In the last few years, scholarly interest in American music before the twentieth century has increased as the focus of interdisciplinary articles and dissertations, and this is a most welcome development for all of us who have specialized in topics relating to music in early America. Part of this resurgence comes from a revival of early American studies from within musicology as well as an expansion of enthusiasm for historical music performance. Perhaps the defining characteristic of this trend, however, is the extension of boundaries that previously circumscribed academic fields of study. This issue of Common-place offers a sampling of some of the most recent research being conducted by specialists from musicology, religion, history, English literature, geography, American studies, dance/theater, and music performance. The range of fields is significant not only because this work has generally broadened the purview of these other disciplines but also because new perspectives of inquiry have moved from an approach based somewhat narrowly on the music itself to aspects of what music historically represented to its practitioners and consumers.

In the 1950s and 1960s, an earlier generation of musicologists published groundbreaking analyses of early hymnody and music production that set a high bar for widely read research in the relatively overlooked field of indigenous American music. The work of Richard Crawford, Alan Buechner, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Irving Lowens, Nicholas Temperley, Nicholas Wolfe, and their graduate students helped to expand a vibrant sub-field within musicology that has endured through the efforts of organizations like the Oscar Sonneck Society for American Music. From a historiographic perspective, the best of this work strove for a synthesis of musical styles, influences, and context in addition to more specific deconstructions of musical notation and musicians’ biographies. Besides a small library of monographs and articles, several compendiums of early American sacred and secular music were compiled. For instance, Crawford’s core repertory is a “top 100” of sacred tunes published in America based on printing frequency, assembled in the same era that Billboard Top 100 listings for popular music began to be broken down by genre within the American music industry. Temperley’s hymn tune index is a comprehensive database of English language hymn tunes that helps identify composers, texts, and publication history through a variety of references including tracking the first five notes of any given melody. Significantly, this latter search engine makes accessible a great deal of specialized scholarship to those with minimal music reading ability and is a great boon to even casual owners of pre-1820 hymnals, often missing title pages or indexes, in identifying publications and songs. The fruits of these scholars’ labors have been indispensable for continuing research.

However, as recently as 2005, an opinion essay in the Bulletin of the Society for American Music, the principle musicological organization for Americanists, asked “What Happened to the Nineteenth Century?” and noted a paucity of young musicologists choosing subjects from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a trend that apparently started in the 1970s. The essay suggests that the cause of this lapse was not from a constriction of opportunity or limited vision, but rather an unintended consequence of the success of the society in fostering interest in popular music. Initially understood as a twentieth-century secular phenomenon, scholarly attention to commercially successful music that often marginalized music literacy, rather than eurocentric art music, was an aesthetic sea-change within the study of music with enormous appeal for young students. In addition, the benefits of studying and teaching to non-specialists musical topics with available sound recordings and moving pictures, as opposed to those without, can well be imagined.

Ultimately, however, the omnipresence of sacred music in early euro-American culture, in and outside of churches, has come to be seen as the popular music of its time by every definition but secularity itself. Its printing and dissemination offered financial opportunity; tradesmen sang hymns while they worked, and many people had favorite, nostalgic hymns they treasured for a lifetime; some populist denominations used contrafacta, or melodies taken from well-known secular songs, in crafting texts for new hymns; stylistic changes came through experimentation with other new forms of music (from theaters, recent immigrants, new mechanical technologies, etc.); music literacy was simplified through a plethora of shape-note systems (a.k.a “dunce notes”) and numeric or letter substitutions for conventional music notation; singing schools for young people met in the middle of the week outside of the church, where new ways of singing that would offend older parishioners could be tried; in some denominations, instruments were gradually introduced, making performance in public more sophisticated; and particularly in the northeast, just about any man with an interest and aptitude in music could establish a reputation as a publishing composer of hymns. Along with the secular folk tradition, early popular music was fair game for any scholar interested in popular culture.

As these new trends were underway in the 1980s and 1990s, other liberal arts such as history, American civilization, and literary studies were being influenced by cultural anthropology in ways that made revealing the process of cultural formation a defining component of research. Positioning courses of study that extended into other fields was a natural consequence of the redefinition of former categories within these disciplines. Researchers who lacked intensive musical training, and previously may have been intimidated, or put off, by the perceived requirement of a grounding in music theory and composition, now felt fully qualified to assess historical music as a cultural artifact. And of course providing the gamut of contexts for specific musical expressions in America’s past makes them all the more comprehensible, and conveys an appreciation for the ubiquitous importance music had for people long before the age of electronics.

Research has also been encouraged by the realization that music is not just a reflection of culture, it is an essential part of cultural production in one of its most protean, humanistic forms. Closely related to language, music is a universal human activity that antedates civilization and perhaps even speech itself. Recent neurological and paleo-humanities studies, such as Daniel J. Leviton’s This Is Your Brain On Music, Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals, and Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, have collectively posited that the human capacity for music is a much more complex and widespread component of the brain than previously understood; or rather, they have sought to substantiate what has long been surmised by many thoughtful music theorists through the ages. Many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American religious tracts pointed to sacred music’s ability to create an atmosphere of sublime transcendence, to cool passions such as melancholy, anger, fear, or grief to a Christian equanimity of acceptance. By the early nineteenth century, however, secular claims for music’s benefits were being rediscovered. For example, an 1804 dissertation on “The Influence of Music In The Cure of Diseases” by a graduating medical doctor at the University of Pennsylvania notes that his opinions “will excite the risibility of many … [but] that its originality entitles it to some degree of notice, and that future investigation of the subject will, no doubt, give it that place in the Materia Medica which it merits.” His theory was based on observations of the calming effect music had on mentally disturbed patients but he hoped to extend the hypothesis to physical disorders.

Several of the essays in this issue touch on this nearly magical capacity of music, and the intimately related ritual of dance, as ways of better imagining historical events, and an alternate means of cross-cultural communication. The reciprocity between melody and dance rhythms, as well as the Irish and African immigrants who exchanged them in mid-nineteenth century America, is highlighted in April Masten’s complex exploration of competitive popular dancing. The efficacy of this non-verbal cultural traffic, which exists alongside, and outside, archival historiography, is further highlighted by her impressions of current reproductions of Negro jigs performed at a recent music conference. Masten also includes extensive discussion of instrumental performance practice and interchange as well as glimpses of audiences and venues for this widespread vernacular entertainment that has received little explication.

In Jeanne Eller McDougall’s series of early musical encounters between English colonists and Kikotan natives in 1609 Virginia, she expands on brief mention of the presence of instruments and musicians in documents recording some of the earliest interaction between Europeans and Powhatan natives to flesh out the importance that each culture placed on various uses of music. The wonderment and strangeness that the music of each culture wrought in the other becomes our own as she parses the social assumptions evident, particularly in the extant English reports. Clearly, each culture’s music is being deployed in the name of diplomacy, deceit, and even conviviality in ways that augmented or replaced the shortcomings of language.

Christine DeLucia’s piece presents a similar contrast between Native and English musicality but firmly locates this confrontation in southern New England. Here, Puritan psalmody conveyed a religious solidarity more akin in purpose to the spiritual chanting of their native neighbors than the martial music of their Jamestown countrymen. However, she traces the continuation of musical interplay between cultures from the eighteenth century to the present, highlighting musical memorials of King Philip’s War. Like a metaphor for their cultural survival, Narragansetts and Wampanoags early on consciously incorporated European musical forms with their own traditions to succeed in conveying their history to the American public.

In a similar use of music as a mnemonic device, Nikos Pappas makes the case for seeing and hearing an 1868 southern hymnal as a solemn reverie for the lost cause of the Confederacy. Papas presents a close reading of the names that Rigdon McIntosh, the compiler and composer of some of the hymns, used to memorialize camps, battles, and officers he knew personally that commemorate his experience as a soldier during the war. He provides a revealing explication of the biblical symbols used by McIntosh on the cover illustration, demonstrating once again that contextualizing cultural artifacts is crucial in recovering meaning that can quickly be lost on later generations unversed in scripture. Pappas makes us aware of the southern audience to which this hymnal is addressed, distinguishing it from other American audiences characterized by region, class, or musical sophistication. By showing how singular this particular collection was we also discover something about how vibrant the mainstream American market for hymnody was.

Nara Newcomer’s article delves into unscrambling a century-old controversy over the authenticity of a manuscript hymnal purportedly signed by John Wesley from the early 1700s. It is also this issue’s nod to the importance of historical manuscript music which reflects an individual’s favorite pieces: an eighteenth-century playlist, if you will. Handwritten music and/or texts were a ubiquitous and inexpensive mode of communal music transmission that could anticipate, copy from, or circumvent printed dissemination. Five line staff markers, for making one’s own blank music paper, were available in most music stores in Britain, even though the first known business dedicated to music didn’t exist in the American colonies until 1768. In the case of the pseudo-Wesley manuscript, personal preferences, like the absence of fuging tunes, help to establish where original owner and psalm singer Ralph Potts situated himself in the controversies that raged in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century hymn aesthetics; and the presence of a single tune that Wesley publicly condemned adds to the evidence that he had nothing to do with the manuscript.

Handwritten music figures prominently in Carol Medlicott’s piece where the idiosyncratic style, music notation, and purpose of Shaker song and dance demonstrate how one of the best known utopian societies in the early nineteenth century customized music to its daily regimen. Shaker music is clearly an ethnomusicologist’s dream: an isolated, tight-knit community with worship and dance traditions that are so different that outsiders flock to witness them; a music notation system that is so radically different that it remains indecipherable for over a century; and a literate society with extensive repositories of both music and letters that discuss their worship and beliefs. At the same time, Medlicott traces the musical ways in which such a proselytizing sect nonetheless could be influenced by trends in mainstream American sacred music. Perhaps the most fascinating feature of the Shaker use of music, and its relationship to fundamentally human needs, is the uniformity of worship and sense of community it could engender over such a wide geographic area.

Two of our essays in this issue center on the rapidly expanding American market for indigenously printed secular music starting in the 1790s, and its penchant for political argument and satire. Myron Gray concentrates on three songs of French derivation printed by Benjamin Carr, one of the best known and most prolific musician/publishers of the early republic. His choice of controversial songs of the French revolution in America details their positioning between the emerging two-party system of Federalists and Democratic Republicans. Musicologically speaking, it directly addresses the nexus of comparisons between a song’s original intent and construction, and its repurposing in a different social context while still retaining some of its original meanings. Glenda Goodman gives us a thick description of how an English popular song, “Derry Down,” with a rich pedigree in street culture adaptability stretching back to the seventeenth century, was widely employed in American political prints of the late 1790s to decry the attempts of revolutionary French diplomats to bribe emissaries of the new American republic. In both essays the influence of the human voice is an important undercurrent to the alterations made to the music itself. In the case of “Derry Down,” the melody acquired syncopation and high-note emphases at phrase ends as it passed through its use in English ballad operas of the mid-eighteenth century. This effect accented key words on the London stage but complicated its suitability for easy singing off the pages of American newspapers. In both cases, later American adaptations moved away from their originally comfortable use within most people’s vocal range. “La Marseillaise,” “La Carmagnole” and “Ça Ira” were each envisioned by Carr as theater entertainment or in a parlor piano setting where singing was peripheral to the project. This points to important shifts in the American music scene that immigrant European professional musicians were implementing in the 1790s. The wide popularity of the tune “Derry Down,” when used as a vehicle for political satire, appears to have been more important than its ability to be sung; but it is also quite possible those responsible for adapting the words to the tune were not musical.

