For much of the seventeenth century, when regions outside of the Delaware Valley erupted in violence, the valley itself, home to the Lenape Indians, experienced comparatively peaceful times. Jean R. Soderlund explains that when Quaker William Penn gained the charter for Pennsylvania in 1681, there had already been decades of overcoming disagreements, finding common ground, and building a society together among the Lenape, Swedish, and Finnish inhabitants of the valley. When English Quakers arrived, Soderlund stresses, they stepped into this pre-existing social framework. In Lenape Country she provides a fascinating and detailed view of the phases of the valley’s history on both sides of the river and goes far beyond the more familiar story of the west side.

This book offers readers a chance to learn much about intergroup relations; Soderlund portrays the Lenapes as taking the leading role for a significant part of the seventeenth century. Her estimates of population sizes for various dates are helpful. These estimates strengthen her case, especially when she shows how greatly Lenapes outnumbered Europeans before the influx of Quakers to the valley (86). Even after their population decreased—especially because of outbreaks of disease—Lenapes maintained influence through ties they had earlier created with the local Swedish and Finnish population.

Lenapes came from many different groups. One of these groups, the Sickoneysincks, lived at Cape Henlopen on Delaware Bay, and Soderlund presents them as shaping a pivotal moment in the history of the region. In 1631, Sickoneysinck interests collided with those of Dutch patroons, who dreamed of controlling Delaware Bay and making profits from both the land and the sea, including through tobacco cultivation and whaling (35-36). Matters went terribly wrong for the Dutch colony, Swanendael, close to Cape Henlopen. The Sickoneysincks destroyed it, killing all thirty-two colonists and their livestock, not long after the Swanendael colony had been established (38-40). Soderlund explores the possible motivations of the Sickoneysincks, investigating what was reported about the event and putting it within a framework of developments on the Chesapeake. She argues that Lenapes would have learned through their Native contacts about the destructive effects of English colonization in the Chesapeake region and would have sought to stop similar impacts on their homelands. Particularly alarming to Lenapes, she notes, was that the Dutch claimed a greater amount of land than was needed for just a trading post (38). Soderlund admirably succeeds in considering a broader context for this event and examines other explanations for the attack, including a statement about the Dutch treating Lenape women poorly (43-49).

This book convincingly highlights the complexities of the valley’s past.

Although Swanendael receives detailed attention here, its significance goes beyond the violent outcome. Indeed, the Lenapes gained a reputation for relating to others peacefully.   Soderlund significantly claims that the attack cast a long shadow as memories of the incident shaped future actions, including later choices that promoted peace (10, 71, 199). “During the seventeenth century, prior to William Penn’s arrival,” she writes, “the Lenapes and early European colonists created a society in Lenape country that preferred peaceful resolution of conflict, religious freedom, collaborative use of the land and other natural resources, respect for people of diverse backgrounds, and local governmental authority, all facilitating the business relationship the residents sought for profitable trade.” Despite these examples of mutuality, she points out that constructing “this society was difficult, uneven, and tenuous” (7-8).

The Lenapes and the Dutch pulled back from conflict after the Swanendael attack, with both concerned to keep trading channels open along the Lenapewihittuck, the Lenapes’ name for the river; nevertheless, Lenapes continued to assert their sovereignty.   Soderlund refers to the Lenapewihittuck as “Main Street,” the “main artery” for Lenapes and a place where they accepted diverse European traders, particularly around midcentury. Although Lenapes permitted Dutch, Swedish, and English traders, their trading posts were often not well stocked. Thus, she indicates, by allowing competing Europeans to set up different posts, Lenapes could improve their chances of obtaining goods (57).  

Along with her stress on groups and their interrelationships, Soderlund brings individual Lenape and European actors into focus, carefully examining the few sources that are left to us from these long-ago encounters. She depicts the frustrations of Johan Printz, one of New Sweden’s governors, whose appeals for more colonists and need for more supplies went unsatisfied (67, 72). In 1651, after Peter Stuyvesant left Manhattan with 120 soldiers to reassert the Dutch presence along the Lenapewihittuck, Printz’s problems magnified (76). Neither man, Soderlund stresses, was in charge of the situation. Each found a “tough match” in the Lenape sachem Mattahorn (81). Soderlund discusses the important role that Mattahorn played in negotiations (77-79). Despite the arrival of the soldiers, the Dutch came to negotiate, not fight with the Lenapes for the land upon which to place a new post, Fort Casimir. The Dutch depended on the help of Lenapes to support them against Swedish counter land claims. Soderlund discusses how, even after the defeat of New Sweden, Armegard Printz, Johan’s daughter, remained in the valley and played a key part in strengthening ties between Swedish inhabitants and Lenapes (90-91).

Lenapes objected to outsiders trying to assert authority over them. Soderlund describes how many of their European neighbors came to object to these same authorities and how this opposition helped create bonds among Lenapes, Swedes, and Finns. “At midcentury,” she writes, “Lenapes and Swedes remained separate communities, divided by lingering suspicions yet tied by individual relationships, mutual commercial interest, and awareness of external threats” (86).   The first major cause that drew them together was opposition to the Dutch, who took over New Sweden in 1655.   Within months after the conquest, an alliance of Lenapes, Swedes, and Finns stopped the Dutch from turning away a Swedish ship with goods and over 100 passengers (97-99).   Swedes and Finns continued to exert independence, rejecting Stuyvesant’s call to create defensive villages for protection against Indians and preferring to remain in dispersed spots close to Lenapes, in whom they showed greater trust than in the Dutch government (104-5).

Soderlund shows how discontent with officials grew after the English conquered the Dutch in 1664. Confronting the hated policies of Governor Francis Lovelace was yet another bonding experience for Lenapes and the “Swedish nation” or “old settlers”—collective terms that included Swedish and Finnish inhabitants and a few from other European backgrounds (113). The English tried to control the land strictly—for example, selling off areas that inhabitants had been using in common. Lovelace disregarded traditional practices that Lenapes used for reconfirming agreements. More Lenapes succumbed to diseases, such as smallpox, and Soderlund lays out evidence indicating that they blamed their suffering on the increasing European settlement. These various complaints contributed to unrest in the late 1660s and early 1670s, including rebelliousness among the “old settlers” in an event known as the “Long Swede revolt” and in small-scale attacks by Lenapes; tellingly, these attacks were not aimed at Swedes and Finns, who had grown closer to the Lenapes over the years (113, 120-126).

For different phases of the valley’s history, this study shows changes, continuities, and statuses of intergroup relations and their interplay with individuals and governments. Although violence tended to be infrequent and localized, it threatened to worsen significantly, especially in the mid-1670s when warfare was erupting in New England and the Chesapeake. As she discusses this era, Soderlund again shows the importance of understanding this wider context. The next English administration, under Edmund Andros, showed a readiness to adapt to Lenapes’ practices and defuse tensions (133, 137-40). Once William Penn and other officials of Pennsylvania began the process of setting up a new government, Quakers recognized the advantage of working with both Lenapes and Swedes, although relations were not always smooth. Then, “after the first years of transition,” Soderlund writes, “when Penn and his colonists became less dependent on help from the Swedes and Lenapes, the new regime learned that the pre-1681 inhabitants could still exert power” (176). “Despite their new status as minority groups,” Swedes influenced events, in part, by “using their churches as a political base” and Lenapes asserted themselves through both negotiations and threats (150, 160, 176, 178).

