For over a decade, English professor and digital humanist Ed Gallagher’s History on Trial Website, hosted by Lehigh University’s Digital Library, has been making its appearance in my early American literature survey. Gallagher describes the site as a “collaborative shared resource” for use in electronic learning environments. The site houses “inquiries into controversies over the representations of history.” These inquiries take the form of curated collections of digital materials for teaching six controversy-inciting events and/or figures in American culture: the “discovery” of the Americas, Pocahontas, filmic adaptations of American history, the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Enola Gay, and the Vietnam War Memorial.

Created and maintained by Gallagher as an open source for faculty and students at universities and high schools, History on Trial is the product of collaborations among graduate students, Lehigh faculty, librarians, technical staff, students, high school teachers, and early Americanists nationally. Operating on the premise that representation matters, the site conveniently archives textual and visual artifacts for teaching about the early Americas. History on Trial provides a digital archive of literary and visual representations related to the six problems of representation Gallagher identifies.

This review focuses on those pages most interesting to readers of Common-place: “The Literature of Justification,” “The Pocahontas Archive,” and “The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy.” The History on Trial main page identifies specific questions that shape each page (or controversy). “The Literature of Justification” focuses on the question, how did Europeans and early settlers rationalize their incursions into North America? Other organizing questions include, did she or didn’t she save John Smith? (for “The Pocahontas Archive”), and, was Jefferson a “hypocrite or hero”? While the controversy template runs the danger of oversimplifying history and representation (more on that later), the rich materials in this archive can be used in complex ways.  

Developed from Gallagher’s English graduate course “Early American Literature: America’s Many Beginnings,” “The Literature of Justification” presents chapters on the papacy, New Spain, Roanoke, Newfoundland, Jamestown, Pennsylvania, and the Supreme Court. The “About” tab unpacks the guiding questions of the course, drawn from literary authors, historians, and legal scholars. The guiding questions center on how Europeans narrated the process of settlement, colonization, and expansion. Resources for these questions are listed in the usefully annotated “General Bibliography” tab. The next tab, an interactive version of Ortelius’s 1606 map of North America, shows which entities had stakes in each region. The “Sound Bites” tab includes over three hundred “provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources” pertaining to the guiding questions. This library of relevant, quick-hitting passages is also keyword searchable, enabling users to compare a range of writing about the colonization of North America from Thomas Harriot to Homi Bhabha. For example, searching the term “rich” yields three sound bites from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the word “savage” yields sixty-two from the fifteenth through the twenty-first centuries.

Each chapter of “The Literature of Justification” addresses a specific colonial stakeholder (the papacy, Supreme Court) or colony (New Spain, Roanoke, etc.). The consistent template—introduction, timeline, graduate student essay, annotated bibliography, and image gallery—orients users from chapter to chapter and provides continuity when moving among chapters.

The most evolved chapter, Jamestown, includes WMV videos produced by Lehigh University graduate students and faculty, but they were not operating when I tested them with Safari and Chrome. The “Teaching” tab links to curriculum mapping for “Teaching British Literature Using Writings from Jamestown,” developed by honors English high school teacher Jane McLemore using Virginia Standards of Learning. The “Teaching” and “Introduction” tabs offer the most opportunity for collaboration among faculty and students at various levels; each page invites users to contribute to the work begun by “first and second generation” graduate student editors and authors.

“The Pocahontas Archive” extends the History on Trial motif to the question of Pocahontas’s relationship with John Smith and the cultural mythologies at work in representing the figure known to the Powhatan as Matoaka. Perhaps most impressive is the monumental effort to collect “materials relating to the study of Pocahontas (and, by association, John Smith, Jamestown, and early Virginia) from early America to the present day.” The archive offers a staggering record of the colonial and U.S. obsession with Pocahontas as a foundational figure in its national mythology.

At the “History” tab, one finds three sections. The “Pocahontas Time Line” provides a chronology of events relating to Pocahontas or her representation from 1595 (the probable year of her birth) to 1899 (completed to 1861). Following the time line is a page called “The Facts,” which attempts to compile all mentions of Pocahontas in the historical record using documents through 1630. Finally, this tab includes a page of epithets used to describe Pocahontas from 1608 through 2003. The “Controversy” tab presents native and western responses to the story of Smith’s rescue by Pocahontas. Mattaponi Sacred History is presented as a list of points derived from Paula Gunn Allen’s (2003) and Linwood and Daniels’ (2007) native biographies of Pocahontas. The “Debunking” page provides an extensive annotated bibliography of books and articles that bear on the question of whether or not Pocahontas actually saved John Smith.

Especially impressive and useful for high school and university faculty and students is the annotated bibliography of over 2,000 entries pertaining to Pocahontas, which is sorted chronologically and is fully searchable. As with the “Debunking” bibliography, electronic full-text documents are linked to the listings where possible. Gallagher has also provided a list of key search categories, mostly related to genre (image, dissertation, musical, novel, etc.).

The “Essays” tab leads to faculty and student work on representations of Pocahontas in texts, images, and film, and a section on her purported rescue of Smith. These essays, the work of advanced undergraduates at the University of Minnesota, and graduate students and faculty at Lehigh University, demonstrate how this unique digital collection offers a range of creative possibilities for students and faculty. Indeed, Gallagher invites interested faculty and students to contribute to the “Essay” and “Teaching” sections.

The centerpiece of “The Pocahontas Archive” is its image gallery, which houses approximately 175 visual representations of Pocahontas, beginning with Simon Van de Passe’s 1616 engraving, “Matoaka als Rebecca,” purportedly completed while she was alive. Presented as an index of thumbnails in chronological order, each image, when selected, is carefully cited and, where possible, linked to an electronic version of the original. For students who know of John Smith only from Disney’s Pocahontas, opening up the image index reveals 400 years of representation and appropriation in thumbnail form. The visual gallery showcases how the figure of Pocahontas has been appropriated, demonized, romanticized, and fetishized. The “Clippings” tab accomplishes what the “Image” tab does only via text; this tab collects over three hundred quotations about Pocahontas by diverse authors, such as students, scholars, poets, and playwrights. The clippings are randomized by choice, but users can perform keyword searches or select “Get 5 Random Clippings.” This explicit refusal to sort invites users to make their own meanings with critical thinking. “The Pocahontas Archive” is conducive to in-class activities. Students can explain how particular images construct Pocahontas or explain how specific clippings or texts are illuminated by an image.

“The Pocahontas Archive” is a stunning, living resource that collects diverse media artifacts from their scattered, sometimes obscure locations into one accessible, easily navigable resource. For both faculty and students, the site promises capacity and creative possibilities for critical thinking and bricolage that textbooks cannot. In focusing on problematizing colonization or the figure of Pocahontas, critical engagement is, to some degree, built into the structure of the site. This problematizing works best when presented through a range of perspectives, rather than as a binary opposition. As Miriam Posner observes, the models we use in digital humanities—especially as we are still figuring out what we are doing—often replicate structures of power, including gender and race, in uncritical ways. “The Pocahontas Archive” resists reifying structures of power by placing Mattaponi sacred history on a par with academic scholars and primary texts. Dr. Gallagher could go even further by including more Native American perspectives and contexts, which would eliminate any perceived binary (Mattaponi vs. western academics). For example, what can we know about the roles of Algonquin girls and women from baskets or wampum?

This challenge to avoid replicating the power structures that constitute present-day experience informs the “Jefferson-Hemings Controversy” site, a series of sixteen episodes that track the media representation of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings from its sensationalized beginnings to the present day. Each episode organizes a cultural moment in the history of the “controversy,” through an overview, primary and secondary sources, clippings, commentary, essays, teaching tools, and images. As with “The Pocahontas Archive,” the information presented for each stage of the controversy is wide-ranging and extensive. And as with Pocahontas, the actual Sally Hemings is noticeably absent from the archive except as a (vilified, sexualized, objectified) figure in Jefferson’s controversy. Because the site is set up as a controversy, the episodes in many ways elide its central fact: A slave woman was raped by her white master. If the controversy drives the site, then Hemings’ position cannot be adequately addressed. Instead of a debate featuring the opinions of those who have been authorized to speak, perhaps a template that challenges binarisms is in order. In “’The Cause of Her Grief’: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,” Wendy Anne Warren reconstructs the life of an unnamed seventeenth-century slave woman using a dizzying array of far-flung sources to demonstrate what it is possible to know about this overlooked figure. After a spectacular tour of her sources, Warren concludes, “We have known, for a long time, a story of New England’s settlement in which ‘Mr. Maverick’s Negro woman’ does not appear; here is one in which she does.” Warren’s investigation emphasizes the slave woman’s life and imagines her perspective on the events described in the archive. I suspect that dispensing with the binaries of controversy could yield something similarly human: an archive that goes beyond the black and white dialogue that shapes the soundtrack to our twenty-first-century lives.

