The Occom Circle at Dartmouth College presents a digital edition of 525 items related to the eighteenth-century Mohegan minister and advocate for indigenous rights Samson Occom. The website provides free access to these texts in the form of facsimiles accompanied by diplomatic and modernized transcriptions. The project includes prose works, letters, petitions, tribal documents, sermons, hymns, confessions, and journals composed by or relating to Occom.

The Occom Circle’s wide range of eighteenth-century genres provides a glimpse into Occom’s life and that of other eighteenth-century Native Americans. Confessions by American Indians like the narrative of Temperance Hannabal and drafts of Occom’s autobiography appear in the archives as well as rare eighteenth-century letters by American Indian women like Occom’s Montaukett wife, Mary Fowler Occom, Narragansett Sarah Simon and Mary Secutor, and Delaware Miriam Storrs. Occom’s student work and Hebrew textbook also give scholars a glimpse into the educational practices of eighteenth-century American Indian missions. Occom’s textbook includes marginalia and annotations such as “Samson Occom, an Indian of Moyauhegonnuek” and “Jure Hune Librum Tenet” or “this book holds the right” in Latin. Occom’s 1773 hymns “Come all my young companions, come” and “The Slow Traveller” deserve examination by scholars of early American poetry and religion. Of interest to book historians, lists of religious and instructional books also pepper the archive, such as the book list by Occom’s Montaukett brother-in-law David Fowler, who would later teach at Montauk and lead Brothertown.

As these examples illustrate, The Occom Circle is also valuable because of its illumination of Occom’s missionary network. Occom’s letter to Susanna Wheatley, mistress of the famous African American poet Phillis Wheatley, demonstrates the interdependence of the literary and historical modes in early Native American writing. Additionally, the letter shares the indigenous ethos of what Lisa Brooks calls the “common pot,” that is, “whatever was given from the larger network of inhabitants had to be shared within the human community” in The Common Pot.

In a letter from Mohegan on March 5, 1771, Occom thanks Wheatley and hopes that her letter to John Thornton “will attract Bowels of Compassion towards me and mine.” The phrase “Bowels of Compassion” comes from 1 John 3:17 in the King James Bible: “But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” Thornton was treasurer of the English Trust that oversaw funds raised by Occom for Wheelock’s Indian Charity School. A strong supporter and friend to Occom, Thornton died one of the wealthiest men in England in 1790. With the reference to “Bowels of Compassion,” Occom prays that Thornton will share his wealth in a Christian version of the common pot, merging missionary networking with an indigenous Christian ethos.

Next, Occom broaches another problem, explaining that his family’s corn harvest last year was poor and meat scarce due to drought. He needs to buy food for his family but lacks the funds to do so, adding that his family burden has increased to “ten Souls” and constant visitors. Occom describes his house as “a Sort of an Asylum for Strangers both English and Indians, far and near.” In the spirit of the common pot, Occom welcomes strangers into his home despite their bad fortune, sharing what little they have.

Occom nevertheless recognizes that others are poorer than himself. He paints a picture of beggars wandering “almost Naked in the Severest weather…oblig’d to go from House to House, and from Door to Door, with Tears Streaming Down their Dirty Cheeks beging a Crum of Bread.” In comparison to these wandering poor, Occom praises God “Night and Day” for what he has been given, realizing, “I have no Room to open my Mouth in a way of Complaint.” The main body of the letter ends with a prayer that this letter “may find you and yours in Health of Body and Soul Prosperity.”

Occom’s postscripts contain the only straightforward requests in the letter. In the second postscript, Occom asks for “a Singing Book” for his children, while in the first postscript, Occom asks, “Pray madam, what harm woud it be to Send Phillis to her Native Country as a Female Preacher to her kindred, you know Quaker women are alow’d to preach, and why not others in an Extraordinary Case.” Occom advocates for Phillis Wheatley to preach to African Americans just as he has preached to American Indian people. Parallels between these two writers who traveled through the same eighteenth-century missionary circles have yet to be examined.

Digital editions of early American Indian writing are rare; in addition to The Occom Circle, the Yale Indian Papers Project offers free facsimiles of early American Indian writing, including letters by Occom and tribal petitions. These projects, as Occom’s letter demonstrates, reveal a vibrant world of eighteenth-century social relations in a missionary context that has yet to be appreciated. Creating a literary genealogy linking Occom and Wheatley could change conceptions of early American Indian and African American writing and missionary work.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3 (Spring, 2017).

Lauren Grewe is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation, “Woven Alike with Meaning,” is on sovereignty and form in early Native North American poetry.

Because Phillis Wheatley’s “On Virtue” is one of the first poems that she wrote, it is often dismissed as a poem of juvenilia. But this poem demands reexamination, as it is where Wheatley first engages with Jonathan Edwards’s theology. Though it is impossible to know whether Wheatley read any of Edwards’s writings, most of his texts—including The Freedom of the Will (1754) and The Nature of True Virtue (1765)—were first published and sold in Boston at Samuel Kneeland’s print shop, which was located a few blocks away from the Wheatleys’ King Street mansion. According to the “Proposals” for her volume of poetry, which was first printed in the Boston Censor on February 29, 1772, Wheatley wrote “On Virtue” in 1766. That Wheatley composed her poem within months after Edwards’s text on the same topic posthumously appeared in print only further supports the possibility that “On Virtue” is Wheatley’s poetic response to Edwards’s conception of virtue.

Placed second in her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), “On Virtue” is a short poem that details the process of evangelical conversion. The poem begins with Wheatley describing Virtue as being out of reach to the human mind: “O Thou bright jewel in my aim I strive / To comprehend thee. Thine own words declare / Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach.” In True Virtue, Edwards similarly argues that virtue is beyond most people’s understanding because it is closely associated with God—that God’s “being above our reach . . . [shouldn’t] hinder that he should be loved according to his dignity . . . we must allow that true virtue does primarily and most essentially consist in a supreme love to God.” Though Wheatley concedes that she will “no more attempt” to mentally “comprehend” Virtue, she does encourage her soul to have a more immediate interaction with it: “But, O my soul, sink not into despair, / Virtue is near thee . . . Fain would the heav’n-born soul with her converse, / Then seek, then court her for her promis’d bliss.” It is only after Wheatley acknowledges her soul’s ability to connect with Virtue that its “sacred retinue descends” from heaven to greet her: “Array’d in glory from the orbs above. / Attend me, Virtue, thro’ my youthful years! . . . guide my steps to endless life and bliss.”

In agreement with Edwards, Wheatley argues that Virtue is a divine and “sacred” quality (it is “array’d in glory from the orbs above”). Yet Wheatley additionally alludes to Edwards when she asks Virtue to “embrace” her soul and “guide [her] steps to endless life and bliss.” For in Freedom of the Will, Edwards also claims that one’s soul is capable of influencing the way one walks: “And God has so made and established the human nature . . . that the soul preferring or choosing such an immediate exertion or alteration of the body, such an alteration instantaneously follows. There is nothing else in the actings of my mind, that I am conscious of while I walk . . .” The reason that Edwards is conscious of nothing while he walks is because his newly converted soul has suspended “the actings of [his] mind.” By saying that his body only moves as a result of his soul’s and not his mind’s “preferring or choosing,” Edwards argues that when one undergoes a conversion experience and gives one’s self up to God, one no longer has complete control over one’s own body. Wheatley’s saying that her soul touched by Virtue can “guide [her] steps” is thus more than just a metaphor for God’s ability to change a converted person’s life: it is an acknowledgment of the immense power that God’s virtuous character can have over a person’s body and soul. 

