howell: I remember first reading Stamp Act Crisis in graduate school and being delighted by two things: the Morgans’ devotion to the gentle iconoclasm of subtlety—their interest in what is “cloudy in history” over what is “clear in legend” (93)—and their sense that even in work that’s keenly interested in politics and economics, there ought not be a bright line between historical inquiry and literary inquiry. Both of these things become really clear in the middle of the book where the Morgans tell the story of Patrick Henry’s resolutions against the Stamp Act in the Virginia House of Burgesses, passed in May 1765.

With respect to cloudiness, the Morgans follow a fragmentary and subjective historical record in order to present a Henry who triangulates and temporizes: he’s against Parliament’s decision to impose a stamp tax on the colonies and he promotes legislation to resist it, but he’s not yet the “Give me liberty or give me death” guy. For someone trying to figure out how American colonists started to say yes to armed rebellion—and to figure out how we, as historians and literary critics, might represent the difficulty of doing so—the Morgans’ willingness to sit with Henry’s complexity was inspiring. Their commitment to exploring the oft-mystifying necessities and procedures of bureaucracy over heroic myths of individuated resistance struck (and continues to strike) me as exemplary.

In this same chapter about Henry’s House of Burgesses resolutions, we can also see how the Morgans acknowledge the coincidence of literary criticism and history. The official record of the House of Burgesses shows four of Henry’s resolutions adopted, the most pointed of which forwards the relatively mild claim that the people of the colony have “without Interruption enjoyed the inestimable Right of being governed by such Laws, respecting their internal Polity and Taxation, as are derived from their own Consent.” As the Morgans show, however, versions of these resolutions printed (and reprinted) in colonial newspapers differ considerably from the official record. Under the sign of “Resolves of the House of Burgesses in Virginia, June 1765,” for example, the Maryland Gazette printed seven resolves, the last of which casts anyone who thinks that Parliament might under any circumstances have the authority to impose any kind of tax on the colonies as an “’Enemy’ to Virginia.” That’s a big difference—one is an abstract statement of rights, and the other is a rationale for beating up your neighbor! Of course, nowhere in the Gazette is there any kind of statement alerting readers to those differences or pointing out that the latter resolve was never passed (and possibly never even proposed)— there is only that neutral and seemingly authoritative title. As the Morgans show, what offers itself as reportorial is, then, profoundly editorial: in the Gazette, the Burgesses are made to fit a narrative of universal resistance that the newspaper and its exchange network have been promoting, regardless of what actually happened on the House floor. Pointing this out, as the Morgans have here, yields the very best kind of high-stakes literary history—where something like tracking changes in a document can give you real insight into what’s going on in the culture.

Perry: There is a little something for everyone in Edmund and Helen Morgan’s The Stamp Act Crisis. A bold attempt to “recreate two years of American history,” the work travels widely from chapter to chapter—tracing imperial structures, politics, and reform; analyzing the language and justifications for the anti-stamp protests; and examining the experience of crowd violence from the victim’s perspective. The first time I read this book along with the accompanying primary source collection Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764-1766, I was excited to discover the sheer variety and volume of questions one could ask about this “Crisis.” Like many younger scholars, The Stamp Act Crisis was not the first work I read on colonial protests and mob action. In a college course on the protest tradition in American history, I encountered the “bottom up” approach and work of the New Left social historians who challenged scholars to think about the members of the crowd. When I first read the Morgans’ work a few years later, I was initially struck by the entirely different set of questions they asked, and in particular, the ways in which they integrated imperial politics into the local disruptions. Although the title would suggest a passing “Crisis” moment, the Morgans demonstrate why protest on the street and bold statements by colonial Assemblies occurred in 1765. The challenge I saw for my own scholarship was how to integrate this imperial and ideological approach with the actions and choices of individuals and communities on the street.

Protest is exceptional, and by highlighting the long-developing imperial tensions, the postwar reforms and regulations, the role of petitioning and lobbying, and ultimately the appearance and spread of colonial dissent, The Stamp Act Crisis explains why this “contagion” occurred and spread in response to a relatively small tax. Each time I reread The Stamp Act Crisis, I am struck by the quality of the writing (which at times masks a questionable use of evidence) and the variety of approaches the Morgans used to argue their points—in one chapter they essentially trace the rhetorical evolution of colonial constitutional claims, in another they explore the perspective of the victims of crowd action, and in another go across the colonies to trace the impact of the protests on the ports and courts. Throughout, they raise questions that all historians of the Revolution grapple with, particularly, the use of existing sources, the nature of loyalty and commitment, and the legitimacy of crowd action. At the same time, for all that they cover, there is much missing from the account. Due in part to the age of the book, their work also prompts a modern reader to ask more questions, particularly looking for a wider cast of characters than the Morgans trace. A modern reader cannot make it through the work without asking serious questions about race, gender, class, and identity missing from this volume.

What have been the most promising developments in scholarship on the Stamp Act Crisis since the publication of the Morgans’ work?

Perry: Scholars working on the Stamp Act Crisis period today face many of the same challenges as the Morgans did a half century ago—a relatively limited source base confined primarily to reports by imperial officials, tax collectors, and customs officers, as well as newspaper accounts and the rare diary entry. The most promising developments in scholarship, then, have not necessarily come from the location of new sources, as much as new questions and new ways of critically examining the sources analyzed by the Morgans in The Stamp Act Crisis. As we reach the 250th anniversary of the Stamp Act protests, many scholars are reconsidering the meaning of this imperial crisis to the larger move toward Revolution. Later this year, a new collection edited by Zach Hutchins, Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act, will be published by Dartmouth College Press and will present many of these new insights and avenues of current research.

With each subsequent edition of The Stamp Act Crisis, Edmund Morgan commented upon the rapidly shifting debates regarding this initial moment of imperial disruption leading to the American Revolution. In particular, developments in crowd studies in the decade directly after publication challenged many of the core interpretations offered by the Morgans of the nature of colonial protest. Readers today would be surprised to read the Morgans’ relatively uncritical account of the mob as merely a group of lower class men manipulated, guided, and controlled by the “better sort” of political thinkers. The Morgans’ descriptions of riots and street protest fit into an older line of interpretation, one that follows the sources’ own bias: that the leaders of the mob must be unmasked, but the members of the colonial crowd had no real political will or imperial stake in the constitutional crisis. Missing entirely is the idea that lower-class people could make rational choices and act upon their own political beliefs and imperial identity as Britons. Similarly, the actions of the many free and enslaved African Americans as well as women in these port communities are entirely missing. Rather, the mob as described in The Stamp Act Crisis is one that was, to varying degrees of effectiveness, corralled, manipulated, and used by their betters in service to a political agenda.