As Common-place transitions to its new look on our new Website, the Web Library is adding a feature to our collection of reviews of online resources for the study of early American history and culture. The Web Library now includes a searchable list of digital projects on topics in early American studies. We encourage Common-place readers to add to this list of digital resources by contributing to the Zotero group suggestion box for Common-place Web Library or by e-mailing suggestions to Web Library editor Edward Whitley. In addition to our regular reviews of digital resources for scholarship and teaching, the Web Library will also become a forum for reflections on digital humanities practices more broadly conceived—a place where both the users and the creators of digital resources can reflect on the opportunities and challenges that digital methods present to the study of early American history and culture.

Further reading:

Miriam Posner, “What’s Next?: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities.” Miriam Posner’s Blog, July 27, 2015 (October 1, 2015).

Wendy Anne Warren, “’The Cause of Her Grief’: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England.” Journal of American History (2007): 1031-1049.

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

Lisa M. Logan is associate professor of English at University of Central Florida, where she teaches early American literature and feminist theory.

The minutes of Colored Conventions constitute one of the most important bodies of primary sources in African American history. The Colored Conventions Project website has brought together a large number of these documents for the first time ever. The necessary work of locating, scanning, uploading, cataloging, and transcribing builds upon the complex print history of the movement. This article offers an overview of the ways in which convention proceedings came into print in the nineteenth century, with the ultimate goal of demonstrating why the work of the Colored Conventions Project is vitally important for historians and for the rest of us.

The Importance of Print to the Movement

A resolution from the 1855 Colored Men’s State Convention in Troy, New York, proclaims, “This Convention strongly recommend(s) to the colored citizens to withhold their support directly and indirectly from all public journals that make it a point to misrepresent us as a people and the world but to use all means in their power to aid on the circulating of such papers as are ready and willing to do us justice.” The last part of this quote points to the well-known technological innovations that multiplied the production of newspapers and ephemeral documents in the nineteenth century. Scholars have shown how African Americans took full advantage of this democratizing trend for their own purposes. The Colored Conventions movement is an important example of this development. However, this fascinating quote also lays bare a surprising counter-strategy, involving a withdrawal from or refusal of certain kinds of print. The published record of the Colored Conventions movement unfolded in a violently contentious space of representation where the stakes were quite high. Print was to be used to further the movement, but it needed to be used in the proper fashion.

Derrick R. Spires writes that the conventions “began and ended in print, producing and circulating documents at each juncture in a way that kept their civic claims constantly in the public eye.” Print technologies offered a means of preparing the public for the debates and decisions that would take place at conventions, and for disseminating and commenting on those actions after the fact. Delegates knew that influencing Black and white public opinion was essential to the success of their political project. As weapons against racial oppression, the words of conventioneers were meant to be “heard” far beyond the walls in which they were pronounced. The print medium made this happen. Today, the Colored Conventions Project is using digital technologies to carry those voices even further. Individuals around the world are accessing the texts of convention minutes. The result is a growing understanding of the true importance of this massive movement.

Circumstances of Printing

With regard to the question of print, convention meetings were exercises in Black organizational autonomy. Printing committees were established alongside executive committees, business committees, and others. Delegates approved plans for the printing and distribution of hundreds or thousands of copies of the proceedings, and decided on the means of funding. In some cases, the title pages of the resulting pamphlets reveal the names of the printers involved. Printed copies of minutes were often given to attendees, who were expected to distribute or sell them, thus helping support the movement financially.

An exhibition on coloredconventions.org features interactive maps offering information about how national conventions planned for the printing of proceedings (“The Print Life of Colored Conventions Proceedings, 1830-1865 “). Drawing this information out of the minutes and placing it within maps allows viewers to easily absorb material that is spread throughout the minutes, while also providing a visual sense of the important regional dimension of the movement.

One section of the exhibit quotes plans to publish 1,000 copies of an address that had been delivered at the 1843 Buffalo, New York, convention. The speech in question was Henry Highland Garnet’s famous address to the slaves, which Sarah Patterson has discussed in an earlier essay. Frederick Douglass led the opposition to the adoption of Garnet’s speech, which invoked violent resistance as a path to freedom for enslaved Blacks. Based on another passage from the minutes, the exhibit also reveals that both Garnet and Douglass were named to the committee that was to oversee the publication of convention proceedings. The fact that both men sat on this committee suggests cooperation that cut across the lines of a disagreement that is the defining feature of the 1843 convention. However one is to interpret such details, their presence underlies the importance of the minutes as historical sources.

Newspapers

Before a convention took place, the publication of newspaper announcements (“calls”) was a necessary act of publicity that set the tone for the convention to come. Sarah Patterson’s essay explains the events surrounding the call that preceded the 1843 National Convention. Ten years later, the call for the 1853 Colored National Convention decried the recent passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, evoked other examples of discrimination, and announced the idea of a National Council, a permanent organization devoted to civil equality for Blacks. Championed by Douglass, this last idea was a direct response to the growing emigration movement, which Douglass opposed. The first significant document of the published proceedings of the 1853 convention elaborates on the topics announced in the call. In a lengthy address, Douglass again denounces the Fugitive Slave Act, calls for full citizenship rights for men of color, and gives details for the establishment of the National Council of the Colored People, which was envisioned as an expression of the democratic ideals that underpinned Douglass’s entire speech: the council was to be composed of free Blacks elected from each state, this at a time when the right to vote was non-existent for Blacks living in many of those states. The call had been used to announce the central feature of the coming convention.

In many instances newspapers published daily synopses of convention activities and reprinted the minutes afterward. Publications such as The Colored American, The Liberator, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, The Aliened American, The North Star, and The New Orleans Tribune are the only known sources for certain sets of proceedings. Although white-owned abolitionist periodicals such as The Liberator published minutes, many conventioneers aimed for autonomy of representation. The creation and support of Black newspapers became important goals, just as Black antislavery thinking began to diverge seriously from the Garrisonian approach, with its emphasis on moral suasion rather than voting and political activism. By the mid-1840s there was serious discussion of the need for a Black national print organ. At the 1847 National Convention in Troy, New York, “The Report of the Committee on a National Press” suggested:

Let there be, then, in these United States, a Printing Press, a copious supply of type, a full and complete establishment, wholly controled by colored men; let the thinking writing-man, the compositors, the pressmen, the printers’ help, all, all be men of color;-then let there come from said establishment a weekly periodical and a quarterly periodical, edited as well as printed by colored men; let this establishment be so well endowed as to be beyond the chances of temporary patronage; and then there will be a fixed fact, a rallying point, towards which the strong and the weak amongst us would look with confidence and hope …

The printing committee foresaw the financial difficulties of sustaining a newspaper such as this, which, they predicted, would require 2,000 regular subscribers. As an alternative, the committee recommended designating an existing paper to play the envisioned role. One year later, at the Colored National Convention of 1848 in Cleveland, Frederick Douglass’s recently established North Star was identified as serving the function of a national Black newspaper.

Between 1830 and the end of the nineteenth century, scores of proceedings were printed in newspapers and as pamphlets, and even as handbills around the country. The strategy worked to publicize the meetings as they were happening, but made it difficult for historians to get a full sense of the published minutes as a body of texts. The print record of the movement was characterized by dispersal. Some sets of proceedings made their way into the collections of historical societies, archives, and libraries. The lack of centralized records reflected the absence of an anchoring, permanent central organization. (The national organization that had been envisioned by Douglass in 1853 never came into being.) Rather, the absence of central records was a result of separate, though often related, decisions to call national, state, or regional conventions in response to events as they unfolded. A researcher working during the pre-digital era had to cover a lot of territory to consult all the minutes that were extant, and even the most intrepid researcher would have been unable to locate many. This situation prevented a comprehensive assessment of the movement by historians. This is the gap that the Colored Conventions Project seeks to fill.

Twentieth-Century Developments

Several volumes of collected minutes appeared during the second half of the last century. In 1969, Howard Holman Bell’s Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions brought together proceedings from the twelve national conventions that took place between 1831 and 1864. For some reason, Bell does not indicate the archival sources of his facsimiles, with one exception, thus leaving readers in the dark as to where he had located the facsimiles that constituted the book.

He gives a fuller accounting in his doctoral dissertation, A Survey of The Negro Conventions Movement (1953), published as a book in 1969. Like so many other scholars doing research on African Americans during the 1940s and 1950s, Bell acknowledges the contributions of influential Howard University librarian Dorothy Porter Wesley to his project. He names Howard as one of the repositories with the best collections of pamphlets, along with Yale.

Bell notes that the pamphlet reports are official accounts of the conventions, but that in some instances they lack pertinent information or become clear “only when supplemented by newspaper reports” (iii). However, he affirms the importance of printed minutes as sources of information. Minutes provide lists of attendees as well as committee rosters. They lay out plans that were outlined at the meetings and speeches attendees made for or against these plans. Even in the absence of other information, these details are invaluable to researchers and students of the movement. Often the minutes are the only source of information regarding the identities of those involved in the movement, as well as the principle strategies and debates. Bell’s observation about the suppression of certain details in the published minutes might be illuminated by an observation made by Spires, who explains that conventions sometimes refrained from providing full details of heated debates, for example, lest there be accusations of disunity in the ranks.

