Sarah Nehama’s catalogue In Death Lamented was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name that she curated at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The topic is mourning jewelry—ornaments produced in honor of a deceased person—a genre that scholars have often overlooked for its macabre and maudlin associations. Nehama traces the changing forms and cultural uses of mourning jewelry in America from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. She draws her examples primarily from the holdings of the MHS, but supplements them with pieces from her own private collection.

Nehama brings the precise eye of a jeweler to the project. The strength of the catalogue lies in her exacting and detailed analyses of individual objects. These textual descriptions are well matched by the spectacular and copious photographs that allow readers to see Nehama’s points clearly for themselves. From the twisting black enameled band of the rococo mourning ring, to the hair-infused ivory landscape of the neoclassical locket, to the paste and jet enhanced curls of the Gothic Revival brooch, mourning jewelry has never looked so good. Nehama’s work as a jeweler may also have shaped her exploration of the changing materials used to create mourning jewelry and her detailed explanations of modes of manufacture. A fascinating sidebar in the catalogue, for example, shows the stages in the creation of a Georgian-style enameled mourning ring, as completed by contemporary jeweler Will Francis. Thanks to this step-by-step explanation, these seemingly simple gold bands—embellished with enameled decoration that included the name and age of the deceased—prove to be surprisingly complex. The catalogue gives the viewer a sense of these bands’ three-dimensionality and their luxury, elements that are difficult to convey without direct contact. This emphasis upon craftsmanship was complemented in the exhibition by the display of a hair braiding tool: a stool made into a loom upon which hair could be braided or twined. Such an apparatus makes clear exactly how intricate those patterns of hair commonly featured in nineteenth-century mourning jewelry, such as the lover’s knot, actually were to produce.

Nehama organizes the catalogue chronologically. Each chapter begins with a brief historical essay and then breaks out to individual catalogue entries, a format that allows the author to fully elucidate stylistic trends in mourning jewelry. She is also attentive to developments in craft as a result of new manufacturing processes, as well as changing mourning traditions. Moving from the seventeenth century through the postbellum period, the author deftly draws connections between jewelry and the larger iconography of funerals, tombstones, and the etiquette of mourning. Mourning jewelry also clearly exhibits stylistic influences from other forms of jewelry and underwent significant alterations as new media penetrated the form. In particular, Nehama’s arguments for the relationship between representation (portraiture and mourning scenes) and jewelry show the complex constellation of practices and influences that shaped mourning jewelry. Nehama explains how the portrait and mourning miniature’s rise in popularity over the eighteenth century resulted in the growing size of mourning brooches and lockets, detailing that “In order to accommodate the size of these miniatures, jewelry settings—both the bezel and the band—had to change substantially” (44). Similarly, the rise of photography in the nineteenth century and the desire to incorporate the daguerreotype also shaped the appearance of mourning jewelry as “jewelry forms evolved to house photographs, making it possible for mourners to wear them” (74).

Throughout the catalogue, Nehama shows how densely enmeshed mourning jewelry was in larger patterns of life. Not aberrant objects produced only for funerals or created for grieving widows, mourning rings, lockets, brooches, and a plethora of other forms were items of everyday life for elites and increasingly, by the nineteenth century, those in the middle classes. They exhibit the patina of age and the effects of being handled and worn. In fact, the catalogue so convincingly places these artifacts within the texture of everyday life that the designation of mourning jewelry becomes problematic. To what extent is the category of mourning jewelry a function of the current collecting market that does not ultimately help to explain period practice? How separate were these items from regular jewelry and tokens of sentiment? Locks of hair snipped from a child’s head as tokens of affection might all too soon be added to a mourning brooch so that parents could remember a lost toddler. Similarly, daguerreotypes exchanged by young lovers or husbands and wives and made into a locket could take on a memorial function after an untimely death. Is mourning jewelry not defined by the intended function at the time of manufacture, but rather by the use to which the owner put a piece of jewelry? Such slippages encourage us to wonder how separate these items were from “regular” jewelry. That mourning jewelry’s styles paralleled shifts in other kinds of jewelry only complicates its position as a distinct form.

Although the author’s painstaking genealogical research anchors individual artifacts in time and space, it would have made the catalogue stronger to have a firmer grounding in actual behaviors and the specific uses of mourning jewelry. Nehama seems to take for granted that these artifacts were always primarily intended to forge a personal and emotional connection between the wearer and the deceased. Certainly mourning jewelry fulfilled this memorial role, yet how exactly did it do so? Recent works on hair jewelry have started to explore hair’s physical qualities and the symbolic associations that allowed hair to play a special role in sparking sentiment. These kinds of more metaphorical associations are missing in Nehama’s analysis. Also overlooked are the potential multiple functions of mourning jewelry. As Nehama notes, but does not fully explore, these items indicated a wearer’s status (as suggested by the fact that desire expanded over time to include those of the middle classes). They could also be used as tools of nation building—for example, those many mourning pieces that were created upon the deaths of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The catalogue even traces the ways that mourning jewelry could function as a tool of international diplomacy, as in the ring for Tsar Alexander I and Empress Elizabeth of Russia that was presented to Louisa Catherine Adams, who had befriended the couple while her husband, John Quincy Adams, served as the U.S. Minister to Russia. What impact might these other uses have had upon the development of the form?

The catalogue also raises interesting questions about gender, demographics, and transatlantic connections. Nehama notes that by the nineteenth century, women were “regarded as the primary ‘observers’ of a family’s grief,” and the catalogue suggests, though it does not explicitly state, that women were the primary wearers and consumers of these objects (72). This gendered association is highlighted by the inclusion of a few pieces of jewelry specifically for men including a stickpin (tie pin) and cufflinks. Nehama mentions other forms of mourning jewelry that are “distinctly masculine,” such as “watch fobs, and watch chains,” yet these are the only examples she gives. Are these forms less common because men were less likely to wear mourning jewelry? Did mourning jewelry become associated with women because of women’s growing role in the nineteenth century as keepers of the home and the family? The number of mourning rings made to commemorate young children and unmarried adults is a similar theme that emerges, but that is also never fully elucidated. (Interestingly, these were composed of white rather than traditional black enamel in order to connote the deceased’s innocence.) Do these examples point to a larger trend? Were mourning rings more commonly made to memorialize children than other deceased people? If so, does this suggest that mourning jewelry was intended in part to help those left behind to grieve during particularly emotionally devastating deaths?

Finally, the geographic parameters of the catalogue suggest possible questions of cross-cultural influence and the relatively limited audience for mourning jewelry. The designation “Anglo-American” is a loose one, and the catalogue interweaves rings produced in England with those of American manufacture without always distinguishing whether these items were made in England and used in North America, or if they are solely English examples. More careful attention to geographic location might have illuminated transatlantic connections as well as potential divergences between mourning jewelry made in England versus America. Considering the specific audience for these pieces might also have shed light on their function. What was it about this jewelry that appealed to Anglo-American elites and not Native Americans or African Americans? Was it solely expense that kept these groups from purchasing mourning jewelry (suggesting its importance in status definition), or was it related to divergences in burial practice and mourning traditions?

In Death Lamented raises many questions that I hope other scholars of early America will pursue. With its careful descriptions and seductive photographs, this catalogue should be a call to arms for museum professionals to put more mourning jewelry out on display and for scholars to give these artifacts greater attention. There is good reason to think that this will happen. The catalogue participates in two growing trends: works of American history that study how past peoples viewed and treated death, funeral rituals, and interments, and studies in art history and the decorative arts that take seriously jewelry, and more specifically hair jewelry. As scholars continue to pull apart the connections between mourning jewelry and the complex cultural practices that shaped it, the seeming conundrum of beautifully embellished rings becoming repositories of painful sentiment is one that promises to yield great historical insights.

In the afterword to The Potter’s Hand, its author, A. N. Wilson, identifies the novel as a work of historical fiction, embellishing the life of Josiah Wedgwood, whom Wilson quite rightly asserts has largely been forgotten. The novel seeks to commemorate the work and life of Wedgwood by presenting a thoughtfully composed portrait of the man and his milieu. Wilson’s family connection to Wedgwood emerges at strategic points in the novel, making the resulting work an impressive homage to an ancestor whom Wilson clearly respects and wishes to bring to wider renown among readers.

The novel consists of three substantial sections, each dedicated to a work of art. The first section, which concerns Wedgwood’s production of the massive dinnerware service termed “The Frog Service” for Catherine the Great, constitutes the bulk of the novel. Subsequent sections document George Stubbs’ production of the 1780 Wedgwood family portrait and Wedgwood’s reproduction of the Portland Vase in 1790. Despite this organizational strategy, the works of art themselves play little role in the novel, with the tepid exception of the Portland Vase, which invokes Keatsian ruminations on the nature of life and death. The novel is more overtly interested in the lives of its artists and their coterie, specifically Wedgwood and his extensive network of British intellectual luminaries, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, James Watt, and Erasmus Darwin.

At its most compelling, The Potter’s Hand explores the tenuous network of Atlantic commerce that enabled the production of Wedgwood’s pottery. Wedgwood’s Creamware, for instance, achieved its characteristic color through a mixture of domestic clay, which fired to a grey hue, and imported clay, obtained from the Cherokee people of North America, which fired to a whitish hue. The conceit of the first section of the novel is Wedgwood’s desire to obtain enough clay from the Cherokee to complete his Frog Service. Wilson accounts for the ways in which the complications of empire—most notably the American Revolution—kept Wedgwood from achieving his goal.

The second section, framed by the Wedgwood family portrait, configures a lineage for the novel’s vision of empire and its relationship to artistic production. The fictional Josiah Wedgwood commissions the portrait in an attempt to reject the rapidly changing social milieu of early nineteenth-century England. He requests that Stubbs paint his family in a classical manner, but soon finds that Stubbs’ capricious artistic tendencies render any attempts to shape the style of the portrait ineffectual. The power struggle that ensues between Wedgwood and Stubbs dramatizes the relationship between industrial and artistic production during the era. As Wedgwood is quick to point out, Stubbs uses Wedgwood enamel tiles as canvases for smaller works, but Wedgwood is unable to profit from this economic arrangement when shaping the formal elements of the portrait itself. The portrait’s production forces Wedgwood to reexamine the relationship between art and commerce, which comes to bear in the novel’s final section.

Wilson’s section dedicated to the Portland Vase expands the novel’s interest in empire to the British removal of Greek and Roman antiquities and sharpens the novel’s interest in trade dynamics as well. While Wedgwood’s reproduction of the vase was initially commissioned for aesthetic value, Wedgwood saw the project as an opportunity to market his virtuosity as a potter and the versatility of his medium. As the novel recounts, reproductions of the vase served as salesman’s samples for the Wedgwood line, which Wedgwood sought to expand into additional European markets. But Wedgwood’s capitalist ambitions are undermined in the novel, and, at its conclusion, Wedgwood pottery is still coded as a thoroughly British production.

