Poems

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.

“Rock Canyon, Montana,” stereographic photograph. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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.

Devil's Passway, Montana — “Devil’s Passway, Montana,” stereographic photograph by W. H. Jackson, photographer to the U.S. Geological Survey, Washington, D.C. (ca. 1871). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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.

“Green River Butte, Wyoming,” stereographic photograph by Jackson Bros., Omaha, Nebraska. Scenery of the Union Pacific Railroad, No. 176. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Jonathan Edwards, the Church, and the Damaging Great Awakening

Jonathan Edwards and the Church (book cover)

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 Panic Worth Unpacking

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.

Money Talks

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.

Nova Constellatio coin. Courtesy the Libraries of the University of Notre Dame. More information on their Website.

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.

Front of bill for twenty shillings. Pennsylvania, March 20, 1771. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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.

Back of bill for twenty shillings. Pennsylvania, March 20, 1771. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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.

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Age in Early America?

Historians of early America often talk about age, especially when measuring an individual’s maturity or defining a demographic group. But what does chronological age refer to in an environment where many people did not know their birth dates? When early Americans recorded age, was this an objective measure of years since birth, an individual’s self-understanding, or a status imposed by a public official? The answer to these questions can tell us much about how people employ abstract social categories—not just chronological age, but also race, gender, and nationality—to determine who has access to particular rights and opportunities as well as who does not.

At the time of the American Revolution, many Americans did not know their birthdays. They left school, started work, and got married at widely varying ages. Death struck young and old alike. The pious measured their days not by secular time but by progress toward eternal salvation. Chronological age, in short, had little significance in people’s daily lives. The law, however, demanded precise knowledge of age. From the beginning of European settlement, people had to meet age qualifications to testify in court, be held liable for a crime, sign a contract, will property, marry, and, if white and male, pay a poll tax, serve in the military, vote, and run for political office. Laws and regulations spoke in terms of precise ages—sixteen years to pay a poll tax, twenty-one years to vote, forty-five years to end militia service, for example. But what did those numbers mean in a culture where many people did not know their birthdays? What exactly were public officials measuring when they demanded proof of age?

1. Inscription page, “to Lucy Bacon from her father Leonard Bacon,” in *Sunday Hymns*, published by S. Colman (Boston, 1846). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Evidence from court cases, diaries, letters, and family records suggest that many people in early America did know their exact date of birth. These individuals often owned a family register they could use to prove age, thus turning age itself into a kind of property owned by some but unavailable to others. Those without a recorded birthday could sometimes offer an approximation based on family stories that associated their birth with a memorable event. Still others had no knowledge at all of when they were born. In these latter two cases, officials charged with administering age qualifications had to determine chronological age based on shared knowledge of historical events or physical signs of maturity. For these people, documents stating age record a negotiation between citizens and the state: individuals offered personal testimony and public officials imposed a precise age. These official assessments appear as chronological age in written records, but in fact have little to do with age in the modern sense of stating an exact birth date. Nor do they reflect people’s use of age as a measure of self-understanding. For some, age was a form of property secured by ownership of a family record. For others, it was a negotiation with the state. In either case, age functioned as a boundary to citizenship with which citizens had to contend.

Most people in early America recognized chronological age as an arbitrary boundary to citizenship rights. As John Adams mused in May 1776, “What Reason Should there be, for excluding a Man of Twenty years, Eleven Months and twenty-seven days old, from a Vote when you admit one, who is twenty one?” The reason was obvious to most people—age qualifications were necessary because young children lacked the capacity to exercise rights and perform duties. Believing that age restrictions were necessary, the nation’s founders retained age qualifications inherited from English common law and embedded new ones in American law. What they did not do was create a reliable system for registering births and documenting age. In the colonial period, some legislatures required ministers or town clerks to register births, recognizing that these records were essential for probate cases, but compliance and enforcement remained spotty at best. Massachusetts led the way over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in creating the first modern bureaucracy for recording vital statistics. By steadily raising fines on town clerks who failed to report births and deaths, and increasing fees paid to those who did, Massachusetts developed the most reliable birth registry in the new nation. Even there, however, infants born in rural areas and large cities often escaped the notice of any public official.

The most common technology for recording birth dates in early America was a private one: notations in the family Bible. This tradition, imported from England, was quite widespread because courts accepted birth records in family Bibles as evidence for probate. Historians Shane Landrum and Susan Pearson have found that some families with even small amounts of property kept such records, but many transient and impoverished people did not. As a result, having a family record was a mark of class privilege. The ability to document and prove age, like many other markers of identity such as whiteness or citizenship, was a sort of property, accrued by some, denied to others. Those able to purchase and maintain a private, family register could easily meet age qualifications in law. The poor, the transient, and the illiterate could not.

2. Engraving by Peter Maverick from artwork by Henry Williams, family register for the family of Mr. Daniel Lamb, of South Hadley, Mass., to the year 1799 (Newark, N.J., ca. 1809). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Indeed, by the early nineteenth century, publishers marketed increasingly ornate and costly Bibles and family records. As historians Georgia Brady Barnhill, Peter Benes, and François Weil have documented, many families aspiring to respectable, middle-class standing displayed illustrated genealogies in their homes. Girls attending female academies learned to paint or stitch handmade family records that could be displayed as markers of family unity and refinement. Engravers marketed family records illustrated with Republican and Christian symbols. Engraver Pater Maverick, for example, presented the allegorical figures of Charity with an infant and cornucopia, Hope holding an anchor and pointing to heaven, and a bird feeding its young beneath the sun’s rays. Most of these surviving records show evidence of having been framed for display. By the 1830s, lithographers such as Nathaniel Currier and James Baillie pictured idealized bourgeois families celebrating births, consummating marriages, and mourning deaths. These ostentatious prints, paintings, and embroideries increasingly linked family record keeping with financial success.

In a further display of prosperity, some families began celebrating children’s birthdays. In 1803, a Boston printer marketed the first American edition of British author Elizabeth Somerville’s small volume, A Birth Day Present, or, a New Year’s Gift . . . For the Use of Young Persons, from Ten to Fifteen Years of Age. At a time when children’s birthday celebrations were still a novelty, this book offered a sort of how-to guide for organizing an event that would balance “a little entertainment of cakes and fruit” with moral lessons on self improvement. By the 1830s, giving books to children on their birthdays was a common practice recorded in loving inscriptions such as “To my dear daughter Lucy Bacon, a birthday present for her sixth birthday.” Receiving birthday presents underlined age itself as a form of property to be treasured. For privileged children such as Lucy, counting birthdays became central to their self-understanding as American citizens. The historian Jon Grinspan found that many white, middle-class youth in antebellum America used their diaries and letters to track their yearly progress toward age twenty-one when they would become adults and, if white and male, cast their first vote.

Beyond age twenty-one, however, most people did not celebrate their birthdays, as historian Howard Chudacoff has found. The main exception was family gatherings when an elder relative reached the biblical milestone of three score and ten. A person living to 100 might receive a special sermon in church and notice in the local paper. Most middle-aged adults, however, did not celebrate their birthdays until late in the nineteenth century when manufacturers of commercial greeting cards began to promote the practice. Many did, however, quietly remark upon the date in diaries or letters. These people, generally from educated, propertied families, displayed a high degree of age consciousness. This did not mean, however, that they could reliably produce written proof of age.