In the introduction to one of their two volumes of proceedings from state conventions (1840-1865), Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker lament Bell’s failure to indicate the sources of the minutes he republished. Foner’s and Walker’s volumes were published in 1979 and 1980 (the two scholars co-authored both volumes). They assemble transcriptions of 45 conventions from fifteen states. In 1986, the two also edited the first of a projected three-volume collection of proceedings of national and state conventions that took place between 1865 and 1900. Fortunately, all three volumes indicate the newspaper or other source of each set of proceedings. These details have been vital to the Colored Conventions Project, which has drawn from these sources, and gone on to offer a much larger number of minutes, which can be searched using keywords.

While the volumes produced by Bell and by Foner and Walker were valuable tools for scholars of African American history during the decades after their appearance, they are now out of print and hard to find. Also, even these capacious resources omit many sets of proceedings, particularly from the state conventions. The Colored Conventions Project drew on the published collections for the first scans that made their way onto coloredconventions.org. Since then, the site has added scores of conventions from archival or online sources. Many had been rarely cited, and some had never been cited at all. New sets of proceedings are being discovered and added continually by the faculty director of the program, as well as by the graduate students, undergraduates, and librarians who make up the project team. And there are more discoveries all the time. At the recent Colored Conventions Symposium in Delaware, scholars pointed us toward groups of proceedings from Texas conventions. We are in the processing of obtaining images of those documents in order to make them available. These minutes should allow researchers to get a sense of the distinctive features and concerns of the Texas conventions movement.

Reflecting on “Hybrid” Texts

Project co-coordinator Jim Casey and other scholars often point to the hybrid nature of the convention proceedings. As seen above, the conversation created by this archive includes preliminary announcements, minutes in newspaper or pamphlet form, and post-facto commentaries in the form of letters or newspaper articles. In some cases they also include resolutions and petitions such as the one that delegates from the 1840 New York State Convention sent to the legislature to protest the exclusion of Black men from the voting process. Bell’s remarks about the importance of the minutes as historical documents show that juxtaposing these linked, heterogeneous sources is necessary to historical reflection on the topic. Not only is the Colored Conventions Project disseminating the constellation of documents that come out of individual conventions, the project is also allowing researchers to read all the available minutes together, or to search across them for names or themes. This tool has the potential to revolutionize understanding of the conventions movement. Reactions from our 2015 symposium suggest that scholars strongly agree. One attendee proclaimed on social media that his research agenda was changing before his eyes.

The Next Phase

In her introduction to the online exhibit documenting the printing of convention proceedings, curator and CCP co-coordinator Sarah Patterson points out that a full publishing history of the Colored Conventions movement remains to be written. By assembling the largest collection of minutes in the world and making them searchable in new ways, the Colored Conventions Project is already contributing to the writing of that history.

Further Reading:

The Colored Conventions Project Website has an extensive bibliography of sources relating to the Colored Conventions movement and nineteenth-century African American political advocacy. Derrick R. Spires’s “Imagining a State of Fellow Citizens: Early African American Politics of Publicity in Black State Conventions,” from the book Early African American Print Culture, was particularly helpful for the writing of this article.

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

Curtis Small is a special collections librarian at the University of Delaware. Most recently he has been assisting the Colored Conventions Project with obtaining permissions and with tracking down and acquiring new sets of proceedings. Working with the project has inspired his interest in the print history of the Colored Conventions movement and in African American print history more generally.

Matthew Garrett, Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 256 pp., $65.

Matthew Garrett’s extraordinary Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form After the Constitution explores the complex textures that resulted when the post-constitutional moment’s consolidating energies found verbal expression in the fragmentary form of the period’s literary production. The book is a “microstructural or subgeneric literary history” (88). It follows the episode—an “integral, but also extractable unit of any narrative” across a range of genres: political essay, memoir, novel, and miscellany (3). As Garrett argues in his lucid introduction, the episode is a dialectical form, “a part that exists as such only in relation to a real or implied whole” (4). This mediating between the one and the many makes the episode an especially rich site for analyzing the politics of form in the early nation. This episodic writing is, Garrett argues, commodified, albeit imperfectly—reproducible but not mimetic, indexical but not iconic. “It is the episode,” Garrett writes, “in its flexibility and diaphanous quality—part gesturing toward whole, whole gesturing back—that does the literary work of this emergent bourgeois culture” (21). The representative texts of Garrett’s four genres, via their respective logics of contagion, error, hesitation, and volubility helped delineate the contours of the political. Episodic Poetics‘ investigation of these dynamics is as theoretically sophisticated as it is elegantly constructed, and in what follows I can only gesture at the readerly pleasures that attend following the involutions of its nuanced argument.

In chapter 1, “The Poetics of Constitutional Consolidation,” The Federalist’s episodic fragmentation—eighty-five essays split between three authors united under a single pseudonym, Publius—emerges as key to understanding how, in Hamilton and Madison’s hands, the American unum was to emerge from the chaotic pluribus.Garrett reads the dialectic between Hamiltonian binarism and Madisonian fragmentation as an essential element of the text’s politics. The Federalist nationalizes, in part, by using metaphors of contagion and disease to pathologize antifederal opposition. Garrett argues that the repressed vehicle of such figures is debt, and that everything about The Federalist, from its narrative grammar to its physical presentation, works to make elite politics synonymous with national politics (28).

Chapter 2, “The Life in Episodes,” explores how Benjamin Franklin’s manipulation of the Autobiography‘s episodes registers and manages the same threatening “social multiplicity” (61). When Franklin corrects his famous errata, he averts conflict by symbolically or literally repaying his debts. Vernon, a friend of the Franklin family, who inadvertently loans Franklin money, is repaid with interest; Franklin’s abandonment of Deborah Franklin is rectified by their marriage (64). Other scholars have seen the Autobiography projecting revolutionary politics inward. Garrett sees Franklin’s deft manipulation of the relationship between parts and whole, major and minor events, and mistakes and corrections as a paradigm for how to defuse conflict without actually relieving its underlying causes.

These fascinating formal rereadings of such canonical texts speak to our own political moment. The threats—multiplicity, plurality, and their near-synonyms—to which Franklin and the authors of The Federalist respond are stand-ins for something akin to “class conflict,” a phrase Garrett employs only once, in a note. “Income inequality” does not appear at all, but then the period was characterized by far more dire forms of oppression. Nevertheless, when Garrett employs the Barthesian concept of “bourgeois,” “owning class,” or “ruling-class ex-nomination”—that is, the naturalization of capitalist ideology—the reverberations with the Great Recession of 2008 are clear. Publius binds essays and Franklin collects parts; both further the implicit claim that the “propertied class” is “the only available force for gathering together the social whole” (115). They are too big to fail, and we have inherited the fruits of their success.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore the career of the episode in the evolving literary marketplace of the 1780s and 1790s. “The Fiction of Hesitation” argues that the dilated, meandering plots of the anonymous Story of Constantius and Pulchera (1789), Susanna Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart (1795), and Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (1799) translate Publius and Franklin’s strategies of dispersal into forms suitable to a nascent literary market economy. Finding the first two texts especially well adapted to both intensive and extensive reading, Garrett argues that their formal alternation between a static domesticity in which not much happens and the duels, shipwrecks, and reunions that comprise the episodic plots provided a range of gratifying possibilities for readers. (In so doing, fiction also unsettled religious tract literature’s reliance upon many of the same formal techniques.)

Ormond professes to be “the history of Constantia Dudley,” but this description does not do justice to what Garrett rightly calls the novel’s “distended” plot (97). After Constantia’s father, Stephen, is betrayed and bankrupted by his former partner, the forger Thomas Craig, the Dudley family moves to Philadelphia, where they encounter the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. True to her name, Constantia remains in the city caring for the victims and resisting both rape and marriage. Ormond, the book’s villain, attempts first to reason and later to force the resolute heroine out of her virtue; in the end she kills him with a penknife. The pull between the aptly named Constantia as the force for narrative diffusion and Ormond as an apostle of fatal closure creates another dialectic of plot and episodic interruption. This play between digression and story recalls the analogous strategies employed by Publius and Franklin, only operating in a different register. That dialectic is Brown’s narrative solution to the problem of plotting, and it is the only vehicle for change in Ormond. It also represents “Brown’s aesthetic solution to the problem of revolution,” since the questions of how to order a story and how to order a polity are versions of each other (113).

