or, Please Don’t Accuse Me of Being Theodore Parker Incarnate

Whenever I attend panels or professional conferences that are about religious toleration—such as the wonderful conference the Newport Historical Society recently hosted to mark the 350th anniversary of Rhode Island’s charter (The Spectacle of Toleration)—I am usually struck by the way scholars who don’t specialize in American Catholic history speak about the anti-Catholicism that characterized American life in the nineteenth century.

“It was clearly wrong” is the message that is almost always conveyed—implicitly for the most part, but sometimes even overtly. The religious leaders and politicians who railed against the evils of popery and warned of the dire consequences that would develop if immigrants who had been “educated under the despotic governments of Catholic Europe” were allowed to “settle down upon the unoccupied territory of the West” were obviously religious bigots. In the case of ministers like Lyman Beecher and Jedidiah Morse, we’re looking at men whose status at the top of the theological food chain was threatened by Unitarianism and disestablishment, and so they lashed out at the Church of Rome because Catholics were the clearest evidence of the Gomorrah they believed America was slouching towards. In the case of mayors like Philadelphia’s Robert Conrad and Boston’s Jerome V.C. Smith, we’re looking at men whose status at the top of the political food chain was threatened by an influx of immigrant Catholic voters into the Democratic party’s ranks, and so they leveraged the anti-slavery sentiment in their cities and got their supporters to the polls by emphasizing long-standing, Protestant associations between Catholicism and slavery.

Rarely at these conferences does anyone give serious consideration to the possibility that people like Morse, Beecher, Conrad, and Smith might actually have been correct—not in the extremity of their paranoia, of course, but in their basic insistence that there was something a little bit incompatible between the mindset of pre-Vatican II Catholics and the understanding that most Americans had in the nineteenth century of what freedom was and how it ought to operate on the individual soul or voter.

Is it any wonder that American Catholic thinkers have drawn upon W.E.B. Dubois’ idea of “twoness” to describe the “unreconciled strivings” that come with being an American and a Catholic?

What is curious about this unwillingness of non-specialists in American Catholic history to entertain the possibility that nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism might have been rooted in something real is that historians who focus on the American Catholic experience have acknowledged for many years now that there was (and to some extent still is) a fundamental tension between “American” and “Catholic” values. Granted, polemicists like George Weigel and Michael Novak would have us believe that there is a seamless philosophical and even theological line running from “Thomas Aquinas to [the Italian Jesuit] Robert Bellarmine to the Anglican divine, Richard Hooker; then from Hooker to John Locke to Thomas Jefferson.” In an essay kicking off the American Catholic bishops’ campaign against the Affordable Care Act in 2012, Weigel insisted that the United States owes more to Catholics for its tradition of religious liberty “than the Sage of Monticello likely ever knew.”

But among those writers on Catholicism who have been motivated by a desire to engage with a faithful rendering of the past (rather than a desire to use history to dismantle the signature legislative achievement of a Democratic president), the consensus is that American Catholics have been animated, in historian Jay Dolan’s words, by “two very diverse traditions,” one exemplified by “Thomas Aquinas and Ignatius of Loyola,” and the other exemplified by “Jefferson and Lincoln.”

Dolan has been joined by John McGreevy, Jim O’Toole, Mark Massa, and others in acknowledging that—to quote Massa —”in the history of Western Christianity, there have been two distinctive (and to some extent, opposing) conceptual languages that have shaped how Christians understand God and themselves.” The first language—which shapes the world of people who have been raised as Catholics, American or otherwise—”utilizes things we know to understand things we don’t know, including and especially God.” The Church, in this language, becomes an incarnation of Jesus—its community and the doctrines and hierarchies that govern that community and can be known and experienced by the community’s members become a tangible (dare we even say “fleshy”?) way for Catholics to comprehend God and the salvation that God promises. The mindset that emerges from a language such as this, according to Mark Massa, is one that exhibits a “fundamental trust and confidence in the goodness of … human institutions.”

The second language, utilized by Protestant theologians from Martin Luther and Jean Calvin to Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, emphasizes the “fact of human estrangement and distance from God.” In this language, it is the Word—the message of judgment and grace, embodied in Christ and found not in the institution of the Church, but in the sanctified lines of Scripture—that convicts the soul, convinces it of its sinfulness, and “prepares us for an internal conversion that makes us true children of God.” The mindset that emerges from language such as this is one that tends to be suspicious of institutions and sees them as distractions that stand between the individual and the Word. Doctrines and hierarchies are “potentially an idolatrous source of overweening pride,” Massa writes; the danger in them is that they are corruptible examples of human beings’ mistaken belief that they can save themselves.

Not all Protestant denominations, of course, have felt the need to jettison the sacramental language that uses the institution of the Church to know and understand God, even as they have embraced an understanding of salvation that sees it as an individual exercise centered entirely upon Scripture. High Church Anglicanism and certain strains of Lutheranism are examples of Protestant denominations that continue to emphasize the idea that the Church—its rituals and traditions—is the embodiment of Christ.

Lutherans and High Church Anglicans, however, did not dominate the political and cultural landscape in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. Neither did Roman Catholics. Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Unitarians dominated that landscape. And these groups, then—and the staunchly Protestant understanding they had of the relationship between God and humanity, the individual and the community, liberty and authority, and rights and responsibilities—were what shaped American identity during those first few decades that followed independence from Great Britain. Given this reality, is it any wonder that American Catholic thinkers have drawn upon W.E.B. Dubois’ idea of “twoness” to describe the “unreconciled strivings” that come with being an American and a Catholic?

Theodore Parker recognized the unreconciled nature of American and Catholic strivings, and he worried—passionately—that when push came to shove, American Catholics would privilege their respect for hierarchy and authority over any respect for liberty and individual rights that they might have developed during their time in America. Naturally, Parker did not phrase his concerns in quite this way; the outspoken minister from Massachusetts who believed that Unitarianism, of all things, was in need of liberal reform was never one for subtlety. “The Roman Catholic Church … is the natural ally of tyrants and the irreconcilable enemy of freedom,” Parker announced in a sermon that he delivered in Boston in June of 1854. As such, “it hates our free churches, free press, and above all our free schools.”

Abolitionists in Boston were up in arms that summer, thanks to the arrest and trial of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns, who was subsequently returned to his master in Virginia in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Theodore Parker wanted his listeners to understand that they would not be able to count on Boston’s growing Catholic population to support the abolitionist movement. “Individual Catholics in America are inconsistent,” he conceded, and did, occasionally, “favor the progress of mankind.” Such people were “exceptional,” however, as the vast majority of Catholics did whatever their priests told them to do. “The Catholic worshiper is not to think, but to believe and obey,” Parker instructed his Protestant audience. The problem with that prescription was that “the Catholic clergy are on the side of slavery.” The labor system was “an institution thoroughly congenial to them,” and recognizing that slavery was “an ulcer which will eat up the Republic,” Catholic priests and bishops in America sought to “stimulate and foster [slavery] for the ruin of democracy, the deadliest foe of the Roman hierarchy.”

There was some truth to what Parker was saying—as discomfiting as that fact may be to twenty-first-century scholars, steeped as they are in the principles of religious pluralism. As George Weigel’s comments about Aquinas and Jefferson make clear, Catholicism is a faith that prides itself on its conservatism and points proudly to its unbroken, historical and theological connection to the earliest propagators of global Christianity: Peter and Paul, who spoke of the mutually beneficial relationship between a master and his slave; Augustine of Hippo, who insisted that slavery, while not a requirement of Natural Law, was a natural consequence of Original Sin; Thomas Aquinas, who believed that slavery brought order to a fallen world where some people were born without an ability to govern themselves; and St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order that served the Catholic population in colonial and early-national America and was responsible for the church’s early institutional and intellectual development in the United States, who implied that slavery could be a powerful tool in the church’s fight against the spread of Protestantism.

Theodore Parker was not wrong to have observed that Catholicism had constructed a complex understanding of slavery’s necessary role in human relations. Long before evangelical leaders managed to convince Protestant planters that it was fine for them to hold their fellow Christians in bondage (and fine, therefore, for them to allow ministers into the slave quarters to effect evangelical conversions among their bondsmen), Catholics in early eighteenth-century Maryland were having their slaves baptized—and then burying them years later in cemeteries that also held the remains of white Catholics. They were designating their slaves as godparents to their own, white children and arranging for priests to oversee slave marriages, even though slaves were not legally allowed to marry in the colony. There was nothing about the Catholic understanding of human existence, in other words, that suggested slavery was incompatible with the will of God.

Even Pope Gregory XVI’s 1839 condemnation of the international slave trade, In Supremo Apostolatus, stopped short of calling for the emancipation of people who were already enslaved. This was not an oversight, according to Charleston’s Bishop John England. Yes, the papal letter referred to human trafficking as “inhumane commerce” and admonished “all believers in Christ” to not “unjustly … reduce to slavery Indians, Blacks, and other such peoples.” But Gregory’s use of the words “unjustly” and “reduce”—in Latin, injuste and redigere—was not accidental, England wrote to Secretary of State John Forsyth, who had previously served as the governor of Georgia. It meant that Pope Gregory was not condemning slavery as it was practiced in the United States; after all, no one in America was “reducing those who were previously free into slavery” anymore.

Theodore Parker’s mistake was not his observation that there was something “congenial” about Catholicism’s relationship with slavery, even or especially slavery in the United States. His mistake was his conviction that Catholics thought of slavery as an “ulcer” that would “eat up the Republic,” and that they supported slavery, therefore, as part of their plan to bring about the “ruin of democracy.” In fact, quite the opposite may have been true.

Historian John McGreevy has pressed modern-day Catholics to accept that the support lent to slavery by Catholic leaders such as Philadelphia’s Bishop Francis Kenrick and Augustin Martin, bishop of Natchitoches, Louisiana, was more than just an angry response to the anti-Catholic tenor of the abolitionist movement. Answering the question of why “so few Catholics … became abolitionists,” McGreevy tells us, “requires consideration of the divide separating liberals from Catholics during much of the nineteenth century.” Catholics had a “wariness about liberal individualism,” seeing it as a source of “social disorder.” This wariness, McGreevy writes, helps to explain why they were “predisposed … to resist pleas for immediate emancipation.”

But the divide between nineteenth-century Catholics and the liberal individualism that defined American identity did more than simply cause Catholics to resist the idea of immediate emancipation. It also made them deeply dependent upon the institution of slavery for their understanding—and, more important, their acceptance—of the republican foundation upon which America’s political culture was built. This foundation was, in many respects, anathema to Catholicism. In the words of Father Joseph Mobberly, a Jesuit who was born in Maryland in 1779, it was “a brother to the great protestant principle that … ‘every man has a right to read and interpret the Scriptures, and consequently, to form his religion on them according to his own notion.'” It’s not that there were no rights within Catholicism; it’s not that there was no freedom. True freedom, however—at least for a Catholic—was not the purview of the individual, the way it was for an American. True freedom could be found only within the community and with the assistance of the leadership of the Church.

Yet, support for the independence movement in colonial America—a liberal movement that emphasized individual freedom and promised republican government—was greater among Catholics than it was among Protestants, except, perhaps, for the Protestants living in Massachusetts and Virginia. In the late eighteenth century, Maryland was home to the vast majority of English-speaking Catholics in British North America. Men there such as Henry Neale, Luke Mattingly, and Ignatius Combs enlisted in the Continental Army and served on Committees of Safety, even as Catholic leaders in Europe, such as Father Arthur O’Leary of Ireland, condemned the war as a “sedition” that would almost certainly “exclude [them] from the kingdom of Heaven.” Ignatius Fenwick, John Dent, and Thomas Semmes helped to draft a new constitution for Maryland as Charles Carroll of Carrollton signed the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Sim Lee, a prominent Catholic convert, ran for and won the governor’s seat in the free state of Maryland before the war was even over.

An astounding 79 percent of the 145 Catholic men who married in St. Mary’s County between 1767 and 1784 swore their allegiance to the free state of Maryland, donated money and supplies to the American war effort, and served in the Continental Army or the St. Mary’s County Militia. Fifty-eight percent of the men who belonged to the Jesuits’ congregation at St. Inigoes Manor in 1768 did the same, and an analysis of the lives of more than 2,000 men from St. Mary’s County who aided the independence movement reveals that more than half of them were probably Catholic, at a time when the Catholic population of St. Mary’s County was between 25 and 32 percent.

In contrast, the most generous estimates argue that just 40 to 45 percent of the white population in all thirteen colonies actively supported the independence movement—and that average includes Massachusetts and Virginia, where support for the Revolution may have been as high as 60 percent. Maryland was home to one of the largest contingents of loyalist soldiers, and Maryland’s merchants were among the last to sign onto the colonial non-importation agreement in the wake of the Stamp Act. Protestants in the colony, in other words, seem to have been ambivalent about independence; that ambivalence, however, was not shared by their Catholic neighbors.

This willingness to challenge traditional authority and to insist on a right to determine the course of some of the affairs governing their lives continued among America’s first Catholics in the decades that followed the American Revolution. In 1786, the members of New York City’s first Catholic parish insisted on the right to choose their priest and determine his salary as a part of the parish’s founding. Five years later, Catholics in Kentucky wanted their priest, Stephen Badin, to provide them with a constitution—an idea that Badin resisted, but one that Bishop John England proved willing to implement in South Carolina and Georgia just three years after his arrival in Charleston in 1820. In 1818, the members of one, tiny Catholic parish in Richmond, Virginia, were so dissatisfied with their indecipherable French priest that they wrote to Thomas Jefferson, pleading with him to use his political influence to pass a federal law that would require the congregational election of all pastors in the United States, regardless of denomination. Their effort failed to move Jefferson, but it testifies to the strongly republican tenor of Catholicism in early America.

Scholars who specialize in American Catholic history have traditionally pointed to what the celebrated British observer of early American culture, Harriet Martineau, called “the spirit of the time” when seeking to comprehend this fiercely republican period in the American church’s development. The period was more or less over by the mid-nineteenth century, brought to an end by the combination of an influx of Irish immigrants—who tended to exhibit a more deferential or “ultramontane” approach to their church’s hierarchy—and a coordinated effort on the part of America’s bishops to stymie what they believed was a “scandalous insubordination toward lawful pastors” and an “evil that tends to ruin the Catholic discipline to schism and heresy.”

Nevertheless, for the first few decades of the Catholic Church’s development in the new United States, lay Catholics were “influenced by broader American notions of authority,” according to historian Jim O’Toole. They were “accustomed to the republican idea that ordinary people such as themselves were the source of power in civil society,” and they assumed, then, that that meant they were the source of at least some power within the Catholic Church, as well.

Undoubtedly, early American Catholics were influenced by the broader American notions of authority that animated their time. This explanation for the Catholic republicanism that characterized the early national period has many merits. The church’s weak infrastructure during the early years of the republic also played a role. John Carroll, the first bishop of the United States, understood that because there were few priests in the country—and virtually no episcopal framework—the Catholic Church was dependent upon the laity for its survival. Carroll had a love-hate relationship with this dependence. As a member of the Society of Jesus, which had been disbanded by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, he felt no particular obligation to advance the Vatican’s authority among Catholics in the United States. Nevertheless, Carroll was a Catholic—which meant he understood the Church and its hierarchy to be the incarnation of Christ. As such, he found some of the laity’s efforts to exert control over their priests to be examples of “libertinism and irreligion,” and he worked, therefore, to increase the number of priests ministering in the United States and to create an episcopal framework for the country.

John Carroll, in many respects, exemplifies why a narrative that points simply to the “spirit of the times” when explaining Catholic republicanism is insufficient. He was a native-born American who supported the independence movement and even traveled to Canada at one point on behalf of the Continental Congress, in an effort to convince the Catholic residents of Montreal to join the Patriots’ movement. He extolled the merits of the First Amendment in public, even though the Vatican would not formally endorse an individual right to religious liberty until 1965. Carroll promised the members of New York’s first parish that he would “extend a proper regard” to their claim that they were entitled to a voice in “the mode of the presentation and election [of pastors].” But even as he promised New York’s Catholics that he would give them this regard, he fretted that they were acting “nearly in the same manner as the Congregational Presbyterians of your neighboring New England states.”

Carroll, in other words, took the “conceptual language” of Catholicism seriously, even as he embraced America’s political culture. He had a “fundamental trust and confidence in the goodness of … human institutions,” and like all Catholics, he believed there was something a little bit dangerous (a.k.a. “Protestant”) about the radical individualism that characterized American life. Catholics’ disproportionate support for the independence movement and their republican approach to the issue of church governance obscures the reality that America’s first Catholics were not a people who challenged authority easily. This does not mean that they were the patsies their Protestant contemporaries often made them out to be; to be Catholic anywhere in the English-speaking world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, after all, constituted a challenge to authority on some level. Catholicism, however, embraces hierarchy as something that is necessary in a fallen world, and it teaches that institutions, rightly formed, are mechanisms through which humanity can come to know God. To be Catholic, therefore, has always been to accept the goodness of boundaries that define relationships in terms of order and obligation. Why, then, were the Catholics who initiated and then oversaw America’s transformation from a collection of British colonies to an autonomous republic willing to challenge the authority of their church and their king?

