It may be best to get this out of the way at the outset: George Lippard was something of a kook. A prolific author of sensational fiction and historical tales in the 1840s and early 1850s, Lippard (1822-1854) had a short but tremendously productive career that saw him become one of the most widely known authors of his day. Yet his overheated prose, his intense political commitments, his occasionally cavalier relationship to plot, and the depth of his enthusiasms can make his work a tough sell for contemporary readers. The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk-Hall (1844-45) was Lippard’s most famous novel—and likely his biggest seller—and it remains the work for which he is best known today. Yet Lippard also published Gothic tales, novels about the Mexican-American War, other sensational urban narratives, historical sketches, and a series of tales of the Revolution that were probably his most widely reprinted works. He also founded his own story paper, the Quaker City Weekly, as well as a semi-secret fraternal organization, the Brotherhood of the Union, to which he dedicated much of his time late in his career.

The Killers […] serves as an accessible point of entry to Lippard’s urban-gothic oeuvre, and gives Lippard the opportunity to critique the antebellum prison system, urban squalor and lawlessness, the hypocrisy of merchant elites, and the corrupting qualities of money.

Despite this prodigious output—Lippard wrote over twenty novels and countless shorter pieces in his twelve years of active professional writing—very little of George Lippard’s work is available in print today. The issue of a new edition of Quaker City (edited by David Reynolds) by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1995 helped spark a revival of interest in Lippard, and now his name is frequently seen in conference paper titles. The June 2015 issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature consists entirely of a set of essays (convened by Christopher Looby) on The Quaker City. Readers have long been waiting for high-quality new editions of more of Lippard’s works, which is why the University of Pennsylvania Press’s publication of Lippard’s 1850 novella The Killers: A Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia is so welcome. At only 120 pages, The Killers provides a more manageable introduction to Lippard’s work than some of his other novels, while also focusing more insistently on matters of race than most of his work. Edited by Matt Cohen and Edlie Wong, this new edition of The Killers includes a useful introduction, an array of helpful contemporary documents, along with a reprinting of the Life and Adventures of Charles Anderson Chester, a shorter text issued virtually simultaneously that duplicates much of the material in The Killers (although in less comprehensible fashion).

The Killers primarily revolves around events associated with riots that took place in Philadelphia on election night in October 1849. The riots were focused on the California House, a bar located in what is now the Society Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia, just on the border of what in 1849 was the working-class district of Moyamensing (a map of present-day Philadelphia marking the events of the novella would have been a helpful addition to the introductory materials). The Killers were a notorious local street gang in the neighborhood, many of whose members—along with their leader, William McMullen—were veterans of the Mexican-American War. Allegedly responding to rumors that the mixed-race proprietor of the California House, which was at the center of Philadelphia’s largest African American community, was married to a white woman, the Killers rammed the bar with a wagon loaded with burning tar barrels, sparking a riot that resulted in several deaths and the burning of the California House.

This riot constitutes the climax of The Killers. Lippard’s narrative starts several years earlier, though, beginning in 1846 at Yale College. Two wealthy ne’er-do-well students, Cromwell Hicks and Don Jorge Marin, have been expelled for having attempted to abduct a professor’s daughter. Cromwell is the son of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, Jacob D. Z. Hicks, while Don Jorge’s father, Antonio Marin, is a Cuban exile. In addition to their expulsion, the young men are deep in debt, having run up bills at tailors, bars, and restaurants around New Haven. Their wealthy fathers refuse to bail them out, which prompts Don Jorge to propose a slave-trading voyage to Cromwell as the best path to riches. Cromwell initially recoils at the prospect of being involved in the slave trade, but after a trip to Philadelphia and a failed effort to embezzle money from his father’s business, which ends up in Jacob disowning Cromwell, he forges his father’s signature on several bank drafts and sets off for New York to meet Don Jorge. Jacob Hicks supposedly commits suicide when news of his financial ruin is made public. The action then skips ahead three years, and returns to Philadelphia; all of the events that supposedly took place on the coast of West Africa and in Cuba are only hinted at.