This book convincingly highlights the complexities of the valley’s past. For example, Swedes and Lenapes became close allies yet maintained separate identities. When Lenapes and Swedes expressed their opposition to restrictions by authorities and sought ways to cooperate, they laid down patterns that continued to shape the valley after 1681.   Another complexity is that the peace established after the Swanendael attack was far from firm and “would be renegotiated throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by different groups of Europeans and Lenapes” (8-9).   The fragility of certain of these relations showed clearly in the eighteenth century. Euro-Americans’ fraudulent treatment of Delaware Valley Indians through the Walking Purchase became one of the most notorious symbols of the strain. A thought-provoking and well-researched study, Lenape Country successfully weaves together significant themes and rich historical details about people and places in the valley of the Lenapewihittuck.

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

Amy C. Schutt is an associate professor of history at the State University of New York College at Cortland and author of Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (2007).

When did the United States become a global force? The answer lies in the nineteenth century, notably before the American Civil War, but this is actually an unhelpfully teleological way of asking the historical question. A more historicist version of the question might be: In the aftermath of national independence, what did various constituencies of Americans strive to do in the wider world, and at what point did such overseas activities attain a global scale?

While curating an exhibit for the special collections library at Indiana University, I unexpectedly found myself undertaking a digital history project aimed toward answering this question. I worked with a technical team at the university and beyond to create an interactive digital map designed to trace American activity throughout the world in the formative and transformative era between the Revolution and the Civil War. The exhibit Website, Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861, centers on this map.

Many other digital mapping projects have focused on the spread of networks, but my “globalization map” hinges as much on overlap as it does on reach. Reach: What kinds of activities happened where, and when? Overlap: When did multiple kinds of activities happen in the same place, out in the wider world?

The “globalization map” features ten variables of historical data which plot American diplomatic, military, commercial, missionary, and other activities onto a series of five historical world maps. The digital map is fundamentally interactive so that users can choose from a menu which data to project onto the map, while a timeline enables users to follow data over time. Users can zoom in for more tightly focused views of the five historical maps, and they can click on any data point for background and source information.

Utilizing historical “basemaps” was the first great technical challenge in constructing the digital map: I needed to determine how to project historical data onto world maps from the nineteenth century, rather than onto a modern basemap like Google Maps. This ambition first arose when I sought to produce a map illustration for an academic talk, and I was quickly confronted by the gap between historical places and modern maps. Places existed in the nineteenth century that no longer exist today. Because their world was not our world, a modern basemap simply could not convey the past in its integrity. Sequencing a sample of five historical basemaps through an interactive digital map seemed an apt way to portray Americans’ constantly changing understanding of a constantly changing wider world. The “globalization map” would, through modern digital technology, be able to display a vast array of data, but it would have the appearance of historical maps from the period.

But how could I project data onto historical maps? To utter this question is to recover the depth of my technical ignorance when I embarked on this digital history project. I had to learn—emphatically from ground zero—about “basemaps,” about “historical GIS,” about “georeferencing,” about “tiling,” about database software, about “centroid” “lat-long,” about mapping visualization software, about “CSS” code for timelines and menus, about “back end” engineering, about data management. In other words, I had to learn about what now in retrospect feels like a zillion technical resources, processes, and steps toward creating an interactive digital map for a Website that finally went public after two and a half years of historical research and technical labor.

The “globalization map” and its surrounding Website were all produced on a shoestring budget, alongside constructing a library exhibit, on top of an already heavy academic workload (hence largely on borrowed time), while coordinating an expanding coterie of technical collaborators. There was the reality of numerous steep learning curves, there was the reality of an already onerous workload, and there was the reality of relying on collaborators with their own onerous workloads.

I certainly never foresaw the magnitude of the demands generated by such a digital project when I first undertook it. Yet given what I know now, why continue to develop the “globalization map” as an ongoing labor of love? The project has forced me to rethink my work on multiple levels: to rethink the organization of research, to rethink analysis of evidence, to rethink the representation of history. And to rethink the discipline of history itself. All of that has been tremendously intellectually rewarding.

One responsibility of historical inquiry is to discern in the past what people did not see at the time. No American mapmaker in the nineteenth century ever produced a map comparable to my “globalization map.” At the same time, one burden of historical inquiry is to reconstruct how people in the past understood their own world and what they strove to do in that world. Such an essential tension between their historical time and our historical inquiry lies at the heart of the “globalization map.” It is the reason the digital map utilizes historical basemaps meant to convey past understanding of the world—what people in the past could perceive. And it is the reason the digital map assembles numerous data variables: to examine the multitudinous undertakings pursued by many Americans, all having particular purposes, which would ultimately accumulate into a phenomenon that can retrospectively be labeled “globalization”—but which people in the past did not perceive as such.

Globalization emerged from undertakings not intended to be global. No United States government office orchestrated all this activity, neither the Department of State, nor the Department of War. Yet, the evidence of the current set of data variables for the digital map suggests that, by the late 1830s, the manifold activities of sundry Americans reached both an extent and a saturation level to operate not just on a transatlantic or hemispheric scale but on a truly global scale. Without any imperial plan, the pre-Civil War United States had already been transformed from its marginal colonial and national origins into a significant world power, albeit one considerably short of the then-formidable British empire.

Until recently historians have tended to narrate the nineteenth century—the era before the “American century”—as one of nation building, continental conquest, and sectional conflict, not global expansion. The “globalization map” is meant to contribute to a more multi-dimensional view of the nineteenth century by appreciating Americans’ pursuits at the “global” level beyond the national, beyond the transatlantic, beyond the continental, and beyond the hemispheric.

The data underlying the “globalization map” comes from many sources. The nineteenth century saw a growing array of American social constituencies invest in producing cartographic, geographical, historical, statistical, and other representations of the wider world—both in its parts, and as a global whole. For instance, 1839 saw the formation of the American Statistical Society; 1851, the American Geographical Society. While the textual record of this vast global history is in fragments scattered across innumerable archives, those fragments can be assembled into a research database driving a digital map in order to interrogate how the United States “globalized” across the first half of the nineteenth century.

This points to one way that working on this digital history project has obliged me to rethink the organization of research and the analysis of evidence. Many other digital mapping projects have focused on the spread of networks, but my “globalization map” hinges as much on overlap as it does on reach. Reach: What kinds of activities happened where, and when? Overlap: When did multiple kinds of activities happen in the same place, out in the wider world? Reach can tell us about serious ambition, initiative, and effort, whereas overlap can tell us that much more about serious capability, interaction, involvement, and intervention. The data overlaps on the digital map indicate that the late 1830s is when the United States became a fledgling global force capable of interacting and intervening throughout the world. It was not yet capable of inflicting the kind of damage on the world that the United States would do throughout the twentieth century, but the country had nevertheless become one of the nineteenth century’s few world powers.

Might this be considered globalization, in advance of global imperialism? That is one of the many thorny interpretive questions that can be asked of the “globalization map.” Because the digital map is fundamentally interactive, I can ask my own historical questions of the map, but users can apply the map to their own historical questions far beyond my personal research agenda. Such open-endedness of historical inquiry is the future potential of the project.

Much remains to be done on the “globalization map.” There are representational dilemmas to be overcome, and there are new technological opportunities to be embraced. Some new elements are already in the works. For instance, the number of historical basemaps is being expanded beyond the initial sample of five to one for every year in which an American-produced world map was available. This is meant to deepen the map’s ability to immerse users in historical time—in changing nineteenth-century understandings of a changing world.

And it is meant to slow down the map’s mode of historical inquiry, to linger over sundry overseas activities year by year, so as not to hasten toward any teleological threshold of global saturation. What came before such global saturation was not self-conscious or unified “globalization.” Deliberately slowing users down might help the digital map recast globalizing as a grounded, arduous, and fraught process, rather than as some kind of timeless human condition. In this way “the global” can be interrogated, rather than presumed, as a category of historical analysis.