The answer may have something to do with the reality that the republicanism these Catholics embraced was formulated in a slaveholding context.

When the United States was founded, most of America’s Catholics lived in communities where slavery was the foundation of the economy and the framework onto which all social relations were built. In the eighteenth century, the Chesapeake Bay region was home to the second-largest concentration of slave labor in the burgeoning British Empire. Only the sugar colonies in the Caribbean relied on slavery more. In 1790, when the first formal census of Maryland’s population was taken by the United States’ government, roughly a third of the state’s entire population was enslaved. The majority of these slaves belonged to “elite” planters, whom historians define as landowners whose personal estate was worth more than £650 by the mid-eighteenth century. Among these elite planters, Catholics seem to have been the ones who owned the largest number of people.

Between 1743 and 1759, the average number of slaves owned by an elite planter in Maryland was 22; in contrast, the average number of slaves owned by a Catholic—elite or clerical—during this same period was 31. Some Catholic owners had a relatively small number of slaves; Father Joseph Mosley, for instance, reported to his sister in 1766 that he had just “some Negroes” living with him on his eastern-shore farm. Other Catholics were among the largest slaveholders in the colony. Charles Carroll of Annapolis, for example, had 386 slaves living on his four western-shore estates in 1773. His father, Charles Carroll the Settler, owned 112 people at the time of his death in 1720. When Henry Darnall died in 1711, he had 100 slaves living on his estate in Prince George’s County.

Catholics owned more slaves than Protestants did, not because slavery was more attractive to them as members of the Roman Catholic faith, but because they tended to be the colony’s wealthiest residents. This wealth was a consequence of the recusancy laws that had governed the lives of their Catholic ancestors in early-modern England. By the mid-seventeenth century, England’s Catholics were more affluent than their Protestant countrymen, partly because the Society of Jesus had deliberately targeted gentry families when attempting to sustain Catholicism, illegally, throughout the Elizabethan period, and partly because wealthy families were the ones who could most afford to pay the recusancy fines that James I levied against anyone who failed to attend Anglican worship services during his reign.

These wealthy, English Catholics came early to Maryland, a colony that had been founded in 1634 by a Catholic nobleman. They brought their wealth with them and augmented it, then, with the tobacco harvests they were able to reap from the large tracts of land they received in exchange for the indentured servants they brought to the colony. By 1758, ten of the colony’s twenty largest estates belonged to Catholics, although Maryland’s governor estimated that Catholics were just seven percent of the white population.

The world that America’s first Catholics lived in, therefore, was similar to the world that historian Edmund Morgan’s “most ardent American republicans”—i.e., colonial Virginians—lived in. The republicanism that Catholics embraced, consequently, was not built on a foundation of individualism (or, increasingly, anti-Catholicism), the way it was for northern Protestants like Jedidiah Morse and Lyman Beecher. Catholic republicanism—like the southern, “herrenvolk” republicanism that Ed Morgan, Gene Genovese, and Lacy Ford have all identified—was a racialized republicanism, built on a foundation of ordered relationships that were defined and defended by the institution of race-based slavery.

Republican society for southerners and early-national Catholics alike was not one in which freedom and individualism ran amok, the way they did in The Planter’s Northern Bride, an 1854 novel by Caroline Lee Hentz, whose depiction of the horrors of the industrializing North was at least as accurate as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s rendering of the brutality of the slaveholding South. For Catholics and southerners, republican society , at least rhetorically, was one in which communal obligations were honored and relationships were ordered in such a way as to allow for the basic, human needs of all individuals to be met, while at the same time giving a growing number of men—white men—the freedom to cultivate their individual talents.

This “positive good” argument for slavery gained traction in the South in the 1820s and ’30s, primarily as a defensive response to the controversy over the Missouri Compromise and the fear that Nat Turner’s Rebellion provoked in 1831. Its roots, however, can be found in the earlier responses of southerners like Parson Weems and Timothy Ford to the French Revolution and the efforts of yeoman farmers in South Carolina to expand their representation in the state’s legislature by not allowing low-country planters to count their slaves when determining district apportionment. Weems insisted that the sans culottes misunderstood “equality,” since the condition, properly speaking, was a matter only of “equal dignity … in appropriate station.” Ford believed, self-servingly, that slaves should be counted in the process of apportionment because slavery helped societies realize the liberal ideal. “In the country where personal freedom and the principles of equality were carried to the greatest extent ever known,” he wrote in 1794, referring to ancient Sparta, “domestic slavery was the most common, and under the least restraint.”

The reality of race-based slavery and the rhetoric that planters increasingly used to justify it made republicanism and individual freedom “safe” for early-American Catholics to embrace by ensuring that the bonds of hierarchy and reciprocal obligation that were so important to the Catholic understanding of human relations remained intact. America’s first Catholics did not worry that what one late-nineteenth-century priest disparagingly referred to as “the principle of private judgment” would “produce disruption in civil as well as in religious society.” Early American Catholics—not just the laity, but even some clergy, like Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore and Bishop John England of Charleston—believed that they could challenge lawful authority, even to the point of waging war, and it would not lead to “exaggerated fanaticism” or “render government impossible, unless by brute force.” They believed they could do this, because even as they challenged authority, America’s first Catholics did so in a context that had clearly defined boundaries of prerogative and duty.

To say that slavery played a role in the making of an early-American Catholic identity is not to say that America’s first Catholics were “slavish.” It is also not to agree with Theodore Parker that Catholicism was or is an “irreconcilable enemy of freedom.” The argument does not even require us to accept that Catholics could not have embraced the republican tenets of American identity without the mitigating influence of slavery. The Irish Catholic newspaper editor Matthew Carey, after all, became a staunch advocate of republicanism after he arrived in Philadelphia in 1784, at a time when slaves made up less than one percent of Pennsylvania’s population. As Edmund Morgan wrote with regard to his fiery Virginians: “This is not to say that a belief in republican equality had to rest on slavery, but only that in Virginia (and probably other southern colonies) it did.”

Matthew Carey aside, the fact is that America’s first Catholics did, by and large, embrace republicanism in a slaveholding context, and we will never know if Charles Carroll, Ignatius Fenwick, or Thomas Sim Lee would have accepted the ideology at the heart of the American Revolution without the reality of race-based slavery. What we do know is that the only active, Catholic loyalists in the colonies were not from Maryland; the “Roman Catholic Volunteers” were a group of around 200 Catholics from Pennsylvania who, unlike their religious brethren to the south, did not encounter the freewheeling, individualistic qualities of republicanism in a slave-holding context.

We also know that in the years that followed the American Revolution, as non-slaveholding alternatives to lived republicanism became available to white southerners—thanks in large part to a deliberate easing of manumission laws in the Upper South—Catholics eschewed these alternatives, even as some of their Protestant neighbors chose to accept them. This Catholic unwillingness to see slavery as incompatible with individual freedom may have been a consequence of the fact that the slaveholding context in which Catholics embraced the tenets of American identity made republicanism less radical—and therefore more palatable—to a group of people whose religious worldview had clearly defined boundaries of authority and obligation.

In the seven years that followed the end of the Revolutionary War, between 7,000 and 10,000 slaves in Maryland were freed by their masters—a phenomenal spike in manumissions that scholars have pointed to as a sign that some slaveholding members of America’s founding generation recognized that slavery could not be easily reconciled with the ideology of the American Revolution. Few, if any, of these manumitting masters seem to have been Catholic.

Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Edward Fenwick (Ignatius’ son), and Thomas Sim Lee did consider releasing some of their slaves from bondage—but not until well into the nineteenth century. Carroll, who died in 1832, made arrangements in his will to free one slave, Bill, out of the more than 300 people he owned. He also manumitted seven slaves in 1808 who claimed to be descended from a free white woman, Nell Butler, and were already suing for their freedom. Thomas Sim Lee manumitted one of his slaves, Nell, and all of her children in June of 1815. The woman’s name suggests that she, too, may have claimed an ancestral connection to Nell Butler, as quite a few slaves in Maryland did. Edward Fenwick promised in 1825 to let his slave Michael purchase his freedom for $318. By 1830, Michael had paid Fenwick $218, and he had found a man named Gardiner who was willing to provide the remaining $100. Fenwick agreed to release Michael after he had worked for Gardiner for three years. In 1833, however, when Gardiner petitioned for Michael’s release, Edward Fenwick refused.

In 1790, the Catholic strongholds of St. Mary’s, Charles, and Prince George’s counties had the highest free-black-to-slave ratios in all of Maryland. In Prince George’s County, the ratio of free black to enslaved was 1 to 68, meaning that 99 percent of the people of African ancestry in Prince George’s County were enslaved. In contrast, the heavily Calvinist Anne Arundel County had a free-black-to-enslaved ratio of 1 to 13. Planters in both counties cultivated tobacco, a very labor-intensive product. Yet, in spite of the need for labor, in Anne Arundel County, more than 7 percent of the black population enjoyed a modicum of freedom.

Much to the frustration of historians, very few manumission papers actually list the slaveholders’ reasons for freeing their slaves. That being said, several records from Maryland in the 1780s and 90s—the brief period after the war that saw a spike in manumissions—do point to the belief that slavery violated “the inalienable rights of Mankind,” or that a slave was entitled to the “free enjoyment of his rights and liberty.” It is noteworthy, therefore, that none of the records after 1802 point to these principles when explaining a manumission. While some slaveholding Americans may have been keenly aware of the disconnect between their property and their principles in the aftermath of the American Revolution, that awareness seems to have worn off as time marched on, and historians believe that the slave manumissions that occurred in the nineteenth century, then—that is to say, the period when Catholics tended to manumit their slaves—were motivated by other factors, such as the declining profitability of slavery in the Upper South.

None of this information requires that Catholics be condemned as a group for failing to manumit their slaves in the immediate wake of the American Revolution. The truth is that most Methodists, Anglicans, and Calvinists did not free their slaves during this period, either. But some did. And the fact that Catholics did not suggests that they may not have seen the hierarchical and authoritarian reality of slavery as inconsistent with the republican principles they embraced when they became Americans.

In this respect, then, Theodore Parker ought not to be dismissed as a religious bigot, simply because he frequently observed that he “never knew of a Catholic … who favored freedom in America.” Parker probably didn’t ever meet or read about a Catholic who embraced freedom as he—a liberal Unitarian—understood it. Freedom, for him, was something wholly and completely individual; it manifested itself most clearly in the “personal self-rule of modern times.” Theodore Parker never spoke of the U.S. Constitution as an example of “well-regulated republicanism,” the way Bishop John England of Charleston did; he never lauded the American system as one that embodied “the conservative principle of freedom” that respected “the spirit of the community …without such a spirit, and such precautions, no true liberty can exist.” That’s because Theodore Parker didn’t share John England’s very Catholic belief that republicanism needed to be “regulated” or reined in by anything other than individual virtue.

It is probably still true that the politicians and religious leaders who railed against Catholicism in the first half of the nineteenth century were motivated by a certain degree of status anxiety—some, perhaps, such as Lyman Beecher, more than others. But it is also true that these leaders were motivated by a real sense that the Catholic understanding of freedom was different from theirs, and they were right to see Catholics’ support of the institution of slavery as the embodiment of this difference. Freedom, for Catholics, was corporate; it was born of the “reciprocal duties” that one priest from colonial Maryland insisted all people had to one another. Freedom, for Catholics, was not “personal,” the way it was for Protestants like Theodore Parker.

It is no small irony, therefore, that modern-day Catholics like Bishop William Lori of Baltimore have been appealing to personal freedom in their attempt to protect the collective freedom of the Catholic Church from the mandates of a law that supporters say defines healthcare as a “requirement of a free life that the community has an obligation to provide.” In 2012, on the eve of the Church’s first “Fortnight for Freedom”—a now annual event that highlights “government coercions against conscience” such as the birth control provision in the Affordable Care Act—Lori made his reasons for opposing the healthcare overhaul clear: “If we fail to defend the rights of individuals,” he warned, “the freedom of institutions will be at risk.”

It was an assertion that—could he have heard it—might have confounded Mr. Parker, or at the very least given him pause.

Further Reading:

For more on the differences between a Catholic and a Protestant mindset—and the challenges, then, that those differences posed for Catholic assimilation into American culture—see: Jay Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (New York, 2002); Mark S. Massa, Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York, 2003); John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom (New York, 2003); and James M. O’Toole, The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).

For more on traditionalist Catholic claims to religious liberty and the recent “Fortnight for Freedom” movement sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops see: Michael Novak,“The Return of the Catholic Whig,” First Things, March 1990; George Weigel, “‘Fortnight for Freedom’: U.S. Catholics and Religious Liberty: The Origins,” First Things, June 20, 2012; Melinda Henneberger, “Is the Catholic ‘Fortnight for Freedom’ really a ‘Fortnight to Defeat Barak Obama?’” op-ed, Washington Post, June 7, 2012; Rich Daly, “What the 112th Congress Faces,”National Catholic Register, January 21, 2011.

Theodore Parker’s comments about the link between Catholicism and slavery can be found in his essay “The Rights of Man in America” (1854) in The Rights of Man in America, F.B. Sanborn, ed. (Boston, 1911). Bishop John England’s interpretation of In Supremo Apostolatus can be found in his letter to Secretary of State John Forsyth, September 29, 1840, in Letters of the Late Bishop England to the Hon. John Forsyth, rpt. (Independence, Ky., 2012).

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3 (Spring, 2015).

Maura Jane Farrelly is associate professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, where she directs the Journalism Program. Before joining Brandeis, she worked as a full-time reporter in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New York. Farrelly is the author of Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (2012).

The commemoration of the Nat Fuller Feast held this past April was a once-in-a-lifetime event. I’m still humbled that I was invited to sit and break bread with the other guests. Because I am a descendant of Eliza Seymour Lee (she was my great-great-grandmother), who played an integral part in Nat Fuller’s training, the evening was especially enchanting.

For me, what Nat did after the war is unprecedented. He decided to hold a huge feast in celebration—but not just to celebrate the end of the war, but to celebrate what the end of the war would mean—slaves, free blacks, and whites now had the opportunity to live their lives equally and together.

As a child growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, I always remembered my mother talking about our relative Eliza Lee and the inn that she ran on Broad Street. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a Piggly Wiggly grocery store on Broad Street. My mother always said it was originally the site of the Lee Hotel (or Mansion House Hotel). As a six-year-old, knowing that my ancestor had a famous hotel 100-plus years earlier on that very spot made me feel quite proud! Even before I knew this story, I had already been bitten by the hospitality (industry) bug. At the age of three or four, my favorite TV show was Julia Child’s “The French Chef.” (In retrospect, this seems interesting since I now know that Eliza was French-trained in the culinary arts.) While most kids would ask for candy or soda from the grocery store, I would ask for smoked oysters and stuffed olives so I could cook and create my masterpieces. Once I’d received these ingredients, I would pull up a dining room chair to the kitchen counter and make my little versions of assorted “hors d’oeuvres.” The only guidelines given by my mother were not to lick the knife, and not to put anything back on the plate if it had been dropped. Surely, I was channeling my great-great-grandmother, even back then!

I must confess that I had never heard about Nat Fuller, or his feast, before last year. But of course Eliza Lee would have had apprentices; it makes sense that she would have needed very skilled help to run her catering business, bakery, inns, and restaurant. I’m still not clear if she had more than one protégé. I wonder if there were others, equally talented, whose stories still remain unknown. After receiving the invitation to the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Nat Fuller Feast, I wanted to learn everything I could about him. Nat Fuller’s vision amazes me. When anyone refers to someone thinking “light years ahead of themselves,” he should always be referenced. I mean, we’re talking about a cook who was a slave until the mayor of the city turned it over to a Union Army general. I wonder how Nat would have felt if he had known that, almost 100 years later, a man named Martin Luther King Jr. would be trying to do what he had actually succeeded in doing: creating a moment when former slaves and former slaveowners sat “down together at the table of brotherhood.”

For me, what Nat did after the war is unprecedented. He decided to hold a huge feast in celebration—but not just to celebrate the end of the war, but to celebrate what the end of the war would mean—slaves, free blacks, and whites now had the opportunity to live their lives equally and together.