Back in Philadelphia, Cromwell is going by the name Bob Blazes and is the head of the Killers. A fellow member of the gang is Cromwell’s abandoned half-brother Elijah, who was recently released from a stint in the Eastern State Penitentiary for passing a counterfeit banknote on a bank controlled by his father, who it turns out is very much alive. Unable to find legitimate employment due to his status as a convict, Elijah is forced to turn to crime, and in the process finds a way to gain revenge against Hicks. A side plot features Kate Watson, a beautiful actress who was raised as Elijah’s sister. Jacob Hicks sees Kate on the stage and is determined to seduce her, first by offering her adoptive mother money in order to keep her as a mistress. When the virtuous Kate rejects the offer, Hicks determines to abduct her in a carriage on the night of the election. (The plot featuring the seduction of a beautiful poor young woman by an older wealthy man is a near-constant feature of Lippard’s narratives.)

Cromwell overhears Hicks arranging for Kate’s abduction with Black Andy, an African American owner of a bar at the end of Kate’s street. Realizing that his father’s wealth must be concealed in his mansion, Cromwell formulates the plan for a riot on election night to provide cover for an attempt to kidnap his father and force him to surrender his riches. As the riot whirls through the city, Cromwell and the Killers find Hicks in Black Andy’s bar preparing to abduct Kate Watson, who was chloroformed by Black Andy. The Killers set the bar on fire, while Cromwell and Elijah confront their father. In a remarkable scene of interracial violence, Black Andy murders Cromwell, and then rescues Kate from the burning building before dying in its collapse. Elijah manages to escape as well. Don Jorge is killed by a booby-trapped strongbox in Jacob Hicks’ mansion. Elijah witnesses the scene and manages to escape to Central America with Kate, Hicks’ gold, and a ledger book that implicates several respectable Philadelphia mercantile houses in the African slave trade.

As is often the case with Lippard’s work, the novella bears the marks of hasty writing, and the several strands of the plot are tied up in a rush of bloody action and surprising coincidences. Yet The Killers also serves as an accessible point of entry to Lippard’s urban-gothic oeuvre, and gives Lippard the opportunity to critique the antebellum prison system, urban squalor and lawlessness, the hypocrisy of merchant elites, and the corrupting qualities of money. The editors perhaps place too much emphasis in their introduction on Lippard’s allegedly sympathetic portrayal of Black Andy—especially since, if Lippard was also the author of Charles Anderson Chester (as they seem to credit), it is difficult to explain his much more racist depiction of that novella’s version of the character, Black Herkles. More importantly, The Killers provides a valuable corrective to our picture of antebellum American literature. The whirlwind action, revenge and seduction plots, and depictions of current (violent) events in The Killers offer an example of a popular fiction genre that stands at a striking remove from the literary forms of the period that have been canonized.

The Killers would be worth reading for its depiction of Philadelphia’s antebellum underworld alone. But, as the editors note, it touches on so many of the key issues of the day—from filibustering to slavery to wildcat banks to penal reform—that it offers an exceptionally rich starting point for discussions of the period’s larger historical context. The edition does feel somewhat padded; the inclusion of Charles Anderson Chester feels unnecessary, particularly since the evidence that has been suggested to prove that Lippard was behind that work’s publication is less than convincing. But the contemporary accounts of the riot provided in the appendix give helpful context in distinguishing where Lippard altered the facts of the California House riot to suit his own purposes. The editors note in the introduction that the “republication of The Killers contributes to current efforts to revitalize George Lippard for a new generation of readers” (39). In the pursuit of that goal, the edition succeeds admirably.

This article originally appeared in issue 15:4.5 (November, 2015).

Paul J. Erickson is the director of academic programs at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. He holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and writes about sensational fiction, the history of the book, and antebellum print culture. He loves him some George Lippard.