While musical exegesis can be fine-pointed and narrowly targeted, the revelation of historically derived meanings have implications far beyond music’s technical arrangements. Every one of these essays has, at least, that theme in common. Musical change over time, both in the construction of early American song as well as the values with which audiences and performers imbued it, are worth discovering as ways of intelligibly complicating the way we come to know our cultural heritage. We hope you enjoy these essays as much as we have.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

Peter S. Leavenworth is an independent scholar, writer, professional musician, and master carpenter from Madbury, New Hampshire. He is currently working on publishing his research in American popular music of the early national period, Accounting For Taste: The Early American Music Business and Popular Aesthetics in the Early Republic.

Violence is the business of war—sword, gun, and canon wreaked havoc among soldiers, sailors, militiamen, and civilians as they faced off in deadly confrontation during the Revolution. Violence against individuals expressed outrage, retaliation, and political conviction. Violence, in those years of Revolution, in this conflict born of an Enlightenment political science experiment, also was visited on art objects, proxies for hated men and even more hated policies.

Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion, for instance, on August 26, 1765, was assaulted by an angry Boston mob, its Georgian elegance ransacked during the Stamp Act Crisis. Historians may not weep for the mahogany furniture, but they have mourned the archive of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents scattered to the winds that dark night (fig. 1). Similarly, in the heated riots of 1769, a mob entered Harvard Hall and cut the “heart” from the Copley portrait of Governor Francis Bernard hanging there. Another vandalized Copley portrait was of Joshua Henshaw, “an able man, a firm ‘Son of Liberty,’ who, [when British soldiers sent to Boston to restore order in 1768 were billeted on the populace] left nothing undone which would make the condition of the soldiers uncomfortable.” His likeness was reportedly slashed by a British bayonet when war erupted and Henshaw removed his household in haste, leaving his furnishings in Boston (fig. 2). More dramatically, a larger-than-life-size 4,000-pound equestrian statue of King George III—cast of lead and gilt with sheets of gold—that had been erected in 1770 in New York City was pulled down on July 9, 1776, by a mob and fashioned into bullets, projectiles flung at the king’s troops in succeeding months.

Patrick Spero prompts Margaretta Lovell to talk about historical memory and material culture.

The problem of war, of course, is that even when passions are not inflamed by specific policies, symbolic executions, betrayals, and cruelties, it shatters the very thing it seeks to establish or reestablish—everyday life lived in peace and prosperity. Everyday life—especially among the craftsmen who have been the focus of my interest during this period—was the universal collateral damage of the war. During the Revolution, coastal, Caribbean, and transatlantic trade was disrupted or halted altogether; materials for the fabrication and production of all kinds of goods were unobtainable; many markets were shut down, and whole sectors of the production economy faltered. Furniture craftsmen whose skills in design and fabrication were such that their works now sell for more than McMansions eked out a living repairing chicken coops. They lost their markets, their suppliers, their patrons, and their customers, even when they did not lose their shops, their kin, or their lives.

What did artists do under these circumstances? How did the trade in face-painting do? The Pennsylvanian (and lapsed Quaker) Benjamin West, having emigrated years earlier but maintaining his American identity, spent the Revolution in London. Indeed, in 1772 he was appointed historical painter to the court with an annuity from the king and a studio in the palace. Gilbert Stuart spent the Revolution in London in West’s studio, maturing into a successful portraitist of the British elite. Essentially, then, these artists stayed out of the fray, while quietly “voting with their feet.”

John Singleton Copley, located at the eye of the storm in Boston, equally asserted the apolitical nature of the artist, voicing neither Loyalist nor Patriot affiliations. As tempers flared in the years leading up to the Revolution, he proved himself an equal opportunity painter: the commander in chief of British forces, General Gage, sat to him, as did arch-Patriots Sam Adams and Paul Revere (figs. 3, 4). Copley’s stance of high-minded neutrality, however, was taxed when his father-in-law’s tea was thrown into Boston Harbor; he found this a convenient time to go to Italy to study European art.

John Trumbull, youngest of these Revolutionary-era artists, enlisted and became aide-de-camp to George Washington, but resigned in 1777, traveling to England in 1780 to study in the studio of Benjamin West. The British did not view his apolitical art project in exactly the same light as he did, and threw him in jail as an enemy combatant. But my point is that in 1780 Trumbull went to London to study art!

Charles Willson Peale is the unambivalent exception to the apolitical (or somewhat Loyalist) stance of most colonial painters. Having spent two years in West’s studio in the 1760s, he returned to America, and, in 1776, settled himself in Philadelphia. He enlisted in the Continental Army, saw action, and served in the Pennsylvania State Assembly, returning to painting and the study of natural history in 1780. Peale eventually assembled a gallery of all the principal faces of the Revolutionary movement (many of these portraits remain together and today are housed in the Second Bank of Pennsylvania, near the location of Peale’s original museum) (figs. 5, 6).

Excepting Peale, all the major American artists of the Revolutionary period appear to have placed art and personal ambition above politics and national feeling. Nevertheless, when we imagine the events and personages of the Revolution, we do so in images they have given us. Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum Washington is the iconic face of the Father of his Country, and we all keep the engraving in our wallets on the one-dollar bill (fig. 7). Stuart is said to have painted 130 reproductions of this unfinished original and called them, perhaps a little cynically, his “hundred-dollar bills.”

Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence, begun in 1785 in Paris, is the iconic rendering of that event and of the faces of those participating. The original is at Yale (Trumbull’s later large-scale copy is in the U.S. Capitol in Washington), and we are familiar with the image from the back of our two-dollar bill (fig. 8). His Battle of Bunker Hill (1786) is equally the best-known battle scene of the war. Abigail Adams, upon observing the work, commented that Trumbull “is the first painter who has undertaken to immortalize by his pencil those great actions that gave birth to our nation. He teaches mankind that it is … character alone, which interests posterity.” Character here is represented by both Patriot and English soldiers deflecting the bayonet of an unfeeling redcoat from the dying body of Gen. Joseph Warren (fig. 9).

My point is that artists seemed to float above (or outside) the fray, but they certainly made hay in the shadow of the Revolution fixing the public memory of the event and its cast of characters. I do not think artists were more ideologically confused or more economically disadvantaged than other craftsmen, although they certainly were in a more socially ambiguous position, rising from modest birth to intimacy with elites, aristocrats, and the king himself. Their chameleon loyalties were to art, and may well have had an element of Stockholm syndrome.

To return to the broader picture: What is the role of material culture in the study of serious history? I would say that the test of its utility for a historian (as distinct from its utility for a collector or curator) is that it provides material evidence that can teach us something significant on which the written record is silent, ambiguous, or obscure. What Peale and Stuart capture in their portraits of the Founding Fathers is not the intensity of their convictions, the violence of the conflict, the inflamed visual rhetoric of nation-building, nor the presumed passionate fire of leadership, but rather the precise physiognomy of the major players, their faces expressing extreme calm and insightful reason. Whether they correctly interpret the faces and behaviors of their subjects is immaterial; what is key is the social and political ideal these portraits embody of purely cerebral activity. What Trumbull intended in Bunker Hill, similarly, was to pantomime violence not as brute force, but as the site of character-formation and character-revelation: specifically, the heroic virtue of dying for one’s nation and the redemptive virtue of clemency. British and Patriot officers collaborate in deflecting the bayonet of a bull-headed grenadier so that all the parties (including the viewer) can savor the exemplary Dr. Warren’s moment of illumination: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. These are the stories the generation of the Revolution wanted to tell and to hear. That these tales do not move us—indeed, that they appear to operate as cover stories for vastly different motivations—does not subtract from the fact of their testimony concerning the power of those narratives in that distant period.

Further Reading:

For more on the visual culture that grew out of the era of the American Revolution, see Margaretta Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia, 2005).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Margaretta M. Lovell is the Jay D. McEvoy Jr. Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (2005), winner of the Smithsonian’s Charles C. Eldredge prize.

The French view of themselves and the world

By the time gold was discovered in California in the middle of the nineteenth century, gold had been a human obsession for five thousand years. From the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia through the Roman Empire, gold had been a symbol of wealth and the standard of currencies. The Columbian voyages at the opening of the sixteenth century ushered in a new chapter in the search for gold. The Spanish conquest and subsequent destruction of the Aztec and Incan empires produced an outpouring of gold from the New World that astonished the Old. This gold production led to endless expeditions of discovery and conquest, all in search of the legendary city of gold known as El Dorado. For five hundred years, the name would survive as a symbol of the unrelenting European quest for gold.

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the gold flowing out of the South American mines continued to dominate world production. But as the nineteenth century unfolded, the locus of world gold production shifted. Russia now became the leading producer, and by 1847 it was the source of about three-fifths of the annual output of the world’s gold mines.

All this changed again with the California gold discoveries. From January 1848 to 1860, the streams flowing out of the Sierra Nevada produced a flood of gold. And, in hopes of sharing in these bonanzas, peoples from all over the world poured into California—almost one hundred thousand in 1849, some two hundred and fifty thousand by 1855. But the impact of California gold around the world involved much more than the mass migration it spurred. From San Francisco to China, from Australia to Western Europe, the social, economic, and political effects of California gold were profound. Among European nations, the impact in France and on the French was perhaps the most profound.

France began 1848 with a violent revolution that gave rise to the country’s second experiment in republican government. The course of that revolution was closely tied to the discovery of gold in California. As opportunists from the Pacific coastal regions—Sonora, Oregon, Hawaii—converged on the gold-bearing streams of the Sierra Nevada, the newly created French Republic struggled with divisive factionalism, street demonstrations, and ultimately a violent urban insurgency. In four days in June 1848, the city of Paris was convulsed by clashes large and small, pitting various liberal anti-government factions against units of the regular army, many brought into the city from the more conservative countryside. When the physical confrontations ended—or rather died away—the cost was staggering. Some twelve thousand had died; another twelve thousand were wounded (no one knew exactly how many). From this catastrophe, the Second Republic stumbled forward in search of a stable government, internal calm, and a revived economy.

Amidst this upheaval came the news of the California gold discoveries. In response to the rumors of gold nuggets available to anyone who could bend over and pick them up, the French focused for the first time since the War for Independence on the United States—now a distant sister republic. Heretofore, America had been an ungrateful petitioner, unmindful of and indifferent to the crucial French alliance of 1778. As America expanded in area and population, the French came to admire its energy and entrepreneurial spirit, while disdaining its crude manners, bad food, and indifferent dress; it was a place altogether too democratic for comfort. As the century advanced, the United States drew English and French travelers, fascinated by its novel institutions and peculiar democratic culture. Alexis de Tocqueville was the most prominent but far from the only Frenchman who had visited the United States and written about this strange and different place. Now it took on an even stranger, more alluring quality.

Within two weeks of news of the gold discoveries half a world distant, one commentator noted the special nature of the commercial opportunities opening up to France. Consider the character of the mines and mining enterprise, he wrote. They sustain “an immense population that consumes but that produces nothing.” Thus, “the greatest chance for success is for France.” Instead of carrying to California “the gold hunters, she should carry on her lines a mass of manufactured products. It is not men who ought to be conveyed to California, it is things; it is not explorers, but traders and the products of our industries.”

Benjamin Delessert wrote in the same vein for the Revue des Deux Mondes. “If the reports which we have of this country are confirmed, the colonization of this rich country by a race as intelligent and entrepreneurial as the Anglo-Saxon race has a great influence on the future destiny of the world and of our commerce. Without a doubt, the Americans can exploit by their ordinary activity the hidden riches in this country which conceals so much treasure.” In short order, “the treasures of California, that the Spanish left so long unexploited, the American race will exploit, and this is a good thing for our old Europe. She will exchange her products of the soil of California against the products of our manufacturers and of our fabriques. This will be a big advance over the aristocratic Russians.” For “the adventurous citizens of the US will rapidly disperse the gold which they have gathered so easily in California, and one can say that it is a veritable gift of Providence that the riches of California have fallen into the hands of the Americans.” These riches could then be acquired through aggressive trade by the French.

