Swashbucklers, rogues, and scoundrels—the legacy of early modern sea rovers in popular culture has made piracy basically synonymous with villainy. Historian Douglas R. Burgess Jr., however, dusts off pirates’ tarnished reputations to make a much larger point about the nature of colonial legalities and imperial criminality in his new book. Spanning the end of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, The Politics of Piracy argues that American governors’ collusion with pirates represented a rupture in the legal and political relationship between England and its colonies. Pirates actively participated in the negotiation of Crown law and influenced the development of an American legal system distinct from that of England. By examining the reception of anti-piracy legislation in the colonies, Burgess reveals an English state too weak to stamp out piracy and a colonial system profiting heavily from the illicit activities of those same mariners. In fact, in Burgess’s telling, it was not until the popular perception of pirates in the colonies changed—due to the closing of the Red Sea as a hunting ground and their depredations occurring much closer to home—that the “war against pirates” experienced any success. This is Atlantic world history at its best and in the end, Burgess assembles an innovative and provocative take on the economic, political, social, and legal formation of England’s American colonies.

 If England defined pirates as outside of the law, but colonial administrators refused to see them as such, what did that mean for the creation of an English state that spanned the Atlantic?

First and foremost Burgess’s monograph uses piracy as a lens into the ways in which England and the colonies understood and enacted notions of law and authority. Nearly forty years ago, historian Charles Tilly argued that the act of defining criminal behavior served as a cornerstone in the construction of states. Taken further, Michel Foucault presented the destabilizing theory that states functioned more as fluctuating relationships of power than as things in and of themselves. Applying this theoretical framework for understanding the formation of states, Burgess argues that, “in a very real way, the creation of piracy law in the early modern period was an expression of state formation” (4). In a sense pirates—as much as any other type of criminal—served as vectors for the creation of law and therefore for the extension of a state apparatus. This argument is key for Burgess’s narrative because England’s efforts to root out piracy in the colonies failed so miserably. If England defined pirates as outside of the law, but colonial administrators refused to see them as such, what did that mean for the creation of an English state that spanned the Atlantic? For Burgess, the inability of officials at Whitehall to enforce their will regarding piracy led to colonial subjects themselves creating their own definitions of legality and illegality—definitions often at odds with their metropolitan counterparts.

The center of Burgess’s book revolves around the sensationalized act of piracy of Captain Henry Every and his crew. Unlike the trial and execution of William Kidd, Burgess focuses on the Every scandal because it was such a spectacular fiasco for the English state. As Burgess explains, Henry Every and the piratical voyage of the Fancy in 1696 precipitated a diplomatic crisis of unprecedented proportions. Every and his crew sailed into the Red Sea and seized one of Emperor Aurangzeb’s ships on its way to Mecca. The seizure and abuse of passengers on the ship led to rioting in port cities of the Mughal Empire and the near-destruction of several trading outpost of the English East India Company. In order to keep their outposts safe and continue trading, East India Company representatives assured the great mughal that Every and his crew would be captured and executed for their crimes. What those representatives could not have realized was how difficult such a proposition would be for a jurisdictionally complex English state with a popular affinity for glamorizing acts of piracy.

Despite the assurances of East India Company officials, the majority of Every’s crew found refuge in the colonies from American governors, who looked the other way in return for a share of the mughal’s wealth. In the end, the English state apprehended only six of Every’s crew, who would serve as proxies in an act of political theater meant to demonstrate to the world that England was not a nation of pirates. However, when put in front of a jury of twelve of their peers at the Old Bailey, all six men were acquitted. Worse, during the course of the pirates’ testimonies, it became clear how deeply entrenched colonial officials’ complicity with piracy ran—so much so that Captain Every himself was sheltered by a colonial official charged with rooting out piracy, Governor Nicholas Trott of the Bahamas. In a hasty attempt to repair the damage done by the failed trial, the English state tried the six men for the original mutiny on the Red Sea. Although the second trial ended in a conviction, Burgess explains that it “also came up short in providing the proper ‘story’ of piracy” that English officials wanted (77).

Anglo-America felt the reverberations of the Every scandal almost immediately. The Board of Trade established Vice Admiralty Courts in the colonies, encouraged colonial governors to renounce pirates sheltered in their territories, and considered a Resumption Bill that would have revoked colonial charters and redrawn the administrative maps of the colonies. This narrative of a reinvigorated English state exerting administrative authority over wayward colonies, however, should not come as a surprise to students of early American history. And yet, the Resumption Bill failed to pass, trials of pirates in the Vice Admiralty Courts remained few and far between, and Every’s Red Sea exploits sparked a frenzy of American pirates trying to repeat his success—many of them financed by colonial governors. By examining the repercussions of the Every scandal in the colonies, Burgess argues that by the early decades of the eighteenth century, two distinct legal systems had emerged between Crown and colonies, systems that would continually clash over the issue of piracy. In fact, Burgess argues that England’s “war on pirates” succeeded only in securing Red Sea ships from attack, leading many Anglo-America sea rovers to seek out colonial shipping in Atlantic waters. It was, for Burgess, the Atlantic depredations of previously protected pirates that moved colonial governors to get on board with England’s anti-piracy measures by the 1730s.

What makes The Politics of Piracy so interesting is the way in which Burgess counters older treatments of the “war on pirates,” which tended to see the turn of the eighteenth century as a moment of English state power being used to rein in illicit maritime exploits. Unlike previous histories of this moment, Burgess looks not just at imperial policy but also at the reception of those policies across the Atlantic, thereby exposing what he sees as the weakness of the English state. In this way Burgess uses many of the same colonial office and public record papers as the books he argues against in order to tell a dramatically different story. However, while he aptly demonstrates that colonial governors largely ignored the anti-piracy measures of the English state, Burgess’s treatment of the Anglo-American colonies could have benefitted from a more hemispheric perspective. By focusing on their responses to the policies of the English state, Burgess produced a static and one-sided account of colonial governors in a period when trade relations throughout the Americas put many of England’s colonies on the wrong side of the law. Burgess’s narrative covers an era in which many Anglo-American smugglers and pirates developed illicit commercial relationships with Spain’s colonial possessions—dealings that irked the newly founded South Sea Company as much as Spanish officials in Madrid. Spanish and English officials alike labeled many of these smugglers pirates despite being respected merchants in their ports of call. In a way, the development of inter-imperial smuggling in this period meshes remarkably well with Burgess’s overall argument regarding the development of two distinct legal systems, yet Spanish American trade receives no attention and Burgess conflates acts of inter-imperial smuggling with his loosely defined concept of piracy.

As with many books worth reading, The Politics of Piracy raises some fundamental questions that are not all answered within its pages. Perhaps the one worth chewing on is the question of the word “piracy” itself. While Burgess explains the creation of a distinct colonial legal system, his use of “piracy” seems to privilege the metropolitan definition of legality and illegality. If colonial governors understood acts of maritime violence abroad as legally acceptable, does calling them “pirates” contradict the notion of a legitimate and distinct colonial understanding of legality? What else could they be called? It is a tribute to Burgess’s provocative work that such questions can be asked and, hopefully, answered in future scholarship.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Casey Sylvia Schmitt is a PhD candidate at the College of William and Mary, where she is working on a dissertation that examines circuits of slaveholding knowledge and practice in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. She is also a contributing editor for The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History, where she writes about researching and teaching in the field of Atlantic world history.

I Am From the Future

Life without pipes
is not life. This is not a

pipe. It’s a rose
about a rose about a poem

about a pipe. Now here come I

with my bag of inventions
charioting through

the time/space continuum

fiddling with the buttons
on my coat. I did not invent

the wayward air here.

Sometimes
a life is just a pipe. 

Another Sip

Primed for horseless trains to change
its very shape,

the nation,

capital-based to the core of each individual
citizen,

is working.

The sky below is white as a lab coat.
He takes another.

The Darkest Night Is History

Laid are the wires

The infrastructure

Begged them to

On the corner

Of the kitchen counter and

The egg counter and

The news ticker

And intuitively

Tonight will be artificial

If the cord fits

It only gets brighter from here

Words of Wisdom

New in town
New to the concept of

New in town

What’s a technology
Anyway

Technology is a fork

The visiting poet said
I thought he meant metaphorically

Later it came to me
He meant even forks

Often I Am Permitted To Recall How

I was at home in that chronotope,

that way of being awake.

I read a mediocre novel about the golden age
of artificial sweeteners
as I rode a cross-country train.