Chapter 4, “Miscellany and the Structure of Style,” “anatomizes Salamagundi‘s episodic whims as a form of commodity writing” (116). The collaborative effort of James Kirke Paulding and William and Washington Irving, Salamagundi (1807-08) is in many ways the “anti-Federalist“: its narrative authority is aggressively dispersed among a number of fictional contributors, its material form is ephemeral, and it claims no moral, rational, or political authority (124). What remains is style, which emerges, in Garrett’s analysis, as “a brilliant compromise in that … it enables a hegemonic articulation of class power” (143). By couching its whimsical episodic form in a gentlemanly or aristocratic style, “the ‘Federalist’ form of subjective self-assertion returns as its dialectical opposite, the ‘Republican’ volubility of an episodic commodity literature” (144). Unlike its predecessors, Salamagundi is “fully saturated by the market,” meaning it can embrace the episodic in ways that the previous chapter’s novels were forced to hold in suspension (121).

A decade after Jonathan Loesberg’s A Return to Aesthetics, literary studies’ aesthetic turn has—happily—lost some of its controversy along with its novelty. Nevertheless, when Garrett claims that Episodic Poetic‘s “modest methodological injunction … is this: literary history is better understood as an integral part of history if we understand literary texts at multiple levels of scale and abstraction,” his modesty is misleading (145). Garrett’s theoretical interlocutors range from Aristotle to Zizek, but they are, nevertheless, carefully chosen. Garrett follows Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and Lukacs’ “Megjegyzések az irodalomtörténet elméletéhez” (“Remarks on the Theory of Literature”) among many others in claiming that literary form registers the sociopolitical antagonisms of its time and place more acutely than literature’s thematic content. Formal readings, then, become the site for a politically engaged literary criticism of the kind Episodic Poetics pursues: “the social problem is … a formal problem of writing” (25). Garrett’s take on these social problems is characteristic of the new formalists’ tendency to favor the Marxist/Hegelian of the Frankfurt School over the Russian Formalists—though Bakhtin is a touchstone, and Lotman and Shklovsky appear in chapter 3. Nevertheless, his repeated invocation of Aristotle suggests a commitment to reconciling the approaches Marjorie Levinson dubbed “activist” and “normative formalism” in her 2008 PMLA article. In chapter 3, as if to literalize this goal, Garrett invokes Aristotle via the eighteenth-century rhetoricians Lord Kames and Hugh Blair, adducing the classic instance of normative aesthetic judgment by filtering it through an account of its reception. Garrett maintains the activist’s interest in a historicized politics of form without abandoning normative belief in aesthetic accomplishment. Thus, as he writes with regard to The Federalist, “I take this rush to abstraction … to be both a cornerstone of The Federalist’s formal achievement and the most unmediated aspect of its connection to the mercantile situation from which it emerges” (45). Conversely, Charles Brockden Brown’s “transparently ‘bad’ plotting is interesting in the specific ways it manifests its ‘badness'” (110). Garrett’s scare quotes distance him from the aesthetic judgment leveled against Brown’s plots, but they do not totally disavow it. Indeed, Garrett wants to recuperate aesthetic judgment as “the means of engaging with the very history that the judgment ‘bad’ would appear to have denied” (115).

For both its theoretical commitment to form and its literary analysis, Episodic Poetics is an important addition to a growing body of aesthetically oriented literary criticism. The book exemplifies Richard Strier’s “indexical formalism”—an investment in form as historical because deictic—but also what Ed Cahill calls “archival formalism”—the “wide-angle perspective” that reveals the pervasiveness of “deep form.” Cahill sees archival formalism as a defense against the complaint that the objects of formalist analysis are not themselves representative, an observation Garrett echoes in his “Conclusion” and elsewhere. At its best, sensitivity to these text’s material forms adds nuance to these arguments. The ephemerality of Salamagundi, for example, is crucial to Garrett’s analysis. Elsewhere in Episodic Poetics, however, the history of these texts’ production and dissemination functions only analogically. For instance, Garrett argues plausibly enough that the fine and common copies of The Federalist materialize the social vision of its principal authors. He continues, “Volume 1 of the typical thick paper copy [of John and Archibald M’Lean’s 1788 first edition of The Federalist] contains thirty-six (or so) blank leaves, filler that was needed to balance the width of the spines, to enable symmetry in the ornamental tooling” (58). It is possible that extra paper was included to preserve the volumes’ Georgian balance, but if so the effort was unsuccessful—the two volumes remain quite unequal in length. But this elevation of the aesthetic seems unlikely. The Huntington Library copy, still in its publisher’s binding, has 25 blank leaves—the remainder of the book’s final signature plus a sheet and a half of extra paper. While it may strike the modern viewer as “obscenely gorgeous,” surely such a judgment should be no less suspect than calling Ormond‘s plotting “bad” (58). The tooled binding, as William Loring Andrews observed a century ago, is extremely well executed, but its speckled calf remains a far cry from gleaming morocco.

This is a quibble, to be sure, yet even such a minor aesthetic reappraisal might in turn prompt us to search for other explanations for these blank leaves. They might have been added for utilitarian rather than artistic reasons. Hamilton hoped the Federalist elite in Virginia would use their copies as a “debater’s handbook” at the Richmond convention (31). The blank pages do not make the fine copies “unreadable,” but they might well have made them more useful in the very specific context of Virginia and New York’s ratification battles (58). Deciding between these two readings would require a wider-ranging bibliographical analysis than I have been able to perform, but such work has the potential to reveal a great deal about the historical connections between Federalist politics and the physical production of material texts. As John Bidwell pointed out in American Paper Mills, 1690-1832, Whatman, Patch, and other English papermakers supplied the “superfine royal writing paper” that distinguishes the fine copies of The Federalist, paper that drew its name from the royal emblems used as watermarks (xxvi.) The common copies, on the other hand, apparently used paper from a new domestic source: Delaware’s Brandywine Mill. Because Garrett takes form to be more discursive than material, it is not clear how these elements of The Federalist‘s production speak to the politics of its literary form. But it is a testimony to the book’s ambition and success that Episodic Poetics provides a fascinating framework capable of investing such antiquarian details with new significance.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3.5 (July, 2015).

Chris Hunter is an assistant professor of English at Caltech. He studies the histories of books, readers, and genres.

The roots of the field of book history lie primarily in the tradition of textual studies—the examination of how a particular written text took the material form of a book, and what changes were wrought in that transformation. Much of the early work in what eventually became a distinct field was done by literary scholars, particularly those involved in studying the publication history of Shakespeare’s plays. As such, book historians and bibliographers have always concerned themselves with the transformation of words into things—how those things were produced, how they moved around in the world, and what people did with them.

In a similar way, much contemporary writing about the future of books focuses on their physical nature, their qualities as things. Writers who lament the decline of book culture detail the distinctive smell of bookstores and libraries, the comforting heft of a book in the hand, the tactile pleasure of the page between a reader’s fingers. These material qualities are typically compared with the evanescent, immaterial characteristics of digital texts—all those ones and zeros zooming around in the ether. This argument is a straw man, of course. Digital texts are read on physical screens attached to physical objects that have their own physical qualities. Each has its own weight and distinctive texture; they give off light and heat. These electronic devices are just as much things as are books. But lovers of books (and particularly scholars who work with old books) often tend to grant books a sort of mystical power, and treat them as a different category of object. New scholarship in book history, however, is beginning to treat books as things that have their own material histories and are used for purposes other than reading (just think of how many toddlers have sat on phone books or dictionaries to be elevated to table height at family dinners). By thinking of books as things that exist not only to be read, but as objects that have to be assembled, moved, sold or exchanged, and disposed of, we can come closer to understanding the way that the “world of books” is made up of individual objects in the world.

Scholars are accustomed to thinking of books as material artifacts, but these artifacts are primarily of interest to historians and literary critics because they have words printed on their pages. One such material object that is generally considered of interest for what it says more than what it is is pictured in figure 1. George Richards Minot’s History of Shay’s Rebellion was printed in Worcester in 1788 by Isaiah Thomas, one of early America’s most successful printers (and the man who, in 1812, would found the American Antiquarian Society).

If we’re lucky, we can sometimes find an artifact like that in figure 2—Minot’s own bound manuscript version of his “History” (this is one of perhaps only two eighteenth-century texts for which the Antiquarian Society holds both the full manuscript and the printed copy). Artifacts such as this, that contain abundant evidence of the author’s hand—strike-throughs, marginalia, passages added on tipped-in pages—offer great insight into the history of specific texts (fig. 3). By studying them we can learn how handwritten words on paper become a physical object that is the product of numerous mechanical processes (making paper, casting type, printing) (fig 4). Scholars can discover how the book’s preface (fig. 5), which appears to have been written after the rest of the manuscript, takes printed form. We can also study the material changes that took place in the transformation from humble paper-bound notebook to Isaiah Thomas’ own copy of the History, handsomely bound in calf with a gilt-stamped spine (fig. 6). And book historians from the bibliographical branch of the field’s family tree can study the book’s presswork, its imposition, and its typesetting in Thomas’s print shop. In short, through studying physical objects such as Minot’s History, we can learn a great deal about the history of this specific book—how it took material form and made its way to readers.