The question that I reflect on the most? How did he come up with his list of guests for that evening? We know that he invited his former white clients, the most significant people in the African American community (members of the Brown Society, etc.), and some prominent officials in the occupying government to be his guests at his famous restaurant, the Bachelor’s Retreat. But did he carefully comb through a list of possible attendees to come up with the perfect list? Though I think people may think that, I want to believe the list was created with less discretion. I’ve been in the hospitality industry for most of my life, a career that’s included formal training at Johnson & Wales University. Feeling that I have the same passion about food and caring for others as Nat Fuller had makes me feel confident that he was trying to focus on expressing his gratefulness for the new ways of life to come. I also believe he wanted to share his gratitude with people that he felt would not only understand, but also be comfortable with the thought of reconciliation, and appreciate his joy. I do feel that he gave some thought to the targeted groups that he wanted to invite. How excited he must have been knowing that he would have a former slave, a free white person, and an official from the Union Army all sitting together eating and having a conversation. To have been a fly on the wall …

I want to thank Professor Shields for the many hours it took to put the April 19, 2015, Nat Fuller Feast together. He truly recreated the occasion for social unity that Nat Fuller wanted to achieve. Of all of the comments and conversations that evening at the table, among the most memorable was several guests noting that they had lived in Charleston all their lives, and had never seen these attendees—from all walks of life, different social groups, etc.—all at the same dinner table. They said if it ever happened again, it would be at the next Nat Fuller Feast dinner. Now, after the horrible events of June 17, it might seem as if reconciliation is still too far off. But in spite of tragedy and strife, Charlestonians continue to lay down their differences and work together … today, as well as 150 years ago.

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

Robin Lee Griffith is the CEO and founder of Epicuity, LLC, a company concentrating on food, fundraising, and philanthropy. She has 35 years of experience in the food industry, including study at Johnson & Wales University.

Students are fascinated by the use of visuals in the classroom. The fine arts provide a wonderful way to transform lectures into exciting and engaging discussions. Paintings provide accessible representations of some of the more complicated themes to which the students are exposed in their humanities-based classes. One painting that I have used with my Advanced Placement United States History students is John Singleton Copley’s The Copley Family.  This painting serves as a wonderful springboard for discussions of gendered constructs of power, historiography, and the Lockean justification of the right to rebel.

John Singleton Copley, a resident of Boston, Massachusetts, for most of his life, until he moved to England in 1774, began to portray himself and his family on canvas in 1776, just as thirteen of Britain’s North American colonies were in the process of declaring their independence. Even though Copley was in England at the time he completed this work, and while he was to some degree a Loyalist through marriage, the painting reveals much about changes that occurred in the American family during the late eighteenth century and that were related to the Lockean ideals that drove the American Revolution. Just as Jefferson turned to Lockean thought to justify the American Revolution, Copley captures the Lockean ideal of the family on canvas. In this sense, Loyalist, or at the very least political neutral, and Patriot converge. 

Before unveiling Copley’s depiction of his family for the students, we explore certain topics related to the relationship between gender and power; in particular, I explain the evolution in the colonies from the Filmerian system to the Lockean system. The Filmerian system, dominant in early-modern English political thought, viewed the family as a microcosm of the state. The father became a miniature king, and the wife, children, and servants became the patriarch’s subjects. 

I ask my students to speculate about any impact this gendered construct of power would have had on the issue of rebellion. The students gradually begin to uncover the notion that this construct supported the idea of absolutism as it reinforced a distinct social hierarchy that was basically masculine in nature. I explain to the students that during the English Civil War the Royalists formulated an argument against rebellion that proved unshakable for nearly half a century. The Royalists reasoned that since families were miniature kingdoms and fathers were, in essence, kings, if subjects did indeed have the right to rebel, then dependents in the home had the right to rebel against the patriarch. The Roundheads could not address this argument and thus failed to adequately philosophically justify their rebellion.

Inevitably a student will want to know how Jefferson could defend revolution in the Declaration; how did he succeed where the Roundheads had failed? This begins to move the class toward an examination of The Copley Family. I explain to the class that it took another rebellion to produce a work that would change attitudes toward both rebellion and the family. John Locke, in defending the Glorious Revolution, 1688/89, both successfully defended the right to rebel, and thus influenced Jefferson as he wrote the Declaration, and reconstructed the notion of the family, which influenced Copley when he painted The Copley Family. Locke challenged the Filmerian System as he redefined the state of nature. To Locke, reason dictated that man should help his fellow man, while biology dictated that man should enter into a relationship with a woman and eventually start a family. However, Locke recognized that reason does not guide everyone, thus necessitating the creation of government to protect both one’s life and property. Locke showed that the state and the family were not related nor were they analogous since the family emerged before the state. To Locke, the right to rebel had nothing to do with rebellion within the home; homes were not miniature monarchies, and husbands were not miniature monarchs.

Locke successfully separated the state and the family, thus allowing for the right of rebellion to exist in a manner less threatening to patriarchs. With this right to rebel established, Jefferson was able to successfully defend the colonies’ right to rebel against England in the Declaration of Independence. Yet the Lockean ideal of the family also redefined the woman’s role in society. The idea of the Cult of Domesticity emerged with the American Revolution and provided a way in which women could find a role in the new republic. Women were the instruments through which morally upright, virtuous citizens would enter political life, something essential in a republic. Men, though less virtuous, were more capable of surviving in the more dangerous public sphere while women, being more nurturing, were better suited to raise children. 

At this point I show the students The Copley Family.  The painting reflects all of these themes nicely. I take the students from one section of the painting to another, asking how the painting reflects this Lockean ideal of the family. The students are quick to point out how Copley’s wife, Susanna, looks lovingly at her son, who equally lovingly looks toward her. All the while yet another child clings to Susanna’s arm, fearfully looking at the viewer; comfort can only be found in her mother’s arms. Students can see how the virtue and nurturing nature of women is clearly reflected in the mother’s face and through the calm manner she exhibits as not one but two children demand her attention. The students find it humorous as we juxtapose the loving relationship between mother and children with the interaction between Copley’s father-in-law and daughter. The grandfather looks off in the distance away from the child, he holds the child in an incredibly awkward manner, and the discomfort felt by the child is clearly evident on the child’s face as the child unsuccessfully reaches out to her grandfather for comfort.

In discussing eye contact made by the subjects in the painting with the viewer, a perceptive student observes that Copley himself is one of three figures to look directly toward us, and wonders if that matters. One student suggests he may be pulling the viewers into the painting as he intimately engages us through eye contact. Another student offers that he is tying himself to the public sphere by looking away from his family and toward the painting’s audience. At this point, a student observes that Copley is unveiling the public sphere that exists behind the curtains. We begin to agree that this world is his world, masculine in nature, not fit for women. His wife is oblivious to this world as she looks inward, toward her child and family, in her own sphere. 

The students have now examined a visual reflection of the familial ideal that shaped the emerging republic as women became relegated to the private sphere and men dominated the public sphere. Through discussion, students point out that it is this model that the suffragists, Lowell factory girls, and even women soldiers in the Civil War challenged as they attempted to enter the public sphere. But the students’ exploration of this beautiful painting is not over. I inform the students that while the painting strongly suggests that gendered spheres were indeed emerging just as the United States declared its independence, not all historians support the idea that such a gendered division of society existed during this period. While the Lockean system may have been an ideal construct, it was not an entirely accurate portrayal of early national and antebellum American society. Women did find ways in which to operate within the public sphere, which was supposedly masculine and inaccessible to them. Carolyn Lawes argues nicely in her work Women and Reform that such gendered spheres were not the reality in antebellum America. Lawes demonstrates that through the church, through sewing circles, through work with orphans, and through work outside of the home, women found “room to maneuver” and challenge the ideals of Republican Motherhood and the Cult of Domesticity. In essence, by using the very stereotypes that attempted to relegate women to the home, women were able to find ways in which they could “exert themselves and enforce their will upon a rapidly changing community.” 

In this light, the students explore how The Copley Family could reveal not only the ideal of the Cult of Domesticity, but the painting could also reveal a society in which public and private spheres merged. A student will mention how the only other figure besides Copley and his young daughter—the one who is holding onto Susanna in distress—to clearly look at the viewer is Copley’s oldest daughter who stands alone in the center of the painting. We all agree that she exerts a degree of independence as she pulls the viewer into the painting to meet her family. She is not tied to the domestic sphere but, like her father, is interacting with the viewer who is in the public sphere. A student excitedly observes that the doll tossed to the side in the painting wears the same clothes as this daughter. Another student suggests that this could reinforce the idea that she is approaching adulthood since the doll is tied to her through clothing yet has been tossed to the side. The class tends to agree that this is a young lady who will soon be finding ways to interact in the public sphere. I then point out to the students how the floral pattern on the carpet allows the private sphere to merge with the public sphere that Copley reveals to the viewer. The floral pattern on the carpet ties the home to the public sphere, thus suggesting that the two spheres are interconnected, similar to the “unofficial sphere” that Catherine Allgor examines in her work Parlor Politics, in which the women of Washington D.C. allowed their homes to become the medium through which national political issues could be settled. In this manner, The Copley Family not only reflects the themes related to Republican Motherhood and the Cult of Domesticity, it also nicely reflects the rich and complex historiography surrounding women’s history during the early national and antebellum periods.

Using The Copley Family in the classroom provides an excellent visual representation of important themes related to the founding of the United States, allowing students to explore these themes but also to better understand how to work with primary documents and to realize that history is truly a dialogue among historians. Teachers can enhance their lessons greatly by turning to the fine arts as a foundation upon which to create lessons and begin class discussions. In this way, the teacher can produce multimodal lessons that can pull visual learners into class discussions and enhance overall student understanding and enjoyment of history. 

Further Reading:

Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, 2000); DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2002); Ava Chamberlain, “The Immaculate Ovum: Jonathan Edwards and the Construction of the Female Body,” William and Mary Quarterly 57 (2000): 289-322; Richard Allen Chapman, “Leviathan Writ Small: Thomas Hobbes on the Family,” The American Political Science Review 69 (1975): 76-90; Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550-1700 (Ithaca, 1994); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980); Carolyn Lawes, Women and Reform in a New England Community 1815-1860 (Lexington, 2000), quoted at 182; Elizabeth D. Leonard, All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies (New York, 1999); Ann M. Little, review of A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender in William and Mary Quarterly, 56 (1999): 624-28; Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1996); Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought,” in The Family in Political Thought, ed. by J. B. Elshtain (Amherst, 1982); Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Founders: Race, Class, Sex and Justice in the Origins of America (Lanham, 2001); Karin Wulf, Not all Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca, 2000).

This article originally appeared in issue 4.4 (July, 2004).

B. Scott Crawford taught western civilization in the Center for Humanities and Advanced Placement U.S. History at Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, for seven years; he is currently the social studies coordinator, grades k-12, for Roanoke City Public Schools.

The ancient Mediterranean in early America

Early Americans loved the classical world. They admired classical art. They signed public documents with classical names (like the “Publius” of The Federalist). They posed for paintings and statues as classical heroes. They decorated their houses as classical temples. They read the classics until the bitter end. “When the decays of age have enfeebled the useful energies of the mind,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1819, “the classic pages fill up the vacuum of ennui, and become sweet composers to that rest of the grave into which we are all, sooner or later, to descend.”

But for all their admiration of ancient Greece and Rome, early Americans also looked beyond those two civilizations to the ancient Mediterranean more broadly. In other words, they got the big picture, a whole Mediterranean that included not just Greece and Rome but Egypt, the Phoenicians, the Persians, and many more. All these societies were known to early Americans from books and maps that we tend to call “classical,” or to divide artificially into distinct units like Oriental, biblical, and classical.

But eighteenth-century Americans were less inclined to focus on the isolated pieces of the Mediterranean puzzle than they were to look at the big picture. This had a number of important implications. First, eighteenth-century Americans did not necessarily think of the nonclassical civilizations of antiquity as exotic or barbaric. Today, we think a lot about the so-called East-West polarity, and we imagine that it has been there forever. But it was not as pronounced in the eighteenth century, when Europeans and Americans discussed nonclassical Mediterranean civilizations without necessarily labeling them as strange, hostile, or exotic. In fact, these civilizations supplied useful information for Americans about matters ranging from politics to religion to art to language to science. Eighteenth-century Americans believed that while Greece and Rome had certainly played an important role in laying the groundwork for later European and American societies, these other, nonclassical civilizations were also to be credited for influence. Nor were they sealed off from Greece and Rome; it was recognized that in antiquity (just as in their own, eighteenth-century world) civilizations overlapped and synthesized, borrowed and lent.

The big picture also reminded Americans that the Greeks and Romans could be criticized as much as admired. Roman monuments were very beautiful—until you remembered that they “were raised at the expense of the freedom of the rest of the world,” wrote John Izard Middleton in his Grecian Remains in Italy (1812). Middleton, a wealthy southerner and aesthete, made a delightful artistic tour of Italy in the early nineteenth century. What fascinated him was less the ruins of Rome (they filled him with “regret”) than the ruins of the peoples who came before Rome. Those pre-Roman peoples had just been minding their own business, worshipping their household gods; then along came the Romans, wrecking everything in their zeal for “universal dominion.”

This big picture started to shrink in the nineteenth century as Americans, like Europeans, became interested in tracing the origin of “Western Civilization” to just one part of the Mediterranean: to a noble race of ancient Greeks, who single-handedly invented all that was beautiful and true and free. The Greeks then passed the torch to the more pragmatic Romans, who codified and stabilized Greek learning before handing it off to the medieval Europeans, who then handed it to modern Europeans and Americans. This new, nineteenth-century story about the evolution of the Mediterranean emphasized Greek originality and invention and its intact transmission from Greece to Rome to Europe to America. The rest of the Mediterranean was still there, of course, but it became less important in the story of how we got here.

In 1930, this modern view of the importance of Greek civilization was captured with breathtaking clarity by Edith Hamilton in her best-selling book, The Greek Way. Her title says it all: there was a distinct people (“the Greeks,” by which she meant the classical Athenians) who shared one culture (a “way”). The Greek way was the cradle of the West and modern America. “None of the great civilizations that preceded them and surrounded them served them as model,” wrote Hamilton of the ancient Greeks. “With them something completely new came into the world. They were the first Westerners; the spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.” And there it was. The Greeks were the cradle of the West. No others need apply.

But this hermetically sealed version of the story of how they became us would have surprised eighteenth-century Americans. With ideas of nationalism still forming and with a far richer immersion in a larger variety of classical texts, maps, and images than is typical of even highly educated Americans today, eighteenth-century Americans had the motive and opportunity for viewing the ancient Mediterranean much more broadly. While still seeing the Greeks and Romans as first and best, they nonetheless delighted in looking beyond, before, and after the classical world for instruction and emulation. In my book, The Mirror of Antiquity, I showed how the so-called neoclassical style that swept America around 1790-1830 was in fact not just Greek or Roman in inspiration but also Turkish and Syrian, that is, a fusion of western/classical and eastern/Oriental elements. (It helps to know that the word neoclassical was not used in the period 1790-1830; it is the label of a later era, and it misrepresents the broad interests and influences of the earlier period by suggesting that they are only classical rather than also nonclassical.)

The big picture, the ancient Mediterranean of eighteenth-century Americans, is easy for historians to find. First of all, it lives gloriously in the huge coffee-table books of the eighteenth century, whose size allowed for the reproduction of what were literally big pictures. These folio editions of ancient sites include gigantic maps and big, gaudy, hand-colored engravings of crumbling temples and chipped urns from ancient Spain, Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Syria, Persia, and North Africa. Because they were so big and expensive, these books were printed and illustrated in Europe. But by the late eighteenth century they started to be purchased by some of the great institutions of Enlightenment America, like the Library Company of Philadelphia.

The big picture can also be found in the Greco-Roman texts that filled the greatest private libraries of this age, like those of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. These libraries tend to get described by modern historians as “classical,” which is true as far as it goes. But the simple term “classical” hides the fact that the Greeks and Romans whose writings crowd these libraries constantly talked about other Mediterranean peoples, their influences, their virtues and failings. Though we label such early American libraries as “classical,” it is important to remember that they were a major source for American knowledge about the larger Mediterranean world.

And finally the big picture comes into focus in the most intimate letters, diaries, and recollections of eighteenth-century Americans, during an era when Mediterranean antiquity was so very present and relevant that one might actually write about it in a letter to a spouse or a friend. When John Adams found himself in Spain in 1779, he visited a “very ancient Monument” of mysterious origin. “It is conjectured that it was created by the Phenicians,” he observed in his autobiography, showing that he knew how this ancient seafaring people from the eastern Mediterranean had colonized Spain before the domination of Rome.

If we surveyed the ancient Mediterranean, eighteenth-century American style, what would it look like?

First of all, Carthage would immediately rise into view. A mighty North African city that dominated the Mediterranean for about six hundred years after roughly 800 BCE, Carthage fascinated eighteenth-century Americans. The popularity of Carthage had a lot to do with eighteenth-century Americans’ concerns about empire building and nation building. Recently members of the British Empire and then in the business of launching their own empire to the west, Americans looked to the long-lived, spectacularly successful seaborne colonial and mercantile might of Carthage as a positive example to be imitated. They were fascinated by the idea that Carthage had been successful at trade without degenerating into luxury and debauchery, a fate that the historians of Rome warned awaited those who abandoned martial, agrarian values for the temptations of materialism. They were also taken by the idea that Carthage influenced Rome and Greece, just as Greece and Rome influenced Carthage. A lot of respected authorities—from Oviedo to correspondents of Thomas Jefferson—even thought that the Carthaginians had originally peopled the Americas. Far from being dead and forgotten, Carthage was alive in the eighteenth century, the focus of a lot of debates about the here and now.