In his response to the challenge posed by historians to reinterpret the colonial crowd “from the bottom up,” Morgan dismissed the neo-progressives as seeking “a perspective not easily achieved and subject to many temptations.” While acknowledging the need to reconsider the role of the inarticulate, Morgan criticized new social historians for “putt[ing] one’s own words into the mouths of the wordless.” Morgan himself falls into this trap when writing from the perspective of the upper-class victims of mob violence. Perhaps Morgan was right to criticize early class-based attempts at history from the bottom up; however, the recent cultural turn in the study of the American Revolution offers perhaps a better path to understand how laboring people might have interpreted and participated in these protests as members of communities and the British Empire. Work on religion, identity, cultural performances, and even the economics of dock communities all help to better understand the dynamics of the mob.

Howell: To me, the most promising developments in scholarship on the Stamp Act have taken the Morgans’ subtilizing approach to the problem of American independence even further. I’m thinking in particular of recent work on Loyalists, fence-sitters, and other people living in the colonies uncertain about the American revolutionary project. Philip Gould’s Writing the Rebellion (2013), for example, does a wonderful job of reading the Stamp Act through the eyes of those who didn’t see independence as a salutary possibility—and who saw arguing about the finest points of literary form as high political warfare.

There has also been a spate of really interesting work on the Stamp Act and popular protest since Stamp Act Crisis was published. Dirk Hoerder’s Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780 (1977), for example, is both a greatest-hits collection of street protests and a sensitive inquiry into the mechanics and philosophical underpinnings of popular demonstrations. Benjamin Carp’s Rebels Rising (2007) thinks brilliantly about the urban landscapes that nurtured popular resistance to the Stamp Act; Nicole Eustace’s Passion is the Gale (2008) takes up both the emotional impact of the Stamp Act Crisis and the ways in which sentimental discourse was mobilized against it. Alfred Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party (1999) revisits one of the Morgans’ best working-class agitators, Ebenezer McIntosh, at a slightly later moment in his career. More delicate strains of resistance—especially in the form of consumer actions—have also been taken up with a great deal of productive energy. I’m thinking here of work like T. H. Breen’s Marketplace of Revolution (2004), which relates the non-importation agreements that emerged in the wake of the Stamp Act to broader ideas about the ideological weight of material culture and the political power of the purse.

Skeehan: Studies of the material objects that colonists animated as props and actors in the scenes of popular protest have examined the non-importation and non-consumption agreements that called colonists to refrain from purchasing the “baubles of Britain,” as well as appeals to women to produce their own homespun cloth in lieu of purchasing imported textiles. For instance Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Kate Haulman, and Linda Baumgarten, among others, have examined how homespun politicized the domestic sphere and provided women an avenue through which to participate in political discourse. Widening our geographic focus to include actors performing on an Atlantic rather than simply a North American stage, Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy has explored the ways in which West Indian colonists likewise resisted the Act. In turn, scholars have expanded the range of written and printed documents that have traditionally served as evidence in our accounts of the Stamp Act crisis and have invited us to look beyond newspapers and pamphlets in order to consider broadsides and the fleeting, ephemeral printed stuff churned out by colonial presses. Bringing some of these new approaches together, a panel at last summer’s joint conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the Society of Early Americanists in Chicago, titled “Theaters of Dissent in the Atlantic World,” featured papers from Peter Messer, Max White, Michelle Sizemore, and Peter Reed that reexamined scenes of popular protest through the lens of performance studies and explored the ways in which the “mob” borrowed from a lexicon of performative strategies and traditions made recognizable by theaters and street theatricals, churches, and state sponsored spectacles and celebrations throughout the Atlantic.

Carp: The most important new interpretations of the Stamp Act crisis have come from the neo-progressive and neo-imperial schools. (The Morgans were arguing strenuously against the paleo-progressive and paleo-imperial schools.)

Social historians of the American city—Dirk Hoerder, Gary Nash, Sheila Skemp, and many others—have given us rich interpretations that are vital to understanding the dramatic crowd actions of 1765 and beyond. What the Morgans dismissed as an “infection” or “contagion” of “disgraceful” mobs turned out to be a moment of striking insight into the mobilization of the coastal cities. The Morgans may have given us the perspective of leading radicals and the “friends of government,” but we also needed further information about the popular response to the Stamp Act.

In addition, the broader imperial picture remains essential to understanding the Stamp Act crisis: Fred Anderson, Eliga Gould, P. J. Marshall, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, and Peter D. G. Thomas, for instance, have been helpful in this regard. These authors have given us a much greater sense of metropolitan Britons’ understanding of parliamentary legitimacy, and how different the mainland colonists’ views were on this same point. (Most Caribbean merchants and planters, by contrast, pursued a separate strategy of conciliation and lobbying for preferential treatment.) Furthermore, these scholars have helped us see just how much Parliament’s search for revenue was related to its desire for stability in the trans-Appalachian West.

A few authors have offered interesting analyses of the rhetoric and iconography generated by the Stamp Act protests. While it’s too early to say how cultural history will shift our thinking, there has been some provocative recent work and I look forward to seeing how it plays out.

Gould: For the Morgans, the Stamp Act Crisis was an exclusively British affair, with most of the action occurring on the North American mainland. Over the last two decades, historians have expanded the geographical scope of the crisis in two areas. First, in a development that can be traced to the work of John Brewer and Linda Colley, both of whom were for a time colleagues of Edmund Morgan at Yale, a generation of British historians has produced a deeper, more nuanced account of the Stamp Act’s metropolitan origins and aftermath. I’m thinking of the work of Kathleen Wilson, Paul Langford, Marie Peters, Bob Harris, and Stephen Conway, as well as my own early work. The result is a picture not of high political arrogance and inattention, which is how the Morgans characterized the measure’s British architects, but of broader, widely held attitudes that made the misguided act appear both necessary to the British public and, according to some people, reasonable. We also know a great deal more than the Morgans did about the many British men and women who sympathized with the Americans and who used those sympathies to mount their own popular protests and movements for reform in Britain. The second development has been to recover the Stamp Act’s global and imperial dimensions. Here, the work of P.J. Marshall on connections between the crises in British India and America before the revolution has been enormously important, as has Andrew O’Shaughnessy’s scholarship on the British Caribbean and Fred Anderson on Pontiac’s War and the Stamp Act’s origins. Equally significant is the growing literature on the French and Spanish empires and the willingness of American historians to pay attention. After perusing the work of J.H. Elliott or Stanley Stein and Barbara Stein on the Spanish Bourbon reforms of the 1760s and 1770s, only the most blinkered reader could think of the Stamp Act Crisis or any other part of Britain’s “Hanoverian reforms” as isolated events.

What’s next? In what areas are scholars most likely to develop new insights into understanding the Stamp Act protests in coming years?