3. Hand-colored lithograph, family register for the Bugbee family of Worcester, Mass., with “Family names – Born when and where – Married when where and by whom – Died when and where,” published by N. Currier (New York, ca. 1850). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Children’s birthday parties and ornate Bibles were effective displays of bourgeois respectability, but they were not reliable means of documenting age. Fires, floods, and carelessness could easily destroy family records along with other forms of property. Young adults who moved West might leave their birth records with parents many states away. As a result, even literate and propertied Americans often found themselves in middle or old age without any proof of their birthdays. To guard against such loss, some families purchased Bibles for each of their children, filling the family record pages and leaving space for the next generation. The American Tract Society, founded in 1825, released relatively inexpensive Bibles with printed family record pages. These mass-produced registers enabled more family members to retain copies, but private registers always remained vulnerable to loss. While it is impossible to quantify what percentage of American families maintained a Bible record or other private registry of births, enough of these documents survive that we can safely assume that many—though by no means all—propertied Americans from stable families possessed some written record of their age by the 1830s.

Detailed birth records also existed for those who were themselves property. Slave owners diligently wrote down the births and deaths of enslaved people because age was an important factor in establishing the monetary value of chattel property. Some slave owners employed Bibles for this purpose, as when Floyd County, Virginia, resident Gabe Wells recorded “Births of my Black Folks” in one section of a family record and his white relatives in another. Mary Ragland Stamps Rice, plantation mistress of The Oaks in Charlotte County, Virginia, used a recipe book to record the ages of enslaved people. She wrote precise birth years for most, but also noted when age was an approximation: “Old Sam about 68 . . . John aged 14 when purchased.” The last entry hints at the uncertainty of age in a market where slave traders had incentives to lie about chronological age in order to inflate prices. As historians Marie Jenkins Schwartz and Wilma King have documented, slaves received the highest valuations in their late teens and twenties. If John was a large child, a slave trader may have passed him off as older than he was. The ages recorded in plantation account books thus reflect the self-interest of those who sold and owned slaves, not the self-understanding of enslaved people themselves.

Indeed, slave owners generally kept the capacity to record age—both written records and literacy skills—from enslaved people. When representatives of the Works Progress Administration interviewed former slaves in the 1930s, many reported that they did not know their date of birth. Fugitive slave Frederick Douglass first raised this issue in his 1845 Narrative, asserting that slave owners desired slaves should “know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs.” Douglass explained that preventing this self-knowledge was part of a larger effort to dehumanize enslaved people. As a free man, Douglass chose February 14 as his birthday because his mother had called him her “valentine.” In 1888, when he was old and famous, admirers organized a gala celebration for his seventy-first birthday. He reminded them that, properly speaking, he “never had a birthday . . . Birthdays belong to free institutions.” With deep insight, Douglass pointed out that chronological age in nineteenth-century America functioned primarily as a measure of citizenship status, a qualification possessed by some but denied to others. By inventing a birthday, Douglass solidified his identity as a free man but learned nothing of his own birth.

4. Sample page from a church register featuring the families of Merrill, Leach, Messure and Oaks. From the Jonathan Fisher Papers, 1791-1826, mss. boxes F (box 1 folder 2), American Antiquarian Society, Worcester Massachusetts.

In contrast to Douglass, some fugitive slaves knew their date of birth. Harriet Jacobs, for example, had access to literacy and a close-knit family, both of which facilitated knowledge of her age. She organized her narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl around particular birthdays. After the Civil War, freed people dedicated themselves to reuniting family members and, as part of that effort, began to keep their own records of births and deaths. Printers capitalized on this new market by releasing family records with illustrations of black families. Like Douglass, the families who purchased these records laid claim to birth dates as a mark of freedom.

In sum, births were most likely to be written down if they occurred in families with property or in those owned as property. What of the large population of poor and working-class people in between? Historian James Schmidt has demonstrated that well into the early twentieth century, many poor, working-class, and rural Americans of all races and ethnicities did not know or could not prove how old they were. How then did people meet the numerous age qualifications they faced in law? Records of military service, marriages, and elections offer evidence that for people without birth records, chronological age was not so much a knowable fact as it was a matter of negotiation with authority. People testified to their ages, but public officials also assessed their appearance to determine if the testimony seemed credible. Those with no written proof of age remained particularly vulnerable to having an age assigned to them by someone else.

For those who did not own a record of their age, negotiating age with the state became an established tradition during the colonial period. Tax assessors, militia captains, court officials, and ministers marrying young couples, among other public officials, all had to determine a person’s age in order to carry out their responsibilities. In cases where a person did not know or could not prove age, public officials balanced personal testimony with their own judgment. In her carefully researched study of boy soldiers during the American Revolution, Caroline Cox documented that recruiters directed to enlist boys over sixteen often accepted “stout” lads of fourteen or fifteen. Size and capacity mattered more than proof of age. With regards to child marriage, Nicholas Syrett found that young people often traveled to counties where nobody knew them and successfully convinced a minister they were of age. Once a marriage was consummated, courts rarely invalidated the bond even if a parent or guardian produced proof that a child was underage. As part of his study of elections in early America, political scientist Richard Franklin Bensel demonstrated that young men provided sworn testimony as to their age but could be challenged by election officials and bystanders. In contested cases with no written proof of age, judges sought witnesses who could name well-known events that occurred around the time of a person’s birth. Officials also looked to physical evidence of maturity, most often the growth or lack of a beard. Based on scattered evidence, Bensel estimated that overall roughly ten percent of voters did not know their own age, though in some areas such as rural Kentucky far more lacked this knowledge.

5. Mary Ragland Stamps Rice, receipt book, 1848, accession No. 15794, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

What these histories reveal is that state and federal governments created age qualifications for citizenship long before all citizens knew or could prove their ages. As a result, public officials developed elaborate mechanisms for investigating and, if necessary, inventing ages. Individuals offered their own testimony, but the ultimate power to determine age remained with officials administering the rights and obligations of citizenship. As with gender, race, and other categories of citizenship, age was subject to visible scrutiny by the state. Personal claims could be either validated or delegitimated by those in power.

The administration of Revolutionary War pensions offers a particularly vivid illustration of how public officials scrambled to determine age before any standardized identity documents existed. In 1832, Congress granted pensions to all surviving veterans without regard to need or disability. The Pension Bureau in Washington directed local courts to process applications, printing a standard form with questions to be answered under oath by the applicant and two character witnesses. As part of a general effort to combat fraud, the pension bureau showed a remarkable interest in both determining applicants’ ages and whether or not they had written proof of age. Directing court officials that “the age of the claimant must invariably be mentioned,” the Bureau demanded that court officials ask “Where and in what year were you born?” and “Have you any record of your age? and, if so, where is it?” This curiosity about written records is remarkable, for it appears as an effort to test whether or not age claims could be documented and if so, how. The results showed that many people could state an age but had no written documentation to prove it.

Payment of a pension was based on service, not age, but these records nonetheless reveal in remarkable detail how people tracked their own ages in early America. Historian Caroline Cox productively used these records to document the youth of boy soldiers, but pension records open a much broader window on understandings of age. A statistical sampling of these records could reveal the extent of age consciousness for a large sample of older men in the 1830s. What interests me here is not quantification, but the ways in which individuals testified to their age and how they knew it. Interestingly, many admitted that they only knew what family members had told them. For example, Abraham Aarons, applying in Adair County, Kentucky, told the court that he was “born in Lancaster County state of Pennsylvania on the 17^th of March 1759 agreeable to the information of his parents which he believes to be true and correct[,] he never having heard speak of any other.” Other individuals came from towns in New England that had kept some record of births and pointed to this official document as proof of age. For example, Nathan Abbot told the Middlesex County Court he “supposes that his birth is recorded in the Town Records” of Andover.

