Discovering a name and a slave narrative’s continuing truth

In a follow-up installment in 1839 to the anonymously authored Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave, the narrator testifies that a Charleston slave speculator known as “Major Ross” had sold his brother. The narrator notes that Ross lives in “a nice little white house, on the right hand side of King street as you go in from the country towards the market.”

The right-hand side? Was that level of precision necessary? Because people challenged the veracity of slave narratives at the time they were published, details mattered very much. But the level of specificity in this instance caught my eye. The facts were borne out: property records in the Charleston County Register Mesne Conveyance Deeds office show that in 1831, a James L. Ross, known also as “Major Ross,” purchased a house situated on the west side of King Street, just a few blocks north of the market. If you were entering the city of Charleston from the country, Ross’ house would indeed have been on the right-hand side (fig 1).

And so it comes down to that. In order to prove his own humanity, the truth about the human capacity for cruelty, and the very reputation of abolitionist crusaders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, this survivor made his story unassailable by giving the correct location for the speculator’s house on King Street in Charleston.

Back in 2007 when I started to select and edit pieces for a collected volume of South Carolina slave narratives titled I Belong to South Carolina, I became interested in a little-known memoir titled “Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave.” I traced the source of the narrative back to the Advocate of Freedom, a small abolitionist newspaper from Maine, and wove this source discovery into the brief introduction to my book. After the collection was published in 2010, I moved on to other projects.

And yet the “Recollections” narrative continued to haunt me. The particular circumstances of its publication, sketched out below, coupled with its agonized detail struck me as so honest that I couldn’t let its author remain anonymous.

1838, the year in which “Recollections” appeared, was an especially difficult one for the anti-slavery movement. In the early months of that year, the American Anti-Slavery Society’s Executive Committee sponsored the publication of what they believed to be the first full-length book by an escaped slave, The Narrative of James Williams, An American Slave. The Committee members arranged for Williams to dictate his narrative under careful supervision in exchange for safe passage to England. They framed it with testimonials and an introduction by noted poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Convinced that its fiercely powerful testimony would galvanize a complacent America into action against human bondage, Executive Committee members mailed a copy to every member of Congress and vigorously promoted it through advertisements placed in periodicals across the nation (fig. 2).

And then, disaster struck. The narrative’s truthfulness was almost immediately, and persuasively, challenged. By late March 1838, a newspaper editor in Alabama publicly attacked its claims, and later the Anti-Slavery Society itself—after concerted and lengthy efforts—ruefully acknowledged that it could not authenticate the narrative. Details were inconsistent. Names and places cited by Williams did not clearly correspond to actual people and locations, and thus could not be verified to counter accusations of fakery. Most troubling of all, the Anti-Slavery Society’s efforts were stymied because James Williams had left for a destination unknown, and could not be found. On October 25, 1838, the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society declared that the book would no longer be published, and directed the publishing agents to discontinue sale of the work. The incident eroded the credibility of the society and jeopardized the future of the anti-slavery movement.

(The superb work recently done by scholar Hank Trent to trace Williams’s controversial story reveals that the core of the Williams narrative was, indeed, true—but this work came over 170 years too late to help the Anti-Slavery Society.)

Despite the society’s shattered reputation in the fresh wake of the Narrative of James Williams scandal and the public’s resulting skepticism about the truthfulness of slave narratives in general, in the summer of 1838 the editors of the Advocate made the surprising decision to print yet another slave narrative, “Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave.” This story, I believed, carried with it a burden of truthfulness that no earlier (or later) narrative had ever faced. And yet the abolitionists decided to not only publish the piece, but also to conceal the name of the runaway. And so: Whose story was it?

Its origins were a bit unclear. The first of five installments was published in the Advocate of Freedom on August 2, 1838, in Maine. The Emancipator, the official publication of the National Anti-Slavery Society based in New York, recognized the power of the narrative almost immediately and started to run the series as well, with the first installment appearing in their paper on August 23 (fig. 3). The original memoir seems to have been transcribed in Maine by a person known as “J” who was a close ally of the editorial team of the Advocate. Another person identified only as “A” sent J’s transcription to the Advocate. As an editorial note mentioned on the page preceding the first Advocate installment, the editors received the manuscript from “a source of the highest respectability.” They included an explanation provided by “A”:

Messrs Editors:— I enclose the “narrative of a runaway slave,” for which I request a place in your paper. It was taken from his lips by a gentleman of indisputable integrity and fairness, and with the greatest care and caution. The manuscript has been repeatedly read to the young man, and he was cautioned in every instance to state only the simple facts; and after the care that has been taken to correct any mistake or error, into which he may have been led, I believe the “recollections of a slave,” are entitled to the confidence of the reader… .”

According to the narrative, the narrator was born in South Carolina, outside of Charleston, in a rural area known as “Four Hole Swamp” (fig. 4). Owned first by “Widow Smith” and then her son, Alfred, he was hired out to many different men, all of them vicious in their own ways. Indeed, much of the narrative chronicles in harrowing detail the violence he saw. He speaks of abuse—and even murder—of women, children, and infants at the hands of his owners and their neighbors. His litany demonstrates clearly that such treatment was common practice and not simply the behavior of morally bankrupt outliers. On one occasion he visits a neighbor and testifies that:

I saw a man rolling another all over the yard in a barrel, something like a rice cask, through which he had driven shingle nails. It was made on purpose to roll slaves in. He was sitting on a block, laughing to hear the man’s cries. The one who was rolling wanted to stop, but he told him if he did’nt [sic] roll him well he would give him a hundred lashes.

After several years of being hired out to various subcontractors in the region, he was sold to David or “Davey” Cohen, the scion of one of the wealthiest Jewish families in the United States at that time. Finding the conditions there intolerable, he fled twice, but upon being recaptured the second time he was taken to the slave workhouse in Charleston. This site was known as the “Sugar House,” an old sugar warehouse repurposed into a prison and workhouse for slaves. It was notorious for the systematic torture that occurred there, and especially for the treadmill run by slave labor that not infrequently maimed and killed the weary people chained to its rotating pedals. There he was visited by David Cohen’s father, the wealthy and eminent Charlestonian Mordecai Cohen. Cohen Senior sent for his son, and then David Cohen himself arrived and ordered the narrator to receive fifty lashes. David Cohen then further directed the men of the Sugar House to whip the fugitive twice weekly between days on the treadmill (fig. 5).

After weeks of enduring abuse, the narrator was then sold to John Fogle, who soon thereafter hired him out to the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company (fig. 6). Our narrator found circumstances there even worse than at Fogle’s. He wrote, “After we were whipped we had to go straight back to our work. They did not care whether we got well or not, because we were other people’s niggers … I worked there about two months, digging pits and wheeling, and taking up old rails and laying new ones …”

Afraid the work and the whippings on the railroad would ultimately kill him, he escaped once again, this time hiding aboard a train bound for Charleston. Once in the city he found a sympathetic ship steward who smuggled him to Boston. He was taken ashore and directed to a boarding house for colored men. Weakened by the journey, he barely made it:

I went along holding on by the houses, and when I had got down the street a good ways, I met a colored man and asked him where the boarding house was. He asked me if I was a sailor, I told him not much of one, but that I had just come from a ship. He said “I understand it all.” He knew from my dress and the cotton on my head and clothes, that I was a runaway. He carried me to a boarding house, and the next day to ——, who gave me some warm clothes. He sent me into the country to stay with some colored people.

The fugitive narrator doesn’t explain precisely how, by the spring of 1838, he made it from Boston to Maine, but presumably he was smuggled north to safety and found harbor with the anti-slavery activists who took down his story.

And Maine is where I found myself this past spring, doing research about an entirely different fugitive, when I was prompted once again to think about “Recollections.” I had hit a lull in my work at the Maine Historical Society in Portland, and I thought to request the entire run of the Advocate of Freedom to see if I could find any clues about the narrative by looking at the newspaper it ran in to see it afresh. The series was such a harrowing read that I thought perhaps published letters to the editor might debate it. Or perhaps there would be more information in the mission statement of the original issues that might give me more details about the process of or context for the narrative’s construction and publication. For hours I pored through issues, using a magnifying glass to read the Advocate’s small print on its large pages, unsure of what precisely might be there.

As is often the case with primary source research directed by instinct, not evidence, I stumbled upon something entirely unanticipated. In an issue dated February 21, 1839, I found an article following up on “Recollections” some three months after the original serialized narrative was published (and which was never reprinted in The Emancipator as far as I can tell). The piece was brief, but appeared to have served multiple purposes: it provided yet more testimony to the evils of slavery, and it also bolstered the credibility of the narrator and the reliability of the editorial team that backed his story (fig. 7).

The sequel ran about a year after the narrator likely arrived in Boston, and was framed by an introduction that opened as follows:

Mr. Editor: Your readers probably remember the runaway slave, whose story was published a few months since in the Advocate. He is now before me, and a more contented and happy creature I never saw. The farmer with whom he has worked ever since he came to this place, speaks of him in the highest terms as a faithful, sober, industrious, well disposed young man. He has thus far shown himself trustworthy in every respect. He is eager to learn, and his employer has placed him at school this winter, where his progress is quite satisfactory. In a little while he hopes to be able to write, so as to send a bill for services to his old masters. If he should recover his just dues, he would be worth a little fortune.

The piece continued by adding a new recollection: that of how the young man had watched in pain as his brother was marched off by speculators in Charleston. While the original narrative had in part described the inhuman conditions of the Sugar House, this sequel added yet more poignant details about how others in the community of outcasts understood the plight of the inmates. The narrator explains:

They [Speculators] kept all the slaves in the Sugar House, only sometimes when the Sugar House was full; then they put some in the Jail. The Jail is right along side of the Sugar House: —there is only a wall between them. The Crazy House and the Poor House are both close by. Sometimes the people in the Poor House would throw scraps out of the window into the Sugar House yard, and every morning when we were let out, we used to rush up to the wall to get what had been thrown out over night. —I never eat the meat, it was so dirty—but sometimes got a scrap of bread.

The brief sequel featured a quick sketch of how speculators worked and what those practices meant for the brothers who were to be forever separated by them. The sketch also demonstrated further intimate knowledge of the city of Charleston. Having discovered this brief yet powerful sequel (presented in its entirety below for the first time since its original publication in 1839), I became determined to find the author’s identity and share this previously unknown work.

Many details—especially about slave owners and established residents of Charleston—from both the original narrative and its sequel have been easy to verify. I’ve identified in census and property records many of the people he names, occasionally with small variants in spelling. (An Elizabeth Smyth bought property on Four Hole Swamp in 1804, for example, and it seems likely she was the “Widow Smith” Jim refers to as his first owner. Elias Rudd bought Four Hole Swamp property in 1814, and surely was the neighbor “Elias Road” referenced in the original narrative.) Other names mentioned correspond directly to those appearing in historical records: David and Mordecai Cohen, for example, were well-known figures in Charleston. “Bellinger,” the man who tortured slaves by rolling them in nail-pierced barrels, was in all likelihood William Cotesworth Bellinger Jr. (1788-1828), who lived near Dorchester Road in Colleton County, as Jim described. Many other names and places mentioned by Jim appear elsewhere in historical records.

But where and how to find the narrator, who was not only an escaped slave but an author with no name? The easiest tack, I figured, was to start with runaway slave advertisements.

After searching fruitlessly through issues of The Charleston Mercurybetween July 1837 and June 1838, I turned to the Charleston Courier. Quite quickly I found an advertisement for a fugitive in mid-December of 1837 placed by a “John Fogle.” The details concur with everything in the narrative. Helpfully, the ad even listed the chain of previous owners, corresponding precisely with how the anonymous narrator of “Recollections” described them. And Fogle had given the fugitive a name: Jim (fig. 8).

FIFTY DOLLARS REWARD—Runaway from the Subscriber, a few weeks ago, his fellow Jim, lately purchased from Mr. David. D. Cohen, of Charleston. The fellow was raised at or near the Four Hole Swamp; was sold to Mr. D. D. Cohen, by Mr. Isaac Bradwell, Jr. agent for A. W. Smith, and may be lurking in the neighborhood. Fifty dollars will be paid for information of his being harbored by any white person, or $25 for his apprehension and delivery to the master of the Work House.

John Fogle

I’m not naming Jim here, for he had a name. But I like to think that I’ve re-assembled or even re-collected some of the scattered fragments of his world. Pressured by an immense burden of truth, Jim shaped his story as directly and honestly as he knew how. His tale was doubtless shaped and perhaps even manipulated by its editors, but Jim’s voice emerges nonetheless as a piercing testament not only to the cruelty of slavery, but as an assertion of his own manhood, his own honor, and his willingness to claim his humanity.

He placed a speculator’s house on the right-hand side of King Street, and with that petty detail shamed the very premise of fact checking. Thus it is with some irony that I hope my project to trace the mundane details of his life nonetheless honors the greater story he tells.

Coda

What happened to Jim after his addendum was published? Two of my student assistants and I came up with at least one plausible future for Jim.

The federal censuses from 1850, 1860, and 1880 record James Matthews, a man of color living in Maine who listed his parents as being from South Carolina and who was possibly born around 1807: this person was most likely Jim. Significantly, Matthews doesn’t appear in any Maine records before 1850, and when he does show up, it seems that he is a middle-aged laborer taken in by the “City Poor Farm” of Hallowell, Maine—the very town where the Advocate of Freedom was published (figs. 9 and 10). The city was known for its many abolitionist activists during this era (the first abolitionist society in Maine, the Hallowell Anti-Slavery Society, was founded there in 1833), and so we can suppose it was a congenial place for a man seeking community and protection. Indeed, one Hallowell citizen, the Reverend Joseph C. Lovejoy, is quite likely “J,” the man who first transcribed Jim’s story. Lovejoy, a close associate of the Advocate’s editors, published an 1838 memoir of his brother, the famous abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy who was assassinated by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois in 1837. Moreover, Rev. Lovejoy went on to transcribe the life narrative of Lewis P. Clarke, another fugitive slave, in 1845. It thus seems quite possible that he would have been involved in bringing Jim’s story to light in 1838. If nothing else, he knew the power of print for a political cause.

Sadly, while Matthews is listed as a laborer and pauper who lived in Maine until his death in 1886, it seems he suffered from some sort of mental illness. Records consistently describe him throughout the decades as “insane,” and the 1850 census indicates that he was getting treatment at a facility known as the Maine Insane Hospital in nearby Augusta.

Neither Jim’s narrative nor the introductory comments written about him indicate he was anything but a resourceful and intelligent young man, albeit one who had, like innumerable other slaves, suffered terribly. And slavery left its physical as well as emotional scars on the man: the Advocate’seditors interrupt his narrative at one point to attest that “Some of the scars [on his back] are the size of a man’s thumb, and appear as if pieces of flesh had been gouged out, and some are ridges or elevations of the flesh and skin. They could easily be felt through his clothing.” It would not be surprising if he were to suffer in later years perhaps in part because of the abuse he suffered as a younger man. 

In the Hallowell Cemetery there stands a grave marker for James Matthews. It is a handsome stone, an honorific that might be surprising for a black, mentally ill pauper who was far from any family. But Hallowell was a special place. Matthews was part of the community, and the city records note that he died of “Old Age” at the age of 79 years. He was accorded a proper granite gravestone, made, I presume, from the rock harvested from the quarries Hallowell was famous for. The inscription reads: “He hath done what he could” (fig. 11).

I therefore conclude, albeit with respectful trepidation, that the man, James Matthews, who was buried in Hallowell, was Jim, the narrator of Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave and its sequel. It seems likely he lived out his days in Hallowell, Maine—ill but cared for in a small community and managing to do what he was known for: enduring.

Special thanks to Collin Eichhorn and Kristin Buhrow, who assisted with the research for this essay. Sam Weber of Hallowell assisted me greatly with information, illustrations, and city records from Maine. Thanks also to Clemson University’s Department of English for sabbatical release support; the Clemson University College of Arts, Architecture & Humanities, which provided me with travel funds, and the Maine Historical Society reference staff for their patient consultations.

Further Reading

The complete run of the Advocate of Freedom (published variously in Brunswick, Augusta, and Hallowell, Maine, from 1838 to 1841) can be found in all of its large format glory (the pages are huge and the font is small) at the Maine Historical Society Research Library in Portland, Maine. If you wish to read it online and have access to a library with a subscription, it has been digitized by Gale/Cengage Learning and is available in their Slavery & Antislavery: a Transnational Archive collection.