One observer offered specific advice on how to respond to this trading opportunity: “I am persuaded that without going to Eldorado, one can do a great business in this country, and that a ship of 400 to 500 tons, loaded one half with wines from Bordeaux, Champagne, Madeira, Tenereiffe; then the other half, clothes, ready-made wear, but principally for the working class, such as chimises, pants, shirts, boots, as well as foodstuffs, tools to work the earth, kitchen ware, ordinary furniture for all the houses that are under construction, strong boxes for the gold that is amassed, and which would go directly from France to California.” Here and elsewhere, the French viewed California in a colonial framework, a source of raw materials but without the capability of providing finished goods for its rapidly growing population.

In addition to commerce, there was the question of empire. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the French were already mindful of the significance of imperial expansion. After various trials, they had at last subdued their first imperial possession in Algeria, and they were now moving to fill this place with colonists and investment. Many of the first colonists turned out to be the insurgents of 1848, convicted and sentenced to deportation. Yet the model of the British Empire suggested that colonies were the future for European nations who hoped to compete on a worldwide scale.

Even before the confirmation of the gold discoveries—or simultaneously with the confirmation—the French began to think about the significance of California as an American possession. Acquired at the close of the war with Mexico under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in February 1848, California (gold aside) was an imperial possession of the greatest importance. Facing the Pacific Ocean to the west, it represented a final piece in America’s new continental empire. Consider the observations of Benjamin Delessert on the occasion of the California gold discoveries: “What an imposing and extraordinary spectacle offers us the constant and rapid progress of this powerful America which, each year, extends her arms farther?” he wrote. “Within the last three years, the territory of the United States has been doubled by the annexation of the Republic of Texas, the conquests from the war against Mexico, and the acquisition of a large part of the northern coast of the Pacific Ocean by treaty with Great Britain. Today Congress discusses buying Cuba from the Spanish.” Delessert continued, “What are thus the limits of this always growing ambition? Where will cease this continual need to grow? Mistress of five hundred leagues of coast on the Pacific Ocean, this strength that nothing can make fall back, goes without doubt to found a new empire.” He went on to suggest that the “immense future is reserved for the nation” with a powerful presence on the Pacific Ocean. “There is there a new world to exploit, to civilize, and to enrich, and, while old Europe debates and wears itself out in the sterile struggles against barbarism which one would wish to revive, the genius American marches with great strides to the peaceful conquest of this new world.”

For the French, the American presence resonated with their own imperial experiences. In the words of the Journal des Debats, a newspaper with official connections, the seizure of California by “the anglo-saxon race” with the intention of colonizing, administering, and making flourish “a vast country which the last year was almost deserted” was a “most interesting spectacle.” And now this heretofore largely deserted landmass with the outlet to the Pacific “had attracted an immense crowd of adventurers gathered from all points of the globe.” The editor continued, “It is a subject filled with insights for France, which tries also a grand work of colonization and which has for eighteen years been mistress of one of the most beautiful countries in the world.” The reference to Algeria, France’s colonial possession conquered in 1830, suggested that the French were still trying to develop an imperial policy. But the common denominator was clear. Like the French in Algeria, the Americans were a superior race replacing an inferior race in the settlement and exploitation of a natural setting of great richness and beauty.

A commentator wrote of the parallels: “In California we see the Anglo-Saxon race as colonizer, administrator, to render flourishing a vast country that last year was a desert.” France had to learn how to govern its new colony, to institute “a rule of law, to maintain order and liberty in the midst of a population which elements are, in the majority, also dissolute and vicious as the population which pours today into the golden sands of the San Joaquin and of the Sacramento.” As for the Mexicans, they were embarrassed to see a portion of that population now living “under American law, ashamed to have been seen to cede almost without a struggle a country where the activity of a superior race has found the treasure for so long time resting unexploited.”

In addition to American growth and physical expansion, another dimension of the California gold discoveries that immediately engaged the French was the role of her citizens in the exploitation of natural resources. Behind wars and treaties came America’s citizens. One of the extraordinary qualities of the nation on exhibit in California was the American capacity as colonizers. The Americans moved aggressively and with great speed. When the news of the gold discoveries became known, many Americans left for the gold fields, including soldiers and their officers, government officials, farmers and merchants, ship captains and ordinary sailors. This rapid response was an essential part of the national character, what one French newspaper called “the spirit of the nation.” And in the vacuum left by their departure, women and children carried on the work and guarded the houses.

The Americans could do more than simply move rapidly. After two hundred and fifty years of experience, they knew how to open up the resources of the land. Indeed, it was “the traits of the Americans that make them so successful in exploiting lands.” Thus, the Americans were the ideal national group to exploit the gold discoveries: “By one of those admirable secrets which suddenly come to modify and to rule the destinies of nations, Providence, has wished that this country, a treasure unexploited and lost between the hands of the indolent Mexicans, passes suddenly into those of the hard working and indefatigable Yankees.” In this old Spanish possession, “the river of gold, un Pactole [a rich gold mine] on which one does not know either the depth nor the limits, is the first fruit of the conquest.” Will this land remain the same? No, it will change as rapidly as the prairies and forests of Indiana and Illinois. “A population ardent, active, and adventurous flocks together from all parts.” Already the new possession feels the force of American presence. The Americans are a force to be reckoned with. “And what a force!” 

This energy and confidence in acquiring new lands and opening up the old led to rapid national growth in the economy and transportation systems. A balance sheet of American progress in these areas from the inauguration of its first president to midcentury (1851) showed this physical achievement. The growth in the physical size of the nation was astonishing, paralleled by its increase in population. At a time when French population was stable or even falling, America’s growth was remarkable. In 1850 alone, the American population increased by one million. By the middle of the century, the Americans had built more than ten thousand miles of railroads and fifteen thousand miles of telegraph lines. Their steamboat fleet was far larger than the French. Their public library system was unique in the Western world. The conclusion: “It has not been given to any other people to march in a step as rapid and to make also in such little time conquests also important for civilization and for the perfection intellectual and material of men.”

Finally, there were issues of monetary policy. France was a leading nation of Europe. It had a valued and widely accepted circulating currency. It had large gold reserves in the Bank of France. The immediate concern was the price of gold. What would be the result of the outpouring of the precious metal from California? The Revolution of 1848 had produced uncertain financial conditions across France: businesses closed, government bonds plunged in value, and the Paris Stock Exchange temporarily closed. In response, the price of gold had risen steadily. With the confirmation of news of the California gold discoveries, the price of gold began to fall. As one newspaper noted, “the news from California and gold which begins to arrive in Europe from this distant Eldorado has contributed much to [falling gold prices].” By the beginning of March, “California gold has already led to the fall of the price of gold in Paris. One has rarely seen gold at a price so low.”

With the decline in the price of gold, the issue was now its impact. In the words of the Journal des Debats, “[T]his change in the relative value of gold, this depreciation of all precious metals, will this be good or bad?” Awaiting the long-term impact on financial markets, observers noted immediate tangible results. “Seriously, however, one effect must inevitably follow from any great influx of this metal, namely, a rise in the price of all commodities, as compared with the gold standard, and where that rise would stop, he must be a bold man who would venture to predict. We have already seen this result take place in California itself.” But the influence in two areas was clear: “Annuities will fall in value; investments in real property will increase two or three times.”

Michel Chevalier, an observer of monetary policy, wrote a series of articles, the first dated September 1849, under the title “The California Gold Mines.” Published over nine months, these essays analyzed the potential influence of California gold on the French economy and French monetary policy. After a lengthy review of the history of gold, Chevalier asked whether the discoveries in California would mark a dramatic change or simply a continuation of the periodic discovery of new sources, which had been the case over the millennia. He concluded that much would depend on the extent of the California gold fields and the richness of the ore bodies. Would the production in California continue to rise dramatically, as it had over the first two years, or would the harvest of gold level off and then begin to decline?

One important difference was already significant: miners from all over the world, including major contingents from England and France, had joined the Anglo-Americans in harvesting the gold from California’s mountain streams. This made the California gold rush unique in the history of gold mining. Heretofore, the gold had belonged to the imperial authority that controlled the landscape, whether Roman, Spanish, or Russian. Now the gold was being parceled out among representatives of a score of nations. And what a remarkable change that was, making the California gold experience something new, driven by several different national groups, and accordingly, making any predictions about economic impact that much more difficult. One thing was obvious, though. The California gold discoveries would profoundly threaten Russia’s dominance of world gold production. Chevalier thought this was a good thing because it was done by prospectors free to claim the fruits of their labors. For in the end, Chevalier wrote, the richest nation was not the nation with the most gold; it was the nation in which the workers harvested by their labor food, clothing, and shelter—the ongoing needs of a civilized people. From this perspective, the California gold harvest was an important advance in the condition of humanity.

In late December 1850, the French monetary world confronted a crisis brought on by rumors. The crisis began when an English paper reported that France would go off the gold standard. London was an important financial center; rumors coming from London, however fragile, thus demanded serious consideration. For a month, French newspapers gave extended coverage to the question. Repeated denials by government officials eventually took hold. France would maintain a bimetallic system, balancing gold and silver. The last central question about the impact of gold on France’s monetary system had been asked and answered.

In the final analysis, the French bimetallic system was strong enough to absorb the impact of the California gold discoveries. The French economy, especially the port towns, benefited from the commercial opportunities connected with the emigration of French forty-niners to California and the export of commodities, clothing, and manufactured goods to this thriving market half way around the world. The influence on ordinary citizens remained uncertain. The sheets on the walls of Paris and other large cities advertising expeditions to California attracted much attention and some participation, among those who could afford the trip. Yet, the issue resonated with working people in ways that were both ideological and practical. These twin themes emerged in an advertisement for a French company that would go to California in search of gold. It read, in part: “People of France, you suffer because gold, that principal stimulant of nations, does not circulate in your veins, because it rests and stops in the hands of some privileged people who refuse to offer it for your work and your sweat.” The object of this exercise, and by implication for all interested in the well-being of the citizens of the Republic, was “to make gold circulate from the heart to all the extremities of the social body.”

Although many of good heart and good will struggled “to circulate” economic advantage to all citizens of the Second French Republic, they did not succeed. The political divisions and the growing strength of those who favored “order” at the expense of “liberty” doomed them to failure. But the California gold discoveries brought a new element into French life, an exhilarating breath from a sister republic across the sea, a new kind of nation, expansive and enriched by gold. The opportunities associated with the gold rush touched many aspects of French life, official and unofficial. They provided a forum within which to debate many of the important economic and social questions of the day. But the transformations gold brought to California ultimately eluded France. Four years after the first discoveries in John Sutter’s mill race, California was a state with two hundred and fifty thousand citizens, producing $60 million in gold annually. Four years after the first tremors of revolution, the Second Republic had become another historical relic. Frenchmen and Frenchwomen had become the subjects of a new emperor, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, now Napoleon III.

Further Reading:

On the history of gold through the ages, see Brian Kettell, Gold (Cambridge, 1982) and Timothy Green, The World of Gold Today (New York, 1973). The standard accounts of the California gold rush from the American perspective are Rodman W. Paul, California Gold (Lincoln, Neb., 1947), James S. Holliday, The World Rushed In (New York, 1981), and Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold (Berkeley,1997). The best descriptions from the French perspective are Annick Foucrier, Le reve californien (Paris, 1999), Liliane Créte, La vie quotidienne en Californie au temps de la ruee vers l’or (1848-1856) (Paris, 1982), and Michel LeBris, La fièvre d’or (Paris, 1988). An important contemporaneous account is Benjamin Delessert, “Les Mines d’Or de la Californie,” Revue des Deux Mondes (Paris, 1849): 468-84. Among the most important French newspapers are Pilote de la Somme (Abbeville), Memorial Bordelais (Bordeaux), National Boulonnais (Boulogne), Ocean (Brest), Journal du Havre, and Courrier de Nantes. Four Paris newspapers are also crucial in tracing official French reactions: Constitutionnel, Gazette de France, Journal des Debats, and Siecle.