Prisoners made license plates,
I think,
and we wore them on our cars.

Although I didn’t necessarily like it,
without it I’m unreadable.

You should see the future
from this wide-angle lens.
A dry field with patches

of long grass from time to time

to time, however and ever the end.

Long After Adorno

There’s nothing wrong with this century

Every atrocity
I’ve assented to
Or pulled over
To let pass

There’s nothing wrong with this century
That hasn’t been wrong before

On this Highway
By my voice
Or my choices
Do you know me

I don’t feel very well as I write this

I’m not a barber
Or in an ancient mood
I’m not a barbarian
But I’ve been wrong before

I don’t feel very well as I write this
I said nothing

Statement of Poetic Research

Mark Twain’s Lucy Biederman.

These poems are my unsuccessful ventriloquisms of Twain’s character Hank Morgan, the nineteenth-century time traveler of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. And they are my account of what I cannot ventriloquize about Twain or Hank Morgan. I keep poking through.

Mark Twain’s America.

A trickster, Missouri Compromiser, Twain seems to be nearly every kind of American regional writer: Western, Midwestern, Northeastern, Southern… Mark Twain of Quarry Farm, Elmira. Mark Twain of Hannibal, MO. Mark Twain of Buffalo. Mark Twain of Carson City. Hartford Mark Twain. Mark Twain Abroad.

I’d do that. It’s that shiftiness about him I most understand. Maybe he was looking for unincorporated territory, but he canonized every place he landed.

Mark Twain’s Middle Ages.

Looking back through my notes about Twain, I see that at one point I made a list of some of the “technologies” that Hank introduces into sixth century life:

A lariat
Gun-powder
A pipe
Sandwich-board advertisements
The telephone
Newspapers
Toothbrushes and toothpaste
A bomb
Soap
Guns
Trains
Electricity

Mark Twain’s Jokes.

The narrator-protagonist of Jenny Offill’s recent novel-in-fragments Dept. of Speculation confesses,

“Three things no one has ever said about me:
You make it look so easy.
You are very mysterious.
You need to take yourself more seriously.”

No one would say those things about me, either.
But I would say all three statements of Twain.

Leslie Fiedler: “American literature likes to pretend, of course, that its bugaboos are all finally jokes.”

In “the poisonous air bred by those dead thousands” at the end of Connecticut Yankee, there is a competition for the last laugh, as Hank exits the scene, leaving his right-hand man Clarence to “write it for him” in a postscript. Clarence recounts the death of Merlin, who, in “a delirium of silly laughter,” accidentally electrocutes himself:

“I suppose his face will retain that petrified laugh until the corpse turns to dust…”

Enter “Mark Twain” in a second postscript, knocking politely on Hank’s nineteenth-century door. Hank is let loose again, in all his confusion, “delirium, of course, but so real!”

Mark Twain’s Apocalypse.

Connecticut Yankee: “To-morrow. It is here. And with it the end.”

Mark Twain’s Theses.

I usually assume I’m right, until I find out I’ve been wrong, and then I turn over easily, like a new engine. That’s me, Lucy.

A picaresque with a thesis, two theses, many theses pointing in many directions: That’s Mark Twain to me.

Mark Twain’s Pipe.

Everett Emerson: “Clemens’s favorite location for smoking was bed. … And the woman who shared the bed of an inveterate smoker through three decades of an apparently happy marriage was more than inconvenienced; she was victimized.” I couldn’t stop thinking about this for a while after I read it, then I thought of it again watching the Ken Burns documentary about Twain, photographs giving way to each other in the Burnsian style, like thick curtains parted to reveal more curtains, Twain smoking in Connecticut, Twain smoking in Italy, Twain smoking after his poor wife, Olivia, started dying, and, then, as he grieved Olivia, smoking.

Mark Twain’s Details.

When I was a little girl, I used to be afraid that I was only the person in the world who had ever read certain dusty “chapter books” from the library. It made me feel terribly lonely, until my mom explained to me that every book, at the very least, went through an editor.

Deep in the current of a Twain novel I recall that old feeling, as if some of the scenes Twain wrote weren’t intended to be read. Looking closely at such scenes, it seems I am working at cross-purposes to the books in which they appear, taking it too seriously. Those people shut up in the dungeon in Connecticut Yankee, for example. “Their very imagination was dead. When you can say that of a man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no lower deep for him. I rather wished I had gone some other road.” The tortuous ins and outs of Tom Sawyer’s tricks. One particular scene in Roughing It, which I think I care more about than Twain seems to, even though he’s the one who almost died, caught in the cold overnight with no sign of safety. “We were all sincere, and all deeply moved and earnest, for we were in the presence of death and without hope. I threw away my pipe, and in doing it felt that at last I was free of a hated vice and one that had ridden me like a tyrant all my days. … Oblivion came. The battle of life was done.” Of course it’s a trick, a joke: Two pages later our narrator is smoking in perfect hilarity. I should have known better. Twain brings characters back around, he reprises, but he keeps it moving: down the river, through the centuries, way out West. Away from our bugaboos.

Mark Twain’s Beauty.

Like John Berryman, Grace Paley, Alice Walker, geniuses of the American vernacular who write in Twain’s grainy shadow, the beauty of Twain’s writing frustrates. It hides itself when excerpted, or masquerades as cute. There’s a quality to Huck Finn’s curiosity—when he describes the Grangerfords’ tacky house, for example—that I can’t convey without “quoting” all of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, every single word of it.

Twain is more beautiful and baggy and bad to me than any excerpt would show.

I take him seriously.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Lucy Biederman is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Other poems of hers inspired by the literature of early America have recently appeared online at Sixth Finch, La Vague, Elsewhere, and Unsplended, and are forthcoming in The Minnesota Review and The Laurel Review.

Common-place talks with Catherine Cangany, author of Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt, about Detroit’s Atlantic connections, the persistence of local control, and the challenges of writing transnational history.

What made Detroit a “frontier seaport,” or as it’s described in the first chapter, “the seaport of the West” (9)?

Location, location, location. French explorer Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac, who founded Detroit in 1701, chose for his settlement a stretch of land along the Detroit River, which connects two of what colonial North Americans called the “inland seas,” Lake Erie and Lake Huron (via Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River). He picked that strait (in French, étroit) in order to partner with Odawas, Hurons, Potawatomis, Ojibwes, and other area Native groups to augment France’s stake in the fur trade. And in so doing, his settlement connected the frontier to the Atlantic world.

Once Detroit’s profitability seemed certain, European and Euro-American fur-trade merchants relocated to what Cadillac boasted would become the “Paris of New France,” bringing with them their Atlantic networks and their access to the “goods of empire.” That, in turn, enticed other groups of people to settle in Detroit and to establish complementary economies. As one example, under the British regime (1760-1796), Detroit surpassed Niagara to become the western hub for shipbuilding and repair. All nine of the armed vessels sailing Lake Erie in 1782 had been constructed at Detroit’s naval yard.

In short, Detroit fulfilled the same functions as Atlantic port cities in the eighteenth century. It imported and exported goods through its harbor. It acted as a collection and distribution center. It was connected to a hinterland. It served as a conduit for people and information. It operated as a site of shipbuilding. It was home to a skilled and diverse workforce that plied port-related trades. And it fulfilled all of these functions 600 miles from the Atlantic coast.

Detroit first made its mark in the eighteenth century as a center of the fur trade. How did that influence the development of Detroit even after the fur trade began to decline?

The fur trade, by its very nature, was a global enterprise: the raw materials collected at Detroit were exported to Western Europe, where they were transformed into finished leather goods, and then exported again—as far east as Russia and China. By virtue of that lucrative economy, Detroit was drawn into the French and British Atlantic worlds, especially into the world of transnational merchandise and its related cultural practices, which Detroiters of all stripes were anxious to consume.

We have an image of culture in early Detroit looking something akin to the Fess Parker Davy Crockett serial: colonists in fringe and raccoon-skin caps. There certainly was some of that culture present, and Detroit’s merchants capitalized on it, feeding Atlantic world consumers’ stereotypes of the frontier. But it was just as common to see Detroiters sporting imperial status symbols only a few months after their metropolitan debuts, whether the latest textiles, imprints of popular books, or specialty dining ware meant for cultured entertaining.

As a result of that engagement with the Atlantic, colonial Detroiters diversified their economy, experimenting with making fur-trade-related goods, most notably moccasins, which were crafted by local merchants for non-Native wearers around the Great Lakes and on the eastern seaboard. This was a significant achievement, as historians have assumed that colonial manufacturing efforts, particularly in the British Empire, were, by mercantilism’s design, few and far between, to force the colonies to acquire everything through the mother country.