People who knew the month and year of their birth often claimed to have gained that knowledge from the record in a family Bible, though in many cases the Bible itself had been lost. Thus, Paul Findley, testifying in Abbeville, South Carolina, reported that he was born in January 1762 and “has no doubt relative to it from the fact of his having seen the record of his age in his father’s family Bible at the age of sixteen or seventeen years, which Bible is now lost or otherwise destroyed.” His older brother, John Finley, also a veteran, provided a more detailed account of how the Bible had been lost. He told the same court that “he has not the original record of his age, that it was burned by the Tories during the Revolutionary War.” Also testifying in Abbeville, David Pressly reported that “he was born in the city of Glasgow in Scotland on the 13^th of January one thousand seven hundred sixty four and brought from there to America when he was an infant in the nurse’s arms.” Pressly clarified that “the record of his age was in a Bible belonging to his cousin David Pressly who is dead.” He did not know what had become of the Bible.

Anticipating that many veterans would have no written proof of age, the Pension Bureau designed a specific process through which those with public authority could certify the applicant’s claim as credible. Directions specified that the applicant supply “two respectable persons—one of whom should be the nearest clergyman, if one lives in the immediate vicinity of such applicant, who can testify, from their acquaintance with him, that they believe he is of the age he represents, and that he is reputed and believed in the neighborhood to have been a Revolutionary soldier.” The pre-printed form provided for this purpose read, “we believe him to be [blank] years of age.” The witnesses thus had to specify a chronological age. They could not simply say he was old, though some qualified their answer by saying they believed the applicant to be “about” his stated age. The clerk of the court also had to certify the applicant’s age. Three people thus had the authority to accept or reject a veteran’s personal testimony as to his age.

Relying on witnesses and court officials ensured that an applicant appeared to be roughly the age he claimed, but could not wipe out all fraud. What it did accomplish was to create a process for categorizing citizens by age before the development of birth registration. This system enabled people to testify as to their own self-understanding of age, but also empowered “respectable persons,” particularly clergy and court officials, to accept or reject that testimony and, if needed, assign a credible age to someone who did not provide one. In processing claims, the Pension Bureau generally accepted whatever age had been entered by the district court. These documents thus reveal in detail how age was a negotiation, a balancing of personal testimony with public authority.

Today, we assume that most Americans have a birth certificate stating their true age. We recognize that people might lie about their age or even obtain a fake identification card, but we suppose that beneath these falsehoods there exists a reliable record. It is worth remembering, however, that age-based qualifications for citizenship preceded and in no way depended upon documentation of age. This should give us pause when we think about the “truth” of other identity categories such as sex, nationality, or race. Just as people lacked written proof of age in early America, they also lacked proof of race or sex. Many people assumed these categories were obvious, easy to read on people’s bodies, and essential to daily life in ways that age was not. But we know some people chose to “pass” as something they were not, while others did not fit neatly into one race or sex category. These people might find a race or sex assigned to them in much the same way that officials assigned age. Age appeared to people in early America as the most arbitrary qualification for citizenship, but that very recognition reveals the arbitrariness behind other categories as well.

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Anna Mae Duane and Nicholas Syrett for their insightful comments on this essay. I am also grateful to Jaclyn Penny at the American Antiquarian Society and the staff of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia for help locating exemplary copies of early family records.

The Dorr Rebellion Website

More than two centuries into our national experiment, it is still a vexing question: What is popular sovereignty? Who are “the people” and how can they exercise their sovereign will? What recourse exists for those disenfranchised by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, property, or residence restrictions? What happens when the existing government does not fulfill the people’s will? Thomas Jefferson famously championed—and most states affirmed in their constitutions—the right of the people “to alter or abolish” government that fails to meet their needs. Do, then, the people yet retain the right of revolution?

Popular insurgencies in the early republic brought these questions to the fore. In the 1840s, they brought the people of Rhode Island to blows—literally and dramatically. That episode—the Dorr Rebellion—is a centerpiece of Rhode Island history, but strangely unacknowledged outside the region. It should be. And now a Website sponsored by Providence College and Digital Publishing Services, authored principally by Erik Chaput and Russell DeSimone, makes it possible to delve deeply into this extraordinary popular insurgency and plumb its national implications for the meaning of popular sovereignty.

First, the drama. Rhode Island’s pre-Revolutionary charter restricted suffrage to property owners. When the colony was agricultural and maritime, this requirement was not onerous; more than three quarters of white males were enfranchised freemen in 1775. But over the next fifty years, Rhode Island’s urban, commercial and early industrial growth boomed, creating a large population of landless working men—the majority of whom could not vote. By the 1820s, the politically impotent began to grumble; by the 1830s they had organized to seek suffrage reforms. But they made no headway: power lay in the hands of a landed minority of conservative rural freeholders who adamantly refused change. Reformers grew increasingly frustrated. Then the insurgent populism of the 1840 Log Cabin presidential campaign suggested a new tack.

Thomas Dorr, idealistic scion of a wealthy Providence merchant, took the helm of the Rhode Island Suffrage Association with a revolutionary proposal. In cases of tyranny, he claimed, the people themselves have the authority to form government—without the consent of the existing powers. Emulating the words and methods of the founders, Dorr and his followers issued a general call for an extra-legal “People’s Convention” to draft a new state constitution and institute a new government, overturning the existing authority.

James S. Baillie, T.W. Dorr. Inaugurated Governor of Rhode Island, May 3rd 1842 (New York: J. Baillie, between 1845-47). Courtesy of the American Portrait Prints Collection at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Dorr’s populist rhetoric engaged the disenfranchised. His reasoned legalism drew supporters among some professional and commercial reformers. And his anti-Whig stance appealed to Democrats, whose party leadership he then assumed. By the spring of 1841, the campaign had grown to an immense popular movement of mechanics, immigrant laborers, and middle class professionals. That autumn, town representatives met in convention. They drafted a new constitution, which was then ratified by a majority of adult white males. Dorr was elected governor, and in April 1842, he and his supporters paraded into town to seize power from the sitting “Charter” government.

But the Charterites refused to yield. They claimed that once a government was constituted, sovereignty shifted from the people to the constitution; thereafter government could be changed only by the constituted governors. What followed was three months of violence and violent repression, martial law, ugly nativism, national political machinations, and ardent debates over constitutional interpretation. Ultimately Dorr suffered a crushing defeat of his populist government, culminating in the rout and exile of its supporters. While Dorr was sentenced to life in prison, the Charter government drafted a new constitution that met most of the People’s demands.

This dramatic and somewhat bizarre episode provides rich evidence and insights. It has not gone unnoticed by historians: Marvin Gettleman’s Dorr Rebellion (1973) told a tale of class struggle and radicalism. Regional scholars Peter Coleman, Patrick Conley, and George Dennison have mined the economic, political and constitutional aspects of Rhode Island’s struggle. The most recent treatment is Chaput’s biographical The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (2013). But the episode has mostly been relegated to brief notice in regional histories, in part because sources have been difficult to access.