Additional data shall be plotted onto the “globalization map” beyond the ten initial data variables: American-sponsored scientific expeditions, for example. But how much more data can be projected onto the digital map before it becomes cluttered and opaque? To what degree can this representational dilemma be overcome by a technical solution?

Further representational dilemmas lurk. A future ambition is to juxtapose global activity against continental activity by the United States. Of course, what is now thought of as “American” continental space was foreign and not sovereign for an extended time period in the nineteenth century, even if it was not overseas. It would seem extremely useful to examine not the scale but the scope of continental versus overseas activity of the United States, in order to determine their relative cultural importance measured along various data variables. In other words, when did “globalizing” become important not only with respect to American reach into the wider world, but within the full range of American life? Precisely what activities can be deemed commensurable across continental and overseas domains to gauge this?

New opportunities beckon as well. It has recently become technically possible to employ the same research database to generate sophisticated digital charts, graphs, and tables in dynamic conjunction with the digital map. As the digital map moves, so can these other data visualizations. A nice coincidence is that the nineteenth century, as an age of statistics, saw tremendous interest in the presentation of data in charts, graphs, and tables. We are in the very early phases of developing data visualizations to complement the digital map by contextualizing data along additional axes of analysis. So, for instance, if an overseas military action appears on the map, the user can choose to see everything else that might appear on the map in the same moment: the global extent and saturation level. But another data visualization could simultaneously show all other military actions for the same place over time, so that the user might in the same instant be lured down alternative research paths, perhaps the geographical, perhaps the chronological, or perhaps another context made available in a dynamically linked chart, graph, or table (one paying homage, ideally, to nineteenth-century graphic creativity).

All this continues to be very much a collaborative undertaking between me, a historian with some augmenting technical skill, and a set of collaborators with professional technical skills. There are other exquisite “historical GIS” projects on the Web, but our “globalization map” has definitely been a collective act of creation. And mine has not been the only learning curve. Instability that comes from filigree complexity and ceaseless innovation is simply inherent to the digital universe, I have come to realize. Mastery is not a condition so much as a continuous process, even for those who work primarily in the digital realm. This has obligated continual collaboration between the historical and the technical, the kind of collaboration that has stretched me far beyond the training of a dissertation or the task of a monograph.

There is another kind of collaboration at play—a collaboration with the unknown. We are mindfully developing and designing the “globalization map” to be both a model and a platform. First, its digital code will be shared as a model for projecting historical data onto historical maps, in contexts far beyond the nineteenth-century United States. Second, its database will be turned into a Web-based platform able to display data contributed by other scholars, because there is now so much exciting new scholarship being undertaken about the global activities of the United States in the nineteenth century which far exceeds my own humble research agenda.

There are things a digital map cannot do, of course. It can discern hidden patterns, but it cannot explain them. It cannot see ideologies or discourses. It cannot see domestic opposition or foreign resistance. It can show limits to imagination and action much better than it can show disputes or contests. It can show only the surface of conflicts.

But a digital map can process data, display data, and interrogate data on a significant scale and in striking and eye-opening ways. We hope that the “globalization map” can be a useful new tool with which to investigate early American history and the history of globalization; the proof lies in the users who employ it for research and for teaching.

We encourage Common-place readers to add to our list of digital resources for the study of early American history and culture by contributing to the Zotero group Suggestion Box for Common-place Web Library or by emailing suggestions to Web Library editor Edward Whitley (whitley@lehigh.edu).

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

Konstantin Dierks is associate professor of history at Indiana University. Author of In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (2009), he is currently working on a book about the globalization of the United States between the American Revolution and the American Civil War, from which this digital history project derives.

The relationship between slavery and capitalism has reemerged as a popular topic of examination among historians of nineteenth-century America. Though Eric Williams first introduced the mutual inclusivity of capitalism and slavery in 1944, in recent years, there has been increased scholarly interest in capitalism’s rise as the guiding economic framework that characterized antebellum slavery in the United States. Calvin Schermerhorn’s The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 adds to this exciting and growing body of new literature. Schermerhorn explores how slave traders, shippers, and bankers situated themselves at the forefront of American economic growth between the end of the War of 1812 and the beginning of the Civil War. He argues that slave financiers and shippers leveraged cycles of credit and debt and in the process influenced the trajectory of American capitalism more directly than any other group of entrepreneurs during the antebellum era.

Ultimately, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 is an investigation of slave trading firms and the financial strategies that slave traders used to capitalize on the buying, transportation, and selling of human property. And in each chapter, Schermerhorn keeps his hand on the domestic slave trade’s pulse by connecting the drain of enslaved people from the upper South, specifically Virginia and Maryland, to the most popular slave markets in the United States between 1815 and 1860: Louisiana, the Mississippi River Valley, and Texas.

Schermerhorn begins by examining Baltimore and the slave trading pursuits of Francis Everod Rives and Peyton Mason and Company, small-time slave traders who took advantage of rising demand for slaves in newly acquired lands in the southwestern United States. He notes that in the 1810s and 1820s, “[s]laveholding agriculturists found themselves in possession of a surplus of bondspeople at just the moment their countrymen were demanding slaves on a distant cotton frontier” (12). The opening of new land, stolen from indigenous people during the War of 1812, offered adventure-seeking planters, bankers, and slave traders from the upper South opportunities to make money. Rives and Peyton Mason and Company set their economic sights on Natchez, the burgeoning entrepôt located northwest of New Orleans and brimming with economic promise in the late 1810s. Their ventures revolved around selling slaves from the Chesapeake to greedy buyers in the lower Mississippi Valley and negotiating their transactions in human chattel through cultivating trust and confidence with local financial institutions.

Schermerhorn emphasizes the importance of trust and confidence in the domestic slave trade, especially during the American banking boom in the 1820s and early 1830s. The slave trading adventures of Baltimore entrepreneur Austin Woolfolk demonstrate how important upper South slave traders’ reputations were to expanding their lower South business enterprises. Woolfolk developed the reputation in Baltimore as a beguiling and ruthless salesman, ready to do whatever was necessary to procure as many enslaved people as possible for sale in the lower South. And he linked business ventures—i.e. his trade and traffic in enslaved people—to trans-Atlantic commercial enterprises, which funneled money into his coffers to continue the same cycle over and over again. Schermerhorn discusses how Woolfolk’s slave trading business was linked to the House of Brown, a trans-Atlantic financial institution, which in 1825 had branches in Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Liverpool, and London. The importance of trust and confidence in early national banking extended far beyond the grips of regional slave traders. Indeed, as Schermerhorn articulates, the financial relationships that slave traders and financiers cultivated were only as good as the human chattel or bank notes that each party brought to the table. For this reason, the Panic of 1837 had the potential to completely destabilize the interregional trade of human property. As credit contracted and banks closed, slave trading firms and planters attempted to liquidate their assets to stay afloat, and their greatest assets were enslaved people.

One of the most impressive aspects of Schermerhorn’s analysis is the way he incorporates slave smuggling into chapter three, “Sweet Dreams and Smuggling Schemes,” and chapter six, “Chains of Violence.” In these chapters, he delves into the economic and legal complications of slave smuggling for traders in the upper Atlantic, specifically in New Jersey and New York. In chapter 3, Schermerhorn examines the ways in which New York merchants-turned-slave traders John Marsh and William Stone took advantage of the growing demand in the 1810s and early 1820s for bonded workers on sugar plantations in Louisiana to coerce conditionally free African Americans in New Jersey to leave their homes for employment. In chapter 6, Schermerhorn deploys Solomon Northup’s narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, to investigate slave-abducting as a byproduct of slave traders’ avarice to fulfill demand for black slaves in the lower South.