Acknowledgement: The author wishes to express his appreciation for a residential fellowship from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

Malcolm Rohrbough, professor of history at the University of Iowa, is the author of Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (1997).

A recent New York Times piece on “superagers” offers strategies to keep your brain youthful, suggesting that it is no longer enough to maintain the face and body of someone decades younger; now, we must strive to keep our memory and attention “on par with healthy, active 25-year-olds.” Women, in particular, are expected to remain preternaturally young. Glossy magazine covers frequently purport to offer the secrets of perpetual youth; readers are urged to “defy” age or to become “ageless” altogether. By the time they reach a certain age, women are expected to be less visible and less vocal, and those who refuse to conform to age expectations are disciplined and vilified. We can easily recall how the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign drew on long-held prejudices about old women as shrewish and ineffective.

Such age-phobic rhetoric is commonplace in American culture, especially as it relates to women, its history stretching back at least to the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that historian W. Andrew Achenbaum calls a “watershed in which the overall estimation of old people’s worth clearly changed.” In this essay, I trace the construction of old age, as we now know it, to the turn of the last century, which saw the rise of convalescent homes, geriatric medicine, and mandatory retirement. As we enter into an era in which most of our citizens will be elderly (what one writer refers to as a “demographic denouement”), it is useful to reflect on the first time mainstream American culture responded to the “graying” of the population and to consider one imaginative response to the dominant expectations for old age as it became a scripted stage of life.

Then, as now, we are taught how to inhabit our ages. Although we tend to think of aging as an inevitable biological reality, there are powerful norms and values that shape our experience of each life stage. Consider, for example, an essay entitled “Growing Old Gracefully,” which appeared in an 1875 issue of The Ladies Repository. “The thought of becoming old myself brings always a saddened feeling, an inward shrinking—almost a shudder,” writes Katie Clark Mullikin. She continues, “The American people . . . are entirely lacking in due and proper reverence for age and its accompaniments,” and old people are “often considered burdens, spoken of as having outlived their usefulness and their day; spoken of often with thoughtless, if not heartless, lack of reverence.” Mullikin’s sentiments convey the extent to which old age was a stigmatized status, and she registers pre-emptive shame, what she calls an “inward shrinking,” at the idea of becoming old, which she attributes not to concerns about frailty or loneliness but rather to the social stigma against elderly people in mainstream American culture (how old people are “considered” and “spoken of”).

Discussions of old age as pathological and feeble pervaded late nineteenth-century popular culture as scientists and social workers classified “the elderly” as a population and made older people subjects of social organization and medical scrutiny. The rise of convalescent homes that specifically catered to older individuals reinforced the view of old age as infantile and socially useless. While the majority of elderly people did not spend their final years in nursing facilities or almshouses, one historian notes that “even the uninstitutionalized elderly began to be affected by the growing social differentiation of senescence.”

Popular magazines and advertisements emphasized the separateness of old age by teaching readers how to appropriately inhabit this specific stage of life. A regular column in Ladies Home Journal by Virginia Ralston, editor of the dressmaking department, instructed women on how to dress for their age. Her columns included titles such as: “For Elderly Women and Semi-invalids,” “The Elderly Lady at Christmas,” “For the Stout and Elderly Woman,” and “Dressing the Elderly Ladies.” Ralston’s columns served to entrench gendered age norms and to homogenize women along age lines, reinforcing generational barriers and disciplining women through the language of “age appropriateness.” Indeed, this advice literature presumes that age is a stable, biological category, even as it does the very work of producing age as a cultural construct. That is, just like contemporary women’s magazines, these columns exemplify anxieties about the proper performance of age and expose the unnaturalness of age expectations.

Moreover, these columns reveal how age, and its supposed pathology, came to be scripted in concert with class and gender. That is, they lay bare the co-construction of gender and age, revealing the double marginalization of being old and being female. Ralston articulates what she calls “certain unwritten laws—laws which are known and intuitively obeyed by all women—which prohibit certain colors and styles to her who can no longer be said to be in the first flush of youth.” Through these laws, Ralston’s column teaches elderly women what Kathleen Woodward calls the “pedagogy of mortification,” or the practice of becoming invisible. By urging her older readers to consider “jet in its many varieties” and explaining that, “most elderly women require a rather plain skirt, whether the material be cloth or silk,” Ralston aligns old age with plainness and discretion. To be an old woman, she implies, one must become as diminutive and unobtrusive as possible, and such dictates mandate that only one model of old womanhood is appropriate.

Literary women chafed against such dictates. In 1894, when Ladies Home Journal ran a forum called “When is a Woman at Her Best?” a variety of well-known writers, including Julia Ward Howe, Mary E. Wilkins (Freeman), and Rebecca Harding Davis, almost unilaterally refused to answer the question as posed. For example, Howe acknowledged aging as individual and idiosyncratic, noting that “the development of character does not correspond with the period of physical growth and maturity.” Their collective refusal to treat women’s lives as quantifiable and uniform in their unavoidable decline serves as a feminist rejoinder to a culture increasingly preoccupied with aging as pathological and unattractive, especially for women.

In their fiction, nineteenth-century women writers resisted limited notions of old age. The old maids and widowers that populate the work of writers such as Mary Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett stage a subversive dialogue with the scientific and cultural denigration of elderly people, particularly elderly women. While mainstream periodicals articulated a disciplinary regime of dress and social conduct for older people, women writers railed against generational segregation and refused to sentimentalize the difficulties of old age. For the remainder of this essay, I turn to a story by Mary Wilkins Freeman to demonstrate possibilities for reading old age as a contested site, a politicized identity to be rigorously explored in its own right, rather than simply a metaphor for obsolescence or a marker of nostalgia. Although it was written more than a hundred years ago, Freeman’s work anticipates our contemporary culture’s obsession with “successful aging” and self-sufficiency and offers a vision of old age in which dependence and debility can be recognized as oppositional.

Freeman wrote primarily about old people. In a letter to the editor of Harpers, she wrote, “I am on another story with an old woman in it; I only hope people wont tire of my old women.” Here Freeman acknowledges that fiction about old people, especially women, risks alienating readers and disappointing critics. Nonetheless, she was widely respected by the gatekeepers of the literary establishment, published in the premiere venues of the day, and was compared by her earliest critics to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Her story, “A Mistaken Charity,” published in the collection A Humble Romance and Other Stories in 1887, centers on two elderly sisters who are coerced into moving to an “Old Ladies’ Home.” At the beginning of the story, Charlotte and Harriet Shattuck live together, rent-free, in a dilapidated home; they are described as having “old rheumatic muscles,” “feeble cracked old voices,” and “little shriveled hands.” Moreover, Charlotte is blind and Harriet is deaf. However, even as they inhabit a deteriorating house and aging bodies, Harriet and Charlotte are content, and “it could not be said that they actually suffered.” Instead, they take much pleasure from the natural world, and Charlotte, the blind sister, delights in the “chinks” in her consciousness, her word for the “light streamin’ in all of a sudden through a little hole that you hadn’t known of before.” These chinks suggest her alternative orientation, and the story’s own interest in opening up a previously overlooked, unseen reality to its readers.

The plot is set in motion when an intrusive neighbor, Mrs. Simonds, visits them one day and decides they must be moved to an institution. Representing a middle-class ideology that expects old women to be stationary and “comfortable,” Mrs. Simonds’s intervention exposes how benevolence directed toward elderly people often masks an anxiety about unfulfilled gender and age norms. The sisters, in other words, must be relocated not because they are unhappy or in danger but rather because they are too openly old and frail. The narrator notes that “the struggle to persuade them to abandon their tottering old home for a better was a terrible one.” Mrs. Simonds’s eloquence, her plea, her “struggle to persuade” and “convince” them, and her appropriation of the term “comfortable” highlights the force of her intervention. Through her coercive use of language, Mrs. Simonds interpellates these women into the physical and ideological space of old age; she must teach them to see themselves as needy and elderly. The very use of the term “Home” indicates the extent to which the emergence of age ideology in the late nineteenth-century involved the co-optation of discourse and the sentimentalization of old age in order to render it powerless and acquiescent.

For Freeman, though, old age is not about docility or pathos; instead, she underscores the ethos of resistance that can characterize elderliness. Indeed, she envisions old women as liberated from gender norms and the expectations of middle class culture. Of the sisters, she writes, “They had been, in the main, except when pressed by some temporary anxiety about their work or the payment thereof, happy and contented, with that negative kind of happiness and contentment which comes not from gratified ambition, but a lack of ambition itself.” This “negative kind of happiness” suggests the unconventionality of their lives, which are not structured around striving or accumulating but rather from simply having enough—a repudiation of the rapidly evolving consumer culture that linked women with fashion and materialism.

The community’s impulse to move the Shattuck sisters to a Home is a way of standardizing their non-normative bodies and controlling their inappropriate modes of consumption and self-presentation. From the moment they arrive at the Home, “they were at total variance with their surroundings, and they felt it keenly.” The most explicit evidence of their misfit with the institution and its expectations is in their dress. The Home requires them to dress more tidily, “but nothing could transform these two unpolished old women into two nice old ladies.” To be “nice old ladies” would entail adopting the types of etiquette and gender performance outlined in Ladies Home Journal, but the Shattuck sisters “did not take kindly to white lace caps and delicate neckerchiefs.” And beyond that, Harriet has “a suspicion of a stubble of beard on the square chin,” suggesting an utter disregard for the expectations to keep their bodies under feminine control and essentially invisible, a refusal to participate in the proper performance of elderly womanhood.      

Paradoxically, even as U.S. culture fixated on old age as a time of sadness and decrepitude, old women were expected to diffuse good feeling, to perform a kind of affective work to counteract the bad feelings their bodies ostensibly elicited. This logic is made explicit in an 1892 column in Ladies Home Journal: “If you want to keep from growing old, if you want to look young and charming, see that there come no wrinkles in your heart. Be as merry and as happy as you possibly can, finding good in everything and loveliness everywhere.” Such affective requirements applied even in convalescent homes. The Home in Freeman’s story may have been based on the Brattleboro Home for the Aged and Disabled, an institution located near Freeman’s home and to whose residents she sent gifts at Christmas. The bylaws for this Home state that residents “will endeavor to diffuse cheerfulness and good feeling throughout the Home.” In other words, residents living in the Home must comply with an emotional code of conduct along with the behavioral norms. To be an appropriate old woman necessitates a kind of emotional labor, a perpetual “cheerfulness and good feeling.”

In Freeman’s story, not only are Charlotte and Harriet guilty of inappropriate affect, they also eschew the very cultural work expected of older women: they are neither mothers nor widowers invested in the preservation and/or reproduction of family values. On the contrary, “neither of them had ever had a lover; they had always seemed to repel rather than attract the opposite sex,” and Harriet has a “blunt, defiant manner that almost amounted to surliness.” Thus, they fundamentally diverge from ostensibly natural ideas about womanhood and its attendant responsibilities. Indeed, Freeman emphasizes their rebelliousness rather than their respectability, reminding us that old age might contain a range of affects and styles, some of which might be deviant. When they are forced to stay at the Home, they “looked like forlorn prisoners,” and just two months after their arrival, they run away. “Hobbling along, holding each other’s hands,” the escaping sisters are “as jubilant as children,” a description that destabilizes the Home’s singular definition of old people as docile and tame. In another affront to the expected behavior of “nice old ladies,” they hitch a ride from a stranger after underestimating the distance of the journey back to their home.