Those barriers have been admirably felled by The Dorr Rebellion Website. The site provides a wealth of primary source documents, images, a well-conceived documentary film, interpretive essays, lesson plans, a bibliography, and links to additional materials. The centerpiece is a selection of sixty letters to, from, or about Dorr. These are provided as scanned images, and then as searchable transcriptions with encoded terms that activate pop-ups to identify persons, places, and organizations mentioned in the letters. This use of digital editing is particularly helpful, easing the sense—so common when reading letters or diaries—that we are entering a long-running soap opera clueless to cast or plot. The pop-ups tell us who’s who, what’s what, and provide Google maps to tell us where’s where. Chaput and DeSimone have organized the letters into two collections. One set presents the People’s Constitution agenda; the second argues for more gradual change and expresses fears of majoritarian tyranny or even mob rule. Together, the letters portray growth, development, and resistance to Dorr’s popular sovereignty movement. They also reveal the passion and drama of people who dared to risk their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for the cause.

Educators will appreciate rich supporting materials. Each set of letters is prefaced by a brief but insightful essay (“The Road to Rebellion” is particularly well crafted). A section contrasting the constitutions produced by the Dorrite and Charter factions allows students to compare the documents by article and topic. A twenty-minute documentary film provides an excellent classroom introduction to the controversy. A large gallery of supplemental images allows teachers and students to view portraits, historic sites, maps, newspapers, broadsides, and political cartoons. Five lesson plans designed for high school and college level students admirably expand the Dorr episode to consider how popular sovereignty was refracted through the lenses of gender and race. The role of abolitionism, popular partisan politics, and sectional tensions in influencing national—and federal—responses to the crisis are particularly well presented, as is the interplay of other reform movements. Links to articles by scholars enrich and expand the lessons, detailing how the Dorr crisis rippled across the nation and prompted responses from Missouri to Maine, from New York Loco Focos to terrified Southern Democrats, from Equal Rights women to ardent abolitionists.

This is a rich Website and good model for using digital editing to make primary sources accessible in the classroom. There are a few minor glitches such as inactive links or encoded terms. But the beauty of the digital resource is the ease of editing. The site could be further enriched by links to contemporary assessments such as the “The Nine Lawyers’ Opinion,” (1842), William Goodell’s “The Rights and Wrongs of Rhode Island,” (1842), Francis Bowen’s “The Recent Contest in Rhode Island” (1844), Frances H. Wright’s “Might and Right” (1844), and Burke’s Report (1844). But it is hard to fault a site as rich as this for not having more.

The Dorr Rebellion digital project provides compelling evidence that Rhode Island’s drama deserves a prominent place among case studies of popular sovereignty. Far from being a parochial matter of local history, it is a complex and nuanced instance of the struggle to advance equal rights, a story of national significance—and resonance—in today’s classroom.

This article originally appeared in Fall 2014.

Mary Babson Fuhrer is a public historian and independent scholar who specializes in the social history of colonial and early republic New England. Her book, Crisis of Community: The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town 1815-1848, was recently published by the University of North Carolina Press.

A Colonial Snapshot: Reading William Hammerton’s “Map of the Southeastern Part of North America, 1721”

Reading William Hammerton’s “Map of the Southeastern Part of North America, 1721”

“What piece excites you?”

It was my first visit to the Yale Center for British Art. The breadth and scope of the collections were so daunting that I resorted to the oldest trick in the book. I asked the curator what she found interesting. Senior Curator Elizabeth Fairman spoke with infectious energy about the materials available, and when she mentioned William Hammerton’s 1721 manuscript map of South Carolina (fig. 1), I could hardly contain my own enthusiasm. My excitement stemmed not merely from the fact that there are so few maps depicting the “Southeastern Part of North America” before the mid-eighteenth century. This map—which details the southern frontier of North America (including the area from Cape Charles in Virginia to Cape Canaveral in Florida, and from the Atlantic coast westward to the Mississippi River)—appears to be the earliest of two known copies of a famous, but lost, map drawn by Colonel John Barnwell. Barnwell, also known as “Tuscarora Jack” for his involvement in the Tuscarora War of 1711, was a redoubtable Indian fighter and frontier settler who traveled extensively throughout the region. (The other period copy of the Barnwell map is housed in the Public Record Office in London).

The Barnwell map became the base for subsequent and well-known maps, such as Mark Catesby’s 1731 “A map of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands” and John Mitchell’s 1755 “A map of the British and French dominions in North America,” which was used during border negotiations after the American Revolution (1782-1783). Though little is known of William Hammerton, who worked as a sailor and was appointed as a naval officer by Sir Francis Nicholson, South Carolina’s governor, in the summer of 1721, his manuscript map offers a virtually unexamined copy of the Barnwell map. Except for a brief mention in William P. Cumming’s The Southeast in Early Maps (1958), the Hammerton map has received little attention.

I had originally ventured into the Center for British Art in the hopes of finding some exciting and eye-catching primary sources for the freshman seminar I was teaching on “War and Rebellion in Early America.” Though Ms. Fairman pulled many items—Benjamin West engravings, maps of Sir Francis Drake’s voyages, and even a military pocket atlas used in the American Revolution—I kept returning to the Hammerton map. My current research project, an examination of the spread and acquisition of information in Southeastern North America, raises questions about how news moved (and who moved it) in the pre-printing press colonial world. Maps are a fascinating source from which to consider both how English colonists negotiated colonial spaces and how those struggles were represented. What role did trade play in connecting South Carolina to the greater Southeast? How were these economic exchanges understood and depicted? What type of information did trade offer the English? How were those far-reaching networks regulated? The Hammerton map offered some answers to these questions.

Seduced by the curator’s passion, I found myself drawn by the striking crispness of the map. Crisscrossing trails connected Charles Town all the way to the Mississippi. The Indian groups along these paths were meticulously identified. The map also included battle sites, well-known trader’s routes, geographic commentary, imperial rivalries, and discussions of possible English ventures into the interior. English Charles Town, Spanish St. Augustine, French Mobile, Indian allies and hostile nations, forts, factories, “pleasant good lands,” as well as swamps were indicated. Every marking on the map made my head swirl. I decided to put my laptop away and stare. Just stare at this magnificent 54-by-31⅛ inch map. I followed each path across the “Southeastern Part of North America.” I read each annotation. I looked at all the small details and then stepped back and stared at the map as a whole. And then I repeated the whole process. It became clear to me that I was not simply reading a map; I was reading history. Hammerton had left us a snapshot of the Southeast in 1721.

Fig. 1. "Map of the Southeastern Part of North America," William Hammerton, 54 x 31⅛ in., 1721, after John Barnwell (ca.1671-1724). Pen and black and brown ink, with red, yellow, and blue-gray wash. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, gift of the Acorn Foundation, Inc., Alexander O. Vietor ('36), president, in honor of Paul Mellon. Click to enlarge in new window. — Fig. 1. “Map of the Southeastern Part of North America,” William Hammerton, 54 x 31⅛ in., 1721, after John Barnwell (ca.1671-1724). Pen and black and brown ink, with red, yellow, and blue-gray wash. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, gift of the Acorn Foundation, Inc., Alexander O. Vietor (’36), president, in honor of Paul Mellon. Click to enlarge in new window.