Value-added goods like moccasins relied to some degree on the fur trade’s production, shipping, and distribution networks, but they also demanded new technologies, such as local manufactories, which foreshadowed Detroit’s late nineteenth and twentieth-century forays into producing stoves, automobiles, and armaments.

That early infrastructure remained, even after the fur trade waned. Perhaps the most salient example pertains to transportation. For the first century of the settlement’s existence, the fur trade relied on a winding route of rivers, lakes, and overland portages to carry people and goods from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and back. Even delicate porcelain teacups and fragile microscopes were transported to Detroit this way—in good enough condition to be salable. That process changed in 1825 with the opening of the Erie Canal, which more directly connected the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes, eliminating portages and allowing larger, heavier vessels to make the journey. The canal’s construction had an instantaneous effect on Detroit’s harbor, which became choked with an unprecedented number of ships, goods, and immigrants who caught the relocation bug known as “Michigan Fever.” When the Erie Canal opened, Detroit was about the fiftieth largest city in the United States. By 1910 it had moved up to ninth largest, peaking at fourth largest in 1940. In the early twentieth century, the Detroit River was deemed the “Greatest Commercial Artery on Earth,” facilitating about 24,000 boat trips and 67 million tons of merchandise per year—nearly twice what was carried through London and New York City combined. Location was still vital to Detroit’s success more than two centuries after the colony’s founding.

The second half of Frontier Seaport focuses on what you describe as “frontier localisms” in Detroit. Can you explain what you mean by the term and how such practices shaped the growth of Detroit as a trading center?

Despite economic and cultural affinity with the rest of the Atlantic world, political incorporation in early Detroit was another story. Because of the settlement’s seasonal geographical isolation (it was inaccessible from the eastern seaboard for at least half of each year), coupled with myriad imperial turnovers, Detroit was mostly left to manage itself. Except for governance of the fur trade, which remained an imperial preoccupation, Detroiters were left to take charge of the day-to-day running of their town. This gave rise to a number of unconventional social and administrative practices, which I term “localisms,” that, although in direct opposition to imperial mandates, kept Detroit functional. For instance, for most of its history before Michigan became a state in 1837, Detroit lacked a comprehensive judicial system, with no practical means of compelling debt collection. Outside of prevailing upon the fort’s commandant or the priest of Ste. Anne’s Catholic Church to arbitrate, Detroiters were forced, at their own expense, to journey to Quebec (and later, under the American regime, first to Ohio and then to Indiana) to seek adjudication. Fed up with the entrenched system, in the British era, Detroit merchants created their own local arbitration court, serving as the unofficial magistrates and thereby keeping local matters under local control. That informal court system was revived in the early American era (which began in 1796) and persisted until Detroit finally received a full, local judiciary in 1805.

For that same determination to keep local matters under local control, we could also look to the rebuilding process after Detroit burned to the ground in the Great Fire of 1805. Newly arrived American residents, who had begun moving to Detroit after it joined the American fold in 1796, saw the catastrophe as a chance to rid Detroit of its French heritage and remake it in the image of East Coast cities. In laying out the new metropolis (envisioned by Augustus Woodward as a pleasing pattern of repeating hexagons), they also began filling in the Detroit River, to allow themselves to build in front of the longstanding French and British residents who had had riverfront properties. You can imagine how this went over. Those established residents worked on a number of fronts to sabotage the rebuilding process. They refused to recognize the new layout, instead rebuilding their homes in their old styles in rectilinear blocks. They ignored easements. They broke one surveyor’s equipment. They spread false rumors about the new layout: some parcels of land would have no street access, some were too small to build on, and some would be located in the middle of the river. And they refused to follow the directive of Congress to furnish it with an official rebuilding plan by which they would abide. Two decades after the fire, Detroit still had not given Congress that plan, but all that while, its residents had carried on with their own ideas about reconstruction. Even today, if you look at a map of Detroit, you will see that only one-half of one of Woodward’s hexagons was built (Grand Circus Park), and it is entirely circumscribed by the squares and rectangles insisted upon by the old guard.

 I am a firm believer in not going into the archives with too fixed an idea of what to consult and what to do with it. I prefer to let the sources seek me out and draw me in.

Some of Detroit’s localisms had more direct economic consequences. When Detroit became a U.S. holding in 1796, the Detroit River became for the first time an international boundary, splitting the settlement in two, with the northern half becoming part of the United States, and the southern half (Windsor, Ontario) remaining with the British Empire. That split rendered Detroit’s most important trading partners (Windsor, Montreal, and Quebec City) foreign, which had the potential to upend Detroit’s economy. The other shoe dropped four years later in 1800, when Detroit received its first U.S. customs collector, to enforce tariff collection on that foreign trade. In response, Detroiters largely refused to change their trading practices, resorting to what the federal government deemed smuggling (but they viewed simply as the continuation of their century-old economy). In the process, they devised some clever ways of circumventing U.S. customs law, including pulling sleds and sleighs across the frozen river to trade with Windsor in the winter. Because there was no U.S. customs law specifically enumerating winter vehicles as appropriate for international commerce and liable to duties, customs inspectors could do nothing but seethe. The story of Detroit has always been, and in many ways continues to be, a fight for local control. Plus ça change…!

The notes section of Frontier Seaport indicates that you did research in the archives of several different countries (including the United States, Canada, and France) to study the history of a single settlement. How did you navigate the challenges of integrating such a diverse set of resources into a coherent narrative?

Early in the research, I jolted myself a bit by wondering, “Of all the paper that was generated in or about Detroit from 1701 to 1837, what percentage of it survived? And of that, what percentage is in this particular archive? And of that, what percentage am I consulting? And of that, what percentage am I using and citing?” To augment that final, undoubtedly small number, I probably looked at more than was strictly necessary, but I like the detective work of history, so I kept going, looking at just about every type of primary source I could find: business records, customs and port papers, court cases, newspapers, maps and prints, material culture, travel narratives, and personal and commercial correspondence.

As historians who work with correspondence can attest, one of the challenges lies in simply finding the various sides (or fragments of the various sides) of the epistolary conversations. Invariably, if they have survived, they are housed at different institutions, and, in this project’s case, often in different countries. That was one of its pleasures—although it sometimes meant waiting for months or years before finding out more about a particular story. The pace could be very eighteenth century. As I went along, I did organize the materials I found by topic and personage, which gave me a rough, running sense of what I had and how I might use it. But even that early organization was deliberately minimal. I am a firm believer in not going into the archives with too fixed an idea of what to consult and what to do with it. I prefer to let the sources seek me out and draw me in. It makes for richer and more interesting subject matter that way.

When I returned from the archives and tried to make sense of all that I had found, the sources began to coalesce around certain tensions (frontier versus Atlantic, imperial versus local, and continuity versus change) and also around certain topics. I decided to have each chapter explore each of those three tensions within a particular topic, whether the fur trade, Atlantic merchandise, moccasins, political localisms, the Great Fire, or smuggling. Those topics, which proceed roughly chronologically, necessarily make use of different kinds of sources, which gave rise to unexpected challenges.

Detroit endured five regime changes in a little over a century. It was founded by the French in 1701, gained by the British in 1760, relinquished to the United States in 1796, lost to the British in 1812, and then returned to the United States in 1813. Travel narratives written in the American era turned out to be one of the most compelling sources for confirming that Detroit was awash in transnational merchandise. The tourists had expected to feel some culture shock upon their arrival in town, both because of Detroit’s “foreign” past and also its success in commodifying frontier goods like moccasins. To their astonishment, many instead found a considerable degree of material parity between the East Coast and the frontier, writing not only of the merchandise, but also of their delight, relief, and in some cases alarm at discovering it so far from the seaboard. But although it was news to these latecomer travelers, Detroit had in fact been flooded with the goods of empire from its founding. This made finding other, earlier sources (including eighteenth-century French and British merchants’ records and correspondence) critical for documenting just how long-standing a tradition Detroit’s access to transnational merchandise was by the time the American tourists finally sat up and took notice of it.

It has become a staple of recent conferences in early American history, it seems, to engage in discussions about the relative values of Atlantic and continental approaches to the history of eastern North America. At first glance, Detroit seems more naturally situated for analysis from a continental perspective, so what drew you to think of Detroit in terms of the Atlantic world?