The story does not end in death, as one might expect, but rather with the women back at their actual home, gleefully observing the butterflies and pumpkins they have missed. The final words belong to Charlotte, who declares, “Thar is so many chinks that they air all runnin’ together!” (“Chinks,” as we learned earlier, are those moments of light and beauty that penetrate Charlotte’s blindness.) This articulation of unbounded pleasure underscores the notion that old age may encompass ineffable joys as well as perspectives unknowable to those at other points on the age continuum—it is a final vision of old age a kind of sensory exultation; the little secret pleasures of the chinks are now dilating and encompassing their world.

Freeman’s story flies in the face of the ageism that emerged at the close of the nineteenth century, and it also suggests a novel response to the directives and imperatives that shape old age in our contemporary moment. Freeman presages a world in which it is unacceptable to inhabit an old body, to reject the pursuit of advancement and achievement, and to jettison prevailing gender and age norms. Her characters, in their blend of frailty and zest, demand that we see old age as multifarious, neither a time of utter debility nor a period indistinct from midlife or youth. Moreover, Freeman reminds us that vigor can coexist with dependence. Her work repeatedly suggests that pure autonomy—at any stage of life—may be elusive, impossible, and even undesirable.

In “A Mistaken Charity,” the sisters do not own their home nor are they self-sufficient. On the contrary, “meaningful survival” in the world of this story entails both dependence and disability; these women rely on one another as well as on a community of strangers, including the man who lets them live in his house rent-free and another who gives them a ride back home. And, of course, their dependence on one another forms the emotional backbone of the story. In this sense, her work warns us against assessing old age according to the dictates of capitalism, which teaches us that to age well is to not age at all, not to need others, not to lose control, or even to slow down. Thus, while the story criticizes a culture of benevolence that smugly assumes it knows what is best for everyone, Freeman also dismantles the notion that autonomy is the sine qua non of a good life or of good aging. Instead, she asks her readers to see how age ideology—its desire to naturalize and universalize seemingly innocuous values like comfort, respectability, and self-sufficiency—can do a kind of violence to the experience of aging, rendering the chinks unseeable, and thus disabling individuals at the end of their lives.

As we attend to age and its intersections with disability and other hierarchies, we should, as literary critic Heather Love reminds us, “check the impulse to turn [dark] representations to good use in order to see them at all.” That is, we need not celebrate old age only when it aligns with the paradigms of success and beauty privileged by capitalism or refuse to acknowledge it at all. Rather, we must see old age as part of a whole embodied life that is unexplored, untheorized, and is inherently oppositional to the demands of power, capitalism, and gender.

Further Reading

The classic histories of old age in the United States include W. Andrew Achenbaum’s Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience since 1790 (Baltimore, 1980), David Hackett Fisher’s Growing Old in America (Oxford, 1978), and Carole Haber’s Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America’s Past (New York, 1983). See also Carole Haber and Brian Gratton’s Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History (Bloomington, Ind., 1994). Cultural histories of age, broadly defined, in American culture include Howard Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, N.J., 1989) and Thomas Cole’s The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (New York, 1992), and more recently, the excellent Age in America: The Colonial to the Present, edited by Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett (New York, 2015). For a contemporary examination of old age, see G. Stanley Hall’s Senescence (1922), a follow-up to his definitive tome on an earlier stage of life, Adolescence (1904). As he put it, “Ever since I published Adolescence in 1904, I have hoped to live to complement it by a study of senescence.” The most current biography of Mary Wilkins Freeman is Leah Blatt Glasser, In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Amherst, Mass., 1996).

Sari Edelstein is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she teaches courses in U.S. literature and culture. She is the author of Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women’s Writing (2014) and is currently at work on a book about age and maturity in nineteenth-century American literature.                                  

Wendy A. Woloson’s In Hock (2009) traces the history of pawning in the United States from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, illuminating the strategies of poor and not-so-poor people as they grappled with economic hardship. Common-place asked her: can the struggles of working people during the great expansion of capitalism in the United States suggest any lessons for Americans today in devising strategies to deal with unemployment, poverty, and inequality? Or is our situation today decisively different from that faced by Americans in the early republic?

Soon after the Bernie Madoff scandal broke in late 2008, the major media outlets ran stories reporting that his former clients, now worth fractions of their former (imagined) wealth, were pawning unusually high-end collateral to pay their bills. A Palm Beach, Florida, pawnbroker, lending money on Hermès purses, Armani jackets, Tiffany rings, and $500,000 yachts, remarked that he was barely able to manage the uptick in business. For this brief, exceptional moment, pawnbroking had gone mainstream: struggling Americans, facing their own financial crises, could find some comfort in the tarnished collateral and faded glory of the rich becoming a little poorer.

By contrast are the countless numbers of ordinary people with mundane goods (iPods and engagement rings, laptops and digital cameras) who transact business every day in pawnshops around the country. Their stories, all too familiar, rarely merit feature stories in newspaper and radio pieces. Today’s pawners engage in a practice that is centuries old, has changed little over time, and continues to play an essential role in people’s lives, whether rich or poor. Relatively simple, pawning is the process of using small pieces of “moveable” property (pawns) as collateral to secure a loan. Anything you can physically take to the pawnbroker, except living things and perishable articles, can be used to get a loan. What the pawnbroker lends is a fraction of the collateral’s actual value. To redeem your collateral you repay the loan with interest within a specified amount of time (usually a few months). If you fail to repay the loan within the allotted time, your collateral is unredeemed—forfeited to the pawnbroker, who is then free to resell it in order to recoup the amount he loaned to you and, ideally, to make a profit on top of that.

Today’s pawners engage in a practice that is centuries old, has changed little over time, and continues to play an essential role in people’s lives, whether rich or poor.

 

This basic process was also followed by Americans of the past, as far back as the early nineteenth century, when professional pawnbrokers first established their businesses in the country’s major cities along the east coast. Before urbanization and the rise of a capitalist economy, however, there was little need for a distinct pawnbroking profession. Because hard currency was in chronically short supply, it was common for Americans living in small, tightly knit communities to act as informal lenders to one another. Neighbors would often use farm animals or equipment as collateral to borrow money, especially when taxes came due and had to be paid with specie (gold and silver coins). Because they came into frequent contact with people on the move who were carrying personal property, tavern and innkeepers, too, often acted as informal pawnbrokers, accepting goods in exchange for a night’s lodging, food and drinks, or as security for a cash loan.

Before the 1830s, credit was in short supply to everyone but the well-off, who enjoyed the privileges of extended commercial networks based on social and familial connections. These men borrowed extensively from one another and in fact conducted much of their business wholly on credit. They also availed themselves of professional brokers who, distinct from pawnbrokers, offered financial services to entrepreneurs. These brokers performed a range of services for the elite, whose business needs were variable depending on the time and circumstance. Well connected and highly skilled in commercial matters, early brokers sold goods on commission; assembled captains, crews, and vessels for trading voyages; put investors in touch with each other; and loaned money, all “with the greatest dispatch, integrity, and secrecy,” according to one contemporary newspaper notice from 1770.

As the eighteenth turned to the nineteenth century, successful merchants and businessmen continued to share in and profit from the broad credit networks that helped them further their financial interests. Needing access to credit themselves, the poor and the middling, however, did not enjoy the same privileged membership in these exclusive circles and were left to their own devices. Turning to banks might have been an option were it not for the fact that banks at this time did not lend depositors money. Not established until the 1810s, the handful of existing savings banks were designed as repositories for extra earnings, to be drawn on only in exceptional circumstances, to pay for medical or funeral services. Bank organizers wanted their institutions to be didactic, to teach working people how to manage their money guided by people who were, they claimed, more responsible and respectable. That is, the elite.

In today’s moralizing critiques of people who have lost their homes to foreclosure or who have filed for bankruptcy, we hear echoes of the past. Then (as now), popular and financial commentators alike claimed that most Americans had neither the wits nor the self-control to manage their money and needed someone else to do it for them. Officers of the Bank for Savings of the City of New York (est. 1819), for example, blamed workers’ indebtedness on overspending, on “vanity” and the “desire of accumulation.” And organizers of Boston’s Provident Institution for Savings (est. 1816) argued that if people did not put their money away in savings accounts it “would be spent in fine clothes, or useless amusements.” Despite the current deteriorating financial prospects for many, judgments of people’s profligacy continue to be leveled against many Americans who struggle to make ends meet by maxing out credit cards and defaulting on car and home loans.

These attitudes have their roots in the first and second decades of the nineteenth century, when we begin to see the emergence of pawnbrokers as a distinct profession in urban areas. It is no coincidence that as capitalism became more fully formed in American cities, so, too, did pawnbroking. In fact, the two institutions went hand in hand: with the emergence of capitalism came the emergence of pawnbroking, and, in effect, the birth of the nation’s poverty industry. (Today’s poverty industry, it should be noted, is much more diverse and includes check-cashing outlets, tax preparation services, pre-paid phone cards, and rent-to-own stores).

The profound economic, demographic, and cultural shifts occurring in the first decades of the nineteenth century spurred the rise of capitalism, the growth of an underclass, and the spread of pawnshops. Immigrants from foreign countries and rural areas flooded east coast cities in search of employment and better lives. As manufacturers wrested control of production from European countries and consolidated their power, the organizational structure of large manufactories necessarily deskilled and disempowered formerly skilled and independent artisans. Additionally, a constant pool of unemployed laborers created a labor reserve that enabled industrial capitalists to pay as little as they could get away with, enlarging the class of working poor who became frequent pawnshop customers.

Pawnbrokers extended loans that ranged from a few weeks to a few months, that were typically for small amounts of money no more than a few dollars, and that people could get on the spot. By obtaining small, short-term loans immediately, pawners were able to supplement their insufficient wages, and in this way pawnbrokers played an essential role in supporting the development of industrial capitalism. They provided a much-needed form of credit that was unavailable anywhere else, including the banks.

To my mind, no statistic better reflects how essential pawnbrokers were to the rise of capitalism than this: In 1828, New York City pawnbrokers handled over 181,000 transactions for the year, equaling nearly one item pawned for every man, woman, and child living in the city at the time. There is no denying that capitalism effectively padded the pockets of select, well-networked entrepreneurs. But these few winners were far outnumbered by the many losers, recorded as tens of thousands of individual transactions in pawnbrokers’ ledger books, evidenced by the countless bundles of pawns crammed onto pawnshop shelves (fig. 1), and the seemingly endless inventories of personal articles put up for resale at auctions of unredeemed collateral.

Mapping the geographies of pawnshops and capitalism provides another instructive glimpse into the concurrent spread of the two. As the country expanded westward in the 1840s and 1850s, pawnbrokers started appearing in cities such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago. Like leading economic indicators, they signaled the maturation of capitalism in these places. Without enough consumer goods as collateral and a sizable population of needy people to patronize them, pawnshops would not have existed at all, let alone thrived for decades, through successive generations of proprietors. Pawnshops tended to cluster on the fringes of retail corridors and were often located near complementary businesses such as saloons and brothels—close enough to where concentrations of the working poor were living, and close enough to entertainment districts frequented by the middle and upper classes who made occasional visits to the pawnbroker for quick cash (much like using an ATM today).

