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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A billion dollar redevelopment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).