Skeehan: In many ways, the primary source materials made available by the Morgans’ 1953 work continue to offer scholars of the Stamp Act different avenues for sifting through the materials, anecdotes, actors, and texts that make up the stuff of this particular moment in the history of empire. These sources have also fostered new “turns” in early American studies: spatial turns that spiral out to include the Caribbean and other sites of imperial order, corporeal turns that look to performance studies, and material turns that broaden our understandings of what constitutes evidence in an increasingly interdisciplinary field. For those of us interested in the stuff of the Stamp Act, we might explore the ways in which material culture as a field of evidence can contribute to two lines of inquiry that seem important to early American literary studies right now: critiques of the inclusivity of print and, in many ways related, renewed interest in performance cultures. First, examining the extra-textual may help support recent reevaluations of the central role that print culture and a print public sphere played in fostering the American Revolution and later constituting an imagined national community. After all, the documents written by Loyalists and Republicans alike also constitute the stuff of the Stamp Act, just as stamped paper—even before it is circulated within a print public sphere—embodies ideas and represents complex social, economic, and political relationships. And second, in the vein of the panel mentioned earlier, we might further explore how what seemed riotous was, in fact, highly orchestrated performance; what seemed like undifferentiated bodies over-running public spaces were in fact bodies coming together to think of themselves as a public. In other words, new directions in the study of the Stamp Act might continue to move us away from the print culture thesis and to challenge the primacy of a print public sphere to which many colonists had only limited access. Instead we might begin to think about how objects are animated and bodies are objectified—how effigies speak and how brutally tarred and feathered bodies “signify.”

Carp: In 1957, Morgan called on historians to study “the local institutions which produced the American Revolution,” a project that is still unfinished. In particular, I get asked all the time (often by high school students) about the Sons of Liberty. The public is fascinated with this shadowy institution that had helped to drive the Stamp Act protests. And while I stand aside for no one in my admiration for Pauline Maier’s From Resistance to Revolution, I think historians will have more to say about this group.

Let’s also remember: from the perspective of most colonial Americans, the Stamp Act may not have been all that significant in the coming of the American Revolution. John Brooke suggested this idea in a Reviews in American History essay on T. H. Breen’s Marketplace of Revolution, but it’s obvious when you read a book like Robert Gross’s The Minutemen and Their World: before 1774, most country people just weren’t paying attention to imperial politics. Was the Stamp Act crisis the start of widespread, sustained resistance, or just a flash in the pan? I still believe in the broader significance of urban protest movements, but I also find it useful to consider this question. Brooke also argues (in a footnote) that we need to know more about the impact of court closings in 1765–66.

Gould: Despite the work of the last two decades, there is still a tendency among both American and British historians to treat the Stamp Act as an aberration, a departure—even a Tory or neo-Tory one—from the principles by which the British colonies were governed before the 1760s and that Americans would seek to preserve after 1776. This tendency, as Tom Slaughter has recently argued, overlooks earlier imperial tensions and conflicts, many dating to the early eighteenth century, if not before. It also, it seems to me, misses the Act’s central point. The Stamp Act was an act of imperial and national integration. Its purpose was not to differentiate the colonies from Britain, as Americans claimed, but to bring them into the fiscal system by which the British fulfilled their obligations to the crown. Far from an aberration, it was a natural, if ill-conceived, successor to the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, as well as a precursor, as people at the time recognized, to Britain’s union with Ireland. No less important, it was a precursor to the American union of 1776, and it set the stage for the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. For that reason, the protests of 1765 and 1766 have also remained part of American history—animating Daniel Shays’ tax revolt in western Massachusetts, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and, according to the South Carolina Convention in 1860, the opening shots of the Civil War. As the Morgans argued, the Stamp Act Crisis was a prologue to the American Revolution, though not the only one. As we observe the 250th anniversary, I think it’s worth remembering that it was the prologue to a great many other things as well.

Perry: The Stamp Act Crisis focuses primarily upon the colonies that joined the movement for American independence, with the crisis playing a deciding point on the road to Revolution. Many scholars currently working on the Stamp Act Crisis have cast doubt on the relationship between the protests of 1765 and the later Revolution. Scholars of the British Empire and the Greater Caribbean are developing a better sense of the relationships between mainland port communities and West Indian sugar islands, particularly during this political and trade crisis. What emerges from this wider geographic lens is less of a road to revolution, but rather a period of experimentation to influence empire, shifting strategies of dissent in streets and in Whitehall, and a long-term commitment to Empire among most port communities. Similarly, studies of the American Revolution have raised awareness of the widespread disaffection and uneven allegiances of many individuals during the Revolutionary War, presenting a challenge for interpretations that would have clear, absolute loyalties formed in the prewar decade. The Morgans themselves raised the question of the nature of loyalty and the American cause in their investigation of individuals associated with the Stamp Act disorders. What emerges in present studies, including my own research, is the sheer diversity of lessons and experiences that American individuals and communities took from the successful repeal of the Stamp Act. The Stamp Act Crisis then, is less clear as the “prologue to Revolution,” unless you consider that prologue presaging a revolution that would become a continuing contest over the meaning and shape of home rule.

Howell: Just like Ben and Danielle say above, I think there is still probably more to learn about the complex and shifting vernacular response to the Stamp Act. And though I think Danielle is absolutely right that moving away from a print-centric model has the most to offer in this respect, it seems to me that there remain some understudied texts that might also be useful. My own inclination would be toward poetry: poems aren’t always great at conveying clear political principles, but they can be way better than other sorts of writing at capturing the internal conflicts of individual actors.

Take something like Hannah Griffitts’s “The Female Patriots, Addressed to the Daughters of Liberty in America.” Griffitts was a coterie poet living in Philadelphia who, as Karin A. Wulf points out, wrote vehemently in favor of political moderation. “Female Patriots” is not about the Stamp Act, exactly—it’s from 1767, and seems to have been written on the occasion of the Townshend Acts—but it presents a complex gendered response to a similar imperial crisis. In some ways, the poem is just what you think it might be from a politically invested woman of the middling sort living in Philadelphia: it offers praise of homespun and promotes the idea that concerted consumer action could affect imperial policy. The beginning of the poem, however, is rather more complicated.

“Since the Men from a Party, or fear of a Frown,
Are kept by a Sugar-Plumb, quietly down.
Supinely asleep, & depriv’d of their Sight
Are strip’d of their Freedom, & rob’d of their Right.
If the Sons (so degenerate) the blessing despise,
Let the Daughters of Liberty, nobly arise,
And tho’ we’ve no Voice, but a negative here.
The use of the Taxables let us forbear[…]”

The speaker’s evident frustration with the Townshend Acts does not conform to traditional patriot/loyalist binaries. What we see instead is something more like thoroughgoing contempt for all of the men involved with the Acts—not only the “Sugar-Plumb” who dreamed them up and the partisans who smoothed their passage through Parliament, but also the “degenerate” American resisters—those nominal Sons of Liberty who seem to have repudiated their birthright, presumably by coordinating mob actions or other ignoble things. Real nobility is here reserved for dissenting women, who can at once be said to have “no Voice” and to assume the royal prerogative of the “negative” in the service of American interests. (Here the consumer boycott and the political veto are neatly aligned.) The poem as a whole, then, shifts us away from its mere occasion into the murkier waters of what it might mean to be gendered, to be colonial, or to be disenfranchised in 1760s America. As in The Stamp Act Crisis, what initially claims our attention as another form of broad political statement winds up suggesting those variable currents of subjective experience that our political histories all too often overlook.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

Danielle Skeehan is an assistant professor in the English department at Oberlin College, where she specializes in early American literature, material culture studies, book history, and Atlantic world studies. Her current book project, “The Fabric of Early Atlantic Letters: Gender and Media in the Eighteenth Century,” examines the material and symbolic connections between texts and textiles in this period.