One cannot fully understand the domestic slave trade without considering the nexus between slave trading and sexual violence. In chapter five, “The Slave Factory of Franklin & Armfield,” Schermerhorn examines the economic pursuits and violent sexual exploits of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice C. Ballard, the three partners who comprised Franklin & Armfield, one of the most infamous slave trading firms in the lower South during the antebellum era. Tales of Franklin & Armfield’s exploits reached far beyond the money that they made trading in enslaved bodies. Schermerhorn rightly devotes considerable time to investigating how they wrote about their sexual exploits (and exploitation) of enslaved women and how they cultivated broad networks of connections from Virginia to Louisiana to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in slave-trading profits. Schermerhorn delves into how Franklin & Armfield’s interest in profit was built on mismanagement of slave cargoes, which adds a macabre layer to their capitalistic quest to make as much money from their trade in enslaved people as possible.

In the final chapter, Schermerhorn focuses on New York shipping magnate Charles Morgan and how his steamship line profited during the 1850s after he expanded his enterprise into the deep Southwest after the United States’ annexation of Texas. This borderland perspective of economic expansion and entrepreneurship broadens our understanding of how slave trading, transportation innovations, and American imperialism were interconnected in the decade before the Civil War. Moreover, Schermerhorn shows that one of the most provocative aspects of slavery’s capitalism was how federal support for improved transportation and monetary policies helped to augment the trade in slaves.

Calvin Schermerhorn’s analysis on slavery and American capitalism adds a layer of complexity to our understanding of how slave traders, financiers, and slaveholders manipulated complex financial instruments to profit from their traffic and ownership of human chattel. If one thinks that the crash of worldwide financial markets is a thing of our modern reality, one only needs to examine antebellum American finance to be disabused of that idea. Investors on both sides of the Atlantic bought mortgage-backed securities—similar in theory to the explosion of complex financial products that played a role in tanking the American economy in 2008. Yet, during the antebellum period, instead of packaging financial products based on houses and other real estate, investors sought mortgage-backed securities based on human property.

Ultimately, these various entrepreneurs and financiers constructed lucrative businesses on the suffering of enslaved African Americans. Through delving into the banking policies, cycles of credit and debt, and the financial hedging by a resolute group of American businessmen, Calvin Schermerhorn shows the ways in which American capitalism and American slavery were mutually constitutive. Schermerhorn’s The Business of Slavery and the Rise of  American Capitalism, 1815-1860 is important reading for anyone interested in the undeniable relationship between capitalism and slavery. In addition, he reveals how American banking, economic expansion, trans-Atlantic fiscal policies, and the domestic slave trade all worked in concert to commodify the bodies of people of African descent enslaved in the United States between 1815 and 1860. Schermerhorn’s work is a great addition to this literature.

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

Justene G. Hill received her PhD in American history from Princeton University in 2015. She is working on a manuscript entitled Felonious Transactions: The Legal Culture of Slave Economies in South Carolina, 1787-1860.

That Forest Leaves had been discovered was very exciting news. The first book of poetry by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper provides a critical piece to the puzzle in the reconstruction of her bibliography and, perhaps, a bit of insight into her life. As the author of a bio-critical study of her life’s work, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911, I made assumptions based on existing documents, which included Harper’s poetry, novels, essays, speeches, newspaper clippings, and library facsimiles, as well as from comments by her contemporaries, such as William Still, William Lloyd Garrison, Anna Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass.

I knew Forest Leaves existed because William Still referenced it in his review of her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) in The Provincial Freeman, September 2, 1854. Indeed, it is important to recognize and incorporate such verifications of works by legitimate witnesses to a subject’s experiences and production. One reviewer of my manuscript stated that I should not even reference the title because I had not actually seen it, and therefore I had no material evidence of its existence. I ignored this preposterous stance and snide dismissal of the book. As a scholar of African American culture, I was ever hopeful that another researcher might one day uncover Forest Leaves, like the recovery of Our Nig. During my research for Discarded Legacy, I visited the Library of Congress. Certain titles of Harper’s books were listed, but were absent. A librarian explained that the disappearance of early African American literature was an unfortunate reality. He then directed me to Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, which contained a far more extensive collection of Harper’s writings.

In Discarded Legacy I propose that the genus of Harper’s oeuvre was represented in her second poetry book, whereby recurring thematic patterns appear in subsequent poetry books, as well as in her essays, short stories, and novels. For the most part, Harper’s writings focused on abolitionism, woman’s rights, temperance, and Christianity. These topics more often than not intersected, such as in “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” written from the perspective of fugitive slave Margaret Garner; or in her serialized novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice, a portrayal of a free black woman who protested slavery and advocated for women’s suffrage.  

Religious and morality poetry dominate Forest Leaves. There is only one antislavery poem, “Bible Defense of Slavery,” which, as is the case for half of the poetry in this first collection, is reprinted in her second book. Though Harper’s second book contains religious verse, it also ventures into broader social topics that she engages as a lecturer as she toured the northern United States and Canada.

But during my research for Discarded Legacy, I never found any love poems or love letters—missing elements that I found most curious. References to romantic love in Harper’s poetry were ambivalent at best. Indeed, in Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, “The Contrast“ portrays a failed romance that ends in suicide. Another poem found in that same volume, “Advice to the Girls,” hints that Harper did engage romance, as she urges caution and discretion; however, the poem is written in the third person. Her first published short story, “Two Offers,” which appears in the Anglo-African Magazine, in 1859, contains a dialogue between two young women: Laura, who feels she must marry or become an old maid; and Jane, who pronounces her independence and seeks financial security as a writer. The latter appears to represent Harper’s own life’s direction, and this character warns against marrying for financial gain.  

“The Mission of the Flowers,” which appears in her book Moses: A Story of the Nile in 1869, deploys flowers as metaphors for women in order to critique the oppressive objectification of woman’s sexuality. As I wrote in Discarded Legacy, a “most interesting feature of the story is Harper’s symbolic manipulation of the rose’s sexuality. The intoxicating allure of the rose—which throughout Western literature has been symbolic of woman’s sexual power—entices, seduces, and even rapes some of the flowers until they all agree to become roses.”

Protagonists in Harper’s novels marry, but these unions are political, and sexual attraction is presented as less important than admiration, respect, and friendship. No gushing or swooning appears in the plots, and certainly there are no allusions to sex or sexual metaphors, except in the novel Iola Leroy, when the protagonist repels disrespectful advances during her enslavement.

Harper’s later writings about romance contrast significantly to the two love poems, “Farewell, My Heart Is Beating” and “Let Me Love Thee,” found in Forest Leaves. These poems are very emotional and proclaim undying love for the object of her affection, which is in form and content consistent with nineteenth-century romantic verse. There is a mournful tone to both love poems, which configures a sense of sadness. “Farewell, My Heart Is Beating” is about loving and leaving: “And now when almost bursting,/ And ‘mid my tears to smile.” Tantalizingly, the opening stanza in “Let Me Love Thee” suggests romantic disappointment in Harper’s past:

Let me love thee I have known
The agony deception brings,
And tho’ my driven heart is lone
It fondly clasps and firmly clings.