My version of the “Recollections of Slavery” narrative was included as a then-anonymously authored narrative in Susanna Ashton and Robyn E. Adams, et al., eds., “I Belong to South Carolina”: South Carolina Slave Narratives (Columbia, S.C., 2010). The most recent publication of James Williams’ narrative is edited by Hank Trent, who does a superb job of untangling the fraught story of Williams’ life and documenting how the burden of abolitionist truth-telling necessarily reshaped the narrative and ultimately doomed its reception. See Hank Trent, ed., Narrative of James Williams, An American Slave. Annotated edition (Baton Rouge, La., 2013).

The Text of the Sequel

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Susanna Ashton is professor of English at Clemson University in South Carolina. She is working on a biography of a fugitive slave and abolitionist lecturer to be titled, A Plausible Man: The Life of John Andrew Jackson. She tweets on abolition and the study of enslaved people’s lives as @ashtonsusanna.

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

Cities, like people, are conceived, then born. St. Louis was the brainchild of imperial officials and two ambitious merchants. In 1763, Jean Jacques Blaise D’Abbadie, the last governor of French Louisiana, granted to Gilbert Antoine Maxent an exclusive privilege to trade with the Indian tribes west of the upper Mississippi and along the Missouri for six years. Such monopolies followed a certain colonial logic: granted a privileged track in the pursuit of American wealth, private parties would do the costly work of breaking ground, building posts, and pursuing alliances with local tribesmen. D’Abbadie, faced with a depleted treasury, inflation, shortages, and trade disruptions, all consequences of the disastrous French and Indian War, hoped to jumpstart the colony’s fortunes and secure the ties that bound the southern and northern parts of this vast region.

Maxent, long involved with this Illinois Country commerce, seized the opportunity. (He would work closely in the future with Spanish governors of the colony, two of whom would become his sons-in-law.) A quarter share in the venture would go to Pierre de Laclède, who had come to New Orleans in 1755, for serving as the new company’s field partner. Laclède’s conception was clear. We know exactly what he had in mind and how he proceeded because his clerk and stepson, Auguste Chouteau, wrote a “Narrative of the Settlement of St. Louis.” (The fourteen-page manuscript is a fragment of a longer narrative account Chouteau had been writing decades after the actual events. It may have been based on a journal or diary. Neither a complete draft nor a journal exists. It is our most reliable firsthand account.) The party left New Orleans in August and arrived in Illinois three months later on November 3, 1763. Storing their trade goods on the eastern bank of the Mississippi at the administrative center of French Illinois, Fort de Chartres, Laclède and Chouteau (thirteen or fourteen years old at the time) surveyed the western bank between the small mining and farming village of Ste. Genevieve and the mouth of the Missouri, selecting the site of St. Louis for its beauty, its elevation (relatively immune from the very real dangers of flooding), and its easy access to the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers. In retrospect, it seems an obvious choice. And so, as Chouteau recalled, “We set out immediately afterwards, to return to Fort de Chartres, where he [Laclède] said, with enthusiasm, to Monsieur de Neyon [Neyon de Villiers, the commandant], and to his officers that he had found a situation where he was going to form a settlement, which might become, hereafter, one of the finest cities of America–so many advantages were embraced in this site, by its locality and its central position.”

Chouteau’s “Narrative” is an astonishing document. To be present in this way at the birth of a great city is a historian’s dream. (It is, of course, a gift to be used with some caution.) St. Louis, like many colonial American cities, was an intentional creation–a planned birth, not an accidental one. The moment of its birth recorded, St. Louis resembles so many American children, videotaped and well documented upon arrival. The sense of purpose that guided settlers, that covered the distance from old to new, created a most bourgeois environment of great expectations, of possibilities, even entitlement. The act of self-shaping seems to lie at the heart of the American experience. Laclède directed young Chouteau and thirty workmen to clear the land and construct cabins and a large shed in February after the winter thaw. He returned in April with a design for the town and christened the newborn city, naming it St. Louis after King Louis XV’s patron saint, Louis IX.

Having made the obligatory nod toward royal patrons and the church, Laclède revealed his priorities and the incipient city’s raison d’etre. A towpath for boats separated the river from the limestone ledges. On the ridge, workers laid out three streets parallel to the river: Grande Rue, Rue de L’Eglise, and Rue des Granges. The public market was front and center, followed by Laclède’s own house. Behind that would be the church. In the back were the barns. Commerce lay at the heart of this place. Farming was an afterthought. St. Louis soon acquired the nickname Paincourt or “short of bread,” for food supplies were occasionally brought in from neighboring villages such as Ste. Genevieve. Ste. Genevieve was, in turn, dubbed Misère. Within decades, the Creole citizens of St. Louis would poke fun at the rustic manners of their rural neighbors. The riverfront of the city today would most probably surprise the founders. The dense and bustling antebellum city with goods and people crowding the space between steamboats and Front Street: that was what Laclède envisioned. Today, all remnants of the original city have disappeared. Only the old cathedral and a national park stand on the site. Busy storefronts would have been more appropriate as historical markers.

The first place established during the French regime in North America, Champlain’s Québec, and the last, St. Louis, carried the same birthmark: the comptoir–the fortified warehouse and counting house. Other economic activities would fill the landscape, but the driving force of this frontier was commerce–specifically, the fur trade. As W. J. Eccles wrote over thirty years ago, French North America “can hardly be said to have had a frontier at all. Rather, it can be said to have been a metropolis, dominating the hinterland around it.” Establishing trading posts and other urban enclaves, the French plugged Indian producers and consumers into an international market economy. Merchants such as Laclède and the Chouteaus facilitated exchange and encouraged regional development from a pioneering urban base. And so the French left a legacy of cities across North America from Montreal to New Orleans, Detroit to St. Paul. And native peoples were hardly passive participants in this enterprise. It was the Mi’kmaqs who insisted that Cartier forget about a passage to China and trade for furs.

The conception of St. Louis likewise owed a huge debt to native groups. A great Indian metropolis, Cahokia, had once existed across the river. More than simply a confluence of great river systems, this location encompassed a primary crossroads of native peoples. Indian groups from the upper Mississippi, the Great Lakes, the Missouri, the Wabash, and Illinois rivers all frequented the area. A network of small-scale traders, French and métis, already blanketed the region. Above all, it would be the increasingly powerful Osages living to the west of the new city that determined the success of this enterprise.

With so many parents watching over the birth, it is not surprising that St. Louis prospered immediately. Imperial contingencies favored the growth of the settlement. Laclède arrived in the fall of 1763 bringing the news of France’s cession of the east bank and Canada to Great Britain. He convinced forty families from the east-bank villages to move across the river to the new settlement. More families followed when the British formally took control in present-day Illinois in October 1765. News that France had secretly ceded New Orleans and Louisiana west of the Mississippi in the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762 finally reached St. Louis in December 1764. The first Spanish officials did not arrive until 1767. By then, St. Louis had passed through its infancy. It grew up speaking French, and its new imperial guardian made no attempt to change it. The Mississippi River had now become an international boundary. Spanish lieutenant governors, palms well greased, usually winked at contraband trade, and furs, skins, and trade goods would flow across borders with relative ease.

The trade exceeded Laclède’s expectations. Sir William Johnson, back in New York, wrote to the Lords of Trade in November 1765 that a Frenchman established near the mouth of the Missouri “carries on a vast Extensive Trade, and is acquiring a great influence over all the Indian Nations.” The following summer, a visiting British officer noted that Laclède “takes so good Measures, that the whole Trade of the Missouri, That of the Mississippi Northwards, and that of the Nations near la Baye, Lake Michigan, and St. Joseph’s, by the Illinois River, is entirely brought to him. He appears to be sensible, clever, and has been very well educated; is very active, and will give us some Trouble before we get the Parts of this Trade that belong to us out of his hands.” That year, 1766, Laclède wrote to his brother Jean, a lawyer back in France, that his business was worth more than 200,000 livres.

To be a successful merchant on this frontier, one needed good judgment, careful calculations, and connections. Procuring goods on credit in anticipation of the next year’s production of furs, skins, and robes meant establishing a reputation for reliability and integrity. Information was the key. Knowing about the conditions that would affect the market for all the goods being exported and imported required a network of correspondents in a dazzling array of places, from tribal villages to American, Canadian, and European cities. The fur trade was a global business. Letters and ledgers were as important as pelts. Good relations sustained trade, literally and figuratively. The objective of a merchant was to create a successful house–la maison–through the gradual accumulation of capital of all kinds. There was no distinct commercial district in early St. Louis. Business was conducted out of one’s house. The private sector was just that, and, more often than not, partnerships were family affairs.

Literacy and a cosmopolitan outlook were a merchant’s tools. So it should not surprise us that Maxent had a library of almost five thousand volumes. The Laclèdes of Béarn had been notaires and avocats for generations. Pierre’s Uncle Jean was a man of letters and science, known by Voltaire. Pierre’s library in St. Louis included practical business guides, histories, a volume by Mirabeau on the theory of taxation, essays on electricity and physics, and books by Bacon, Locke, and Descartes. Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, published in 1767, could be found in his room in St. Louis. Some of these volumes were later purchased by his stepson Auguste at the estate sale. Chouteau would amass his own impressive library. An affinity for Voltaire seems to have been passed down. Auguste owned a clock adorned with a figure of the great French philosophe. Not surprisingly, freemasonry would attract French merchants in St. Louis, Detroit, and New Orleans. The first generation of merchants who migrated to St. Louis was, indeed, a cosmopolitan group. The majority came from western and southern France. Northern Italy and Spain provided four each. Others came from Canada, the West Indies, Swiss cities, Holland, and Germany. In short, colonial St. Louis, although a muddy village-sized enclave in the middle of Indian country, was not a sleepy and isolated frontier town. It could not afford to be.

Nor could it afford to be inhospitable to Indian clients who hunted and processed the animal skins that would become luxury goods in distant markets. Their productivity, their taste as consumers, and their goodwill were all key elements. Knowing your customers in this business often meant having connections within Indian settlements. Kinship ties, real and fictive, were maintained. The most important merchants in St. Louis had métis allies in the field. (Some also had more direct relationships with Indian women.) Historian Tanis Thorne described the family of one trader, André Roy, a client of the Chouteau family. After Roy’s death, an Iowa Indian, Angelique, with whom he had two children, moved with her family from their village on the Des Moines River to St. Charles, a suburb of St. Louis. In St. Charles, Roy’s Iowa family lived near his French widow and children. Both women remarried, the children shared in the inheritance, and apparently, the “siblings enjoyed a close relationship.”

St. Charles, a village some twenty miles northwest of St. Louis on the north bank of the Missouri, was founded in 1768 by a hunter named Louis Blanchette. Other suburbs were settled within the metropolitan orbit of St. Louis in this first generation of the city: Carondelet or Vide Poche (“empty pocket”) in 1767; St. Ferdinand de Florissant in 1785; Portage des Sioux in 1799. The Deshetres, a family of Indian interpreters, went to Florissant. The Antoine Le Claires, father and son, the latter achieving some fame as Black Hawk’s interpreter and the métis founder of Davenport, Iowa, lived in Portage des Sioux. By 1800, over half of the 2,447 people living in the St. Louis metropolitan district actually lived in these satellite villages. This suburban population included many of those who filled the lower rungs of the fur trade’s occupational ladder. Closer to Indian country, these villages provided convenient jumping-off sites and, for older workers, a place to retire and do a little farming. Land there being cheaper and more available, these villages also attracted full-time farmers. Florissant contained the summer homes of some of St. Louis’ wealthier merchants. Viewing the metropolitan district of St. Louis in its entirety, one can say that the place contained a rather diverse population. To call it a middle-ground city would be both redundant and a little misleading. It was, simply, a city, a crossroads, a place where people from different cultures met and products were exchanged.

As the surrounding suburbs drew off the métis portion of the population, the core became increasingly colonial. But the city proper was, from the beginning, a French home. When a group of 150 Missouri Indians arrived in 1764 while Chouteau and Laclède’s workmen were first laying out the town, Laclède hurried back to the site and carefully explained why they must leave, disabusing them of their notion to settle in the heart of the new post. (Before they left, the women and children were engaged to dig a cellar for the company’s main building.) Never intended to be an Indian home, St. Louis, nevertheless, quickly became a place of both interest and influence within Indian country. Coeur qui brule, a Kansas chief, wrote to the lieutenant governor in 1800 that “for a long time I have wanted to see the town (depuis longtemps je désire voir la ville).” Understanding that St. Louis was a place of French manners and values, he added that he did not want to visit, like some chiefs, to seek presents. On the contrary, he said, “I have the heart of a Frenchman (j’ai le coeur d’un français).”

Exchange and curiosity did not always produce harmony. The proximity of disparate cultures with unequal resources and power could easily produce tense situations. In one telling incident in December 1778, an Indian man named Louis Mahas announced that “he had dressed long enough as a Frenchman, he would now dress as an Indian warrior and go and take scalps.” He was quickly arrested. Early French St. Louis was a compact settlement, and lots were enclosed with palisades. When Auguste Chouteau purchased Laclède’s old stone headquarters in 1789, he enclosed the entire lot with a “solid stone wall two feet thick and ten feet high, with portholes about every ten feet apart, through which to shoot Indians in case of an attack.”

The vulnerability of St. Louis was exposed only once in its early period. In 1780, a force of around 950 British soldiers and Indian allies, with some Canadian traders, attacked the town. The invaders were repelled, but not before over ninety inhabitants of the town, free and slave, were killed, wounded, or taken captive. The losses were deeply felt in a town with a population of some seven hundred souls. But the challenge of this first generation was not how to defend the place; rather, the primary task was that of constructing a city, a family, and a business from scratch. Consider the story of its founding mother, Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau. Madame Chouteau, born in New Orleans in 1733 to a French immigrant, Nicholas Bourgeois, and his Spanish wife, Marie Tarare, did not have an easy early life. Her father died when she was six; her mother remarried. Family tradition has it that Marie Thérèse was placed in the Ursuline Convent. More likely, she lived with her mother and stepfather. She married René Chouteau, a baker and innkeeper, at age fifteen. By all accounts, her husband was contentious and physically abusive. He abandoned his wife and young son, Auguste, possibly as early as 1753 and returned to France. She must have met Pierre de Laclède fairly soon after his arrival in New Orleans in 1755. They remained together until his death in 1778. According to the laws of the Roman Catholic Church and France, the couple could not marry. Therefore, when their four children arrived–Jean Pierre (1758), Marie Pelagie (1760), Marie Louise (1762), and Victoire (1764)–they were given the name Chouteau. When Laclède and Auguste Chouteau, Marie Thérèse’s only child by her legal husband, left on their founding journey, she was pregnant with Victoire. Sometime soon after the baby’s baptism, she left New Orleans to make the seven-hundred-mile journey upriver with her three young children and infant in tow. In short, Marie Thérèse and her children, alone in the world with few resources, left a fragile past for a most uncertain future.

Arriving at Fort de Chartres, Madame Chouteau and the children then traveled to Cahokia in a bumpy, two-wheeled charrette and crossed the river in a pirogue. The family began their new life in the newly built stone headquarters. Four years later, they moved to a new house down the street. Laclède deeded this residence to Madame Chouteau, along with the lot, an additional piece of land in the common fields, three black slaves, and two Indian slaves, Manon and Thérèse, both in their teens. These gifts Pierre gave to his partner in consideration of his clerk Auguste’s “faithful service” and “the affection” he bore the other four children of “dame Marie Thérèse Bourgeois and of Sieur René Choutaud.”

By this time, the missing husband had reemerged. Boarding a ship at La Rochelle in 1767, he returned to Louisiana. He spent some time in jail in New Orleans in 1771 for slandering a rival baker. Then in 1774, he initiated legal action to force his wife to return. Governor Unzaga directed the lieutenant governor in St. Louis to send Madame Chouteau back to New Orleans to be “under the authority of her husband.” Although another set of letters followed, this time with a promise to keep Marie Thérèse and Laclède apart, no further action was taken. Laclède continued to live in a room in the house he had given to Madame Chouteau. His children could never acknowledge their true father in public. All of this caused some consternation among the many socially prominent descendants as late as 1921, when one published a tract entitled Madame Chouteau Vindicated. What the story suggests is that St. Louis provided not only an economic opportunity, but a domestic one. In this distant place, the family could be secure, beyond the reach of legal propriety. Their stake in the city’s survival represented an unusual risk.

To their relief, René Chouteau died in 1776. Thereafter, Marie Thérèse signed herself as Veuve (Widow) Chouteau. Laclède and Madame Chouteau never married, very possibly because he was heavily in debt to his former business partner, Maxent. The two had terminated their arrangement back in 1769, several years after their trade privileges had been discontinued. Laclède bought Maxent out but was never able to cover the notes he had signed. When Laclède died in 1778, his stepson Auguste was appointed by the governor to settle the estate at the request of Maxent. The results of the sale suggest that Maxent allowed the widow to acquire enough property cheaply to provide a good income in the future.