The most information-heavy portion of the map extended along the coastline, from Charles Town to St. Augustine. Every inlet was labeled. Every river identified. But the focus of the map was not the Atlantic seaboard. The west was the heart of the Hammerton map. The map pointed to the lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, which though far away from English settlements, seemed well within English control. Indian trade and slaving routes connected Charles Town to that vast territory.

Fig. 2. "A plan of the town & harbour of Charles Town," detail from "A compleat description of the province of Carolina in 3 parts," Edward Crisp. Engraved by John Harris; published in London by Edward Crisp (1711?). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C. Click to enlarge in new window. — Fig. 2. “A plan of the town & harbour of Charles Town,” detail from “A compleat description of the province of Carolina in 3 parts,” Edward Crisp. Engraved by John Harris; published in London by Edward Crisp (1711?). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C. Click to enlarge in new window.

With the founding of Charles Town in 1670, the English had expanded relentlessly into the Southeastern interior (fig. 2). South Carolinians re-oriented the Indian trade away from Spanish Florida and English Virginia and, in the process, developed their own extensive and profitable trade connections. The trade routes were the arteries that gave South Carolina a pulse—a pulse that moved with individual traders. The fact that the roads on the map were labeled after the specific traders who journeyed on and through them revealed the extent to which South Carolina depended on key individuals to forge these distant connections (fig. 3).

12.4.Dubcovsky.3 — Fig. 3. Detail showing the paths taken by two Indian traders, Captain Thomas Nairne and Esq. Hughes. Hammerton’s “Map of the Southeastern Part of North America” (1721). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, gift of the Acorn Foundation, Inc., Alexander O. Vietor (’36), president, in honor of Paul Mellon.

These lines drew Charles Town closer to backcountry outposts, like Fort Moore and Indian towns in western Florida, and even offered the English access to the Mississippi. But more than simply paths connecting Charles Town to the interior, from point A to point B, these routes were “courses,” “journeys,” and histories of interaction. These trails served as a testament to the region’s long history of trade. They emphasized South Carolina’s persistence as well as the importance of the Indian nations that had facilitated (and those that had blocked) English access. The map showed how these commercial networks afforded the English a wide, albeit uneven, engagement in the region. In 1721, South Carolina was looking to make its presence in the interior more consistent, more powerful, and more felt. The trade routes in the Hammerton map revealed both English desire to expand west as well as the concrete steps South Carolina had taken to make this ambition a reality.

Waiting to foil this English drive into the interior were the French. Stationed all along the map’s western edge were French forts, missions, and outposts. By the 1720s, the French had positioned themselves as South Carolina’s most serious European rival in the region; they had established Fort Toulouse (near the present-day city of Wetumpka, Alabama) in 1717 and made repeated incursions along the Mississippi River. Though the French had a presence in the region dating back to the sixteenth century, these new outposts and trading posts placed them as a permanent and tangible threat.

After studying the map, it was clear to me that the English were expending a significant amount of energy and effort to push west. However, my own research, which focuses on Anglo-Spanish rivalries in the Southeast, forced my gaze away from the French, the west, and the map’s narrative of westward expansion. I looked south to Spanish Florida. How did South Carolinians depict this old neighbor and competitor?

With so much focus on the French and on the west, I was surprised to find that the Spanish figured so prominently in the Hammerton map. Unlike the sparse details denoting the French posts and trading excursions, the section on Spanish Florida was heavily annotated. The Hammerton map offered the location and histories of selected engagements between English South Carolina and Spanish Florida. For example, the map identified several battle sites, including the Battle of Ayubale (labeled Ayavally on the map) and other unnamed towns along the Apalachicola River “where 600 Spaniards and Indians were killed and taken by the Carolinians.” These attacks were part of the violent campaigns led by South Carolina’s former governor, James Moore, in 1704-1706. The English raids had decimated Spanish Indians and missions in Apalachee (western Florida) and removed the Spanish from the area for close to two decades. While the Hammerton map proudly included these English victories, it did not mention Moore’s disastrous invasion of St. Augustine in 1702, which led to the costly and unsuccessful siege of the Spanish presidio (fig. 4).

Fig. 4. "Pagus Hispanorum in Florida," Arnoldus Montanus (1625?-1683), in John Ogilby (1600-1676), America: being the latest, and most accurate description of the New world; containing the original of the inhabitants, and the remarkable voyages thither … Printed by the author (London, 1671). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. — Fig. 4. “Pagus Hispanorum in Florida,” Arnoldus Montanus (1625?-1683), in John Ogilby (1600-1676), America: being the latest, and most accurate description of the New world; containing the original of the inhabitants, and the remarkable voyages thither … Printed by the author (London, 1671). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

I realized that the conflicts inscribed on the map had a predictable pattern: total English success and complete Spanish defeat. This presentation transformed the Spanish into an anemic rival, still present in the Southeast but posing no real threat. Whereas Spanish towns and missions were nothing more than a relic of past tensions, French outposts and western territories were the future. Spanish feebleness seemed to tell a history of English strength as well as explain why the English had shifted their attention from the south to the west, from a Spanish to a French rivalry. The Hammerton map made it very clear that the key to the Southeast was in the west. But in 1721, no one knew for certain what direction that key would turn.

How far South Carolina had managed to trade, where and with whom they had established commercial exchanges, and when those relationships truly blossomed all depended on Indians. The amount of detail included on Indians and Indian affairs signaled how deeply South Carolina valued this type of information. Indians appeared in every nook of the map, but their presence was neither arbitrary nor decorative. On the contrary, information concerning Indians was highly specific and strategic. I was struck by how the Hammerton map chose to represent Indian peoples within its vision of English westward expansion. Not all Indian groups received equal treatment in the map; not all Indians groups were of equal concern. But each Indian group was recognized as distinct, autonomous, and yet somehow connected to both South Carolina and to other Indian nations.

Representations of the Cherokee and Creek provide a telling example. The map described Cherokees as “numerous” and Creeks as “warlike” (fig. 5). The Cherokees and their lands were depicted as having “extensive prospect,” while the Creeks were regarded with trepidation. At the root of this juxtaposition was the Yamasee War (1715-1717), a bloody and violent conflict that had reshaped the Southeast and forced South Carolina to restructure its Indian relations. The English world turned upside down as they waged war against Yamasees and Lower Creeks, Indians who had once been South Carolina’s closest allies. During the Yamasee War, it became a matter of survival for South Carolina to secure an alliance with the Cherokees or, at the very least, to prevent this large Indian nation from joining Yamasee-Creek forces. (The Cherokees ultimately did ally with South Carolina in 1715.)

By the time the map was made, the dust from the Yamasee War had somewhat settled. The Yamasees had been expelled from South Carolina. The Creeks had once again been embraced as friends of the English. And the Cherokees had grown into formidable trading partners. The Hammerton map exposed the war’s open and still bleeding battle wounds, portraying the Creek-English friendship as riddled with mistrust and danger, marred by the experience of the Yamasee War five years before. In contrast, fear and rivalry were nowhere to be found in depictions of Cherokee-English relations. The Cherokees had aided South Carolina during one of the colony’s darkest hours. The map hinted at this budding alliance by labeling Cherokee country as “very hilly,” but “very good land” that would enable both English trade and “English factor[ies].”