A map of Carthage published in the middle of the eighteenth century confirms the importance of the ancient city to Americans at that time (fig. 1). Entitled The Carthaginian Empire in Africa, it centers not on Rome and Greece but on western North Africa and the Carthaginian colony of Spain. The toe of the boot of Rome appears at the top, kicking Sicily, also a Carthaginian colony. Greece is nowhere in sight.

This Carthage-eye view of the world was not locked away in some obscure library. It appeared in what was perhaps the most widely read book of ancient history in the English-speaking world at this time: Charles Rollin’s Ancient History (1730-1738), originally published in French and quickly translated into English. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, Rollin was read in England and America, by men and women, boys and girls, in libraries, colleges, female academies, and reading circles. The title of Rollin’s book is usually shortened to Ancient History, but the complete title is an example of the big picture. In full, it is The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians, and Grecians. So the big picture was available to anyone who wanted to read Rollin and look at his maps. It made a lot of sense in the eighteenth-century world of Atlantic sea empires, in which whole peoples collided and melded. There was also much that was practically useful about ancient Carthage for revolutionary Americans. James Madison spent a lot of time reading about Carthage as he prepared to draft the essay that became Federalist no. 63, which holds Carthage up as a model for how Americans might create a long-lasting, stable senate. Though definitely not “classical,” the city stars in this essay next to “classical” states such as Rome and Sparta.

Even Rome was much more complicated to eighteenth-century Americans than modern readers might imagine from reading the automatic praise of ancient Rome that crowds Revolutionary American documents. Though we often speak casually of ancient Rome as interchangeable with ancient Italy, educated eighteenth-century Americans were aware that other peoples had inhabited the peninsula before the Romans. The mysterious and beautiful remains left by these pre-Romans posed an implicit challenge to the idea of Roman imperial hegemony.

There were the archaic Greeks, for example, who were colonizing southern Italy and Sicily (an area called Magna Graecia) by the eighth century BCE, well before their so-called Golden Age in Athens a couple of centuries later. Magna Graecia was important enough to Rollin’s story that he gave it its own map in the Ancient History (fig. 2). The cities of Magna Graecia featured magnificent temples built in the simple, robust Doric style. Some of these early temples were rediscovered by Europeans in the eighteenth century at the ancient city of Paestum, south of Naples. Of course, the temples had been slowly rotting away there for two thousand years. But it was only in the eighteenth century that classically interested Americans (like Ralph Izard and Alice Delancey Izard) and Europeans traveling to southern Italy on the Grand Tour began to care about what those ruined temples meant. What they meant was that there had been a great civilization in Italy that predated the Roman conquest. So Europeans painted the ruins as silent witnesses to pre-Roman grandeur, and these engravings bedecked the numerous books on Magna Graecia published in the late eighteenth century.

In fact, a funny thing happened on the way to Magna Graecia: by the late eighteenth century there may have been more information easily available about the early Greek temples at Paestum than there was information on the Greek temples of Athens, which are so much better known today and which epitomize—to us, at least—what ancient Greece was “really like.” Magna Graecia was all the rage in the eighteenth century because the temples of Paestum were in Italy rather than Greece, and so they were easier for Europeans and Americans to reach. Paestum offered a glimpse not just of ancient Greek architecture in the convenient setting of Italy but also—perhaps more importantly—proof of the attractive idea that the Greeks had launched empires as a first step toward cultural perfection. The Doric temple style eventually became the darling of American builders of the so-called Greek Revival after 1800. At that point the “ancient Greece” it represented was associated with Golden Age Athens and not archaic Paestum. But well before this there is evidence that Americans were bitten by the Paestum bug. In the late eighteenth century the Library Company of Philadelphia acquired Thomas Major’s Ruins of Paestum (1768), which was full of large engravings of the temples decaying picturesquely in the Italian countryside. Some Americans even imported cork replicas of the crumbling Paestum temples.

Ancient, pre-Roman Italy also included the Etruscans, the early peoples of the area in central Italy later absorbed by Rome. The Etruscans soared to popularity in the eighteenth century as a direct product of rising Tuscan nationalism, as modern Italians in the region around Rome began to excavate Etruscan sites and to claim a pre-Roman grandeur for Etruria. Temples, roads, pots—so many objects in and around Rome now appeared to antedate the Roman conquest of central Italy. By the late eighteenth century, images of these Etruscan objects were popularized around Europe and later America by the illustrated book trade.

“Etruscan” style could be a pretty haphazard label. So many peoples had settled on the Italian peninsula over the millennia that it was difficult for eighteenth-century excavators to determine whether a vase or monument was Etruscan, Roman, Greek, or something else entirely. “Etruscan” usually implied that a pot’s decorations were black and orangey-red. As Etruscan style swept over late-eighteenth-century European and American homes, this dramatic color scheme became all the rage. The Scottish architect Robert Adam decorated several stately homes in England in this way. Americans probably became most familiar with Etruscan color scheme through the pottery of Josiah Wedgwood. Fascinated by the Etruscan style, he named his pottery plant “Etruria” and pioneered the modern factory production of new “Etruscan” ware that was black and blood red. American magazines kept the public abreast of Etruscomania, discussing the latest archaeological finds and promoting the Etruscan style in furniture decoration and dress.

An important book for popularizing the “Etruscan” style in eighteenth-century America and Europe was also in itself a monument to the spectacular possibilities of the book. This was Pierre F. H. d’Hancarville’s Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Honble. Wm. Hamilton, published in four folio volumes in 1766-67. To call these volumes impressive is an understatement. They are enormous, filled with hand-colored engravings of ancient objects, most in Halloween hues of deep orangey-red and black (fig. 3). The books rode on the popularity of the man who financed their production: Sir William Hamilton, British ambassador to the Bourbon court of Naples. Hedonist, antiquarian, and patron of the arts, Hamilton spent his many years in Naples leading hikes up Mount Vesuvius and filling his villa with ancient pots and statues plucked from the on-going digs in the surrounding Italian countryside. His bewitching and much younger wife, Emma, added her own touch by dressing in ancient style and dancing for visitors à l’ancienne against the backdrop of the steaming crater of Vesuvius, an act she called her “attitudes.” (Emma Hamilton later shocked the world again by carrying on a public affair with Lord Nelson.) Lord Hamilton sold much of his collection of Etruscan and Greek antiquities to the British Museum, where they remain today. In 1772, the Library Company of Philadelphia acquired d’Hancarville’s Collection. It was among the first color-plate books acquired by that institution, alongside other coffee-table books of this era that we remember better today, like the third edition of Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina (1772).

Thomas Jefferson came to the Etruscans for his own reasons, which were not so much aesthetic as political. In a letter to John Adams dated May 5, 1817, he mentioned that he was reading Giuseppe Micali’s L’Italia avanti il dominio dei Romani (Italy before the Conquest of the Romans) (1810). The title did not promise much, he admitted to Adams, but he was drawn in. And no wonder: this is a fascinating work, a product of the same emerging Tuscan nationalism that made eighteenth-century Italians rush out to dig up Etruscan antiquities. Micali’s project was to assert that the Etruscans were as worthy as the ancient Greeks and Romans. They were great artists and virtuous farmers and not (Micali adds) savage nomads like the Indians of North America. A massive folio edition was published in Paris in 1824 with beautiful plates of Etruscan monuments and vases that reflected what Micali called a Tuscan “national” style.

Jefferson believed that Micali’s history of the Etruscans supplied a new, more critical perspective on Rome. Early national Americans looked to the founding of the Roman republic as one of the most virtuous chapters in Roman history, when simple farmer-warriors tilled the warm earth, thinking of grain and not glory. But from the Etruscan point of view, as put forth in Micali, the Roman founding was the end of the world, a calamity to rival the fall of Rome to the barbarians a thousand years later. Jefferson saw this, and it gave him a new perspective on the very Rome he had worked so hard to enshrine as the model for American politics and taste. “Micali,” he wrote to Adams, “has given the counterpart of the Roman history for the nations over which they extended their domination. For this he has gleaned up matter from every quarter, and furnished materials for reflection and digestion to those who, thinking as they read, have percieved [sic] there was a great deal of matter behind the curtain, could that be fully withdrawn. He certainly gives new views of a nation whose splendor has masked and palliated their barbarous ambition.”

Carthage, Magna Graecia, and the Etruscans were just three of the civilizations that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Americans routinely encountered in the course of what we so often call their “classical” reading. But geographical and chronological expansiveness are only part of the story. It is easy to think that eighteenth-century Americans were interested only in the rigorously political qualities of the ancient world, the virtue and stoicism that would secure the republic and that were endlessly praised in Revolutionary American rhetoric. But in fact Americans were also interested in the not-so-virtuous features of antiquity. This is easy to miss as you page through the huge library catalogues that eighteenth-century Americans left behind. After a while all the orators and historians and moralists start to run together, and you begin to wonder how many editions of Diodorus Siculus one person really needs.

Then out from the monotonous list of editions pops something that looks sort of fun. Like the private life of the Romans: specifically, Jean Rodolph d’Arnay’s Vie privée des Romains (1752; repr. 1757), which Jefferson had in his library. And it is fun, a glimpse into everyday life in ancient Roman. Sometimes everyday life was wholesome and virtuous, and sometimes it was deliciously not, especially as the republic degenerated into debauched empire. But that was part of the appeal of Rome and cyclical history. Readers knew what was coming, as day followed night. So after sitting patiently through the agrarian republic of virtuous frugality when simple farmers ate porridge out of wooden bowls and fought for Rome, d’Arnay’s readers got to the other part, the part with the bad emperors and the orgies, the naked slaves, and the dinners of peacock tongues and parrot heads. It was all a bit de trop, but such books would not have sold (in multiple editions and translations) if there had not been a market for this kind of thing.

And this is just the beginning. There was so much more excitement and awe over places whose names we barely remember today. We don’t remember because our own modern Mediterranean world, with its seemingly insurmountable East-West divide, has such burning, present meanings for us that we imagine that these meanings are eternal. But they are not. They too will change in time, just as the ancient Mediterranean of early Americans eventually faded away.

Further Reading:

Some of the major classical libraries of eighteenth-century America are now appearing on the Web, such as The John Adams Library at the Boston Public Library. These are a useful supplement to such major print compilations as E. Millicent Sowerby’s Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1952-1959). Readers interested in the antiquarian collections of Sir William Hamilton should consult Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and His Collection (London, 1996). D’Hancarville is featured in the Library Company of Philadelphia’s online exhibit of early color-plate books in America: Living Color: Collecting Color Plate Books at the Library Company of Philadelphia. More on Robert Adam’s Etruscan interiors can be found in Eileen Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors (New Haven, 2001). The American mania for neoclassicism is beautifully illustrated in Wendy Cooper, Classical Taste in America (New York, 1993).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Caroline Winterer is associate professor in the department of history at Stanford University. She is the author of The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900 (2007) and The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (2002; paperback, 2004).

In 1779, a satire called The History of a French Louse; or, the Spy of a New Species, in France and England was published in London. On its title page, the book claims to be a fourth edition translated from the French. A French edition was also published in 1779, but there is no evidence that previous editions exist.

The Louse was published anonymously but is often attributed to “Delauney.” The text is an “it narrative,” part of a genre of tales told by nonhuman narrators that was wildly popular in Britain and the Anglo-Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century. The satire’s narrator is a louse who has lived on a series of heads in and around Paris and been witness to the political maneuverings happening behind the scenes of the American Revolution.

This anti-revolutionary satire, the centerpiece of which is a caricature of Benjamin Franklin, quickly made its way to British colonial North America. In 1781, advertisements for the Louse appeared in the Loyalist newspaper the Royal American Gazette, which was published in New York City. In Philadelphia, the Louse circulated at least until the 1830s. The Library Company of Philadelphia holds two copies of the text, one of which was damaged in a fire in 1831. Readers cared enough about the Louse to rebind it afterward with a group of pamphlets that had been similarly damaged.

Upon its publication, the Louse joined a wave of anti-Franklin propaganda unfolding  on both sides of the Atlantic. Satirical renderings of Franklin as a self-serving lush and lecher were popular in France, England, and British America. From its position on the scalp of a dinner guest, the Louse’s narrator introduces Franklin as “a man of great note who came from another part of the world,” as a minister representing a people who’d recently rebelled (19). Franklin is then quickly derided as a “grotesque figure,” sunburnt, wrinkled, and warty with absurd spectacles. The louse also encounters Marie Antoinette; Mademoiselle d’Éon, who had been a diplomat and spy under the male identity Chevalier d’Éon but later identified as female; and Pierre Beaumarchais, a French supporter of the American rebellion.

In addition to skewering some of the most famous people of the period, the Louse raises questions about the status of the individual agent and the scale of political action. Spying, after all, is so easy, and human bodies are not as individual and discrete as they might at first appear. Influential political philosophers of the period, including John Locke, acknowledged and sought to manage the material discontinuity of the human body—what Locke calls the “constantly fleeting particles of matter” that make up a man. The louse inhabits bodies that ooze both matter and information, which he carries with him as he scurries from head to head.

By the late eighteenth century, the idea of a social parasite and the idea of a biological parasite would both have been familiar to readers. The Louse makes the predictable anti-revolutionary argument that British colonial Americans like Franklin are lousy parasites. It also explores the uneasy possibility that some minute part might scramble off a human body and go on to tell a story of its own, with significant political consequences.

The History of a French Louse is available on GoogleBooks. Google unfortunately omits four prefatory pages, in which the louse introduces himself as the first author of his species, dedicates his narrative to King Louis XVI, laments his misfortunes, and declares himself as stoic as a Roman republican statesman. This introductory material is digitized in the Sabin Americana Digital Archive. You can also find copies of the Louse at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Huntington Library, or the Newberry. An excerpt from the text appears in British It-Narratives 1750-1830, Volume 2: Animals.

Further Reading

For more on Loyalist writing in British colonial America, see Philip Gould, Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America (New York, 2013). On Franklin in France, see for example Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (New York, 2005). For more on it narratives, see Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore, 2006); Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cranbury, N.J., 2007); and Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton and Oxford, 2011). For an argument about social relations as fundamentally parasitic, see Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis, 2007). The excerpt of the Louse is in British It-Narratives, ed. Heather Keenleyside (London and Brookfield, Vt., 2012).

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

Julia Dauer is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studies eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and the history of science.

Teaching American History in the Clemente Course

Since 2001, I have taught American history in the Boston Clemente Course, a college humanities program accredited by Bard College and offered free of charge to lower income adults through the Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester, Massachusetts. I also teach at Harvard. The driving distance between Harvard Square and Codman Square is less than eight miles, but these neighborhoods can sometimes feel like they’re a world apart. My Clemente students are mostly women and people of color, often from immigrant backgrounds. Many of them have young children and older relatives for whom they are the primary or sole caregivers, which makes it more difficult for them to afford or attend college, especially full time. They shoulder the heavy burdens and myriad manifestations of poverty and prejudice that disproportionately affect people who live in places like Dorchester. Despite all of this, my Clemente and Harvard students have important things in common: they are smart and engaged, they are eager to learn and improve their lives, and they struggle to balance lingering self-doubt with the loftiest of dreams. The Clemente Course is driven by two core ideals: first, that the humanities—the study of history, literature, art, and philosophy—should be accessible to everyone; and second, that the humanities have something to teach all of us, can help us become more critical and compassionate citizens.

Aspirations to equal opportunity, to more enlightened citizenship, and to the common good are part of the core of what it means to be American. Thomas Jefferson’s ambitious and elusive phrase “the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” set in motion Americans’ tenacious belief that tomorrow can and should be better than today, our mythic faith in the possibility of progress. It has inspired our “new births of freedom,” our “new deals” and “new frontiers,” our “great societies” and “mornings in America,” our “bridges to the 21st century,” and our “audacity of hope.” Yet these aspirations—to equality and freedom, to the full rights of citizenship, to a better life—have also functioned as cruel reminders that throughout American history, many people have been denied these things by virtue of their race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and country of origin. The Declaration’s enduring power—as an act of political dissent and as a piece of protest literature—rests in the fact that more than any of the founding documents, it has inspired future generations of Americans, particularly those who have been marginalized or disenfranchised in some way, to critique the ongoing shortcomings of their society and struggle to create a more just world.

