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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

—Sarah Vowell

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together…

—Samuel Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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