Benjamin L. Carp is the Daniel M. Lyons Professor of American History at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He is the author of Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (2010) and Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (2007).

Molly Perry is currently a lecturer in history at Christopher Newport University, and completing her PhD at the College of William and Mary. Her dissertation, “Influencing Empire,” explores dynamics of protest and methods of persuasion in port towns of the Greater British Caribbean from 1764-1769, highlighting in particular the actions of free and enslaved African Americans, sailors and the dockside community, as well as agents and lobbyists.

William Huntting Howell is an assistant professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States (2015).

Eliga Gould is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. His most recent book is Among the Powers of the Earth:  The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (2012). He is currently writing a global history of the American Revolution.

In Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700-1845, Jodi Schorb, an associate professor of English at the University of Florida, extends and revises the historiography of literacy, punishment, and incarceration during the long eighteenth century in British North America and the early United States. Schorb focuses on “the origins, purpose, and development of reading, writing, and education behind bars” to “analyze what kinds of ‘literate’ prisoners entered print and why.” Ultimately, Schorb’s goal is to “construct a narrative that has heretofore only been told in fragments: the literacy history of early American jails and the nation’s formative penitentiaries” (6). Schorb achieves this goal in two tightly argued chronological parts—“Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century ‘Gaol’” and “Literacy in the Early Penitentiary.”

Unlike the criminal narratives of the colonial period, the criminal narratives of the early Republic no longer relied exclusively on ministers as the arbiters of truth and authenticity. 

In part one, Schorb analyzes execution narratives and sermons to trace the emergence of the “literate prisoner” in the print sphere of eighteenth-century British North America. Chapter one demonstrates that “prisoner literacy was crucial to the meaning-making power of public punishment in colonial America, particularly but not exclusively in New England” (19-20). “Put bluntly,” Schorb writes, “executing criminals triggered early America’s interest in prisoner literacy,” propelling the “reading prisoner” into print. Schorb deploys the term “reading prisoner” as noun and verb: “the prisoner who reads” and “the act of interpreting the prisoner who reads” (20). Frequently, such as in the narrative of Native American (possibly Monomoyick) Joseph Quasson, prisoners modeled “intensive and reflective reading habits” that led to the possibility of “spiritual redemption” (30). By the mid- to late eighteenth century, as the colonial print sphere expanded, the criminal narrative shifted. Narratives became less spiritual, and more heterogeneous and autobiographical (44).

By the late eighteenth century, a new prisoner emerged into print: the “writing prisoner.” Unlike the criminal narratives of the colonial period, the criminal narratives of the early Republic no longer relied exclusively on ministers as the arbitrators of truth and authenticity. Prisoners shared their first-person perspectives and experiences as they attempted to authenticate their own narratives. They imagined their audience “as an alternative court of opinion” and hoped that their writings would influence their own fate in a positive manner (49). Schorb analyzes the writing prisoner within the contexts of the spread of “written literacy and writing pedagogy” as well as an “eighteenth-century crisis in authenticity” (50). Schorb’s analytical frame is productive when it comes to interpreting counterfeit notes and narratives penned by counterfeiters such as Owen Syllavan, John Potter, Joseph Bill Packer, and Stephen Burroughs. Although counterfeiters were a diverse bunch, they shared the quality of being masters of written literacy and often worked as schoolmasters or writing instructors at least once in their lives (75). By the end of the eighteenth century, the reading public looked at currency and the writing prisoner who circulated in print with uncertainty. Should Americans celebrate the writing prisoner as a folk hero? Or condemn the writing prisoner as a deviant, potentially dangerous, other? It was at this historical moment as the writing prisoner rose to prominence, Schorb argues, that reformers such as Benjamin Rush began to argue in favor of removing criminals from public view to behind the walls of a new institution, the penitentiary.

In part two, Schorb follows the criminal into the penitentiary “to explore how the birth of a new form of imprisonment created new logics and rationales for educating prisoners, as well as new justifications for promoting or obstructing prisoners’ literacy practices, including their writing” (95). Chapter three focuses on the literary practices of prisoners confined inside Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison and Eastern State Penitentiary. In Schorb’s telling, officials at Walnut Street were ambivalent about the reformative potential of education. Instead, they focused most of their efforts on training prisoners to labor at one of the prison’s industries. In 1798, inspector Caleb Lownes established a school inside the prison. The school’s curriculum focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic; not religion. The school closed after Lownes departed the prison in 1799. Schorb pulls no punches in her section on Walnut Street: “Pennsylvania’s prison defenders, administrators, and philanthropic reformers did little to promote education” (118).

By the 1820s, as Schorb notes, overcrowding and prisoners’ resistance to confinement led Philadelphians to replace the Walnut Street Prison with the Eastern State Penitentiary. After seven years of construction, the Eastern State Penitentiary opened in 1829 (113). Unlike at Walnut Street, where prisoners worked together in workshops and sleep together in apartments, prisoners at Eastern State spent the entirety of their sentences isolated inside solitary cells. The meticulous ledgers of the penitentiary’s moral instructor, Thomas Larcombe, indicate that many inmates worked diligently to acquire reading and writing literacy while confined in their solitary cells (126). It was not until 1844, perhaps in response to Charles Dickens’s scathing criticism of the Eastern State Penitentiary in his American Notes for General Circulation (1842) that “inspectors articulated a sudden determination to make reading, writing, and arithmetic instruction a ‘prominent ingredient in the discipline of the prison’” (127). Consequently, officials appointed two schoolteachers; and by 1846, the penitentiary’s library held approximately 1,600 texts and continued to grow each year (129-130).

In chapter four, Schorb moves north to analyze New York’s first three state penitentiaries: Newgate, Auburn, and Sing Sing. Despite being modeled on the Walnut Street Prison, prisoners at Newgate had more educational opportunities than did their Pennsylvania counterparts. In 1799, two years after Newgate opened, inspector Thomas Eddy established a convict-led school inside the institution (147-149). Even after Eddy’s departure from Newgate in 1804, inmate-run night schools continued under prison chaplain John Stanford. “Reverend Stanford’s reputation,” Schorb argues, “sustained, spread, and legitimized Newgate’s educational experiments in convict-led education” (155). Just as at the Walnut Street Prison, overcrowding and inmate resistance to confinement led to the eventual abandonment of Newgate and the construction of two new state penitentiaries: Auburn and Sing Sing.

Unlike at the Eastern State Penitentiary, inmates at Auburn and Sing Sing labored in silence inside large workshops during the day and spent their evenings locked inside individual cells. At these institutions, officials were, for the most part, concerned more with maintaining discipline than promoting inmate education. During the 1820s and 1830s, in a series of published narratives that often referred to one another, New York inmates entered into prison debates to criticize the state’s penitentiaries. Schorb calls the process, in which one inmate’s writing of a prison exposé inspired another inmate to write a prison exposé, “congregate literacy effects” (146). Schorb illustrates the profitability of this analytical term through analyses of the writings of inmates W.A. Coffey, John Maroney, Levi S. Burr, and James Brice.