This is the work of traditional book history, but it is also in line with the new focus in the field on “material textuality.” Yet when scholars talk about “material textuality,” the focus is still usually on the “textual” part—about how one text (like Minot’s manuscript) turns into a printed physical book, what labor processes are involved, what decisions the pressman makes that influence the final appearance of the book. Once the book is printed, scholars explore how those decisions affect how the book is received, and how the material form the book takes also serves to convey meaning. Literary scholars tend to become interested in the history of books because of the history of a specific book, and we are interested in that specific book because of what it says, or who wrote it, or what impact its words had on those who read it. And many other branches of scholarship that focus on the lives of books are primarily concerned with the contents of the books, rather than their material form. Books get censored because of what they say, not what they’re made of. Systems of intellectual property such as copyright apply to the ideas and words contained in books, not to books as manufactured objects. But there are books—physical things, made out of cotton and glue and twine and leather—that do something else, something that helps me think about early American literature in a different way, a way in which considerations of authors and readers hold much less sway, and where the materials that go into books take center stage.

In the early 1790s, Isaiah Thomas was one of the most successful printers in North America. In his various shops in Worcester, Massachusetts, he employed almost 150 workers, and was a partner in printing, publishing, and book-selling enterprises in Boston; Walpole, New Hampshire; Brookfield, Massachusetts; Baltimore; and Albany. In January 1793, frustrated with the difficulty of obtaining enough paper from paper mills outside Boston, Thomas purchased land just southwest of Worcester to build his own paper mill. In his 1810 History of Printing in America, Thomas wrote (about himself, in the third person): “At Worcester, he also erected a paper mill, and set up a bindery; and was thus enabled to go through the whole process of manufacturing books.” It is this comment of Thomas’s—his reference to “the whole process of manufacturing books”—that led me to look at the object in figure 7: the account book of payments made to the workmen in Thomas’s paper mill and bindery from 1794 to 1796.

The page in figure 8 is the first of several showing payments to John Salter, the mill’s foreman. Salter was clearly a skilled workman—he made paper moulds used in the mill—and he was relatively well paid. But it is the pattern of payments that is most interesting. He was paid in cash; in 2 bushels of wheat in May 1794; in 2 barrels of cider the following month; and in corn sent to him by a third party, Willard Parker, in August. These forms of payment-in-kind were quite common in eighteenth-century North America, particularly outside of the larger cities, where hard money was often scarce; indeed, Thomas often accepted payment in corn, wheat, butter, and other agricultural products from his rural customers. But in addition to being paid in goods that could have been used to feed his family, Salter was also paid in paper and, more notably, in books. He received a copy of Perry’s Dictionary in payment on Jan. 12, 1795; a quarto Bible on April 6; and Isaac Watts’s Psalms on August 14. He also received a large number of copies of Webster’s spelling books in payment, perhaps for resale.

The variety in the forms of compensation that Salter received for his work in Thomas’ paper mill was not exceptional. Patrick Gilmore (fig. 9), a journeyman paper maker, was paid in cash, in linen, in an order on a local merchant, and in copies of the Young Man’s Companion and the famous sex manual Aristotle’s Master-piece. Other workers were paid in extra boards, binding materials, Morocco leather, and gold leaf, indicating that they might be manufacturing books on their own.

The page in figure 10 shows payments to “Pitman, Whittemore, and Cunningham, lads in the binding room.” Over the course of 1795 they received payments in cash, “small books” (which most likely meant chapbooks for children), and paper—in very small amounts (one of them received six cents’ worth of marbled paper on Sept. 9). But they also were paid in more expensive books, receiving a Hieroglyphic (illustrated) Bible on Jan. 28, 1796, and a copy of Pamela several months later. In contrast (fig. 11), during his brief employment at the mill, Moses Adams, another “one of the lads,” was paid in cash, and in a pair of shoes made by a Worcester cobbler.

It is this use of books as fungible assets—as payments to workers who labored on their manufacture, equivalent with a barrel of cider or a pair of shoes—that I find productive in reorienting how we think about early American literature. With the Atlantic turn in early American studies, there has been a wave of interest in transatlantic book history. But this transatlantic study is still often focused on texts, looking at how either finished books made their way from Dublin or London to Boston or Philadelphia, or at how particular texts by specific authors were reprinted in North America, examining issues such as copyright and piracy that inhere in specific texts, or addressing how radical ideas from England crossed the ocean on the pages of pamphlets and helped fuel the Revolution. What Thomas’s business records help us see, though, is that books were the result of, as he put it, “a whole process of manufacturing.” That is, they were manufactured goods that drew on the Atlantic world trade in raw materials (figs. 12, 13), such as the rags Thomas bought for his mill, gold, and leather, and in tools, such as composing sticks and type, which represented Thomas’s single biggest capital asset. Thinking about books as objects that were processed, stored, and packaged by industrialists (I use the term advisedly, instead of “printer”) like Isaiah Thomas helps re-orient the way we think about literature in early America.

Another Thomas account book from 1794 helps us see this distinction even more clearly. This inventory of his business’s stock in books, paper, type, and ink lists all of his assets, by location in his many buildings in Worcester (James Green has written that in 1794 Thomas had $35,000 worth of books in his warehouses—he continually plowed all of his available capital back into books) (fig. 14). There is a list of “American Books in Warehouse—Bound—Room No. 1,” sorted by trunk. His “European Publications in the Store” are listed by shelf, and then by subject (fig. 15). “Books folded, Room No. 2, Upper Warehouse,” in figure 16, lists items that have been folded into gatherings but not yet bound, a common practice for printers of the day, while figure 17 features a list of “Books in Sheets, in the Loft” that inventories books whose sheets have not yet been folded. This way of viewing a set of books not as specific texts by particular authors, or as collections of texts that are related by subject matter, but based on their point of origin (which affected their sale price), their state of completion, and their storage location helps us see that book history looks very different from the perspective of the maker of books than from that of the reader. Scholars may say that they study a particular author, and librarians may arrange books in their collections chronologically, or by subject, or by publisher. But the “List of Books: European Editions. Trunk No. 12, Upper Warehouse, Room No. 2” shown in figure 18 includes a motley assortment of titles, from Frances Burney’s Cecilia to Samuel Butler’s Hudibras to issues of the Tatler and Spectator to stocks of Greek grammars and William Smellie’s treatise on midwifery. They have nothing in common as texts, other than their origin and where they are stored. There is no authorial thread that connects them, and they would not have found the same readership. Yet, for Thomas—a producer and seller of manufactured items that just happen to be books—these titles represented a coherent category of goods, objects that were in meaningful ways somehow the same. To the librarian and the scholar, these account books are manuscript texts, but they are also things that provide a map for where to find other things, and also contain a record of paying the workers who produced these things in the raw materials necessary to make more of these things. Examining objects such as these account books, and taking seriously their status as objects, can help reorient our view of American literature away from that of the writer (and the reader), and even away from that of the editor or printer, to that of the manufacturer and the laborer—those for whom the book exists purely as a fungible, interchangeable object, one among many—not as a specific set of words like George Minot’s “History,” labored over by the author’s hand, but as a thing stored in Trunk No. 12 in Room No. 2 of the Upper Warehouse, taking up space, waiting to be sold.

Further reading

There are two groups of book professionals—conservators and library curators—who are uniquely attentive to the physical qualities of books and to the materials that are used to make them. Anybody interested in the materiality of books of any sort should consult these incredibly knowledgeable resources first—nobody knows more about how old books were made than those who are responsible for their care.

Numerous scholars in recent years have explored the history of individual commodities in early America and their impact on the material objects of which they became a part, as well as the implications of those goods’ production and trade. See in particular Jennifer Anderson, Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2012); Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (New Haven, 2016); and Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2015).

One of the most notable examples of the “new materiality” approach to book history scholarship is Leah Price’s How to Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, N.J., 2012), although its focus is still primarily on books being used as objects in literary works, rather than in actual practice. Jonathan Senchyne’s work on the materiality of paper and early American literature is particularly useful for readers interested in this relationship. See in particular “Paper Nationalism: Material Textuality and Communal Affiliation in Early America,” Book History 19 (2016) and “Vibrant Material Textuality: New Materialism, Book History, and the Archive in Paper,” Studies in Romanticism (forthcoming, spring 2018). For a more theoretical approach to some of the issues involved in this materialist turn, see Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, N.C., 2005) and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C., 2010).

The most useful brief introduction to book production in early America is James N. Green, “The Rise of Book Publishing,” in A History of the Book in America, Volume 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010). For Isaiah Thomas’s account of his own firm’s development, as well as wonderful contemporary observations of the early American book trade, see Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, with a Biography of Printers & and Account of Newspapers, edited by Marcus A. McCorison from the Second Edition (Barre, Mass., 1970). For more on Isaiah Thomas’s career, see Clifford Shipton, Isaiah Thomas, Printer, Patriot and Philanthropist, 1749-1831 (Rochester, N.Y., 1948).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

Paul Erickson is the director of the Programs in Humanities, Arts & Culture and American Institutions, Society & the Common Good at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a learned society based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Living as I do in Williamsburg, Virginia, I am surrounded by the American Revolution. Here are the buildings where the Revolution was to some considerable extent conceived and here through the programs of Colonial Williamsburg it is reenacted every day. This may explain why I found myself wondering about a world without an American Revolution and why I took it upon myself to read alternate histories (or counterfactuals, as historians tend to call them) in which that was the case.