It is for these reasons that I begin my Clemente American History class with the Declaration of Independence. Actually, I begin with two Declarations: Jefferson’s draft and the final version. Jefferson preferred the former, but for various reasons, the Second Continental Congress went with the latter. The vast majority of my students, both at Clemente and Harvard, have never read Jefferson’s draft, another reason why I always insist on teaching it. The most striking change between the two versions comes at the end of a long list of colonial grievances against the “repeated injuries and usurpations” and “absolute tyranny” of the King of England:

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christianking of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

This entire paragraph from Jefferson’s draft—by far the most sharply worded of the original grievances—was edited out completely. I always read this section aloud, as Jefferson originally intended, so that my students can hear the power and urgency of the language. Their responses are always as diverse as they are: “He sounds angry.” “The language is so violent.” “It seems like Jefferson is working out some issues here.” “How can Jefferson blame the King for slavery when he owned slaves himself?” “No one person was solely responsible for slavery.” “He’s right, slavery was a war crime.” “Who made the decision to remove this paragraph?” What follows is a discussion that never disappoints, one that explores the complex political dynamics of the Revolution, the percolating regional tensions within the colonies, the relationship between Jefferson’s psychology and his rhetorical project, the unsustainable co-existence of slavery and freedom. My students come to understand that the omission of this last grievance in the final version of the Declaration, combined with the absence of any race-specific language or explicit mention of “slavery” in the Constitution, serves as powerful evidence of the Founding Fathers’ personal and political limitations, their inability—and unwillingness—to confront slavery head-on at that historic moment. They erased slavery in word, if not in deed, rendering it all but invisible to readers of the founding documents who did not have access to their behind-the-scenes political wrangling as they were writing the nation into existence. At first, my students seem startled by this revelation, but it begins to make sense to them as they reflect more deeply on the fact that subsequent generations of Americans, including our own, have had similar difficulties squaring the nation’s loftiest professions of freedom and equality with the pernicious legacy of the “peculiar institution.” As one of my Clemente students once said in class: “Slavery was America’s original sin, but we’re all still paying for it.”

No one understood these things more deeply—or experienced them more directly—than enslaved people themselves. When the Declaration of Independence was signed in the summer of 1776, slavery existed in some form in all thirteen colonies, where people of African descent, most of them enslaved, constituted roughly one-fifth of the total population. In the northern states, where the Revolution set in motion a decades-long process of gradual abolition, African Americans began to organize and speak out against both slavery and racial discrimination. Among the most compelling documents from this period are the surviving petitions that enslaved people submitted to colonial (and then state) legislatures to gain their freedom. In the Clemente Course, I teach two such petitions from Boston—the first submitted on January 6, 1773, by an individual (“Felix”), and the second submitted on April 20, 1773, by a group (“Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joie”). Enslaved individuals began petitioning local governments for their freedom, sometimes successfully, long before the Revolution, but prior to the 1770s, petitions for black freedom were usually written by one’s master or master’s minister, and framed as moral rather than political appeals, highlighting good behavior or religious piety as justifications for freedom. As the Revolution unfolded, and as enslaved people began to acquire the literacy necessary to write their own petitions, their appeals increasingly displayed the kind of political rhetoric that was common in other, white-authored documents from the period, as well as a growing awareness of the spirit of rebellion that was sweeping the colonies. The petitions from 1773 represent this shift. Inspired by the Revolution’s promise, African Americans began using the printed petition to express their own grievances, giving enslaved people, both individuals and groups, their first public forum to assert their rights to freedom and equal citizenship on their own terms. Taken together, they represent the first and largest expressions of black political agency in the face of white political supremacy in the early history of America.

My students are fascinated by these documents, and more than a few are surprised that they exist at all. As a group, they are drawn, among other things, to questions about authorship (were they written by an individual or group?), literacy (were they written by or on behalf of enslaved people?), regional variation (was it possible for enslaved people to petition southern governments, or just northern ones?), and tone (why are some more deferential and others more defiant?). Building on their reading of the Declaration and its draft, they begin to see more clearly the political implications of rhetorical choices, and the power of language itself: the strategic use of pronouns (I, you, we, us, them); the careful ways petitioners navigated between sacred and secular appeals; and the explicit invocation of “natural rights,” as well as “liberty,” “tyranny,” “equality,” and “independence.” And then they read back from these documents to the Declaration, understanding that all of them are petitions of grievance and acts of protest against existing—and unacceptable—government practices.

One of the most thrilling moments of my Clemente teaching experience occurred early on in my tenure, during the first year of Mitt Romney’s term as governor of Massachusetts. The students came to class the week after we had been reading these and other documents from the American Revolution, including excerpts from Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense. The students were all fired up about some of the governor’s proposed budget cuts to public education and social services, cuts that were certain to negatively affect their lives and livelihoods. There was a town hall meeting that night, at the Great Hall, across the street from our classroom in the Codman Square Health Center. They were clamoring to attend. One student—clearly designated by her classmates to be their spokeswoman—said to me: “Professor Tim, you’ve been teaching us all about revolution, about the right to petition your government when you have grievances. We, the people, have grievances. Can we go?” I pointed out the irony inherent in their asking my permission to protest: What would Jefferson, or Felix, do? They all laughed and then left for the town hall meeting together. Afterwards, we returned to class to discuss how our actions that night, right here in Boston, were related to the Revolutionary history we’d been studying. At that point the students began brainstorming other ways to make their voices heard. They had learned a lesson about citizenship that went far beyond my initial plans or intentions.

For some students, the most powerful historical documents are those that are more individual or private in nature. In addition to very public texts like the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, slave petitions for freedom and pamphlets like Common Sense, we also study the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and letters from Abigail Adams to her husband, John. In 1773, Wheatley made history as the first person of African descent to write and publish a book in English, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, making her, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. has argued, the “Founding Mother of African-American literature.” Born in West Africa, Wheatley was brought to the North American colonies at the age of about eight in 1761. That she would complete her first book of poetry at the age of nineteen, while still enslaved, was nothing short of remarkable. But before she could secure its publication, she had to prove to eighteen of “the most respectable Characters in Boston” (all wealthy, white, older men) that she had actually written the poems herself. Wheatley convinced her interrogators, the book was published, and she became something of a celebrity, both in England and America.

In the Clemente Course, we begin our study of Wheatley with her most famous (and also infamous) poem, “On Being Brought from AFRICA to AMERICA”:

‘TWAS mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

My students always have a wide range of reactions to this poem. The more religious students are drawn to Wheatley’s religious language. Some of the more secular students find it troubling; they reject the implication that one must “find Jesus” to be civilized or worthy of citizenship. We discuss the poem’s voice, as opposed to the poet’s (these are not always the same thing, I tell them, in Wheatley’s poetry or anyone else’s). We debate the extent to which Wheatley was an “apologist” or an “abolitionist” insofar as slavery was concerned, and whether she was making strategic, not just aesthetic, choices in presenting herself, and her art, in this way. Time permitting, I add several other poems to the mix—”On Imagination,” “To the University of Cambridge, in New-England,” “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 1770,” and “To His Excellency General Washington”—to get them talking about religious imagery and Classical allusion, Wheatley’s personal and political audacity, and her preferred use of elegy. The class is often divided on a number of issues—whether Wheatley was successfully using the “master’s tools” to dismantle the “master’s house,” whether her poetry was (or wasn’t) “political,” why she seemed to be “obsessed with death,” and “what the deal was with her relationship to powerful white men,” including Whitefield, the British evangelical Methodist minister who was a religious inspiration to her, and Washington, the American Founding Father with whom she shared a mutual admiration.

When I re-introduce Thomas Jefferson—this time as a sharp critic of Wheatley’s poetry—the class dynamic always changes. “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately,” Jefferson wrote in his 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia, “but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are beneath the dignity of criticism.” It is here that my students—nearly all of them, regardless of their previous stance on Wheatley—shift from being critics to defenders. They are struck by Jefferson’s “cheap shot” in publishing his derisive comments about Wheatley one year after her death in 1784, and they insist upon recognizing—and respecting—Wheatley’s achievements, given the extraordinary hurdles she had to overcome to be a trailblazing writer, a “first.” “Regardless of whether you love or hate her poetry,” a student once remarked, “Jefferson had no right to disrespect her like that.” As the eighteenth-century debate over Wheatley continues to rage in my twenty-first-century classroom, my students view Jefferson’s critique of Wheatley as something of a racist assault on all black (and female) intellectual and artistic expression, and they rush to the Boston poet’s defense, even as they continue to offer a wide range of critical interpretations of her poetry.

Themes of race, gender, and class are always central touchstones in the Clemente Course. My students bring a mix of sensibilities to the classroom, and their academic work is often refracted through the lens of their own experiences, identities, and backgrounds. To my mind, this is a good thing. Connecting the past to the present, the historical to the personal—and vice versa—is part of living history, not just studying it. How this plays out in any given class is never predictable. Take, for instance, Abigail Adams. When I first began teaching selections from the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams, I did not necessarily expect that my students would relate to them. After all, by any measure, the Adamses were elites—wealthy, educated, powerful—who were far removed from the world of ordinary people, then and now. But there is something about Abigail Adams’ spirit—the way she expressed her affection for, challenge to, and disagreement with her husband—that strikes a chord with many of my students. When we read aloud lines like “I wish you would ever write me a Letter half as long as I write you” or “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could,” the room always erupts in laughter, head-nods, knowing glances, vocal affirmations—and not a little squirming and grumbling from some of my male students! In addition to her willingness, as one student expressed it, “to put her husband on notice,” the group is also struck by the dynamic between Abigail and John: “They clearly love each other.” “He sees her as an equal.” “She feels comfortable challenging him.” “All things considered, this seems like a pretty good marriage.” This opens the door for a discussion about the history of marriage, about gender and class and race dynamics in the late eighteenth century, about letter-writing as a more private space where women might have had more freedom, or power, to express themselves. In the end, my students are most surprised by Abigail Adams’ political audacity: her bold exhortations to “Remember the Ladies” and “not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands,” as well as her sharp warning that “if particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” To them, Abigail Adams is a revolutionary in her own right—like Phillis Wheatley, a Founding Mother, both determined to work within and against the various constraints of their society to express themselves forcefully and more freely.

If one thing has become abundantly clear to me teaching in the Clemente Course all these years, it’s that students will fall in love with American history if they can see themselves, something they recognize, in the historical record. This was the animating impulse behind multicultural social history—that women and workers, racial and sexual minorities, outliers and ordinary people have made history, and continue to do so. This does not mean that we always, or only, find kindred spirits in the lives of people who are just like us—as my students’ reactions to Phillis Wheatley and Abigail Adams demonstrate—but it does mean that if we teach and write history to include the broadest possible spectrum of humanity, we have a better chance of discovering commonalities in the human experience that can inspire new modes of empathy, understanding, and connection across the ages. We will never be able to have everything in common with those who lived in other times, but in knowing more fully what they were up against, how they responded to their worlds, we may gain a deeper understanding of how to live and act in our own.

This indispensable lesson was confirmed for me again last fall, when I attended the annual gala dinner for Mass Humanities, a non-profit organization that supports public humanities work, including the Clemente Course, across the Commonwealth. David Tebaldi, its executive director, asked one of our recent graduates to speak at the dinner. Ieshia had excelled in the Clemente Course and had recently been accepted to Boston University’s Metropolitan College to continue her undergraduate studies. In the middle of her speech, Ieshia turned to address me directly from the podium, as if only the two of us were in the room. “Professor Tim,” she said, “I don’t think you know how much it meant to me, and to so many of my classmates, that you began your course with Abigail Adams and Phillis Wheatley.” She went on to tell me about how inspired she had been to learn about women who wrote poetry, challenged their husbands and masters, and engaged with the major political issues of the day, despite the fact that they were living at a time in American history when they enjoyed neither rights nor liberty, to say nothing of equality. “They did more than foment a rebellion,” Ieshia concluded, quoting Adams’s words. “They helped us find our voice.” At the end of her remarks, my husband, an educator himself, turned to me and said, “That’s why you teach.”

Indeed it is.

Further Reading

On the Declaration of Independence, see Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (New York, 2014); Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, 1993); Pauline Maier, American Scripture: How America Declared Its Independence from Britain (New York, 1997), and Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978).

For examples of slaves’ petitions for freedom, see Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, Volume 1: From Colonial Times to the Civil War (New York, 1990) and Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillian, eds., The Radical Reader: A Documentary Anthology of the American Radical Tradition (New York, 2003). See also James and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks (New York, 1997).

Phillis Wheatley’s writings are collected in Vincent Carretta, ed., Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings (New York, 2001). See also Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens, Ga., 2011) and Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York, 2003). Abigail Adams’s letters are collected in Frank Shuffelton, ed., The Letters of John and Abigail Adams (New York, 2003). See also Woody Holton, Abigail Adams (New York, 2010) and Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980).

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

Timothy Patrick McCarthy, PhD, is the Stanley Paterson Professor of American History and former academic director of the Boston Clemente Course. He also teaches in the History and Literature program and at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is the author or editor of five books on history, politics, and social movements in the United States, all published by the New Press.

“I can’t wait to read this religious nineteenth-century pulp magazine!” said no one ever. Yet as a historian, I have found myself reading such texts repeatedly. I stumbled upon the pulp fiction of yesteryear as an undergraduate. Since then, I’ve learned that dime novels, story papers, chapbooks, and other literary ephemera of the nineteenth century offer unconventional perspectives on American culture—and especially on American religion.

I happened upon dime novels while desperately searching for a paper topic for an undergraduate research seminar. At the urging of my professor, I contacted the librarians at the University of Rochester’s Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, & Preservation to consult their collection of dime novels. I vaguely knew that dime novels, with their ludicrous and fanciful stories, anticipated twentieth-century comic books. I also knew that British dime novels, known as penny dreadfuls, introduced iconic characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Sweeney Todd. However, I had never seen an actual nineteenth-century dime novel.

Within fifteen minutes at Rare Books, I had more dime novels than I knew what to do with. Manuscript Librarian Phyllis Andrews brought out a stack of texts measuring roughly six inches high. A closer look revealed that dozens of dime novels, each wafer-thin, made up this stack. Most of the novels were not catalogued, so Phyllis encouraged me to just dive in. She also gave me a copy of J. Randolph Cox’s reference work, The Dime Novel Companion (2000), which explains that, although story papers and other pulp publications originated in the early 1800s, dime novels in the literal, sold-for-a-dime sense were published after 1860.

Leafing through my sample pile, I saw small dime novels formatted like a modern magazine and others the size of newspapers. After a few minutes of sifting and feeling a bit overwhelmed, I found a mid-sized title that sounded familiar—The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main (1847), written by the prolific dime novelist Edward Zane Carroll Judson, a.k.a. Ned Buntline. Thinking back to high school English class, I remembered that, in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, young Tom imagines himself as the Black Avenger. A look at the academic literature revealed that the connection between Judson and Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens had not been explored in depth. Intrigued, I re-read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and connected them to Judson’s Black Avenger.

Judson’s tale describes a runaway slave, Francisco Solonois, whose family is kidnapped by the governor of Cuba. Francisco expresses his desire to live a good Christian life, yet he argues that circumstances force him to commit piracy. The implication is that (male) vigilantism is permissible so long as the vigilante cites Christian morality as his justification. Judson portrays the protagonist’s seventeen-year vendetta against the Cuban government through overblown prose, racist caricatures, and hapless female characters. Francisco unleashes mayhem with the assistance of a self-loathing black hangman, Lobo, who speaks with mangled grammar. A handful of female characters attempt to aid Francisco and his allies, but the women are generally depicted as incompetent, and always accompanied by male chaperones. These themes resurface in at least one other pirate dime novel, Prentiss Ingraham’s The Black Pirate (1882). Ingraham borrows Judson’s ends-justify-the-means approach to vigilantism; he gives readers female characters devoid of agency (one gives up and kills herself moments before our heroes are rescued); and he reuses the pernicious stereotype of the murderous black man, which sadly appeared often in post-Civil War fiction. Judson and Ingraham glorified Protestant family life, but in a manner that is discomfiting when read today, due to their dime novels’ ingrained misogyny and racism.

As for the Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain connection, Clemens in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) patterns young Tom on Francisco Solonois. Both characters are master manipulators who shirk normal expectations of behavior, although Tom just wants to have fun, rather than inflicting harm like Francisco. Like Judson, Clemens includes a violent non-white character (Injun Joe, instead of Lobo) and portrays women as passive (Becky Thatcher languishing in the caves while Tom seeks a way out, to name but one example). Still, Clemens shows some interest in mocking the conventions of dime novels. When Tom, Huck Finn, and Joe Harper run away to play pirates on Jackson’s Island, they quickly run out of supplies and become homesick. Clemens thereby reminds his readers how difficult it would be to launch, let alone sustain, a multi-year crusade like that of Solonois.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), however, Clemens actively attacks the clichés of American pulp fiction instead of recycling and gently mocking them. The African American slave Jim is an active, noble character. Mary Jane Wilks and Aunt Polly play strong supporting roles: they are the opposite of the weak women in pirate stories (or Becky in Tom Sawyer, for that matter). Most of all, Clemens skewers the implausibility of dime novel plotting. When Tom and Huck plan to liberate a captured Jim, Tom foolishly makes the plot convoluted, so that it is more exciting—like a real-life dime novel. Tom’s dramatic scheme proves a disaster. In this way, Clemens shows that the events described in dime novels, with all their unbelievable coincidences, cannot play out in reality.