While the novel engages with the rapidly shifting dynamics of empire and its social and political vicissitudes, it is a book that is interested in human emotion first, and politics only subsequently. Its primary character, despite overtones otherwise, is not Josiah Wedgwood; while scenes focused on Wedgwood begin and end the novel, the bulk of the novel follows Tom Byerley, Wedgwood’s young nephew and, early in life, the heir apparent to Wedgwood’s pottery works, and Sukey Wedgwood, Josiah Wedgwood’s daughter, who would ultimately be the mother of Charles Darwin. While Josiah Wedgwood is central to the novel, his character is never developed to the extent that the novel’s younger protagonists are. Tom follows the path of any number of bildungsromane, first departing from his uncle’s patronage to pursue an acting career in New York, then setting out into the wilds of colonial America to help his uncle obtain the desired Cherokee-owned clay, finding himself entangled by chance in the American revolutionary cause, and ultimately returning to England and settling into marriage and career, now a chastened former artist. Tom’s story enables changes of scene in the novel much more readily than other characters, chiefly because he is unhindered by the social and physical limitations of much of its cast of characters (for instance, Josiah Wedgwood himself has a wooden leg, a characteristic that the novel exploits). Sukey, only two years old at her first appearance in the novel, faces the challenges of being young, well-connected, and female in late eighteenth-century Britain, and her development is charted in terms of insights on the family’s internal dynamics rather than adventures abroad. Wilson counts on Tom and Sukey to provoke in readers an emotional investment in Wedgwood’s story and clearly prizes this connection above attachments to Wedgwood’s art itself.

Aspects of Wilson’s interest in Tom and Sukey do help to create momentum through the intricacies of Wedgwood’s career, but other aspects, frankly, detract. Tom provides the basis for the novel’s central love plot, which begins when he first encounters a young Cherokee woman when attempting to secure his uncle’s clay. The woman, named Blue Squirrel, is beautiful, impetuous, and sexually adept: an assemblage of damning colonial stereotypes of Native women. Blue Squirrel does develop as a character, and by the end of the novel seems to be a representation of colonial hybridity, having achieved an identity independent from violent male control and a revered status in Wedgwood’s pottery works. But Blue Squirrel, later renamed Merry, is always an object of sexual desire first and an artist second. The last scene in which readers encounter Blue Squirrel consists of her stripping naked to swim, and then having sex with a male companion who, like Tom, is “saved” through a sexual experience with her. Blue Squirrel is a character imported from colonial romances featuring Native peoples, as are Wilson’s references to the Cherokee tribe more generally. While this novel certainly does not claim to be revolutionizing historical romance as a genre, and does feature better-developed portrayals of women, such as Sukey, the inclusion of a stereotypical Native maiden is disappointing.

The ideal reader for Wilson’s novel has a general interest in the eighteenth-century British colonial moment and the economic workings of the Atlantic world, but should not approach the text seeking a meticulous account of the networks of cultural power during the era. As Wilson clearly articulates in his afterword, and as any observant reader will conclude in the early pages of this nearly 500-page work, it does not presume to be a historical account of the era. What it does accomplish is piquing the interest of readers in a neglected historical figure who provided an important connection between the economic and intellectual life of England. Wilson does so in a style that echoes authors such as Sir Walter Scott, a figure that Wilson has lauded in previous critical work. The Potter’s Hand offers readers a chance to engage with Josiah Wedgwood in a familiar and well-developed literary form.

In the 1847 Grammar of the Mpongwe Language, principally authored by John Leighton Wilson, the American missionary to Gabon marveled at the flexibility of the central African language despite what he perceived to be the “contracted world” of the Mpongwe people themselves. Erskine Clarke’s By the Rivers of Water narrates the Atlantic journeys of this gifted linguist and earnest minister, revisiting the places that broadened—and constrained—the white missionary’s worldview. Despite his expansive and even global sense of Christian calling, the minister returned to his Southern homeland as his family, church, and nation divided over the issue of slavery; his world proved equally contracted.

The Presbyterian missionary, whom the author refers to as Leighton, is survived by an ample documentary record that warrants his central position in the narrative. Clarke approaches these sources with care and imagination to honor the journeys, struggles, and perspectives of less-chronicled others: enslaved Gullah people of the Carolina Lowcountry, the women of the American missionary movement, free or formerly enslaved American colonists, the Grebo people of Liberia, and the Mpongwe of Gabon. He masterfully explores conflicted definitions of freedom and faith, the problems of slavery and racism, and the many human choices that shaped nineteenth-century America and the broader Atlantic World.

The book’s opening chapters provide vivid social and spatial contrast between the Gullah and the affluent white Presbyterian families that together populated the coastal lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia in the early nineteenth century. As demonstrated by his 2006 Bancroft Prize-winning Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic, Clarke adeptly mines genealogies and household records to reveal the intertwined relational networks of Southern plantation households and religious communities. Leighton and his future wife, Jane Bayard, both inherited slaves in their native states of South Carolina and Georgia. Extended stays among the Presbyterian elite of Philadelphia, however, stoked a passion for foreign missions in Jane and her sister Margaret. By 1832 the sisters were both engaged to aspiring young missionaries, and Jane looked forward to service with Leighton in West Africa.

The second part of the book follows Leighton and Jane Wilson to Cape Palmas, Liberia. Leighton first visited the site in 1832, and after their 1834 nuptials the young pair conducted their gospel labors among the Grebo and African American colonists. With the cooperation of these neighbors, the Wilsons worked to help erect new buildings, start schools, and combat the common threats of malaria and disease. The Wilsons maintained amicable relationships with the indigenous residents, and prominent Grebo not only chose Christianity, but also advanced the educational agenda of the mission. In a particularly fascinating chapter, Clarke illustrates the forms of accommodation and selective appropriation that characterized the conversion of the polygamous Grebo leader known both as William Davis and Mworeh Mah.

The missionaries rarely preached in Grebo, but worked tirelessly to translate and print the Bible. Of interest to scholars of print culture, African American printer B.V.R. James established a printing press at Cape Palmas, trained local apprentices, and with the Wilsons sent a young Grebo man to New York to study book binding. Christian texts were published both in Liberia and later in Gabon.

Leighton opposed Iberian slavers and the ongoing Atlantic trade. While still an owner of slaves in the U.S., the white minister disdained African American colonists who supplied the ships of slave traders. He also scorned the imperialistic sensibilities he perceived among some African American colonists and the racist deceptions of white promoters of the African colonization movement back in the U.S. In contrast to the amity and respect shared with his printer colleague, Leighton frequently contested the decisions and authority of the African American governor of the colony, John Brown Russwurm. Clarke might be at times overly sympathetic to Leighton’s point of view, but remains mindful of the white Southerner’s racial biases. In his final analysis of these combatants, Clarke suggests both were shaped by and sought two different worlds with respect to race and justice.

Despite their work abroad, the bonds of slavery still tethered the Wilsons to the Southern worlds of their youth. Leighton was slow to emancipate his own two slaves that remained in South Carolina, in view of laws that demanded newly freed blacks leave the state. Eventually liberated, they declined Leighton’s recommendation to relocate in the Northeast. They instead elected to keep their freedom quiet and illegally remain with their families in the South. The Wilsons emancipated Jane’s slaves and encouraged their migration from Savannah to Liberia in 1838. A number accepted the Wilson’s suggestion to leave Georgia and joined the American missionaries in West Africa. Even as they received the newly emancipated, the Wilsons harbored growing dissatisfaction with the colonization project at Cape Palmas.

In the 1840s the Wilsons explored alternate sites and relocated the mission hub to the Gabon estuary of the Como River. As in Liberia, most white Americans sent to the new mission quickly died of malaria. Jane and Leighton enjoyed their work among the Mpongwe people and labored alongside surviving whites and a group of mixed-culture black families. The educational attempts of the mission and Leighton’s convictions sought to prove black intellectual capacity. Yet sadly, his anthropological correspondence to missionary publications and delivery of a gorilla’s skull to American scientists inadvertently reinforced pseudo-scientific racism. Clarke notes the intended and unintended cultural imperialism of the missionaries, though Leighton decried other instances of imperial overreach, such as the U.S. removal of the Cherokee from Georgia, African American colonists’ disrespect of the Grebo in Liberia, and French Catholic impositions on the native people of Gabon.

The final section of the book details the homecoming of Leighton and Jane after seventeen years abroad. In 1853 Leighton accepted an appointment as a secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions and moved to New York. Though he envisioned global Christian expansion and understood slavery to be a sin, Leighton believed the election of Lincoln an imperialist violation of Southern planters’ moral exercise. Leighton and Jane said goodbye to friends and family and returned to the South by 1861. During and after the Civil War, the Wilsons kept busy. Leighton oversaw the chaplaincy needs of Confederate soldiers and led the missionary attempts of a newly formed Southern Presbyterian Church while Jane administered a boarding school for black children at their Old Homestead plantation.

The titular allusion to Psalm 1:3 fits the book’s riverside settings—alongside the swirling Black River, tidal waters of the Georgia Sea Islands, the Atlantic shore of Cape Palmas, and the broad Gabon Estuary. Furthermore, the psalmist’s metaphor likens the human to a tree rooted at the river’s edge. Despite the Wilsons proximity to the diverse cultural flows of the broader Atlantic, their roots ran deep into plantation soil and held to the slaveholding traditions of the white South. Near the end of his life Leighton reflected on the idolatry of homeland and church. Clarke suggests that Leighton’s loyalty “to a history and people committed to maintaining slavery and its deep oppression … was both an act of deep love and the desertion of moral vision” (337).

By the Rivers of Water significantly contributes to the study of American religious history. Clarke proves the heuristic value of an Atlantic/world paradigm for the study of Christian missionaries and extends this conceptual framework deep into the nineteenth century. Beyond his extensive research in archives that directly pertain to the missionaries, Clarke uses anthropological and historical accounts of the African diaspora to honor the narratives and voices of African Americans and Africans on both sides of the Atlantic.

Counter to the paternalism and imperialism of the American missionary endeavors, Clarke asserts that subsequent generations of Grebo and Mpongwe people reinterpreted and reappropriated the African-language bibles and Christian traditions that the Wilsons left behind. West African Christians developed their own contextual theologies, new practices of faith, and independent African churches. The epilogue speaks to a shift in the “demographic center of Christianity … to the ‘Global South,'” evidenced by numerous West African missionaries currently deployed to the U.S. and a white Episcopalian church in South Carolina that recently joined the Anglican Diocese of Rwanda (377-8). In these considerations, Clarke—a professor emeritus from Columbia Theological Seminary—brings to the monograph a keen awareness of historical and emergent developments in the world Christian movement.