This idea that one’s spiritual status is reflected in the way one walks recurs in black evangelical writing in the early-national period, most especially in Lemuel Haynes’s sermons. Like Edwards and Wheatley before him, Haynes, in his 1776 sermon on John 3:3, argues that a converted man “evidences by his holy walk that he has a regard for the honour of God.” Though she was not a minister, Wheatley was, like Haynes, deeply invested in Edwards’s theology and advanced his theory of conversion. Placing Wheatley’s “On Virtue” in dialogue with the writings of other evangelical ministers, black or white, is one of the many ways that scholars can begin to value Wheatley as a formidable theological thinker in the colonial era.

Further reading:

The most authoritative edition of Wheatley’s writings is Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York, 2001). Haynes’s writings can be found in Black Preacher to White America: The Collected Writings of Lemuel Haynes, 1774-1833, ed. Richard Newman (Brooklyn, 1990). The most authoritative editions of Edwards’s writings are from Yale University Press; Freedom of the Will is found in the collection’s first volume and True Virtue is located in the eighth volume. Cedrick May is one of the only other scholars to discuss the affinity between Edwards’s and Wheatley’s theology; see his Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760-1835 (Athens, 2008). For more information on Samuel Kneeland, see Jonathan Yeager, “Samuel Kneeland of Boston: Colonial Bookseller, Printer, and Publisher of Religion,” Printing History 11 (2012): 35-61. Eighteenth-century maps of Boston show that King Street (location of the Wheatley mansion) becomes Queen Street (where Kneeland’s shop was located) upon crossing with Cornhill Street. The “Proposals for Printing by Subscription, A Collection of Poems . . . by Phillis, a Negro Girl” was reprinted in the Boston Censor on three occasions in 1772; it is reproduced in Carretta’s edition of Wheatley’s Complete Writings.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3 (Spring, 2017).

Michael Monescalchi is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Rutgers University. He is writing a dissertation on how the Christian ethical theory of disinterested benevolence affected reform philosophies in the early-national era.

As the rather otherworldly title of Caleb Smith’s brilliantly inventive and unsettling new book begins to intimate, The Oracle and The Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War is a study that makes itself at home with the irrational. Though situated as an examination of that seemingly most reasonable of realms, “the law’s public sphere,” this book tells a complex transatlantic story of the monumental difficulty, and perhaps the ultimate undesirability, of putting any particular analytical stock in arriving at a final distinction between reason and rationalization, argument and harangue (40).

Viewed most broadly, this is a study of the intersecting stories of the early national and antebellum secularization of the law and the period’s complementary desecularization of protest. In the cultural narrative that Smith constructs, the oracle-curse dichotomy serves as a barometer to these shifts, according to which the secularization of the judiciary can be described as the “decline of the oracle” and the desecularization of protest can be described as “the rise of the curse” (xiii). At the same time, Smith also uses the oracle-curse dichotomy as an aesthetic index to the unfinished business that would otherwise be concealed by the story so neatly rendered. The oracular, that is, describes a traditional source of authority as well as a persistent style of juridical pronouncement in which the judge seems to assume the voice of the priestly medium. Here, the judge, like the oracle of antiquity, performs the role of designated conduit of the law, rather than merely its fallible professional interpreter. This is the mode that secular justice always claims to want to leave behind. Yet, as Smith demonstrates, it flares up repeatedly in literary representations of the law as well as in the law’s own public representations of itself. It arguably persists down to the present day, when judges both insist upon their ethical and political neutrality and signal their ceremonial authority by wearing flowing black robes—essentially the oracular vestments of a judicial priesthood.

The curse operates in this scheme as the oracular’s insurgent other, the likewise apparently anachronistic style of extra-juridical denunciation that also claims authorization from beyond. The curse, as Smith shows, can be understood alongside the oracle as a mode that the eighteenth century’s own valorization of the reasonable and deliberative public sphere also wants to disavow: exasperated expressions of rage and non-compliance uttered by the oppressed and unjustly condemned are not, after all, “arguments.” At the same time, the curse often seems to be the form of extralegal address most regularly called forth by the very attempts exerted toward its suppression. Whether in the early political efforts at corralling the speech of the dispossessed, the legal energies exerted to control supposed public menace of blasphemy, or the broad censorship campaigns waged against radical abolitionist publicity, the curse, Smith shows, was frequently conjured by the very fear of its power.

Shadowing this story throughout is a compelling exploration of the realm of the aesthetic—the subtitular “poetics of justice”— which functions as the cultural repository for law’s generally unacknowledged but nonetheless constitutive reliance on nonrational persuasion. It is through the lens of the aesthetic, Smith contends, that we can best apprehend the law’s ongoing reliance on explicitly public rituals of judgment that seem continuous with the sensory appeals of religious worship or the old world’s gaudy displays of aristocratic prerogative. It is likewise in aesthetic terms that we can perhaps understand the capacity of the curse—the speech of that seemingly marginalized voice in the wilderness—to constitute its own public. Perhaps the best-known example of this effect, and one central to this book’s argument, is the political and aesthetic reverberations of John Brown’s statements on the eve of his execution. Brown appealed to his contemporaries—and arguably to us—through what Smith names as his language’s “summoning power,” despite the general consensus that there was nothing particularly reasonable, strategic, or worth emulating, about the revolutionary attack on Harpers Ferry (xi). As Smith writes,

By nonrational persuasion, I mean modes of address and affirmation which involve not the critical evaluation of propositions but the affective and aesthetic response to justice’s performative invocation. I mean the love that binds subjects to power, the beauty that enchants, and (in the case of the curse) the fiery righteousness that animates dissent. Often, a promise of belonging is implicit in these styles of conviction, and I attend, especially, to the feeling of taking a side in a collective conflict, joining a community which knows its identity in opposition to its enemies. (9)

In the cultural story that Smith is telling, in other words, justice’s ability to move its public—to submission, or to rage—is every bit as native to the public culture of law as the rendering of judgment itself. The “poetic” in this critical framing is not particularly the preserve of the literary imaginary, though it is often the work of literature to resist, amplify, or object to the aesthetic convolutions of contemporary legal culture.

The Oracle and the Curse traces these questions across three pairs of chapters that follow the cultures of legal secularization and extralegal protest from the late eighteenth century to the brink of the Civil War. The first pair examines the contradictory fortunes of oracular justice in the age of revolution. Chapter one, “Oracles of Law,” documents the means by which the early United States judiciary established itself as the privileged mediator of the law by successfully representing itself to the public as if it were the voice of the public. Smith traces this effect through the elite treatise literature that bore debates around the nature of the “common law” across the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century. Smith examines the debates between William Blackstone and Jeremy Bentham in Britain, and then among a larger cast of legal commentators in the early national United States, including Jesse Root, Henry Dwight Sedgwick, and James Wilson. By working carefully through this archive, Smith exposes the paradoxical aesthetic operations by which judicial power was solidified in the early republic, explicitly against the well-articulated antinomian objections of skeptical interpreters such as Robert Rantoul and William Sampson who called specific and outraged attention to the Blackstonian jurist’s assumption of the oracular style under the cover of natural law and common sense.