This was not nearly as formidable as taking on alternate histories in which the South won the Civil War. Those fill many more shelves, and it’s easy to see why. There are still plenty of people who find the Confederacy’s Lost Cause a romantic one and who relish the idea of a triumphant Robert E. Lee. Alternate histories of World War II also abound, presumably not because a Nazi-ruled America is appealing but because it’s irresistibly scary. A British America, in contrast, conjures up little more than a visit from Queen Elizabeth II: a bit of pomp, comfortably familiar and not very exciting.

Historians generally have held this kind of “what-if” history in disdain. In 1961, E. H. Carr called it a “parlor game” and insisted “history is … a record of what people did, not of what they failed to do.” Since then, it’s become a bit more respectable. Historian Gavriel Rosenfeld lists among the reasons the rise of postmodernism in the humanities, with its blurring of the line between fact and fiction; of chaos theory in the sciences, with its emphasis on how small changes can have big results; and of online virtual realities, making historians, like everyone else, more comfortable with the idea of alternate outcomes. And the decline of ideologies such as Marxism, which saw historical trends as predetermined and inevitable, has led to a greater appreciation of how the decisions and actions of individuals, and how sometimes pure chance, can change the course of history.

Still, though historians have played with the genre, alternate history is more often the work of science fiction writers. The genre has also appealed to some mainstream and literary novelists, like Stephen King and Michael Chabon and Philip Roth, and to plenty of readers. The website uchronia.net lists more than 2,000 printed works in the genre. The discussion forum at alternatehistory.comhas more than seven million posts. General anthologies of alternate history, such as Robert Cowley’s What If? series, have been bestsellers.

As for alternate histories of the Revolution, they held enough surprises to keep me reading.

How the British won

Judging from many works in the genre, the easiest way for the British to have won the Revolution would have been never to have fought. A bit more farsightedness on the part of the king’s ministers might have averted the whole nasty business. Roger Thompson’s story, “If I Had Been the Earl of Shelburne,” plays out this scenario. Shelburne’s plan here is simple: take away the colonists’ rallying cry—No taxation without representation—by not taxing them and by giving them seats in Parliament. Among the colonists, too, moderates might have prevailed, as in Edmond Wright’s story, “If I Had Been Benjamin Franklin in the Early 1770s.” Wright’s Franklin mollifies the British by promising Congress will pay for the tea dumped in Boston’s harbor.

Unlike most of the other writers whose work this essay surveys, Thompson and Wright are both historians. This perhaps accounts for their focus on the moments when history might have changed rather than on the long-term results of those changes. Both teach American history in England, which perhaps accounts for their eagerness to see the American “problem” handled, as Wright puts it, “with more delicacy and discretion.”

Once begun, the Revolution’s success was anything but inevitable. Indeed, this is a war that cries out for alternate histories. The actual military history is simply too improbable: an undermanned, underarmed, underfed rabble defeating the world’s most powerful empire. The patriot cause, historian Thomas Fleming wrote, experienced “almost too many moments … on the brink of disaster,” again and again “to be retrieved by the most unlikely accidents or coincidences or choices made by harried men in the heat of conflict.”

Disaster certainly seemed imminent in September 1775. General William Howe’s troops, having defeated Washington’s on Long Island, crossed the East River to Kip’s Bay on Manhattan’s east side, and again routed the Americans. Fortunately for Washington, Howe was satisfied to have secured New York City, and Washington and his army escaped to the north.

In Paul Seabury’s story, “What If George Washington Had Been Captured by General Howe?” Howe gets his man, though he deserves no credit. Seabury presents us with the diary of a Mrs. Murray, who owns an orchard on Murray Hill, not far from Kip’s Bay. Mrs. Murray is mostly worried about the troops ruining her crops. She sees both Washington and Howe on her hill. The latter is more interested in having a drink, but Mrs. Murray takes charge, refusing Howe even a cup of water until he brings back Washington—which, as a result of her prodding, he finally does.

Seabury concludes his story with Howe’s biographer reading the diary, then dismissing Mrs. Murray as a washerwoman and a strumpet and offering to buy the diary, clearly intending to keep its contents secret. This may not qualify Seabury, a political scientist, as a champion of women’s history, and alternate historians of the Revolution have focused on dead white men no less than actual historians—witness the centrality to so many stories of Washington being captured or killed. But Seabury certainly enjoys poking fun at historians who glorify the great men of history, be they Howe or Washington.

Washington is again captured in New York in Gary Blackwood’s novel for teens, Year of the Hangman. The novel’s plot turns on the efforts of its fifteen-year-old hero to save Washington from being hanged. It does not bode well that it is set largely in 1777, a year that began with the hanging of various rebel leaders and in which the three 7s, as Blackwood notes, have shapes distressingly similar to that of gallows.

Washington is also captured in “Washington Shall Hang,” a play that is an alternate history of the Revolution. In Robert Wallace Russell’s story, Washington is put on trial for treason and defended, improbably, by the British colonel, Banastre Tarleton, best known for his bloody cavalry raids and his defeat at the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina. Here Tarleton redeems himself by outwitting the prosecutors, who have to resort to perjury (from Benedict’s wife, Peggy Arnold) to make sure Washington is found guilty.

Washington’s capture or death is so common in alternate histories of the Revolution that you might wonder why so many writers found it necessary to get rid of Washington in order for the British to prevail. After all, Washington’s successes depended heavily on the flaws of British generals, such as Howe’s hesitation. Washington was no military genius. He was, however, opportunistic, dogged, and inspiring. For a revolution that depended less on defeating the British than on persuading them that America wasn’t worth the trouble of a continuing war, what Washington had to offer was just what was needed. He kept going and he kept his troops going when others would have despaired. He was, as Henry Lee said after Washington’s actual death in 1799, “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

Had the Revolution been lost, how would the world be different?

For starters, Indians would have been a lot better off. In The Two Georges, a novel by Harry Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss, the union between Britain and her colonies has lasted into the late twentieth century in which the novel is set, and a few independent Indian nations remain intact in parts of North America.

Native Americans’ fate is more ambiguous in Marc Laidlaw’s short story, “His Powder’d Wig, His Crown of Thornes.” The story appears in an anthology devoted to the question of whether individuals, even “great men,” can truly change the course of history. Here Washington’s death (after being betrayed by Benedict Arnold) leads to the demise of the Revolution, but also to the rise of a secret Indian religion. Grant Innes, a modern-day British trader in Native art, stumbles upon a figure of Washington on the cross. Tracking it through the literally underground world of the American capital (Arnoldsburg, District of Cornwallis), Innes finds a painting much like da Vinci’s Last Supper but with Washington as Christ and his various generals—Knox, Greene, Lee, Lafayette, Rochambeau—as disciples. In the place of Judas is, of course, Arnold.

Innes learns that the Indians blame themselves for Washington’s death and for the world’s subsequent imbalance. As British allies, they scalped his wig and pierced his body with thorns. This, they believe, led to an America that bore factories instead of fruit. “Let no man forget His death,” one of their biblical-sounding books reads. “Forget not his sacrifice, His powder’d wig, His crown of thornes.”

Powerful though the Indians’ faith is in Laidlaw’s story, it seems misplaced. Given the actual history of Native Americans under Washington’s successors, it seems likely that, had the Revolution failed, Indians would generally have been better off.

Blacks, too, would have been better off without the Revolution, at least as portrayed in alternate histories. Turtledove and Dreyfuss assume the abolition of slavery in America would have followed logically from its abolition elsewhere in the British Empire during the 1830s. In the North American Union of The Two Georges, where civil rights were established well before the 1950s and 1960s, the governor general is Sir Martin Luther King.

The fate of blacks is less clear in Charles Coleman Finlay’s story, “We Come Not to Praise Washington.” Finlay’s stories range from alternate history to Arthuriana, sword and sorcery, and horror. Here Washington died in 1793 and the military, led by Alexander Hamilton, has taken over. The cause of freedom for blacks and whites ends up in the hands of an escaped slave named Gabriel, who in actual history organized a failed slave rebellion in 1800.

Overall, alternate historians seem confident the world—and not just Native Americans and African Americans—would have been better off under the British. The combined American and British forces are, for example, unbeatable in “The Charge of Lee’s Brigade,” a story by S. M. Stirling, author of numerous works of alternate history. It’s no coincidence that Stirling’s title conjures up that of Tennyson’s poem, “Charge of the Light Brigade.” In 1854 Brigadier General Lee of the Royal North American Army finds himself fighting for the British in the Crimean War and ordered to lead what seemed likely to be a suicidal charge on the Russian position. Is there a way to seize the Russian guns without condemning half the brigade? If anyone can figure out how to do it, it is Lee, for in a world without a Revolution and thus without a Civil War, this is none other than Robert E. Lee. Students of military history will find this story especially intriguing.