As I read the map’s text, I was reminded that the evolving relations among Creeks, Cherokees, English, Spanish, and French were all happening at the same time. The Hammerton map offered a striking visual record of English interactions not just with one group, but with all the diverse inhabitants of the Southeast together. The map showed South Carolina’s strained relations with the Creeks as it depicted its growing friendship with the Cherokee. The map offered no explanation for the ways in which Creek-English interactions affected Cherokee-English relations (and vice-versa), but it did describe Creeks and Cherokees in comparable, albeit different, terms—as if providing two possible alternatives to English-Indian relations. The Hammerton map reminded me of the importance of looking at the larger context when considering specific interactions.

Yet I kept feeling that something was missing. What was it? At first I did not see it. The Hammerton map seemed to draw a fairly inclusive picture of the Southeast region and its inhabitants. It was only as I began to compile a list of the Indian groups mentioned in the map that I noticed a glaring omission: there were no Yamasees and no references to the Yamasee War. How could this be? This massive Indian war had almost wiped the English off the map. At first I thought that South Carolinians merely wanted to erase this event and forget that any Indians had challenged English authority—maps are more often representations of desires than of realities. The map, however, included references to other Indian adversaries. Both Lower Creeks, who had been major players in the Yamasee War, and Tuscaroras, who had embroiled the Carolinas in the massive and costly Tuscarora War, were featured. Why were the Yamasee missing?

Fig. 5. "Characteristick head of a Creek war chief," Barnard Romans (ca. 1720-ca. 1784), in A concise natural history of East and West Florida … Printed for the author (New York, 1775). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. — Fig. 5. “Characteristick head of a Creek war chief,” Barnard Romans (ca. 1720-ca. 1784), in A concise natural history of East and West Florida … Printed for the author (New York, 1775). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

It seemed likely that the Yamasee War was nowhere in the map because, truly, it was everywhere. It was the context and subtext informing this map. It had taken me so long to notice that there were no explicit mentions of Yamasees and the Yamasee War because the scars of this failed alliance and conflict were all over the map. Creek Country seemed particularly affected by this unmentionable event. The map listed many Creek towns as abandoned and relocated in 1715 (fig. 6). The map did not explain that the Yamasee War was the cause of this displacement; it merely illustrated Indian mobility and change without offering any reason for these removals. In all fairness, reason probably had little to do with it. The years following the Yamasee War were a time of great anxiety for South Carolinians. The English were shaken not just by the bloody war that had just ended, but by the uncertainty of the future.

Fig. 6. Detail of abandoned Indian towns during or as a result of the Yamasee War, Hammerton's "Map of the Southeastern Part of North America" (1721). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, gift of the Acorn Foundation, Inc., Alexander O. Vietor ('36), president, in honor of Paul Mellon. — Fig. 6. Detail of abandoned Indian towns during or as a result of the Yamasee War, Hammerton’s “Map of the Southeastern Part of North America” (1721). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, gift of the Acorn Foundation, Inc., Alexander O. Vietor (’36), president, in honor of Paul Mellon.

In 1721, South Carolina was caught in a difficult balancing act. The English had to weigh the danger and risks brought by the Yamasee War on one hand, and bet on the potential of an aggressive and expansive future on the other. This map showed South Carolina’s gamble. Both a product of the past and a producer of a future, the map was also an expression of a specific moment in South Carolina’s history. The Hammerton map provides a fleeting but vivid insight into the uncertainties and prospects connecting the Southeastern world in 1721.

Echoes

I’m not in the habit of reading my work once it appears in print. I figure: I wrote it, I finished it, and now, in a way, it’s over. I’d never really considered the dynamics of being a reader of your own finished work—or rather, of posing as a reader of it—until this past November, when I did indeed read my book in anticipation of the roundtable discussion at the American Studies Association conference. As I was reading, I found myself taking notes, because that’s what I do when I read. And as I was taking notes, I began to recognize, visually, in my own hand, short phrases that I remember writing years ago—in margins, on Post-its, in notebooks, on the backs of library call slips. Short strings that I hoped would throw a line out to something just out of reach. Or bursts of words that, once flung down, might just send something back from the big surrounding sound. They were the phrases that I jotted with a sense of discovery, underlined, circled a few times, and then filed away praying that they would somehow turn into more text. And here, years later, I found myself taking notes again in a hotel room in L.A., pulling these phrases out of the book that did finally emerge, and only belatedly, uncannily recognizing them as those very first strains as I was straining to hear.

On this reading, I kept thinking about closure.

I share this because these jottings on either side of the narrative made me think about how texts are assembled and disassembled, how inevitably and intimately we are involved in this messy practice of taking narratives apart and putting them together again, of dealing with pieces, consolidations, disarticulations, gleanings. I realized that practice was not simply inevitable, but that it actually became an important part of my method and my attempt in writing Seasons of Misery, especially in constructing the narratives I was writing—or what I perhaps awkwardly called the “narrative readings.” Trying to turn the textual evidence of early settlement into not only an analysis of, but also into a particular kind of narrative of early settlement, required this kind of piecing apart and piecing back together differently—not just repeating or translating the original narrative as a re-told thing; not just reading alongside the original narrative; not just summarizing, or streamlining, or stylizing—but really using an act of narration (my own) to hear more clearly what I kept on hearing: the enormous unsettlement at the heart of what we call colonial settlement.

Plimoth Plantation. Courtesy of Jack Costello.

On this reading, I kept thinking about closure. It’s done, after all. What does it add up to? How do its accounts close out? The question is legitimate. Nevertheless, I kept being thrown back on the realization that resisting closure was always a main element—not just in the process of reading for and writing the book, but in its very argument. I needed, as much as I could, to stay inside catastrophe rather than to recuperate it, to stay inside chaos without the relief of overview, to stay inside seasons of suffering and violence rather than to chart a chronology that resolved them. To me, resisting closure was a key point, because I thought doing so could bring us closer to the profound discontinuities that characterized these first “settlements.” The developmental narrative—this led to that, led to that, and ended thus—enforces or at least attempts to fix a continuity of meaning, a heuristic “making” that does not keep being unmade. This taken-for-granted demand to arrive at historical continuity, coherence, trajectory was associated, in my mind, with establishing a fixity of meaning that seemed to seriously mis-tell what settlement was, and how coloniality happened.

To resist closure, to dwell in discontinuity, required engaging different temporal frames—both within the texts that I was reading and within the text that I was writing. Most of all, it meant slowing way down. Recently, I heard Hayden White talk and he said at one point: “No one ever lived the historical past, only the experiential past.” By the historical past, he meant the knowledge that historians have mapped out for us. The experiential past was the unmapped. As a writer and scholar, I wanted to stay in and move slowly within that unfixed, unresolved past: that sense of a present, ongoing past which, because it was catastrophic, had lost its bearings in understanding its own relation to both past and future. Because I am a literary critic, I am of course aware of the fact that the texts I use as evidence are made things. They are not the experiential past, but more exactly attempts to map that past. Therefore, it was the unsettlement in the textual objects that drew me, or else the purported meaning that tried mightily to discipline that everywhere-unsettlement. Given that neither experience nor representation were transparent, it was left to me try to create a world in my own text that did not close easily, that did not level out, that did not, in Joseph Roach’s words, “invest the future with the fatality of the past.” I remember posting a big sign on my wall that said in capital letters: STAY WITH THE ACUTE. That was my effort.