Chapter two, “Oracles of God,” shifts focus from the oracle to its public and from theoretical wrangling about the role of the judiciary to the larger scene of judgment evoked in the print cultural formation of gallows literature. Given this book’s interpretive matrix, it is easy to imagine that gallows literature could serve as the seedbed for the curse’s rise. However, Smith finds that gallows literature assumed a more delicate mediating role. If the democratic gallows can be understood as a particularly extreme expression of the translation of godly authority to a posited popular judgment nonetheless rendered by the judiciary, gallows literature worked to repurpose the traditional genres of the execution sermon and the criminal confession to urge a modern print readership to see their own will in the grim workings of secular justice. That work of mediation seemed to assign those responses to the scene of judgment that could be deemed literary—feelings of sympathy for the condemned, apprehensions of punishment as tragic—precisely to the realm of literature and therefore distinct from the realm of official judgment. With the help of gallows literature, Smith argues, it becomes possible to feel the pain of the condemned while sending them to hang. Such, Smith argues, is the role of literature generally within the more capacious field of the poetics of justice. The chapter concludes with a reading of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, the era’s famous gothic novel of murder prompted by an untraceable disembodied voice. Working against the grain of a number of critical readings that approach this work as a political allegory of federalism or anti-federalism, Smith reads the text as a more aesthetically ambitious literary analogue of popular gallows literature—a work that repeatedly restages scenes of confession and judgment as a paradoxical means to assert literature’s ceding of secular judgment to the realm of the law.

The second pair of chapters examines the curse’s public emergence. Chapter three, “Blasphemy ‘At the Court of Hell,'” considers the secular trials for the crime of blasphemy in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Here, in another ironic turn on the notion of democratic justice, the popular voice is positioned as both the object of punishment and the source of correction, as legal decisions of the era—most famously in the case of the convicted atheist Abner Kneeland—quite explicitly carved unwritten “laws” of social cohesion and class coercion away from the bone of those other legal abstractions known as free exercise and free speech. In the Jacksonian era, Smith finds, the secular judiciary turned its attention to the censure of blasphemy not out of a renewed or residual religiosity on its own part, but rather out of an avowed belief that blasphemy, when publicized among the laboring classes, and particularly through the rising mass circulation of print, could cause social unrest and thus injure the interests of “the people” whose normative identity was imagined to be more genteel.

This particular formation of post-secular juridical authority, Smith finds, did however produce the very form of popular protest it most feared: “the self-exonerating convict narratives, trial reports, and polemics that were beginning to circulate in the mass press of the 1830s” (118). These were the public appeals produced by those who felt themselves wronged by official justice, who, like many aggrieved bloggers of today, “go public” in hopes of finding readers inclined toward more favorable judgments. This chapter includes an extended literary reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’sHouse of Seven Gables in conversation with Hawthorne’s early story “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” framing them as two texts engaged with the formal implications of the “self-exonerating” search for counter-publics that could offer extra-judicial vindication to the officially guilty.

Chapter four, “Evil Speaking, ‘A Bridle for the Unbridled Tongue’,” examines the evangelical community’s self-regulating project of prosecuting “evil speaking,” or unauthorized preaching, especially among women in the 1830s and 1840s. As was the case with the blasphemy trials, the intramural regulation of “evil speaking” and “enthusiasm” produced a popular literature of opposition, those works of spiritual testimony written by women such as Sally Thompson, Elleanor Knight, and Zilpha Elaw. But, more to Smith’s point, the evangelicals’ efforts at self-regulation provided the material and aesthetic preconditions for the emergence of sentimental novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) chief among them. If the “problem” of female speech was its inspired, embodied publicity, Smith suggests, novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin managed to solve it by accomplishing female publicity in a form that strategically described itself as being spoken in private.

The third pair of chapters examines literary abolitionism’s characteristic means of mobilizing what the blasphemy trials revealed as the odd duality of the curse as a threat to be contained and a power to be unleashed. Chapter five, “The Curse of Slavery,” takes up what Smith identifies as a curious paradox within the radical abolitionist publicity associated with William Lloyd Garrison. On the one hand, Garrisonian radicalism was deeply invested in the power of stirring speech to move a public toward extra-legal action. After all, Garrison promised in the 1831 inaugural issue ofThe Liberator that his rhetoric would be “as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice.” However, in Garrison’s mind, there appears to have been a difference between imagining harsh speech diminuendo—as inspiring quietly peaceful action—and crescendo—as inciting destabilizing physical violence. In Smith’s account, the threat of crescendo becomes, perhaps ironically, the self-imposed job of these most radical and self-sacrificial of abolitionists to manage and moderate. As a matter of philosophy, Smith argues, this duality can be discerned in Garrison’s ambivalent treatment of the legacy of the condemned prophetic enslaved revolutionary Nat Turner. As a matter of aesthetics, Smith finds these questions brought to the surface most powerfully in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s abolitionist poem, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” Published in the United States abolitionist annual The Liberty Bell in 1848, “The Runaway,” Smith persuasively argues, works to represent the enslaved rebel’s summoning curse as, Job-like, withheld rather than uttered to ignite a revolution.

Chapter six, “Words of Fire,” returns us at last to John Brown’s moment and, with it, to the possibility that “mere” words can be finally reimagined as so inextricable from deeds as to become frankly inflammatory. Completing the book’s rigorous dialectical practice of tracking the cultural poetics of law as a contest between empowered and incompletely silenced voices vying to be heard, this chapter tracks the emergence of the very incendiary publicity that abolitionism—particularly white-led movement abolitionism in Smith’s account—worked so hard to regulate. Attending to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and its subsequent publicity in the legal public sphere, Smith interprets Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl(published in 1861) and Martin Delany’s novel Blake: Or, the Huts of America (serialized from 1859 to 1861) as two major African American-authored literary works that can be understood as responding to the militant “summons” of the Harpers Ferry Raid and the additional attention drawn by Brown’s legendary jailhouse eloquence. Whereas white movement abolitionists might have wished to imagine Brown’s raid as an act of sacrificial extremism that would yield more moderate and controlled results, Jacobs and Delany heard a different call from Harpers Ferry: a call to imagine the powers of amplification possible if deeds were to be translated into words and then back into deeds again ad infinitum. Harpers Ferry provided a means to imagine slavery’s end not as the work of reform, but rather as a general rising of the oppressed in response to the martyred revolutionary’s call.

The Oracle and the Curse, as I began by saying, is an unsettling work, and deliberately so. As a matter of method it is devoted to upending those comfortable myths about the practice of democracy in the decades between the revolution and the Civil War upon which popular historiography has long rested. This book furthermore offers an unsettling implicit commentary on our own particular era, a period in which the connections between privilege and the enjoyment of supposedly universal liberties seems once again to be laid bare. The Oracle and the Curse offers a persuasive redescription of the public culture of the law in early America, even as it prompts us to reflect anew on the legal and institutional worlds that we now live in.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2.5 (April, 2015).

Martha Schoolman is assistant professor of English at Florida International University in Miami. She is the author of Abolitionist Geographies (2014).

Statement of Poetic Research

“If you would learn the earth as it really is,” N. Scott Momaday writes, “learn it through its sacred places.” For many years, I have been visiting pictograph and petroglyph sites in Montana and the West, reading the archeological research and tribal records, and consulting with area archaeologists, hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the place where I live. “What we mean by place is a crossroads,” writes Rebecca Solnit in her book Storming the Gates of Paradise, “a particular point of intersection of forces coming from many directions and distances.” In Montana, as I’m sure is true of all places, that intersection is complex. There are sculpted mountains, limestone canyons, glacial erratics and volcanic seams, the ice age having covered the land so long that that making seems new and ongoing. As South Dakota novelist Kent Meyers writes, “The surface of the continent is literally older [in the West]. There is no new, thick topsoil to cover the evidence of former years, nor is there enough rainfall to support plant life abundant enough to prevent the erosion that year after year reveals ancient burials. Time is always being stumbled over here.”