Judging from photos and written descriptions, Harper was certainly an attractive woman, and one can speculate that she probably had admirers, even suitors. Conversely, she was an intellectual and an artist, a combination that deflects male attention even today. Two hundred years ago, such characteristics would have intimidated most men. Because of her stature as an antislavery lecturer, rallying audiences to oppose the inhumane institution of slavery, while exposing the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and advocating equal rights for all women, Frances Harper had to maintain an uncompromised posture. It was the nineteenth century, the Victorian era, and she was a black woman representing her race before integrated audiences composed of men and women. As a public figure, it might have been impolitic to reveal romantic interests in her writings. She was, after all, considered “the bronze muse” of the abolitionist movement, and had to maintain a posture that would not jeopardize her stature or her activism.

Until Frances Ellen Watkins becomes Frances E. W. Harper in 1861, when she married the widower Fenton Harper, she was probably considered a spinster. She was thirty-six years old. In Discarded Legacy, I speculate that she met Fenton Harper when she was teaching at the Union Seminary in Wilberforce, Ohio, when he was possibly still married to his first wife. But this is pure conjecture based on Frances Harper’s residence there, because I have not discovered any evidence of their meeting to substantiate this. Moreover, no love poems appear in any of her subsequent publications about this short marriage, only a poem written about the birth of their daughter, Mary.

Forest Leaves was published when Frances was only twenty-one years of age, which suggests she was infatuated with someone(s) before the book was published, before she ventured away from Baltimore to teach in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and long before she became a popular writer and lecturer. The absence of romance in her later writings or in her correspondence was a missing link in her life until now. In any case, I was delighted to find romantic verse in her first collection of poems because it supplies a human dimension to her persona that until now was a mystery.

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

Melba Joyce Boyd is the author of Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911 (1994) and Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (2004). She is also the author of nine books of poetry. She is a distinguished professor at Wayne State University in the Department of African American Studies.

I can still recall perfectly the day Johanna Ortner walked into my office, asking me to be her doctoral advisor, and in search of a dissertation topic. I told her that someone ought to write a historical biography of the relatively forgotten abolitionist-feminist, writer, poet, and temperance advocate, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Having already expressed her interest in black women’s history to me, Johanna was up to the challenge. With a historian’s passion for archival research, she made a brilliant discovery: she found Harper’s first book of poems, Forest Leaves, thought until now to be lost to history. My interest in Harper stemmed from the book I was writing, now complete, which centers on African Americans, free and enslaved, in the history of the abolition movement. In my research, I came across a host of black writers, mostly ignored by historians, but whose work had been carefully recovered by literary scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Vincent Carretta, Jean Fagan Yellin, Robert Levine, Joanna Brooks, William Farrison, and most recently, Ezra Greenspan, to name a few.

Black women writers, as Gates argues in his essay, “In Her Own Write,” have been central to the genesis and development of African American literature, starting with Phillis Wheatley. We are still in the process, he goes on to note and as Johanna’s discovery makes clear, of “unearthing the nineteenth century roots” of black women’s literary tradition. Harper, the “bronze muse of the abolitionist movement” in the apt words of her biographer, Melba J. Boyd, is one of them. With her too, I turned to the work of literary scholars like Boyd, Carla Peterson, Frances Smith Foster, and Maryemma Graham to fully appreciate the breadth of Harper’s oeuvre, poems, short stories, novels, and not the least, her speeches, many of which went unrecorded in the abolitionist and black presses. After the Civil War, her speeches were neglected in the temperance and women’s rights press. Indeed, it was Harper’s skills as an orator and activist that has led Peterson to include her in a group of black women “doers of the word” and Graham to call her a “supremely oral poet.” I suspect that we have yet to recover the full range of Harper’s writings and words.

My own interest in Harper was piqued not so much by her now well-established authorial reputation in African American letters but by her work as a forgotten activist and polemicist for abolition, women’s rights, and black citizenship. My encounter with her began in the pages of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, which contained accounts of her accomplished and persuasive antislavery speeches in the 1850s. According to an admiring John Stephenson, on one occasion, Harper spoke “eloquently of the wrong of the slave” for two hours “in a soul stirring speech.” He reported to Garrison, who knew Harper’s abolitionist uncle William Watkins well, that “Miss Watkins is a young lady of color, of fine attainments, of superior education, and an impressive speaker, leaving an impression, wherever she goes, which will not soon be forgotten.” (Garrison, along with the Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, had lived with black abolitionists Jacob T. Greener and Watkins in a boarding house in Baltimore, when he briefly co-edited The Genius of Universal Emancipation with Lundy in 1829.)

On the eve of the Civil War and her short-lived marriage to Fenton Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins (fig. 1) was a well-established presence in the abolitionist lecture circuit. She was hired as a lecturing agent by the Maine Anti Slavery Society, went on lecture tours as far west as Michigan, according to the black abolitionist William C. Nell, and assisted the adroit secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, William Still. As she wrote succinctly to Still, her first biographer, who recalled how generously she had contributed to the abolitionist underground: “My lectures have met with success.” She added proudly, “I took breakfast with the then Governor of Maine.”

As an abolitionist lecturer, Harper honed to perfection a polemical political style that appears to differ with the seemingly sentimental and religious form of Forest Leaves. In her lectures, she pointedly contrasted the reality of black suffering with popular antislavery fiction: “Oh, if Mrs. Stowe has clothed American slavery with the graceful garb of fiction, Solomon Northrup comes up from the dark habitation of Southern cruelty where slavery fattens and feasts on human blood with such mournful revelations that one might almost wish for the sake of humanity that the tales of horror that he reveals were not so.” Harper powerfully makes clear that Northup’s unvarnished story of the harsh labor regimen and commodification of black bodies in the Cotton Kingdom is a truer depiction of slavery than Stowe’s best-selling novel saturated with the tropes of romantic racialism. As an ardent advocate of the Quaker-led free produce movement, Harper argued that she would rather pay for a coarse dress and “thank God that upon its warp and woof I see no stain of blood and tears; that to procure a little finer muslin for my limbs no crushed and broken heart went out in sighs, and that from the field where it was raised went up no wild and startling cry unto the throne of God to witness there in language deep and strong, that in demanding that cotton I was nerving oppression’s hand for deed of guilt and crime.” Cotton, as Harper realized, was the fabric of slavery. Her lecture combined literary sentimentalism with an acute perception of the political economy of slave labor-grown cotton.

Harper’s abolitionist imaginary of bloodied bodies and soul-crushing oppression presents an obvious contrast to the lovely imagery of the poems in Forest Leaves. But even in this initial literary endeavor, Harper deploys abolitionist rhetoric. In her first poem, “Ethiopia,” she writes,

Yes, Ethiopia, yet shall stretch
Her bleeding hands abroad,
Her cry of agony shall reach
The burning throne of God

Based on an oft-quoted Biblical saying deployed by early black abolitionists, Harper repeats this first paragraph at the end of her poem with added emphasis, “Oh stretch” and the conviction that Ethiopia shall “find redress from God.” Black abolitionists from Richard Allen to David Walker often evoked divine vengeance against the crimes of slavery and racism. William Watkins, who had brought up his orphaned niece and was a teacher and clergyman himself, no doubt provided her with a political education in abolition as well as a conventional education in reading and arithmetic.