It was a case of art imitating life. While I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, doing coursework on the traditionally defined Atlantic world, I was also curating at a local history museum. For background material, I read the continental fur trade histories that have shaped our interpretation of colonial Detroit for more than a century. I found myself wondering if, akin to what I had been reading in the classroom, an Atlantic argument could be made for Detroit. Despite my curiosity (and a robust primary source base—the Detroit Public Library, home to the Burton Historical Collection—is in particular an underutilized archive), I had already committed myself to a completely different dissertation topic and was wary of abandoning it for what I was afraid might be a whim.

Then, in an unexpectedly fortuitous turn of events, I came down with West Nile virus. While out of commission, I had a fever dream about the Detroit project and woke up determined to change topics. It was absolutely the right decision—although I am sure that my strange epiphany must have sounded quite worrisome to my dissertation advisors!

I hope that one of the things that this project achieves is to join the ranks of books that have encouraged us to rethink the artificial confines of the Atlantic world—as a step perhaps toward doing away with that model altogether. The continental-versus-Atlantic debate in many ways is more about historiography than history. As this project taught me, in the long eighteenth century, people, goods, technologies, and ideas, not to mention germs, animals, and other kinds of travelers, regularly moved back and forth between the interior and the seaboard without construing them as separate, unrelated, and fundamentally irreconcilable spaces. We should be following their lead.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Catherine Cangany is an associate professor of early American history at the University of Notre Dame. Her current book project, a study of the underground economy, is entitled An Empire of Fakes: Counterfeit Goods in Early America.

Kelly A. Ryan’s work, Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700-1830, explores the intersections of patriarchal power and sexual regulation in Massachusetts from the late colonial era through the early national period. Drawing on a wide array of sources, including legal records, print culture, letters and diaries, and church records, she argues that the regulation of sexual behavior was one of the cornerstones of white men’s patriarchal authority. Ryan defines patriarchal power as the “authority of men in households, government, economics, sexuality, religion, and culture,” as well as “the direct power of male heads of household over their dependents’ sexual, economic, and religious choices” (2). She uses both anecdotal and statistical evidence to show that this authority was manifested in many ways, from the prosecution of white women for fornication in the court system to the control of enslaved people’s marital choices.

Although the close reliance of patriarchal authority on sexual regulation remained constant throughout the period in question, Ryan argues that the American Revolution and the emergence of the new nation facilitated challenges to patriarchal authority and contributed to shifting methods of sexual regulation. In the late colonial period, she shows, sexual regulation largely occurred through official channels of authority—the authority of fathers over children, of masters over servants and slaves, and of courts and public officials over the behavior of all residents. After the American Revolution, however, sexual behavior was less likely to be policed via official channels of power; instead, a new culture of virtue and reputation sought to shape individual behavior by emphasizing the importance of sexual virtue and self-regulation.

Ryan’s book is divided into two sections. The first part explores sexual control in the late colonial period and focuses on efforts to regulate the behaviors of white, Native American, and African American women and men. At a time when rates of premarital sex were increasing and when print culture depicted the dangers of women’s erotic power, Ryan shows that government authorities particularly focused on containing the dangers of white women’s sexuality within lawful marriage. Fornication prosecutions in particular sought to control women’s sexual behavior, and the courts made white women uniquely culpable for sexual transgressions. White men, on the other hand, enjoyed far greater sexual license. They were rarely prosecuted for fornication, and paternity suits were one of the few avenues through which white men’s sexual misdemeanors were brought before the courts and the public. Yet in spite of this sexual liberty, young white men and poor white men found that their behaviors and choices were constrained by the realities of dependence—dependence on fathers, masters, and the overseers of the poor.

At a time when rates of premarital sex were increasing and when print culture depicted the dangers of women’s erotic power, Ryan shows that government authorities particularly focused on containing the dangers of white women’s sexuality within lawful marriage.

In many ways non-white women and men faced similar constraints on their sexual behavior. White men believed that their patriarchal authority and responsibilities extended to Native Americans and African Americans, whom they viewed as racially and culturally inferior and therefore dependent. Ryan argues that over the course of the eighteenth century, white patriarchal authority over Native Americans increased. Systems of indentured servitude and guardianship, as well as missionary efforts, provided multiple avenues for imposing white sexual norms on Native communities and families. For African Americans the system of slavery provided white men even greater scope for sexual regulation. Of particular concern for white authorities was the prevention of interracial sex and marriage. Ryan reveals fascinating inconsistencies in the ways interracial sex was policed. White women were more severely punished when prosecuted for fornication with African American men than with Native American or white men. Conversely, like white men, African American and Native American men were rarely prosecuted for fornication with white women. Unlike white women, African American and Native American women were rarely prosecuted for fornication, whether or not they crossed a racial boundary. This gave white patriarchs considerable license to cross racial boundaries without having their behavior exposed in public. As Ryan explains, “By not prosecuting African American or Indian women for fornication, masters of servants and slaves were implicitly protected from any financial or criminal charges being brought against them for engaging in interracial sex” (78). Ultimately, Ryan shows that in virtually any situation, white women bore the burden of maintaining racial boundaries.

The second part of Ryan’s work examines shifts in sexual regulation that occurred during and after the American Revolution. Ryan argues that sexual regulation shifted away from legal and institutional avenues of power and toward cultural strategies by which sexual values could be explained and promoted. This shift was prompted by developments such as a new emphasis on equality that elevated the status of young men and poor men to that of virtuous citizens capable of governing themselves. Even churches, which formerly had emphasized public regulation of members’ behavior, moved away from rituals of public confession and repentance toward new values of self-regulation and private intervention. Moreover, legal prosecutions of sexual misbehavior such as fornication and adultery declined in this period.

In addition, one of the most significant changes in this post-revolutionary period was the emancipation of slaves in the wake of the revised Massachusetts state constitution in 1780. With legal authority over African Americans reduced, Ryan argues that “many whites drew on cultural strategies to sustain the racial hierarchy rather than institutional and legal controls” (105). Print culture, for instance, drew increasingly stark racial divisions by insisting that African Americans (and Native Americans newly eligible for citizenship) did not experience genuine feeling and attachment—they were merely lustful and uncontrolled. More practically, new social patterns of segregation emerged in towns and cities, thus drawing spatial boundaries in addition to cultural lines between the races.

In the aftermath of the Revolution, moreover, white women writers began to carve out a new role for themselves in the republic, emphasizing their moral and intellectual capacities. In particular, Ryan shows that white women intervened for the first time via print culture in the system of sexual regulation that sought to put the greatest burden on them. In essays, stories, and novels, they openly criticized men’s unruly sexual behavior and called for an end to the sexual double standard that held women more responsible than men for good sexual behavior. Seduction narratives in particular proved popular with readers and offered women a narrative structure for demonstrating that innocent women were in danger of being led astray by unscrupulous men who needed to be held responsible for their actions.

White women’s writings constitute one of Ryan’s most convincing examples of resistance to patriarchal authority; these writers effectively increased the scrutiny of white men’s sexual behavior and pushed readers to regard “fallen” women with greater sympathy. As Ryan argues, “middle and upper rank white women asserted a new place for themselves as the arbiters of sexual morality in their criticism of men’s sexual behavior and defense of women” (150). These women certainly did not unravel patriarchal authority, but they did shift some of the burden of sexual regulation away from themselves and onto white men.

Ryan’s work has many strengths, most notably her ability to analyze differences of race, class, gender, and age without losing sight of her broad interpretation of shifts in sexual regulation from the late colonial to the early national period. Moreover, her ability to address both changes in sexual regulation and continuities in patriarchal power is important and necessary in conveying the complexity and sources of white men’s authority. She emphasizes the constancy of white men’s patriarchal power during this period while still revealing the challenges posed by individuals, groups, and new ideological trends. By highlighting these challenges, Ryan is able to expose the ways in which patriarchal authority shifted and transformed to meet these pressures. Ultimately, she reveals the resilience at the heart of enduring systems of power.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Nora Doyle is an assistant professor of history at Salem College. Her research focuses on women’s and gender history and the history of sexuality in early America.