Throughout part two of Reading Prisoners, Schorb demonstrates that many officials and overseers in the nation’s two premier penitentiary systems, Pennsylvania and New York, viewed inmate reading, writing, and education with ambivalence. They were much more concerned with establishing and maintaining strict discipline over inmates. Inmates, on the other hand, avidly pursued prison educational opportunities when available. According to Schorb, “Inmates most often assessed opportunities for reading, writing, and education as signs of the institution’s recognition of their humanity” (184).

Schorb positions imprisoned authors’ perspectives at the center of Reading Prisoners. This helps readers understand the crucial roles that reading and writing prisoners played in the development of American literature and American penitentiary systems. Besides the notable exception of Austin Reed’s 1858 The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, Schorb’s sources of prisoner writing are primarily published accounts. Schorb’s claims about inmate writing, especially by men and women confined within Pennsylvania’s first two penitentiaries, might have been strengthened by incorporating unpublished writings. For instance, during the 1820s, prisoners confined in the Walnut Street Prison wrote Philadelphia Mayor Joseph Watson to complain about poor treatment and to request pardons. James Morton, an inmate at the Eastern State Penitentiary, kept a diary during his final year of a seven-year sentence for forgery during the early 1850s. In the diary, Morton chronicled the history of Christianity, identified numerous conspiracy theories, commented on the Eastern State Penitentiary, and wrote brief letters to penitentiary officials. Likewise, in an 1862 series of letters and poems addressed to fellow Eastern State inmate Albert Jackson Green, Elizabeth Velora Elwell discussed love, life, and the loneliness of solitary confinement. A greater attention to prisoners’ unpublished writings would complement Schorb’s small archive of prisoners’ published writings and shed further light on prisoners’ perspectives on incarceration and literacy behind bars.

Reading Prisoners engages with multiple historiographies and deserves a wide readership. Scholars who study literacy, the history of the book, gallows literature, crime, punishment, and incarceration in eighteenth-century British North America and the early United States will profit from reading Schorb’s text. Reading Prisoners also speaks to our present historical moment. As Americans reassess their nation’s mammoth, costly, and deadly carceral state, Schorb’s arguments provide a useful historical primer on the alleged goals of incarceration, the meaning of “reform,” and the benefits of prison educational programs.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

Jonathan Nash is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. He studies the history of prisoners and penitentiaries in the early United States.

Literature and Music in the Atlantic World, 1767–1867 presents an interdisciplinary account of a rich period in the history of Western culture. Considering figures as diverse as Johann Sebastian Bach, Thomas Jefferson, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Frederick Douglass, Catherine Jones weaves together a patchwork of case studies in the transmaritime interaction of two major art forms over the course of a century. The thread uniting her examples is the connection of rhetoric to music. She shows how this relationship, in its reliance on European culture, evolved from the American Revolution through the Civil War. A common conception is that the rhetorical model of music languished with the triumph of absolute music in the nineteenth century, but Jones argues that music led a rhetorical life in the Romantic era by virtue of its connection to national identities and to literary theories of organicism and the sublime. Her transatlantic approach also contests the centrality of the nation in accounts of artistic production, and her interdisciplinarity challenges the autonomy of literature and music as fields of historical study.

In fewer than two hundred pages, Jones traverses a wide territory. The chapters move from the American reception of Charles Burney’s history of music in her introduction, for example, to the significance of European musical thought for leaders of the American Revolution (chapter one), to the role of music in Thomas Jefferson’s foreign correspondence (chapter two), to the reception of Beethoven among New England Transcendentalists (chapter three), to connections between Thomas Moore’s and Frederick Douglass’s attitudes toward music (chapter four), and finally to the legacy of J.S. Bach in American music criticism (chapter five). Her discussion is meticulously sourced, and the academically inclined will spend as much time perusing her detailed endnotes as they will her concise narrative. As a scholar of literature, Jones is at her best when analyzing the written word. Her account of how the concept of the musical sublime came to be transmitted from German thinkers like Christian Friedrich Michaelis and Friedrich Gustav Schilling to the American John Sullivan Dwight, for example, is robust and nuanced. Jones’s comparative lack of training in music is sometimes evident—for example, her discussion of Paul Revere’s music-notational frontispiece to William Billings’s New-England Psalm-Singer (1770) contains inaccuracies—but non-specialists will still find this book useful for its introduction to musicology, including the work of noted scholars like Carolyn Abbate and Carl Dahlhaus.

One of Jones’s achievements is that she offers fresh approaches to familiar subjects like Beethoven, Franklin, and Walt Whitman. 

At its best, Literature and Music unveils intriguing transnational connections between major authors and composers that open broad new avenues of inquiry. Who knew, for example, that Benjamin Franklin penned a critique of the relationship between words and melody in an aria from George Frideric Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus (1747), and that this analysis reflects Franklin’s sustained engagement with European debates in musical aesthetics? Citing musical examples in a letter to his brother, Franklin rebuked Handel for distorting the properties of natural speech, and thus obscuring the message of the aria, by a characteristically Baroque excess of musical artifice. Franklin’s advocacy of a plainer, more agreeable musical style reflected his investment in political notions of transparency and consent. For Jones, Franklin’s musical thought, together with the transmission to America of the Orpheus legend, which mythologized music’s persuasive power, documents a belief that music could improve society. Leaders like Franklin and Jefferson certainly prized music for its rhetorical force, but perhaps the more interesting point here, which Jones doesn’t quite make, is the isomorphism between American republicanism and the European fashion for galant music, which opposed the Baroque by virtue of its pleasing simplicity.  

One of the highlights in Jones’s account of the Romantic era is her revelation of Washington Irving’s contribution while in Europe to the first English translation of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz (1821), and of the consequences of this for the composer’s reception first in London and then as far afield as New York and New Orleans. Irving and his collaborator, Barham Livius, grappled with the same problems that make the transmission of opera a fascinating subject today, including the need to alter stories in light of changing political context, the obligation to consider local theatrical taste, and the difficulty of reconciling new words to existing music, which can result in changes to the score. In detailing differences between German, British, and Anglo-American versions of Der Freischütz, not to mention French adaptations mounted in Paris, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, Jones shows how a single opera could mediate multiple national and cosmopolitan identities. Assigning special importance to New Orleans, she argues that it acted as a hub for the transmission of continental European music to the rest of the United States. Her conclusions ought to inspire contextual studies of other important operas—for example, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1831) and Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna Bolena (1830) and Lucia di Lammermoor (1835)—that appeared in translated adaptations on American stages during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The transatlantic and transdisciplinary rationale of Jones’s project doubtless requires a broad perspective, but at times the vast scope of the book hinders its depth and flow. The number and variety of case studies necessitate an anecdotal approach, with the result that Jones’s larger interventions and individual analyses aren’t always fully developed. For example, her efforts to relate the writings of Emily Dickinson to the music of two rather different composers, J.S. Bach and Claude Debussy, lack the direct evidential links that underpin her other arguments. She goes to interpretive lengths to identify a vague Christological correspondence between Bach and Dickinson—one that needs to be mediated by the eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards and the nineteenth-century music critic J.S. Dwight—and she ascertains a similarly imprecise resemblance between Dickinson’s fragmentary poetic language and the aesthetic of interruption outlined by the twentieth-century philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch in connection with Debussy’s music. These lines of investigation aren’t without interest, but they remain speculative. Non-sequiturs also creep in: the logic leading from, say, a 1939 review of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata, to an 1849 speech by Frederick Douglass, is unclear. Lacking the cohesion and narrative integrity more easily attained in a more focused study, the book reads at times as a miscellany of musico-literary connections.