  At the heart of Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s New World Drama lies an intriguing account of the theater in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1794, rival English and French theaters mounted competing productions of Richard Sheridan’s popular 1781 pantomime Robinson Crusoe, or Harlequin Friday. Each theater—one tied to provincial English circuits, the other headlined by refugees of the French and Haitian Revolutions—tried to entice audiences with alluring scenes of New World colonialism.

Clearly, scripts and defining performances matter some, but performances are constantly adapted, revised, and remade in response to local exigencies.

Both theaters evoked the well-known story of Crusoe’s shipwreck, his formative encounter with racial difference, and his efforts to establish a colonial economy and return to the mainland. Those performances show the animated physical, visual, and musical styles of a culture that seems more colonial or provincial than early national. Both playhouses trumpeted their new scenery, sumptuous decorations, and costumes; advertisements spoke of the “greatest care and attention” each theater devoted to the music and choreography (149). The performances themselves drew on European traditions while showcasing distinctive New World acts, their racial masquerades and “savage dances” transforming the traditional pantomime into something rather different. For Dillon’s account, these performances certainly matter for what they show onstage—for bringing Crusoe’s colonialism face to face with Harlequin’s unruly, unceasing, and transformative motion. Just as important, though, is the way that the performances gathered new Atlantic publics together and represented those publics to themselves. In Atlantic theaters, two linked but distinct colonial traditions competed for the right to call into being a new kind of creole public that, as Dillon’s account has it, deeply engaged both American newness and its persistent connection to the old.