My work with Ned Buntline and the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main revealed that the lines between high and low culture were blurry in nineteenth-century America. Dime novels lacked critical acclaim, yet famous authors like Samuel Clemens readily drew from dime novel conventions. No wall separated pulp from art. Historians should continue to explore this intersection of prestigious and pulp literature, replacing rigid genre boundaries with a more fluid understanding of writing and reading in America.

Although I enjoyed the Black Avenger project, I didn’t work much with dime novels during the rest of college. As I started graduate school at Villanova, however, dime novels returned to my life. When the librarians showed me around Special Collections, they revealed stacks of dime novels, some of which were being digitized for the first time. I recalled the despairing words of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III—“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”—but I spun those words in a positive way. Since I had access to extensive primary materials and many of the texts had never been studied, I decided to embrace this sign from the pulp heavens and get to work.

Maybe it was Villanova’s Catholic ethos, or maybe it was because I’d written my senior thesis on Mormon portrayals in nineteenth-century newspapers, but I became curious about the treatment of religion in dime novels. Although it was clear that ideas of Protestant morality undergirded Black Avenger, I had relegated the topic of religion to the background of my project, focusing instead on the connections to the Tom Sawyer novels. What might I discover, I wondered, if I brought religion to the fore? With this approach in mind, I turned to a small, decaying pamphlet, Mormonism Exposed, which the J. Regan firm of Chicago published in 1896.

My investigation of this booklet focused on its literary contents and its material aspects, especially as they related to the dime novel industry. Supposedly authored by a “Mormon slave wife,” Mormonism Exposed purports to be nonfiction, but it is almost certainly a false document—a thinly veiled Protestant critique of Mormonism sold as the account of a survivor. The book is not billed as a dime novel, but it sure reads like one. The Exposed author recounts the history of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) movement, but portrays the new religion as corrupt and immoral. Although most pulp fiction could be read by youths, Exposed does not seem like children’s fare. The violent narrative deems Mormonism despotic, interrogates LDS theology at length, claims that Mormon secret societies kidnapped women to serve as sex slaves, and concludes by recounting the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormons and Native Americans wiped out a wagon train.

Ironically, the author ignored the changes in LDS society that were underway in 1896. The LDS Church had officially disavowed polygamy, and Utah was about to become a state. By printing this book, the Regan staff perpetuated longstanding criticisms and stereotypes of Mormonism, even as those criticisms ceased to describe contemporary Mormons. It is true that many dime novels after 1896 used Mormons as villains, but these stories were set in the days of the American West long past. By contrast, Mormonism Exposed asserted that Mormons remained enemies of Americans in the present, thereby failing to reflect the changing attitudes of Protestants toward Mormons in the early twentieth century.

The edition of Mormonism Exposed that I studied had a strip of paper pasted on the back, in the spot that other Regan books listed their publication information. The paper strip suggests that another publisher wanted to hide that Exposed was a Regan publication. This practice reflects the widespread plagiarism and the purchasing of companies’ excess stock, both of which occurred with some frequency in the dime novel industry. Dropping down the rabbit hole of alternate editions, I identified several versions of Exposed, one of which—A.B. Courtney’s—was apparently from 1894, but was not available online in full-text form. Not long ago, Prof. Marlena E. Bremseth, the current editor of Dime Novel Round-up, showed me her copy of the Courtney edition. Sure enough, it was published in 1894, two years before the Regan version. While Courtney at this point seems like the original publisher of Mormonism Exposed, it’s difficult to know for certain. Earlier variants may exist, in a chain of plagiarism or buyouts all the way down. In this way, Exposed speaks to the volatility of the nineteenth-century pulp industry: Buy or steal an existing book; slap a new cover on it; artfully conceal older publication information; and put the “new” text on sale.

I initially assumed that the five-cent price of Exposed meant the booklet was written for and marketed to working-class laborers. However, Exposed contains advertisements for bulk orders of two luxury items: mechanical pencils and a dice game. These items may seem like trifles in 2016, but in 1896 the daily wage for a non-farm laborer was approximately $1.20. It’s unlikely that a person making a dollar a day, who already spent five cents on a book, would then spend ninety cents on pencils, or seventy-five cents on games. As such, it seems that Exposed was meant for middle-class readers with extra spending money. At the very least, Regan did not publish its pulps exclusively for the working class.

I could not confidently determine a target age group from Exposed’s ads (or from the book’s cover price, although some historians speculate that nickel or dime prices denoted books for different age groups). Based on the content of Exposed, however, I doubt the book was meant for children. By appealing to an adult audience, Regan was out of step with current publishing practices. In 1896, most dime publishers were targeting an exclusively youthful audience, while Regan still aimed for adult readers. Similarly, Regan published Exposed with an understated black-and-white cover—showing a polygamist Mormon family reading—at a time when dime publishers were turning to sensational covers illustrated in color. Just as Exposed’s ideas lacked staying power, so too did its format fail to meet the changing conventions of the pulp industry.

After I published my paper on Exposed, I learned from Marlena that Mormonism Exposed is not a dime novel in the official sense (i.e., a cheap novel sold after 1860). Technically, this kind of small, (dubious) nonfiction pamphlet is called a chapbook. Marlena’s suggestion reminded me to look beyond dime novels to analyze other formats in the pulp industry. In particular, Marlena prompted me to study documents that I had scanned as a volunteer for Villanova’s Digital Library. Many of these documents constitute religious pulp literature, although they are not dime novels per se.

Consider the Catholic Weekly Instructor, a Philadelphia-area periodical for children from the 1840s. Some issues begin with fictional stories like those found in story papers and other proto-dime novels, while other issues begin with essays and poems. Various other sections—Bible excerpts, Catholic Church news, travelogues, devotionals, jokes, advertisements, and even math questions—fill the remainder of each issue. A Catholic child reading the Instructor would encounter literature, even escapist stories, but in a manner approved by Catholic elders. In other words, the stories and essays reinforced a religious and social worldview that Catholic adults wanted their children to adopt.

Texts like the Catholic Weekly Instructor, with their explicit references to Catholic customs and doctrines, provide historians with alternatives to the non-denominational Protestant perspective expressed in works like Mormonism Exposed, Black Avenger, and Black Pirate. Historians should further investigate the youth magazines of American Jews and other non-Protestant religions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The LDS Children’s Friend, which existed from 1902 to 1972, comes to mind. By identifying pulp stories and literary ephemera written by non-Protestants, historians can construct counter-narratives of American religion within nineteenth-century popular culture.

I also digitized an 1898 volume from the New Sabbath Library, a short-lived series of moralistic Protestant dime novels. The volume in question contained a reprint of Rev. J.H. Ingraham’s The Prince of the House of David (1855), a histrionic epistolary novel about a young Jewish woman caught up among Jesus’ followers. In the context of the New Sabbath Library, House of David works as a devotional text and an evangelization tool, imparting the glory of Christianity to young readers. Very few secondary sources discuss the New Sabbath Library, although dime novel historian Nathan Vernon Madison wrote a blog surveying the series in 2011. However, historians know that religious pulp novels like those of the New Sabbath Library left their mark on at least one famous reader: Cecil B. DeMille based his 1956 film, The Ten Commandments, on Rev. Ingraham’s 1859 Moses novel, Pillar of Fire.

Essentially, the New Sabbath Library’s editors were not satisfied with contemporary literature that simply reflected their worldview (as is the case in Mormonism Exposed, Black Pirate, and Black Avenger). Rather, the editors of the New Sabbath Library sought to write children’s literature that foregrounded and actively promoted Christianity. The New Sabbath editors worked within the Protestant idiom that the Catholic Weekly Instructor’s editors challenged, but these Protestants and Catholics had the same strategy. They would use the conventions of pulp fiction to attack what they considered the sinful nature of pulp fiction. As Nathan Madison points out in his blog, advertisements for the New Sabbath Library made the editors’ message of evangelization plain. According to the ad inside House of David’s front cover: “To meet the growing demand for pure literature at popular prices, we began in April, 1898, the issue of a monthly publication entitl[e]d the New Sabbath Library…” As such, the New Sabbath editors would likely be happy that DeMille recycled Pillar as a movie, and that the film still airs at Easter time.

Despite the religiosity of these denominational pulps, we should not assume that religious dime novelists were exclusively wedded to pure literature. It is true that Rev. Ingraham wrote House of David and Pillar of Fire, but he also wrote pirate stories and other adventure pulps—the sinful kind of dime novel. His son Prentiss, author of Black Pirate, continued in this sensationalist vein. It seems that the Ingrahams were comfortable balancing their religious impulses with thrilling stories.

Historians have only scratched the surface of American dime novels. Unfortunately, two major obstacles impede the academic study of these stories: the overwhelming number of dime novels in American archives, and the fact that many archives have not catalogued individual volumes. Research projects like the ones I have embarked upon are regrettably piecemeal, looking at small samples of dime novels, while the full range of, say, pirate stories or religious dime novels remains unknown. If historians are truly to understand pulp literature, then they must collaborate with librarians, archivists, and antiquarians to track down and catalog surviving dime novels. This process will require historians to learn digital techniques like scanning, optical character recognition (OCR), and text mining, all of which are common in library science but are not yet standard parts of a history graduate degree. Nonetheless, the study of dime novels can be a rewarding one for historians who learn to wear multiple hats—much the way Rev. Ingraham learned to pivot between evangelist and fabulist.

The ultimate goal in dime novel cataloging should be the creation of a national database of extant dime novels. Such a database would allow scholars to track trends in publishing over time and identify titles dealing with religion, gender, race, and other relevant topics. Villanova’s ongoing Edward T. LeBlanc Memorial Dime Novel Bibliography is a step in this direction. Yet the LeBlanc Bibliography needs the help of more people—professional historians and interested citizens alike—to be completed.

A comprehensive database would open up dime novels to research in fields as diverse as the history of publishing, race and gender studies, and material culture. The study of religious pulp fiction, to take but one example, has spatial implications. It would be illuminating to map the places where dime novels, magazines like the Catholic Weekly Instructor, and chapbooks like Mormonism Exposed were published, and then to classify the publishers based on the attitudes they expressed toward different religions. To identify a publisher’s view of a religion is a subjective process, reliant on what the historian deems normative or not. Nonetheless, such a spatial project would show how religious opinions varied across the United States and among publishing houses. If the resulting dataset were run through a customizable application like CartoDB or Google Maps, historians could produce striking visualizations of these religious views, region by region.

Finally, historians should strive to make dime novels accessible not only to other researchers, but also to K-12 educators. The vast majority of dime novels are not great, or even good, literature. Yet the best of the stories still have entertainment value, while the worst—the most sexist, racist, xenophobic, and religiously bigoted—reveal the prejudices of past Americans. Dime novels are as educational as they are shocking, so they have great potential as teaching tools for high school teachers of history and English. Since most dime novels are now in the public domain, accessible dime novels would also provide educators with free primary source materials. HathiTrust, Project Gutenberg, and Google Books contain some nineteenth-century dime novels, but these websites provide only a small percentage of what was actually published. The holy grail of dime novel digitization would be to place the Library of Congress’s enormous collection online. Until the Library obliges, academic historians should work with their universities to digitize local dime novel collections. Once the digital repositories are available online, historians should write lesson plans and discussion guides to accompany the texts. In this way, the study of dime novels could become a form of public history.

A broad swath of the American populace once consumed dime novels as disposable but diverting entertainment. In the process, readers likely absorbed some of the stories’ ideas and biases. It is important to keep pursuing this line of historical inquiry, for dime novels provide rich insights into the popular culture of a past age. Besides, reading and interpreting tales of mummies, secret societies, pirates, and rogue religions never gets old.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Prof. Marlena E. Bremseth, the editor of Dime Novel Round-up; Demian Katz, Michael Foight, and Laura Bang of Villanova Library Special Collections; Phyllis Andrews of the University of Rochester Libraries, Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, & Preservation; Dr. Joan Shelley Rubin of the University of Rochester, who advised my Ned Buntline project; Dr. Whitney Martinko of Villanova University, who advised my Mormonism Exposed project; and Dr. Wendy Woloson of Rutgers University-Camden, my editor for this essay. The friendly spirit of collaboration that I’ve experienced is one of the joys of working with dime novel scholars: Even when you’re wrong, your colleagues are likely to be encouraging when offering criticism. Still, I have learned that the historian of dime novels chases after loose ends, contradictory facts, and unclear terminology. Sometimes, it feels like falling down a rabbit hole of cultural history!

Further Reading

Michael Austin, “‘As Much as Any Novelist Could Ask’: Mormons in American Popular Fiction,” Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon, Volume Two: Literature, Art, Media, Tourism, and Sports, edited by J. Michael Hunter (Santa Barbara, 2013).

The Beadle and Adams Dime Novel Digitization Project, Northern Illinois University Libraries.

Biography of “Col. Prentiss Ingraham,” The Beadle and Adams Dime Novel Digitization Project, Northern Illinois University Libraries.

Biography of “Rev. Joseph Holt Ingraham,” The Beadle and Adams Dime Novel Digitization Project, Northern Illinois University Libraries.

Ned Buntline (Edward Zane Carroll Judson), The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main: Or, The Fiend of Blood. A Thrilling Story of the Buccaneer Times (Boston, 1847).

Ned Buntline (Edward Zane Carroll Judson), The Hero of a Hundred Fights: Collected Stories from the Dime Novel King, From Buffalo Bill to Wild Bill Hickok, edited by Clay Reynolds (New York, 2011).

Michael L. Cook, Dime Novel Roundup: Annotated Index 1931-1981 (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1983).

J. Randolph Cox, ed., Dashing Diamond Dick and Other Classic Dime Novels (New York, 2007).

J. Randolph Cox, The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book (Westport, Conn., 2000).

Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, from the Haymarket Series (New York, 1987).

Dime Novels from the Rare Book collections of the Library of Congress, LC online catalog, loc.gov.

The Edward T. LeBlanc Memorial Dime Novel Bibliography

Paul J. Erickson, “Judging Books By Their Covers: Format, the Implied Reader, and the ‘Degeneration’ of the Dime Novel,” American Transcendental Quarterly 12:3 (September 1998): 248-263.

Chad J. Flake, ed., A Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930: Books, Pamphlets, Periodicals, and Broadsides Relating to the First Century of Mormonism, introduction by Dale L. Morgan (Salt Lake City, 1978).

Terryl Givens, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (New York, 1997).

Daniel Gorman Jr., “The Untold Stories of Mormonism Exposed: Material Culture, Dime Novels, and Mormonism in American Society,” Concept: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Graduate Studies 38 (2015): 18-45.

Daniel Gorman Jr., “The Joy of Piracy: Ned Buntline, Mark Twain, and the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main,” eds. Mila Lemaster and William Patton, Proceedings of the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (2013): 574–582.

Index for Dime Novel Round-Up, Readseries.com.

Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle & Adams and its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature (Norman, Okla., 1950).

Demian Katz, Paper for the People: Dime Novels and Early Mass Market Publishing, Villanova University Falvey Library Exhibits.

Nathan Vernon Madison, “An Interesting Find—The New Sabbath Library,” Argonotes (April 23, 2011).

Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986).

John Springhall Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830-1996 (New York, 1998).

Larry E. Sullivan and Lydia Cushman Schurman, eds., Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes: Dime Novels, Series Books, and Paperbacks (New York, 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Daniel Gorman Jr. is a second-year history M.A. student at Villanova University. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Rochester and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In Fall 2016, Dan is returning to Rochester for his PhD in American history. Dime novels are not the only religious topic Dan enjoys researching, but he is increasingly happy being the dime novel guy. Read more of Dan’s work here and follow him on Twitter at @DanGorman2 and @TangentsUSA. He can also be reached at dgormanjr14@gmail.com.

More people than you might think

Who reads an early American book? The varied list of readers implied by our table of contents suggests several answers to the question posed by the title of this special issue. But consider also the readers, past and present, represented by the history of one curious early American text: the epitaph on the headstone of a Revolutionary-era poet named Elizabeth Whitman, the prototype for the heroine of one of the new nation’s bestselling novels, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797). The thirty-seven-year-old daughter of a Hartford, Connecticut, minister and an associate of the best-known poets of the new nation, Whitman became famous in the summer of 1788, not for her poetry, but for her death, which helped to bring her poetry to a wider audience than she had enjoyed during her lifetime. Whitman died, self-exiled in South Danvers (now Peabody), Massachusetts, having delivered a stillborn child out of wedlock. Her identity became known as a combination of newspaper notices and gossip circulated throughout New England, the mid-Atlantic, and as far down the coast as Charleston, South Carolina. A flurry of newspaper commentary ensued, and Whitman’s story was recounted in the “first American novel,” William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, early the next year. In the fall of 1789, a little more than a year after her death, Whitman’s Connecticut friends paid for an unusually wordy headstone to be erected in Danvers.