Clarke brilliantly explores the contradictions between Leighton’s expansive missionary travels and the limits of racial constructs and sectional divides. He succeeds in narrating the mysteries “of good intentions and cruel consequences, and the enigma of human freedom in the midst of slavery and the contingencies of human life” (xxii). Frequent reminders of characters’ relationships to one another are at times repetitive, but understandable given the book’s complex social networks. Effusive descriptions are most effective when advancing the narrative, though Clarke’s lively pen will undoubtedly attract and satisfy a wide audience. Concluding with Leighton’s reflections on the idolatry of home, Clarke occasions the humble reader to consider the moral constraints of one’s own time and place.

At this Point, a Confluence

Less enterprising men would have left the beautiful ruin of a city
to moulder away and decay, but the Sacramentans
could not be induced to forego the work of a decade
just for the disasters of a month.
Editorial, The Sacramento Bee, October 3,1865

Before rousting the American from its bed,
a century before sobering the Sacramento’s snowmelt
with a catch and release schedule,
they stood in the park to watch two rivers mix:
one ran muddy from paddlewheels and boilers,
the other spooned the city
like a lazy morning lover.

Citizens feared
that an inconsolable river
would stumble home angry and drunk,
bring everyone down to its banks
for a baptism, wash away
the sins and signs
of order, civility.

It took twelve years for a sidewalk of dismantled steamships,
fraying even before it was finished,
to float the city on stilts
the river thickening
with silt from the mines
the mines that pushed
the railroad to Promontory
the railroad that promised
a passage east by way of the west.

A streetside frescoed Virgin of Guadalupe
watched over flocks of families spilling
between pushcarts and Pullman coaches
where the docks met the tracks
that obliterated time, space.

ADLUH

A thin slice of cinderblock, seven stories high
squares against the sky, a downtown silo
with what is left of the working wage. Harvest
rains within windowless walls of whitewashed
ads, which flash neon on and off again
in an Amen cadence slowed to pace the rails
and Congaree canals that once mapped coastal plains.
Reapers’ fruit goes crushing, grinding, gristing.
Who set it flowing, this nourishing dust
sitting in the middle of time, no plains, no past?
What talk was wrought in the wheat stalk fields?
And the dusk yields        ADLUH ADLUH

Succession in Iowa

Contrails bend pink and north over Osceola,
hot trails dragging behind what makes them
roar, passing through other ragged clouds
tossed across the darkening sky.

A train whistle wails over rip rap
creek beds, calling to the grain towers
that huddle like rocket thrusters
on hills combed neat as heads of hair.

When those engines finish shouting hosanna,
echoing off the paved hills, their thunder
trickles through summer cottonwood branches,
where the noise could be mistaken for herds of buffalo.

Palimpsest

I.
Where black asphalt splits an ancient trail,
which fauna have not forgotten,
a tom fans royal feathers
for his brood,
who drip their gray drop bodies
from terra cotta roof tops
and swagger the asphalt’s
addresses even to odd,
stopping traffic with red, round authority.

Sidelit by the low sun, the crossing guard
folds up crimson feathers and marches over
to where, in a panic of wings,
the flock takes to the sky,
trailing molt like the stains
of scraped away ink on a map’s second draft.

II.
A hand-drawn map needs RE-visioning
when memory leaks through borders.
Black Mountain’s first campus
now tithes for the Scots’ god,
its Lee Hall rocking chairs answering
traditional on the valley-side porch.
The lower pasture of its second,
paradisal Eden fell back to being
just another exit before Bat Cave.

To stand on the open field
with the old tobacco barn
that never dried leaves, only paint,
speaks the difference between rhododendron
and mountain laurel: one
should never build a campfire
without telling them apart.
Is an uncured branch still poisonous without geography?
Departure means a separation from vitality.

III.
Black ink traces a communicative edge.
It is right to resist declension narratives,
it is just that location is never where we left it.

IV.
What the map can’t tell:
The time of year the night is as hot as the day.
That a bobcat’s cry sounds like a human baby.
How mating love bugs resemble Chinook helicopters.
Why redbuds bloom before dogwoods, and which is prettier.
Which granite face eroded to make this creek sand.
How to pedal past a timber rattlesnake.
Why dance moves look like domestic chores.
That when getting off a plane in sandals, humidity affects the feet first.

Tricks a Girl Can Do

Hannah Maynard (1834-1918) was a Canadian photographer who
created surreal images after the death of her daughter; she was a proto-surrealist.

I will hang myself in picture frames
in drawing rooms where grief
is not allowed a wicker chair

then grimace back at this facade
from umbrella eyes
under a cage of silver hair.

Look! I’ve learned to slice myself in three
to sit politely at the table
with ginger punch and teacake;

offer thin-lipped graves
of pleasantries.I develop myself
in the pharmacist’s chemicals

three women I’m loathe to understand—
presences I sometimes cajole
into modern light and shadow;

we culminate in a gelatin scene—
a daughter birthed from a spiral shell,
a keyhole tall enough to strut through.

Endless Forms, More Beautiful

After a multiple exposure self-portrait of Hannah Maynard, c. 1894

So she keeps her herringbone hands busy with teacups and white flowers
and murmurs to no one what she will create. No nephew sawed in half

will interest her today, no devoted husband measuring buttes
but a suitcase of her own bright follies. The living room pulses on

and off with gunpowder expertly fitted for her flash. Or perhaps
the room becomes a kind of snowbound mausoleum exhibiting her grief

one winter afternoon. (It’s quite impossible to know but let’s presume.)
No more inner voices to wake her from sleep, no more fussy wives

who arrive with meat pies and then hurry their bosoms home
to living daughters. In the frame, Hannahs stand here, sit there, bend over

to brush a bouquet of lilies from other Hannah’s hair.
From house left and then house right solitary Hannahs float like smoke

rings into me. I should have known —the artful dodge, her concentric days,
unwavering dark-sky stare—recognized my own pathology.

Strange Symmetry of Past, of Present

after a self-portrait set in a keyhole: late 1890’s

Actually, the past does slip forward
through a keyhole,

alive, feeding on our half-
recounted facts and figures,

penny-farthing bicycles and pancake
breakfasts annually eaten.

How we learn to study it
in private (the past)

like reading the phrasing
of rare birds or fisherman

sweaters or scat; to unlock
the world in retrospect —

a human kind of heaven.

Take photography, for instance.
Here the 19^th century returns

as Hannah poses herself
in crisp black and white;

she’s made a negative space
on the threshold of a life-

sized paper cut-out: keyhole
fit for the movie sets

of Orson Welles (well before
Orson was born).

Her figure stands neither in
nor out of the century but floats.

She’s her own avant-garde parade

a riddle, amulet, sunflower seed;
comic, crazy, genius woman

finding the multiplicity of things —

patterns of desire across a face:
two dead daughters, ghost light, and similar fates.

The Tangible, Intangible

after a photograph by Hannah Maynard
on the death of her child, c. 1884

Afterwards, she surveys the site:
the jostled cups, a buffalo rug
faded burlap of bookcase

overstuffed with tromp l’oeil painted spines.

The sound of the photograph
would be island rain
and the animal cry of the child gone—

In the darkroom she works alone

cajoles waterfalls, brings to light
the floating picture frame,
the doily’s difficult knowledge —

Commonplace days she survives
with a mirror trick, a few glass plates
that echo don’t let go; let go.

Hannah, Decanter, and Cloud

~self portrait at 74

Age is still decanters on the table
the size of small chandeliers
or cloud foam. You, remember,
are the one that is unmade
as of yet, unknown. Medium
merely to an image, a woman

studio-posed. Self-portrait
developed for the afterlife—
our ticker-tape world

of tableaus and combs
circling on. And. Then. Somehow
your barnacled vessel
lit from within like a carriage
clock or sea-washed amber stones.
Have you been taken?

the Victorians inquired; from flesh
into silver salts, into gaslight paper
or gold? Everyone becoming older.

Your gaze darts forward, lifts
beyond the mayor’s clapperboard
home, the dead dove, the séance, the bones.
One unknowable instant—
even as the aperture quietly
holds, even as the light

decants over gloved hands
that turn into clouds.
Don’t tell me this is only a story.

Tell me there’s more to our lives
than jigsaws and doorknobs,
more than tumbleweed, sediment or sex.
We live for the tunnel, the years signatured
together into the surreal, for our art
imperfect and striving.

On Finding the Earliest Known Poem by John Rollin Ridge, the First Native American Novelist

I sometimes think that I could recognize John Rollin Ridge’s voice anywhere. Considering he died in 1867—a widely hated California Copperhead newspaper editor, and the exiled scion of a once-powerful Cherokee family—this feeling is a bit uncanny. But, as many readers of Common-place can probably attest, spending a great deal of time with the work of a particular writer has the effect of rendering him familiar as an old friend. One grows accustomed to his repeated patterns of thought, his recurring metaphors, until finally one is able to recognize the writer’s voice as easily as that of a remembered classmate heard from across a crowded room. And it was this voice—by turns bombastic and anxious, deeply Christian and yet infused with the rhetoric of Romantic transcendence—that I recognized while flipping through a copy of the Arkansas State Gazette in the American Antiquarian Society’s reading room last January.

If John Rollin Ridge is familiar at all today, it is likely as the author of The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the first novel written by a Native American. Yet Ridge was a journalist for most of his career, and wrote throughout his life. I was visiting AAS to research Ridge’s California newspaper editorials from the 1850s for a dissertation chapter dealing with Mexican resistance in California after the Mexican-American War. On a lark, I thought I might take a look at a few of the local newspapers from places where Ridge lived during his teenage years. I didn’t expect to find much, but there it was: a previously unknown poem by a very young John Rollin Ridge, titled “To a Thunder Cloud.” It was even signed with Ridge’s pen name, Yellow Bird—an English translation of his Cherokee name, Cheesquatalawny. Even without the byline, though, I would have recognized that voice—dramatic, sing-song, redolent of violence—just about anywhere.

What was more, the poem appeared to be Ridge’s earliest extant publication. Appended to the text was a composition date of November 1846, when Ridge was only nineteen. That date was earlier than any other known Ridge poem, including those that exist only in manuscript form. Scholars have had a hazy awareness that Ridge wrote poetry as a young man (biographer James W. Parins refers to, but does not identify, “several … poems, published under the pen name Yellowbird”), but much of this writing remains undiscovered. His earliest identified poem, “To a Mockingbird,” was composed in May 1847, seven months after the composition of “To a Thunder Cloud,” and not published until years later.