Auguste purchased Laclède’s gristmill (the only one in the region), a dam, lake (known thereafter as Chouteau’s Pond), and over eight hundred arpents of land for two thousand livres. By this time, both Chouteau brothers, Auguste and Pierre, were trading on their own account quite successfully. All three daughters married well, bringing well-educated men (from France, Canada, and Switzerland), with capital and connections, into the family and its city. In this first generation, the growing Chouteau clan followed the time-honored patterns of mercantile families. Episodic ventures between family members allowed them to pool their resources while minimizing risk. Early transfers of property, large dowries, and a system of partible inheritance favored the entry of sons and sons-in-law into commercial ventures at an early age. Trial partnerships encouraged the identification of skills. Children were an investment. As one descendant observed, “They come high, but they may become valuable in time to come.” In a new and distant place, women played a critical role in preparing their children for the complex world of international trade. It was Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau who gave the family its sense of direction and purpose. She set the tone in this bourgeois enclave in Indian country.

By the turn of the century, a new generation of family firms had begun to form. New relations, the building blocks of the urban community and the interconnected family businesses, arrived from Gascony, from Laclède’s home province of Béarn, even from Italy (Barthomolew Berthold or Bertolla whose brother represented the firm that produced glass beads for the Indian trade). A new generation of Chouteau women would create homes that served as gathering places and centers of socialization and education: Julie Cabanné in St. Louis and Berenice Ménard Chouteau in a new Chouteau outpost, Kansas City. Judging from the family’s letters over several generations, it was, for the most part, an affectionate set of connections–a family that saw no separation between the spheres of worldly ambition and domestic pleasure. Indeed, merchants who spent much time away from home pursuing trade in Indian posts and European and colonial capitals often wrote home with thoughts of loving partners and children at play.

At her death in 1814, Veuve Chouteau was mourned by close to one hundred children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Given her own experiences, it is not surprising that Veuve Chouteau acquired a reputation for being thrifty, but family stories also describe her as a woman who loved clothes and jewelry. She conducted her own business affairs, with help from her Indian slave woman, Thérèse, whom she taught to manage her household. The town and family the widow constructed retained its French character during her lifetime. As one visitor described it in 1816, “St. Louis, as you approach it, shows like all the other French towns in this region . . . The French mode of building, and the white coat of lime applied to the mud or rough stone walls, give them a beauty at a distance, which gives place to their native meanness when you inspect them from a nearer point of view . . . The site is naturally a beautiful one, rising gradually from the shore to the summit of the bluff, like an amphitheatre. It contains many handsome, and a few splendid buildings.”

The city changed quickly after Madame Chouteau’s death: new commercial and industrial enterprises, banks, Protestant churches, a new cathedral, civic institutions. Even some of the muddy streets would be paved. Above all, the first steamboat arrived in 1817, an impressive tool for conquering the tyranny of distance and reinforcing the city’s position within a regional and national economic network. Madame’s grandson, Pierre Chouteau Jr., would use steamboats to consolidate the family firm’s dominant position in the fur trade, eventually superseding and even acquiring John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. Chouteau would become the most famous name in the West in the antebellum period, appearing on Indian medals and flying from the flagpoles of company vessels. Controlling the flow of people, information, and goods, the Chouteau company would continue to serve both their private interests and those of an expanding American empire–in that order. Within a new diversified portfolio that included railroads, railroad iron, and real estate, the fur trade would become an Indian business that drew profits from the dispossession of native people. But then St. Louis had been from the beginning a place that took advantage of its proximity to Indian communities. It was not a home for native people, and Indian residents of the city in this early period were more likely to be slaves, outnumbered by the sizable population of African slaves.

The family itself remained open ended. Veuve Chouteau’s grandson General Charles Gratiot Jr., a graduate of West Point, would spend much time in Washington as a company lobbyist. His daughter Marie Victoire would marry a Frenchman and become “one of the most brilliant ornaments of the court of the Empress Eugénie.” Another grandson, Frederick Chouteau, would spend most of his adult life in Kansas and Oklahoma. His son William would marry a Shawnee woman, Mary Silverheels. That couple’s great granddaughter, Yvonne Chouteau, would celebrate both her Chouteau ancestry and her Indian ancestry and achieve fame in the 1940s and ’50s as the prima ballerina of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

It was a curious and fascinating circle Laclède and Chouteau created when they first arranged the pattern of people and buildings named St. Louis. Perhaps the most representative sight in the city’s first generation was that of the two Thérèses, one French, one Indian, walking down its streets. The Indian Thérèse served as Madame Chouteau’s personal secretary and close companion for almost fifty years. If only we could have recorded their conversations. They were said to have been a “formidable combination.” In her will, Madame Chouteau gave the Indian woman her freedom and a small amount of cash and goods. During her lifetime, the French Thérèse, surmounting a rough start, became the mother of a city and a family dynasty. The Indian Thérèse, we should remember, was her slave.

Further Reading: The best history of the city is James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980, 3rd ed. (St. Louis, 1998). Charles van Ravenswaay, St. Louis: An Informal History of the City and its People, 1764-1865 (St. Louis, 1991) provides an invaluable anecdotal history in a well-illustrated volume. William E. Foley and C. David Rice, The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis (Urbana, 1983) is the definitive study of the first generation of this family, placing their activities in their local, regional, and national contexts. John Francis McDermott, ed., The Early Histories of St. Louis (St. Louis, 1952) contains Chouteau’s “Narrative” and other important early writings about the town. Katharine T. Corbett, “Veuve Chouteau, A 250th Anniversary,” Gateway Heritage 3:4 (Spring 1983) provides a portrait of the founding mother. Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (Philadelphia, 2001) combines the perspectives of history and urban studies in a most useful way.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Jay Gitlin is a lecturer in history and the associate director of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale University. His book, The Bourgeois Frontier, will be published by the Yale University Press in the spring of 2004.

Read Two Pieces

Cape Cod 1782

He painted his initials in black inside the windmill. My great grandfather times five, Thomas Greenough, who would come to be known as the last surviving Wampanoag Indian in South Yarmouth, Massachusetts. The Pawkunnawkut Indians in South Yarmouth are part of the Wampanoag Federation of the Algonquins. Though of course there were other relations in Yarmouth, including his own children. But he was the last full Wampanoag in this town, last on the Bass River reservation. His solitary status convinced the town to take his land. Thomas Greenough’s hand on the inner wall beside the winding staircase, beams and tower, overlook: “T.G.” and the date “1782.”

Later, the windmill would be sold, a collector’s item. It now stands next to America’s oldest post office. Vanes raised like arms, canvas hooked in a shroud. My relative had helped lift the windmill with forty oxen and move it to Indian Town. He was thirty-five years old. This was years before the windmill was given to the father of modern assembly on his eightieth birthday by a group of automotive dealers. The owner, Dr. Edward F. Gleason of Hyannis, sold it to the Ford Dealers Association of America for $12,000, the windmill dismantled and shipped to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The oldest windmill on Cape Cod, with my relative’s name inside it like a letter.

The Wampanoags wrote letters, in their own language, about their own land to the U.S. government. In the film, We Still Live Here—Âs Nutayuneân, Eva Blake, a Wampanoag language instructor, said that touching one of those old documents is like touching their hand.

I want to go to Dearborn, Michigan. Touch Thomas Greenough’s black paint initials inside the windmill. The only writing he left in the world that I can find. Thomas Greenough lifted the windmill four years after the town called him the last of his tribe. The town of Yarmouth took back the reservation land through a Writ of Ejectment on March 30, 1779, though at the Yarmouth proprietors’ committee meeting of July 1, 1713, they had agreed “with the Indians where to lay out such land, which land is to lie for their use forever.”

The Wampanoag linguist, Jessie Little Doe Baird said, If someone lost their land, they would say nupunuhshom, I fall down. To lose the right to one’s land is to literally fall off your feet. To have no ground under you. My land is not separate from my body.

Farris Windmill, named for the family who ran it for three generations, is the oldest windmill in America. It was built in West Yarmouth about 1650, according to the Henry Ford Collections’ Farris Windmill “Creator Notes.” Or, the windmill was built in 1633, as reported in several 1935 New York Times articles discussing the uproar that the sale of the windmill caused among Cape residents. In August 2014, the Henry Ford Collections uploaded a recently digitized photo of a 1935 newspaper article: “Protest Removal of Windmill,” which includes an image of Farris Windmill and reports on the “storm of protest” raised by Cape Cod residents.

Ellice Engdahl, digital collections and content manager at the Henry Ford, comments on the article: “This photograph, which appears to capture a newspaper clipping, shows that not every community wanted Henry Ford to purchase and relocate their architectural treasures to Dearborn.” “On a cheerier note,” Engdahl said, she includes a link to another photograph celebrating the sale: “Ford Dealers in Greenfield Village for the Presentation of Farris Windmill to Henry Ford, November 6, 1936,” in which hundreds of men in overcoats and hats cluster before the newly transplanted mill. Many carry walking sticks though the land appears level.

In 1782, Thomas Greenough helped carry Farris Windmill to Bass River where his land had been. That year the mill was bought by David Kelley, who also bought the Wampanoag reservation land. The Kelley name is still on the street sign nearby. As noted by the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth in Images in Time: Cape Cod Views, Thomas Greenough “commemorated the event by writing his initials and the date high inside among the rafters.”

In We Still Live Here, Eva Blake spoke of documents that had been written in Wampanoag hand, written by those fighting for their land. I wonder if Thomas Greenough wrote a letter.

On November 18, 1935, workmen began tearing down the mill for shipment to Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. Each shingle was marked and packed for shipment. Workers in Dearborn reassembled it. The New York Times said that for years the windmill had been a landmark and a shrine for Cape Cod residents. When the sale was announced, letters of protest were sent from “all parts of the U.S.” Ford collected to help preserve the past, so twenty-two thousand employees of Ford Company pitched in to buy the windmill for him. As workers took each shingle and stone, tore it down in a steady rain, a 24-hour police guard kept watch. People offered $5 for a shingle, but workmen filed them all.

Why does Thomas Greenough have an English name?

Interviewed in We Still Live Here, Aquinnah Wampanoag Linda Coombs said, I think the pressure was convert or die, get harassed out of town, harassed out of life.Was Thomas Greenough an Indian convert? Were his parents? In the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, English settlers tried to convert the native people. Thomas Greenough was born in 1747. My Aunt Marguerite, who was the first to search for Thomas, said that he was a Christian Indian and a teacher. His obituary states that “he wore, through the last year of his life, the title of ‘Lawyer.'”

The first Bible printed in America was in the Wampanoag language, John Eliot’s Algonquian Bible. The narratives of Wampanoag conversion to Christianity were collected by John Eliot and published in Tears of Repentance, 1653. In We Still Live Here, a portion of Monequassun’s confession is read: Because I loved the place where I lived I thought I will pray to God so that I could still stay at that place. I prayed not for the love of God but for the love of the place I lived in.

In the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress, I’d asked for Experience Mayhew’s Indian Converts, Laura Arnold Liebman’s Cultural Edition published in 2008. I expected this recent copy. After a long wait, the librarian placed the original 1727 edition in the cradle on my table: Indian converts: Or, Some account of the lives and dying speeches of a Considerable number of the Christianized Indians of Martha’s Vineyard in New England. The inside cover was stamped: “War Library.” I touched the pages. Who were Thomas Greenough’s parents? What were their names?

A court could say you are the last of your kind, and we will take back your land. So, in the summer of 2012, I drove one morning from Wellfleet to the mid-Cape in search of the deed for Thomas Greenough’s land. At the assessor’s office for the town of Yarmouth, the assessor, Matthew Zurowick, kindly sets me up at the first desk in the office and opens the deed database, searchable back to 1704. On the desk, I place one of the books I’ve brought, Images in Time: Cape Cod Views, and open it to a marked page. It’s Farris Windmill, with Thomas Greenough’s initials “high inside among the rafters.” Matt is still at the desk, my computer, and asks, What windmill is that?

It’s Farris, I say, But now it’s in Dearborn, Michigan.

Guess where I’m from? he asks. Delighted. He grew up near the windmill, the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village—the area by the museum that he says is living, people reenacting time. The windmill is lifted off the ground now, he says, pointing to the windmill wings. See how they reach the ground in the photo? Otherwise, they’d hit people in the head.

Ford couldn’t have been happy with a photograph, a painting of the windmill. He seemed to want not only to preserve the past, but to keep it all in one place, in his village and museum. But when it was taken from Yarmouth, Thomas Greenough’s name and the Wampanoags of South Yarmouth disappeared from the windmill’s history. What could the black painted letters “T.G.” or “1782” mean to Henry Ford? Two letters and four numbers. There is no mention of Thomas Greenough’s initials on Ford’s Greenfield Village Memories website. The past preserved inside the windmill remains unknown to its owner or visitors.

The Oldest Windmill on Cape Cod reassembled in Michigan: the turret is the revolving mill at the top, the red wheel and long post at the back of the tower turn the turret (and the sails). The base is colored rocks: white, gray, tan, charcoal. The danger of the wings isn’t just a tap to the head. It looks like they could decapitate. The shingled peak of the windmill rotates. Shingles dark brown. Front door latched shut, and so high off the ground now, you’d need a ladder to get in. Thomas Greenough must have walked through that doorway to paint his name inside. Above the door, about halfway to the top of the mill, is a tiny open, four-paned window with its own shingled door wide open. Another tiny six-pane is above the new red door inside the stone base.

Ocean wind was the power source, turning the wooden sails that set in motion half-ton millstones on the second floor. Greenfield Village has a Model T Ride, Working Farms, Hearse Shed, Frozen Custard, Porches & Parlors, Edison at Work, Sarah Jordan’s Boarding House. You could spend days here, eat at a nineteenth-century roadhouse, shop at the Greenfield Village Store. The mill looks lonely. No people in the photograph, no ocean breeze. Inside, Henry Ford holds a message from Thomas Greenough. Ford’s wealth, his antique love, his 22,000 employees bought the only known writing in the hand of the last surviving Wampanoag of South Yarmouth, Massachusetts. Without even knowing it. Under the blue sky, lost among the other artifacts.

I’d begun writing the poem “Farris Windmill, South Yarmouth, Massachusetts” after reading in Daniel Lombardi’s Windmills of New England: Their Genius, Madness, History, & Future that Thomas Greenough had painted his initials inside the mill when he helped to move it. Images in Time: Cape Cod Views from the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth also mentioned this, as does a Yarmouth Register newspaper article from 1894, as well as other sources. I’d been fascinated with Thomas Greenough since my Aunt Marguerite had given me a copy of her genealogical research and our family tree traced back to him and his wife, Jane Freeman.

The next document I discovered was his obituary in the Barnstable County Archives. The more I read about his life, the more I wanted to find Thomas Greenough in whatever way possible. The town had reclaimed the Indian lands in 1778 after the smallpox epidemic, but apparently Thomas Greenough did not abide by that decision. On March 30, 1779, a court case was settled against him “for setting his house and making improvements on land that was laid down for the Indian inhabitants to live upon, contrary to the directions of the Selectmen. This land had been formally sold and transferred by the town, to various parties for an ample consideration; and after some subsequent litigation, the town’s action was sustained by the courts of law.” He lived the remainder of his life on a pond that now bears his name, Greenough’s Pond, until he went to the town almshouse and died at the age of 90.

The tone used by Thomas Greenough’s obituary writer gives a sense of how the townspeople viewed Greenough’s right to his land:

“…and though always supplying himself with such wild productions as he found upon what he called and believed to be his own territory, but the legal seizing of which unfortunately was the home of his white neighbors —”

The obituary writer also romanticized Thomas Greenough as “the last of his kind.”

When I discovered, through the Yarmouth Cemeteries Department, that in 1826 the town selectman “voted that Thomas Greenough & all other people of colour, be requested to remove their dead from the place where they are now deposited & bury them in the (unmarked) Southeast corner of the burying ground, as is to be laid out by the Selectmen for that purpose,” it was striking that Thomas Greenough is the only person of color named.

I wondered how a person lives when so many things are taken away, when the land itself is taken, even though, as Jessie Little Doe Baird said, this loss means to have no ground under you. I’d been working on essays and poems about Thomas Greenough, but until I found the windmill, the only way to touch Thomas Greenough was to walk into Greenough’s Pond. Though I’ve yet to travel to Dearborn, Michigan, I’m heartened that his writing exists. This tangible evidence. That when I touch it, it will be, as Eva Blake said, like touching his hand.

While it seems most likely that Thomas Greenough painted his initials in the mill after helping to move it, others think he was a builder of the mill. I recently came across the Dennis Historical Society’s digitized copy of W. F. Kenny’s article, “The Old Farris Grist Mill,” in the Yarmouth Register, April 14, 1894, which noted Thomas Greenough’s initials and the date painted in black on “one of its massive oak posts” and states: “It is thought that the figures indicate the year it was built and that the letters stand for Thomas Greenough, the builder; but no one knows with certainty.”