This humble stone, in memory of
ELIZABETH WHITMAN,
Is inscribed by her weeping friends,
To whom she endeared herself
By uncommon tenderness and affection.
Endowed with superior genius and accomplishments,
She was still more distinguished by humility and benevolence.
Let Candour throw a veil over her frailties,
For great was her charity to others.
She lived an example of calm resignation,
And sustained the last painful scene,
Far from every friend.
Her departure was on the 25th of July, A.D. 1788.
In the 37th year of her age;
The tears of strangers watered her grave.

Whitman’s epitaph, which was reproduced with some minor but significant revisions at the close of The Coquette, was one of the most widely reprinted in the nineteenth century. Her grave (like that of the fictional heroine Charlotte Temple in New York City) became a major tourist destination and was also a favorite spot for local youths to become engaged. All this was due in some measure to Foster’s novel, which went through ten editions between 1797 and 1866. Generations of American readers consumed it; grandparents passed it down and told their grandchildren stories about the beautiful, mysterious stranger who died in Danvers; and relic seekers chipped off pieces of her headstone until nothing remained but a soft stump of red freestone with only the last line of the epitaph visible. Some readers in the later part of the nineteenth century even assumed Elizabeth Whitman had provided a model for Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne.

Many of the strangers whose tears watered Whitman’s grave read an early American book, the one penned by Hannah Foster. Though it eventually fell into obscurity, relegated to a readership of specialists and antiquarians, its extraordinary shelf life should suggest to us something of its value as a roadmap not only to the early decades of the new republic but to much of the nineteenth century.

Can early American books regain such a readership in the twenty-first century? Again the case of The Coquette is instructive. In the spring of 2004 the Peabody Historical Society (PHS), led by Martha Holden and Bill Power, aimed to revive interest in Whitman and in Foster’s novel among local residents. Along with calling for a town read, the society sponsored dramatic renderings of parts of the novel as well as some of Whitman’s extant poems; Peabody Veterans Memorial High School (PVMHS) added the book to the American literature curriculum; and the Peabody Historical Commission and Peabody Institute Library placed a new headstone at the gravesite—one modeled on the version that appeared in Foster’s novel. The new headstone even reproduces the conventions by which early printers sought to create the image of a headstone on the printed page. On its face, that is, the new headstone bears the outline of a headstone as it would have appeared in print, along with repeated winged-skull icons common to early American grave markers. The appearance of these print conventions on an actual “restored” headstone suggests, perhaps, the ways in which the “real” Elizabeth Whitman was eventually overshadowed by her fictional counterpart from Wharton’s novel. Outside the cemetery gates a sign now announces Whitman’s grave as a stop on the Massachusetts Literacy Trail. A few years after the new headstone arrived, and unrelated to the PHS celebration of Whitman, another local resident created a virtual gravesite for Whitman on the popular Website findagrave.com, where readers of Foster’s novel or those who simply stumble upon the story fresh can leave their thoughts along with virtual flowers (and tears) of their own.

The renewed attention given to Whitman and Foster beyond the university classroom suggests that early American books still have much to teach ordinary Americans, even about a world whose political luminaries, thanks to an unending parade of biographies and even HBO miniseries, now feel like familiar friends. During the Peabody discussions of The Coquette, as the PVMHS English department chair, Michalene Hague, wrote to me, “it became clear that people were learning about the era as it presented women’s roles and the lifestyles of ‘acceptable’ society; social mores then and now were discussed and regional connections explored. Our students, living as they do surrounded by history which they take for granted or often forget, benefitted in a community pride way—knowing that the early townspeople looked past the ‘sin’ and nurtured Elizabeth Whitman’s needs at the time.” Another local teacher and community historian, S. M. Smoller, who had brought Whitman’s story to local attention a few years earlier during a Women’s History Month celebration, was drawn to Whitman as a writer, not simply a literary heroine. “As I scrutinized her poetry,” Smoller recalls, “I was taken with her voice, especially when she adopts an attitude of anger and admonishes her deserting lover to go on and live although she knows her life is over.” Smoller was intrigued, too, by the story’s long popularity, the stuff of local legend. Salem resident Robert Buckley, who created the virtual gravesite for Whitman, has one theory: “I believe The Coquette fell into a category of novel that was long on titillation, and offered just enough moral instruction or consequence to justify the titillation. I think it was entertaining to readers because the story of a chaste, well-bred lady’s ruination packed an erotic wallop.”

Who reads an early American book? With a recommendation like that one, even you might.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

Bryan Waterman is associate professor of English and American literature at New York University and author of Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature. His essay “Elizabeth Whitman’s Disappearance and Her ‘Disappointment'” appears in the April 2009 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly.

Upon hearing the news yearned for by every college professor—the announcement of an upcoming sabbatical leave—a senior scholar of religious studies I know celebrated his freedom by buying a fresh copy of a long-admired sacred text: Moby-Dick. Before he contemplated the research and writing he might accomplish, or outlined the diligent yet humane schedule that might structure his blissful days, he set what appeared to be a manageable goal: to have a thorough encounter with the novel whose compelling intricacies had so far managed to elude him. An hour a day spent in serene contemplation of Melville’s prose, feet propped on the ottoman, cup of tea at hand, seemed the humanist’s reward for years of labor. The novel, it seems, had other plans.

Burnt out, frustrated, and bored after thirty chapters, this professional reader could not finish the book.

What had gone wrong? Surely it was his fault. Perhaps it was some innate deficiency: a previously asymptomatic and probably imaginary tin ear for great works of literature. It might well have been the book’s “Cetology” chapter: that bugbear of a whale catalogue whose painstaking detail has repelled generations of undergraduate readers, sending them back to their CliffsNotes. At the very least, this scholar suddenly appreciated the challenge of pursuing such a major literary project on his own without the motivating presence of colleagues or students, whose anticipated questions often push us through our most difficult texts.

But was this failed encounter with Moby-Dick the reader’s fault, or the book’s? Why did this literary experience promise so much, and then refuse to deliver? Even more curiously, was there anything that this reader might have learned in the midst of this endeavor that might eventually be of greater value than a successful reading of the book itself?

Many of us labor under the impression that Moby-Dick is a book we should read and, more importantly, understand. An avatar of the “Great American Novel,” as elusive a concept for writers and critics as the White Whale is for Ahab, the book both tantalizes us and makes us feel uninformed if we have not yet turned its pages. Those who were not exposed to the book in their high school or college years may be slightly embarrassed; Moby-Dick may be on others’ bucket lists as they dream of continuing their education in retirement. Yet Moby-Dick is familiar territory to most of us. We may have read excerpts from the novel in American literature anthologies, all the while absorbing the message that The Scarlet Letter is certainly legible in full, whereas Moby-Dick is not. The central drama of Melville’s book seeps into popular culture, and often supplies the animating metaphor in political debates about American imperialism, exceptionalism, and assertions of global morality. Ahab has reappeared alternately as Al Gore fighting for disappearing votes in Florida, one of the two Presidents Bush in pursuit of embodied “evil,” or a monomaniacal hedge-fund manager in search of the ultimate rate of return. The ghostly cultural presence of Moby-Dick might persuade us that Ahab is the narrative’s central figure, and that his quest for revenge is the only story that the novel has to tell.

To the reader who actually commits to opening the book, Moby-Dick offers an entirely different story: the journey of Ishmael. Melville’s narrator is the one who encourages us to address him as a friend before ushering us into the “wonder-world” of whaling, and who makes those promises on which the narrative fails to deliver. It is he who essentially creates Ahab, and he to whom we as readers must pay more attention. Ishmael gets our hopes up from the start. Have you not felt the thrill of that “mystical vibration,” he asks, or experienced the revelatory confluence of “meditation and water” that a sea voyage holds? His questions are maddeningly suggestive. What will happen on this adventure? “Surely all this is not without meaning,” he assures the reader, as he evokes “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life” that will be “the key to it all.” After such an opening, who could not hope to find an explanation of the meaning of life itself in this novel’s pages?

There are some early warning signs that we as readers may not receive what has been promised to us. Even as Ishmael sparks the reader’s curiosity with a vision of “a portentous and mysterious monster” floating in “wild and distant seas,” not to mention other “attending marvels” of his voyage (the kind of exotic itinerary to which the readers of Melville’s highly successful early adventure novels, Typee, Mardi, and Omoo, had become accustomed), he confesses his limited understanding of his own story. Ishmael explains, “I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and judgment.” Weighed down with qualifiers (“I think I can,” “a little”) and uncertain in its intent (obscured by “disguise” and “delusion”), the statement provides readers with a clue that this narrator may not fully comprehend the events of his own life, or know how to retell that story so that it makes sense to others. We are already in trouble.

Ishmael, as it turns out, is cripplingly naïve. When he enters this new “wonder-world,” he misinterprets nearly every sign and character he encounters. When Peter Coffin, the landlord of New Bedford’s Spouter-Inn, tries to explain to him why his mysterious suitemate, the Pacific Islander Queequeg, has not yet returned to the inn, Ishmael works himself into “a towering rage,” exclaiming, “Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozling story is this you are telling me?” Without the cosmopolitan reference points that other sailors possess, Ishmael fails to realize that Coffin is not mocking his ignorance, but rather speaking of Queequeg’s shrunken head, nor can he tell that another hotel proprietor really means to give him a choice between two kinds of chowder when she offers him one measly “clam for supper.” As Ishmael misses these verbal cues, readers are plunged into the same confusion that he feels; we are at sea even before the Pequod‘s voyage begins.

The novel actually intends for us to share Ishmael’s disorientation; his interpretive challenges therefore become our own. His arrival at the Spouter-Inn plays out in the second person, as not only he, but now “you found yourself” in the entry hall of the inn, looking at a particularly baffling painting. As “you” (the reader) and Ishmael contemplate this picture together, you begin to understand why reading the novel itself might be such a challenging proposition. Ishmael observes:

On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last came to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

The painting, like the book, is obscure and difficult. It requires “diligent study” and intellectual exertion, and it cannot be understood on the first try. Along with Ishmael, we must ponder this painting in “a series of systematic visits” or multiple readings, and we cannot do it alone: we also must ask for help from our “neighbors,” friends, and fellow readers who are likely to share our baffled frustration.

As I tell my students, Moby-Dick is the ideal text to read together in a discussion seminar, a group that can share the burden of interpretation and illuminate the book’s mysteries from different angles. But woe to the solitary reader who finds herself stymied in an effort to discern the narrative’s ultimate “purpose.” The novel celebrates this kind of sociability as it chronicles events like the “Gam”: a floating gathering of whaling ships that relieves the isolation of months or years at sea. In fact, one of the key experiences that persuaded me to give the previously impenetrable Moby-Dick another try was a “Gam” of sorts held by a group of professors and students in my graduate program: a meeting of landlocked readers who found certain elements of the novel fascinating, but realized that they would come to a much better understanding of the book as a whole in conversation with others. No wonder Ishmael insists on our fellowship in this work of interpretation.

What puzzles him the most is the actual subject of the painting. Later on, Ishmael will realize that instead of “chaos bewitched,” his first but nonetheless startlingly accurate impression, the painting depicts a ship about to be destroyed by a giant “exasperated whale.” Our minds do not have to leap very far to recognize this as a version of the Pequod‘s fate: this is one of many portholes through which the novel foreshadows its narrative conclusion. In the end, however, locating the whale underneath all the layers of accumulated grime that “besmoke” this picture isn’t the point. The process of guesswork is far more interesting. Ishmael tells us that this is “[a] boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet there was a sort of half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous painting meant.” Despite, or more likely because of its “squitchy” nature, the book inspires in us a feeling of wonder, a desire for knowledge. You as a reader are compelled to “find out” more, simply because the meaning that this book promises is so sublime. Although that meaning may be only “half-attained,” or even “unimaginable,” it hovers right on what Philip Fisher calls “the horizon line of what is potentially knowable, but not yet known”: that territory we want desperately to inhabit but know we cannot quite reach.

Frustrating, teasing, and egging us on as we swear to ourselves that we will master, or at the very least, finish this book are all part of Melville’s larger plan. In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” the 1850 review of his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short fiction that served as a platform to discuss his own theory of writing, Melville shares his secret. What is most admirable about an author like Shakespeare, he explains, is the way in which his lines evoke “that undeveloped, (and sometimes undevelopable) yet dimly-discernable greatness” of a working imagination. This imagination captures “occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth” that, however fleeting, keep spectators and readers alike hooked as they balance on the edge between the known and the unknown. For Melville, a writer’s power to suggest an elusive “Truth,” whatever that may be, is far more important than his capacity to explain what that meaning really is. As readers of Moby-Dick, a book of distinctly Shakespearean ambition, we are perplexed by the holes that riddle the narrative even as we endeavor to see through them to the ultimate truth we have been promised.

As the story works toward its final scene of deadly encounter between Moby-Dick and the Pequod, Ishmael, and consequently the novel’s readers, get distracted by a number of fascinating but oddly unrelated pursuits. In the midst of the voyage that Ahab commands with frightening resolve (“Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”), Ishmael cannot stop playing around. In what other nineteenth-century novel would you find such a clash of high-mindedness and lowbrow humor? The narrative swings wildly from monologues that would be more at home in a tragic drama to a song and dance scene straight out of musical theater, from Biblical reflections on the story of Jonah and the whale to a sacrilegious costume party in which a fellow sailor dresses up in the foreskin of a whale and becomes a candidate, as Ishmael winkingly informs us, for an “archbishoprick.” The novel is fundamentally strange and endearingly nerdy, as students often delight in observing, with its pages of epigraphs, its jokes about “Sub-Sub librarians,” and its leaden footnotes. It explores different types of language and various registers of meaning, from those vague questions of fate and free will that haunt the narrative from the beginning, to the symbolic potential of the color white, to the detailed cultural history of the “curious substance” called ambergris that is extracted from whales. Unlike such contemporary novels as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose lines of narrative intent were consistent to a fault, Moby-Dick never would have survived serialization, as each chapter seems like an independent essay or perhaps a novel in miniature. Even when those disparate parts are bound together along the spine of a book, readers must constantly readjust their expectations of the text lest they lose their footing in the midst of its literary storm.

So what are we to make of Moby-Dick, that book which New York editor Evert Duyckinck pronounced in his review “an intellectual chowder of romance, philosophy, natural history, fine writing, good feeling, [and] bad sayings”? Ishmael, who has endeavored throughout the narrative to piece together the different components of a whale, has left us holding its parts without comprehending the whole. He studies each body part of the whale carefully, devoting entire chapters to the skin, the blubber, the head, the sperm, the brain, the spout, and finally, the tail. When he reaches the end of this catalogue, Ishmael stops, apparently defeated. He tells us:

The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable… Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face.

The whale’s “tail” in this passage illuminates something crucial about the “tale” of the whale that Ishmael himself tells. Not only does he sense his “inability to express” its essence in writing, a narrative deficiency that has been clear from the beginning of the story, that very essence is itself “inexplicable.” Both the tail and the tale have “no face”: they perpetually elude the reader bent on their pursuit, and cannot be met head on. Ishmael’s invocation of the Biblical language of the Old Testament in this moment—in particular, the prophet Jeremiah’s portrayal of divinity as that ineffable presence with no discernable face—speaks to the limits of human understanding that Melville seeks to explore.

When Ishmael realizes that he cannot comprehend the whale’s tail, his wonder returns, and the cycle of questioning and knowing the world begins again. In this moment of failure, even intellectual disaster, Ishmael grasps the humility that eludes Ahab even more definitively than Moby Dick himself. Unlike Ishmael, Ahab is confident that he knows the whale and follows a stubbornly straight line to locate him, all the while proclaiming “[t]hat inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate.”

As a narrator, Ishmael fails us. He admits as much, noting as he constructs his ambitiously comprehensive system of cetology that “any human thing supposed to be complete, must infallibly be faulty.” Yet, he is the only one who survives the wreck of the Pequod, and the only one who has a chance to tell this tale. In the novel’s paradoxical terms, his failure is actually the key to his success.

To a certain extent, Moby-Dick rewards those readers who make it to the bitter end with the Pequod and her crew. The novel’s final chapters chronicle three days of a climactic chase: the Hollywood-style action sequence that we have been waiting for all along. For those who have made their way through the preceding 130-odd chapters, though, it might seem that the real energy of the book lies elsewhere: in that middle ground where Ishmael’s meditations meet our own exasperated efforts to comprehend the novel’s intentions. When we as readers fail in our encounters with this book, whether that means we never complete it or never feel like we fully understand it even if we read every chapter, we have seized, perhaps by accident, upon its uniquely counterintuitive truth. If you have never managed to finish Moby-Dick, you may actually be wiser than you think.

Further Reading:

An excellent edition of Moby-Dick with sections on Melville’s sources and reviews is published by Norton (New York, 2002). On the sea narrative tradition, see Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill, 2008), reviewed in Common-place 9:3 (April 2009). For more on the historical context in which Melville wrote Moby-Dick, as well as the resurgence of its themes and characters in contemporary American culture, see Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York, 2006). For a consideration of Moby-Dick as a “Great American Novel,” see Lawrence Buell, “The Unkillable Dream of the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick as Test Case,” American Literary History 20:1-2 (2008). Passionate readers may be especially intrigued by the discussion of wonder in Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, 2002).