“Man,” wrote John Webb, a Boston-based minister, in a 1726 sermon, “conforms to the Tempers and Manners of the Company he keeps.” Warning listeners of the dangers of keeping bad company, and dedicated to the youth of his congregation, Webb’s sermon quietly registers another much broader and very muscular tenet of eighteenth-century, Protestant common sense: that one’s environment had an almost unlimited capacity to influence one’s behavior, feelings, desires, and even one’s faith. Webb’s Seasonable warning against bad company-keeping, and the concerns about the spiritually corrosive potential of bad company that it voices, provide a glimpse into one of the major structural idioms through which residents of eighteenth-century British colonial North America understood their world. Social influences, however, were ultimately only one part of this broad logic that understood the environmental writ large—the physical, natural, climatic, gustatory, social, and spiritual environment—as one of the most definitive factors in human individual and collective development. For scholars who work on the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, this radically different way of thinking about human constitution poses one of the biggest challenges to approaching the period, as we are exhorted to do, “on its own terms.” Reading eighteenth-century texts through the framework of environmental determinism, however, is critical to developing a careful and textured understanding of the period, and essential to the project of denaturalizing categories of human difference—race, sex, sexual desire—that were beginning to be taxonomized and reified in the eighteenth century, and that continue to be live political questions for all of us today.

The promise of this carefully historicized reading practice is exactly what Katy Chiles delivers in Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America. Suggesting that we tend to analyze debates about the meaning and etiology of racial difference in the eighteenth-century through “nineteenth- and twentieth-century quotidian understandings of race” that “deemed it an internal rather than an external phenomenon,” Chiles’ monograph turns its focus to the environmental logic in which eighteenth-century, colonial North American intellectual culture was steeped (109). Pairing eighteenth-century natural historical texts with some of the most canonical works of eighteenth-century North American literature, Chiles’ careful, close readings highlight the way that these texts understood race to denote “a sense of human somatic difference (albeit, and indeed, one that could change) influenced by environmental factors, not one in the blood” (10). Putting writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Samson Occom, Benjamin Franklin, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Olaudah Equiano, Charles Brockden Brown, and Royall Tyler into conversation with some of the most prominent natural philosophers and scientific thinkers of the same era—among them Benjamin Rush, John Mitchell, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Timothy Dwight, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon—Transformable Race insists on reading early American literature “in relationship to its own racial epistemology of the late eighteenth-century—the very one through which these early American writers both knew and wrote their world” (23).

The central argument of the book is one that is unlikely to raise eyebrows: Transformable Race describes how popular cultural understandings of race in eighteenth-century North America defined it in anything but ontological terms. Pointing to the muscular place that natural historical thinking held in eighteenth-century print culture, Chiles insists that “early Americans largely considered race…to be potentially mutable: it was thought to be an exterior bodily trait, incrementally produced by environmental factors (such as climate, food, and mode of living) and continuously subject to change” (2). In Transformable Race, Chiles turns to myriad forms of literature (essays, sermons, true narratives, poetry, novels) from the period to illustrate two important ideas: first, that race was understood as a dynamic bodily state, a notion predicated on the idea “that the body, its racial features, and racial identity itself were always in flux and had to be consistently maintained,” and one that “informed a broad cultural logic about racial construction” (3). Second, Chiles painstakingly leads the reader through her analysis of texts that we do not usually assume to be “scientific” (an at best specious distinction when used to describe eighteenth-century writing) to illustrate the ways that writers from Phillis Wheatley to Royall Tyler were explicitly engaging in contemporary conversations about the origins and meaning of racial difference (6). Endeavoring “to identify how eighteenth-century racial thinking informs the figurative language in this crucial period’s literature,” Transformable Race “strives to illustrate for us how early American authors imagined, contributed to, and challenged the ways that one’s racial identity could be formed in the late colonial and early national moment” (3).

Natural historical theories of racial difference also became a tool and an occasion for public intellectual debate by African peoples, slaves, and Native peoples—exactly the populations at whom the racist potential of this discourse was frequently aimed.

Despite the relatively intuitive character of its central argument—that race was understood in primarily environmental terms, as a “transformable” quality in humans during the eighteenth century—this is a book that deserves to be read carefully. Indeed, many of Chiles’ most interesting and important interventions emerge from diligent attention to some of the seemingly smaller or subtler arguments that she makes in this project. For example, Chiles refuses to reify any distinction between “literary” and “scientific” thinkers or thinking, highlighting the degree to which writers we rarely think of as “scientists”—such as Equiano, Wheatley, or Tyler—actively drew upon and engaged with natural historical theories of racial differentiation that were circulating in their moment. The payoff of this careful denaturalization of the modern epistemological categories of “literary” and “scientific”—again, a specious distinction, in the eighteenth century as it remains, today—is that it changes the presumed political contours of the natural historical archive, one that we frequently think of as ineluctably bound to the emergence of racist pseudo-science and eugenics in the nineteenth-century United States. What Chiles demonstrates, however, is that this is an association predicated more upon an understanding of a nineteenth-century brand of natural historical thinking than upon an eighteenth-century version. Indeed, she insists that “notions regarding the formation of racial categories of the eighteenth century differed dramatically from those of the nineteenth—and that the ways in which they were different really matter to how we read and interpret the literature written in the late eighteenth-century moment” (23, emphasis original). Chiles’ attention to literary engagements with natural historical thinking emphasizes the polyvocality of specifically eighteenth-century natural history. Beyond merely a racist or proto-racist epistemology developed to justify colonialism and slavery (although that is an element of this archive that certainly should not be understated), natural historical theories of racial difference also became a tool and an occasion for public intellectual debate by African peoples, slaves, and Native peoples—exactly the populations at whom the racist potential of this discourse was frequently aimed. Chiles is nonetheless careful to not assume a recuperative position in relation to this archive; despite the fact that natural history offered another idiom through which oppressed peoples might speak truth to racist power, “it was not always necessarily utopic or liberating thinking” (24).

The central argument of Transformable Race is developed and complicated over the course of four chapters and an epilogue, all of which put works of natural historical thinking into conversation with various forms of popular literature. In each chapter, Chiles offers close readings of her focal texts to highlight the often very subtle or implicit references to and engagement with eighteenth-century racial science that are actually remarkably proliferate in many of the most canonical works of early American literature. Each set of texts she considers—Occom and Wheatley in chapter one; Benjamin Franklin and Hendrick Aupaumut in chapter two; J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, John Marrant, and Charles Brockden Brown in chapter three; Olaudah Equiano and Hugh Henry Brackenridge in chapter four; and Royall Tyler in the epilogue—calls our attention to how the writers in question engaged popular concepts deriving from eighteenth-century natural history and other forms of racial science. Her careful, close readings convince us that writers from Occom and Wheatley to Franklin and Tyler were not just deploying the vocabularies of racial thinking incidentally or unreflexively, but were doing so with care and intention, explicitly engaging natural historians and their ideas.

For example, in the first chapter of the monograph, “Becoming Colored in Occom and Wheatley’s Early America,” Chiles reads three pieces of Samson Occom’s writing ( “A Short Narrative of My Life,” A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, and “To All the Indians of this Boundless Continent”) and Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), alongside writings by naturalists such as Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) and the Comte de Buffon (Georges-Louis Leclerc) in order to emphasize how Occom and Wheatley “min[e] Christian and natural-historical explanations for where color comes from” (63). Her analysis highlights the way that each discourse relies on “a symbolics of metamorphosis” that both these writers differently mobilize “to explore the construction of racial categories in ways particular to early America” (31). In other words, “transformable race, a sense of the external mutability of the racialized body, figures centrally in how Occom and Wheatley characterize racial formation” (31). Ultimately, Chiles argues that Occom’s and Wheatley’s writings offer an intervention into eighteenth-century racial thinking by “represent[ing] the process of ‘becoming colored’ as a God-inspired design,” Wheatley by gesturing to “changing beliefs about the effect of the African climate to intervene in debates about race, science, and aesthetics” in her poetry, and Occom by asserting “a particular kind of indigenized Christianity and Native sovereignty” based on the ideological chasms separating “both Christian and nativist” accounts of the origins of racial difference (32). In the wake of Chiles’ close reading, we are left with a new awareness of the way that Occom and Wheatley are invested in the project of “refigur[ing] what ‘blackness’ and ‘redness’ might mean”—and to what ends (63).