Many pawners were women, and it was often left to them to keep the family afloat, a balancing act requiring skill and ingenuity learned through hard experience. They scrimped on clothing, patching and mending and buying secondhand apparel. They also consumed less food and cooked with inferior ingredients. But some expenses could not be massaged—rent in particular, what one scholar called “the one unending terror of life,” remained utterly fixed and inflexible, and many families lived chronically just one week or one day away from homelessness. To cover these and other essential expenses women turned to the pawnbroker, often their only lifeline, and they chose what items among the family’s possessions to hock, whether a treasured heirloom, a useful tool, or a decorative tchotchke. If a pawnbroker thought it had resale value, he would accept it as collateral. Pawnbroker John Simpson’s ledger from 1838 shows that women were pawning petticoats, handkerchiefs, linens, kitchen utensils, jewelry, and family Bibles.

Wives, in fact, often had a better idea of what household goods were worth and had more accommodating work schedules than did their husbands, and were therefore frequent patrons of the local pawnshop (fig. 2). And husbands did not always know what their mates were up to. There are accounts of pawnbrokers selling cheap brass wedding rings to replace the real ones wives pawned, and sometimes women would stash their pawn tickets (receipts needed to get their things out of hock) in tea caddies kept under lock and key. While family budgets of today may perhaps be more equitably managed, the practice of women independently pawning important collateral continued well into the twentieth century. One of the most evocative documents I came across during my research was an urgent letter that a pawner wrote to her Stockton, California, pawnbroker in the late 1930s. She was desperate to get her collateral back by mail, explaining to pawnbroker Ralph Hands, “I had to leave for Home on very short notice so it was impossible to get my rings. So you will find enclosed a money order for $5.75 and I will expect my rings in the following mail as my husband did not know they were in Pawn… I hope there will be no mix up or any trouble in getting them as it might cause serious trouble.”

Because they were so ubiquitous and offered an essential service to the working poor, pawnbrokers were often stereotyped as being hard-hearted and greedy. Attempting to dispel any belief that capitalism and pawnbroking might be interlinked, reformers, politicians, and businessmen alike characterized pawning as an “aberrant” and “marginal” activity. So even though pawnbrokers were necessary to the continued growth and stability of the emerging economic system, they also became important scapegoats for the various social and financial ills that capitalism brought. It was in the interest of those who benefited from prevailing economic conditions—namely, those who were doing well—to reinforce the idea that pawnbrokers were fringe operators whose business was nothing like “mainstream” enterprises. While pawners were often faulted for not being able to handle their own money, the most vehement and direct criticism was aimed at pawnbrokers themselves, who, true to the stereotype, were initially Jews who came to the profession from the used goods trades. Although the complexion of pawnbrokers changed over time as the Irish and African-Americans joined the business, this stereotype remains firmly ingrained in the popular imagination even today. Anti-Semitic depictions of pawnbrokers furthered the larger endeavor to make other businessmen look good by comparison, defining pawnbrokers as threatening foreigners who looked strange, spoke an alien dialect, and engaged in shady or illicit business practices such as usury and fencing, accusations which were largely untrue. Surfacing as early as the eighteenth century, the stereotypes became more frequent in the nineteenth century, calcifying over time to such a degree that by the dawn of the twentieth century, Jews and pawnbrokers were practically interchangeable (fig. 3).

Some two centuries after it first appeared in this country, the sign of the three balls (which came from the motifs of European banking families’ coats of arms) still hangs outside many pawnshops, indicating Americans’ continued need for small, immediate, short-term loans. Yet our relationship with pawnbrokers remains fraught, and the stereotypes are still entrenched. The popular media often portrays pawnbrokers as trafficking stolen goods or engaging in some other illicit activity, and people’s gut reaction to pawnbrokers remains negative. The new reality television show Pawn Stars may have helped soften the rough image of the pawnbroker, but he still appears as a menacing figure in the popular imagination, perhaps only recently replaced by banking and insurance executives. What was true centuries ago remains true today, that pawnbrokers, operating all across the country, are still the lenders of last resort for people who don’t have bank accounts, don’t want to ding their credit scores, or own only modest collateral but need quick cash. Our present moment of economic crisis has had a surprisingly unifying effect. Hard times have trickled up, forcing the formerly rich and the downwardly mobile alike to hock their personal possessions with the pawnbroker. Equal opportunity reigns in the pawnshop, where one pawner’s DVD player is another’s Rolex watch.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.4 (July, 2010).

Wendy A. Woloson is an independent scholar and consulting historian living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her research interests focus on nineteenth-century American consumer culture, material culture, and secondary markets. Her book In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression has just been published by the University of Chicago Press. She is also the author of Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America (2002).

In late 1850, as a busy wife and mother in Brunswick, Maine, with a modest professional sideline writing essays and magazine fiction, Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house. He was not the first fugitive she had ever met, but he was the first that she harbored in her own home. She took this step despite the draconian penalties imposed for such behavior by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which had been passed only a few weeks earlier. This runaway made an impression upon Stowe and her family. “He was,” as she wrote in a letter to her sister, “a genuine article from the ‘Ole Carling State.'”

Stowe had met other men and women seeking freedom, when she lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, across the river from the slave state of Kentucky. And many of those individuals doubtless influenced her writing and inspired her concerns. Scholars have long speculated about the myriad influences that went into the imaginative construction of the iconic black characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin such as Uncle Tom, George Harris, Topsy, Eliza Harris, and others. There is little doubt that her creative impulses were fueled by a life of exposure to pro-abolition arguments as voiced by white people. However, her creativity was also fueled by having witnessed both suffering and resistance on the part of black people in the decades before she wrote her monumental novel. Her early experiences with enslaved people and the effects of slavery on American society—particularly during her years in Ohio (1832-1850)—may have been limited, but they were substantial in their impact. In some ways, these interactions may have prepared her for an encounter with a runaway slave, in a situation when the stakes were significantly higher than they had been back in Ohio.

Stowe had read widely of the desperate circumstance enslaved people faced, studied how they sought their own freedom, and learned about the issues from her passionately abolitionist father and brothers (one of whom, Charles, lived for a time in Louisiana). We know that she witnessed a slave auction in Kentucky, and that she helped a servant of the Stowe family who they had mistakenly thought was free escape from her former master’s pursuit. All these experiences may have seemed like a paltry source of knowledge to the Southern critics who railed against her ignorance of the South after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but they were sufficient for Stowe to create a literary work that would influence the course of American history. After all, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century, a book that helped energize the most consequential social revolution in American history.

So why does Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brief encounter with a fugitive slave in Maine in 1850 matter? How was her effort to help this man hide in the “waste room” of her house different from her earlier encounters with African Americans, whether free or enslaved? It was different for a number of reasons: the time and context in which it occurred, the manner in which it occurred, and the effect it had on her. Most of all, this encounter was different for a reason she herself could not have predicted: it was different because of the identity of this particular man and the future he went on to make for himself.

Stowe took a fugitive black man into her home and, under the threat of very real danger, waited upon him, hid him, and allowed her children to help care for him. This type of engagement, however brief, trumped some of her more circumstantial or distant encounters with African Americans, or even her realization in Cincinnati that the family’s house servant needed to be spirited away to a station on the Underground Railroad. By Stowe’s own admission, this man who spent one night hidden in her back room exerted a powerful influence on her feelings about slavery. As we shall see in her own version of this event, her interaction with this man helped give form to her belief that domestic sentiment could have a political and personal impact upon the actions of men—that it could help them “feel right.”

The Fugitive

Harriet Beecher Stowe never named this fugitive who was fleeing to Canada. Yet he was, indeed, “a genuine article.” As this essay will argue, it appears almost certain that the man was John Andrew Jackson, whose encounter with Stowe was only one incident in his long and richly remarkable career.

Born enslaved on a Sumter County plantation in 1825, Jackson would declare in his 1862 memoir that “I belong to South Carolina.” Yet Jackson’s verbal dexterity layered that quote with meaning. He made the comment when confronted by Charleston dock workers who wondered if he was a fugitive slave and asked to whom he “belonged.” Since he couldn’t plausibly pass as a Charleston slave, and he couldn’t admit to being a fugitive, his shifty retort was a disarming gamble—one that, oddly enough, worked. Because he “belonged to South Carolina,” or perhaps simply because he perplexed his interrogators, they let him be. His memoir shows how his way with words saved him on more than one such occasion.

Jackson certainly didn’t belong to South Carolina for long under any terms, however artfully phrased. In 1847 he engineered a terrifying escape, stowing himself away between bales of cotton aboard a northbound ship, and settled in Salem, Massachusetts. Rather than live underground, Jackson chose to keep his name and live openly so as to fundraise with Northern abolitionists who were willing to help him negotiate freedom for the wife and baby daughter he had left behind. But this plan was doomed to failure. Before he was able to raise sufficient funds to purchase his family’s freedom, the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act effectively pushed him back into hiding, and eventually led him to flee again, this time north to Canada with the help of the increasingly organized Underground Railroad. After a few years in the city of Saint John, New Brunswick, he went overseas to England on the abolitionist lecture circuit (admiring testimonials included in his memoir indicate that he was lecturing in England by at least 1857 if not 1856). While there, he wrote a complex and powerful memoir of his time in bondage, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina (1862). At the end of the Civil War, he returned almost immediately to the United States, whereupon he shaped a new career of teaching and activism. He would work for another 30 years to lecture and raise funds in support of the now free black communities in South Carolina. And thus, gratitude to mentors and patrons notwithstanding, Jackson would make his own decisions and fashion his own career through the remainder of the nineteenth century.

But what was the connection between Stowe and Jackson, and why might it have mattered to each of them? How do the events of real life come to influence literary work? Most of all, what was at stake for Stowe and Jackson in each of their later accounts of their meeting?

Jackson and Stowe

This question of the effects of this meeting is fundamentally one of timing: When did Jackson spend the night hiding in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house in Maine? First, let us contextualize Jackson’s own references to Stowe. In his 1862 memoir, he wrote of the wake of his 1847 escape from South Carolina:

Just as I was beginning to be settled at Salem, that most atrocious of all laws, the “Fugitive Slave Law,” was passed, and I was compelled to flee in disguise from a comfortable home, a comfortable situation, and good wages, to take refuge in Canada. I may mention, that during my flight from Salem to Canada, I met with a very sincere friend and helper, who gave me a refuge during the night, and set me on my way. Her name was Mrs. Beecher Stowe. She took me in and fed me, and gave me some clothes and five dollars. She also inspected my back, which is covered with scars which I shall carry with me to the grave. She listened with great interest to my story, and sympathized with me when I told her how long I had been parted from my wife Louisa and my daughter Jenny, and perhaps, for ever. I was obliged to proceed, however, and finally arrived in safety at St. John’s, where I met my present wife, to whom I was married lawfully, and who was also an escaped slave from North Carolina.

Upon first reading this account, it doesn’t seem that remarkable. After the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in March of 1852 (and even after the installments started appearing in The National Era in June of 1851), Stowe’s celebrity spread so wide that many abolitionists, fugitives, and free people sought her endorsement. If Jackson fled New England after her installments had begun appearing and had sought her help on his way North, perhaps even asking for a letter of celebrity support, he could still have arrived in New Brunswick early enough to meet and marry his new wife (the marriage was announced in the New Brunswick Courier in November 1852). Moreover, Jackson’s memoir was accompanied by reprinted remarks, dated 1857, authored by Scottish ministers noting that Jackson had presented them an especially persuasive and “strong” testimonial from “Mrs. Beecher Stowe.” Hence we can see in 1857, at least, he was carrying around a valuable letter from Stowe while lecturing overseas, and that he had obtained that letter after her publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with an awareness of its potential value to him. A letter from her written before she had written Uncle Tom’s Cabin would have been of little value, so clearly this letter was acquired after the publication of her work.