This article originally appeared in issue 10.2 (January, 2010).

Leslie Eckel is assistant professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston. She is completing a book on Transatlantic Professionalism: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World and contemplating a reader’s guide to Moby-Dick.

We seem to have entered an era in which global financial capitalism has become more opaque than ever. Mountains of paper bonds, securities, mortgages, and credit change electronic hands in cyberspace, while hedge-fund managers, portfolio insurers, and international bankers manipulate our investments in shrouds of mystery until their schemes crash. And even then the mystery remains. Regulatory officials and lawmakers fail to keep up with the brokers and managers who hatch ingenious plans for investing billions of dollars. Rising expectations and dashed investments operate without obvious economic causes and global markets thrive on guesswork and the kind of rationality that most Americans do not practice. And yet Americans from all walks of life have lined up in unprecedented numbers to ride a roller coaster of boom and bust over the previous three decades, willing to invest with leveraged loans and easy money wherever there is a promise of success, despite the fact that time after time, stocks, bonds, and hedge fund failures spiral into losses of myriad jobs and homes. As one middle-class Chicagoan who had lost his overpriced home recently told a journalist, “I just asked the bank to fund me to the max” because “I had this gut feeling I would be safe from foreclosure.” His gut was wrong. According to many of the authors rushing to publish books from their perches close to the epicenter of hedge funds, most of the catastrophes of the last three decades were utterly predictable, yet “the experts” did not dream of averting them.

Perhaps because our habits of building personal investments such as savings accounts, life insurance, and retirement pensions have provided us with real security against crises and infirmity, many Americans are willing to extend such investment-for-security to encompass the riskier forms of investment-as-a-gamble. Most of the time, personal gains are fairly modest and investments grow at a reasonable pace, with reasonable account managers keeping an eye on stock markets for us behind the scenes. But at times we are reminded about the fragility of economies in which the gambling has run amok. The stock market crash of 1987, a subsequent Internet bubble, the Asian currency crisis of the 1990s, overlapping with a Russian bond default that triggered the failure of hedge fund giant John Merriweather, a portfolio insurance implosion, Bernard Madoff and his massive Ponzi scheme, cascades of bank failures, and the sub prime-mortgage bond tsunami, are only some of the recent debacles that have defied regulatory powers and enticed millions of people into schemes that promised riches before the bubbles burst.

The stories of hard times brought on by speculators and hedge fund gurus who drive up the prices of stocks and bonds through great global webs of investment have become too familiar; bailouts and regulations have been woefully inadequate. The general contours of the great public rush of investors eager to get a piece of the artificially inflated riches, followed by stunning losses of private savings, are equally familiar. But how new are the stories? Americans’ fascination with making their dollars grow through paper speculating, and their fortunes and failures resulting from it, has been a subject of scholarly interest for a long time. Historians have chronicled credit and investment schemes beginning in the late-colonial years and continuing in every era of American history. In the two hundred years between the Revolution and the 1980s, over a dozen episodes of overextended credit or speculative frenzies grew into full-fledged financial panics, some followed by years of depression. In many respects, the crashes and panics of the recent past do not differ in kind from previous historical examples, but only in intensity: the cycles of boom and bust bombard Americans more frequently, the fortunes reported are outlandishly greater, the effects spread far more widely, and the losses to millions of people are much more consequential.

Shocked repeatedly, as we have been in recent decades, by swindles and crashes of mind-boggling dimensions, the Panic of 1792 seems to be a minor episode in comparison. After all, Americans had barely begun to build institutions, make their mark in global commerce outside the former empire, and conquer the western wilderness. How much cash and credit could have been available to speculators in so fragile a republic? How deeply could a panic have affected average Americans’ lives, especially when most Americans still thought about wealth in tangible, material ways, and still doubted that piles of paper securities and IOUs could play a viable role in the “true prosperity” of their country?

As they entered the American Revolution, patriots professed that in order to be successful, their Revolutionary War required a higher degree of self-control and moral virtue than anyone had demanded of them previously. Their conception of virtue, which was refined as they assumed responsibility for independence and mobilized all their resources, entailed self-sacrifice, unflinching commitment, and an impeccable regard for the public cause over private agendas for profits. Three major nonimportation movements during the Imperial Crisis joined elite and middling colonists in public pledges to restrain individual desire for more goods of a wider variety by ceasing to consume an array of British imports. Benjamin Rush’s famous words that a citizen was “public property. His time and talents—his youth—his manhood—his old age—nay more, life, all belong to his country,” became a truism at the onset of the Revolution. Corruption, venality, and luxury, republicans insisted, had no place in the American polity.

Yet it was abundantly clear, to those who studied events closely, that civic and moral virtue was insufficient to sustain either the Revolutionary War or the rebuilding that followed. For generations, colonists had looked with ambivalence at merchants who marshaled a whole bundle of privileges, including greater access to credit and investment opportunities than most colonists had. But this perspective faded in the late colonial years; older, customary, notions of an organic harmony of interests, which had been especially manifest during the nonimportation movements, gave way slowly to images of a congeries of individuals in the marketplace of goods and services, where every American’s own private interests were said to have social benefits, in turn validating widespread risk-taking and inviting visions of abundance. The idea of restraining individual desire for more and better goods on behalf of the commonwealth’s welfare would arise now and again in the early republic, but it seemed a curiously outmoded way of thinking to an increasing number of Americans after the Revolution. The prospects of hiking up the prices of agricultural goods to what the market would bear appealed to farmers more and more. The prospects of winning supply contracts that promised to yield exaggerated commissions, or getting privateering contracts that legalized snatching the riches on enemy vessels, swept merchants into the role of business agents to state governments and the Continental Congress on a previously unimagined scale.

Not all revolutionary Americans gained from such thinking and behavior. When dire times set in by 1779, wide sections of the revolutionary movement began to question the consequences of mixing private benefits with the ideal of public virtue. Price inflation, severe currency depreciation, chronic food shortages, selling necessities to the enemy, and the failure of price-fixing were placed at the feet of the most visible scapegoats, the merchants and suppliers entrusted with the well-being of everyone. Although a broad swath of Americans welcomed the greater degree of individual autonomy that the Revolution both promised and made possible for the ambitious, they were not complacent about the new interests that seemed to be so handsomely profiting. Critics took note that only a few Americans, most already well-positioned, could live the promise of free individuals pursuing self-interested opportunities; critics also argued that this self-interest had serious social drawbacks if left unbridled. Their public warnings, spread through a growing print culture in America, turned into petitioning and rioting against those perceived to be responsible for economic injustices in their communities.

The critics were correct in claiming that relatively few Americans prospered, or prospered for long, on the scale that the new rhetoric promoted and promised. But those who were already so positioned in the late colonial era, those few with privileged access to resources in land and commerce, together with the ambitious fast-risers who emerged in the wake of the Revolution, were poised to make the most of—indeed, to create—a speculative fever in the war’s aftermath. New Yorker William Duer, a Revolutionary army supplier and international importer, was among the best at grasping opportunities to move much-needed goods for personal gain. Using false clearances, forging commercial bonds, and collaborating with customs officials at foreign ports, he “greased the way” for goods that supplied both patriots and loyalists. After the Revolution he continued to win Army contracts, but more importantly, he was poised to amass state and federal securities in the wake of the war, buying them at drastically reduced prices and gambling that this debt would be assumed as part of Alexander Hamilton’s federal program and thus grow in value. Duer professed the dawning financial wisdom, that money not only embodied the value of actual goods and labor but also the value of future development and profits. Like other ambitious entrepreneurs, he insisted that the enterprise of myriad Americans would be driven not by the necessity to avoid starvation, as so many early modern theorists had thought, but rather by the incentives of high wages and interest rates, and the availability of extensive credit on easy terms. Likewise, the development of commerce and land need not be bound by the limits of one’s available capital, but “could be furthered with barrels, nay store rooms, full of Revolutionary paper.” Duer, and a consortium of ambitious speculators and risk-takers around him, believed that the 1780s presented a golden opportunity to overtrade in public assets, especially the paper securities of state governments and the Continental Congress.

At first, speculators scrambled to accumulate state and Continental Congress currencies at drastically depreciated prices; farmers, veterans, and widows sold the money and certificates issued during the Revolutionary war at a few cents on the dollar in order to raise more usable cash for themselves in the hard times of the 1780s. By the end of the decade, speculators were eagerly purchasing stock in the country’s few state banks and they were looking forward to amassing scrip from the proposed federal Bank of the United States.

There was no shortage of ways for Duer to invest these stocks and securities. Plans to turn the newly independent country toward manufacturing popped up everywhere, though most of them failed for want of capital and plentiful cheap labor. But Duer leaped at the opportunity to develop one such plan, the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SEUM), in early 1791. Acting as an agent for Alexander Hamilton and Tench Coxe, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, he mobilized the corps of mid-Atlantic speculators who held bundles of state and federal securities issued during the Revolution; having purchased these “barrels” of paper from veterans, suppliers, and army agents at a fraction of their face value, Duer’s circle was poised by the end of the 1780s to invest or resell these securities to another layer of speculators—middling Americans with their own deep ambitions—at enormous profits. So long as a federal financial plan was not yet in place, including the much-talked-about Bank of the United States, the speculators could not be certain that their fistfuls of paper would be redeemed at the level of profit they wished to gain. But Duer acted as if the rumors and wishes would soon come to pass. He assumed authority over the sums amassed for the SEUM—especially wartime securities of state and Congressional governments—and used their prestige to attract further investors who sank their private savings in the project. Then, before building a single manufactory or mill on the SEUM site, Duer and his associates used the SEUM’s precarious paper funds to speculate in different schemes in New York and New Jersey. To top it off, they ran state-chartered lotteries that granted SEUM investors the privilege of raising still more funds to indemnify themselves from losses in the value of their investment, should the SEUM not work out. Investors promised to bring skilled labor and machinery for manufacturing, attract miners and equipment to take iron and copper from nearby hills, and build stores and homes for future migrants. But the site, the future Paterson, New Jersey, became, instead, an opportunity for a few men to “make a bubble of this business” from stock shares, wartime securities, and unpaid loans from friends.

Then, too, there were Duer’s dreams of colonizing land beyond the original states. Like numerous speculators of his day, Duer obtained a vast tract of land from Congress, based on his promise to raise a small fraction of the land’s cost quickly, make further payments much later in the future, and settle migrants on surveyed tracts. He formed a syndicate to settle the Scioto tract, stretching over 4 million acres along the Ohio River, with French immigrants. However, within months after a few families arrived and crossed into the Ohio Valley, Duer’s debts to Congress went unpaid, his promissory notes were rejected in France, and suppliers who sent goods to the new Ohio towns begged for payments. The small nucleus of French settlers languished from hunger and vulnerability to Indian attacks, and then dispersed. Duer fared just as poorly in developing land in Maine and along the Mississippi River near St. Louis.

Duer and the circle of speculators around him believed their securities would continue rising in value so long as the Hamiltonian plan for public credit and a central bank was put into place, and so long as the Bank of New York continued to make loans to Duer for his speculations. Rumors surfaced in spring 1791 that Duer’s circle was cornering the newly issued scrip of the Bank of the United States, borrowing heavily in order to buy the scrip, on the expectation that its value would rise. However, after an initial surge in scrip and securities prices, values fell precipitously in mid-1791. On guard against the potential for a complete collapse of credit and prices across the nation, Hamilton initiated a kind of bailout, in which the Treasury purchased large amounts of circulating securities in order to restore their higher values. When the Bank of New York refused Duer further loans to buy securities and cover his debts, Hamilton lamented that however irresponsible Duer had been with other people’s money, his downfall would harm thousands of Americans and the economy overall. Reluctantly, Hamilton instructed the Bank to buy Duer’s stock at market prices, thereby averting his ruin and a tremendous shock to the economy that autumn.

Yet, despite the need for government support and a publicity campaign warning Americans about the dire effect that any speculative craze would have on the economy’s stability, the Duer circle was buoyed into a new frenzy of securities and stock-buying by the end of 1791, and planned to corner the market on federal securities in order to sell them at inflated prices to not only those whose appetites for speculation were already whetted, but also to “my fellow inhabitants of this city [New York] and far beyond.” Rumors held that Duer not only speculated on the first shares of the Bank of the United States, using information gleaned from the first stock holders’ meeting to time his purchases, but he also demanded advances from the SEUM and his land companies, as well as extensive loans from his erstwhile friends, to buy “as much paper as my chests will hold.” By late 1791, his obligations far outran his ability to pay, so he widened his circle of speculation further and scrambled to borrow “small sums” at usurious rates from “shopkeepers, widows, orphans, butchers, cartmen, Gardeners, market women & even the noted Bawd Mrs. McCarty.”

Duer’s paper castle began to crumble in the early months of 1792 when overdue debts plagued him and the Bank of New York closed its doors to him. The First Bank slowed the expansion of its loans and contracted its supply of circulating banknotes, which forced a general credit contraction throughout the economy. Soon the Federal government initiated a suit for repayment on Duer’s army contracts and land holdings. When small lenders came forward in distress, he blamed his problems (which were just as much their problems) on brokers and agents who “acted outside my authority;” he stopped payments on his obligations just as the general fall of stocks and reputations caught up with him in early 1792. Like many of the credit crises in our times, there was no great precipitating international event, no war or revolution, that initiated the generalized collapse.

The Panic of 1792 did not generate a bailout plan. At first, mobs of small note holders who despaired of getting their money back held Duer virtually a prisoner in his house. Within weeks, his larger creditors took the additional step of committing him to the city prison, where he lived out most of the rest of his days. Duer’s debt to scores of Americans was so enormous that his own undoing was only a beginning to the panic. In the ensuing confusion “Speculators fought like Dogs, Cursing & abusing each other like pick pockets & trying every fraud to prey on each other’s distress” over the rapid decline in securities values. Some sold off their own securities and defaulted on loans, adding to the contagion; some fled the city to evade lenders; others in Duer’s circle landed in jail, and many people who trusted him with their small savings went to the poor house. By March, food prices rose, “and as for confidence there [was] no such thing.” Hamilton, who continued to believe that public offices were best tended by men who anticipated private rewards, kept a safe distance from New York. From Philadelphia, where the new Bank of the United States offices were headquartered, he engineered huge open-market purchases of bank stocks, which helped manage the national financial market by prompting a rise in stock prices and restoring some of the Bank’s lost credibility. Four years later the state of New York refused to lighten the laws concerning debt and bankruptcy, for fear Duer would be released and “get in the game again.” He never did; Duer died in his prison cell in 1799.

Was the excess of self-interest that provoked the Panic of 1792 any more or less consequential than the periodic crises engineered by our own era’s Mad Hatters? Measured in dollars, the post-Revolutionary generation’s speculative fever was miniscule compared to trading done now on Wall Street. Post-Revolutionary Americans also practiced more face-to-face negotiations over loans and credit, and lived within a more interpersonal matrix of trust and reputation, than our own generation’s traders who buy stocks online and build portfolios with Wall Streeters they will never (and perhaps never care to) meet. The international reach of men like Duer was hardly comparable to the complicated and interdependent reach of postmodern capital markets today. Perhaps those Americans endowed with inside information and social access are prone to a form of blindness that admits the light of potential profits to be garnered from fistfuls of securities while shutting out any light that might illuminate dire outcomes, no matter what era they live in. But what is it that entices so many people of all walks of life to gamble with life savings? What makes them too arrogant to guard against overextending themselves? Like our recent hard times, the Panic of 1792 drew scornful attention to the agents of speculation and the evils of overdrawn credit; people pointed fingers and agreed that men such as Duer deserved to languish somewhere out of sight. And yet, before the panic, that same bandwagon was crowded with an eager public investing its small sums in an unpredictable future built on scraps of paper. In that respect, little seems to have changed. For every Duer historians meet in the sources for 1792 there is a John Merriweather or a Bernard Madoff two hundred years later.

Further reading

On the Panic of 1792, I offered one interpretation in Cathy Matson, “Public Vices, Private Benefit: William Duer and His Circle, 1776-1792,” in Conrad Edick Wright, ed., New York and the Rise of American Capitalism: Economic Development and the Social and Political History of an American State, 1780-1870 (New York, 1989), 72-123. For parallel stories of paper and land speculation, financial insecurity, and the speculating mania of Americans during the 1780s and 1790s, see Bruce Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, 2002); Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York, 2008); Allan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York, 2007); and Lawrence A. Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Baltimore, 2003). Thanks to Christian Koot and Ken Cohen for their insights.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.3 (April, 2010).

Cathy Matson is Professor of History at the University of Delaware and Director of the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in Early American Economy and Society. She has written books and articles on the political economy and economic culture of colonial and early national years and is currently at work on her fourth book, “A Gamblers’ Ocean: The Economic Culture of Commerce in Philadelphia, 1750 to 1811.”