Charleston’s dueling Crusoes make for a strange moment in early American cultural history. The scene seems pointedly local and transient—both theaters eventually became little more than footnotes in their national histories. If one cares most about authorship, originary moments, and integrity of tradition, the performances Dillon explores would seem at best derivative and belated, provincial rewrites produced by second-rate institutions. And from our twenty-first-century academic perspective, it can prove difficult to assign these performances membership in a particular national tradition and equally vexing to decide in what course to teach these texts—difficult, in fact, to even find a text here. But those are the precise reasons such performances are so important to Dillon’s New World Drama. Those Charleston performances were, as Dillon shows, just some of the many such acts appearing around the Atlantic littoral throughout a very long eighteenth century. Such theatricals demonstrate New World Drama’s central claim that theater, as part of a “performative commons,” played a key role in the emergence of distinctive new Atlantic publics and popular cultures in the course of the eighteenth century. Each chapter of New World Drama focuses on a specific site, and the structure invites readers to attend to performances in London; Charleston, South Carolina (by way of a chapter on “Transportation”); Kingston, Jamaica; and New York City. Each chapter centers on a particular iteration of the “performative commons,” Dillon’s term for the collectivities and shared resources gathered together by Atlantic modernity’s new cultural practices. London, for example, sees the emergence of a popular commons in both politics and entertainments, while the dispersed Atlantic performances of transportation show the reorganization of the commons under the pressure of the English colonial enterprise. Charleston and Kingston show the increasing transnational and racialized versions of the performative commons in the greater Caribbean. Finally, a series of theater riots and state-sponsored violence leading up to New York City’s 1849 Astor Place riots point to a closing of the performative commons after nearly two centuries. Characteristic performances appear at each site, but the circulation of character types and scenarios through the Atlantic world produces new forms. Figures of tortured Native American royalty, for example, crop up repeatedly—in William D’Avenant’s 1658 Cruelty of the Spaniards, in Thomas Southerne’s 1695 Oroonoko, in Richard Sheridan’s 1799 Pizarro, and in John Augustus Stone’s 1829 Metamora. The figure of Caliban similarly journeys through Atlantic drama, appearing in Dryden and D’Avenant’s 1667 Enchanted Island, in Isaac Bickerstaff’s 1768 The Padlock, in the pantomime adaptations of Robinson Crusoe, and even in the gyrations of blackface minstrelsy’s Jim Crow. Following these strands gives the study, to my mind, one of its great virtues, namely, its understanding that the dramas of Atlantic modernity did not simply travel and adapt. They did, of course. But more importantly, they also seem to be constantly doubling (and doubling back on) themselves, constantly re-enacting themselves, stepping outside of themselves, re-gathering the old in new ways, and reformulating themselves in each new moment. In framing those complex performance histories, this book offers early Americanists and Atlanticists a clearly defined conceptual vocabulary. Dillon helpfully revisits even apparently basic terms: “New World”—not precisely the same as “Atlantic”—is here a version of “American” that acknowledges the (inter)colonial, the imperial, the transnational. In short, it refuses to take the national as the only framework for understanding these performances. While the study is primarily anglophone, non-English and a-linguistic practices do show up at key moments, and one can imagine attending to the performative commons across an even broader cultural geography. Crucially, the study does not make or imply arguments that inflexibly attach these cultural practices to national traditions. “Drama,” for Dillon, has both referential and constitutive (“mimetic” and “ontic”) dimensions. Clearly, scripts and defining performances matter some, but performances are constantly adapted, revised, and remade in response to local exigencies. Performances emerge from mashed-up traditions on their way to becoming something new in the constant Atlantic recirculation of people, goods, discourses, and gestures. And they occur amidst a welter of offstage performances, a rich collection of voices, acts, moves, costumes, and props performing the everyday life of the Atlantic world. It’s a lesson learned well from theater history and performance studies, but perhaps most strikingly from the intertwined critical histories of Native American performance, African American theater, and blackface minstrelsy. New World Drama seems intimately informed by the perspectives of scholars such as Daphne Brooks, Monica Miller, Saidiya Hartman, Philip Deloria, W. T. Lhamon, and Eric Lott—deeply attuned to the ways in which non-European bodies performed and were made to perform, how forms of blackness and indigeneity were invented, displayed, watched, and suppressed. New World Drama’s account of Atlantic performance ties economic to cultural explanations, and the colonial to the national, through the concept of a “performative commons,” Dillon’s phrase that, to my mind, focuses the book’s most distinctive contribution to early American and Atlantic studies. Thinking through the commons by way of E. P. Thompson and the more recent work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the phrase offers an alternative to the Habermasian bourgeois public sphere, avoiding the restrictions of literacy-based practices of bourgeois commercial culture. Dillon’s performative commons seems broader, if not completely inclusive, and features the constant rehearsal of uneven and indecisive contests on constantly shifting terrain. The performative commons offers open-ended collectivity, belonging, demotic power, and unruly energy. Lest we romanticize it, of course, the performative commons also emerges from a colonial economic system, and it can just as easily share in modernity’s new practices of social segmentation, political oppression, and economic exploitation. Precisely for this reason, to my mind, the phrase is generative and useful. It evokes a way of reading culture through economic and environmental problems—issues of scarcity, sustainability, ecological impact, and questions of ownership, use, and distribution of resources that seem increasingly important both today and in the long eighteenth century. New World Drama, then, explains some of the stranger and more complex moments in modernity’s Atlantic performance history through an ambitious and frankly inspiring reframing of the relationships among cultural, economic, and political power. This study presents the kind of creative synthesis and thoughtful working-out of big ideas that will make it required reading for scholars of early American and eighteenth-century Atlantic culture, and for readers interested in new approaches to the intersections of performance, textuality, and social history.

This article originally appeared in issue 15:4.5 (November, 2015).