However, a careful examination of the likely dates and an analysis of the circumstances of events suggest a different—and more significant—historical encounter, one that occurred well beforeStowe had begun publishing her momentous novel, and before he ever asked her for a letter of endorsement.

To recreate the events of 1850, we must examine the story from another perspective. In 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s husband, Calvin Stowe, had achieved prominence as a theologian and scholar at Lane Seminary in Ohio. Calvin had been offered a named professorship at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. But he still had to finish out a term at Lane before taking up his position at Bowdoin, and had thus sent Harriet ahead from Cincinnati to Maine to organize their household before her seventh pregnancy made travel too difficult. With several stops to visit her relatives along the way, she set out for Maine in April of 1850 and was well settled into her Brunswick house by the beginning of July, when she gave birth to her son Charles Edward.

While Stowe was organizing her household and nurturing her newborn son, she followed with horror the debates over the evolving Compromise of 1850 and the consequent passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. In agonized anticipation of its passage, she published in the August 1850 issue of The National Era a dark sketch titled “The Freeman’s Dream.” In this tale she imagined a farmer who refused to help a desperate family of fugitives, in fear of violating the new law. He was to face, however, a more horrific justice, for his confrontation in the afterlife made it clear that God’s judgment of his sins was more consequential than any legal punishment could have been. But no short story written by a minister’s wife in Maine could stop the course of events. The Fugitive Slave Law passed as predicted, and went into effect on September 18, 1850. Thus we know that Stowe was very much concerned with not only the effects of the law, but also with issues of how to represent, imagine, and enact defiance of it at the very moment of its inception. She didn’t know it at the time, but she was primed for both craft and action.

We know from his memoir that Jackson’s flight from Salem occurred at some point after September 18, 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Act passed, and thus it is during the tumultuous months immediately following this legislation that we must attempt to pin down the point where their lives intersected. Aside from Jackson’s memoir, the key documented account of their meeting is an undated letter Stowe wrote to her older sister, Catherine. In this letter—which Stowe’s biographer Joan Hedrick identifies as having certainly been composed in either late 1850 or early 1851—Stowe first decries the scourge of the newly passed Fugitive Slave Law, and then shares an account of how she and her close friends and neighbors, the Uphams, had discussed the actual consequences and impact of the law, followed by a description of the events immediately after their discussion.

The Upham family had swiftly become the Stowes’ closest friends in Brunswick, and it is easy to see why, as the families had much in common. Thomas C. Upham was a professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at Bowdoin College. He and his wife, the brainy and bustling Phebe Upham, welcomed the Stowes as kindred spirits to their intellectual and activist New England circles. The Stowe family had six children at that time and the Uphams had themselves adopted six orphans, and easily understood the challenges of managing such a busy household.

While Thomas Upham was a passionate supporter of abolition, he was also a cautious man who served as the vice-president of the American Colonization Society and had affirmed that his distaste for the Fugitive Slave Law would nonetheless not allow him to advocate violating it. Phebe Upham, who was known for regularly arguing with her pastor at the First Parish Church (Congregational) about the suitability of women speaking in church meetings, had also (sometime earlier in 1850) authored a religious tract that told of the inspiring life of Phebe Ann Jacobs, a freed slave. (Various scholars have pointed to this tract as possibly influencing Stowe’s later portrayal of pious Uncle Tom.)

The dinner with the Uphams that Harriet recounted in the letter to her sister demonstrates that the Stowe house was ever one for lively debate among its adult members. And while the domestic sphere might not be the place where decisions were made, it could be where they were shaped. It is unclear from Harriet’s letter whether Calvin Stowe was present at this dinner, although it seems unlikely as she doesn’t mention him, and when present he frequently played a role in her lively letters. If Calvin was away (and her letters indicate he was certainly away for Christmas and much of December), it was because he was fulfilling a brief (and somewhat fraught) temporary teaching obligation at Andover Theological Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts. Much to the frustrations of the Bowdoin faculty who had granted him a professorship, he had nonetheless agreed to teach from November 1850 through March 1851.

As she described it in her letter to Catherine Beecher, Harriet held her own in an impassioned dispute with Thomas Upham over the Fugitive Slave Law:

He & I had over the tea table the other night that sort of argument which consists in both sides saying over & over just what they said before, for any length of time—but when I asked him flatly if he would obey the law supposing a fugitive came to him Mrs. Upham laughed & he hemmed & hawed & little Mary Upham broke out” I wouldn’t I know.”

And yet, in an incident which scholars have noted clearly inspired the “In Which it Appears that a Senator is but a Man” chapter in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe gleefully told her sister that the very next day, a runaway slave was directed by another Bowdoin faculty neighbor, William Smyth, to the Upham house. And like the fictional Senator Byrd that Stowe was to sketch out a few months later in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when Thomas Upham was faced with an actual fugitive at his door, he overcame his civic scruples:

… the next day there come along a fugitive bound for Canada and Smyth sends him right up to Proff Upham who takes him into his study & hears his story, gives him a dollar & Mrs. Upham puts in bountifully in the provision line.

It is at this point that the story of Jackson and Stowe truly unfolds, for the Uphams directed the runaway to the Stowe house for a night’s lodging. Even with her husband almost certainly away (as well as her teenage twin girls, who were then visiting with relatives), Stowe took the unnamed fugitive in and marveled at how well her three young children (Henry, age 12, Frederick, 10, and Georgiana, 7) interacted with the charismatic man.

Now our beds were all full & before this law passed I might have tried to send him somewhere else As it was all hands in the house united in making him up a bed in our waste room & Henry & Freddy & Georgy seemed to think they could not do too much for him—There hasn’t any body in our house got waited on so abundantly & willingly for ever so long— these negroes posses some mysterious power of pleasing children for they hung around him & seemed never tired of hearing him talk & sing.

In bemused assessment, Stowe declared, “He was a genuine article from the ‘Ole Carling State.'”

While Stowe seems to be quoting a well-known minstrel tune that was in circulation in the late 1840s and through the 1850s known as “Old Carolina State” or occasionally as “Dearest Mae,” she was also, quite possibly, quoting John Andrew Jackson. This seems all the more plausible since, in his own memoir published some twelve years after the fact, Jackson included lyrics to a small handful of anti-slavery songs, including “The Slaves Song” that opens with the lines:

Now, freemen, listen to my song, a story I’ll relate,
It happened in the valley of the old Carolina State:
They marched me to the cotton field, at early break of day,
And worked me there till late sunset, without a cent of pay.

If he knew the lyrics well enough in 1862 while in England to be able to recite them to his friends there, it seems believable he knew them well enough in 1850 to sing them for Stowe.

Despite the songs and happy times, the visit was to be a brief one. Spending more than a short time in a household full of chatty children might well have seemed unwise, and the runaway was directed elsewhere the next day. While there are clues for where this fugitive may have stayed after his one night at the Stowe house, Harriet doesn’t refer to him again.

So, what do we know of Jackson’s life at this point? Aside from Jackson’s own claims in his memoir, the next firmly documented reference to Jackson places him a year later in the free city of St. John, New Brunswick. Starting his free life anew, Jackson evidently settled fairly rapidly into St. John’s community of free blacks and fugitive slaves. On November 20, 1852, his second marriage was announced in the New Brunswick Courier: “m. By Same, same day, at his residence, John A. Jackson / Miss Julia A. Watson both of Saint John.” Within a few years he and his wife turned up in England, and his international career as abolitionist lecturer began.

That Jackson was familiar to Stowe by the late 1850s is fairly clear. Not only does his memoir assert it, but two clerical testimonials that were printed as part of his 1862 memoir in England refer to him carrying a reference from Stowe:

18, Coates Crescent, Edinburgh, 7th May, 1857. Mr. Jackson, on producing what seemed to me sufficient testimonials, and particularly a strong one from Mrs. Beecher Stowe, was allowed to deliver two lectures in my Church. These lectures were, I have reason to know, very creditable to him. I have no doubt of his being entitled to countenance and support in his laudable undertaking.
THOS. CANDLISH, D.D., Minister of Free St. George’s.
JAMES GRANT, 7, Gilmore Place.

Resermere Presbyterian Manor, Loanhouse, Edinburgh, 18th May, 1857. From testimonials produced by Mr. Jackson, given by Mrs. Beecher Stowe and others, I was convinced of the truth of his case, gave him the use of my Church for public lectures on two occasions, and felt happy in affording him hospitality for two nights. From all I have seen and heard, it gives me pleasure to testify my conviction that he is entitled to cordial sympathy and encouragement in the laudable object he has in view—the deliverance of some relations from that estate of bondage from which he himself has in the good providence of God escaped.
I can cordially unite with the above, from
WM. ANDERSON, Minister of the gospel.
DAVID GUTHRIE, Minister of the Free Church, Tibetson.

If Jackson were not the slave who first encountered Stowe in 1850 as a fugitive, then he had certainly either met her or corresponded with her before those testimonials were written. But that notion, if they had met in person, seems unlikely, for it is difficult to imagine that Jackson would have returned to the United States (where such a meeting would have taken place) after he had just gone to such perilous lengths to leave it. And, while it is conceivable that Jackson might have met Stowe during one of her trips to England during 1853 or 1856 (which might more sensibly account for the testimonials he obtained), this does not explain why he would later claim to have met her in 1850, when he was en route to Canada. For the purposes of this essay, I will assume that his account of taking refuge with Stowe in Maine in 1850 is true, and that he later—perhaps before leaving Canada, perhaps while in England, but certainly after her novel had made her famous—wrote her asking for a letter of introduction, knowing that it would be of great value.

So, if Jackson had taught Stowe anything about slavery, why wasn’t he mentioned in her exposition of facts about the “Institution” published as The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853? After all, other specific individuals were cited as having shaped her literary creations. And, furiously defending herself against charges of exaggeration and unreliability, surely Stowe would have added as many real-life accounts of slavery as she could.

Of course, there are several ways to account for this omission; the point of The Key was to document what would otherwise be “hearsay” inspirations, and the Key is therefore almost totally reliant upon published (often to the point of being inaccurately retroactive) sources. Her illegal harboring of Jackson not only couldn’t have been publicly mentioned in 1853 under penalty of prosecution. But it also would have been, almost by definition, undocumentable, and wouldn’t in any substantive way have helped her establish her public “authority” in constructing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It might even have served to reveal crucial details of the Underground Railroad network in Maine, something she would have scrupulously avoided. She cites the lives of people such as Josiah Henson and Lewis Clarke inasmuch as they produced published narratives. In The Key she does not discuss her personal interviews or encounters with slaves or fugitives she had met in Ohio and Kentucky, regardless of the influence those events had upon her.

One of the stronger challenges to Jackson’s claim might be to question why Jackson did not foreground his Stowe connections even more. After all, Josiah Henson and others made careers for themselves as professional muses to Stowe, claiming that they had been the “real” or at least the models for various iconic characters from the Stowe oeuvre. Indeed, Josiah Henson republished his original 1849 memoir The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada. Narrated by Himself in 1876 in London under the title Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life.

While Stowe did complain to the Evening Bulletin of Maysville, Kentucky, in a letter dated December 9, 1895, about upstarts “going about the country representing themselves to be the originals of Uncle Tom, or George Harris, as the case might be,” both Henson’s and Clarke’s lives are explicitly cited by Stowe as real-life parallels and inspirations, if not models, for her fiction. So it seems that if Jackson had had a direct influence upon her, she would have mentioned it at some point.