This land, fragrant with multiple species of sage, or dark with Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine is not, however, untouched. In fact, it is over- and under-laid with thousands of years of indigenous occupation, language and trade and trails, as well as the later Indian massacres and broken treaties, reservation land divided by sale of allotments, and the wholesale slaughter of buffalo. Montana, which we praise for its recreational opportunities, has been recreated over ruins, has built itself wholesale over cultures whose visionary images, depicted in pictographs, still watch, many of them “undiscovered,” from the grottos and caves above us. “The counter-history of the indigenous people,” as Solnit writes, includes the various ways the land has been ceremonialized by them, ceremonies whose purpose was to keep alive a relationship between the human and the animals, plants, trees, elements, and the dead.

The sites where the pictographs and petroglyphs were made are some of the most beautiful places I have ever visited, sun-splashed gulches blooming with cream-colored yucca and a strange pink-orange paintbrush, prickly pear cacti, the threat of snakes, places over-hot and lush with sandstone hoodoos and pinnacle rocks guarding them, places where one could see no one for fifty miles, places imbued with their past, a single eagle or hawk, and baskets of rock wrens. And high caves that overlook entire watersheds. Here are some of the names: Valley of the Shields, Weatherman Draw, Bear Gulch, Perma, Sun River, Medicine Wheel. A number of sites have been completely destroyed by vandalism, graffiti, and theft. I visited one remote cave where, the ranchers told me, curators from the Smithsonian had come decades ago and chiseled out the central pictograph and taken it with them. Some are known only to a very few. Some, like Pictograph Cave, outside Billings, Montana, or Writing-on-Stone in Alberta, have become part of the national park systems and are being protected and preserved.

Petroglyph: Castle Gardens

Late morning, strange, a kind of music. I was in love with earth again. I wanted to stay forever as with a Person. Corridors of sandstone, the white, orange-rose. A flour batter poured into sloping pans that overflow into a sphere larger, more varied than we can travel. There was color where there is no color, inside the abraded circles and incised lines, only a fugitive green or violet, resembling fresco. Like the wash of lilac through the mind when one says lilac. Or shadow limbs between real limbs a painter sketches in space only to suggest the complications of lineage. Because there were no horses yet, the walk must have taken weeks, a hundred miles through sage and rabbit bush, far from water and trees. The ground friable, like stepping on wetted ash. They must have set alive a fragrance burning. To prepare their ancestral homeland. To pace themselves inside the dream. That we might have at one time added something to it.

Moving Pictograph: Parenthetical Signs of Spring

In the winter twilight, below the mountain—violet, aqua—the brown prairie unrolls in bolts of suede. The snow patches gather and disperse like herds. The mythic snow deer is what we say. One sole bluebird detaches itself from the sky, that trick most wild things play, which enables us to see the hundred more. The clouds, frothy and wild, tossing their manes and tails, prepare for what they will be: tomorrow. Goatsuckers and swifts. Nightjars and nighthawks. Two false eye spots, high rattle or trill. All things cryptically colored. Like the lynx in the ditch you have longed to see all your life. Like the reindeer. Like the shaman. An animal runs across the road, dives into the ditch, its ears like the forked and broken tines of dogwood. This is the important point: where vision came. And also, at the same time, the vision.

Questioning the Dead

Look how they go on without us, how they already existed when we arrived. On the other side, I have learned to say, but they’re not somewhere else, they’re here, in the green haze about the limbs, between me and that row of cottonwood barely budding. Like the culvert I came to yesterday, the backwater still. I saw what I usually see: the shoreline, the surface, not the upside down trees, which then swayed into being, though darkly. What is the nature of the eye’s adjustments? Take this valley, for instance—where would the dead be? If I hung cloth on the limbs, would they lift it? At what stage do we lose our precious names? Our symptoms? Our traceries? Our handicaps? Our turns of phrase? The shadows we lug everywhere, like an overfull valise? Earth the cool clay tablet where we set it down. I have been wrong to confront them so directly, to stare into the photographs of their battlegrounds.

Further reading

The poems included here are included in my most recent book of poems entitled Pictograph (Minneapolis, 2015). Coterminous with the writing of the poems, I was also writing a long essay, entitled “The Imaginary Book of Cave Paintings,” which appears in my collection of essays, Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision (Spokane, 2013). Informing both the essay and the poems were my research trips, as well as my relationship with Sarah Scott, a Montana State archeologist working to preserve rock paintings. I was also enormously educated and influenced by a number of amazing contemporary books on the subject. For recent theories on cave painting as a neurological expression of shamanic activity, see David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave (London, 2002). I was convinced by the author’s theory of a “spectrum of consciousness,” with ordinary waking consciousness on one end and the visions of a shaman on the other, and his belief that we all move up and down the spectrum at various times and with various experiences. On shamanism in general, see Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (London, 1989); Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People (Boston, 2005); and Clayton Eshleman, Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld (Middletown, Conn., 2003). For archeological research on pictographs and petroglyphs in the West, see James D. Keyser and Michael A. Klassen, Plains Indian Rock Art (Seattle, 2001); David S. Whitley, The Art of the Shaman: Rock Art of California (Salt Lake, 2000); Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s First Art, Symbol and Notation (New York, 1972); and Julie E. Francis and Lawrence L. Loendorf, Ancient Visions (Salt Lake, 2002). The latter book led me to visit Castle Gardens in southern Wyoming one late May morning, an unmarked site reached by dirt road far from any habitation, in the middle of hundreds of miles of sagebrush flatland. Alone, wandering paths between sandstone hoodoos and pinnacles, I soon was imagining how terrifying and ecstatic it must have been for those traveling by foot for days to encounter images of animals and gods a thousand years old. On the visionary imagination in general, see Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth (Princeton, N.J., 1989), as well as Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (Princeton, N.J., 1990); James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (New York, 1979); Adonis, Sufism and Surrealism (London, 2005); and John Berger, “The Chauvet Cave,” in The Shape of a Pocket (New York, 2001).

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2.5 (April, 2015).

Melissa Kwasny is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Pictograph (March 2015), The Nine Senses, and Reading Novalis in Montana, all from Milkweed Editions. A collection of essays, Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision, was published in 2013. She is also the editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950 and co-editor of an anthology of poetry in defense of human rights, entitled I Go to the Ruined Place. She lives in western Montana.

The Great Awakening of the eighteenth century strengthened American religion, but damaged America’s churches. The revivalists’ critics, and their more cautious supporters, believed that traditional church life was being jeopardized by the converts’ transcendent spiritual experiences and itinerants’ intrusive ramblings. Although Puritans and other fervent Protestants had assigned a prominent role to lay piety, America’s churches—especially those of the New England Congregationalists—gave a quasi-monarchical role to the pastor, whose theological education and formal ordination set him above his fellow believers as pastor and ruler. Revivalists assailed the churches’ stability by trumpeting the individual’s knowledge of God through the Holy Spirit. The lowliest man or woman in whom the Spirit dwelled could apprehend divine truths in a manner that an unconverted pastor could not, whatever that pastor’s knowledge of systematic theology, Greek, or Hebrew. One might expect Jonathan Edwards, the greatest theologian of the Great Awakening, to have offered trenchant commentary on the church and revival. Happily for Rhys Bezzant, director of Ridley College’s (Melbourne) Jonathan Edwards Center, no one had systematically analyzed Edwards’ views on this topic until Bezzant’s Jonathan Edwards and the Church.