Harper’s lectures combined abolitionist polemics with literary romanticism, the hallmark of her popular poems like “The Slave Mother.” Some of her poems from Forest Leaves, for instance the “Bible Defence of Slavery,” encapsulated the abolitionist critique of proslavery theology and Biblical literalism. Perhaps her most overtly political poem was the one that she sent to Senator Charles Sumner in 1860 praising his abolitionist speech, “The Barbarism of Slavery.” That caught my attention. While writing an article on the caning of Sumner, I discovered that African Americans corresponded frequently with the Radical Republican from Massachusetts and most, like Frederick Douglass, anointed him “our Senator.” But it was Harper’s poetic tribute to Sumner that remained with me. Harper’s poetry eloquently captured black sentiment, demonstrating the political power of her art. Like another black woman abolitionist, Charlotte Forten, Harper idolized Sumner. But she was one of the few African American women to directly engage him and the politics of slavery and antislavery.

Thank God that thou hast spoken
Words earnest, true, and brave;
The lightning of thy lips has smote
The fetters of the slave.

……………………….

Thy words were not soft echoes
Thy tones no siren song;
They fell as battle-axes
Upon our giant wrong.

Clearly, in a nineteenth-century literary style, Harper, as Graham argues, like writers associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, rejected the conceit of art for art’s sake. For her as for many African American authors, the art of writing was a profoundly political act.

My third encounter with Harper, the polemicist, came through an essay that she wrote for the only black newspaper that was published continuously during the Civil War, the Christian Recorder. While researching an article on Abraham Lincoln and black abolitionists, I found a treasure trove of essays, letters, and editorials written by African Americans on the war, the president, emancipation, and black citizenship here. Eric Gardner’s recent work with this newspaper resulted in his discovery of a chapter of Harper’s novel Sowing and Reaping, and the later—and until now, unknown—writings of black abolitionist-feminist Maria Stewart. Such remarkable finds highlight the Christian Recorder’s significance as a source of early African American literature. Yet Harper’s article on colonization in the Recorder has escaped the attention of scholars and is not included in Foster’s 1990 collection of her poems, fiction, speeches, and letters. I discovered this essay published in the Christian Recorder on September 27, 1862 (fig. 2) under the title “Mrs. Francis E. Watkins Harper on the War and the President’s Colonization Scheme.” Harper’s essay opens with a radical abolitionist condemnation of the nation at the high tide of Civil War nationalism:

I can read the fate of this republic by the lurid light that gleams around the tombs of buried nations, where the footprints of decay have lingered for centuries, I see no palliation of her guilt that justifies the idea that the great and dreadful God will spare her in her crimes, when less favored nations have been dragged from their place of pride and power, and their dominion swept away like mists before the rising sun. Heavy is the guilt that hangs upon the neck of this nation, and where is the first sign of national repentance? The least signs of contrition for the wrongs of the Indian and the negro? As this nation has had glorious opportunities for standing as an example to the nations leading the van of the world’s progress, and inviting the groaning millions to a higher destiny; but instead of that she has dwarfed herself to slavery’s base and ignoble ends, and now, smitten of God and conquered by her crimes, she has become a mournful warning, a sad exemplification of the close connexion between national crimes and national judgments.

After penning this philippic, Harper issues a stinging critique of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime colonization schemes: “The President’s dabbling with colonization just now suggests to my mind the idea of a man almost dying with a loathsome cancer, and busying himself about having his hair trimmed according to the latest fashion.” The playfulness and skill of the mature Harper’s critique here stands in contrast to the earnest tone of her first literary production, Forest Leaves. Schooled by her uncle William Watkins’ anti-colonization articles in the abolitionist newspapers Freedom’s Journal and The Liberator, which he published under the nom-de-plume “A Colored Baltimorean,” Harper vigorously made the case for black citizenship anew. She advised,

Let the President be answered firmly and respectfully, not in the tones of supplication and entreaty, but of earnestness and decision, that while we admit the right of every man to choose his home, that we neither see the wisdom nor expediency of our self-exportation from a land which has been in large measure enriched by our toil for generations, till we have a birth-right on the soil, and the strongest claims on the nation for that justice and equity which has been withheld from us for ages—ages whose accumulated wrongs have dragged the present wars that overshadow our head.   

She mocked the notion that the United States could part with “four millions of its laboring population.” Harper’s anti-colonization piece, unlike her later well-known speeches on women’s rights, has not received any sustained scholarly analysis. While Johanna’s recovery of Forest Leaves allows scholars of literature to further develop their criticism and understanding of Harper’s literary productions, as is evident in other essays in this issue, her activist speeches and writings, lying hidden in plain sight, help us reconstruct the nature of her forgotten activism. These two acts of recovery and discovery help us view Harper as somewhat of a renaissance woman, a woman of many parts and ideas.  

Recent historians of black women have recast Harper as a pioneering African American feminist. Her well-known speech during the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1866 has made her a black feminist icon, her work read as an early iteration of intersectional analyses of race and gender: “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.” Later in the speech, Harper drew attention to her own property-less and right-less state as a widow and famously critiqued white suffragists for ignoring the particular oppressions of African American women. “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man’s hand against me.” Born from the abolitionist schism over “the woman question,” the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement met in national and state conventions in the 1850s and 1860s. Before the emergence of an independent suffrage movement, Garrisonian and women abolitionists like Harper participated in them regularly. (See the calls for the National Woman’s Rights Conventions of 1858 and 1866 illustrated here [figs. 3, 4].)

For the rest of her life, Harper continued to draw attention to the plight of the “Coloured Woman” and became a spokeswoman for Frances Willard’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which was closely allied with the women’s suffrage movement. Black women’s labor, Harper said in her speech to the Women’s Congress in 1878, along with their education, “energy and executive ability” entitled them to equality. Historically, black women, like most working class and immigrant women, had always worked outside the home, she reminded her audience:

In different departments of business, coloured women have not only been enabled to keep the wolf from the door, but also to acquire property, and in some cases the coloured woman is the mainstay of the family, and when work fails the men in large cities, the money which the wife can obtain from washing, ironing, and other services, often keeps pauperism at bay…They do double duty, a man’s share in the field, and a woman’s part at home.

In alluding to the “double duty” performed by working class black women, Harper anticipated the “second shift,” one of the pivotal metaphors of modern feminism.

Recent scholarship has given us a heretofore unknown archive of black women’s writings: Jean Fagan Yellin’s authentication of Harriet Jacobs’ narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s discoveries of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative. Crafts has been identified as Hannah Bond, a fugitive slave from North Carolina, by the literary scholar Greg Hecimovich. Historians, philosophers, and political theorists have also sought to recover black women’s early intellectual history. If Harper has long occupied a pride of place in African American literature, she surely deserves a similar place in African American intellectual and political history. I have a hunch that many still undiscovered nuggets await Johanna Ortner in her quest to write a historical biography of by far one of the most interesting American women writers and activists of the nineteenth century.

Further Reading

On early African American women’s literature see the multi-volume The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African American Women Speakers and Writers, 1830-1880 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995), and Frances Smith Foster, Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892 (Bloomington, Ind., 1993). On Harper see Melba Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E.W. Harper 1825-1911 (Detroit, Mich., 1994), Frances Smith Foster, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York, 1990), and Maryemma Graham, Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (New York, 1988). On the Christian Recorder see Eric Gardner, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (New York, 2015). On my encounters with Harper see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, Conn., 2016), “Allies for Emancipation?: Lincoln and Black Abolitionists,” in Eric Foner ed., Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World (New York, 2008): 167-196, “The Caning of Charles Sumner: Slavery, Race and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War,” Journal of the Early Republic 23 (Summer 2003): 233-262. On black women’s intellectual history see Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway eds., Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds (Burlington, Vt., 2007) and Mia Bay et al eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2015)

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

Manisha Sinha is professor of Afro-American Studies and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (2000) and The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016).

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

Translated from the French by Michel Lavoie.