One of the most fully drawn portraits of a modern world in which America is still part of the British Empire is The Two Georges (which must be the only book ever co-authored by a Hugo winner and an Oscar winner). The world Turtledove and Dreyfuss imagine is, however, not fully modern: absent American independence and inventiveness, its steampunk technology is behind ours, with slow-moving though luxurious whale-shaped airships instead of planes and long-distance calls that require operators and patience.

There is much to be said for this world. With the British in control, the world is at peace, despite threats from the Russians and a combined French and Spanish empire. America, too, is a more peaceful place: it’s rare that a member of the Royal American Mounted Police encounters an armed criminal. When a painting is stolen prior to the opening of its tour in Los Angeles—oops, New Liverpool—it is up to Colonel Thomas Bushell of the Mounties to get it back. The painting, which is called “The Two Georges,” portrays George Washington bowing before George III, and it is a symbol of the continuing union between Britain and America. The prime suspects are the Sons of Liberty, extremists who want a free America. These semi-fascist Sons would also like to free the continent of Negroes and Indians.

Dreyfuss and Turtledove draw heavily on and acknowledge the influence of Harry Harrison’s Tunnel Through the Deeps (published in England and in some later American editions as A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!), In Harrison’s novel, the failure of the American Revolution has again resulted in a modern world that’s vaguely Victorian in its technology and manners. This world, too, is somewhat more civilized than our own, a pleasant Tory fantasy of luxury airships and class distinctions. The book will, as the flap copy on the British edition proclaims, “warm the heart of every Englishman … on whom the sun has ever set.”

A few refreshing dystopias

All these worlds where everything works out seem a harsh verdict on a Revolution dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Granted, the words of the Declaration of Independence obviously did not apply to blacks and Indians—or women, for that matter. Still, would we really want July 4 to be just another day on our British calendars?

For a refreshingly dystopian change, there is S. M. Stirling’s three-volume series, The Domination. In Stirling’s history, Americans win the Revolution but belatedly and with much more bitterness on the part of those loyal to England. Instead of going to Canada, as many loyalists actually did, they settle in South Africa and found the colony of Drakia (named after Francis Drake). Later joined by European aristocrats and Southern Confederates, these losers of our history hold a grudge. They turn Drakia into an empire known as the Domination of the Draka, an empire that fulfilled the dreams of apartheid’s most avid supporters. A common greeting: “Glory to the Race.” The Draka are not only racist but also extraordinarily violent, turning conquered peoples into serfs and soldiers to fuel further conquests.

The first of the trilogy, Marching Through Georgia, is set during World War II, or as it was known in Stirling’s world, the Eurasian War. Having already seized Africa and Asia, the Draka roll over the Nazis and then Western Europe. The second book, Under the Yoke, chronicles the early years of a Cold War between America and the Domination. The third book, The Stone Dogs, carries the Cold War into space, giving the Draka control of earth and exiling the remnants of America to distant corners of the universe.

Stirling provides a great deal of military detail, and the first two parts appeal in particular to fans of military history. By the third book, he has moved into a world that is more fully science fiction, i.e. the focus is on fictionalized science rather than fictionalized history.

Much of the trilogy is written from the perspective of Draka characters, but this in no ways blinds us to the fact that this was a world that would have been better off with our version of the American Revolution. Only a white supremacist would choose the Domination over America. Stirling, however, ought not to be thought of as entirely uncritical of America; after all, the Domination was founded and built by loyalists from the Revolution and Confederates from the Civil War—Americans all. In any case, The Domination is actually less a commentary on the American Revolution than on the Cold War. The question Stirling’s work raises is the one faced by Americans after World War II: How do you fight an empire that is undeniably evil but has weapons that could destroy the world?

For want of a nail

Robert Sobel’s For Want of a Nail … is a comprehensive 450-page history of North America written entirely in the style of an actual history, complete with tables and charts, economic and political analysis, footnotes, bibliography, and acknowledgments. All entirely made up.

Well, not entirely … the opening thirty pages are real history. That takes us to the Battle of Saratoga, often cited as a turning point in the war, since it was this American victory that convinced the French to lend their support. Here the American general Horatio Gates hesitates at a crucial moment, the British general Henry Clinton arrives in time with reinforcements, and the British army of General Johnny Burgoyne deals another blow to the Americans. In the absence of an American victory, the French back away from the Americans, Congress loses faith in Washington and replaces him with a nonentity named Artemas Ward, and moderates led by Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson seize control of Congress from Adams and Jefferson. Franklin opens negotiations with the British, and in 1778 the British agree to generous peace terms. Most rebels are granted amnesty, though a few of the most radical leaders are executed, among them John and Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, and Tom Paine. Washington is sentenced to life in prison.

Next, the British create the Confederation of North America, making the capital Fort Pitt, which in our world became Pittsburgh, and renaming it Burgoyne. Some of the remaining rebels are unwilling to submit to any form of British rule. Led by, among others, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Benedict Arnold, they head west on what comes to be called “the Wilderness Walk.” In Spanish territory, they found the city of Jefferson, which eventually becomes the capital of a new nation, also known as Jefferson.

The nation of Jefferson pushes south and west in its version of manifest destiny (which Jeffersonians call continental destiny). Taking advantage of Spain’s problems in Europe, Andrew Jackson leads a Jefferson army on a conquest of Mexico. Jackson becomes president of what comes to be called the United States of Mexico, which eventually stretches through Arizona and California.

All this is sort of familiar, or at least figures like Jefferson and Jackson act much like themselves, albeit in different circumstances. As Sobel pushes further into the nineteenth century, however, the story focuses on entirely fictional characters. Unlike science fiction writers whose main interest is to portray some alternate world whose history is generally given in flashbacks and often just in passing, Sobel gives us detailed portraits of Jackson’s successors as president of the USM, of the series of wars between the USM and the Confederation, of various depressions and elections, inventions, riots, scandals, genocides, and everything else you’d expect in a history.

Sobel’s adherence to the forms of historical writing extends to including a highly critical review of his work, as might be found in an academic journal. The reviewer—another fictional character—criticizes Sobel’s anti-Mexican bias and suggests as a corrective that the reader refer to various other histories, also fictional. The review makes one wonder whether Sobel’s whole point is to parody the conventions of history writing. For Want of a Nail also reminds us how easy it is for historians to sound authoritative, even if they’re making it all up.

Sobel’s work has inspired a cult following. At the website, “For All Nails,” contributors have submitted hundreds of possible extensions of Sobel’s history up to the present, and some reinterpretations of its past (though the site’s rules prohibit changing any of Sobel’s facts). In its scope, Sobel’s world can legitimately be compared to Tolkien’s or George Lucas’s.

Yet Sobel’s exhaustive approach can also be exhausting. One of the pleasures of great history and great fiction is the originality of the language, and by so fully conforming to the conventions of academic writing, Sobel denies us that. Reading Sobel is like reading a textbook. You can admire it, but you’re not likely to be swept away by it.

In contrast, the best alternate histories make for entertaining reading. You should not expect literary masterpieces, nor should you expect a radically new understanding of the Revolution. You will not learn what the founders really believed about guns or God. But the masters of the genre—and these include Turtledove and Stirling and Harrison—portray vivid and plausible worlds, all emerging from a change of course somewhere in the past.

Like any alternate history, For Want of a Nail demonstrates the power of contingency: a seemingly small tweak, in this case Gates hesitating at Saratoga, changes the course of history. Sobel’s title refers to another such moment: Richard III’s unhorsing at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. This is the moment at which Shakespeare’s Richard offers “my kingdom for a horse.” It is also the moment commemorated in a seventeenth-century poem most often attributed to George Herbert:

For want of a nail the shoe is lost,
For want of a shoe the horse is lost,
For want of a horse the rider is lost,
For want of a rider the message is lost,
For want of a message the battle is lost,
For want of the battle the war is lost,
For want of the war the nation is lost,
All for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Further Reading

The alternative histories of the Revolution that I have referred to in this essay are the following:

Gary Blackwood, The Year of the Hangman (New York, 2002); Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove, The Two Georges (New York, 1996); Harry Harrison, Tunnel Through the Deeps (New York, 1972); Charles Coleman Finlay, “We Come Not to Praise Washington,” Wild Things (Burton, Mich., 2005); Marc Laidlaw, “His Powder’d Wig, His Crown of Thornes,” What Might Have Been, Vol. 2, eds. Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg (New York, 1989); Robert Wallace Russell, Washington Shall Hang (New York, 1976); Paul Seabury, “What If George Washington Had Been Captured by General Howe? Mrs. Murray’s War,” What If? Explorations in Social Science Fiction, ed. Nelson W. Polsby (Lexington, Mass., 1982); Robert Sobel, For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga (New York, 1973); S. M. Stirling, “The Charge of Lee’s Brigade” Ice, Iron and Gold (San Francisco, 2007); S. M. Stirling, The Domination (Riverdale, N.Y., 1999); Roger Thompson, “If I had been the Earl of Shelburne in 1762-5,” If I Had Been … ed. Daniel Snowman (Totowa, N.J., 1979); Edmond Wright, “If I had been Benjamin Franklin in the Early 1770s,” If I Had Been … ed. Daniel Snowman (Totowa, N.J., 1979).