To the people of colonial America, especially those in the Middle Colonies and New England, the church (both as a building and as a fellowship) had unique prominence as a social outlet and the site where saints lived out their faith. Many attended church meetings multiple times a week, listening to lengthy, doctrinal sermons. The laity participated in psalm-singing, but in general, the pastor and sometimes lay elders commanded most of the public speaking roles. The revivalists, especially the radicals, pushed for a democratization of those roles. All should have outlets to testify about their conversions and their experiences in the Spirit, the radicals insisted.

This balance between churchly order and the work of the Spirit was arguably the central point of controversy in the Great Awakening. It was a topic on which Jonathan Edwards, the celebrated pastor-theologian of Northampton, Massachusetts, developed important insights. But those views often remained at the level of implication within his writings on other topics, from revival to eschatology. Edwards’ most revealing experience in ecclesiology came in his own church in Northampton, from which he was dismissed in 1750 when he tried to shift away from a sacramental model established by his grandfather and predecessor, Solomon Stoddard.

Some scholars have commented on Edwards’ views on the church, but they have tended to suggest that those views were underdeveloped, or that Edwards’ revivalist sympathies neglected or even hurt the churches. Rhys Bezzant argues instead that in Edwards we find an admirable balance between respect for church tradition and support for evangelical innovation. Bezzant is an unabashed admirer of Edwards, whose ecclesiology, Bezzant says, coheres “within a larger embracing vision of reality shaped by the Gospel and the Kingdom” (255).

Bezzant’s monograph is a must-read for students and scholars of Edwards and the evangelical revivals. He is remarkably conversant with the vast literature on Edwards and early modern evangelicalism. For anyone needing to get up-to-date on the latest Edwards scholarship, Bezzant is a good place to start, accompanying the broader works on Edwards such as Gerald McDermott and Michael McClymond’s The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, and George Marsden’s definitive biography, Jonathan Edwards: A Life.

Bezzant walks the reader through most of Edwards’ major writings, sifting through them for ideas with ecclesiological import. This method also serves well as a theological introduction to Edwards’ massive body of writings. The fact that Bezzant cannot produce much in the way of direct commentary on the life of the church in that vast corpus, however, may tend to confirm that Edwards neglected this topic, as critics have suggested. Edwards seemed more comfortable discussing the work of God through the church around the world, and the eschatological destiny of that universal church, than he did talking about the local manifestations of the church. Of course, his dismissal from Northampton forced the issue forward, and in the last couple chapters Bezzant seems to be working with the strongest evidence as he discusses the dismissal, and the weekly practices of Edwards’ type of Congregationalist church (as well as Edwards’ growing sympathy for the extra-congregational authorities featured in the presbyteries and synods of Presbyterianism).

For Bezzant, Edwards tried to balance the Calvinist vision of a church working to “provide for the community pastorally,” and the Baptist/Anabaptist conception that the church was “a gift almost exclusively to the redeemed” (173). Edwards fatally decided in the 1740s to revoke Stoddard’s policy of making the Lord’s Supper available to all who were morally sincere. Edwards came to believe that while the church could not perfectly distinguish the regenerate from the unregenerate, the Lord’s Supper was meant only for those who could give a plausible testimony of saving faith. The transition did not go well, and when combined with lingering resentments over botched church discipline cases, the frustrated congregation voted to relieve Edwards of his duties.

Edwards similarly sought to balance the tension between godly order and the fresh work of the Spirit in the revivals. He was open to laypeople’s radical experiences early in the revivals, helping to account for his complicity in the raucous scene when he delivered “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in Enfield, Connecticut, in 1741. As time wore on, he and other moderate evangelicals became concerned that the work of the Spirit in individuals needed tethering. He offered anchoring in the long-term ministry of the Word (especially preaching), and in the long-term behavioral qualities one would discern in the true convert: love, holiness, and generosity, which the saints could only practice fully in the church. The Spirit might work powerfully in the minds and hearts of converts during seasons of revival, he wrote in Religious Affections (1746). Pastors should be willing to let the Spirit work as he would. But the real test of revival was its enduring effect in believers’ lives.

Some readers will undoubtedly find Bezzant too much an apologist for Edwards. From first to last, he takes an unfailingly positive view of the pastor-theologian, and writes primarily for an audience that appreciates the “theological significance of the church in God’s world” (ix). While I am sympathetic to Edwards in much the same way as Bezzant is, I still found myself wondering whether Edwards inadvertently did the kind of damage to the church that critics have suggested. In Edwards’ writings, there is much room for the glories of an individual’s delight in God, and for the fabulous scenes of the universal church in the millennial era. But Edwards always seemed to struggle with the mundane grind of weekly life in the institutional church; it always seemed to disappoint him. His congregation no doubt sensed that disappointment, and heard it in occasional chastising sermons (not least his “Farewell Sermon” delivered after his dismissal). His ever-present dissatisfaction undergirded his dismissal. But then and now, the pleasures and challenges of a life of faith are normally lived out in a local congregation, a fact too often missed by historians of American religion, including historians of the Great Awakening. Bezzant serves as an excellent guide to the conundrums presented by revival, early evangelicalism, and the everyday work of the churches.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2.5 (April, 2015).

Thomas S. Kidd is professor of history at Baylor University and the author of books including George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (2014)

A decade ago, the Panic of 1837 lurked only on the margins of popular memory. Aside from either assigning or absolving blame on President Andrew Jackson’s Bank War for the economic crisis, the writers of popular history paid little attention. And once safely past their PhD qualification exams, academic historians rarely revisited 1837. Sure, the most ardent students of the American economy used their weathered copy of Peter Temin’s The Jacksonian Economy (1969) to cite the silver strikes in Mexico, opium addiction in China, and spendthrift cotton agents in the United States that helped usher in the Panic of 1837 to cite the episode as one of the first global economic events. But for most, the panic was an “inside baseball” event in U.S. history; who other than specialists in this era should care? After all, a financial downturn followed by a few years of a depressed economy seemed all too typical of a seesaw American capitalism system. As such, 1837 took its dutiful place among other financial panics in 1819, 1857, and 1873 as signifiers that economic growth during the nineteenth century came in fits and spurts.

Our recent financial crisis of 2008 changed all that. The Panic of 1837 moved from the sleepy backwater of the early American republic into the spotlight. With breathless titles like America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder After the Panic of 1837, new books on this event attempted to draw parallels between cotton prices and canal stocks in the nineteenth century with collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps of our own. Apparently, the roller coaster that was the nineteenth century had reemerged with the destruction of the New Deal regulatory order and American capitalism was returning to its wild and wooly roots. Rather than draw the inevitable comparisons with the Great Depression of the 1930s, savvy historians argued that the twenty-first-century collapse of American financial institutions seemed more like the 1830s: overvalued commodities—albeit in our case houses, not cotton—filled the portfolios of greedy bankers and when the crash inevitably arrived, we all suffered for the hubris of our financial sector.