One of the most promising elements of the historiographic project in which Chiles is engaged is the potential that Transformable Race bears to contribute to our understanding of the history of racism and of struggles for racial justice, and this is one of the many things that I deeply admire about this book. Chiles explicitly imagines this monograph in direct and intentional relationship to critical race theory, and implicitly suggests that broad eighteenth-century debates over the origins of racial difference constitute an early moment in a long genealogy of specifically North American racial thinking. Pointing to the ways that “critical race studies has importantly pried apart scientific from social conceptions of race,” she argues that critical race theory has nonetheless “been using temporal perspectives that we have not yet understood to be temporal,” and offers a definition of transformable race that “replaces prevailing critical race frameworks particular to later periods with one that is apt for early America” (26, 25). Chiles’ careful attention to the historicity of racial thinking—and specifically, her concept of “transformable race”—“demands that we rethink axiomatic angles of analysis in critical race studies, such as passing, iteration, and performance,” and challenges “unexamined tenets on which critical race theory has operated in literary studies” (26). In her efforts to “posit a historically specific, transformational model of critical race theory” that derives from early thinkers—white colonists and people of color (both colonists and indigenous peoples) alike—Transformable Race “refigures our understanding of racialization in early American literatures and advances a new paradigm that offers critical race studies a fresh way of understanding racial formation” (26).

If this project has a weakness, it is that the conversation it ultimately delivers vis-à-vis critical race theory is less developed than the book’s introduction promises. Putting the eighteenth-century intellectual traditions that Chiles examines in Transformable Race into dialogue with specific texts and exchanges in the development of critical race theory in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries—or, alternately, a more explicit discussion of the way that Chiles seems to be reading many of the texts at the center of her analysis as an early moment of the longue durée of critical race theory—would have made this already very strong book even stronger. For example, in chapter four, “Doubting Transformable Race: Equiano, Brackenridge, and the Textuality of Natural History,” Chiles’ reading of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative calls our attention to the way that “Equiano…question[s] the limits of what others such as Phillis Wheatley and Samson Occom saw as the beneficial aspects of transformable race,” arguing that “Equiano subscribes to specific natural histories and then questions them, both by troubling certain facets of their theories and by noting how they fail to influence white behavior” (148, 149). Ultimately, she argues, Equiano arrives at the economic argument against slavery (in short, he suggests that if the British were to establish a broader trade network in the African continent, that commerce would become more lucrative than the slave trade [167]) that he advances at the end of his narrative because he realizes that engaging with monogenetic natural historical theories of racial difference has a limited impact on the practices and predations of anti-black racism:

…it is precisely because whites foolishly do not recognize and base their actions upon an equality implicit in the single origin story that Equiano himself is skeptical about the theories’ ability to make a difference in the world. Understanding Equiano’s vexed investment in natural historical theories and his skepticism about whether these theories and their implications can change white behavior also helps us comprehend his turn at the conclusion of his text to the economic argument he makes against the slave trade because, as we shall see, he advances it only after his narrative has shown how arguing the equality of Africans through natural-historical and/or religious means has not been effective. (152)

This is very compelling, but in keeping with Chiles’ suggestion that the discourse of transformable race in the eighteenth century has something important to say to understandings of the processes of racialization that gird critical race theory (in its early moments and today), I also believe that Equiano’s economic argument against slavery might be fruitfully put into conversation with the large body of critical race scholarship that addresses the relationship between whiteness, blackness, property, and political economy. I am thinking, in particular, about whether or how Chiles’ analysis of Equiano’s frustration with the precarity of various forms of legal enfranchisement (e.g. legal manumission) and subsequent turn to the economic argument above might complicate or augment Cheryl Harris’ famous theorization of whiteness as property (1993), now considered one of the foundational texts of early critical race theory. If eighteenth-century debates about transformable race—and efforts to engage those theories, penned by people of color living in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world—indeed constitute part of the long history of critical race theory or critical thinking about race by people of color (as I believe they do), Chiles’ book envisions the felicitous prospect of conversation between these bodies of work that, while historically distant from one another, nonetheless share crucial ideological and ethical territory.

Ultimately, Transformable Race makes an important contribution to both early American studies and to the history of race more generally; this is a book that will find a very broad audience, and frankly, a book that scholars of early American studies should all both read and teach. It seems worth noting that beyond being an important piece of scholarship, Chiles’ lucid prose, careful close readings, and analytical pairings of very canonical writers alongside understudied ones make this a book that might also be appropriate for advanced undergraduates. It is unusual to come across book-length studies of eighteenth-century North America that so deftly pair careful historicization of thick, challenging concepts (such as race) with the explicit intention of rendering those concepts more clear in our own time, yet this is exactly what Chiles sets out to do: she baldly asserts that “if we develop a better sense of how science and literature interacted in the definition of early American racial categories and how this interaction has changed over time, we will have a better sense of how to think about our own conceptions of race, right now” (30). And this is precisely what Chiles manages to achieve with Transformable Race, rendering this a project as politically refreshing as it is intellectually rigorous. Chiles leaves us convinced of the current political significance of the fact that “in the eighteenth century, a sunburn is never just a sunburn” (217).

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Greta LaFleur is assistant professor of American Studies at Yale University, where she is finishing a book on the history of sexuality in eighteenth-century colonial North America.

With tornado warnings having been issued for the South Carolina midlands on the evening of Sunday, April 19, 2015, an air of uncertainty suddenly upended months of planning for Nat Fuller’s Feast on the University of South Carolina’s historic Horseshoe. McKissick Museum and its partner organizations—the Atlantic Institute, Columbia Luncheon Club, Columbia Urban League, Greater Columbia Community Relations Council, and USC’s African American Studies Program and Institute for Southern Studies—had chosen this venerable, oak-shaded quadrangle at the heart of the campus as the feast site for several reasons. First, because the Horseshoe is encircled by a historically significant collection of slave-made structures that stand as a testament to the artisan and manual labor of enslaved Africans that continues to shape our lived experience of place. Second, because of its proximity to the museum and the juried contemporary art exhibit—Crafting Civil (War) Conversations—that had challenged artists to imagine and give form to Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a “table of brotherhood” where the sons of former slaves and former slave owners might sit together. And third, because of the role the Horseshoe had played during the Civil War as the site of an army hospital—a place where the wounded might be healed. What better site to pay homage to Nat Fuller’s remarkably generous-spirited gesture of hospitality and healing within weeks of the Civil War’s end?

Ultimately, however, the inclement weather prevailed, and we had to move inside. After the cocktail reception at McKissick Museum—where guests sampled Fuller’s signature mint juleps and celebrated the announcement of artworks from Crafting Civil (War) Conversations to be purchase for the museum’s permanent collection—everyone made their way to McCutcheon House, one of the antebellum buildings facing the Horseshoe. There, rectangular tables were set in long rows as they likely would have been arranged at Fuller’s establishment, and the best china available was elegantly presented with tasteful floral arrangements on each table.

We sit in fulfillment of things foreshadowed to be hardships for our future generations. History will be his story more over told in hopes of shedding light into dark hearts.

Once guests settled in, Dr. Carl Evans gave a non-denominational prayer. Then Khadijah Dennis—a USC junior and founding member of First Word Epiphany, an African American spoken word collective—performed a poem she composed for the occasion to conjure the spirit of what she imagined Fuller might have said to preface the meal he had invited guests to share.

Today, we end this war
But the truest battle lies ahead.

Today, I am wrapped in a warm environment of trust and sanctuary.
Hands intertwined with substance—
“rejoice and divide this among you.”
For this is of my heart, given for you.

The road we’ve traveled hasn’t been easy, and neither is adversity.
Today marks promise.

We are the peace in the midst of rain.
A century ahead of time it feels like a dream.
In this moment, we are all the same, and we are the example.

The question should not be how we did it, but in that we did, we are.
“I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. We cannot walk alone.”

We sit in fulfillment of things foreshadowed to be hardships for our future generations. History will be his story more over told in hopes of shedding light into dark hearts.

There will be days that the sun decides against shining, laughter will be hard, grace difficult, freedom non existing for all of God’s children, but still there is hope. Today, we sit in light of a dark hour, and in remembrance of our adversity.

This meal I present to you is of my heart, filled with gratitude. Take ye, feast of it.

At this point, a well-rehearsed wait staff entered with almost military precision to serve the first course—crab and cabbage cannelloni with lemon-parsley gelée and red pepper coulis. This light, delicately flavored course was followed by an earthier terrine de foies de volaille (chicken pâté) accompanied by green pea-mint puree, crispy bacon, citrus compote and chard potato bread.

For a moment, people paused their conversations for toasts by USC President Dr. Harris Pastides and Milton Kimpson Jr. speaking on behalf of his father, Dr. Milton Kimpson, who served as the first executive director of the Greater Columbia Community Relations Council. With much candor, Pastides used the occasion to reflect on the history of the university as it related to the history of slavery. Kimpson leavened his toast with humor as he suggested that perhaps not everyone present at the 1865 feast was in a celebratory mood.