The Dennis Historical Society follows this with a typed and footnoted version beneath the original 1894 article. In this update, footnote no. 9 confirms that “Thomas Greenough was, indeed, one of the builders. He also has the distinction of being the last surviving Native American in South Yarmouth. The mill was built by a group of men, under the direction of Samuel Farris, and Thomas Greenough was one of them.” Yet this conflicts with the known age of the windmill itself. Thomas Greenough wasn’t born until 1747, and the latest date for the windmill’s construction is about 1650. I did consider revising the poem to include this new possibility—Thomas Greenough as builder—but the dates are so off, it seems impossible. Though it further convinces me of the importance of discovering what I can of Thomas Greenough and the need for clarity.

As I wrote this, I watched the dawn in Provincetown’s West End, a five-minute walk from Pilgrims’ First Landing Park. The year before the Pilgrims first landed here in 1620, a smallpox epidemic killed two-thirds of Native Americans in the Massachusetts Bay. So many that the Pilgrims’ leader, John Winthrop, thanked God for their deaths as it left the land seemingly empty for the Pilgrims to take. Pink rose along the Cape Cod Bay, blue above. I’d been writing all night at a green Formica table facing an old church pew against a wall of 80 small windowpanes, each the size of a hand. I’d been surprised to learn that this borrowed loft had originally been the Nickerson/Freeman house in the early 1800s, family names of Thomas Greenough’s wife and of his descendants. Here at the end of the earth lived someone with the family name of Jane Freeman, my fifth great-grandmother, and the name of her daughter-in-law, Deborah Nickerson, my fourth great-grandmother. When I expressed doubt that these Nickersons and Freemans in Provincetown were connected to those in Yarmouth, my neighbor said, The world wasn’t that big. It’s the same name, they’re connected. I feel my ancestors connect in me, as if I am a kind of physical map. A map with a key, a legend I’m just learning how to read. The rising sun also reminded me that this place had been home to the Wampanoags for over 15,000 years. Wampanoag means “People of the First Light.” When I imagine Thomas Greenough, I see him painting the letters of his name, walking the streets of South Yarmouth after his court case. I see him at Greenough’s Pond. Dying in the almshouse, a man of “wild productions.” I would like to see him as clearly as I can. And someday to reach out and touch his hand.

Further Reading:

Director Anne Makepeace’s We Still Live Here—Âs Nutayuneân, is a PBS Independent Lens documentary (2010). John Eliot’s Algonquin Bible is Mamusse wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblium God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament. The Holy Bible Containing the Old Testament and the New Translated into the Indian Language (Cambridge, Mass., 1663). For more on Wampanoag conversion narratives, see John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew’s Tears of repentance, or A further narrative of the progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New-England (London, 1653); Experience Mayhew’s Indian converts: Or, Some account of the lives and dying speeches of a Considerable number of the Christianized Indians of Martha’s Vineyard in New England (London, 1727); and Laura Arnold Liebman’s Cultural Edition of Experience Mayhew’s Indian Converts (Amherst, Mass., 2008). For more on Farris Windmill, see Images in Time: Cape Cod Views from the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth (Yarmouth Port, Mass., 2003); Daniel Lombardi’s Windmills of New England: Their Genius, Madness, History, & Future (2003); and the Dennis Historical Society’s “The Old Farris Grist Mill,” in Yarmouth Register, April 14, 1894. For more on the Farris Windmill sale, see “Ford Buys Country’s Oldest Windmill” in New York Times, November 10, 1935; “‘Too Late on Windmill’: Cape Cod Can Do Nothing to Bar Removal By Ford,” in New York Times, November 13, 1935; “Start Dismantling Oldest Windmill,” in New York Times November 16, 1935. For more on land issues, see Simeon L. Deyo’s History of Barnstable County, Massachusetts (New York, 1890) and Charles Francis Swift’s History of Old Yarmouth: comprising the present towns of Yarmouth and Dennis from the settlement to the division in 1794, with the history of both towns to these times, published by the author in 1884.The Henry Ford Collections’ recently digitized newspaper article on the sale of Farris Windmill,“Protest Removal of Windmill,” is available. The related photograph, “Ford Dealers in Greenfield Village for the Presentation of Farris Windmill to Henry Ford, November 6, 1936” is also online.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Kelle Groom is a poet and memoirist. Her memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (2012) is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, a Library Journal Best Memoir, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor’s Pick. She is the author of three poetry collections: Five Kingdoms, Luckily (2010), and Underwater City (2004). Her work has appeared in AGNI, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, James Merrill Writer-in-Residence Program, Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Library of Congress, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Ucross Foundation. Her awards include a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose, as well as a state of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs grant, two Florida Book Awards, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant. Recently distinguished writer-in-residence at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, she is now on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program. She is currently at work on her second memoir, The Cartographer’s Assistant, and her fourth poetry collection, Letter from Aphrodite.

America’s floral women in the nineteenth century

In the introduction to her Familiar Lectures on Botany, first published in 1829, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps explained that “the study of Botany seems peculiarly adapted to females; the objects of its investigation are beautiful and delicate; its pursuit leading to exercise in the open air is conducive to health and cheerfulness. Botany is not a sedentary study which can be acquired in the library; but the objects of the science are scattered over the surface of the earth, along the banks of the winding brooks, on the borders of precipices, the sides of mountains, and the depths of the forest.” Phelps’s progression from gendered limitations (women, like flowers, should be “beautiful and delicate”) to limitless exploration (of the earth, brooks, precipices, mountains, and forest) echoes a more general development in nineteenth-century American women’s culture.

That familiar story follows middle-class American women as they emerge from the parlor onto the public stage to condemn slavery, to defend the indigent and the sick, and to fight for their own citizenship. From “beautiful and delicate” objects, they emerge as active agents of America’s social maturation. As this story goes, the delicate domestic woman exists as a kind of counterpoise to the strong public man. The two revolve around each other in a kind of codependent orbit, neither able to exist without the other but both strangely at odds. This neat bipolar world of the domestic and the public, the feminine and the masculine, served nineteenth-century middle-class men as they struggled to maintain their own authority in the face of all sorts of challenges to that authority. As women, working-class men, people of African descent, and others excluded from citizenship struggled to expand the bounds of citizenship, conservative moralists and their middle-class male supporters struggled to defend the status quo. To this end, the idea of separate spheres was perhaps the defining social ideal of Victorian America. There was the public world, and it was a place of strength and masculinity. And there was the private, domestic world—a place of delicacy and beauty. For a woman to leave the latter for the former was, implicitly, for her to sacrifice certain virtues ascribed to her gender—or so the words of Victorian men and women would have us believe.

Historical reality turns out, not surprisingly, to have been somewhat more complicated. The neat separation of feminine and masculine spheres existed more as an ideal than as a fact. As Phelps suggests, it was perfectly possible for a nineteenth-century American woman to define herself in terms that transcended contemporary gender norms. Curiously, one of the arenas in which women did this involved flowers, nature’s most stereotypically feminine production. The connection between women and flowers seems so obvious—and stereotypical—that its significance is often overlooked or dismissed. Yet America’s early “floral women” reveal that their passions for flowers and their passions for public good were inseparable. Flower power nineteenth-century style may have reflected the “turn on, tune in” ethos of the better known era of flower power. But the “drop out” part was definitely stuff of a later and very different age.

We might begin with Almira Phelps herself. She wrote books on botany, chemistry, and the physical sciences. Her Familiar Lectures on Botany and its companion for younger learners, Botany for Beginners, went through multiple editions throughout the nineteenth century: an 1891 edition of Botany for Beginners boasted of being the “270^th thousand” one printed, and Familiar Lectures on Botany remained in print for more than four decades. By contrast, Amos Eaton’s widely-used Manual of Botany went through only seven editions between 1819 and 1836. In addition to writing science textbooks, Phelps was also a social reformer. As her Lectures on Botany suggest, she was especially interested in women’s education. Her assertions about the benefits of botanical study included not only healthful exercise and mental discipline but also loftier benefits. In a preface “To Teachers” in the 1848 edition of the Familiar Lectures, she noted that flowers “are designed, not merely to delight by their fragrance, color, and form, but to illustrate the most logical divisions of Science, the deepest principles of Physiology, and the goodness of God.” It was as if she were telling her readers, “Do not be deceived by the prettiness of flowers. Beneath their delightful surfaces lie profound lessons about the design of the natural world.” But for women to grasp those lessons, Phelps intoned, they would have to forgo their ephemeral scrapbooks and personal diaries for more scientific productions: “herbariums and books of impressions of plants, drawings, &c. show the taste and knowledge of those who execute them.”

Later editions of Familiar Lectures on Botany included a section on the “Symbolical Language of Flowers.” Dating at least to Shakespeare’s time in the West and even earlier in Asia, the language of flowers was an elaborate symbology in which specific flower species had particular emblematic meanings, as in Ophelia’s well-known line in Hamlet, “there’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.” Flower emblems reflected both positive and negative traits, especially those particular to personal relationships: forget-me-not means “true love,” but foxglove means “insincerity”; heliotrope means “devotion,” but wild honeysuckle means “inconstancy,” and so on.

By the mid-nineteenth century, scores of flower language books had been published in the United States. Often, brief versions of this language were appended to other types of books, including botany textbooks (as in Phelps’s Familiar Lectures), plant guides, gardening books, and even conduct manuals. Books devoted entirely to the language of flowers, however, have their own particular charm. Some were published as token books, fitting neatly in the palm of a woman’s smaller hand; others were larger editions with elaborate gold-stamped covers that featured lavish full-color plates illustrating meaning-laden bouquets of multiple flowers. A number were specifically intended for prominent display on the parlor table. Most of them included both scientific information and sentimental material, often in the form of poetry.

Sarah Josepha Hale’s Flora’s Interpreter: or, the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments relied on several earlier works for its contents: Flora’s Dictionary (1829) by Elizabeth Wirt (wife of Attorney General William Wirt) and The Garland of Flora (1829) by Dorothea Dix (better known as the champion of dedicated asylums for the mentally ill). Whereas both Wirt and Dix published their flower-language books anonymously, Hale proudly claimed hers. First published in 1833, Flora’s Interpreter came at a time when Hale was still editing the American Ladies’ Magazine. In her introduction, Hale notes that the collection is an “experiment” that will “give an increased interest to botanical researches among young people.” But beyond that benign purpose lies a more potent one. From Hale’s pen, the language of flowers becomes a national language. Many of the flowers in her book reveal distinctly “American sentiments,” which are in turn reinforced by copious excerpts from American poets. For, she asserts, “it is time our people should express their own feelings in the sentiments and idioms of America.”

When many American writers were preoccupied with defining and celebrating American productions, Hale’s nationalism is not unique within the genre of flower language books. Dorothea Dix, in the preface to The Garland of Flora, hopes that her book will “display many pleasing traits of national manners.” Lucy Hooper, in the preface to The Lady’s Book of Flowers and Poetry (New York, 1859), similarly expresses “pride and pleasure” regarding “the selections from our own native poets.” Poems by Lydia Sigourney, Frances Osgood, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Hannah F. Gould stand beside those by Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, and Holmes in these American flower books.

As the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1837 to 1877, Hale wielded enormous power through her writings, especially her editorials. She promoted the study of botany and urged her readers to cultivate an interest in flowers, especially wild flowers. In July 1841, Godey’s Lady’s Book asserted that the preservation of wild flowers is “a subject worthy the attention of our sex” and noted the benefits of this activity as “a pleasing exercise for the mind.” The article further discussed the potential for women’s contributions to the larger project of native species preservation: “If memoranda were made of the places where such wild flowers are found, the latitude, with the common name, and whether they grow singly or in groups, profusely or sparsely, with the time of flowering, ladies might add something to the history of our Flora worthy of remembrance, and particularly so, would they make themselves acquainted with, and note their botanical characteristics.” Even more significantly, the author (most likely Hale) pointed to such activity as an example of women’s civic involvement. Their botanizing efforts, the author suggested, would save America’s floral treasures from the relentless march of cultivation:

“Our American woodlands are rich in the treasures of the florist and botanist. It is to be feared, however, that the hand of the early cultivators of the soil, has swept for ever from the face of nature many of the brightest gems of the forest and the plain . . . The most beautiful and delicate wild flowers known to our older states, generally inhabit the depth of the forests, the skirts of woodlands, the mountain fastnesses, or the rocky and precipitous banks of rivers and creeks. And why? Because our extensively cultivated lands, have been laid under tribute for bread; and the remorseless plough, sacrificing to the first instincts of nature all that could captivate the eye of the florist, has left only to the fringe of our worm fences and the edges of our highways, generally speaking, the coarser productions of the soil . . . The diminishing and fading wild flowers of our land call to [us] for protection.”

In an interesting reversal of gender roles, women have become the protectors of the more delicate and vulnerable wild flowers, these “gem”-like treasures of forest, plain, and wilderness. Although most historians place the beginnings of American women’s conservationist consciousness and activism in the late nineteenth century, this example from the 1841 Godey’s Lady’s Book suggests that this emerged much earlier.

The popularity of botany, flower collection, and herbarium construction can be traced not only through such mentions in the popular press but also in women’s private writings. In May 1845, the fourteen-year-old Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Abiah Root, “I am going to send you a little geranium leaf in this letter which you must press for me. Have you made you an herbarium yet? I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you; ‘most all the girls are making one. If you do, perhaps I can make some additions to it from flowers growing around here.” Although famous today as one of America’s foremost poets and a significant precursor of the modernist aesthetic, Dickinson was probably best known during her own lifetime as a gardener. Her love of flowers came early, as this letter attests, and like “‘most all the girls” of her day, Emily was preserving local species in an herbarium. Flowers, both cultivated and wild, figure prominently in her poetry: cardinal flower, clover, daisy, dandelion, gentian, harebell, heart’s ease, jessamine, orchis, and rose are but a few of those she specifically names. The image of an Indian pipe, one of her favorite flowers, adorns the cover of the first edition of her posthumously published Poems.

The symbolic power of flowers attracted other women writers in the nineteenth century. Louisa May Alcott’s first book was Flower Fables, published in 1854 but written several years earlier for Ellen Emerson, the daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In these moralistic tales, personified flowers teach virtues such as unselfish love, care for the poor, patience, cheerfulness, and humility. After the Civil War, the prolific African American poet, essayist, and lecturer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper used the flower fable format to promote a message of racial tolerance. In “The Mission of the Flowers,” published in the Harper’s collection Moses: A Story of the Nile (Philadelphia, 1869), the beautiful rose is the center of attention, and “its earth mission was a blessing,” whether cheering the sick or brightening a prisoner’s cell. The rose, “very kind and generous hearted,” “wished that every flower could only be a rose.” A spirit grants her wish, and she changes every flower in the garden into a rose. But soon “that once beautiful garden was overrun with roses; . . . that variety which had lent it so much beauty was gone, and men grew tired of roses, for they were everywhere.” The rose realizes the error of her ways, wakes to find that she was only dreaming, and learns a powerful lesson: “to respect the individuality of her sister flowers.” Of various shapes, colors, sizes, and blooming seasons, each flower has its own valuable mission; “and of those whose mission she did not understand, she wisely concluded there must be some object in their creation.” Harper had a strong sense of her own mission as an abolitionist and a champion of equality for women and African Americans; as an activist who also felt the prejudice of her white sister feminists, she deeply understood the need for the movement’s metaphorical gardens to feature more than just roses.

Not all floral women had careers as public as Sarah J. Hale or Frances E. W. Harper. One woman whose accomplishments were known to just a small group of experts during her lifetime is now memorialized with several species of wildflowers from the intermountain region of the western United States. Thompson’s Dalea (Psorothamnus thompsoniae), Thompson’s Penstemon (Penstemon thompsoniae), and Thompson’s Woolly Locoweed (Astralagus mollissimum var. thompsoniae) are all named for their discoverer, Ellen Powell Thompson. The wife of Professor Almon Harris (“Harry”) Thompson and the sister of Major John Wesley Powell, Ellen Thompson accompanied her husband, brother, and other members of the second exploratory expedition of the Colorado River through the canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona. Harry Thompson was Powell’s geographer and chief assistant, and “Nell” Thompson was widely admired by the other explorers for her cheerfulness, “love of adventure,” and botanical interests. Ellen Thompson kept a diary in 1872, which covers her plant collecting as well as daily life in camp.