It is tempting, therefore, to view Jessica Lepler’s The Many Panics of 1837 as yet another in a growing field of “not that historical depression, but this one” arguments the blossomed in the wake of 2008. This is simply not the case. The genius of Lepler’s book is that it does offer timeless insights into some of the bedrock characteristics of American capitalism—faith, confidence, and timing—and at the same time is grounded squarely in the 1830s and 1840s. In its careful reconstruction of the day-by-day unfolding of small, localized crises, this book provides a fascinating account of this complex series of small-scale events that eventually became known as the Panic of 1837. The lesson learned is not a breezy or casual one suited for punditry or a sound byte. As Lepler demonstrates, 1837 offers more than a simple historical first or a lesson for modern policymakers; it provides us instead with a convincing case for “the power of communication as a causative force in economic history” (95).

The Many Panics of 1837 begins, quite fittingly, with a financier’s suicide in New Orleans. Lepler then introduces us to the arcane world of nineteenth-century finance, in which bills of exchange, reputation, and sheer gumption seemed to matter more than actual account balances and cash reserves. The book really focuses on three locations—New Orleans, New York, and London—and the vast distance separating these three commercial centers is no coincidence. In fact, time and distance play a starring role in The Many Panics of 1837. In simple yet compelling prose, Lepler reconstructs a financial world in which steamboats and sail ships provided a network of delayed and incomplete information. Imagine the uncomfortable feeling of a three-day check float in modern times. Did your payday deposit go through in enough time to cover the check you just wrote? Now take that sinking feeling and multiply it in both intensity and frequency. That was the everyday routine of an economy based on promises to pay and credits against future gain—a world in which unexpected dips in the price of cotton or the toll revenues on canals could trigger a cascade of defaulting loans. Since practically every participant in these networks was in debt to someone, everyone had something to fear. Lepler portrays nineteenth-century merchants and bankers as an anxious lot, and they had good reason to be. They worked in a world with excruciatingly long periods of incomplete or false information. Gossip, rumor, and subterfuge could be as powerful as any official statement, even if it came from such a stalwart source as the Bank of England. We have, for example, the story of Thomas Fidoe Ormes, a junior clerk at that institution, who took an ill-timed trip to the bathroom in the winter of 1836. Along the way, he confided to a loose-lipped broker about the failure of a firm. In subsequent weeks, this leak proved fatal not only for Ormes’ career with the BOE, but also fueled the sense that a downturn was on the horizon.

Over the course of a few months, then, individual occurrences like this combined to create a number of “panics,” in which anxious investors sought safety. Lepler stresses that many of these local events—the failure of a brokerage, a series of bad debts, overconfidence in cotton prices—did not in and of themselves cause an international economic crisis. Rather, their combined effect, further amplified by imperfect communication networks, started the ball rolling. A system based on confidence is only as good as its flow of information, and once the news of financial trouble spread from London to New York and then to New Orleans, policymakers in the United Kingdom and United States scrambled to respond to them. Lepler traces the ways in which the growing financial crisis ushered in a wider economic depression in the United States, leading to a period of “hard times” for Americans, most of whom had never speculated in cotton or finance. Those folks demanded action, but as President Martin Van Buren and other policymakers discovered, the power of “hard times” defied an easy solution. “The politicization and nationalization of the many panics in 1837,” Lepler asserts, “resulted in the invention of the Panic of 1837” (155). This panic was not mysterious, therefore, but it was quite complicated and the feedback loop between London, New York, and New Orleans exposed its residents to a vulnerability to economic forces that they had never experienced before. In the end the realization that individual virtue or thrift offered little protection against volatile market forces is one of the most significant legacies of the Panic of 1837 and a major reason that it merits close attention.

Lepler’s intricate reconstruction of the snowball effect of what English and American financial actors saw as reasonable attempts to weather the crisis—and the further catastrophic consequences of those actions—is the major selling point of The Many Panics of 1837. She weaves local stories into a network of international significance. This might frustrate some readers looking for a simple explanation or a new silver bullet that can hold off such “panics” in the future. Certainly there are pundits out there who will offer that kind of simplistic perspective. In the end though, Lepler’s rigorous approach to the Panic of 1837 and her focus on the importance of communication makes a much more significant statement about the value of studying the past in order to shed light on the present. It is a complex story, to be sure, but one that’s well worth taking the time to understand.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2.5 (April, 2015).

Sean Patrick Adams is associate professor and chair of the History Department at the University of Florida, where he teaches classes in nineteenth-century U.S. history and the history of American capitalism. His recent book, Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century (2014) examines the roots of America’s fossil fuel dependency during the Industrial Revolution.

Listening to the history of value

In 1601, strapped for funds and pressed for time, Elizabeth I ordered her mints to create new Irish coins that were short on silver. She used the base money, adorned with the same harp that the Tudors had traditionally chosen for their Irish coinage, to pay her royal army to put down the Ulster confederacy. Her strategy captured as profit the difference between the face value of the new money and its lower metallic value. At the same time, Elizabeth outlawed use of the old coins with higher silver content; these became bullion, available to be minted into the new currency. In a stroke, Elizabeth had raised a revenue without recourse to Parliament, its delays, and its demands. A few years later, a common law court confirmed the Queen’s sovereign authority to declare the denomination, weight, and worth of money. The new coins circulated, silver “harps” of a literally lighter note.

In 1768, a group of countrymen from Chester County, Pennsylvania, suggested a radically different way of making money. Four years before, Parliament had prohibited American legislatures from issuing colonial paper notes for legal tender, triggering a currency scarcity that bore down on the small rural producers and consumers of the state. Their solution was as bold as Elizabeth’s: let the general assembly issue paper without any official status; the people of Pennsylvania by mutual pledge would “receive the bills . . . in discharge of all debts and contracts, and in the business of trade and commerce to all intents and purposes as if they were made and declared by law to be legal tender in all cases whatever.” In other words, the people would cooperate in treating a homemade money with no legal backing as if it were the officially sanctioned medium. If they had been able to pull it off—had they convinced the legislature and maintained their pledge—the money would have succeeded, its value founded on their collective commitment rather than the sovereign’s authority. The money, we might imagine, would have looked much like the bills of credit produced during the period before the Act of 1764: rough prints of surprising beauty, often bearing a provincial symbol—the pine tree or the fox, a snake, sailing ship, or colony seal, edged with garlands or a scrolled pattern.

A revolution later, Robert Morris argued that the emerging states required a very new sort of money. According to his Report on the Public Credit, sent to Congress on July 29, 1782, the war had demonstrated that Americans must anchor their system on silver and gold specie with a value set by international exchange. Specie would be multiplied by credit—notes borrowed by governments or private individuals—that would lubricate the productive activities of enterprising men. The public role here was neither to decree value nor to coordinate its creation. Rather, Congress would set up a structure within which individuals would act according to their own ends, unlocking the “secret hoards” of precious metal they had long since hidden, lending, borrowing, investing in an economic whirl that would energize the new nation. Morris proposed a new unit for the federal coinage: the “mill,” which would be defined according to a standard metallic content of one quarter grain of silver and would, by factoring easily into the heterogeneous state and foreign currencies then circulating, ease conversion to the new national money. Morris even had prototypes of his proposed money minted: the legend Nova Constellatio encircled a sunburst of rays that emanated from an Eye of Providence; thirteen stars surrounded the sunburst and the back of the coin bore the words Libertas-Justitia. At the same time, Morris worked to convert the Continental dollars owed American troops into interest-bearing IOUs.