Peter P. Reed, author of Rogue Performances (2009) and other essays on early American and Atlantic performance, is associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

La felice victoria: Bartolomé de Flores’s A Newly Composed Work, Which Recounts the Happy Victory That God, in His Infinite Goodness and Mercy, Was Pleased to Give to the Illustrious Señor Pedro Menéndez (1571)

Translated by E. Thomson Shields Jr. and Thomas Hallock

In spring 1562 the French explorer Jean Ribault cruised the north-flowing St. Johns River, what he called the “River of May,” below present-day Jacksonville, Florida. Two years later, the Calvinist Huguenot explorer René Goulaine de Laudonnière established a fort nearby, challenging shipping lanes off the Atlantic coast. The French Protestant threat caught the attention of Roman Catholic King Philip II, who sent the formidable Asturian Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to eradicate the fort and establish a Spanish fort there. Acting as Adelantado, an entrepreneurial governor who invested his own money in the enterprise, Menéndez answered his charge with military and religious zeal. He demolished the French fort, slaughtered most of the Huguenots, and established St. Augustine—a city that now bills itself as the nation’s oldest continuously occupied city. The year 2015 marks the 450th anniversary of these events, and with the commemoration of St. Augustine’s founding, it serves to recognize that the European contest for la Florida held literary as well as historical importance.

An outsized body of writing emerged from the struggle for this obscure corner of empire, one work being Bartolomé de Flores’s 1571 La felice victoria que Dios por su infinita bondad y misericordia, fue seruido de dar, al Illustre señor Pedro Melendez (The Happy Victory that God, in His Infinite Goodness and Mercy, Was Pleased to Give to the Illustrious Señor Pedro Menéndez). Flores’s poem, published in eight quarto (20 cm x 15 cm) pages and translated here for the first time, has three parts. The first part includes a brief invocation, followed by a description of Menéndez’s charge against the Huguenot settlers, which Flores freely sets against the range of Spanish conquests in the Americas. The second part celebrates the beauty, natural resources, and people of la Florida—again, situating the wonders of one colony against broader imperial claims. A villancico, or carol, finally, sings of a joust, offering Menéndez’s victory as a martial conquest for the Christian realm. The parts may appear disjoined, but in its loose associations, La felice victoria provides a valuable window into Spanish perceptions of empire.

Flores’s verse tribute adds to the substantial—if undervalued—literature about St. Augustine’s founding, a body of work that cuts across several languages and rhetorical positions. Before the Spanish attacked the French Huguenot colonial efforts, Jean Ribault, in England because of the religious wars in France, penned The Whole & True Discouerye of Terra Florida (1563), a book-length promotional account of the St. Johns expedition that mixed pastoral jubilation with topographic detail. At least two early English poems described the far-off territory. Robert Seall’s 1563 broadside, A Commendation of the Adventerus Viage of the Wurthy Captain M. Thomas Stutely Esquyer and others Towards the Land Called Terra Florida, paid tribute to Thomas Stucley (or Stuckley), who vied to set up a colony there. And a slightly better-known 1564 ballad would ask, “Have you not h[e]ard of floryda,” where natives “Fynd glysterynge gold / And yt for tryfels sell?” The swift Spanish victory and dubious Huguenot defense in 1565 sparked a considerable body of writing, much of it legal or procedural, and often with a rhetorical agenda. Multiple biographies of Menéndez chronicle the battle for la Florida, and French survivors penned two accounts. Laudonnière’s L’histoire notable de la Floride (1586) was published posthumously and translated in part by Richard Hakluyt, while Nicolas Le Challeux offered his own version in Discours de l’histoire de la Floride, contenant la trahison des Espangnols, contre les subjects du Roy (1566). The most famous record of this imperial struggle, finally, came from Jacques le Moyne de Morgue, whose 1591 Brevis narratio eorum quæ in Florida Americæ provincia Gallis acciderunt … (Brief Narration of Those Things Which Befell the French in the Province of Florida in America …) included Theodore de Bry’s engravings of native Timucuans, spurious images of Florida’s “first people” that circulate widely to this day.

Many of these sources are known to historians and critics, although La felice victoria has escaped attention. Scholarship on this and other scenes of imperial struggle has remained fixed on the accounts of participant-observers; quasi-literary works have found their way into undergraduate textbooks and appear ripe for commentary, even by scholars who do not read Spanish. But a poem, especially one by a non-participant, does not carry the same historical weight, leading to its neglect. Yet La felice victoria illustrates how empire was understood in Spain, how victories were celebrated, and how the little-regarded territory of la Florida fit alongside more significant triumphs.