Detail from an illustrated map in Richard Ligon, A true and exact history of the island of Barbadoes: Illustrated with a map of the island, as also the principall trees and plants there, set forth in their due proportions and shapes, drawne out by their severall respective scales (London, 1657). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

In piecing texts apart and putting them back together, in catching strains and straining to catch, I was trying both to pay a much slower attention to things that we take for granted, and to extract and compose other stories that the texts were holding but not telling. To me, this set of terms—non-closure, slowness, discontinuity, staying with the acute—had everything to do with the misery and violence, with the catastrophe of colonial settlement. The last section of the Jamestown chapter is called “The Echoing Air.” Reading the book again, that was one of those old phrases that stayed with me anew. As Paspahegh warriors surrounded the Jamestown block house, they shouted their own name in triumph. George Percy writes: “The echo thereof made both the air and woods to ring.”

It was the echo I heard: the thing that both hangs and reverberates; that amplifies and extends; that repeats and reflects; that warbles, distorts; but that ultimately both remembers and haunts the sound that was made. Now I’m interested in thinking about this conversation, too, as a kind of an echo. I’m enormously grateful for the chance to hear this through other people’s ears, and to think of the book as not over, not closed, but rather open and perhaps even unresolved in a potentially generative way.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Sojourners and Strangers in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic

The cast of characters in Robert Love’s Warnings is astonishing. William Collier, a British veteran of the Seven Years’ War, journeyed to Boston from as far as South Carolina and East Florida in hopes of obtaining passage back to England. Scipio Fayerweather, a former slave who owned two houses in Boston, sheltered blacks who passed through the bustling port. Elizabeth Simmons, a transatlantic traveler widowed upon her arrival in Boston, made ends meet by marketing her expertise in London fashion and lodging boarders in the spare rooms of the house she rented. Joseph LeBlanc, an Acadian exiled from Nova Scotia during the Seven Years’ War, awaited passage to Quebec in cramped quarters on the outskirts of town after the war’s end. Nell Puce and Peggy Carpenter, wives of British soldiers who evacuated the port in the early 1770s, kept themselves from starvation by gathering wild dandelions on Boston’s Fort Hill to sell to their neighbors. Michael Hogan, a peddler circulating New England, arrived in Boston with a box of goods he intended to “Sell upon a WheleBarrow” and managed to establish a shop in town before his untimely death from heatstroke after a string of sweltering summer days (120).

Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger tell the stories of hundreds of marginal and ordinary people in their ambitious book, relying heavily on the records produced by a little-known clerk in pre-Revolutionary Boston named Robert Love. Love emigrated from Ireland to New England as a young man, ultimately settling in Boston. There, like many lower-middling urban dwellers, he pieced together a living to support his growing family, working alternately as a tailor, a small-scale trader, and a retailer in liquor. At the age of sixty-eight, Love added a new post to his patchwork of occupations: he began to walk the streets of Boston in search of strangers to “warn” from the town. For nine years he perambulated the port, telling some 4,000 men, women, and children “in His Majestys Name to depart the town of Boston in 14 days” (57).

Love’s words sound harsh to modern ears. And, indeed, they have been interpreted that way by many a chronicler of New England’s history. Historians have perceived warning, which was distinctive to New England, as an expression of the region’s distaste for outsiders and stinginess with relief for the poor. Some scholars have interpreted the concept literally—as physical banishment of those who did not have legal habitancy in the towns from which they were being warned. Other scholars have recognized that warning did not require eviction, but they have nonetheless misunderstood its purpose, presuming that declarations like Love’s were intended to inform sojourners that they were not legal inhabitants of the town and therefore could not receive poor relief. Dayton and Salinger, however, expose the limits of these conventional interpretations of warning. New Englanders were no xenophobic penny-pinchers, they argue; on the contrary, the region’s warning system was integral to what was arguably the most generous welfare system in the British Empire.

Centering their analysis on Massachusetts—”the province that originated the warning system used throughout New England”—Dayton and Salinger call attention to a largely overlooked feature of the Bay Colony’s relief system: the province account (4). Taxpayers across the colony contributed to this account, which provided aid to needy persons who did not have legal habitancy in Massachusetts. Thus, when Love tracked strangers on Boston’s wharves and in its alleys, his job was to determine their place of legal settlement: if in Boston, they would be entitled to local poor relief should they fall on hard times; if elsewhere in the colony, the town to which they belonged would be legally responsible for their support; if anywhere outside of Massachusetts, the province account would pick up the tab. Love’s warnings, then, were not intended to evict itinerants from the port (though removal warrants did follow warnings on rare occasion). Nor were they used to exclude outsiders from poor relief. Rather, they were meant for “fiscal accounting”: they “establish[ed] the line between a town’s budgetary responsibilities and the province poor account” (20). Better understood as a bureaucratic mechanism than an exclusionary measure, the warning system in no way hampered people from crossing town or colony borders, as some historians have supposed. In contrast, this system actually promoted movement by allowing Bostonians to hire, house, feed, and befriend sojourners without worrying that they were exposing the town to undue financial risks; should newcomers encounter hardship, the burden of their care would be shouldered by taxpayers across the province.

Robert Love’s Warnings is composed of nine chapters. The first sets the stage for the story of Love and his strangers by examining how the warning system functioned in Massachusetts. Here Dayton and Salinger explore the regional particularities of warning in the colony and trace its evolution from the late seventeenth century to the 1760s, when rates of warning in New England peaked and Love undertook the daunting task of distinguishing newcomers from settled inhabitants on the streets of Boston. The first chapter also lays out the various paths to attaining legal settlement status in the Bay Colony, which largely revolved around one’s place of birth or the legal settlement of one’s household head. Those who wished to change their place of settlement could do so in two ways: by petitioning the town selectmen (an approach that yielded success only to wealthy or highly skilled sojourners) or by residing in the town for a year without being warned (a route to settlement that Dayton and Salinger term the “backdoor method”). One of the reasons Boston’s selectmen hired Love to scan the town’s streets and frequent its inns was to keep sojourners from gaining habitancy via that backdoor method. If Boston’s many newcomers—particularly its economically marginal ones—became eligible for local rather than provincial aid, the port’s relief system would be swamped.

The second chapter tells Love’s story, illuminating why he would have desired the warning post and why he succeeded so brilliantly in it. Chapter three traces the origins of New England’s warning system to seventeenth-century English settlement law, and it explains the genesis of the province account—a New England innovation that emerged in the late seventeenth century when the province maintained white settlers throughout the colony whose homes had been burned in King Phillip’s and King William’s wars. The chapter also reveals the liberality of New England’s poor relief practices by situating them in the context of welfare regimes in England, Continental Europe, and Britain’s American colonies; “Nowhere else in the West” were taxpayers “willing to pay what was in effect two poor rates,” Dayton and Salinger argue (54). The fourth chapter describes the daily realities of Love’s job on the streets of Boston: where the man found strangers to warn; what his encounters were like; and how he managed to obtain information when he came upon defiant or deceptive visitors.