The harps of Elizabeth, the paper money imagined by the people of Chester, and the specie-and-debt combination proposed by Morris are more than historical tokens, intriguing material artifacts of their times. They are also more than ornaments on the political dramas that produced them: the tragic policy of Elizabeth towards the Irish, the ineptitude of Parliament confronting a rising American population, or the early nationalist impulses of American economic elites. Rather, currencies are the language of value, and like other languages, they convey a history, if we can hear it. Embedded in the currencies of Elizabeth, Chester, and Morris are three distinct theories of value—or, more precisely, three constitutions or regimes of practice that produced value. These distinct approaches to the creation of value illuminate the political economies of their times. In so doing, they allow us to reconsider mercantilism, to define capitalism in new ways, and to recognize alternative forms of value creation that we’ve previously neglected. More generally, they suggest the need for a history of the way we produce value, as well as meaning, and the way we distribute value, as well as meaning, in selective ways.

The Queen and the Irish Harp

When Elizabeth debased the Irish harp, she acted against a well-recognized baseline. Value, at the turn of the sixteenth century, was widely understood in a particular way: it was a real or tangible resource to be collected, controlled, and distributed by a sovereign. The character of money lay at the heart of that practice, with all its political and legal complexity, its material impact, and the conceptual categories that attended those dimensions. Through its medium, a particular approach to value penetrated the constitutional relations of mercantilism, the precapitalist belief that value was acquired not made.

Listen to the reasoning of the court that legitimated Elizabeth’s act. The political message is perhaps the most conspicuous. According to the judges, the King’s power to make money was enormous; he alone could make money “of what matter and form he pleaseth,” determining its weight, denomination, fineness, and stature as legal tender. Generally, monarchs used metallic tokens, convinced that value depended on the amount of precious metal captured in the coin. Likewise, the more gold or silver a country monopolized, the wealthier would be that polity. Sovereign power and control over value were joined at the root.

Even more striking, the King alone could “by his prerogative . . . put a price of valuation on all coins”—and he could change that valuation at will. The King could, in other words, drastically affect the fortunes of men: “so may he change his money in substance and impression, and enhance or debase the value of it, or entirely decry and annul it, so that it shall be but bullion at his pleasure.” Moreover, the monarch acted without recourse to Parliament; in such a regime, the King could raise revenue and save a kingdom, all without asking Parliament to levy a tax.

But an approach to value that placed it largely in the hands of a sovereign was not a regime without law. To the contrary, the judges located the rationale for “a standard of money” in a notable place: the need for individuals to contract with each other. “For no Commonwealth can subsist without contracts,” they observed, “and no contracts without equality [of terms], and no equality in contracts without money.” The need for a token that held a value constant between holders, if not a value consistent over time (given debasements), in turn supported the monarch’s prerogative to determine value. And if debasement for good cause was legal—and the judges clearly determined it to be within the common law—then the redistribution of property that it entailed was legal as well. This regime thus embedded in legal relations an order that expressly encompassed sovereignty over private resources, with organizing effects on the social, political, and material hierarchies that resulted.

The dynamics of the system stretched from exceptional cases like the Irish harp to everyday practice. Economists have argued that regimes relying on coins supposed to be worth the intrinsic value of their metallic content could not regulate amounts of small change in circulation; early modern rulers regularly debased currency in order to cure shortages of coin—not always because of their designs on revenue. That is, an approach to value that identified it as inhering in real resources brought with it the practical consequence of devaluation, a dynamic that then had to be managed, politically and legally. That project would affect basic categories like rights and property as participants rationalized the political economy they created. For example, early English judges created mechanisms, like the petition of right, that bound the Crown to repay public creditors while preserving its ultimate discretion over the value of that payment. The courts granted no such latitude to participants in private contracts. The division distinguished the standards that bound public and private entities, an orientation that affected how rights against the state were defined, where “rights” themselves were located (in the community or the individual), and when individual interests should give way to the claims of the public.

In the end, the Elizabethan categories used to understand governance, the definitions given property and rights, and the power granted the sovereign all related intimately to an approach to value that treated it as a tangible resource to be garnered and dispensed across a kingdom coordinated at the center.

Paper Models of Value

Acting out of a world still organized around the tenets of mercantilism, colonial Americans invented another approach to value. The paper money proposed in Chester followed seventy years of experimentation and turned on the insight it had produced: value was a functional concept that could be created by collective action. Since the early eighteenth century, Americans had circulated public “bills of credit” (essentially IOUs) as money when, like the inhabitants of Chester, they lacked silver and gold. Local communities issued non-interest-bearing notes (notes stating a government obligation) to pay their creditors. Those IOUs could be submitted or “retired” to pay for tax obligations; in the interim, they functioned as silver or gold currency because they would be as good as silver or gold for future public payments. As modern macroeconomists have shown, the notes carried real value because the collective practice of issue and retirement created a value-bearing asset out of them, at least as long as people could predict that they would be taxed.

The new approach to value radically redistributed political authority. Provincial assemblies, formally prohibited from controlling expenditures, took charge of public spending when they invented a money under their own auspices. They now paid public creditors, directed appropriations, and made land-based loans. The issue of paper money thus fueled the famed “rise” of the American assembly in each colony: legislators exercised increasing authority in practice and began to assert rights against the imperial order more aggressively.

Even more startling was the power now claimed by taxpayers: monetary policy depended on their votes, and the stability of economic value depended on their compliance with levies. When they cooperated, taxpayers financed the expenses of the public by meeting those obligations. But when inhabitants were strapped by war or economic distress, tax defaults rose and money depreciated. In those circumstances, taxpayers forced a new mode of finance into effect: the public debt was paid off as the money used for common expenses lost value in the hands of those holding it; those holders absorbed the loss if and when the drop in value became permanent. Participants understood the dynamic; Franklin called depreciation “a tax on money, a kind of property very difficult to be taxed in any other mode.” Communities in turn debated its consequences, often taking political measures to reallocate the losses that followed devaluation. The high profile of each monetary experiment—pamphleteers advertised how bills of credit operated in order to establish their legitimacy and secure their acceptance—emphasized the role of participants. The small size of each colony made the system even more transparent.

Those circumstances changed the consciousness of participants. They became, first, increasingly aware of their provincial integrity. The effort to maintain a local money trained attention on the boundaries of the community: the system depended on the actions of residents, used provincial obligations as its linchpin, and created value only within domestic borders. The Chester petitioners thus identified the virtue of earlier paper money exactly in its quality as “a medium of commerce issued to the people, which from its nature was not subject to be transmitted to the mother country.” Provincial boundaries in turn underscored the politics within each community. Legislators became increasingly sensitive to the electoral debate over money. Populist rhetoric rose, heightening popular expectations of involvement. The Chester experience again provides an example: someone printed the petition to the general assembly as a broadside—and inspired colonials from Philadelphia to the frontiers of the province to submit similar pleas, close to sixty petitions in all. Finally, pointing to the local boundaries and effects of monetary decisions, participants began to identify as a priority the economic development of themselves and their communities. The pro-paper propagandists that dominated in most of the colonies developed arguments for opening up markets to the middling men of their provinces. As the Chester petitioners summed up the operation of local paper, “from its permanency among us, the merchant, farmer and mechanic were always able to obtain a proper currency, by which they could conveniently fulfil their engagements.” These were not, however, proto-capitalists—their arguments stressed access to the market for newcomers over security within it for those with material investments, unlike the arguments several decades later.