Much of this early poetry strikes readers as derivative and unconnected to Ridge’s later complex politics. Take “Mockingbird,” for example. The speaker of this poem addresses the bird of the title, which sits on a high perch. Below, human beings suffer. Above, the bird watches. Does the bird empathize with suffering people, the speaker wants to know, or does it instead exist in an immortal realm of “living thought,” far removed from human concerns? Considering that another name for the Northern Mockingbird is the American Nightingale, it is perhaps unsurprising that the poem is reminiscent of John Keats’s more famous ode, which also links birdsong to immortality. But Ridge’s “Thunder Cloud,” it seemed, was inflected by the politics of the moment, and in ways that revealed the political dimensions of his other poems, like “Mockingbird.” In order to explain, I’ll have to back up.

Although Ridge was occasionally composing poems in a Romantic mode by 1847, writing had not been his primary concern. The twenty-year-old’s life had been lived at the center of a political maelstrom. At the age of twelve he watched a gang of assassins brutally murder his father just outside the family home. This murder was the culmination of a conflict that had gone on for nearly a decade. Just prior to the elder Ridge’s death, there had been two Cherokee nations—one bordering Georgia and another just across the western border of Arkansas. The state government of Georgia, however, coveted the lands of the eastern Cherokee nation. White settlers had, over the years, attempted to seize portions of it. This resulted in a power struggle within the eastern Cherokee nation itself. On one side stood the Ridge family and their allies, who believed the eastern nation would eventually be lost and therefore supported a plan to sell it entirely in exchange for millions of dollars and lands in the West. Some compensation for this loss, they reasoned, would be better than nothing. On the other side were the supporters of John Ross, who wanted to stay and fight for their ancient rights.

In 1835, Rollin Ridge’s father, John Ridge, signed the Treaty of New Echota, selling the entire eastern Cherokee nation in exchange for lands in the West and financial compensation to be distributed among the Cherokee people. This led to the infamous 1838 Trail of Tears—the militarily enforced expulsion of the Cherokee people from their nation in the east. Thousands died. From John Ridge’s perspective, removal was the only option. He once compared it to the Exodus: a long march from slavery to freedom. But to John Ridge’s enemies, the treaty and removal constituted a betrayal. And so, in 1839, supporters of John Ross surrounded the Ridge family’s new settlement at Honey Creek, in the western Cherokee nation. They dragged John Ridge from his home and stabbed him twenty-nine times, killing him. Fearing for their lives, the surviving members of the Ridge household left for Arkansas a week later.

The conflict within the Cherokee nation continued during John Rollin Ridge’s teenage years, which he spent exiled in Arkansas. By 1845, the long-simmering feud between the “Treaty Party” (as the Ridge family and their allies came to be known) and the more powerful John Ross faction had broken out into widespread, sectarian violence. Ridge’s biographer, James W. Parins, writes that we simply cannot know the degree to which the teenage John Rollin Ridge participated in or was affected by the violence marking this period of his life. What is clear, however, is that he wanted to be involved in some way. Ridge formed inchoate plans to murder John Ross. He wrote a letter to a cousin asking for a Bowie knife. He praised the guerrilla tactics of an anti-Ross fighter. When the United States government brokered a peaceful settlement to the violence in 1846, and ratified this settlement in August of that year, it marked an end, at least temporarily, to the fighting. But Ridge’s letters from this period suggest that his mission to restore his family’s position—and not his goal of becoming a poet and author—remained foremost in his mind.

And this restoration was precisely what Ridge set about accomplishing. He received reparations for his father’s murder, as specified by the August 1846 treaty. He purchased the family farm at Honey Creek, near the Cherokee-Missouri border, which his mother had been forced to flee with her children nearly eight years before. And, in May 1847—the same month he wrote “To a Mockingbird”—Ridge married Elizabeth Wilson.

But the Cherokee nation was still riven by conflict. In 1849 Ridge murdered David Kell, a pro-Ross judge. (There is some evidence that Kell stole one of Ridge’s stallions and castrated it in order to provoke a fight that would enable him to justifiably murder the heir-apparent to a marginalized but still threatening political faction. If this was Kell’s plan, it proved to be something less than a complete success.) After this, the young poet was forced into exile, first in Missouri and then in California. It was then that he began to write professionally. At first he published articles about the California Gold Rush in newspapers and periodicals. Then, in 1854, Ridge published his first and only novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, a bacchanal of political violence set in U.S.-controlled California.

Or so goes the conventional account of Ridge’s writing. But the text before me pushed the timeline of Ridge’s authorship back by nearly a year. The poem I had encountered in the Arkansas State Gazette, “To a Thunder Cloud,” had been published on January 9, 1847. More importantly, it was dated November 30, 1846. I was looking at an example of Ridge’s poetry written not around the time of his marriage, but much earlier—only a few months after the U.S.-government brokered settlement between warring Cherokee factions.

And the poem was written in that recognizably bombastic Ridge style. Organized into two stanzas, made up of four and six tercets, respectively, the poem reveals a steely-eyed speaker unafraid of violence, death, or upheaval. Ridge begins by addressing the thunder cloud of the title:

Thou deep, black cloud, boom on, aye boom!
Thy utmost terrors—let them loom
To shroud the Earth in august gloom!
The body’s knell thy sound may toll,
But not the death of man’s high soul.

The speaker’s address offers a challenge to a malevolent natural order. Even the weather in the world of Ridge’s poem is dangerous, looming overhead with its “utmost terrors,” shrouding “the Earth in august gloom,” and tolling a grim, funereal knell. From any other nineteen-year-old poet, we might read the talk of death as merely imitative Romanticism—all that chiaroscuro, those picturesque shades of darkness and light. And yet Ridge’s early life had been defined by violence: the death of his father, the sectarian bloodshed in the Cherokee nation, and the senseless brutality of the Arkansas frontier, where, Ridge once wrote to an acquaintance, “the people sometimes fight with knives and pistols, and some men have been killed here, but the people do not seem to mind it much.”

And yet the text isn’t only inflected with Ridge’s violent past. It is also heavily invested in a transcendent individuality. In addressing the thunder, the poem valorizes the unique power of an individual to confront a terrifying natural order. Ridge begins the second stanza:

Then boom thou on!—I fear thee not;
My name by men may be forgot,
My works in cold neglect may rot,
But I have now a burning fire
Whose flame is lit with wild desire,
Which cannot by thy doom expire!
Go! Sound the fall of kingdoms’ crown,
Of nations crushed and trodden down,
Of grandeur cast, of pride o’er-thrown;
Go! Sound thy deep-toned trump for worlds
That God in Heav’n to ruin hurls,
But all in vain thy tempest whirls
Around my brow, around my head!
Beyond, above thy threatening dread
My spirit’s home is fadeless spread!

There’s a lot here. Ridge’s speaker resolves to accept the vicissitudes of fortune, and yet this acceptance is a screen for his defiance. Yes, he suggests, history may forget him and his works—all that as-yet-unwritten literature. But, despite this, he will struggle on. Ridge’s writing career would in fact be consumed by considerations of doomed struggle, particularly in the form of revolutionary bloodshed. His novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, considers a band of Mexican war veterans who wage a brutal conflict with white Americans, including U.S. soldiers. And Ridge’s newspaper editorials, written in later years, equivocate about the U.S. Civil War by nominally defending the Union but nonetheless heaping criticism on President Lincoln and acknowledging the South’s right of rebellion. The revolutionary perspective that defines these later texts is radically articulated even here, in a sing-song poem Ridge wrote when he was still a teenager. Acts of resistance, he suggests, are not to be measured by their potential for success. Kingdoms fall. Nations are crushed. And powerful factions—with their “grandeur” and their “pride”—are usurped. But the poem’s speaker remains undaunted. Victory is less important, in this worldview, than fearlessness.

But, perhaps most interestingly, the poem offers a pair of interwoven beliefs animating this fearlessness. It ultimately argues that these powerful, natural forces remain ineffectual because a Christian God holds out a redemptive promise of salvation and grace. This perspective would remain with Ridge throughout much of his writing career, although it appears in no more than a few traces in his novel. But lurking behind this conventional message of Christian salvation is a veneration of the individual. Ridge’s poem is brash in its defiance of impossible odds. He writes: “E’en, if thou wert the smoke of Hell, | My pride thy roaring could not quell—.” And while he ends on a final note of salvation (“Eternity! with thee I dwell”), the poet nonetheless has given us a speaker who fears nothing—not the natural world, not the fall of nations, not “the smoke of Hell” itself. Ostensibly, it is his faith in salvation that gives him this strength—it is the “Eternity” of the final line. And yet, in the preceding line, Ridge provides another explanation: “pride,” which the thunder’s “roaring could not quell.” The speaker finds strength both in his faith and, more blasphemously, in his own pridefulness.

Ridge’s poem, one might suspect, articulates his ambivalence about the new political order. It could also serve as a message to his enemies that he does not fear them.

Coming just a few short months after a treaty ostensibly settling the differences between warring Cherokee factions, Ridge’s poem, one might suspect, articulates his ambivalence about the new political order. It could also serve as a message to his enemies that he does not fear them. In late 1846 and early 1847, Ridge was putting into motion his return to the Cherokee nation: collecting reparations, re-purchasing the family settlement, moving into his family’s former home. Dated in late 1846, then, the poem becomes extraordinarily suggestive. If the poet does not fear the “smoke of Hell,” it is unlikely that he fears John Ross.

Ridge never stopped writing poetry. Yet during his lifetime he was known more as a Democratic newspaper editor than as a literary figure. Even his brief attempt to fashion himself as a novelist failed financially. After his death, his widow arranged for the publication of his collected poems. In an unsigned Preface, possibly written by Elizabeth Wilson Ridge herself, we learn that “Mr. Ridge lost in the excitement of political life his youthful ambition for literary fame.” The posthumous collection was an attempt to restore Ridge’s significance as a poet (the praise of the “Eastern … press” gets a mention), as well as to generate money for his widow. Interestingly, though, the collection does not include “To a Thunder Cloud,” either because the poem was lost or because it did not conform to the apolitical, literary version of John Rollin Ridge put forward by the preface.

The collection sold poorly, in any case, and Ridge was largely forgotten for over a century. In a 1979 article in MELUS, Thomas King identified Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta as the first novel by a Native American writer, and in 1990 Ridge’s writing was included in the Heath Anthology of American Literature. After that, interest in Ridge developed in more significant ways. Today, scholars like John Carlos Rowe and Mark Rifkin have done excellent work on Ridge, particularly in reconsidering his first and only novel. Despite this, there is much more to do. No complete scholarly collection of Ridge’s writing exists, and most of his prose remains scattered in nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals from Arkansas to Texas to California, many of them un-digitized. For nearly a century, Ridge’s prediction that his “works in cold neglect may rot” seemed to have come to pass. Now, however, his voice—in all its bombast—is re-emerging.