Excerpts from her diary reveal not only her fascination with local flora but also the extraordinarily difficult conditions in which she did her botanizing. On March 6 she wrote, “we are in a heavy snow storm for four hours, tho we stop several times to sketch. Found a new cactus (to us). Intend to secure the blossom if possible.” During the next several weeks, she was sick more often than not, frequently not able to get out of bed or do more than read or write a few letters or do some mending. Yet she persevered, insisting on proper botanical procedures even when she could not collect specimens for herself. On March 29 she wrote in her diary that “Jones brought me three flowers, but do not make out what they are as he brought no leaves.” A few days later, she noted that “we woke this morning to find that snow had fallen to the depth of 2 feet during the night. Not too comfortable . . . to be up on the mountains in such a storm with nothing for a cover but a small tent. Have worked with my plants all day.”

Thompson’s work remains important to botanists, for the new species she discovered and for the many other species that she successfully identified and preserved. Her herbarium specimens are among the earliest scientific record of Utah flora. Just as important, however, is the larger narrative told in the sparse detail of her diary and the more detailed accounts of those whose work received greater recognition at the time. Hers is the story of a middle-class, college-educated woman who did not stay at home to raise children and keep house. Instead, she joined her husband on a fascinating and challenging journey into unfamiliar territory and made the most of her time there, using her intellect, education, and interests to contribute valuable scientific information to the overall effort of the expedition.

In the decades after the Civil War, as the western part of the country opened to exploration and settlement, regional differences became a source of national pride rather than the impetus for armed sectional conflict. Writers of the “Local Color” movement paid careful attention to dialects, folklore, landscapes, and manners, producing a regionalist literature in both fiction and nonfiction. In New England, the work of Celia Laighton Thaxter often described the Isles of Shoals, a collection of small, rocky islands off the New Hampshire coast. Thaxter moved to one of these islands at age four, when her father became the lighthouse keeper of White Island. Nearly sixty years later, having spent most of her life on and around these islands, she published An Island Garden, a memoir about her many years of experience as a gardener. In beautifully detailed prose infused with a passion for nature and a wonderful sense of humor, Thaxter invites readers to notice, as she does, the changing of seasons, the birds and insects that threaten and sustain her plants, and the flowers that “have been like dear friends to me, comforters, inspirers, powers to uplift and to cheer.”

Published in 1894, An Island Garden featured color illustrations by Childe Hassam, the American impressionist artist who spent many summers at the Isles of Shoals, painting their rocky coastlines and wild hillsides. One of Hassam’s favorite subjects was Thaxter’s garden, and more than twenty of his illuminations and full-page scenes illustrate An Island Garden. Completing this treasure of late nineteenth-century textual and visual art is the exquisite cover design by Sarah Wyman Whitman. Whitman was one of the principal artist-designers for Houghton-Mifflin, and her Art Nouveau covers appear strikingly fresh today. Whitman’s predilection for floral motifs reveals the organicism of Art Nouveau, while her frequent use of soft-edged, ribbon-style banners hearkens back to the feminine ornament of an earlier generation.

The heyday of floral women came to an end with the close of the nineteenth century. Although women would continue to study botany and write about flowers throughout the twentieth century, their attentions were more often devoted to other concerns and pursuits. The modernist fascination with the machine age supplanted Victorians’ fascination with the natural world, and women’s professional opportunities outside the home increased in number and social respectability.

Looking back, the limitations of nineteenth-century American women’s culture seem in many ways to have enabled their widespread dedication to flowers. As an appropriately feminine form of science, botany literally opened doors for women, permitting them to step outside and ramble though the woods searching for specimens. But perhaps the most important “public” function of the collection, preservation, and artful display of flowers was conservation. The work of these botanizing women raised national consciousness about the need to save America’s vanishing native species.

Further Reading:

For more on women and science in early America, see Nina Baym, American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (New Brunswick, 2002). A useful survey of American women’s environmental involvement can be found in Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill, 1993). Judith Farr’s The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass., 2004) gives rich detail about the poet’s love of flowers. The full text of Harper’s “The Mission of the Flowers” appears in Frances Smith Foster, ed., A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York, 1990). The excerpts from Ellen Powell Thompson’s diary are from Beatrice Scheer Smith, “The 1872 Diary and Plant Collections of Ellen Powell Thompson,” Utah Historical Quarterly 62:2 (1994): 104-31. A facsimile edition of Alcott’s Flower Fables is available (Bedford, Mass., 2004), as is one of Thaxter’s An Island Garden (Boston, 2001).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.1 (October, 2006).

Annie Merrill Ingram is associate professor of English at Davidson College, where she teaches courses in American literature and environmental studies. She has recently coedited Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice, forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s bloody fourth year, it is perhaps appropriate to ask: just what is the place of military history in our culture? A glance at the current landscape of American history would lead one to think that military historians might well rejoice at their place in our collective memory. Bookstores often have shelves of books about battles and generals, campaigns and cannon, armaments and armies. Civil War Round Tables meet with a frequency that Woman’s Suffrage Campaign Round Tables do not. National and state parks preserve and interpret many battlefields; parks dedicated to remembering the environmental or economic history of the Civil War era are scarce by comparison. Re-enactors (or “living historians”) still organize their events around staged battles. If ever a group of historians should feel secure and happy with their status, it seems as though military historians should be among that rare number.

And yet there is a palpable unease among the chroniclers of powder and shot. As an example of just how insecure they can be, we might turn to Richard McMurry, who lamented in his book, The Fourth Battle of Winchester, the many historians who neglect military scholarship because it has become unfashionable and choose to instead “flit off in pursuit of trendy new fields of inquiry” (63). It seems that at least some military historians sense that other fields of history are gaining on them, or even leaving them in the dust. McMurry’s dismissal of his rival historians as effeminate (the choice of “flit” seems oddly specific) scholars concerned with fashion suggests the depth of his anxiety about his field’s place in the larger profession. Such McCarthyisms rarely appear from people secure in their social and political place.

If we are to ask how Civil War military history might come back into the professional fold, sharing its insights with other fields and in turn borrowing from them, we can start with Earl Hess’s recent works.

We are left to wonder, then, just where military history lies in our culture. Is it popular and widely read, or is it thoroughly marginalized? The answer to that question lies in the different audiences being considered. Military history thrives with readers in the general population, smart people who are looking for a strong narrative and, often, a sense of good and evil. Among professional historians—people with advanced degrees in the field and teaching appointments or jobs in libraries or museums—military history has been in a state of apparent decline. We might wonder which audience is more desirable, but we might also ask how military historians might retrieve the attention of other scholars in their profession and—more importantly—also produce better military history. How can military history branch out to more fully comprehend the social and political (but not expressly military) aspects of warfare in an era of democracy and armies that rely on mass enlistments from citizens?

Which brings us to Earl J. Hess, one of the country’s foremost practitioners of Civil War military history and Stewart W. McClelland Distinguished Professor in Humanities at Lincoln Memorial University. A prolific and talented historian, Hess has brought out three books on the Civil War in the last two years, two of which will be considered here. Prior to these works, Hess has written books that go beyond the standard questions of which side had the better generals, luck, or tactics. He has studied the types and effects of field-works on military campaigns and researched the emotional and psychological impact of combat on Union soldiers. He also takes logistics seriously. His books are filled with men who have hearts and stomachs; battles in his books are not affairs in which units are pushed across a map and asked to do the physically and psychologically impossible by historians trying to decide if one more attack by the Confederates could have won the war (at Shiloh, or Gettysburg, or Chickamauga, and so on). If we are to ask how Civil War military history might come back into the professional fold, sharing its insights with other fields and in turn borrowing from them, we can start with Earl Hess’s recent works.

Hess’s The Civil War in the West has the daunting task of covering military events in the region between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. Some military historians might approach this task as an invitation to cover military campaigns in depth while doing little else, but Hess’s book instead covers battles in brief sketches, thereby leaving enough room for other matters. Logistics and political context often take precedence over combat in the scramble for pages. The battle of Stones River, for example, receives four solid paragraphs. Meanwhile, the pages before and after the description of combat discuss, in greater detail, broader “civil-military relations,” including how Union forces dealt with pro-Confederate women in their midst. Also debated here are the logistical quandaries facing the Union commander trying to strike into middle Tennessee during the winter, and the political needs and expectations of Presidents Lincoln and Davis. After the battle, Hess places Stones River in a larger military context, but memorably also highlights the importance of the Union victory by reminding us that it happened in the week that the controversial Emancipation Proclamation came into effect.

Hess makes much of Union logistics in analyzing how the Union war effort managed to prevail in the western states. His descriptions suggest ways to build bridges between academic subfields—to move military history back into the mainstream of the discipline and to better understand perennial, and still useful, questions such as why the United States won the war and why the Confederacy lost it. For many years, historians have criticized Union General Henry Halleck for breaking up his army into disparate groups after taking Corinth, Mississippi, instead of moving ahead with a massive force to take Vicksburg. The results of his dispersal of forces, his critics have said, were Vicksburg remaining Confederate for another year and a successful pair of Confederate counter-offensives into Tennessee and Kentucky as they regained the initiative. For Hess, however, the matter is not so simple. Not only did Halleck lack the necessary supplies, but Hess also suggests that he really did need to stop and consolidate his position. Hess knows that modern armies move among civilians, and that these non-combatants can have significant effects on campaigns. Rather than fault Halleck for spreading out his large army, Hess states that “there was every reason for Halleck to stop after the fall of Corinth and consolidate Union control over the vast territory that had fallen into Federal hands” since the start of 1862 (52). “Vast stretches of [Tennessee] were under the control of no organized military force at all,” Hess writes, and his book spends considerable time analyzing how the United States approached the problem of re-asserting control over its rebellious citizens. Partially this is a military question relating to guerrilla warfare, but in Hess’s hands it is also about the political allegiance of Unionists and people who would become Unionists if that route promised stability and prosperity. Asking such questions means that Hess also must cover how Union policy evolved regarding former slaves, as well as the actions of Freedmen and women who sometimes followed federal policy, but sometimes made up their own. Hess covers these issues adeptly, as well as other military-civilian issues such as looting and its close cousin, the formal requisitioning of supplies from southern civilians. For readers who know that wars are won in the hearts and minds of the civilians around whom battles are fought, Hess’s concentration on non-combatants is welcome and leads to a better understanding of why most early Confederates acquiesced to United States victory and why the Union Army was able to re-supply itself in places where the population was originally either hostile or indifferent to their success.

Hess’s focus on logistics informs one of the major interpretive conclusions of his book. While many historians, led initially by former Confederate officers, have concluded that the United States won because of its superior manpower and war materials, Hess adds a significant addendum. It was not just the Union’s greater quantities of men and goods, but their “greater ability to mobilize and manipulate those resources” that won them the war. The Confederacy, he adds, made “poor use” of what little it had (308). Hess provides ample examples of this, but perhaps none so spectacular as the move, late in the war, of the Union 23rd Corps from the western theater to the coast of North Carolina. The transfer moved a significant body of troops from a military backwater to the right flank of William Sherman’s army for the war’s final campaign. This important transfer happened smoothly and quickly.

Hess’s interpretation—crediting the United States for better use of its resources—is enough of an advance for us to applaud Hess for a job well done. But could he have taken his interpretation further? Can we not ask why the Union was able to outperform the Confederacy in this arena? For generations, we have linked the superiority of Rebel cavalry in the war’s first two years to the southerners’ agrarian background; is it not time for historians to make connections between the superiority of Union logistics and management to the knowledge many white-collar northern men gained before 1861? Or to examine the practical skills learned on the job by northern mechanics and other industrial workers and how they were applied during the war? Can’t we better understand why the Union made bridges, railroad timetables, and fiscal policies better than the Confederacy by studying the real men (and women, in sanitary commissions) who made this all possible? Earlier studies praise northern Generals Montgomery Meigs and Herman Haupt for their abilities with supplies and railroads, but this narrow focus only leads us to a sense that a handful of people at the top made the difference. One suspects that expertise extended far deeper into the Union logistics branch and even into the ranks of soldiers, and that this depth of knowledge made an exceptional difference. But we will never know for sure until historians leave the battlefield and go into shipyards, armories, budget offices, and roundhouses. It is one thing for Hess to surprise and enlighten readers by pointing out that Union troops in Chattanooga in December 1863 were not receiving enough supplies even after the Confederate siege was lifted; it would be another to know more about the people who eventually fixed the problem and to place them in a broader social and economic context. Such avenues would enable military historians to enter into mutually fruitful dialogues with economic and business historians. If we read down into the ranks, we can also link labor history and military history. Looking at who built the Union’s bridges can help historians build bridges of their own.

Earl Hess’s The Knoxville Campaign offers scholars and general readers outside of military history less to chew on. With this work, Hess follows the form of the traditional campaign study, in which readers pick up the story at the beginning of the campaign, witness troop movements, a battle, and some final maneuvering. As the subtitle (Burnside and Longstreet in East Tennessee) suggests, Hess’s conclusions are mostly limited to assessments of the performances of generals during the campaign. Somewhat surprisingly, given their larger historical reputations, Union general Ambrose Burnside receives generally good grades for his well-conducted retreat into the fortifications around Knoxville and the foresight and skill with which he and his subordinates prepared the city for a siege, while Longstreet appears to have missed opportunities and blundered in ordering a poorly planned assault on the city’s Fort Sanders. Hess writes all of this with clarity, and his conclusions are reasonable. We now have a record of the events of the campaign that exceeds what we had before. But this is the kind of factual narrative that leaves other professional historians at a loss as to how to apply this body of information to a fuller understanding of the war.

There are places where Hess could have branched out into other discussions about the era. The most important opportunity comes from Hess’s acknowledgment that East Tennessee Unionists provided essential provisions to the Union garrison while it was otherwise cut off from northern supply bases. Asking why there were such Unionists in Tennessee even after they had been under Confederate rule for two years would have allowed Hess to converse with a larger body of work on white Southern Unionism and what it says about Southern society. It also would have enabled him to connect his military history with discussions of guerrilla warfare and civil-military relations, in this case with how Confederates approached hostile civilians in an area over which they held military control. In the era of “hearts and minds” winning conflicts, Hess could have broadened his recognition of the logistical importance of Tennessee Unionists to get beyond the men in uniforms. Beyond allowing him to talk with other professional historians, taking this course would have led to a fuller understanding of the military events in East Tennessee during the fall and winter of 1863.

Hess, however, does take us down one unconventional but promising path in this campaign study. Many military historians are working with the study of memory, and Hess finishes his book with an appendix covering “Knoxville’s Civil War Legacy.” Spanning twenty-three pages, the appendix discusses photographs taken after the battle, claims for battle damages files by civilians, the construction of monuments, and the fates of the campaign’s battlefields (and how to get to them). The appendix will allow people to understand what they see if they visit East Tennessee, both in terms of the natural and the built landscape. This kind of postscript may open up new paths for military historians, preservationists, tourists, and environmental and urban historians.

Writing in the middle of the 1700s, Voltaire warned that not all history was equally important. In his Age of Louis XIV, he tells readers that not everything that occurs is worth writing down. Perhaps, he suggests, we should not always remember what soldiers did here, instead saving our efforts for more important matters. Like what? Voltaire would have us remember “the arts, the sciences, and the progress of the human mind.” Only those fields will serve “as an eternal token of the true glory of our country” (2). We cannot ignore military events, but neither can military historians seal themselves off from the rest of the profession as it moves toward a broader picture of the progress of American culture.

On April 30, 1789, George Washington was inaugurated as the nation’s first president. According to the traditional story, he added “so help me God” to the words of the oath prescribed by the Constitution. However, that “traditional story” goes back only to 1854, when Rufus Griswold included it in a book titled The Republican Court. Griswold’s story caught on, and by the 1860s, “so help me God” had appeared in dozens of other biographies of Washington and was well on its way to becoming the accepted account. Until the last decade or so, Washington’s “so help me God” was as true as anything else in our history.

This essay is not another tirade in what sometimes threatens to become a tedious debate over “Did he say it?” Rather, it simply describes how a story first told sixty-five years after the fact became entrenched in America’s public memory; it uses “so help me God” as a case study of American myth-making.

Here are three typical examples of how Washington’s inauguration was described before 1854. The first is from Chief Justice John Marshall’s Life of George Washington (1807). The title page notes that the book was “compiled under the inspection of the Honourable Bushrod Washington,” nephew of the first president and himself an associate justice on the Supreme Court. Marshall’s description of the first presidential inauguration is as follows: “On the 30th of April, the president attended in the senate chamber, in order to take, in the presence of both houses, the oath prescribed by the constitution. To gratify the public curiosity, an open gallery adjoining the senate chamber had been selected by congress, as the place in which the oath should be administered. Having taken it in the view of an immense concourse of people, whose loud and repeated acclamations attested to the joy with which his being proclaimed president of the United States inspired them, he returned to the senate chamber.”