Again, the practice of value affected the very categories used to constitute the community. “Politics” ranged American actors against imperial ones on a new issue, value, which had been a central attribute of English sovereignty. More subtly, within the colonies themselves, monetary policy and market access became core matters of popular and legislative debate. That debate in turn implicated and was itself influenced by basic legal categories: bills of credit were “contracts” that linked the public to those holding its bills. As political decisions and economic circumstances changed the value of money, participants molded the jurisprudence of contract to explain, justify, or challenge those events and the claims of participants. As John Adams said, defending an episode of devaluation in 1780, “[t]he public has its rights as well as individuals, and every individual has a share in the rights of the public. Justice is due to the body politic as well as to the possessor of the bills; and to have paid off the bills at their nominal value would have wronged the body politic.”

In the paper approach to value, then, the community organized its roles and defined basic notions like “rights” by reference to a value they expressly produced out of the collective contribution—only some called it confiscation—of all members. The approach reconstituted the imperial design for the colonies into a new corporal order.

Capitalism and a New Coin

Robert Morris wrote his Report on the Public Credit near the end of a war won largely, if painfully, on the power of paper money. His report was organized around that history; it articulated the old system and argued for a new one. Here for the first time, politics was moved to the periphery—Morris put it there with a flourish, all to emphasize the space made for the productivity of private men. In the new approach, the state would be understood as a frame for the creation of value by individuals.

The money at the center would again be metal, but Morris assumed a kind of currency far removed from the Irish harp. Apparently projecting a specie supply with a price set stably by international exchange, he happily excluded politicians from controlling quantities of money in circulation. He then advocated adding a rather new device: instruments of public debt. Unlike taxes, which quickly became burdensome to taxpayers (and, because their weight was “more sensible,” invited protest too easily), government borrowing could raise revenue without any discernable impact on the citizenry. In the meantime, participants multiplied their money with the interest-bearing notes that public borrowing produced—they added to the currency, in other words, again apparently without the intervention of politicians. Indeed, state legislatures at the end of the decade would struggle to defend the very institution—control over money—that had earlier won them so much power.

As for the problems associated with debt, Morris dismissed them with the fuel that powered the whole system—individual productivity. Borrowing paired with that tonic drive had, in his view, only one result—economic growth. Farmer after farmer who borrowed to improve his land earned more than enough to pay back his loans—Morris chose his hypothetical deliberately and, he may have felt, quite diplomatically. The same logic would work in the aggregate: government would borrow and use the money to good effect. The economic growth that followed would make paying off the principal easy and make the country wealthy. In the meantime, the system would tie public creditors, those most able and entrepreneurial in Morris’s view, to the new nation.

The political economy that Morris anticipated would be as publicly structured as the regimes improvised by Elizabeth or the American provincials. When the Federalists accepted many of the tenets proposed by Morris, they had also to construct the collective conditions that would make it operate. Politics, that is, did not so much recede as change its shape. A freely floating metallic money did not, as it happened, produce sufficiently stable prices without complex interventions: the negotiations necessary to run a bimetallic system or maintain the gold standard consumed seemingly limitless political energy in the nineteenth century. Legislatures at the same time lost their power to add to the money supply if specie was scarce and prices fell—but until foreign money arrived seeking bargains, representatives could borrow instead. Public debt provided the new means of public finance, and private credit, generated by the new national bank and its state counterparts, further multiplied available gold and silver. The debate over economic policy continued with new contours.

Likewise, the law developed for an earlier approach to value was revised for the new order; Americans did not suddenly discover “rights” that would make the new system work—they redefined them that way. Courts and legislatures developed doctrines of negotiability and dismantled other safeguards, like requirements restricting transferability, which had traditionally been attached to legal contracts. As for the government’s obligations under public instruments—bonds now rather than money—arguments drawn from private law furnished new models that disallowed devaluations like those that had occurred in the colonial world. The courts, with their orientation towards individuated disputes, became the oracles of “contract,” and legislatures, formerly the brokers of complex revaluations that balanced individual and group claims, retreated from the responsibilities to recalibrate value they had claimed in the earlier system. The “public,” once conceived as a distinctive entity with organic significance became an aggregate of individuals, a transformation that boosted the leveling rhetoric of individualism, even as it ceded populist claims based on shared economic circumstances.

If Morris’s system was as publicly structured—indeed, as controversially constructed—as previous orders, what was new was its approach to value. Recognizably capitalist, that approach defined politics as a framework for value produced by private activity and investment. Citizenship itself reflected the revision: investing in the government for profit became a public service, lauded and promoted. The boundaries that defined politics as a setting for individual entrepreneurial action depended on the courts; their developing doctrines drew new lines that marked financial gains largely as private. Increasingly, the market appeared independent of the very materials that had created it, reinforcing a gathering assumption of its autonomy. The capitalist approach to value, in other words, itself conditioned the world in ways that located the political as legitimate insofar as it supported liberal individual agency.

A History of Value

The transformations told by money matter enormously. The Irish harp, the paper proposed by the Chester petitioners, and Morris’s specie-and-debt system were very different media, designed to produce value in very different ways. Those approaches to value organized the constitutional systems in which they occurred. They changed divisions of authority, including those between law and politics and between public and private. They redistributed material power, variously allowing monarchs, taxpayers, and public creditors to claim the resources of others. They forced their creators to invent concepts as distinct as a “public contract” and the “autonomous market.” Those concepts, claims, and divisions of authority mark our world as surely as money. They are, in fact, carried into practice with every exchange of that medium, as the stories above reveal. Value, as much as meaning, has a history.

Further Reading:

For an account of Elizabeth’s debasement, see Edward Colgan, For Want of Good Money: The Story of Ireland’s Coinage (Wicklow, Ire., 2003). Her strategy was validated in “The Case of the Mixt Money, 2 James I” (1605), in Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials (London, 1809): 114-130. Economists Thomas Sargent and Francois Velde model the difficulties of supplying early modern communities with small change in The Big Problem of Small Change (Princeton, 2002).

The petition submitted by the inhabitants of Chester is “To the Honorable the Representatives of the Freemen of the Province of Pennsylvania . . . The Petition of the Inhabitants of the County of Chester,” AAS Broadside 41096 (1764) [sic]. (The correct date appears to be 1768 or 1769, according to Terry Bouton’s history). Terry Bouton writes about the petitioning efforts of Pennsylvanians and the conditions that catalyzed it in his dissertation, “Tying Up the Revolution: Money, Power, and the Regulation in Pennsylvania, 1765-1800.” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1996: 49-80. Christine Desan reviews the macroeconomic models that explain how American paper money held value and considers that money as a form of governance in “The Market as a Matter of Money: Denaturalizing Economic Currency in American Constitutional History,” Law and Social Inquiry 30 (Winter, 2005). The quote from Benjamin Franklin comparing depreciation to a tax on money appears in “Of the Paper Money of the United States of America,” Albert Henry Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin IX (New York, 1907): 231, 234. John Adams’s language appears in his letter to the Comte de Vergennes, June 22, 1780, in Francis Wharton, ed., The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1889): 810-812.

Robert Morris submitted his Report on the Public Credit, July 29, 1782,to Congress on August 5, 1782; it is reprinted in Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789,vol. 22 (Washington, D.C., 1914): 429-446. A short history of his attempt to establish a mint is available at the Website of the beautiful Coin and Currency Collections of the University of Notre Dame. For the authoritative account of the financing of the American Revolution, see E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961). The complexities of establishing and maintaining the gold standard are accessibly suggested by Barry Eichengreen, in Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton, 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

Christine Desan teaches law and legal history at Harvard Law School. She is at work on a history of the political economic world of colonial Americans called The Practice of Value before the Coming of Capitalism: Money as Governance in Early America.