The first four chapters serve as a prelude of sorts to the following five, which in many ways comprise the heart of the study. Here Dayton and Salinger transition from examining the history, purpose, and practice of warning to investigating the warned themselves: Who were they? Why had they come to Boston? How did their sojourns fit into their broader life trajectories? In answering these questions, Dayton and Salinger reveal gendered patterns of movement and poverty as well as expose the influence of race on geographic circulation in the region. And they correct the longstanding assumption that the warned were destitute, or nearly so; over four-fifths of those Love warned were economically stable migrants who moved for work or training. Dayton and Salinger also shed light on the ways in which disruptions wrought by imperial policies influenced individuals’ lives, examining in depth the plights of three groups of people dislodged by imperial crises in the Anglo Atlantic: British veterans of the Seven Years’ War stranded in the mainland colonies; exiled Acadians seeking passage to French communities; and women and children deserted by the British soldiers who occupied Boston in the early 1770s.

Chapters five through nine provide remarkable insight into who was moving and why during the turbulent period between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. But these chapters are most striking for the stories they tell. Dayton and Salinger have contextualized Love’s detailed warning records with a wide array of contemporary historical sources, producing hundreds of biographies of people who left only the faintest of tracks in the historical record. The stories of these individuals appear on nearly every page of the book’s latter half. Thanks to the fruitful collaboration of two meticulous historians and the diligent efforts of an obscure town official in pre-Revolutionary Boston, Robert Love’s Warnings peoples the streets of an eighteenth-century city as few studies have.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Gloria McCahon Whiting is a doctoral candidate in history at Harvard University completing a dissertation on race, slavery, gender, and family in early New England.

Art in Transit

Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014. 240 pp., $60.

Exploring the materiality of early American paintings and prints, Jennifer Roberts’ excellent new book spans the 1760s to the 1850s in three fascinating case studies, each involving the complex transport of art. Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America examines the ways that art and artists anticipated and responded to movement, first in the trans-Atlantic passage of paintings by John Singleton Copley, then shifting to the production and distribution of John James Audubon’s huge Birds of America, and finally examining the links between Asher B. Durand’s varied careers as an engraver of banknotes and fine art and as a landscape painter in the telegraphic age. As Roberts writes, “pictures in early America … were marked by their passage through space—not only by crushed corners, craquelure, and other indexical injuries that they may have sustained along the way, but also by their formal preprocessing of the distances they were designed to span” (1-2).

With few existing art historical tools to analyze the transportation of art in eighteenth and nineteenth century America, Roberts culls concepts from a range of disciplines, including semiotics, philosophy, anthropology, economics, and science studies. This theoretical diversity is one of the book’s many strengths. Another is the author’s integration of ideas in modern art, which inform her approach to motion and transit in early American pictures. The topic of the transportation of and in art provides a focus that is at once rather narrow and yet broadly ambitious, offering Roberts a means to bridge theoretical gaps between disciplines. While art history focuses on illusionism, representation, and iconography, often overlooking materiality, material culture frequently attends to “thingness” at the expense of representation. The transport of pictures opens up a sort of sweet spot between the two disciplines, examining how movement activates and materializes images in ways that scholars have not considered. Utilizing the term “phatic” from semiotics, meaning those aspects of language that refer to channels of communication rather than the primary message, Roberts seeks the phatic aspects of pictures. As eighteenth-century letters, for example, often expressed uncertainty about when and if the recipient would actually receive them, so too did paintings register artists’ fears of delay and damage in transit. Transporting Visions “develops an approach to the phatic richness of pictures, arguing for the centrality of the phatic” in modernity (7). Examining the events and passages of time in between production and consumption—those delays and interstices that art historians have generally ignored—Roberts finds a great deal of meaning.

Chapter one explores John Singleton Copley’s efforts to participate in London’s academic exhibitions remotely from Boston, laboriously packing and sending paintings on long overseas voyages, then receiving belated news of his work’s reception, all in all a process fraught with delay, tension, and the possibility of loss and damage on the high seas. Copley registered the challenges of this spatial and chronological distance in the paintings themselves, Roberts argues. They can be seen in Copley’s stylistic eccentricities and in his aesthetic of transmission derived from models of Atlantic exchange and transport. Roberts’ keen analysis of Copley’s pivotal 1765 A Boy with a Flying Squirrel, painted for submission to the Society of Artists’ exhibition in London, was published in part in the American Art Journal (Summer 2007). Roberts incorporates considerable new material in the book chapter by examining a wider range of Copley’s work. Her reading of Watson and the Shark as a direct response to the events and the political upheaval of the Boston Tea Party is particularly fruitful. In contrast to Copley’s earlier tabletop portraits, which Roberts reads as agents of sensory synthesis and transmission, Watson and the Shark offers a vision of misalignment, its precious cargo overboard and in grave danger, indicative of a larger breakdown in Anglo-American material relations.

Chapter two analyzes John James Audubon’s ambitious Birds of America project of the 1820s and 1830s. Audubon was determined to publish it with life-sized images of American birds, despite the enormous costs and logistical challenges of doing so. Emphasizing the materiality of Audubon’s pictures and the physical problems associated with producing and distributing them, Roberts notes that the images ironically navigated the landscape with much greater difficulty than the birds they depicted. Audubon’s insistence on real-life scale derived in part from his desire for accuracy and pictorial preservation in the transatlantic realm of natural history. His emphasis on indexical accuracy is also seen as a reaction to the instability of credit and currency in the early republic. Roberts connects the Birds of America project to Audubon’s previous career as a western merchant, emphasizing the traumatic effects of the bank panic of 1819, when Audubon lost everything and was forced to declare bankruptcy.

The third chapter addresses art in the telegraphic age. While words and images had previously traveled at the same rate, with letters, newspapers, and objects journeying together as cargo on boats and wagons, the telegraph conveyed coded words at lightning speed, leaving pictures behind. Roberts posits that Asher B. Durand’s plein air landscape studies of the 1840s and 1850s articulated this difference and celebrated the qualities of slowness that images had newly acquired. Durand’s early career as an engraver—of banknotes and then fine art—left him particularly attuned to issues of reproduction and transmission and to tensions between surface and depth in an era of collapsing differentiations in time and space. Linking Durand’s engraving of John Vanderlyn’s Ariadne with his later up-close studies of mossy rocks and trees, Roberts finds visual and thematic connections to materiality, to the labyrinth, and to surface attention that resisted the dematerializing tendencies of telegraphy.

An extraordinarily useful and influential contribution to art historical scholarship, Transporting Visions will shift how Copley, Audubon, and Durand are studied. More important is the book’s demonstration and assertion of the significance of the communication and transportation revolutions in early American art. These new and provocative interpretations leave the reader wanting more—wishing for a fourth chapter that might have investigated Samuel F. B. Morse’s fascinating career as an artist, academician, and inventor, for example, addressing his career shift from painting to inventing the electromagnetic telegraph. Despite this omission, Jennifer Roberts’ nimble prose and keen insight offer the first sharply focused consideration of the impact of transport on and in early American art.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Poems

Statement of Poetic Research

Petroglyph: Castle Gardens

Moving Pictograph: Parenthetical Signs of Spring

Questioning the Dead

Further reading

Jonathan Edwards, the Church, and the Damaging Great Awakening

A Panic Worth Unpacking

Money Talks

The Queen and the Irish Harp

Paper Models of Value

Capitalism and a New Coin

A History of Value

Further Reading:

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Age in Early America?

Acknowledgements:

Further Reading:

The Dorr Rebellion Website

A Colonial Snapshot: Reading William Hammerton’s “Map of the Southeastern Part of North America, 1721”

Further Reading

Echoes

Sojourners and Strangers in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic

Art in Transit