Further Reading

While Ridge’s complete writings are not yet collected, his novel and many of the articles and poems he wrote throughout his life are available in print. See John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, ed. Joseph Henry Jackson (Norman, Okla., 1955); John Rollin Ridge, Poems (San Francisco, 1868); John Rollin Ridge, A Trumpet of Our Own: Yellow Bird’s Essays on the North American Indian, eds. David Farmer and Rennard Strickland (San Francisco, 1981); and Edward Everett Dale and Gaston Litton, eds.Cherokee Cavaliers: Forty Years of Cherokee History as Told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot Family, (Norman, Okla., and London, 1995).

The original manuscript of Ridge’s “To a Mockingbird” is housed in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. A published version can be found in Ridge’s posthumous collection, Poems, from 1868. For the poem considered at length here, see Yellow Bird, “To a Thunder Cloud,” Arkansas State Gazette 9:2 (January 1847).

For a biography of Ridge, see James W. Parins, John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works. (Lincoln, Neb., and London, 2004).

For the establishment of Ridge as the first Native American novelist, see Thomas King, “Additions to ‘A Bibliography of Native Novels.'” MELUS 6:4 (1979): 79.

For recent scholarship on Ridge, see especially John Carlos Rowe, “Highway Robbery: ‘Indian Removal,’ the Mexican-American War, and American Identity in The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta,” NOVEL 31:2 (1998): 149-173; Jesse Alemán, “Assimilation and the Decapitated Body Politic in The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta,” Arizona Quarterly 60:1 (2004): 71-98; and Mark Rifkin, “For the wrongs of our poor bleeding country’: Sensation, Class, and Empire in Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta,” Arizona Quarterly 65:2 (2009): 27-56.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.4 (Summer, 2014).

Gordon Fraser is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Connecticut. Last January, he held a Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. His scholarship has appeared in NOVEL, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, The Henry James Review, and Victorian Literature and Culture. His dissertation, “American Cosmologies: Race and Revolution in the Nineteenth Century,” deals with the literatures of revolutionary violence across the long nineteenth century, from Black Nationalism to Cherokee Nationalism to the Hawaiian independence movement. He is currently a Draper Dissertation Fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.

Indigenous and Atlantic Histories

Common-place sits down with Brett H. Rushforth to discuss his 2012 book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, and the challenges of integrating Atlantic history, Native history, and continental history.

The enslavement of Native Americans in Canada is not usually high on the list of topics in early American and Atlantic history, or even the history of slavery. What led you to tell this particular story?

Between the 1660s and 1760s, the colonists of New France held thousands of American Indians as slaves, perhaps as many as ten thousand over the course of the century in a relatively small colony. Targeting hundreds of distinct Native peoples, the slave trade that supplied the colony reached across vast spans of geography, from Plains Apache villages on the southwestern Plains, to Sioux settlements in modern Minnesota, through Fox and Sauk communities near the Great Lakes, and into the St. Lawrence Valley. Enslaved Natives lived in every major settlement in New France, and many were shipped to French islands in the Caribbean. Unlike most North American colonies, in New France enslaved Indians remained the predominant form of unfree labor throughout the eighteenth century. Given the extent and scale of this slave system—and how profoundly it shaped both French-Native relations and social life in the St. Lawrence Valley—it is less remarkable that I stumbled onto the topic than that so little had been written about it before.

My initial question was fairly straightforward. I knew that French fur traders were relatively successful at forming alliances with Native peoples: they lived in Native villages, learned Native languages, and developed long-term intimate relationships with Native women. These bonds, mostly forged for the purposes of trade, also translated into important military alliances that protected the people of New France from their much more numerous British colonial neighbors. Yet French colonists also held a significant number of Indians as slaves. Bonds of Alliance began as a dissertation studying the nexus of these two colonial dynamics, assessing the relationship between alliance and slavery in French-Native relations.

Although I did not realize it at first, this question forced me into a simultaneous exploration of two worlds that had been discussed more or less separately in earlier scholarship. Until very recently, historians of New France, like those studying other North American colonies, tended to focus either on colonial settlements and their Atlantic ties, or on the history of European-Native relations, but rarely both together. This made the slave trade hard to see because in each context only a small piece of the system was visible. Social historians came across enslaved Natives a few at a time in judicial, notarial, or Catholic parish records: a handful of Fox teenagers growing hemp, a few Sioux children working as domestics, and a string of individuals vaguely identified as “Panis/Pany” washing laundry or loading boats. Scholars of French-Native relations read Fox and Sioux complaints about French-sponsored slave raids. But it was impossible to evaluate the significance of these fragments in isolation. My starting question forced me to cross the usual regional divides because answering it required me to look at both French colonial towns and French-Native interactions. I had to search for enslaved people in the baptismal and burial records, notarized contracts and inventories, court dossiers, and institutional papers that had provided such rich material for social histories of the St. Lawrence Valley. But I also had to search for evidence of the slave trade in the official correspondence, missionary letters, and travel accounts that informed studies of Native history. Over time I began to see connections between shifting slave populations in French settlements and shifting geopolitics in the western region the French called the pays d’en haut (“the upper country,” roughly the western Great Lakes and upper Mississippi Valley). It also became clear that these connections spilled into the Atlantic. French ideas about the Niger River Valley influenced their reading of the Platte River Valley. Martinique’s struggle to get African slaves during Saint Domingue’s sugar boom facilitated slaving raids on the Great Plains. Freedom suits by enslaved Africans in Paris emboldened enslaved Indians in Montreal.

Although Atlantic and continental approaches to early America overlap in important ways, Atlantic histories have tended to overlook the centrality of American Indians to the shaping of colonial development, while continental histories have often underestimated the degree to which Europe and Africa influenced interior North America. As long as Native history is treated as a separate field of study, Native peoples will likely remain marginal to serious discussion of “colonial America,” absurd as it might seem to discuss settler colonialism without accounting for the people who lived in the areas being colonized. Bonds of Alliance links these two approaches, developing indigenous and Atlantic contexts with equal attention. By demonstrating the connections, and not just the distinctions, between these two worlds, I hope my work will inspire others to develop new ways of understanding early modern colonialism by fully reckoning with Native peoples as influential actors in the Atlantic world.

One of the key distinctions you make is between the process of enslavement and the status of being a slave. Why was that so central to your argument?

Slavery has taken so many forms throughout human history that historians, anthropologists, and sociologists scarcely know how to define it. That is why some of the most important works on comparative slavery center on the narrow question: what is slavery? Many of these studies—most notably Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death and Claude Meillasseux’s Anthropologie de l’esclavage (The Anthropology of Slavery)—respond to this question by searching for abstract analytic frameworks that make slavery more universally comprehensible. Slavery, they insist, is X but not Y; it has these attributes but not those. Recognizing the wide variety of societies that practiced slavery, the goal of these works is to filter out the extraneous particulars in order to identify common denominators that define the essence of a complex and evolving institution.

Bonds of Alliance takes nearly the opposite approach, reconstructing slavery within its specific cultural, legal, economic, and political contexts rather than reducing it to a set of common characteristics. The Latin term for slave, famulus/famula, nicely captures slavery’s historical connection to other institutions that regulate intimate expressions of power. And like many of those institutions—family, household, and property, for example—the meaning of slavery varied significantly across time and space. As I began this book, it seemed much more interesting and useful to emphasize particularity over commonality, to recreate (to the extent possible) the specific ways that people conceived of and attempted to shape the role of enslaved people within their communities. My approach was most influenced by an article I read during my second year of graduate school, written by James Watson, a historian of China. As he explains, slavery is best understood in relation to other institutions and statuses within a given society rather than in relation to slavery in other societies. “The relationship characterized by slavery is by no means universal,” he argues, “but it is ‘special’ in the sense that, wherever and whenever it appears, slavery isdistinguishable from other forms of exploitation in the same society.”

As I worked to understand the particular expressions of slavery in both the Native communities of the pays d’en haut and the French communities of the Mediterranean and Caribbean, I was struck by just how different the logic of the two systems seemed to be. The usual commonalities were there: the violent alienation of outsiders, persons being owned like property, captive labor performing various tasks for another person or household. But, while slavery stood apart from other forms of subordination in each society, its essential purpose was quite different in Native and French minds.

One of the most marked of these differences was how each group understood enslavement: the process of making someone a slave. For Native people, enslavement was the most important aspect of slavery, really its central purpose. Subordinating enemies demonstrated the slavers’ strength and, they believed, captured the power of the victims. But the intent was not to create a perpetual underclass to labor for the captors. Instead, slavery in the indigenous pays d’en haut was incorporative, drawing outsiders in through a process of forced assimilation. Native people thus spent very little energy policing pathways out of slavery, and in many ways they encouraged such journeys, because the more an outsider assimilated, the more fully the purpose of enslavement would be realized.

French slavery, on the other hand, focused on perpetuating slaves’ status, keeping them in bondage as long as possible so they could work to produce sellable commodities like tobacco and sugar. Unlike their indigenous counterparts, French thinkers drew a strict legal and moral distinction between the act of enslavement and the institution of slavery. To their minds, enslavement was so complete as to effectively end the life of the captive, and the captor’s choice to spare the victim’s life granted him unrestricted ownership of the spared captive. Rather than focus on entries into slavery, then, French efforts centered on closing down pathways out of slavery. This often meant creating narratives of exclusion that made it difficult for former slaves to assimilate into colonial society. It also facilitated a legally plural empire in which enslavement, slavery, and the merchant activities that depended on both could operate in separate legal spheres—insulating Caribbean planters from continental critiques of West African slaving and French sugar merchants from the moral hazards of profiting from slave labor.

When these two very different ways of understanding slavery came into prolonged conversation in the North American slave trade, their divergent approaches to enslavement became both a point of conflict and a site of creative adaptation. The French would have preferred, for example, to obscure the ethnic identity of captives and to ignore the circumstances of their capture. This made little sense to their Native allies, for whom the identity of their captives and the means of their subordination were of central importance. Similar tensions emerged over questions of how permanent and inescapable slave status should be, including what happened to enslaved enemies when their people reconciled and formed alliances with their Native captors or their French owners. Enslavement, then, provides a useful window onto both the cultural differences separating French and Native slaveries and the adaptations and innovations that grew out of their encounter.

The second chapter stands out in Bonds of Alliance because it is primarily an intellectual history of French ideas about slavery in the Caribbean. When in the process of writing the book did you decide that you needed such a chapter, and can you expand a bit on the role of the Caribbean ideologically in Canadian slave practices?