Portions of this essay first appeared in Colonial Williamsburg: The Journal of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

This article originally appeared in Spring 2014.

Published papers are an invaluable resource for historians and the public alike. But it is sometimes useful and often necessary for historians to return to the archives to consult the original documents because editors can exclude material, and archivists, researchers, and the original owners can jumble the order of things. I was reminded of this necessity three years ago when, as a consulting historian, I accepted a project to help research a new exhibit on the Ten Crucial Days Campaign of the winter of 1776-1777 for the Museum of the American Revolution, which opened in Philadelphia in April 2017. One element of my project seemed easy enough: discuss the civilian lives of a company of Philadelphia militia who participated in the Ten Crucial Days Campaign. We needed to know who they were, where they lived, what they did for work, and why they became revolutionaries. These questions complicated what I originally thought was a simple task.

I believed that the project would be relatively easy because the commander of that company was the artist, soldier, politician, and future museum curator and entrepreneur Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) (fig. 1), whose journals and correspondence made his militia company the best documented Philadelphia company from the winter of 1776-1777. But I was wrong.

The museum intended to build a tableau—a life-sized scene with mannequins—to relate an evocative incident Peale remembered in his autobiography about his company’s experience on December 8, 1776:

As soon as they had reached Trent Town, orders came, for them immediately to recross the [Delaware] River with all possible haste. And General Washington’s whole army followed that night, and made a grand, but dreadful appearance. All the shores were lighted up with large fires. The Boats continually passing and repassing full of men, Horses, artillery, and camp Equipage. The hollowing [hollering] of hundreds of men in their difficulties of getting Horses and artillery out of the boats, made it rather the appearance of Hell than any earthly scene. That night he lay with his company by a fire on the shore, the next morning, they were ordered to an Encampment about half a mile from the water.

He now met his brother James, who had a commission in the Maryland line, and had been in the rear guard, through all the retreat of the American Army, from the north River, and had lost all of his cloaths. He was in an Old dirty Blanket Jacket, his beard long, and his face so full of Sores, that he could not clean it, which disfigured him in such a manner that he was not known by his brother at first sight.

The tableau would include life-sized figures representing the Peale brothers, Charles and James, and others including camp followers and soldiers (fig. 2). The display was intended to illustrate one of the low points of the American cause. It would also illustrate the two very different revolutions of Philadelphia and Maryland: Charles’s company represented the increasingly radical egalitarian revolution taking place in Philadelphia, while James and his comrades embodied the more conservative, planter-driven revolution in Maryland. To heighten the effect, the exhibit would also include artifacts associated not only with the Peales themselves, but also with the people associated with them, such as members of Charles’s company. I already knew that Charles’s militia company was drawn from a ward made up of laborers, tradesmen, and gentlemen. But it would be a coup to find objects associated with them to display along with their stories. So my task was to check Peale’s remembrances against other records and then to recreate the scene as closely as possible, by researching the prevailing weather, the condition of the roads they marched on, the time of day, the clothing they wore, and most importantly, the actual people who would have been at the scene. In short, I was supposed to help the museum get the scene “right.”

Historical accuracy is, of course, of utmost importance for the people involved in designing exhibits at the Museum of the American Revolution. They want visitors’ experiences to be “authentic,” for people to come away understanding what Revolutionary America looked and felt like. To that end, one part of my job was confirming historical facts and getting the tableau’s details right. For instance, Peale’s journal suggests that the incident he remembered took place on December 8, 1776, near present-day Morrisville, Pennsylvania. Weather logs and other journals confirmed that the muddy, nasty conditions were as Peale remembered them. But the museum wanted more detail about the event itself. Who else would have been there, and what would they have worn? These questions were harder to answer and entailed, at the very least, finding out the names of the people in Peale’s company.

This was a much more difficult proposition. The task that I originally thought would be “easy enough” was actually, I discovered, a complicated research problem. What I needed to find was a muster roll—a list of company members—from the winter of 1776-77. But this proved elusive. Many Philadelphia militia muster rolls were published by the state of Pennsylvania in the nineteenth century, but the one I needed wasn’t there. Because I could not find the muster roll I needed, I would have to reconstruct one using other sources. A first step was taking stock of what I actually knew. Charles Willson Peale’s company was from the physically small but population-dense High Street Ward in Philadelphia (fig. 3).

The white male population of the area consisted largely of tradesmen and laborers. Many of the inhabitants of the ward were of the “lower sort,” the type of people chronicled in Steven Rosswurm’s Arms, Country and Class: The Philadelphia Militia and the “Lower Sort” during the American Revolution and Billy Smith’s The “Lower Sort”: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750-1800. So I knew where they lived, and, because of the already substantive research done, I had a broad idea of what their daily lives were like, and their relationship with the Revolution. Unfortunately, I did not know their names.

Working in my favor, though, was the fact that the inhabitants of the High Street Ward were relatively well documented. Tax lists and other militia muster rolls abounded. By looking at them in tandem, it was possible to build a dossier on nearly every white male in the ward at that time. Although dated a year before the one I needed, the muster roll from 1775 is remarkable as one of the few from Philadelphia City to survive from that period. In that year, a majority of white tradesman and property owners joined the company from the ward. But the extant 1777 muster roll showed that in the intervening time, enthusiasm for the Revolution appeared to have waned: very few members of the company of 1775 served their tours of duty in the years after 1777. Several were noted as loyalists. Though eventually crucial to this project and incredibly interesting, this research trail was not an effective method of deducing members of the company in the winter of 1776-77. As is often the case in conducting research for a project, the material I needed simply was not there.

 Which brought me back to Charles Willson Peale himself. I knew he had kept a detailed journal of the winter campaign of ’76-77. The published versions did not contain a muster roll but that fact did not preclude the possibility that his original might. Peale’s journal from the winter of 1776-1777 had been printed three times over two centuries. Each publication reflected the editorial choices of their periods of publication. It was first published in the February 1856 issue of the art magazine The Crayon by Peale’s son Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860). Rembrandt titled it “The Artist-Soldier” and presented it as “nothing worthy of the great historic pen, yet [it has] interesting episodes of soldier life without the embellishments of romance.” Rembrandt’s editorial choices possibly reflected the tendency in antiquarian publishing of the period to highlight the everyday experiences of the Revolution instead of recounting grand narratives. Further, Charles Willson Peale’s account suggested to another generation of American artists that they could be both artists and play a role in building their republic. The editorial interventions were relatively typical: there was an attempt made at correcting spelling and grammar, while addenda, accounts, and some portions of daily events were excised.

In 1914, Peale’s great-grandson Horace Wells Sellers (1857-1933) published the journal again. Sellers’s editing was fairly typical of that period as well: corrected for grammar and spelling, with a little bit of hagiography, and no attempt to unpack any of the contradictions between Peale’s journals and his later autobiography that Sellers included. Sellers was a prominent Philadelphia engineer and architect who, along with his father Coleman Sellers, began gathering Peale family material that had been loaned or donated elsewhere. Sellers reused Rembrandt Peale’s title, “Artist-Soldier,” but his narrative suggests slightly different purposes than Rembrandt’s. Above all, Sellers wanted to reestablish Peale’s role as a founder and artist.

When the journal was published again in 1983, the editor, Lillian B. Miller (1923-1997), also wanted to reestablish Peale’s reputation as a great American painter and a major figure in the cultural world of the early republic. Like the others, Miller’s volume reflected contemporary editorial practices. She attempted to include everything that could be of value to the public and academics alike—especially to academics of the early 1980s. Among other changes, Miller elided some material out of concern for length, and “in deference to printing costs.” But the material that Miller left out—CWP’s “running account of provisions supplied to his company and individual transactions between him and his men”—was the very material I wanted to examine.

Together, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and the Huntington Library own Peale’s Revolutionary War-era journals. (The Huntington has Peale’s winter of ’76-77 journal except for a few pages, while the American Philosophical Society Library has several pages of the original and a photostatic copy of the rest.) It soon became clear that the unpublished contents were as valuable as I had hoped they might be: they included some of Peale’s financial and militia accounts, the accounts of his company, clothing issues, and most importantly, a list of company members by last name (fig. 4). While this list was not a detailed muster roll, taken together with the other muster rolls and tax lists, the list of company members was sufficient to recover the names of many members of Peale’s company. Finally, the museum could flesh out the figures of Peale’s company.