The second account, from Samuel George Arnold’s The Life of George Washington, First President of the United States (1840), is more explicit in the details of the oath-taking: “Having entered the Hall [Washington] passed to a balcony in front of the house, where he was received with loud acclamations by the assembled multitudes. Here the oath was administered by Chancellor Livingston. The Bible was raised, and his head bowed to kiss the sacred volume. The chancellor then greeted him with, ‘Long live George Washington, president of the United States,’ and the assembled multitude responded with a tremendous burst of cheers.”

The third account is from the September 1846 issue of The Green Mountain Gem: A Monthly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Arts: “In a short time Washington made his appearance on the balcony, and loud and long-continued cheers arose from the sea of faces that thronged Broad and Wall streets… . Washington looked around upon the people before him, and then placed his right hand upon the open bible, as Chancellor Livingston administered the oath:—’I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ Washington kissed the sacred volume, and Chancellor Livingston pronounced in a loud tone—’LONG LIVE GEORGE WASHINGTON,—PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.’ Shout upon shout rent the air.”

A few notes about these accounts. First, “Chancellor Livingston” is Robert Livingston; Chancellor was the highest judicial officer in the state of New York. Today the presidential oath is administered by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, but that is not required by the Constitution. Second, the “open gallery” was an outdoor balcony on New York’s old Federal Hall, a building (razed in 1812) that served as the first capitol of the U.S. Third, we do not know if Washington repeated the oath (phrase by phrase, as is currently done), or if he simply heard the oath and agreed to it (like the “I do” in modern weddings); again, the Constitution is silent on how the oath should be administered. Fourth, Washington kissed the Bible, an extra-Constitutional flourish many other presidents followed up to the mid-twentieth century. (From Eisenhower on, no president has kissed the Bible following the oath.) And finally, in these accounts Washington did not add “So help me God” to the oath. In fact, no account of his inauguration, either contemporaneous or later, has Washington saying “So help me God”—until 1854.

Rufus Wilmot Griswold was a well-known literary critic and editor. Author of Poets and Poetry of America (first published in 1842), in which he promoted the idea of a distinctly American poetry, he is perhaps best known today for his literary feud with Edgar Allan Poe. In the last decade or so of his life, Griswold became interested in historical subjects. He was especially enamored of the first president, and in 1847 he published a work titled Washington and the Generals of the American Revolution in which his brief biography of Washington (later widely reprinted) read: “His superiority was felt by all these persons, and was felt by Washington himself, as a simple matter of fact, as little a subject of question, or a cause of vanity, as the eminence of his personal stature.”

In the early 1850s, Griswold began collecting material for a book on Washington and the social scene of his day. Published in 1854, The Republican Court: or, American Society in the Days of Washington was praised as “an accurate and scholarly production.” In the prefatory note, Griswold wrote that while the book possessed “little merit of a purely literary character, I can claim for it the far more important excellence of a most exact adherence to truth.” (Griswold had a reputation for lying—”Mendacity seems chronic with him,” one critic wrote—so perhaps in his one attempt at history he thought he should emphasize his “adherence to the truth.”)

Here is Griswold’s telling of the inauguration: “A gesture of the Chancellor arrested the attention of the immense assembly, and he pronounced slowly and distinctly the words of the oath. The Bible was raised, and as the President bowed to kiss its sacred pages, he said audibly, ‘I swear,’ and added, with fervor, his eyes closed, that his whole soul might be absorbed in the supplication, ‘So help me God!'”

Rufus Griswold was born in 1815, a quarter century after Washington’s first inauguration, so how did he get this information? A possible answer comes three paragraphs later in the text. “Few persons are now living who witnessed the induction of the first president of the United States into his office,” Griswold writes, but on a recent night, he was walking the streets of New York with his friend John Francis and the famous writer Washington Irving. It happens that Irving was working on his own biography of Washington (for whom Irving was named, incidentally), so no doubt Washington was on his mind. During their stroll, Irving “related … his recollections [of the inauguration]… . He had watched the procession till the President entered Federal Hall, and from the corner of New street and Wall street had observed the subsequent proceedings in the balcony.”

Did Griswold get the story from Irving? Irving was only six years old at the time of Washington’s inauguration, and was standing over 200 feet away (and we know that Washington spoke softly on this occasion). Perhaps Irving shared some general recollections of the inauguration, but not the “so help me God.” Maybe Griswold got the story from someone else, or maybe he just made it up. In any case, this is the first time—sixty-five years after the event—that we have a “record” of Washington saying those words.

Griswold described the inauguration in the sentimental language that was all the rage in both biographies and novels of the time. Washington did not simply say “so help me God,” he added it “with fervor, his eyes closed, that his whole soul might be absorbed in the supplication.” In Inventing George Washington, Edward G. Lengel, current editor of the Papers of George Washington project, described Griswold’s account as “a typical mid-nineteenth-century glob of treacle.” He was perhaps right, but we should add that it was an influential glob of treacle; by the end of the decade, “so help me God” had become an unquestioned part of the Washington inauguration story.

Washington Irving may or may not have told the story to Rufus Griswold, but he included it in his own biography of the first president. Irving, who made a name for himself with such tales as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” had also written historical works, such as a life of Christopher Columbus (which contained the myth that Europeans in Columbus’s day thought the Earth was flat). Irving hoped his five-volume biography of George Washington would be the greatest achievement of his career. He described the inauguration in the fourth volume, published in 1857: “The chancellor advanced to administer the oath prescribed by the constitution… . The oath was read slowly and distinctly; Washington at the same time laying his hand on the open Bible. When it was concluded, he replied solemnly, ‘I swear—so help me God!'”

Three others writers put “So help me God” in George Washington’s mouth in 1857. Caroline Matilda Kirkland, best known for a trilogy of books on life on the Western frontier (she and her husband lived several years in Detroit), dedicated her biography of Washington “to all my young friends, known and unknown, and particularly to my own sons and daughters … , to make his goodness and patriotism irresistibly inspiring to them.” Here is how she described the inauguration: “In kissing the book as he took the oath, he was observed to say audibly, ‘I swear!’ adding, with closed eyes, as if to collect all his being into the momentous act—’So help me God.'”

John Frederick Schroeder was an Episcopalian priest who had already published Maxims of Washington, with over 400 pages of quotations attributed to Washington on (in the words of the subtitle) “Political, Social, Moral, and Religious” topics. Schroeder’s Life and Times of Washington (1857) recorded the inauguration as follows: “While the oath was being administered, Washington laid his hand on the Bible. As its conclusion he said, ‘I swear—so help me God.'”

On March 14, 1857, just after the inauguration of James Buchanan, Harper’s Weekly ran a three-page article comparing that ceremony to the first inauguration. Washington “exclaimed, with closed eyes and much emotion, ‘I swear, so help me God!'” Buchanan, on the other hand, was not reported to have used the phrase. A year later, J. A. Spencer, who ended his History of the United States with Buchanan’s inauguration, wrote that Washington, “reverently appealing to Heaven,” added “So help me God!” to the end of the oath.

This was just the beginning. John N. Norton’s Life of Bishop Provoost, of New York (1859) and his Life of George Washington (1860) both included “so help me God” in their accounts of Washington’s inauguration.

E. Cecil compiled his (or her) Life of George Washington. Written for Children (1859) “with the hope of giving American children some knowledge of Washington’s character.” A couple pages at the end of the book summarize some of the lessons children might learn from Washington’s life: “How could he thus resist temptation? How did he succeed in controlling his passions? There is but one answer. Washington was a religious man.” E. Cecil—the name is possibly pseudonymous, but the writer was certainly Victorian, what with the emphasis on resisting temptation—had Washington saying “so help me God” at the end of the oath.

In 1859, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, a group formed several years earlier to preserve Washington’s Virginia home, had worked out an arrangement with John Washington, George’s great-grandnephew, to purchase the estate. Benson J. Lossing, a popular historian (in both senses of the phrase) known for his Pictorial Field Book of the [American] Revolution, wrote a history of Mount Vernon to support the MVLA. Mount Vernon and Its Associations, Historical, Biographical, and Pictorial, published in numerous versions with various titles over the years, was dedicated “to his patriotic countrywomen, by whose efforts the home and tomb of Washington have been rescued from decay.” Lossing described the inauguration: “Chancellor Livingston then waved his hand for the multitude to be silent, and in a clear voice, read the prescribed oath. The President said ‘I swear,’ then bowed his head and kissed the sacred volume, and with his eyes closed as he resumed his erect position, he continued with solemn voice and devotional attitude, ‘So help me God!'”

So, before 1854, we have no written record of Washington adding “so help me God” to the oath. Then Griswold wrote it, and by the end of the decade, at least eight other books and magazines recorded the same phrase. “So help me God” quickly became the traditional story. This was not quite the same as Mason “Parson” Weems’s fanciful story of the boy George chopping down the cherry tree with his hatchet, a fable that represented a great Truth about Washington’s character but was not to be understood as literally true. Unlike “I cannot tell a lie,” “so help me God” became gospel. “In Griswold we trust,” we might say, although by 1860, Griswold’s role in creating the myth had been forgotten.

To be sure, not every description of Washington’s inauguration published after 1854 used the phrase. Nonetheless, the post-Griswold inclusion of “so help me God” in Washington biographies was both widespread and persistent. Benjamin Lossing became one of the phrase’s most prolific promulgators; after the Mount Vernon book, he told the “so help me God” story in the three-volume Life of Washington: A Biography, Personal, Military, and Political (1860); in Our Country: A Household History of the United States for All Readers (1877); in Harpers’ Popular Cyclopedia of United States History, from the Aboriginal Period (1881); in Mary and Martha: The Mother and the Wife of George Washington (1886); and in two pieces for popular magazines for the centennial of Washington’s first inaugural (The Independent and Century Illustrated Magazine, 1889).

From the 1860s on, Lossing was joined by dozens of other writers in spreading the gospel of “so help me God.” Among them was Woodrow Wilson, a professor of political science at Princeton, who in his George Washington (1896) wrote that after the oath, the president “bowed his head and said ‘So help me God!’ in tones no man could mistake, so deep was their thrill of feeling.” Seventeen years later, when he was himself taking the presidential oath of office, Wilson did not use that phrase.

Some of these other efforts were aimed (like Kirkland and Cecil, in the late 1850s) at children. Biographies of Washington for children were everywhere in the mid-nineteenth century, ranging from Samuel Goodrich’s Lives of Benefactors in 1844 to an illustrated Heroes of the Revolution in 1846 to Child’s Life of Washington in 1860. Different Washingtons were offered for different genders. Women of Worth: A Book for Girls (1860) republished George W. P. Custis’s biography of Mary Washington, while Mrs. Anna M. Hyde offered The American Boy’s Life of Washington in 1868. Mrs. E. B. (Elizabeth Breckenbrough) Phelps was motivated to write her Memoir of Washington: Written for Boys and Girls and Dedicated to the Pupils, Past and Present (1874) by “observing how little interest the pupils of our charge seemed to take in the history of their own country, and consequently how little knowledge they possessed.”

Josephine Pollard’s Life of George Washington: In Words of One Syllable (1893) was part of a fad in the late nineteenth century of one-syllable books—books aimed at young readers and written using words of only one syllable. Her section on the inauguration begins: “On the last day of A-pril, 1789, Wash-ing-ton took the oath of office in front of the hall where the wise men of the land had been wont to meet in New York.” This sentence shows that the authors of one-syllable books often used proper nouns, regardless of syllabification, and that “one syllable” does not necessarily mean easy (unless most children of the late nineteenth century could be expected to understand “had been wont to meet”).

Hyde, Phelps, and Pollard all used the identical phrase in their descriptions of the inauguration for their juvenile readers: “I swear—so help me God!”

Not surprisingly, histories told with a religious bent often put the “so help me God” into Washington’s inaugural. Such works include Benjamin Franklin Morris’s Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States (1864), written to show that the United States “is pre-eminently the land of the Bible, of the Christian Church, and of the Christian Sabbath.” Rev. J. A. M. Chapman’s “A Christian Republic: Its Grounds, Functions, and Claims,” in Christian Advocate (Dec. 7, 1876) (“I say a Christian Republic, for such I claim ours to be in the design of its founders, in the opinion of the wisest expounders of our national law, and as a recognized fact in our actual history”), and Bishop A. Cleveland Coxe’s “Christianity and the Constitution,” in The Independent (April 5, 1880) (“The spirit of the Constitution speaks for itself, and proclaims itself Christian in all that it implies and presupposes”), both quote “so help me God.”

The centennial year witnessed an outpouring of literary accounts of the first inauguration, almost all of which included Washington taking the oath and adding “so help me God.” In addition to Lossing’s contributions, books by Henry Cabot Lodge (later a five-term senator from Massachusetts) and Horace Elisha Scudder (editor of The Atlantic Monthly through most of the 1890s), as well as articles in The American Magazine, The Cambrian (subtitled A Magazine for the Welsh in America), Century Magazine, The Chautauquan, The Churchman, The Cosmopolitan, The Home-Maker, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, The New York Tribune, and Zion’s Herald, were among the works published in 1889 that included “so help me God.”

As the nineteenth century came to an end, “so help me God” had been firmly entrenched in the nation’s historic memory for four decades. (The works cited above are just a fraction of what would be a very long list.) The phrase was so imbedded that no one in the twentieth century, not even academic scholars with PhDs, thought to question it. Douglas Southall Freeman won a (posthumous) Pulitzer Prize for his six-volume biography of Washington. In the final volume (1954), he recorded the events of inauguration day in great detail (beginning with “When Washington had eaten breakfast….”). Washington took the oath of office, then “reverently he added, ‘So help me God.'” In George Washington: A Biography (1984), John R. Alden, one of the premier academic historians of the American Revolution a couple generations ago, wrote: “Washington repeated the oath, adding solemnly, ‘So help me God.'”

David McCullough won a Pulitzer Prize for his John Adams (2001), a book in which he described the first presidential inauguration: “In a low voice Washington solemnly swore to execute the office of the President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ Then, as not specified in the Constitution, he added, ‘So help me God,’ and kissed the Bible, thereby establishing his own first presidential tradition.” It was Griswold, not Washington, who started the tradition, but McCullough and others have certainly continued it. When HBO based a miniseries on John Adams (in 2008, with Paul Giamatti in the title role), viewers could see the inauguration and actually hear George Washington (actor David Morse) say “So help me God.”

So if it was not Washington, who was the first American president to say “so help me God” as part of the oath of office? Perhaps it was Jefferson Davis, who according to the Macon Daily Telegraph used the phrase when he was inaugurated president of the Confederate States of America on February 18, 1861. The first president of the United States of America for whom there is convincing contemporary evidence was Chester A. Arthur, who took the oath following the death of James Garfield in September 1881. Following Arthur, we know that William Howard Taft (1909), Warren G. Harding (1921), Calvin Coolidge (1923), and Franklin Roosevelt (1933) said “so help me God.” From 1933 to the present, every president has used the term. Prior to that, however, the list is short.

In the years after World War II, the story of “so help me God” in American historical memory took another turn. As tensions increased between the United States and the “godless communists” of the Soviet Union, Americans began to use religion as a weapon in the Cold War. “The fate of the world rests with the clash between the atheism of Moscow and the Christian spirit throughout other parts of the world,” said Senator Joe McCarthy, and J. Edgar Hoover added, “Since Communists are anti-God, encourage your child to be active in the church.” The 1950s was the decade that “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God we trust” became our national motto. And it was in the 1950s that the tradition was established that all presidents, not just Washington, had said “so help me God” as part of their oath.

Frank C. Waldrop, editor of the Washington Times-Herald, led the way in 1948, in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in McCollum v. Board of Education. In that case, the Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for public schools to aid in purely religious instruction. “Every President from Washington down to Harry Truman has always taken that oath [the Constitutionally prescribed presidential oath] with his hand on the Bible, a religious book,” Waldrop wrote in response to the decision, “and more than that, every President so far as this writer can learn has also added the undeniably religious phrase, ‘So help me, God,’ as an unofficial element of his promise.”

Bruce Catton, the famous Civil War historian, solidified this “new” tradition in January 1957, just in time for Eisenhower’s second inauguration. “George Washington was a man inspired,” Catton wrote in one of his occasional “Words America Lives By” pieces, “and his inspiration has come down to all of us, coloring the environment in which we live… . After reciting the formal oath, he put in a short sentence of his own: ‘So help me God.’ Every President since has added those words. They have now become part of the ritual; and it is a good part, an essential part, pledging more than was originally intended when the oath was written… . [Washington] spoke not only for all future Presidents, but for the rest of us too.” And so a century after Rufus Griswold had George Washington saying “so help me God,” Bruce Catton and others made it a part of every presidential oath. It joined “one nation, under God” and “In God we trust” to create a trinity of Cold War religious phrases.