What little we know about Bartolomé de Flores comes from his work. Between 1570 and 1572, he apparently experienced a burst of energy, resulting in five verse pamphlets. According to La felice victoria, Flores was “natural de Malaga y vezino de Cordoua,” a Malagueño living in Córdoba. Internal evidence highlights Flores’ being Malagueño, especially the presence of seseo, the Andalucían pronunciation of z and s both pronounced like the letter s in English. Another pamphlet poem identifies Flores as a “colchero,” or quilter, suggesting he was a middle-class tradesman. These verse pamphlets reflect everyday attitudes of the times about Spain’s engagement with the world. Some are laudatory, praising victories in the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula or celebrating the marriage of Princess Anna, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. Others tell of the 1570 earthquake in Hungary, floods in Flanders, and losses by the Muslim armada of Turkey. The range of subjects indicates that Bartolomé de Flores wrote from reports, not experience. As such, La felice victoria is a valuable record of popular attitudes and beliefs—a source of insight into middle-class Spanish attitudes toward imperial rivalries, perceptions of native peoples and resources in places like la Florida, and for the suggestion of how victories like the one by Menéndez were celebrated.

This translation continues the effort of early Americanists to recover forgotten traditions for twenty-first-century readers. The documentary transcription of the original is included because, although there was an edition of the poem published in 1898, it contains errors and takes a few liberties with the text without marking them. Regarding form, the bulk of La felice victoria is in copla real (with exceptions), i.e., stanzas of ten rhymed octosyllabic lines, with the closing villancico in mainly stanzas of eight octosyllabic lines. Our translation does not attempt the impossible task of replicating the rhythm or rhyme scheme, and because Flores often sequenced his thoughts around end-rhymes, we take some liberty in reordering the lines for fluidity. The goal has been to render a poem in English, not a literal rendering of the Spanish. Those who want to compare the translation with the Spanish are encouraged to use the side-by-side transcription and translation or to consult the page images.

The editors initially worked separately and unbeknownst to one another. E. Thomson Shields Jr. prepared the transcription from a copy at the John Carter Brown Library, and we later consulted scans generously provided by the JCB. The following translation was developed by comparing the two versions, combing through each line for meaning, continuity, and fluidity. Our goal is to present a work that, we feel, helps alter the shape of the early American canon, that argues further for the multilingual roots of what would later become part of the United States, and that documents the difficult attempts to understand events in a new world that cut across imperial boundaries, religious and linguistic differences, and, of course, an ocean. 

Notes

[i] señor: Less a general title like mister and more an honorific implying master or gentleman.

[ii] The terms viuiendas (viviendas) and fayciones (faiciones) illustrate the variable and changing language of the sixteenth century found throughout the poem. They are noted here as typical examples. Viviendas generally means “dwellings” but has a now obsolete meaning of “modo de vivir” or “manner of living.” And a review of dictionaries from the sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries available online through the Real Academia Española’s Nuevo tesoro lexicográfico de la lengua española shows no standard way of writing or printing the word, not only the exchange of u’s for medial v’s, but also the exchange of b’s for initial v’s—vivienda, viuienda, bivienda, and biuienda all being found as main entries. Similarly, faiciones comes in several variant spellings (fayciones, faciones, settling in modern Spanish as facciones) and with several possible definitions, from factions to facial features to manners or customs (Nuevo tesoro lexicográfico de la lengua española). There is even an interesting 1604 Spanish-French dictionary entry by Jean Pallet that brings together vivienda and facción, “biuienda, Vie, façon de viure” or “vivienda, See, manner of living [i.e., the now obsolete meaning of facción].”