But this doesn’t mean that those connections aren’t interesting and important. One of Jones’s achievements is that she offers fresh approaches to familiar subjects like Beethoven, Franklin, and Walt Whitman. The drawback to her preoccupation with major personalities, however, is that she overlooks the work of lesser-known, pseudonymous, and anonymous authors, composers, editors, and copyists, who were essential to American cultural production in this era. Meredith McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003) showed the importance of piracy and its elusive agents in the transnational formation of antebellum literature, for example, and Jones would have done well to address this. More problematically, Jones’s fixation on the big names of history leads her to neglect a vital region of the Atlantic world—the Caribbean. For a more broadly Atlantic perspective on creative life, readers might consult Elizabeth Dillon’s New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (2014). Although Jones excludes part of the Atlantic world and gives relatively short shrift to the workaday intermediaries responsible for the material transmission of literature and music between continents, the list of those who will benefit from reading her book is long. She contributes to the scholarly literature on dozens of canonical figures in an accessible manner. And if her treatment of individual cases risks, at times, being superficial, this is excusable, because the chief value of Literature and Music is as an impetus to further study. The book offers a rich catalogue of international artistic relationships that invite additional research. 

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).   

Myron Gray teaches music history at Haverford College. He holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Pennsylvania and has published articles on the early American reception of French music in Common-place and American Music.

Scholarship on the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution is still, to a significant extent, shaped by and measured against Gordon Wood’s and Bernard Bailyn’s seminal monographs and the enduring interpretive shadows they cast over the field. So it is with Eric Nelson’s reappraisal of the ideological underpinnings of the imperial crisis, independence, and American constitutionalism. Nelson locates the roots of 1760s-1780s political debate in the constitutional contest between Charles I and Parliament that led to the English Civil War more than a century earlier. At issue for eighteenth-century colonists, as it had been for seventeenth-century Englishmen, lay the question of who served as the proper guardian of liberty and whence the danger of encroaching power originated: Parliament or king? Nelson’s driving argument is that the “fear of legislative tyranny” that animated royalists in the 1640s and 1650s also shaped the constitutional thought of an influential group he labels “patriot royalists,” including James Wilson, John Adams, James Iredell, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Rush (172).

Nelson thus attempts to resolve the problem of the presumed disjuncture between a radical revolution and a conservative constitution. He argues that the two were, in fact, connected ideologically and constitutionally by a predominant strain of royalism, “understood as the defense of prerogative powers lodged in a ‘single person’” that is compatible with liberty (115). While admitting that the term “royalist” is problematic, Nelson defends his use of it by claiming that some colonists “equated their position with that of the Stuart monarchs of the seventeenth century and traced the origins of the imperial crisis of the 1760s to the defeat of the seventeenth-century Royalist cause” (240, n32).

Clearly, seventeenth-century English history shaped the worldview of eighteenth-century British Americans, but from which aspects of that history did the spokesmen for independence and the architects of the Constitution take their lessons? Nelson rejects the idea that independence signified the high-water mark in a rising tide of republicanism. He argues instead that patriot royalists went to war, not against the king, but against Parliament, and subsequently created a constitution replete with royalist prerogative. Nelson concludes that “if American constitutionalism does not rest on the Royalist theory of representation, it rests on nothing” (107). In support of this bold claim, Nelson presents the ideological lineage of royalism during the imperial crisis and of constitutionalism in chronologically organized chapters, each of which covers a key component in his argument.

Nelson begins by explaining that between 1768 and 1775, British colonists embraced “dominion theory,” a theoretical shift in constitutionalism predicated upon the assumption that the colonies lay without the realm and that colonial charters linked Britain’s colonies to the Empire through the king alone. This shift required a revision of English history in which, Nelson posits, colonists made “an outright assault on the ideological apparatus of the two parliamentarian revolutions of the seventeenth century” (108). In the revised narrative, Puritans fled to America to escape the tyranny of Parliament, not Charles I.

Nelson addresses a central problem that arises from his argument for ideological consistency between 1775 and 1787: how to reconcile prerogative power with republicanism.

Nelson believes that in taking this line of argument, colonists supported the “Royalist theory of representation” (108). Patriot royalists deemed the king a better representative of the people than Parliament since he served as a disinterested arbiter who sought to benefit the empire as a whole. Moreover, prerogative powers invested in the king shielded his subjects from a grasping, self-interested legislature. Thus, colonists “became the last Atlantic defenders of the Stuart monarchy” (31). In his effort to establish this ideological connection between the English Civil War and America’s founding, Nelson could do more to distinguish the royalists who went to war in the name of Charles I from the patriot royalists. To argue, as Nelson does, that original authorization (via charter or ratification) held more importance than did election in the late-eighteenth century overlooks the fact that numerous imperial reform plans attempted primarily to resolve that very point.

Nelson addresses a central problem that arises from his argument for ideological consistency between 1775 and 1787: how to reconcile prerogative power with republicanism. He juxtaposes two strains of revolutionary republicanism: “Hebraic,” which identified the dangerous element in monarchy as the idolatry of kings, and “Neo-Roman,” which stressed that danger stemmed from prerogative power (115). Patriot royalists clung to the hope that George III would claim his rightful prerogative powers, particularly his negative on Parliamentary legislation that adversely affected the colonies. Only when the king steadfastly refused did colonists turn against him. Yet, royalism survived the throes of rebellion because most colonists had “thoroughly absorbed [Thomas] Paine’s Hebraizing exclusivist argument against kingship” that separated prerogative power from “the kingly office” (144, 183).

Finally, Nelson argues that the U.S. Constitution did not mark a departure from revolutionary ideals, but an adherence to them. It was, instead, the initial period of constitutional formation between 1777 and 1780 that diverged from the revolution’s royalist trajectory, as exemplified by the Pennsylvania Constitution that evoked the “ghost of the Long Parliament” (179). In Nelson’s view, the turning point came with the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution that corrected “‘elective despotism’” (181; original emphasis). In keeping with revolutionary principles, Americans then created “a recognizably Royalist constitution, investing its chief magistrate with the very same prerogative powers that Charles I had defended against the great whig heroes of the seventeenth century” (232).