Meanwhile, the champagne flowed and the food kept coming—all fueling feelings of goodwill. Manchester Farms quail stuffed with wild mushrooms and artichokes in a port wine sauce served with sweet potato-rutabaga gratin and braised wild greens inspired many a guest to express a desire especially for the potato recipe. Taste buds found delight in the palette-cleansing, red beetroot granité with tarragon syrup. Chef Corey Green finished his savory offerings by bringing us back to low country cuisine with roasted cobia, oyster risotto, and fried spinach in a grapefruit vinaigrette.

Just as apple jelly cake was being served, Dr. Carl Wells, director of USC’s gospel choir, regaled guests with a deep-voiced rendition of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round, in which the song’s protagonist pledges to “keep on a walkin’, keep on a talkin’, walkin’ into freedom land.” Needing very little prompting, guests then heartily joined Wells in singing Let My People Go. 

The evening ended with Chef Green and his crew coming out from the kitchen to enjoy a standing ovation. As guests braced themselves to face the formidable weather and trip home, many remarked “until next time” or “until next year.” The general feeling seemed to be that this was an experience well worth repeating—that Nat Fuller and his legacy should not be forgotten.

Crab and Cabbage Cannelloni
Lemon-parsley gelée, red pepper coulis

Terrine de Foies de Volaille
(Chicken pâté)
Green pea-mint puree, crispy bacon, citrus compote
Chard potato bread

Manchester Farms Quail
Stuffed with wild mushroom and artichoke
Sweet potato-rutabaga gratin and braised wild greens
Port wine sauce

Red Beetroot Granité
Brunoise of golden beet and tarragon syrup

Roasted Low Country Cobia
Oyster risotto, fried spinach, grapefruit vinaigrette

Apple Jelly Cake
Spiced cider reduction, caramelized apple rounds
Coconut mousse and crisp apple cookie

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Jane Przybysz is executive director of McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina. She earned her PhD in Performance Studies at New York University. In 2015 she spent four months in Poland on a Fulbright Research Fellowship studying post-WWII efforts to revitalize and monetize Polish folk traditions.

My home is where eternal snow Round threat’ning craters sleep, Where streamlets murmur soft and low And playful cascades leap. Tis where glad scenes shall meet My weary, longing eye; Where rocks and Alpine forests greet The bright cerulean sky.

(*While Forest Leaves was published under Harper’s maiden name, Watkins, I refer to her throughout the article as Frances Harper, because she is more commonly known by her married name; further, it will avoid any confusion with her uncle William Watkins.) In her poem titled “Yearnings for Home,” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper describes how she longs to be back home in her mother’s cot in order to pass away peacefully in the familiar surroundings of home. Harper beautifully depicts the rural landscape that surrounds her mother’s little house as a heavenly, blissful place. Those who know Frances Harper and her literary works might feel taken aback by the above-mentioned poem, because it was not printed in any of her known literary publications before or after the Civil War. Indeed, “Yearnings for Home” is only included in Harper’s first pamphlet, titled Forest Leaves, which was deemed lost to history for more than 150 years. This article introduces that long-lost publication to readers, scholars, and archivists.

A Lost Text Found

As I began to research my dissertation, “’Whatever concerns them, as a race, concerns me:’ The Life and Activism of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,” which chronicles Harper as a seminal figure in black women’s protest tradition and aims to highlight her political activism, I started in Maryland, the state of her birth. To be honest, I had no clear concept of how to go about conducting archival research on a figure like Harper, who did not leave behind, as far as we know, any personal papers, other than letters and speeches, some of which were published in newspapers, such as The Christian Recorder and The National Anti-Slavery Standard.

I decided to begin with the Maryland Historical Society, which is located in Harper’s hometown of Baltimore. Having done my secondary source reading on her, I knew that Forest Leaves was deemed lost. Call it my naiveté as a young graduate student, but I figured I might as well type in the title in the society’s catalogue. Voilà, it came up, together with a collection number. Even as I stared at the number on my screen, I thought that it could not be the “real deal,” but instead was maybe a copy of the cover, or a newspaper clipping discussing the pamphlet (my naiveté knew no bounds). Fast forward to when the MDHS special collections archivist placed an envelope with the call number in front of me. I opened it up, peeked inside and wanted to let out a high-pitched squeal that I had enough sense to repress at the last second. The pamphlet slid right out of the envelope into my hands and there it was, staring me in the face. The term surreal is appropriate for how I felt when I first perused the pages of Forest Leaves. As I am writing this essay, I still catch myself looking at my copy, double-checking the cover of the pamphlet, making sure that I am not imagining the title. I have to reassure myself that I am not hallucinating: finally, scholars and students will be able to read Harper’s first published work and include it in their teachings and studies alike.

A Key to Harper’s Early Life

The retrieval of Forest Leaves not only gives us an earlier starting point for Harper’s writings, but it is also the only primary source we have from her young life in Baltimore, before she joined the abolition movement in 1854 and began her decades-long career as a committed writer and activist for major social reform movements during the nineteenth century. Harper was raised by her uncle William Watkins, who took her in after she became an orphan at the age of three in 1828. Watkins was a renowned minister, educator, and avid abolitionist in Baltimore. He taught in his own school, the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, which, according to Frances Smith Foster “was well known for its emphasis upon biblical studies, the classics, and elocution.” Harper was one of his students until she was about thirteen years old and began to work as a domestic servant for a couple who owned a bookstore in the city.

Very little is known about Harper’s childhood and young adulthood in antebellum Baltimore, where she lived with her uncle William Watkins’ family in the city’s eleventh ward. Being born in a city with the largest free black population in the nation in the decades leading up to the Civil War, Harper grew up in an environment that displayed an intimate geographic proximity to slavery, since Maryland was a slave state. While we do not have autobiographic sources by Harper describing the first—roughly—twenty-five years of her life in Maryland, it is safe to state that her uncle had a great influence in shaping the young Harper’s mind and writing development. Due to Watkins’ position as the founder of his own academy, Harper had the advantage of receiving a formal education at a time when access to schools was either greatly restricted or impossible to obtain for African American children. Leroy Graham lists the subjects taught at Watkins’ academy as “History, Geography, Mathematics, English, Natural Philosophy, Greek, Latin, Music, and Rhetoric” and describes Watkins as “a grammarian of such precision in the way of etymology, syntax, prosody, and so on, that one of his former pupils wrote humorously of the old leather strap Watkins used to correct grammar misuses.” This account of the teacher’s strict expectations allows us to safely assume that Harper not only learned basic literacy in her uncle’s school, but was also taught the composition and style that is needed to write well-developed poems. The rediscovered pamphlet testifies to Harper’s access to a strong formal education, which made her stand out from the majority of the nation’s black population, who were denied such access. She was not the first one in her family to use the medium of print in order to have her voice heard. Her uncle William Watkins had his letters published in newspapers like Freedom’s Journal and The Liberator, discussing the need for abolition and expressing his strong dislike for colonization—the plan to repatriate all free black people to Africa. One could argue that Harper must have been familiar with Watkins’ activism and publications and perhaps this was the inspiration for her to seek to have her own work read outside of her family’s household. While the pamphlet was written by Harper herself, one has to acknowledge how her familial surroundings helped her develop and nurture her growing desire to write for public consumption.

Forest Leaves gives us insight into Harper’s desire to publish her works for a public readership while she was still living in Baltimore and had not, as yet, joined the abolition movement.

Forest Leaves gives us insight into Harper’s desire to publish her works for a public readership while she was still living in Baltimore and had not, as yet, joined the abolition movement.

Insights into Nineteenth-century Black Print Culture and Harper’s Body of Work

The pamphlet functions as our “new” starting point for Harper’s introduction into African American literary history and allows us the opportunity to discuss how she was able to distribute her first poems within the nation’s burgeoning print culture. Forest Leaves was published by printer James Young, who founded and lead temperance organizations in Baltimore. As Patricia Dockman Anderson has shown, Young owned a printing business, but was also a leader in the Maryland temperance movement, helping to found Maryland’s branch of the Sons of Temperance organization in Harper’s hometown. According to the title page of Forest Leaves, Young’s printing business was at the corner of Baltimore and Holliday streets. An advertisement in the Baltimore Wholesale Business Directory for 1845 lists Young’s printing press at No. 3 South Gay Street and states that he would “execute every description of printing as cheap and well as any other establishment in the city.” It’s likely that the prospect of an affordable print run influenced Harper’s choice of Young’s business for her first collection of poems. Having books and pamphlet printed was not a low-cost venture for writers during that time, and Harper certainly could not have paid high prices on her domestic servant’s salary.