Chapter 2 (“The Most Ignoble and Scandalous Kind of Subjection”) draws its title from the writings of the seventeenth-century legal philosopher Hugo Grotius, whose 1626 book De jure belli et pacis (The Rights of War and Peace) both reflected and shaped French approaches to slavery. I had initially meant for this chapter to be a brief synthesis of existing literature on the emergence of slavery in the French Atlantic world. As it turned out, relatively little work had explored the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century origins of French slavery, and most work focused on the later eighteenth century. So I had to piece the narrative together using a wide range of manuscript and printed primary sources in French and Caribbean archives.

The story that emerged centers on how French laws and institutions responded to a resurgence of slavery in the sixteenth century in the Iberian Atlantic and, more urgently, in North Africa where thousands of French captives labored as slaves themselves. So there is a fair amount of legal history, including some purely intellectual history, in this early discussion of French slavery. But those ideas are not legible outside their social context, which is why much of the chapter focuses on the lived realities of slavery in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French world.

A related question would be to ask why it seems natural to characterize the study of European (but not Native American) ideas about slavery as “intellectual history.” The book’s first two chapters ask essentially the same questions of two different communities, exploring how each of them understood, explained, and practiced slavery in the decades preceding their North American encounter. Yet I think many, and possibly most, readers will draw a similar distinction between the two because of the sources on which they are based. I would hope no one believes that only Europeans had ideas about slavery (while Indians had timeless, unthinking traditions). Yet it would be hard to dispute that analyzing Algonquian insults (“I lift up her breechcloth, treat her like a slave,” “[you are a] slave woman’s worthless penis”) feels quite different than reading Grotius. But as Michèle Duchet, Laurent Dubois, and Hilary Beckles have argued, we should not allow the scarcity of surviving sources to persuade us that non-Europeans existed, in Beckles’s words, “in an atheoretical world which was devoid of ideas.” Instead, our challenge is to find creative ways to see ideas where they can be seen, whether they were printed on a page or expressed in a ritual feast. Despite having access to quite different source bases, I have tried to take the ideas of each group seriously, and to see how they fit within a social world where slavery was only one of many subordinate statuses.

You argue that the slave trade empowered France’s Indian allies in such a way that they were able to thwart French territorial expansion in the interior for decades. Can you explain how that process worked?

The North American slave trade did not operate with European aggressors on one side and victimized Indians on the other. Native peoples participated in the slave trade and often determined its contours to suit their evolving interests. Initially, slaves passed from Native to French hands in small-scale diplomatic ceremonies, where captive enemies were given as gifts to create or affirm alliances. Offering a captive to an ally signaled the giver’s strength and enjoined the receiver to accept the victim’s people as a shared enemy. The Native peoples of the pays d’en haut used slavery as a way to assert their vision of alliance with colonial newcomers. By raiding a neighbor, then giving or selling the captives to the French, they marked the victims as outsiders and asked the French to do the same. When these raids succeeded—and they often did—they profoundly limited French options as they tried to extend their colonial reach.

For example, when French traders started moving into Sioux country in earnest around the beginning of the eighteenth century, their allies (who were at war with the Sioux) felt betrayed, fearing the strength the Sioux would draw from European weapons. French traders, they complained, “were carrying aid to their enemies.” For the next four decades, each time French traders reached into Sioux country, their efforts were thwarted by strategic slave raiding that targeted Sioux villages and then sold the slaves to French buyers. Slave raids disrupted trade in the short term, and French colonists holding Sioux slaves predictably hurt longer-term efforts to develop a French-Sioux alliance.

Perhaps the best example of this occurred in 1742. After months of negotiations, a French trader convinced a large number of Sioux that the French could stop the slave raids and mediate a peace between them and their French-allied enemies. When Sioux delegates made the long trip to Montreal to formalize this relationship, they found Sioux children working as slaves in French households. Angry at this obvious evidence of French duplicity, the Sioux delegation left Montreal without concluding an agreement, forcing French traders out of Sioux country for the third time in as many decades. The success of this strategy allowed New France’s Native allies to use the French demand for slaves as a weapon against French westward expansion, blocking attempted alliances west of the Mississippi River that would have drawn the French far deeper into the North American interior.

One of the key concepts over the past twenty years for understanding Native-French interactions in the interior, or pays d’en haut, has been Richard White’s “middle ground.” It seems in Bonds of Alliance that you seek not only to revise the concept but also to transcend it (you cite White frequently, but rarely if ever use the phrase in your text). How did you come to decide to frame the book in that way?

Richard White’s The Middle Ground is an extraordinarily insightful book and has deservedly become one of the classics of twentieth-century American historiography. It would be difficult to overstate the book’s significance in reorienting how historians discuss cultural encounters in early America, and French-Native relations in particular. Above all, White powerfully demonstrated that early American cultural relations were not a zero-sum game between two fully separate entities, with colonizers either eroding Native cultures or failing to do so in the face of Native resistance. In much of North America, colonizers and Native people could only obtain their objectives by adapting to what they perceived to be the cultural expectations of the other. Over time, through thousands of small acts of accommodation, a new regional culture emerged that was neither fully Native nor European but a product of the colonial encounter. Bonds of Alliance follows this way of understanding colonial-Native relations, arguing that the Native slave trade itself was a product of exactly the kind of cultural adaptation and innovation that White had in mind. As I explain in the introduction, “Slavery reveals a somber dimension to cultural accommodation in the Pays d’en Haut, showing that its success was often founded on a shared commitment to violence. Yet even this violence was a product of mutual adaptation and produced new cultural forms that persisted for generations” (11).

However, I decided not to use the specific term “the middle ground” for two reasons. First, as a general rule I avoided all jargon or catch phrases that would mean something particular to scholars already familiar with them but that might be misread or not understood by students or general readers. Second, as White himself has noted, in the two decades since he published the book, the idea of “the middle ground” has taken on a life of its own, applied to such varied historical contexts that it has come to mean many things to many people. Rather than use a phrase carrying so much scholarly baggage, I chose to explain my interpretation on its own terms, leaving it to others to make what comparisons they found most useful.

Then, too, despite broad agreement on the general process of cultural encounter, Bonds of Allianceand The Middle Ground offer substantially different readings of certain historical dynamics that shaped French-Native relations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With over nine hundred pages of text between the two books, it would be impossible to explain every interpretive difference here. But there are several ways that, in my view, accounting for Native slavery invites a reconsideration of important aspects of both Native and French colonial histories. Ranging from the nature of the indigenous social world of the pays d’en haut to the forces checking French westward expansion, the slave trade provides a new lens through which to view questions that have interested scholars studying this region for decades. And because it linked the pays d’en haut to the broader dynamics of the early modern Atlantic, the Indian slave trade powerfully reveals that the Native people of the North American interior were simultaneously more connected to, and less overwhelmed by, early modern colonialism than previous studies have suggested.

Further reading:

For James Watson’s comments on understanding slavery, see “Slavery as an Institution,” in Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Berkeley, 1980): 1-15. On the question of definitions of slavery, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Claude Meillasseux, Anthropologie de l’esclavage: le ventre de fer et d’argent (Paris, 1986); Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31 (February 2006): 1-14. For further perspectives on Native American and European interactions, see Paul Cohen, “Was there an Amerindian Atlantic?: Reflections on the Limitations of a Historiographical Concept,” History of European Ideas 34 (2008): 388-410; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991).

When the old Plymouth lost its brakes
on the bridge’s far slope she didn’t say
a word, just shifted down to an empty lot,
stopped them short with the parking brake,
raised a hand to her lips, and smiled at him.

   Ten years later, when he’d drive her to market
or the clinic, and she’d say “Home, James”
in her amused, quavering voice, he’d recall
the flicker of triumph on her face that day,
as though she’d been modestly enjoying
what she’d have called pluck, what now
was letting her live out winters alone
beside the bay. She had a cheerful dignity,
humorous self-possession, and a streak
of unpredictable severity, but he could bear
her gentle admonitions, about speeding,
sex, seamanship—even her once saying
she hoped he wouldn’t always be an angry
young man. So he keeps yearning her back
across the lost waves, the old moraines,
longing, and fearing her arrival.

            She was interested
in history, (they were on the way
to Gilbert Stuart’s house the morning
the brakes failed), and so one summer
suggested he accompany his cousin
to the museum, near Philip’s last
stronghold on Monthaup, his people’s
summer home—a spring, the granite throne.
There they sorted moccasins, and built
a wigwam with a student of anthropology
from Brooklyn, a young bearded man
whose anger took an ironic, Marxist form.

The museum was near the bridge, minutes
from an estate where they learned tennis.
No wonder he had them pegged: no hope,
or worse, the first who would perish
in the revolution’s maw. In their whites
and sneakers they were helping make a story
out of items—that gentle catalogue of what’s
presumed an extinct way of life, recalled
as a romance by those who murdered it.
Arrowheads and spearpoints, wampum
and beads—that frail dome of saplings
and bark they struggled to lash up said more
about their habits than lost cultures, but their
lives depended on finishing that hut, upon
reading labeled items under glass, selected
and arranged like stones for a path the mind
might follow down to the waters…

*

   Mud became the shale the glacier
crushed to stones we heaved as
children by the hour into whitecaps,
to become the gravel becoming
the sand piling at the tidemark. Legend
says that with the Devil’s help, Philip
could throw a stone from Mount Hope
a mile across the harbor to Poppasquash…

   I would call her back, who passed
such history on to me. But I never
learned the faith she used to compose
past and future, that let old portrait
figures, villains, heroes, plain,
goodhearted sorts from several
centuries go about their lives
and works all at once in her mind,
as in some busy village Brueghel
painted. Now as the land she knew
is vanishing, her shadow comes
in me to belong somehow with Philip’s,
like contraries the mind feels
obliged to hold together—the strange
comfort of distinction made and
overcome at once…

            That is not your piping voice, not
your deliberate passage from the porch
to the kitchen, not your sigh heaved through me,
but it is, it isn’t merely a gust of southwest wind.
The cardinal in the big oak isn’t answering,
he is keening twice, then eight bunched,
rising whistles back to me, three times,
and then he adds cadenzas, until I cannot
say it back.

Cuppyaumen.

Pashpishea.

Mequaunamiinnea

Now you are there.

Moonrise.

Remember me.

Memory, no wish to be a hero
made Philip sayI am determined not
to live until I have no country.Even if
his scattered bones calcified beneath
this earth, no prayer, no spell, no
moonrise will bring the lost to voice.
Salt wind on our skin is not their touch.
Aloof and disappointed, they only seem
to wake in episodes of our making, beneath
the wind-ridden trees, the driven clouds.

            In her last years she wondered aloud
only whether she would recognize
her husband. I pretended to remember him
more clearly than the sharpest recollection
I have—clinging to his shoulders as
he swims toward a float. Could I reach
him, or even Philip in their afterworld,
I’d ask if they could locate her. And look
what I have done now, stranding her under
Matteson, in my life’s encyclopedia,
across from Metacomet, far from her William.
Surely someone who knew them both to love
will put this right. And I think she would
forgive me, having called me more than
once by her lost son’s name, dead suddenly
at about the age I was when she died.