Throughout the book, Nelson takes pains to distinguish his argument from historians such as Wood, Bailyn, John Philip Reid, and Brendan McConville. Nelson certainly carves out a historiographical niche regarding royalism’s reverberations in the early national period and the revival of understudied seventeenth-century sources. However, much of the structure in his challenge to the canon is not without precedent, particularly regarding the pre-revolutionary period. For example, in The King’s Three Faces, McConville discusses many of the same points—albeit with different conclusions—including colonists’ alignment with the king during the imperial crisis via charters, dominion theory, and prerogative power. Nelson attempts to sidestep these similarities by asserting: “McConville and I are in agreement that eighteenth-century British Americans generally felt great ‘devotion to the monarchy,’ but such devotion was not in itself a constitutional position” (239, n29; original emphasis). This seems off the mark, however, considering that McConville’s explanation of monarchical political culture includes colonists’ disparate interpretations of seventeenth-century constitutionalism as well as their adoption of dominion theory in the 1730s and 1740s, decades before Edward Bancroft’s pamphlet, which Nelson identifies as the template for this shift.

While his study is necessarily limited, at times Nelson superimposes a mid-seventeenth-century theoretical framework on the late eighteenth century without sufficient contextual depth in the latter period to make his points compelling. For instance, while he presents convincing evidence that colonists discussed the Hebraic interpretation of Common Sense, in presenting this as the sole link between revolutionary and constitutional royalism, Nelson navigates a narrow interpretive path that simply does not account for the depth of colonists’ rejection of monarchy. He gives short shrift to key events and actors, such as the part the king’s troops played in alienating colonists. Likewise, his strategy of taking political writers at their word seems to require that ideas supersede context, lest the latter muddle the former. This is a tough pill for historians to swallow, as context is often the only reliable determinant in sifting sincerity from dross in an age rife with sarcasm, pseudonyms, and vitriolic debate.

Another problem is that Nelson’s dichotomy of parliamentarian Whigs and patriot royalists does not account for the complicated and shifting spectrum of political affiliation and imperial conceptualization during the late eighteenth century. He seems to view loyalists as mouthpieces of the administration, defined by their fealty to Parliament. Yet, many loyalists argued for colonial rights and equity within the empire. Nelson even classifies James Madison as “something of an inadvertent loyalist,” which is, frankly, a bit bizarre (202). He aligns Madison politically with royal governor Thomas Hutchinson simply because neither subscribed to the charter theory of authorization—hardly the salient point. What, then, distinguished patriot royalists from loyalists? After all, loyalists refused to take oaths to a Continental Congress they believed had usurped the king’s authority, which sounds remarkably like the royalist constitutional position. Loyalists withstood threats, exile, torture, humiliation, imprisonment, and confiscation of property, all in the name of the king.

While a rich resource for scholars and students, The Royalist Revolution is probably too dense for lower-level undergraduates. Nelson relies heavily on the papers of his core group of patriot royalists, but also draws extensively from other contemporary sources. While much of Nelson’s book covers well-trodden ground, it nevertheless includes meticulous explication of issues like the royal negative and representation. It also brings attention to understudied issues such as the Fishery Bill debates and introduces a fresh perspective of the Constitutional Convention as something more than a platform for the historically ubiquitous James Madison. In broader terms, Nelson’s book underscores the point that historians have underestimated the influence of monarchy and royalism on the watershed moment in American history. It is worthwhile to consider what implications potentially grounding our founding moment in royalism—however one defines it—has for our understanding of the origins of the Revolution and the Constitution as well as for our national identity. 

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

Heather Schwartz is an assistant professor of history at SUNY-Delhi. She is working on her first manuscript, “Rewriting the Empire: Plans for Institutional Reform in British America.”

“Please take my good friend to my
Father’s old plantation of Mill Grove,
and show him where first American Ornithology
grew in the heart of Audubon!”

(Letter IV, 1827)

Few figures in American history have weathered as intense a scrutiny of their written work as the celebrated ornithologist and artist John James Audubon (1785–1851). Nearly every scrap of his writing has been transcribed and debated in numerous biographies and articles spanning more than a century, each revisiting the same primary sources in search of a new angle. The first half of his life is generally obscure because his journals and letters have been lost or destroyed, or because there were few to begin with. This is especially true prior to 1826, when Audubon, after ironically failing to find an engraver or publisher for The Birds of America in the United States, crossed the Atlantic to pursue the same goal.

Known primary sources from 1824–25 provide almost no information about his artistic vision for the book. This is especially unfortunate because the genesis of The Birds of America can be traced to this period. Audubon later confessed that he had not thought seriously about publishing until he met Charles Lucien Bonaparte (1803–1857), the French ornithologist, in Philadelphia on April 10, 1824. Four days later, Audubon’s paintings were examined by Philadelphia’s foremost engraver, Alexander Lawson (1773–1846), who was unimpressed and refused to engrave them. A second engraver, Mr. Fairman, felt that Audubon’s artwork was beyond his ability to engrave, and suggested that the ornithologist find someone with superior skill in Europe. (This may also have been the unexpressed reason that the proud Lawson rebuffed Audubon.) On April 15, Audubon wrote in his journal, “I had now determined to go to Europe with my ‘treasures,’ since I was assured nothing so fine in the way of ornithological representations existed.”

Audubon’s journal from this period was deliberately destroyed by his granddaughter Maria in 1895. She later admitted to biographer Stanley Arthur that she had “copied from it all [she] ever meant to give to the public.” The destruction of the journal made it impossible to verify the scattered excerpts that she published two years later in Audubon and His Journals (1897). Indeed, she refused to transcribe most of the journal, feeling that “the mental suffering of which it [told] so constantly . . . the very heart of the man,” should be shielded from public scrutiny. Journal excerpts that appeared three decades earlier in The Life and Adventures of John James Audubon, the Naturalist (1868), and The Life of John James Audubon (1869), also became impossible to verify when the original journal was destroyed. These works had been produced from the same manuscript, prepared by Audubon’s widow, Lucy, and did not differ with respect to the 1824 excerpts.

Five unpublished Audubon letters, unknown to most scholars until now, are reproduced and annotated below. Passed down for nearly two centuries by the descendants of their recipient, the Quaker naturalist Reuben Haines III (1786–1831), the letters fill critical gaps in our understanding of Audubon’s early artistic vision for The Birds of America, and include the only known copy of the original (American) prospectus. Audubon proposed a collaborative and patriotic work that would be a symbol to the world of the strength and agency of the new American Republic. He envisioned a text in which “the idea of each man of judgment and truth being inserted would go toward increasing the imitation of God’s work . . . [Only] then the book would positively contain America and its birds.” But rejection in Philadelphia and New York left him no choice but to abandon that lofty goal for one more practical: to publish on his own without the support of the American scientific community. When The Birds of America was eventually financed and published in Europe, Audubon’s move was perceived by many in America as having been driven by personal gain, and his original (rejected) vision was lost to history. The letters that outlined that vision were held in the Haines family’s private collection, and thus escaped the notice of Alice Ford, whose otherwise comprehensive bibliography in John James Audubon (1964) is still used by modern biographers. I came to know of the letters in 2010, during my tenure as resident caretaker of Wyck, the historic house and garden where Audubon was hosted in July 1824—the home of Reuben Haines.