In 2001, the first year of the twenty-first century, Philander Chase, editor of the Papers of George Washington project (1999-2004), was cited in a Washington Post article as saying that the “so help me God” story “is not supported by any eyewitness accounts.” Others had perhaps doubted the story, but Chase’s statement was, according to Ray Soller, “the first public announcement that flat out challenged what historians and pundits … had come to treat as an unchallenged matter of fact.” Newdow v. Roberts, a lawsuit aimed at prohibiting Chief Justice John Roberts from prompting Barack Obama to add the non-Constitutional phrase at the end of the oath in 2009, certainly raised awareness of the issue. Professor Peter R. Henriques, of George Mason University, submitted an amicus brief in the case outlining the historical background, including the lack of contemporaneous account of “so help me God” and the role of Griswold and others in starting the tradition decades later. A shortened version of Henriques’s brief, published as “‘So Help Me God’: A George Washington Myth That Should Be Discarded” by History News Network in January 2009, became perhaps the most-cited scholarly discussion of the issue.

Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life (2010), one of the latest Washington biographies and another Pulitzer Prize winner, addressed the issue this way: “Legend has it that he added ‘So help me God,’ though this line was first reported sixty-five years later. Whether or not Washington actually said it, very few people would have heard him anyway, since his voice was soft and breathy.” Chernow’s gentle handling of the phrase contrasts with Edward Lengel’s, in Inventing George Washington (2011): “Any attempt to prove that Washington added the words ‘so help me God’ requires mental gymnastics of the sort that would do credit to the finest artist of the flying trapeze.” The contrast is one of tone only; Chernow and Lengel, in questioning the traditional story and acknowledging that it lacks an evidentiary foundation, signal a change in our historic memory, almost as sudden as was the diffusion of the “so help me God” story a century and a half earlier.

Scholarly debunking does not always equal popular acceptance, of course. The current debate—Did Washington say “so help me God” or not?—often has little to do with historical accuracy and much to do with particular political and religious agendas. But that aside, the post-1854 ubiquity of “so help me God” tells us something about how easily “facts” can become part of our shared historic memory.

Further Reading

Most of the nineteenth-century works listed above are available through Google Books or Internet Archive. For other discussions of “so help me God” in the presidential oath of office, see Frederick B. Jonassen, “Kiss the Book, You’re President: ‘So Help Me God’ and Kissing the Book in the Presidential Oath of Office,” William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, 20 (2012): 853-953, and Mathew Goldstein and the Nonbeliever Antidiscrimination Project, “So Help Me God in Presidential Oaths.” Ray Soller’s unsurpassed work on “so help me God” often appears in the American Creation blog. Peter Henriques’s “‘So Help Me God’: A George Washington Myth That Should Be Discarded” is available at History News Network. Edward G. Lengel writes about this and other Washington myths in Inventing George Washington: America’s Founder, in Myth and Memory (New York, 2011).

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

David B. Parker, professor of history at Kennesaw State University, is the author of Alias Bill Arp: Charles Henry Smith and the South’s “Goodly Heritage” (1993) and editor (with John D. Fowler) of Breaking the Heartland: The Civil War in Georgia (2011). He has written numerous articles and essays on American cultural history.

So, over this past weekend I was sweating over a long-overdue article [hi, Sean!] on Philip Freneau, the so-called “poet of the Revolution” who is probably better known these days, deservedly in my view, as the American republic’s first major journalistic gadfly. Freneau was a good deal more than that as well, since his National Gazette was closely associated with the emergence of the first opposition political party, the Republicans (or Democratic Republicans to distinguish it from the modern GOP), which was first publicly named and its principles first spelled out in his pages.

Freneau was also a bitter critic of the elective quasi-monarchy that the presidency almost immediately started to become, and one of his most frequent themes was the overpowering influence of “great names,” like George Washington, “over the human mind.” Freneau recognized that putting a face and name people liked and respected on a government, personifying it in a word, was a good way to distract even good republican citizens from the potentially unrepublican policies and values of that government. Once the officer and the office were thoroughly conflated, popular veneration of the great personage would make criticism of the government seem churlish and rather treasonous. Then you had monarchy — we might just call it something more general like autarchy — whether the chief magistrate was called “King” or not. Once a single man or family had been elevated over all the others, any hopes of a society based on republican political equality were destroyed. As Freneau or a like-minded contributor wrote over the pseudonym “Cornelia,”

No character or place ought to be sacred in a republican government as to be above criticism. Inviolability and infallibility are royal qualities, which slaves only can comprehend. . . . In a free government every man is a king, every women is a queen; each should preserve the individual sovereignty guaranteed by our constitution that “ALL MEN ARE BORN EQUALLY FREE.” To homage any one is to destroy the equality of our sovereignty, and is a degradation of freemen. [Philadelphia National Gazette, 21 Dec. 1792]

Based on this conviction, the over-veneration of leaders was a insult to the human dignity of all, and reason. Freneau made a habit of lampooning the “absurd panegyrics” that issued from orators, artists, and his fellow poets whenever some Great Man died or whenever some landmark of George Washington’s life was reached. “Birth-day odes” to Washington were especially vexatious.

Back to the point of this post. Wading through Freneau’s collected poetry — nothing says “weekend” like Freneau’s collected poetry — I ran across his, er, counter-programming to the choirs of angels that most other writers were unleashing in response to Washington’s death, “STANZAS Occasioned by certain absurd, extravagant, and even blasphemous panegyrics and encomiums on the character of the late Gen. Washington.” Now, Freneau was no Yeats, so I do not make any claims for this piece as Great Literature, but the message is a good one that our time needs even more than Freneau’s did: “Who stuff’d with gods the historian’s page,” the poet asks, “And raised beyond the human sphere/Some who, we know, were mortal here?” I particularly like Freneau’s emphasis on the blasphemy involved in supposed Christians deifying even a great mortal like Washington: “Ye patrons of the ranting strain,/What temples have been rent in twain?” As you can imagine, this snottiness did little to help Freneau’s fading popularity and ever-precarious finances.

At any rate, President’s Day (give or take a week) seemed like an appropriate time for a reminder that democracy needs some disrespect and inappropriateness towards our historical icons in addition to the celebrations. Come to think of it, that might make Freneau the patron saint of the blogosphere.

P.S. Thank you, readers, and editors, for letting me work out my mental blocks in public.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

Jeffrey L. Pasley is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and the author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001), along with numerous articles and book chapters, most recently the entry on Philip Freneau in Greil Marcus’s forthcoming New Literary History of America. He is currently completing a book on the presidential election of 1796 for the University Press of Kansas and also writes the blog Publick Occurrences 2.0 for some Website called Common-place.

Among the most cherished rights of American citizens is the right to vote. No wonder we hear cries of alarm when legislatures raise barriers to citizens’ voting. The right to vote is widely recognized as fundamental to citizenship; and its denial to non-citizens seems axiomatic. If we allowed “foreigners” to vote, many believe, we would endanger our democracy. But as Americans consider the proper way to qualify voters and how to apportion representation, it is worth being reminded that U.S. citizenship and suffrage have not always been two sides of the American coin. Indeed most Americans, Supreme Court justices probably included, would be surprised to learn that the voters who elected presidents from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln included many thousands who were not United States citizens.

In 1773, when Patriots dumped East India Company tea into Boston harbor, the colonists cried “No taxation without representation!” Though Parliament had cut the tax on tea, Patriots protested because no matter what the tax rate, Parliament did not represent them. Patriots were willing to pay taxes, and paid them every year, but only when voted by a majority of their elected representatives. No principle was dearer to American Revolutionaries than the bond between representation and taxation. They reasoned that if government could take their property arbitrarily, government could reduce them to begging food and shelter for themselves and their families. Secure possession of property was the necessary guarantor of liberty.

This is why twelve of the thirteen original United States stipulated that representation must belong to property holders, and denied suffrage to those who did not own property. After all, leaders reasoned, if poor men could vote they would seize prosperous men’s property. One state, Pennsylvania, thought otherwise, judging that every man paid taxes one way or another, and all, rich and poor, had a stake in society. Moreover, with warfare underway, why should men with no representation fight to defend rights they were denied?

In time, state after state came to adopt Pennsylvania’s reasoning. Americans learned that extending suffrage to poor men did not lead them to confiscate wealth or redistribute property. Instead, by ending property requirements for voting, states enhanced the legitimacy of governments. By the 1830s, free white men could vote in virtually every American jurisdiction. Those who were widely barred from voting—slaves, free African Americans, and women, like youths—were understood to be “dependents” subject to the will of others at the polls.

But for white men, the only generally required qualification for voting was one year of residency, two at the most. What began as a restricted republic of property holders became a white men’s democracy. Most remarkable from the perspective of 2016, there was no uniform requirement that voters be United States citizens, or even citizens of the state where they resided. As Alexander Keyssar reported in his The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000), as of 1855, though eighteen of the nation’s thirty-one states did require U.S. citizenship to vote, two (Ohio and Rhode Island) had only added that stipulation in 1851. Three states (Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin) explicitly stated that foreigners could vote if they intended to become citizens. And ten more, mostly the original states formed during the Revolution, demanded state citizenship only. When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, tens of thousands of foreign immigrants who were not U.S. citizens were voting in states from the Carolinas and Virginia to New York and Massachusetts, and west to Indiana and Michigan. The Revolutionary cry, “No taxation without representation,” remained central to voting rights, even more basic than national allegiance.

As American legislators ponder the regulation of suffrage, it would be well to remember that erecting barriers to the franchise does not reflect the long history of voting in the United States, and has instead been connected to efforts to shape the character of the electorate. Initially propertied people feared that their property-less neighbors would re-distribute wealth. Then there was a fear that women and non-whites would corrupt the integrity of the electorate. Later that concern shifted to foreigners. Whether or not we believe there is such a thing as “the integrity of the electorate,” we need to recognize that from the beginning the foundation of voting rights was taxation: the belief that those who are taxed should have a voice in the disposition of their property. How far we choose to honor that ideal has been more a matter of practical politics than a matter of principle.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.4 (September, 2016).

Richard D. Brown, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History emeritus at the University of Connecticut, is the author of the forthcoming Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution through the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017). He is co-author of two microhistories: Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic (2014) with Doron S. Ben-Atar, and The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America (2003) with Irene Quenzler Brown.

Misery is the new black. It is the theme of next year’s American Studies Association conference, it unfolds itself in dystopic TV melodrama, and wends its way onto conference agendas in panels that focus, as many do at ASA this year, on the many registers of dispossession, displacement, wildness, unsettlement, and dis-ease.

So Kathleen Donegan’s book is right on target. Her beautifully written and carefully crafted book shows both the productivity and the perils of examining misery, catastrophe, and their textual productions, probing at the ways in which they catapulted their subjects into alternative realms of being that language could not quite reach, although they certainly tried to make it do so. Death, sickness, and violence; hunger, dislodgement, affliction, dis-possession—of self and world—all had to be negotiated by the earliest waves of English settlers, who found themselves frequently incapable of addressing the tasks at hand. Such insecurity and devastation begat additional violence as brutal and frightened settlers strove to project their own catastrophes onto native peoples, but lacked the local knowledge, skill and—terrified and starving as they were—the mental acuity to do so. Although many scholars have written about these founding documents of American literature, Donegan has newly shown how their missives home forged an archive of woe that expressed, among other things, the pain and suffering of deracination, the brutality of lament, fear, and hate.

Donegan’s book allows us to experience, from the inside, the terrible moments of early American settlement. But then the historian and literary scholar are left adrift, waiting for … what? What came next? What effects did these catastrophes have on futurity, however defined, in addition to serving—strangely—as a kind of weird template through which to understand the modern-day American character? Strange because these people were English, and America as a country lay hundreds of years away. Certainly settler catastrophe offers an easy fable about the founding of America that can be endlessly analogized and reflected even in contemporary dysfunction. But what did it do? What kinds of effects did it have on how empire and colonization were planned and executed by the English and then British, and then American, state?

Let’s consider another scene, in another New World, some 300 years later, in 1788. In New South Wales, an insular British colony of convicts, governors, soldiers, and settlers is lodged on the edge of a vast continent only partially charted by Captain Cook and inhabited, in British eyes, by a “savage” and strangely incurious people. The official projectors assured all that the new colony of convicts and freeholders would plant the seeds of a mighty empire to become the new Rome, delivering inexhaustible “Funds of Wealth and Commerce” for the British that may exceed any derived from the Americas.

Needless to say, the opposite unfolded: grim and gut-wrenching years as officers and their families, convicts, and soldiers struggled with bad soil, poison grass (killing off much of the livestock), drought, disease, and a lack of agricultural expertise which led, among other things, to planting precious seeds in the wrong season and widespread theft of food supplies. Everyone was starving; over half were sick and dying. The wrecking of the supply ship Guardian off the coast of Cape Town en route with supplies to the starving colony only added mental distress to physical hardships. “Famine . . . was approaching with gigantic strides, and gloom and dejection overspread every countenance,” Marine Captain Watkin Tench famously recorded. “I every day see wretches pale with disease and wasted with famine, struggle against the horrors of their situation.” It was only the threat of flogging or hanging that kept the convicts to their tasks. Gothic horror unfolded amidst spectacles of death, deprivation, dispossession, captivity, and punishment.

Apparently, between the 1590s and 1790s the British appear to have learned very little about settling a colony. In sites across the Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Atlantic worlds, British explorers and settlers had tales of horror to relate as they “possessed” foreign lands as British, making similar mistakes, exhibiting the same hubris, and experiencing seemingly irrecuperable horror, grief and dislocation as native peoples and landscapes just as readily sought to expel them. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised; death and destruction are the first steps in transculturation, after all, according to Fernando Ortiz, so perhaps these were just the latest victims, necessary sacrifices to a seemingly inevitable global expansion.

What am I suggesting, besides the obvious point that spectacles of colonial suffering suggest a historical problematic of non-change—the strange inability to learn from past mistakes that was duplicated in the English state’s modes of warfare—is that these episodes are integral to nation-state expansion and formation, and become recuperated as foundational to “national identities”—that performative, phantasmic set of characteristics that, for the English, were believed to consist of hardiness, restlessness, and perseverance, and for Americans, of the suffering that bequeathed us our selves.

Native relations support this view, as here, too, the British seemed not to learn from their pasts. In New South Wales, the first governor adopted a policy of kidnapping adult Aboriginal men in order to introduce them to the superior civility of British culture. This was a practice that, according to one historian, predated the Columbian exchange. The governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, called it “the kindest piece of Violence that could be used,” but the kidnapping incensed his own officers. The natives’ obvious terror and the screaming and crying of their distraught kin were traumatic to all involved; the captives, kept in iron ankle bracelets, escaped with alacrity if given the opportunity, if they did not die first of smallpox. Tame as this may appear next to, for example, shooting out the brains of Indian children thrown into a river in Virginia, as Donegan relates, kidnapping was the modest opening to the subsequent onslaughts of violence that spiraled across the next century almost to the point of aboriginal decimation. Here we can see at work Jodi Bird’s zombie imperialism, which wipes out the native over and over; or the humanism that first endangers and kills and then offers rescue, which Jack Halberstam referenced in his talk on wildness. Catastrophe, then, becomes an essential part of nation-building, whether that nation is imperial or colonial in inception.

Hence my final point has to do with the meaning of “becoming colonial,” which Donegan and others have suggested is the first-order result of these catastrophes, i.e., “crisis was a means of producing coloniality.” The settlers lost their English moorings (Englishness being another undefined yet key term that seems to be a synonym for “civilized”) and became something else, and that something else was colonial. Yet Donegan offers little guidance as to what that means or could entail. Is “becoming colonial” the state of being estranged from oneself ? Being subordinate, unheimlich, alienated, abjected? Of being undecideable, disordered, speculative, ungrounded, i.e., what we used to call queer? The insidious logic of the nation-state is, again, at work in the use of these terms, in that becoming national seems the obvious and indeed only antidote. And although these scenes present an originary moment for American literature, it is worth reminding ourselves that these were English people, and the English nation was the first to process these tales of horridness into a national narrative that Americans would—much later—borrow and embellish, even as it worked to exculpate the perpetrators from the horrors they would continue to unleash.

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

Today it can sound like a cliché, but “follow the money” is actually pretty good advice if you’re a reporter looking to get a foothold on a story. It’s also been just as useful to me in my work as a historian who looks at the intersection of business, politics, and public infrastructure, the field we broadly call “political economy.”