Yes, I seek him rowing there among
a moonlit fleet of boats at anchor. There are so many
places to look.

            Mere associations
that’s all, dissolving from reverence to humor,
disappointing hope with common sense.
My ancestors read and read their holy
dictionary for signs of their god’s will;
the random verses they lit upon made
metaphors with practical results—
destinies, space for English names to creep
west across the blank, benighted maps.

The winters here are hard, the bright spaces of the snow as
smooth as vellum. Deerprints and sticks look like words I
cannot read, just at the dark edge of the forest.

Listen, poor shadow, whirled among
the cedars. The bell, whose bird-limed
clapper we held silent for five minutes
one moonlit wild night years ago,
the bell goes on, telling the channel passage
to the ships, searing the darkness white
an instant, clanging, clanging.

This is the passage through, the right of way,
all else is damnation, a wilderness of death.

   Now that you wander, I know why
you told us more than once of that
Longley cousin. Taken, after
witnessing the slaughter of his parents,
he begged his captors to let him
return, just to set his father’s cows to forage.
When he kept his promise and returned
to the tribe, they adopted him, and when years
later relatives redeemed him, the story goes
they had to bring him back by force. Claimed
by twenty stark Quebec seasons, he had
wandered, couldn’t return to ownership,
the stonewalled plots of Groton. He grew
old, of course, and well-to-do (why
his story survived), but I have always
wondered what became of his two
sisters, and if you trembled to think
of them, or envied how they really
must have come to know the countryside?

As we know it now. Disaforested, routed, claimed,
a prospect of some acquiring mind. The dead have always known
what they, what you have done.

Fear their smiling. I was a teller of
stories. I am a story now.
The living suppose the stories belong to them.

But you seemed to bless my reverence
for waves and stars and trees. Because
it was your nature to love kinships,
affinities, or just the apt and lovely names
of things, I thought you left mere causes
and effects to the sententious…

It is not as you suppose. I pass freely in the light between the worlds.
No one needs to hold the quahog shut, answer the bird, fasten the blossom
underneath the apple.
We can hear the sad improvisations inside the silent one, the snarl within
that one’s smile, all the threnodies of resignation, shame, desire,
but we cannot connect them, only listen.

When you spoke your hand would
undertake a gentle dance, fingers
tamp your thumb, drumming
syllables out upon a chair’s arm,
a table, your lap. When you lay
down beneath a shawl on the daybed
under the window, your eyes
would strangely drift and close
while you spoke, but your hand
would flutter up with remembrance,
as if in the chambers of the years
to choose, cherish, caress what those
chambers would contain.
Items.
Exhibits. Evidence. That way of taking
the world was old and well in New England,
brought here like the germs thrashing
inside the Pilgrims, before they were the land’s…
Exempla, symbols, wonders, the argot of god.
Divers Indian baskets filled with corn…

            Today, on the way to cross
the Mount Hope Bridge we paused
beside the old stone walls near the north end
of the road. Hooves that forever changed this
soil (trampling the maize of Satan’s children)
stamped in the clover, while my sons counted
the black, fly-tormented backs.
And I saw that all I can give to them
are curiosities, assembled under glass
or foggy legend: the sachem’s jawbone
Cotton Mather kept, the black stone Philip
hurled across the harbor, the brass button
he tore from the emissary’s coat, saying
this, this, is what your English religion
means to me, the Tyrian whorls inside
the quahog shell, the vile self-regard
of believers in the mirror of their faith,
the scalp’s hot, moist peeling from
forehead to nape, the word of twenty
natives valued as that of one who prayed,
the mourning dove’s doxology, the sachem’s
son, nine years old, spared, to be sold
in the Indies. Items. Dis-rememberment.

Poor shade, walker, old woman I loved,
gone now with all the lost, lost one, you
didn’t say this land you gave us once
belonged to Church, deeded him in
gratitude by the magistrates he saved
from the great, doleful, dirty, naked beast.

Their holy war came down to musket balls
and butchery, but the tale’s essence isn’t
cruelty, gross injustice, nor ferocious
piety. It’s how fitting was the payment
made to the one who betrayed the sachem’s
whereabouts to Church, and how he displayed
the wonder of it all around New England,
surviving on the coins he charged to view it.
And they didn’t fear it, all those avid
readers of signs and wonders…

   Now in my imagination a kindred
habit lives—gorging on remorseful
supposition, sometimes with the terror
of one holding closed a grievous wound,
it works at telling the world back whole
as it knew, beginning with the accidental
talismans, details that almost cohere,
but will not comfort. How naturally
it seemed to come to you, a dominion
I would covet if it still seemed possible—
whatever flower, bird, fish, or person
found dead or living, named, gathered in…

   whose bodiless curse would be a thousand
times more terrible than any word to me…
I cannot revive the song that water and wind
and your old house sang in me, nor
the sons you lost, the son I was when we
played evening checkers, your ancient,
waist length, wild hair, drying in firelight,
nor that terror when I found you waiting
up past midnight on the stairs, to warn me,
frighten me, look right through my after-
glowing rapture with some girl…
All I picture now
is your hand upon the tablecloth—
liver-spotted, translucent skin, the palm
pale, vulnerable, the fingers beating
gently beneath your words. Your hand.
And Philip’s hand, Metacomet’s stiff,
burled hand, cured in a pail of rum.

For liability purposes, it is the sea that will kill you.
—Pirate Captain, The Simpsons

“In the beginning was the land.” So states Charles Sellers’s classic look at antebellum American economic expansion, The Market Revolution (4). But to a swelling field of historians, the landlubber tradition in American history has led us to skip something quite fundamental: the sea. Maritime history has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, kindled in part by enthusiasm for global fields of study that examine the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceanic worlds. But we have been slower to appreciate that waterways have not simply served as conduits between distant lands, but were themselves sites of conflicts over labor, identity, and state formation.

In The Republic Afloat, Matthew Raffety uses violent encounters on merchant vessels in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War to suggest that it was on the water, not on land, that Americans settled key dimensions of federal governance and citizenship. Raffety contrasts his findings with Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s hydrarchy of revolutionary mariners in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. “Rather than the radical internationalists that some historians describe Atlantic seafarers as being in the eighteenth century,” he writes, “the crews of American antebellum vessels used the apparatuses of the legal system to press their case, to demand redress, and to assert their understandings of the privileges of manhood and citizenship” (212). Through their democratic appeals, sailors of early America built the state.

The book contains three sections: law, honor, and citizenship. The first is the meatiest of the three. Raffety contends that “maritime issues made up the bulk of the work of federal courts before the Civil War” (27), and that federal judges were at the forefront of this national reach. While the Constitution explicitly gave the federal judiciary oversight of “admiralty and maritime” issues, the Judiciary Act of 1789 suggested that this did not include common law cases (35). Here, in the regulation of shipboard crime, Congress and federal judges made what may have been their strongest stand in favor of a robust national government over a loose federation.

Thus Raffety points to an overarching trend of growing “federal paternalism toward seafarers” before the Civil War (44). Two acts of 1790 formed the early basis of federal authority over mariners, requiring ship registration, establishing parameters for shipboard governance, and defining the terms of sea-based crime. Yet these acts proved vague and insufficient. While the 1790 Crimes Act provided the legal basis for punishing offenses committed at sea, the legislation gave courts little flexibility in differentiating between work stoppages and mutiny, grumbling and violence, harsh masters and the criminally abusive. Over the years, Congress increasingly limited officers’ authority. In 1835, a new Crimes Act refined and strengthened the 1790 law and its 1825 revisions. The 1835 law curtailed officers’ prerogatives in using corporal punishment to discipline their crew—or at least acts deemed in “haste” or in “excess.” Finally, in 1850, even as the use of the lash waned, Congress banned flogging.

Of course, law differed from practice. Courts only limited punishments deemed cruel and unusual—not only those that were brutal, but also outside of the ordinary parameters of shipboard life. By using the weather or extreme chores, officers skirted liability. In the 1854 case of sixteen-year-old cabin boy Stephen Whatley, the captain of theHarvard kept the lad at the wheel for long hours until his hands and feet froze, inducing permanent disability. “Cruel and unusual punishment” often translated into overwork and deprivation of food, rest, or clothing rather than outright assault. Regular tars became increasingly conversant in legal rights even as they persisted in resorting to “forecastle law” and convention. Officers and sailors alike used travel to renegotiate their contracts: “Just as captains ‘encouraged’ men to jump ship (and by doing so, forfeit wages) in ports where seamen were cheap and plentiful, seamen exploited their advantage, either at sea or in ports where a shortage of qualified tars meant a more lucrative berth could be found with ease” (108). The book is at its best when delving into delicious troves of newspaper accounts and case law to consider how mariners and officers wrangled over acceptable working conditions at sea.

Section two pushes into the murkier realms of custom, masculinity, and honor. Chapters five and six take us from the forecastle to the quarterdeck, from mariners’ demands that “conventions of the sea mandated food and conditions above and beyond the legal minimums” to officers’ tenuous claims to “mastery” (109). As older status-based models of authority came under attack, the question was, which model of authority would prevail? While in the 1843 Somers case, Justice Peleg Sprague upheld a naval officer’s authority to serve as both judge and jury over his men, courts compared officers on merchant ships to parents, schoolmasters, and master craftsmen. For captains in particular, authority rested upon a precarious balance of navigational expertise and claims to elite status by virtue of their position. Raffety uses court and consular records, newspaper accounts, treatises, and literature to show officers and tars alike wielding shared discourses of honor and reputation as weapons that could be put to use abroad and at home.

The final section examines citizenship in the legal and cultural senses. Here we have the building not only of the state, but also the nation. What is an American? Who could lay claim to national protections? What defined the national character? Raffety offers the familiar argument that distance from home forced individuals to clarify definitions of nation and citizenship. While this is most in evidence in chapter eight’s history of how the impressment crisis in the years leading up to the War of 1812 provided a template for the passport system through Seamen’s Protection Certificates, Raffety also recounts the development of consuls as arbiters of American identity in chapter seven and discusses sailors as a staple of American literature and iconography in chapter nine.