One more time, in this summer of 1633, a ship brought Samuel de Champlain back to Québec. The travellers spent more than two months at sea before reaching Percé where, finally, they were able to stock up with fresh water and be on their way towards Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay River, the destination beyond which sailing ships did not dare to venture. With its squalls, reefs, and fogs, the St. Lawrence River was seen to be far too dangerous. Four to five days were necessary still to navigate against the current in small crafts over a distance of 180 kilometres before reaching Québec, this small post so close to salt water and yet so far from the sea, and obstructed by ice five months a year. Champlain singled out this site as early as 1608, one reason being that from a cape, cannons could be installed to control the narrows of this river leading upstream to the Great Lakes (“Quebec” means “narrows” in the Micmac language). Hazardous for the great sailing ships, Québec opened up the whole continent to the legendary canoe. By 1633, Champlain had already drawn detailed maps of the Saguenay and three of the Great Lakes, as well as the waterways leading to Hudson’s Bay and even those that could potentially open the passage to China.

With a group of approximately fifty men, Champlain was taking over the small post left in a neglected state after its capture, in the name of the English Crown, by the Kirke brothers in 1629. The town he returned to was an establishment by the waterfront, composed of a few buildings in the lower part of the city, and, in the upper part, Fort St. Louis armed with a few cannons to block the entrance of the river to rival merchants. How many men had scurvy and winter cut down in the previous years? Champlain had only survived because, at the expense of his own men, he had saved for himself a more balanced diet. Game barter with the nearby Montagnais and the settling of a few French families had finally allowed residents to escape the initial hecatombs.

Champlain had dreamt earlier to make out of Québec the Ludovica of the New World, but misfortune had plagued the newborn colony. He understood the necessity to look beyond the simple logic of commercial interests expressed by merchants in the fur trade, for whom the arrival of new settlers meant increased competition. But who, rather than taking the direction of the West Indies, would prefer venturing into such a cold, harsh country? The Protestants? Had not a handful of them commanded or participated in the very first voyages in the seventeenth century? Could this have changed? Futile hopes, since the Catholic party had finally prevailed in France. The resumption of the religious wars led to the siege of Larochelle in 1629 and to the death of 80 percent of the reformed residents. If the Protestants no longer had the right of establishment in the colony, they could, however, scuttle its foundation: eight ships and five hundred immigrants on their way to lay the basis of a new French and Catholic society were captured by English Protestants demonstrating solidarity with their counterparts in La Rochelle.

How to revive a French and Catholic Ludovica in the absence of French settlers? Worse still, how to do this while the very few men who immigrated decided to leave quickly, failing to find French wives? Champlain hoped that a solution, indeed, would present itself. Wasn’t the small colonial post located within Indian country? To be sure, there were no more sedentary Indians; not since the 1580s, when the St. Lawrence Iroquois vanished, even before the French settled, probably under the combined effects of wars, climatic changes, and epidemics. However, every summer Québec played host to approximately fifteen hundred Algonquins and Montagnais. They came to fetch birch bark for their canoes, chase wildfowl, fish salmons and sturgeons, but above all to catch the phenomenal quantities of eels that they smoked and stocked up for winter. These Indians were gathering at the mouth of the St. Charles River, immediately downriver from the French post, and, upriver, at Ka-Miskoua-ouangachit, which would become Sillery (now a district of Québec City). This is not taking into account those six hundred Hurons and Nipissings that a one-month trip and fifteen hundred kilometres from the Great Lakes brought annually to Québec for a one-week stay at the fur fair. They arrived in flotillas of canoes, up to one hundred and forty at the same time, wearing bear, beaver, or moose skins. They were, the Jesuits said, “well made men of splendid figures, tall, powerful, good-natured, and able-bodied.” Their encampments, in close proximity to the establishment, easily outnumbered the French residents settled in the whole colony.

The various native groups held councils with the governor to renew friendship and alliances between brothers, as each and everyone considered themselves. The Jesuits were fascinated by the proceedings of these councils, especially those between French and Hurons. They who vowed the greatest admiration to Greco-Roman civilization, who mastered Indian languages, who could easily follow debates and decode rituals, wrote in 1633 regarding a talented Huron orator that he “arose to answer, but with a keenness and delicacy of rhetoric that might have come out of the schools of Aristotle or Cicero.” The councils debated alliance conditions, warfare plans against the Iroquois, conflict settlements, and even alliance-threatening murders. Murder was not punished in the French manner–by the hanging of the murderer–but by redress and compensation in the form of presents handed out by the aggressor’s family to the victim’s family in accordance to the country’s custom.

The Huron visitors traded their furs with the French for “blankets, hatchets, kettles, capes, iron arrow-points, little glass beads, shirts . . . and many similar things.” They also traded their tobacco and their fishing nets with the Montagnais. They visited the chapel, admired holy images and had access to the Jesuits’ carpentry workshop–although always under surveillance, for the fathers were afraid their tools would be stolen. The Indians even sampled European delicacies, including a lemon they tasted in the presence of the French, who were bursting with laughter. The visitors were scandalized by the chastisements imposed by the French upon their children. French authorities of the then small village of Québec knew very well that they were guests in an Indian country over which they had yet to impose their control.

How to establish a French province in America without immigration? A solution presented itself in the transformation of Indians into Frenchmen. Would those “miserable pagans” renounce darkness in order to rise to the lights of faith through the missions? Wouldn’t these poor nomads become sedentary farmers as soon as they were taught the ways of the trade? In fact, weren’t they expressly asking for this transformation to happen? And, furthermore, why limit “progress” to the sole close neighbors? Hadn’t Québec been allied to the powerful Great Lakes Huron since 1609? These Hurons would certainly recognize the pope as their spiritual father and the king as their temporal father and in this way become French naturals. They would doubtlessly be able to achieve this so much more easily since they were sedentary and some of them had already been converted to Catholicism.

For the French, generally intolerant of religious differences, the multiplicity of cultures, statuses, and traditions among the natives did not constitute an obstacle to integration. The successes of their colony in Paraguay, where Indians accepted collective protection under Jesuit patronage, showed that all that was needed were missionaries to preach, to teach children, to regroup and settle nomads within defined boundaries. There was also a need for the presence of a few good devoted Catholic families to set the example of faith and hard work, and to conclude matrimonial alliances. No heretics, no people with morally reprehensible habits such as the young single pregnant woman who, after she arrived in Québec in 1658, was immediately returned to France, presumably to give birth on the ship taking her back across the Atlantic. Soon, Montagnais, Algonquins, Hurons, and French, and how many more, would form a single people. Champlain formally affirmed this notion to the allied Montagnais and Huron chiefs in 1633 and 1635 when he said that “our young men will marry your daughters, and we shall be one people.” While in agreement with Champlain’s ideals, the Montagnais chiefs found the pledge amusing, since that promise had probably been vainly reiterated many times in the previous thirty years.

Sometimes they did seem to be one people. A few native interpreters had married in Huronia. Why then did the young Frenchmen at the post fail to act in a similar fashion? Perhaps they rejected the obligation of a Catholic marriage, over which priests in Québec and in the Sillery and the Huronia missions exercised a very strict control. And for this first generation of Frenchmen in America, getting married and becoming hunters must have been as remote and unimaginable as it was for young nomad Indian women to transform themselves into sedentary peasants.