Since I first started looking into an 18th-century water company-turned-bank called the Manhattan Company back in 2003, I’ve been following the money in New York during the early republic—to banks, steamboats, railroads, and the Erie Canal. Eleven years later I’m checking copyedits for what will soon be my first book on the subject. But in between teaching, a new project on corruption, and the rest of academic life, I’ve also spent a good portion of this year on the third floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza on MSNBC talking about bridges, infrastructure, and New Jersey politics. This wasn’t how I expected to be using my PhD, but here’s why being a historian of the early republic helped prepare me for an ongoing twenty-first-century political economy caper.

I can tell you exactly when I became interested—really interested—in the scandal we call Bridgegate.

On Wednesday, January 8, 2014, Chris Hayes opened his 8 p.m. MSNBC show with a roundup of the latest news out of New Jersey regarding the weeklong September 2013 lane closures on the George Washington Bridge. New documents had come to light showing that in August a top member of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s staff had been in touch with one of Christie’s top appointees at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (the agency that owns and operates the bridge), informing him that it was “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” In response the appointee e-mailed back, “got it.”

Hayes spent the next few minutes walking viewers through other revelations in the document leak, which linked other top Port Authority officials and members of Christie’s team to the lane closures and made clear that, despite claims to the contrary, Fort Lee’s local traffic woes had not been caused by a “traffic study.”

I know almost all of the people involved in this story. Before I went to graduate school at the University of Virginia, I had been a reporter at Money magazine, writing about financial markets and mutual funds. During the 2000 presidential election, I left Money to write for George magazine, where I continued to look at finance and how it intersected with national politics. In early 2001 George folded, and I briefly ended up working for a New Jersey state senator and then a newly elected assemblyman. It was in that job that I first met David Wildstein, who owned and operated a political news Website called PoliticsNJ.com. Wildstein later became the Christie appointee who would write “got it” and actually implement the lane changes.

In early 2002, David hired me to be the site’s first full-time reporter. In that job I covered Chris Christie when he was a U.S. attorney in New Jersey. I met Bridget Kelly, the woman who sent the “time for some traffic problems” e-mail, back when she was an aide to a mild-mannered Republican assemblyman from Bergen County. I became a friend of Bill Baroni, who later became a top political appointee at the Port Authority, back when he was a candidate for the state legislature. When I left reporting to go to graduate school, Bill and I kept in touch. He was a UVA law school alum, and when he came to Charlottesville for reunion events we occasionally went to football games. During one of those visits I met his successor at the Port Authority, who is also a UVA law grad. I kept in touch with many of the people I met in New Jersey politics, from legislative aides to reporters, to even a few members of Congress. So when politicians showed up in newspaper articles and on television expressing outrage about this new story involving the George Washington Bridge, I had people to e-mail and call. I already knew some of the state legislators leading the investigation.

Working as a journalist had helped me see a set of questions that I knew I would never have the time, space, or guidance to explore as a reporter.

But I did not know and had never met the mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, who was Chris Hayes’s guest that night during what I now know is called the A-block—the first segment of a television broadcast.

Sokolich is a tall, affable real estate attorney. During the September 2013 lane closures he had written to Bill Baroni asking for a meeting, hoping that he wasn’t being punished for declining an invitation to endorse the Republican incumbent Christie across party lines in the November 2013 gubernatorial election.

I watched Sokolich’s back-and-forth with Hayes to take a measure of the man who claimed that he had no idea why he or his town might have been targeted by the Christie administration. Then Sokolich said something really interesting:

“And I’ll tell you, we’ve done phenomenal things in Fort Lee, and that truly is the tragedy here, we’re in the middle of a renaissance, we’re in the middle of a billion dollar redevelopment, we are arguably the most progressive community in the state of New Jersey run by this idiot [Christie], and we should be applauded for that, not penalized for it.”

A billion dollar redevelopment.

I remember sitting with my wife on our couch and saying: “So why is a local mayor nobody’s ever heard of from a town nobody’s ever heard of using time during his national television debut to mention that?”

The next day Governor Christie gave a marathon lunchtime press conference with what I thought was an internally contradictory narrative. A half hour later David Wildstein refused to testify before a state legislative panel but, through his lawyer, offered to talk if given immunity from federal and state prosecution. The following day, the legislature released more than 2,000 pages of subpoenaed documents—e-mails, text messages, letters, and memos—relating to the bridge lane closures.

I read all of it. Most of it that day and into the night. This was how it started for me.

Truth be told, I hadn’t been following Bridgegate throughout the fall. My wife gave birth to our daughter on September 30 as I was furiously trying to finish revisions on my book manuscript and renovations to our kitchen. Then in mid-October my father woke up with double vision in his right eye, something that turned out to be the first symptom of an aggressive lymphoma. He died three weeks later in an ICU. He was 69.

Devastated, all I could do after that was work to finish the manuscript he would never see finished—a heavily revised reboot of my dissertation about political economy and state formation in New York in the early republic. I was rewriting a chapter on the Erie Canal and what I see as a monumental decision by New York lawmakers and canal promoters to finance the project with state-backed bonds rather than stocks, which would have conveyed ownership of the project to private investors. This was a pivotal moment in public infrastructure finance and the application of political economy principles that tried to sort out distinctions between public and private interests. In the back of my mind as I worked on the book was Robert Moses and Robert Caro’s biography of him, The Power Broker, one of the most important books ever written about power and infrastructure. So was work by other distinguished scholars of the early American economy like John Larson, Cathy Matson, and Peter Onuf.

I went to graduate school to study with Peter because I was interested in looking at the intersection of politics and finance within larger institutional and jurisdictional federal frameworks. This had been the main question that interested me as a magazine journalist, and I likely would have kept on working it at George magazine or elsewhere had the presidential election of 2000 turned out differently. But Al Gore lost and my chance to become a White House correspondent slipped away. Then George folded and the economy slipped into a recession. After 9/11 it was clear that time was precious, and I revisited the idea of going to graduate school.

Working as a journalist had helped me see a set of questions that I knew I would never have the time, space, or guidance to explore as a reporter. I had done stories that touched on lobbying and financial regulation, and I had gone to enough political fundraisers to see how transactional policymaking could be. I knew that many legislators were not policy wonks; if you interviewed them about legislation they supported, and even bills named after them, they did not necessarily know what was inside. On the other hand, you could bet that their staffs and lobbyists with an interest in those bills did; they knew exactly what was at stake in the wording of particular subsections and clauses. But being able to detect when and why bills are drafted or amended isn’t ordinarily possible in conventional political reporting undertaken with conventional methods. Influence is hard to detect at the moment it’s exercised, and favors are often part of a long game. Campaign finance disclosures just cannot capture the scale or nuance of the economy of influence that is the backdrop to our political economy. Similarly, the disciplinary boundaries of political, legal, and economic history, even when only lightly enforced, can obscure the bridge-building connections forged by early American political entrepreneurs who married finance to political connections and legislative skill in order to build the nation’s first financial and transportation infrastructure projects.

Before I applied, my undergraduate advisor at Haverford College, Roger Lane, wisely and responsibly cautioned me that it would not be easy to find an academic job. Truth be told, I was never under any other impression, and I wasn’t really going to graduate school to find a specific career anyway. I finished college knowing that there were things I wanted to study more deeply, and for a time being a reporter had quenched that desire. If I could get lucky enough to land a decent job in academia, that would be great. But if I ended up not having any good career options in academia when it was all over, so be it. I was going to do the best work I could do to take on questions that I could not avoid, which in my mind was—and remains—a perfectly respectable reason to go to graduate school if you can do so without incurring loads of debt.

Sometime after I decided to go to UVA, I briefly took a job with PoliticsNJ.com, run by an anonymous editor who went by the name of a long-deceased governor of New Jersey named Walter “Wally” Edge. Wally, I learned years later, was David Wildstein. David/Wally taught me a lot about power, and one of the more interesting things I observed while working for him was how much power is wielded by people whose names never appeared on a ballot and who operate in a mixed economy where public and private interests collide. In New Jersey, you might think that the political system bends to the will of a small group of public figures: the leaders of the state legislature or the governor, and maybe a few political party bosses and fundraisers. But in truth, some of the most influential political operators can be found at three agencies most people have never heard of: the Casino Redevelopment Authority (think Atlantic City), the Sports and Exposition Authority (which runs the Meadowlands and Giants Stadium), and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (in charge of tunnels, airports, the World Trade Center, and of course the George Washington Bridge).

There were 2,040 pages of documents released in seven appendices on January 10, 2014, the day after Wildstein refused to testify to the New Jersey legislature. I began reading them at lunchtime after collating them into a single PDF that I ran through optical character recognition software to make them text-searchable. I also started taking notes and began building a rough timeline in a spreadsheet.

One of our great strengths as historians is that, like journalists, we are trained to not be intimidated by paper. We can organize information. Put us in a room full of boxes at an archive and we can use close reading, tenacity, and patience to sift through it all to find the dozen pieces of paper we need to tell a story. Even if not all of us write narrative history, we can rely on narratives to build persuasive cases that tease out tension and illustrate change over time.

As I kept reading through the documents, I had the growing suspicion that the Fort Lee mayor’s throwaway line about a real estate development was significant. Sometime that Friday night I chatted with another former David Wildstein employee, Steve Kornacki, who hosts a weekend morning show on MSNBC. Over the course of three hours we started pulling together documents from Fort Lee’s local government Website—minutes of city council and planning board meetings—along with financial disclosures from the developers behind the billion dollar project, news articles, and items from within the newly released documents. Steve and I thought we had found something important. We had evidence showing that the lane closures jeopardized sensitive late-stage financing of the redevelopment project Mayor Sokolich had mentioned two nights earlier, and that people at the Port Authority were aware that the project’s viability hinged on its proximity to the George Washington Bridge. As I later wrote in a story for the political news site TalkingPointsMemo.com, “the Hudson Lights project is a billion dollar project because it offers unparalleled access to the George Washington Bridge. But take away that access and it’s no longer a billion dollar project.”

With the same exhilaration I felt after making a key discovery in a box of archival materials at the New-York Historical Society, I climbed into bed around 3 a.m. saying “I think we found something really big here.” Steve and I reconnected after he was finished with his Saturday morning broadcast and invited me to come on his show on Sunday, where he presented our reporting. I wrote up a version of the story at TalkingPointsMemo.com, owned by Joshua Marshall, who also has a PhD in history from Brown University (he was a Gordon Wood student). The following day, the mayor of Hoboken reached out to Steve saying she had a story to tell—and that she had documents to back it up. Her allegations are now at the center of a federal investigation that, according to recent reports, is targeting the former chairman of the Port Authority and possibly Governor Christie as well. Our reporting, then, relied on a mix of convincing people to give us things and a close reading of things that were already in the public domain, hidden in plain sight—in short, a combination of the skills I had gained as a reporter and the research habits I had learned as a historian. The timeline I began building has yielded several headlines, one of which was significant enough that MSNBC brass brought me in for a meeting to make me one of their official contributors.

For me, none of these insights would have jumped out had I not spent the better part of a decade thinking about how financial and transportation infrastructure projects were incorporated and structured into a public-private mixed economy regime that exists within a layered federal union of divided and competing jurisdictions—even though the projects I had been thinking about for ten years took place in the 1810s and ’20s. Within American government, parties do not field candidates and electioneer only to win elections; they have priorities and agendas driven by both ideological convictions and material interests.

When I began thinking about how an institution like the Port Authority fit into partisan politics in New Jersey and into Bridgegate specifically, the questions were framed by my past work on the 1799 founding of the Manhattan Company (founded by Aaron Burr to provide clean water to lower Manhattan, the company also had banking privileges; in 1955 it would merge with Chase National Bank to become Chase Manhattan, now part of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.). New York Republicans considered the company to be an essential factor behind Jefferson’s election as president in 1800. Back in 2002 I began wondering why would a water utility that ran a bank mattered so much for electioneering. In time, I realized that it had really been a tool for party development. This newly incorporated bank enabled Republicans to offer discretionary financial rewards to their allies, recruit new supporters, and punish mutinies, all while offering New York voters an institutional alternative to the city’s Federalist-run banks, which were dominated by Alexander Hamilton. My research on the Manhattan Company (originally a seminar paper in graduate school) eventually became an article in the William and Mary Quarterly and a revised chapter of my book, Building the Empire State. Intellectually that piece set the trajectory for much of the work I do by establishing a fixed point for me to begin thinking about political economy in a sustained way.

After a few years of presenting work that garnered feedback from colleagues in the Early American Seminar at Virginia and a few conferences’ worth of supportive SHEAR audience members, it was becoming clearer to me that material interests—something I don’t want to necessarily label as “greed,” but rather an interest in extracting benefits and turning profits—was at the heart of early American state formation. Competing ideologies of liberalism and republicanism that dominate the historiography seemed less immediately relevant to the group of people I study than what seems to me to be a widespread assumption that one of the fundamental purposes of government is to foster commercial relations by actively and aggressively structuring the economic marketplace. The landscape of political opportunity in the early republic was defined not only by public laws and regulations adopted by legislators and enforced by courts. It was also dotted with corporations that mobilized private capital and sought public benefits to serve both public and private interests by building a financial infrastructure of banks and commercial enterprises that depended on a transportation infrastructure of roads, bridges, steamboats, canals, telegraphs, and railroads. The high-minded way to look at the ensuing institutional matrix was to see it as knitting together an expanding union by manufacturing common material interests among distant citizens; a more realpolitik take would be to say that political entrepreneurs were searching for ways to make politics profitable. Although twentieth-century reformers tried to professionalize and depoliticize these practices by creating agencies like the Port Authority, in reality they pushed those politics out of view. In spite of its professional engineering and management staff, the Port Authority has proven to be incredibly vulnerable to partisan tampering and responsive to political pressure, reinforcing my contention that the agency’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antecedents are all the more relevant to how we understand it today.

I bring all of this work to the reporting I’ve done for TPM and MSNBC—it’s impossible to stop being an early Americanist, even when you’re on television. If there were footnotes to accompany television segments, they’d be populated with the scholarship of Richard John, Andy Shankman, and Cathy Matson, not to mention Sean Adams, Robert Wright, Johann Neem, and Brian Balogh. I read court cases differently because of the way Chuck McCurdy taught his legal history seminar. I think about alliances in light of the Aaron Burr letters edited by Mary-Jo Kline and the work of Joanne Freeman. And I cannot even begin to imagine how I would have put any of those early stories together without Peter Onuf’s guiding influence. There is no time on a 7-minute-long television segment with 5 minutes of “talk time” to properly offer these credits. But make no mistake—the work I’ve done on the events of 2013 flows directly from the work I and other historians have done on the early 1800s.

I appreciate that being a contributor for a cable news network is not an easily replicable model for how to be a publicly engaged academic. But I would say this: as historians we are blessed with numerous avenues to reach the public. Many of these have been catalogued in response to Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column calling on scholars to be more engaged in public life. Kristof offered us only a narrow set of options when, in reality, we can do so much more through a vast array of media.

The challenge is to take those opportunities when they arise. I see no conflict in doing reporting on a major modern New York institution and a national political story while also being a history professor. My colleagues and my dean at Baruch have been nothing but supportive. Some other colleagues in the field, however, have referred to all this as “a distraction,” as if the opportunity to discuss transportation agencies and political institutions in front of an audience of 750,000 viewers is something I should be worried about. It is an odd thing to wake up at 5 a.m. on a weekend, put on a shirt and tie, get driven into New York, and put on makeup, only to be on camera for 5 or maybe 10 minutes. As historians, we don’t usually get to see the inner workings of the news cycle, or labor over things where we can’t discuss work in progress. It’s more than a little ironic that the biggest story I’ve ever worked on is happening for me more than twelve years since I “left” journalism. But how often do you get to be a part of a story that gets enough attention that you can tell friends and family—in complete seriousness—that even if they miss your television appearance, they’ll still hear about your latest work by putting on news radio or checking the wires soon after?

But rather than being distracted by this media work, reporting on the intersection of politics and money in New York and New Jersey in 2014 has only sharpened the focus that I bring to studying the intersection of politics and money in New York and New Jersey in 1820.

Historians are trained to understand narrative and provide context. We understand tension and can spot change over time. Those instincts make our voices valuable in the public sphere, and we cannot afford to retreat inward at moments when our presence is welcomed and even needed. As a state senator said to me in the green room outside Studio 3A after I walked him through the redevelopment story back in January: “You guys see that it’s all about land,” he said, “and you get what politics is really about in this state: wringing as much f—ing money out of the system as you possibly can before you get caught.”

The only way you begin to understand a “system” like that is by looking at its origins and its history. If this story had fallen into my lap in 2001 I might not have known what to do with it. I had to become a historian to try to get a handle on the present.

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

Brian Phillips Murphy is an assistant professor of history at Baruch College, City University of New York. His first book, Building the Empire State, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2015.