The Republic Afloat is especially valuable as a contribution to the literature on American state formation. Raffety highlights three ways in which the maritime story diverges from narratives of American statelessness, like the invisible state depicted in Brian Balogh’s A Government Out of Sight, or even William Novak’s local and state-based “well-regulated society” in A People’s Welfare. First, Raffety argues that articulations of nationhood and federal power flourished throughAmerican maritime expansion. The 1835 law sparked a surge of criminal cases from sailors and officers, ultimately shifting the center of adjudication of sea-based crime “from the quarterdeck to the courtroom” (47). Second, federal judges handled offenses that on land would be reserved for state and local authorities. While states reformed penal codes in the 1820s and 1830s, representatives of the federal government outlined criminal offenses and regulated labor relations, within the marine context. And federal judges seemed more willing to intervene than their state-based counterparts. Finally, the 1790 legislation required ships to have articles—a contract establishing the terms of a voyage—and federal courts proved surprisingly willing to meddle in the enforcement of these contracts. Intentionally or no, sailors strengthened the federal government: “[S]eafarers’ rights became one of the first important tests of federal law, the federal courts, and a national identity. Because they pressed Congress to regulate their work environment, and the courts to delineate how those rulings would be applied, seamen prompted the machinery of the new nation for definitions and structure” (196).

Readers of Common-Place may well recall Gautham Rao’s 2008 article on early American marine hospitals as an initial example of public health care. Like Republic Afloat, Rao’s article points to a broader national willingness to support federal intervention by the early American public than is commonly acknowledged, albeit for specific populations. But why was judicial intervention acceptable for mariners, but not land-bound laborers? Raffety suggests that the international context of shipping and, above all, mariners’ status as wards of the state marked them as exceptional—more akin to children or slaves than other men (10). Thus, seamen helped to establish the federal apparatus, but within the distinctive context of admiralty law. Still, if this judicial activism was about a desired expansion of federal power, as suggested in chapter three, why was it so circumscribed? And was judicial paternalism on the rise? Raffety himself seems conflicted. In surveying New York federal court verdicts between 1835 and 1861, Raffety found that rulings tended to uphold officers’ prerogatives: sailors were more likely to be convicted for acting against officers than vice versa. Likewise, given that support for consular service vacillated depending on the presidential administration, how does the national political context influence the book’s broader narrative, especially given its focus on Massachusetts and New York?

Yet in shifting our attention from the land to the water, Raffety persuasively establishes the importance of America’s maritime tradition to the nation’s development. Raffety’s work reveals that “Jack Tar, American” did not disappear with the Congress of Vienna, but continued to be central to the nation and state well after 1815.

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle placed “spectacle” (opsis, that which is seen) dead last in importance among the six elements he listed as essential to drama when writing his Poetics, his notes on dramatic structure. Ever since, scholars and critics of the theater have maintained an uncomfortable relationship with stage spectacle, fearing that its very adoption arrives at the expense of thoughtful, verbal, literary content and, therefore, impedes theatrical performance from reaching some higher cultural purpose. Indeed, “most assume that spectacle’s main function is to decorate and amuse, or believe that it is a voracious vacuum,” Amy E. Hughes writes in Spectacles of Reform, “robbing us of our ability to think, feel, or act.” “But spectacle is rarely empty,” she argues, and throughout the mid-nineteenth century, the spectacles realized on the American melodramatic stage were overflowing with socially relevant, audience-activating messaging (166). Identifying and unpacking this previously unacknowledged freight is the mission of Hughes’s carefully researched, methodically wrought monograph.

As an interdisciplinary cultural history operating at the intersection of performance and print, Spectacles of Reform comprises at its core three chapter-long case studies that explore how visual images contributed to three nineteenth-century American reform movements: temperance, abolition, and women’s suffrage. Although the point of departure for each case study is a close reading of the so-called sensation scene—a scene of pumped-up emotional affect usually coupled with stagecraft designed to amaze—from a popular mid-century stage melodrama, the discussion is by no means limited to things theatrical. Print images in books and periodicals, on sheet music covers, stationery, and even decorative kitchenware, rise alongside their theatrical counterparts as Hughes examines their roles in both reflecting and shaping American public opinion on some of the country’s most pressing issues of the 1840s through the 1860s. Despite the author’s position as a scholar of theater history, her book is as much (if not more) about the conversations these plays’ spectacles provoked outside theater walls than it is about the responses and reactions elicited inside them, as the subtitle Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America suggests.

Hughes offers a preliminary chapter to orient the reader’s gaze upon the human body, which, she posits, can manifest itself as spectacle (in the case of societal and biological “freaks”), in spectacle (as performers within sensation scenes), and at spectacle (the audiences who behold the first two bodily varieties). Somewhat surprisingly, then, spectacular scenography—what is usually thought of as the primary vessel for melodrama’s spectacular excesses—arrives secondary in interest to what Hughes calls “exceptional bodies,” those that defy or exceed recognized social norms, in this study the drunkard, the fugitive slave, and the woman suffragist. Furthermore, Hughes argues that it is not melodrama’s manufactured distresses themselves (such as the archetypal oncoming locomotive) that make a scene “sensational,” but rather the presence of a “body in extremity” (the figure tied to the tracks in the path of the oncoming train) that creates a “rigorous stimulation of the senses” in the spectator (41). Therefore, it is the spectator’s bodily response to bodies in perceived danger—danger effected through spectacle’s affective jolt—that compelled melodrama’s original audiences to consider, or else to reconsider, the sociopolitical conditions of real-world bodies located outside the orbit of theatrical representation, and to alter their own personal behaviors in light of what they have seen.

The first case study centers on the “spectacular insanity” of the delirium tremens, a violent, hallucinatory fit, invoked frequently throughout the nineteenth century as a cautionary result of excessive alcohol consumption. Along the proverbial road to ruin, mapped out visually by socially conscious lithographers, the “DTs” (in the common shorthand) marked a mere step away from destitution, and a mere two steps from death. Though the condition was typically experienced as a private episode, plays like W.H. Smith’s pioneering temperance melodrama The Drunkard (1844) seized on the affliction’s inherent theatricality and provided audiences with dynamic public exhibitions of its alcohol-induced hysteria. Hughes underscores that such displays were often made all the more effective as tools for reform by dint of their performers’ own personal histories of alcoholic indulgence, which seemed to enhance their credibility. This was the case for Smith, who himself portrayed the drunkard he authored, as well as for John B. Gough, who famously slipped back into drink while touting abstinence in autobiographical “lectures” featuring dramatic recreations of his own DTs. Whereas most scholarship on temperance drama has tended to privilege the image of the reformed drunkard’s ultimate return to a “normal” state of bourgeois domesticity, Hughes intentionally focuses on the threat of the unreformed drunkard’s withering-away in the country’s newly formed insane asylums—of which she provides a brief social history.

Next Hughes considers the case of the fugitive slave, typified by the image of Eliza crossing the ice in several theatrical adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), including the best-known stage version, by George L. Aiken, which premiered only months after the novel’s publication. These plays’ varying melodramatic depictions of Eliza are made spectacular via the character’s “excess of potential,” explained as the surpassing of “racist, culturally constructed expectations of [her] innate abilities and proclivities” (23). And it is not the stage machinist’s realization of the Ohio River ice floes that makes the scene sensational, but rather the Eliza character’s precarious journey across them which does so. Assessing Stowe’s original construction of this episode as an artistic response to the Compromise of 1850 (legislation that toughened the Fugitive Slave Act, demanding the return of escaped slaves to the South even after they’d reached free Northern territories), Hughes reads in sensational renderings of it—both on stage and in print—the character’s fundamental transformation from being another person’s property to being an autonomous human being. The famous scene, therefore, offered a corrective to the period’s rampant dehumanization of fugitive slaves, frequently represented as chattel and reduced to stock typographical ornaments in print advertisements seeking their return.

The final chapter, at once the most ambitious and satisfying, finds its theatrical root in the sensation scene of playwright-impresario Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight (1867), the melodrama that inaugurated the trope of the railroad track rescue. Despite the seeming disconnect between railway accidents and gender politics, and her own caveat that the politics of the play “have been lost to us over time,” making them “harder to detect than those of the temperance play or abolitionist drama,” Hughes reads in this scene a timely exhibition of female potency (119). In Daly’s play, the gender roles now typically assigned to victim and savior are swapped: it is the strong-willed Laura Courtland who rescues a male Civil War veteran from the path of the speeding train, a daring subversion of expectations one year after Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded the American Equal Rights Association and one year before the implicit denial of women’s suffrage in the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the context of this historical moment, Hughes argues a dissenting critical perspective, that the liberal politics of the victim’s reaction to his deliverance (“And these are the women who ain’t to have the vote!”) and Laura’s excessive display of progressive traits (not the least of which being her ability to wield the masculine “American axe” during the sensational rescue) could not have gone unnoticed by the play’s original audiences. Women had proved to be an indispensable force in aiding the earlier temperance and abolition movements, but resistance to their right to vote held fast. And whereas most voting-rights plays of the era sought to cement the status quo, Hughes claims that the audacious visual spectacle of Daly’s pasteboard train provided a shock to the senses that allowed for the delivery of an alternative political message.

The author’s close readings, both of the melodramas themselves and of their related extratheatrical images, demonstrate an impressive ability to weave together remarkably heterogeneous archival materials into a fluid scholarly narrative, of interest well beyond theater history. Her explanatory and bibliographic notes alone (which make up a fifth of the book) make Spectacles of Reform an invaluable reference, as does its trove of thoughtfully selected images, pulled largely from the periodicals collections of the American Antiquarian Society and New York Historical Society. In the analysis, however, there lurks on occasion a tendency to suppose the political intent of dramatic moments that were influenced, no doubt, by a number of factors, making conclusory leaps that might be taken with more cautious footing. For instance, her reading of The Drunkard‘s inclusive final tableau—”that every American, despite personal failing and lapses in respectability, could rehabilitate and join the ranks of ordinary citizens once more”—is perhaps not inadmissible, but the the ensemble finale likely has as much, if not more, to do with plain old melodramatic stage conventions than with politics (65). To this point, it is sometimes more implied than explicated just how the social and political content located in these plays translates into direct real-world social or political action, leaving the subtitle’s promise of Theater and Activism more of a laying-out of the two side by side than an argument for the theater as a driving agent of reform.

Nevertheless, when Hughes lifts her gaze from the past to consider how the nineteenth century’s spectacular fascinations remain at work in our own spectacle-obsessed world of today—making, for example, an ingenious connection between the “freakish” bodies of The Octoroon (the racially charged Dion Boucicault melodrama from 1859) and the so-called Octomom (Nadya Suleman, who in 2009 gave birth to eight children in one pregnancy)—these reservations dissolve, and the project affords her entire subject refreshed relevance. American melodrama is so frequently relegated to the category of disposable, sub-literary entertainment that any attempt to treat it otherwise can feel like a de facto exercise in inconsequence. But by showing in transhistorical flashes how “the spectacular instant [that] offered producers, reformers, audiences, and consumers a unique opportunity to articulate ideas” still does (44), Hughes helps to close the temporal gap between her reader and the works she discusses, making the nineteenth-century popular American theater a little more relatable, a little more worthy of our attention. And that is no little achievement.