The Jesuits took leadership of the project both in the distant Huronia and on site in Québec. They built a house beside the two principal Indian encampments, the main one being in Sillery. With funding from a devoted donor, Noël Brûlart of Sillery, they supervised the clearing of lands and the construction of houses where two Christian Montagnais chiefs–Noël Negabamat and François-Xavier Negaskoumat, both reputed for their loyalty–and their families could settle and experience sedentary life. Furthermore, considering that they occupied ancestral Indian lands, the Christian newcomers were awarded a seigneurial concession that stretched for five kilometres along the river, and ran back fifty kilometres into the woods. While the Jesuits maintained a tutorial role, the few French settlers established in Sillery were in fact under the jurisdiction of Indian chiefs seigniors. Still missing were “three batteries” of French priests and nuns committed “to destroy the empire of Satan and unfurl the banner of Jesus Christ in these regions.” Providence supplied them in 1639 with the arrival in Québec of “a college of Jesuits, an establishment of hospital nuns and a convent of Ursulines,” that is to say, approximately a dozen religious figures. Taken to Sillery the very next day, the newcomers fell into tears at the sight of these Indians devoutly praying and melodiously singing Christian hymns in their own languages. The hospital nuns settled in quickly, treating patients that were already affected by fast-travelling epidemics, and helping the poor, homeless, and itinerant people who were, in their view, those indigent hunter-gatherers.

Very soon, little boys and girls, for the most part chiefs’ children, were studying in the Ursulines’ and Jesuits’ boarding schools established in Québec. The teaching was trilingual, in French, Montagnais, and Huron. Negabamat, elegantly dressed in the French fashion, receiving all ceremonial honours, presented himself as an ambassador of the French while travelling to Tadoussac and further down the river to negotiate commercial agreements. He even went to Boston and Plymouth to consolidate an alliance with the Sokoquis, the Pennacooks, and the Mahicans against the Iroquois.

Approximately forty families from various nations settled in Sillery, but the epidemics overwhelmed them quickly, bringing doubt in their wake. Weren’t Indians dreadfully dying since the arrival of the French? Couldn’t the latter be responsible for the deaths? On the other hand, weren’t the French here to resuscitate Indian nations, weren’t they caring for Indians, weren’t they constructing houses for them? Should Indians be cured with blessed water or the sound of drums? How and by which criteria should the chiefs of this small cosmopolitan universe be selected: according to heredity, secret vote, the intensity of their religious practice? Was it necessary to expel pagans from the mission, to punish polygamy, to chain adulterous women? Should Indians get closer to the French settlers who were established on the seigneurial lands, or move away from them because they were not equally possessed by the neophyte fervor, and, above all, because they did not dislike alcohol?

In some ways, the different peoples did indeed become close. Regularly, Indian parents chose French people of note as their newborns’ godmothers or godfathers, but the Jesuits were not very favorable to marriages between native converts and French: in thirty years (1638-68) only five ceremonies were held. The fathers also watched over morals and forbade “night visits” between unmarried couples. A final obstacle was the Jesuits’ great deception from which the sedentary way of life and conversion could not be dissociated: it was impossible, in a few seasons, to transform–or “reduce,” in the language of the day–a hunter-gatherer into a farmer. In fact, the reduction encouraged the nomadic way of life: couples entrusted, for the winter, their elderly and their young children to the missionaries and the nuns, which facilitated their travelling. And merchants encouraged Indians to keep trapping. They had no need for an Indian farmer who could not supply them with furs. Moreover, there was the threat of the Iroquois, whose warriors patrolled the St. Lawrence, laid ambushes, even threatened Sillery, which was weakly protected by a frail palisade erected on the riverbanks. Many families fled while the nursing nuns took refuge in the higher part of the city. Almost deserted, the mission burned down and was transformed into a refugee camp: for the Abenakis who were driven back by the English settlers, for the Hurons who were annihilated by the Iroquois and who were hounded down as far into the colony as Québec and l’île d’Orléans.

Over time, however, most of the refugees left and settled somewhere else. Finally, only approximately 150 Hurons remained in Sillery while, gradually, French families–roughly sixty in 1663–took over the seigniorial lands and settled permanently in Sillery. By that year, the French population approached three thousand. The project designed to create a French province peopled with peasant Indians having failed, the king took over control of the colony in 1663 to people it with immigrants and to conduct a war offensive against the Iroquois.

With the Indian depopulation and the French repopulation, Québec gradually emerged as the capital of a small French and Catholic colony along the St. Lawrence River from Montreal and downstream, while the Upper Country–the country of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi–remained Indian country. Immigration continued, however, to be heavily dominated by men, despite the arrivals of ships transporting numerous “Filles du Roy,” orphans to be married. There were easily, in this Lower Country, seven suitors for each woman. The small colony could not survive without the links established with the Upper Country, which it had lost after the Iroquois raids and the defeat of its allies and intermediaries in the fur trade. The arrival of French regiments in 1665 to conduct warfare against the Iroquois permitted the reopening of the Great Lakes trail while the men that could not marry in the colony and who did not wish to return to France became wayfarers or fur traders and went out to meet the Indians in the interior of the continent. Two very different types of Frenchmen embodied the bipolarity of the colony: the settled peasant and the nomad traveller. In the Upper Country, the latter took wife and “indianized,” the native societies transforming these Europeans into Indians where the reverse had proven impossible. But those marriages also gave birth to a new people: the Métis.

Why did intermarriages, not very frequent prior to 1663 despite the gender imbalance, later become an ordinary practice? Because following the disappearance of the Indian merchants due to epidemics and fur wars, a new intermediary function in the fur trade opened up for the settlers’ sons. This third generation, already designated as Canadian rather than French, appropriated the country, travelled the rivers to go out and meet the interior Indian nations, hence slipping out of political and religious controls. Furthermore these travellers and fur traders acquired in Indian country the prestigious function of suppliers of European staples. The marriages conducted according to the country’s fashion, that is to say in the Indian fashion, became the norm in the Upper Country.

As he sailed up the river in 1633, did Champlain know that the new phase of Québec’s history he began would be a history of an original encounter, of a religiously monolithic but ethnically and culturally pluralistic project, of alliance and interbreeding rather than apartheid?

Further Reading: For further reading on Québec and early New France, see Marcel Trudel, The Beginnings of New France 1524-1663 (Toronto, 1972); Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers (Montreal and Kingston, 1985); Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal and Kingston, 1976); Denys Delâge, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-1664 (Vancouver, 1995); Nathalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), Dean Louder and Eric Waddell, eds., French America: Mobility, Identity, and Minority Experience across the Continent (Baton Rouge, 1993); Rémi Savard, L’Algonquin Tessouat et la Fondation de Montréal: Diplomatie Franco-Indienne en Nouvelle-France (Montreal, 1996); François-Marc Gagnon, La Conversion par L’Image: Un Aspect de la Mission des Jésuites auprès des Indiens du Canada au XVIIe Siècle (Montreal, 1975); Paul-André Dubois, De L’Oreille au Coeur: Naissance du Chant Religieux en Langues Amérindiennes dans les Missions de Nouvelle-France, 1600-1650 (Sillery, 1997). For several articles related to the history of French-Indian relations, consult the journal, Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4

Denys Delâge, professor of sociology at Laval University, Québec, has written on the history of the French- and English-Indian alliances. He is associated with the GETIC research center on native peoples.
Mathieu d’Avignon is completing a Ph.D. in history at Laval University, where he is a member of the CELAT research center; he is also a member of the Groupe de recherche sur l’histoire, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi.

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

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

Searching for an Early American Pacific

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

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

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

New Texts, New Maps

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

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

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

Finding the Pacific in the Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

The Pacific Breadfruit and the Atlantic Slave Trade

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

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

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

Is the Pacific American?

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

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

Acknowledgments

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

Still a Prologue? The Stamp Act Protests at 250

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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