Reuben Haines was an agricultural scientist, meteorologist, and philanthropist whose role in the early development of American science has been largely forgotten. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society (APS) on October 16, 1813, where he later served as secretary (1814), member of the auditing committee (1814–16), and curator (1819); and to the Academy of Natural Sciences (hereafter, the Academy) on November 16, 1813, where he served as corresponding secretary for 17 years (1814–1831). In that capacity, Haines played a pivotal role in the early success of the Lyceum of Natural History in New York, and kept written correspondence with an extraordinary number of naturalists, including Audubon.

The Return to Mill Grove

Audubon spent his final days in the Philadelphia area at Wyck, the country estate of the Haines family in Germantown. The rural landscape that surrounded Wyck in 1824 has long since been consumed by the expanding city, but the house still stands and now functions as a living museum and urban farm. Haines kept and bred a captive flock of Canada geese (Branta canadensis) at Wyck for over a decade, of which he wrote that the males and females were “so much alike that I could not distinguish them from each other until the breeding season when I could distinguish the males from their motions and voice.” The flock was composed of seven birds by early 1824, but they did not breed as they had in previous years. Haines was concerned and sought the advice of an expert. On July 25, he made the following entry in an unpublished research journal now housed at the APS Library:

John J. Audubon of Louisiana visited me at Germantown. He states he has reared many wild geese, wood ducks, &. &. and has no doubt that my confining them all together prevented their breeding. Had I put one pair alone in the pen he has no doubt they would have bred as usual. He evinced great knowledge of these birds, picked out almost instantly all the males from the females and old pair from the others, and the 1 year from 2 year old.

The next day, Haines took Audubon on a carriage ride to his old home at Mill Grove plantation, where the ornithologist had lived from 1803-05. A note in the margin of Haines’s financial ledger, also housed at the APS Library, reads, “[July 1824] 25. With J. J. Audubon Naturalist . . . to Mill Grove (at the junction of the Schuylkill & Perkiomen). Dined at Wetherills with Isaiah Lukens . . .” Mill Grove and nearby Bakewell Plantation were dear to Audubon, for it was there that he met and wooed his future wife, Lucy Bakewell, and where his ornithological talent and artistry first began to flower. Audubon wrote in his journal of the nostalgic experience:

July 26. Reuben Haines, a generous friend, invited me to visit Mill Grove in his carriage, and I was impatient until the day came. His wife [Jane], a beautiful woman, and her daughter [Sarah], accompanied us. On the way my heart swelled with many thoughts of what my life had been there, of the scenes I had passed through since, and of my condition now. As we entered the avenue leading to Mill Grove, every step brought to my mind the memory of past years, and I was bewildered by the recollections until we reached the door of the house, which had once been the residence of my father as well as myself. The cordial welcome of Mr. Watherell [sic], the owner, was extremely agreeable. After resting a few moments, I abruptly took my hat and ran wildly towards the woods, to the grotto where I first heard from my wife the acknowledgment that I was not indifferent to her. It had been torn down, and some stones carted away; but raising my eyes towards heaven, I repeated the promise we had mutually made. We dined at Mill Grove, and as I entered the parlour I stood motionless for a moment on the spot where my wife and myself were for ever joined. Everybody was kind to me, and invited me to come to the Grove whenever I visited Pennsylvania, and I returned full of delight. Gave Mr. Haines my portrait, drawn by myself, on condition that he should have it copied in case of my death before making another, and send it to my wife.

There seems to have been some genuine affection between Audubon and Haines, but there was also a conflict of interest. Audubon had been ill-received by Haines’s Academy colleagues, especially ornithologist George Ord (1781–1866), sitting vice president of the Academy and secretary of the APS, who was financially invested in publishing a second (updated) edition of American Ornithology, the foundational work of his late friend and mentor, Alexander Wilson (1766–1813). Ord was hostile to Audubon from the outset, and his enmity increased dramatically after Audubon accused Wilson (posthumously) of academic fraud in 1831. One year after his trip to Philadelphia, Audubon made a personal appeal to Haines, trying in vain to garner formal support from the Academy despite Ord’s disapproval. Haines’s role as intermediary (or rather, Audubon’s wish for him to be) was foreshadowed in the final paragraph of a letter to Thomas Sully on August 14, 1824, in which Audubon wrote: “Should you see honest Quaker Haines, beg him to believe me his friend; should you see Mr. Ord, tell him I never was his enemy.”

In 1825, Audubon penned three letters to Haines, in which his tone progressed from hopeful (Letter I), to discouraged (Letter II), to near despair (Letter III). Letter II contained an embedded copy of a prospectus for The Birds of America that (Audubon claimed) was sent to the president of the New York Lyceum of Natural History, the botanist John Torrey (1796–1873). To my knowledge, this is the only known prospectus that predates Audubon’s departure for Europe in 1826. Haines did not respond to Letter III. Audubon wrote to Haines again two years later (1827), apparently unsolicited, to inform him that he was “engaged in publication of [his] work at last,” but this letter also received no reply, or Haines neglected to make a note of it on the opposite letter face, as he was in the habit of doing. Letter V was a brief response to an invitation, written during the Audubons’ visit to Philadelphia in 1830. Letters I and V have never appeared in print. Bowdlerized excerpts of Letters II–IV appeared in the late W. Edmund Claussen’s Wyck: The Story of an Historic House (1970), an independently published and locally distributed book that is now rare and out of print. A brief excerpt from Letter III appeared in Patricia Stroud’s biographies Thomas Say: New World Naturalist (1992) and The Emperor of Nature (2000). The following is the first complete, annotated transcript of the letter series.

Mary Troth Haines (1893–1983), the ultimate proprietor of Wyck, transferred the deed for the house and its collections to the Wyck Charitable Trust in 1973. Most of the Wyck documents were deposited at the APS Library in Philadelphia in 1987, but the Audubon letters had been separated from that collection and passed down through the family of Reuben’s great-grand nephew, Robert B. Haines III. Today they are found in a collection bearing Robert’s name in the Quaker and Special Collections of the Haverford College Library, which may explain why these letters have not been previously exposed by Audubon biographers. With a stationary stand, I took perpendicular digital photographs of the original documents, and then, referring to the digital images, carefully transcribed the complete text of each letter. I deciphered confusing words by comparing their letter shapes to those of known words, and retained whenever possible Audubon’s orthographic conventions including (often inconsistent) spelling and punctuation, underlining, and breviographs. Illegible words were denoted with an ellipsis in brackets, and any words for which my transcription was uncertain were enclosed in brackets. Contractions formed with superscript characters were retained, but punctuation marks that appeared below the superscript were omitted. Digital scans and hard copies of this manuscript have been deposited with the Wyck Association for use by future researchers.

The Wyck Audubon Letters

LETTER I