Forest Leaves does not include a publication year, but the found copy of the pamphlet is likely not from the year 1845, which initially was proposed as the publishing date by other scholars, since James Young’s shop was located on Gay Street during that year, and not at Baltimore and Holliday as stated in the pamphlet. This could either mean that Forest Leaves was not originally published in 1845, or that a different printer printed it that year and no record survived. In the following year, 1846, Young printed an almanac, published by J. Moore, still citing his Gay Street address. In 1853, he printed a lecture by Harry Young on the rise in crime, and the printing location is the same as in Forest Leaves. This indicates that James Young moved his business from No. 3 Gay Street to the corner of Baltimore and Holliday Streets sometime between 1846 and 1853, and that he printed this copy of Forest Leaves during that time period. Keeping in mind that Harper moved to Ohio to teach at Union Seminary in 1851, it is safe to state that her first pamphlet was published sometime in the latter half of the 1840s, when she was in her early twenties. The publication of Forest Leaves provides a prehistory for the other literary works Harper wrote when she became one of the most well-known black women activists of the nineteenth century. After Harper left Baltimore to eventually work as a traveling lecturer for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society and later the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society during the mid to late 1850s, she published her second pamphlet, titled Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, in 1854. After the Civil War ended and slavery was officially abolished, Harper became active in the women’s rights and temperance movements and continued to publish (serialized) novels, such as Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph, and Iola Leroy, as well as collections of poems. Harper died in Philadelphia in 1911. Frances Smith Foster points out that “Harper’s literary aesthetics were formed during the first half of the nineteenth century, and her commitment to a literature of purpose and of wide appeal remained constant.” This constancy is evidenced by a writing style, which, we can now see, did not change much after her first pamphlet. However, while her later publications, including her novels, were certainly more political and focused on black life, her first pamphlet centers heavily on Christianity. Importantly, Forest Leaves marked the first stepping-stone of a literary career that would earn her a spot as one of the most influential and celebrated African American women writers.

A Case Study in the Politics of Authentication

Forest Leaves provides a new site to discuss the practice of authenticating black writers’ literary productions during the antebellum period. Black writers like Phillis Wheatley, Ann Plato, and Harriet Jacobs, who published their works during the 1770s, the 1840s, and the 1860s respectively, relied on well-respected community leaders/activists to write prefaces that would vouch for their intellectual writing capabilities. Harper’s own 1854 pamphlet Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects includes such a preface by none other than abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, most likely because of her emerging public persona as an abolitionist lecturer and the use of the pamphlet as a piece of literature that spoke out against the enslavement of millions of African Americans in the South. Yet Forest Leaves has no such authenticating material. Does the lack of a preface in Forest Leaves suggest that Harper did not mean for it to be published for public consumption? Or, we might ask, did she actively opt not to have an authority like her well-known uncle vouch for her authenticity as an author?

In The Underground Railroad, William Still wrote that “the ability [Harper] exhibited in some of her productions was so remarkable that some doubted and others denied their originality.” With this in mind, Harper’s omission of a preface for Forest Leaves can be read as a conscious effort to distance herself, as a young black woman in her early twenties, from white America’s desire and need to have (predominately) white men function as creditors for black intellectual publications. She could very well have viewed her pamphlet as her first foray into the literary world and was content with publishing her creative expression without someone else’s written stamp of approval.

New Poems, and New Origins for Known Work

The content of Forest Leaves itself provides a rich new site of study for scholars of African American literature and history, and for researchers of book history and print culture. To begin with, we now have earlier versions of poems scholars are familiar with through her already known literary productions. Forest Leaves’ poem “The Soul” was republished in the Christian Recorder in 1853, according to Foster’s citation of Daniel Payne in A Brighter Coming Day. “Bible Defence of Slavery,” “Ethiopia,” “That Blessed Hope,” and “The Dying Christian” were republished in Harper’s 1854 pamphlet, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. Two poems from Forest Leaves, namely “He Knoweth Not That The Dead Are There” and “For She Said If I May But Touch Of His Clothes I Shall Be Whole,” were also included in her second pamphlet, but with different titles, “The Revel” and “Saved By Faith,” respectively.

The content of Forest Leaves itself provides a rich new site of study for scholars of African American literature and history, and for researchers of book history and print culture.

According to an advertisement in the newspaper the National Anti-Slavery Standard from June 6, 1857, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects was for sale at the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Office for 37 cents and could “be had at short notice and at the current price, by applying at this office.” Her poem “Ruth and Naomi” was included in the pamphlet’s 1857 edition. Also, “I Thirst” resurfaces, with minimal corrections from the original version in Forest Leaves, in the National Anti-Slavery Standard on October 9, 1858, and is reprinted in Harper’s 1873 edition of her publication Sketches of Southern Life. The poem “A Dialogue” was republished in the Christian Recorder on July 3, 1873, as stated in A Brighter Coming Day. While Harper republished “I Thirst” in an anti-slavery newspaper a few years after the publication of Forest Leaves, it is interesting to note that she held on to “A Dialogue” for more than twenty years before republishing it again in a newspaper. Further, the content of “A Dialogue” shares clear commonalities with her short story “Shalmanezer, Prince of Cosman,” which, according to Melba Boyd, “is concerned with the pitfalls of man’s materialism,” and is published in the 1887 edition of Sketches of Southern Life. Thus, one can see how her earliest work continued to influence and inspire her later literary productions. Because of the pamphlet’s discovery, we know now that none of these already known poems were reproduced in their original form, but were revised in various ways for the 1854 publication. Further, most of these poems were at least one verse longer in Forest Leaves, and Harper altered punctuations as well as various words in her revisions. This discovery alters our understanding of these previously studied poems, as they now must be understood as revisions of earlier works. Harper’s choice to reprint these early works allows for the conclusion that she was, despite some alterations, satisfied with her literary productions before she formally joined the abolition movement and became one of the most well-known nineteenth-century black women writers. The fact that “Bible Defence of Slavery” was originally written for Forest Leaves testifies to the young writer’s growing activist mindset, exemplifying her critique of slavery while she was still living in Baltimore. Further, it shows her uncle’s influence on Harper’s evolving thoughts on slavery, as Watkins himself published various letters in Frederick Douglass’ Paper in which he voiced his contempt for Christians and ministers who used the Bible to justify the enslavement of millions of African Americans.

The ten new poems are, of course, exciting additions to Harper’s body of work. Half of the newly recovered poems in Forest Leaves focus on religion and Christianity, which function as dominant themes throughout her career as a writer. Harper’s focus on Christianity as a central topic in her first pamphlet emphasizes the fact that religion played—as it still does to this day—a key component in the lives of African Americans. According to Frances Smith Foster, biblical studies were part of the Watkins Academy’s school curriculum. William Watkins was also a minister at Baltimore’s Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church and thus religion was probably a central part of his family’s life, which is reflected in the Christian themes of most of the poems in Forest Leaves. Further, Harper stays within the limits of female respectability by writing about religion, which is not surprising for a young, free black woman who was consciously defying societal norms by publishing her literary works for a potentially broad audience. This fact is further underlined by her use of romanticism and sentimentalism in the poems “Let Me Love Thee” and “Farewell, My Heart Is Beating.” These works could be expressions of a young Harper’s awakening sense of love and romance, something she did not address again in her subsequent poems; by exploring these topics in her writing, she again remains within the boundaries of proper femininity, while expressing herself through the public medium of print culture.

Forest Leaves adds to a broader genealogy of antebellum black women’s literature.

In sum, Forest Leaves represents a new vista for scholarship on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper by not only expanding the cannon of her literary work, but by also adding to a broader genealogy of antebellum black women’s literature. Writing in the decades leading up to the Civil War, African American men and women affirmed and fought for their right to be seen as full citizens in a country that continuously portrayed them as inferior and lacking in intellectual capabilities. Education became one of the crucial pillars of the black freedom struggle. Due to people like Harper’s Uncle Watkins, the succeeding generation of black activists, which included Harper, were able to put their demands, thoughts, and ideas into writing, defying stereotypes. Forest Leaves is illustrative of the success of the antebellum black fight for literacy and education, while adding to the field of early African American literature.

Read the Poems