[iii] estrena: A handsel or gift given for good luck at the start of a new year or new endeavor; according to Covarrubias, the gift recognizes the relationship between vassal and señor, between client and patron, etc.

[iv] A puzzling reference. Hernán Cortés, credited as the Spanish conqueror of Mexico, had two sons named Martín (one legitimate, the other illegitimate); neither participated in the conquest of Peru.

[v] Santa Elena: Most likely Punta Santa Elena in modern-day Ecuador. The other locations in this stanza are locations in South America, mainly in modern-day Colombia.

[vi] Here and elsewhere, Flores has the dates for events in la Florida wrong. Menendez landed and proclaimed the founding of San Augustín on September 8, 1565.

[vii] Juani: Juani appears to refer to Jean François, a mutineer from Fort Caroline (San Mateo), who figures largely in Solís de Merás biography of Menéndez, the Memorial. In Hakluyt’s English translation of Laudonnière, the same man is called Francis Jean and is described as “a traitor to his nation,” being “one of the mariners which stoale away my barkes, & had guided & conducted [the] Spaniards thither.”

[viii] larga mina / de tierraplene: A mina, or mine, is a tunnel dug under a fortification to destroy it with explosives; in this context, however, mina may be a mistake, with a moat, or foso, being meant.

[ix] There was a custom in medieval and early modern European warfare up to the mid-seventeenth century to ask for ransoms in exchange for high value captives taken in battle.

[x] Vandalianos: Natives of Andalucía, a region sometimes known poetically as Vandalia because the Vandals once ruled there.

[xi] campo de Matanças: Literally, field of slaughter, but also where the French were killed, near today’s Matanzas River or Inlet.

[xii] a la conclusión de sexta: The sixth, or noon, hour of prayer; the origin of the word siesta, or nap.

[xiii] Francelini Canabe: Unidentified; possibly an aside to a specific reader.

[xiv] los dos cuernos . . . montañas de acayo: May 16 falls within the astrological sign of Taurus, the Bull, thus the sun “breaking with two horns,” with acayo being the mountain of Achaea, Greece. Flores misdates Ribao’s surrender, which occurred on October 11, 1565.

[xv] memento mei: Remember me. A reference to Luke 23:42: “[A]nd he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom” (KJV).

[xvi] cinco maneras de gentes: Literally, five manners or kinds of people.

[xvii] oyllas: Translated as oir las.

[xviii] nueve codos por medidad: A codo, or cubit, is the length from one’s elbow to the end of one’s finger, making these people of western Florida about thirteen feet tall in Flores’s description.

[xix] Here and below, a misspelling of Saturiba, a sixteenth-century Timucuan; without the letter u, neither line is octosyllabic.

[xx] Alimacani (also Limacani): A Timucuan village on Fort George Island, near present-day Jacksonville.

[xxi] Mocosa el Bacu: The Mocoso were a tribe on the east coast of Tampa Bay and Mocoso was the name of the tribe’s leader; el Bacu is an unclear reference or modifier for Mocoso/a.

[xxii] Sus cabellos denegridos / en forma de caballera: Their hair styled like a caballera most likely means a shock of hair in back, a ponytail, or a wig, the latter which was just coming into vogue by the late sixteenth century but would not be popular until the seventeenth century.

[xxiii] sus carnes todas de fuera: Covarrubias defines “estar en carnes” as going naked, suggesting a pun on food, carne meaning flesh, both as meat and nudity.

[xxiv] Menjuy and Estoraque: Menjuy is also called benjuí, meaning Benjamin or gum benzoin. Estoraque is storax, also called styrax. Both are fragrant gums or resins coming from Asian trees of the genus styrax, used in medicines and perfume and often mentioned alongside other aromatic gums such as frankincense.

[xxv] Tacamahaca and Caraña: Tacahamaca is a Nahuatl word; caraña comes from an unidentified Central American native language. Both are aromatic resins coming from trees native to Mexico and Central America and which were believed to have medicinal qualities.

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).