Moreover, surely Jackson, a savvy opportunist, would have been justified in milking his early connection with Stowe in his personal fundraising efforts, perhaps with the argument that he had been an original of Uncle Tom—or, in a more fitting parallel, an original of Eliza Harris, who like Jackson had appeared at the doorstep of someone who had just stated his intention to never violate the Fugitive Slave Law. Or perhaps we can see a parallel in Jackson’s life to the defiant George Harris, for Jackson too had singlehandedly escaped and was determined to somehow rescue his young wife and daughter from bondage. Alas, unlike the fictional Harris, who was reunited with his family, Jackson’s happy ending wasn’t so pat. Jackson was never able to secure the freedom of his first wife and their child. While he remarried twice, there is some possibility his first wife, Louisa, survived the war, and that they saw one another in South Carolina. However, the records are unclear on that point. Stowe’s contrived endings were just that, and real lives like Jackson’s could never unfold so tidily. Census records from 1870 and 1880 indicate a Louisa Law living in Lynchburg, South Carolina, who might be Jackson’s first wife, presumably having moved back from Georgia.

While it is tempting to speculate about what Jackson might have told Stowe on the one night that he spent under her roof, we can never ultimately know. But perhaps the pivotal nature of the incident lies in its domestic presence. A man fleeing for his life was not an abstraction or an inspiration. He was someone who brought the effects of the Fugitive Slave Act into her very house in Maine. She very likely would have seen the hand of divine providence at work. In early March 1851, Harriet was sitting in the Upham family’s church pew in the First Parish Church in Brunswick, and she had a vision of a man being whipped to death, a vision that compelled her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a vision that drew upon a lifetime of impressions, research, knowledge, and experiences. Adding Jackson to that assortment of influences is important, because the fact that he was “the genuine article,” and the fact that he was sent to her for protection in a strange town, may have been part of the final push toward the writing of her great novel.

So, if Jackson was the slave who spent one night under the roof of Calvin and Harriet Stowe in Brunswick, Maine, in late 1850, how might we apprehend its influence on another important nineteenth-century writer, namely John Andrew Jackson? How was his life story crafted in response to the expectations that abolitionists such as Stowe had created in the public mind about the experience of slavery? How might his encounter with such an author have influenced his own decisions to pursue a career in letters and social change?

Like Stowe, Jackson was a writer who drew upon a variety of sources and inspirations. And yet, leaving aside the anxious question of influence, we can still see that, just as Stowe doubtless used Jackson in some small way as the emotional impetus for launching Uncle Tom’s Cabin, so too did Jackson likely use Stowe as part of consolidating the emotional and intellectual confidence necessary to put his own life story down in words. After all, while it is true that many slave narratives had been published throughout the previous decades, the audacious self-possession it takes to write a memoir should not be underestimated. While Jackson does not tell his readers how he learned to read and write, it was most likely as a free adult, and it almost certainly took a series of experiences with men and women of letters—people who put their activism into permanent textual form—that undergirded his belief that he could and should write his own story. It is notable that he confidently and almost casually signed his book “By John Andrew Jackson,” eschewing the by then rote “written by himself” that was often appended to most American slave narratives.

And yet, while Jackson accumulated a number of literary, clerical, and intellectual friends who assisted him in the production of his 1861 memoir, Stowe remained more than just a figure who could vouch for him. She clearly provided a frame in which he could move between fiction and non-fiction in the project of his own self-fashioning. An account of one of the lectures Jackson delivered in Scotland in 1857 provides an overview of the life story he was soon to sketch out in his memoir. The newspaper report of the talk, however, shifts into a discussion, perhaps inadvertently, of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1856 novel, Dred. Jackson evidently told his audience of his determination to free his father and his sister’s children from bondage, but he included other figures in his lecture as well. As the observer in The Christian News of June 6, 1857, put it: “In the course of his lecture he told a thrilling tale of a slave named Dred.” The reporter then went on for a paragraph to summarize Jackson’s version of Dred’s tale, never hinting that it might be fiction, stating only that “This story was told with great effect.” Since Stowe’s novel had been in circulation in Britain for at least a year before Jackson’s lecture, it seems unfathomable that Jackson would have tried to pass off Dred’s story as non-fiction, even though Stowe had presented the novel Dred as intricately inspired by the testimony of the very real revolutionary leader Nat Turner.

Nonetheless, as the reporter saw it, Jackson then segued smoothly into an account of how a black driver on the plantation where Jackson had once lived had been similarly threatened and, in this instance, eventually murdered by a white owner. Jackson’s own brave escape by pony to Charleston and then by ship to Boston were thus aligned with the actions of Stowe’s revolutionary character Dred.

Finally, Jackson’s own 1862 memoir, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, was explicitly introduced as a supplement of sorts to Stowe’s legacy. As the preface to his memoir stated, Jackson’s mission was to discuss the evils that even Stowe had been unable to reveal:

In aiming to arrest the attention of the reader, ere he proceeds to the unvarnished, but ower true tale of John Andrew Jackson, the escaped Carolinian slave, it might be fairly said that “truth was stranger than fiction,” and that the experience of slavery produces a full exhibition of all that is vile and devilish in human nature.

Mrs. Stowe, as a virtuous woman, dared only allude to some of the hellish works of slavery—it was too foul to sully her pen; but the time is come when iniquity should no longer be hid…

From his own account, we can see that while Jackson never excessively capitalized upon the fateful past he and Stowe shared, he did move ahead with his life fully cognizant of the impact of stories, the courage of kindness, and the power of the pen to help him fashion his own fate.

Further Reading

For a fuller story of how Jackson tried unsuccessfully to free Louisa and his young daughter Jinny, see this thoughtfully curated exhibit of letters and documents organized and edited by Lucia Z. Knoles.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.4 (Summer, 2013).

Susanna Ashton is Professor of English at Clemson University and is currently working on a literary biography of John Andrew Jackson.

Southern Slaveholders and the U.S. Military in the 1850s

In late February 1854, Virginia Senator Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter rose from his seat to speak on the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Among the augustly named men who populated the political leadership of the antebellum South, Hunter cut no exceptional figure (fig. 1). He had fought no duels, killed no Mexicans, and, relative to Robert Barnwell Rhett or William Lowndes Yancey, he ate very little fire. With his heavy brows and massive head, thick torso and plain, faintly bedraggled waistcoat, Senator Hunter’s appearance suggested unpretentious dignity, to his friends, or vegetable torpor, to his opponents. “It is unfortunate,” mused his sympathetic son, “that all of Pa’s compliments to his mind are the reverse to his person.” Even these compliments, such as they were, tended to have a quality of equivocation. “I think he is the sanest, if not the wisest, man in our new-born Confederacy,” Mary Chestnut, who liked him, wrote seven years later.

But across the 1850s, Hunter’s lumpish sanity earned him a larger share of national influence than many of his more charismatic rivals. As the senior senator from the South’s most populous state, chairman of the Finance Committee, and a key member of the formidable F Street Mess—a Washington boarding hopoliuse that served as unofficial headquarters for pro-slavery politics in the capital—Hunter was one of the most powerful men in the Senate. And during the fierce sectional debate over slavery in the Kansas-Nebraska territory, it was the Virginian’s sturdy and conventionally Southern instincts, no less than his seniority or chairmanship, that made his speech worth hearing. Neither a flame-breathing radical nor an ambivalent moderate, Hunter was fully aware of his influence: a “triarch of the slavery party in Congress,” one contemporary called him; “the very head and front of the States-rights” men in the Senate, noted another. When he rose to speak on February 24, 1854, colleagues on both sides of the sectional divide had good cause to listen.

As befitted his talents and reputation, Hunter began his remarks by dutifully enumerating what were by then already familiar Southern arguments in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. He reviewed the political history of slavery debates since 1820, adverting briefly to the South’s patriotic spirit of self-sacrifice, while declining to dwell at too great a length on the North’s monstrous inflexibility. He clambered into a thicket of constitutional law and emerged from his parsings with the not-entirely-unexpected discovery that Congress, in fact, possessed only limited control over the organization of new territories, and lacked the legal power to forbid slavery in any of them. He took notice of the latest demographic trends, as reported by the 1850 census, and offered the comforting observation that even if slavery were extended to every state in the Union, the rapid increase of the white population in the North meant that black bondage was very unlikely to overwhelm the free states.

Near the end of his 90-minute speech, however, Hunter ventured onto less familiar ground. Without retracting any of his earlier declamations about the urgency of the bill at hand, or the seriousness of the constitutional crisis, the senator paused to consider the entire Kansas-Nebraska controversy from an international perspective. Suddenly, he found its significance wanting. “We stand on the eve of a general European war,” he noted, referring to ongoing tensions in the Crimea between Britain, France, Russia, and Ottoman Turkey. With these great powers poised to collide in battle, and the “commerce of the world” wavering uncertainly, Hunter asked, would the United States let itself be “distracted and divided here at home upon the miserable, pitiful question as to the mode in which a given number of slaves are to be divided between the country east and that west of the Mississippi river?” Rather than engage in this petty bickering, Hunter declared, the nation should be “consolidating our columns for the great march which is before us”—the larger international struggle that would define the rest of the nineteenth century.

As he talked on, it emerged that even this very earthbound Virginian—”he resembles some quiet unpretending farmer,” wrote one journalist, “who might have come up from a rural district, to sit in a State legislature”—was capable of viewing minor American squabbles from the magnificent heights of global politics. The foundation of those politics, Hunter believed, was the inevitable expansion of “the Anglo-American population” all across the earth. “It is plain that in the course of this progress, ours must rule all inferior races.” The fate of slavery in a specific western province, no matter how it was decided, could not dislodge this great fact.

But while Hunter approved, in the most general sense, of all “Anglo” expansion, he was sharply critical of Great Britain’s imperial policy: the British, he proclaimed, too often appeared “amongst nations composed of different races as intermeddlers and architects of ruin.” The United States must pursue a different course. In contrast to Britain’s emancipation project in the West Indies, and its further attempts to “Africanize” Cuba, America’s first duty abroad was to preserve the international racial order. “The welfare of neighboring nations which are composed of different races,” he argued, “depends upon the possession of power by that which is the superior of them all.” American respect for “the natural relation of the races”—that is, black slavery—offered the best hope for stability, prosperity, and peace in the troubled “land of flowers.”

Why, in the midst of this bitter sectional debate, did Virginia’s senior senator guide the conversation towards foreign affairs? How did a speech that began in Kansas end up in the Caribbean, by way of Crimea? A cynic might answer that Hunter sought to transcend domestic strife with vague, global evocations of national purpose. But why, then, would the senator expound at such length about the spread of slavery across the hemisphere—rhetoric that was sure to nettle, if not inflame, his Northern colleagues? In fact Hunter’s speech illuminates the continuing importance of international politics, even amid the darkest moments of America’s mid-century crisis. Few chronologies in U.S. political history are as familiar as the one that precedes the breakup of the Union. The Compromise of 1850, the Nebraska Act, “Bleeding Kansas,” the caning of Charles Sumner, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, the election of Abraham Lincoln—the narrative of disunion is as colorful and complex as it is closely studied. The theatrical intensity of these events, however, has an unfortunate tendency to obscure the importance of what was happening outside national borders. And yet as Hunter’s remarks suggest, even the most dramatic sectional clashes unfolded in a political atmosphere regularly informed by, and strongly sensitive to, the larger universe of world affairs.

Hunter’s approach to the Kansas-Nebraska question was structured not only by the conservative creed of states’ rights, but by a keen interest in international commerce, foreign relations, and the global spread of empire. His irritation at the “pitiful” scale of the Nebraska debate, when compared to these great questions, grew out of a worldview profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of Southern provincialism. In national affairs, Hunter well understood, the slaveholding South played a part that was small and likely to grow smaller. Population growth in the North, not to mention the spread of anti-slavery feeling, was making the South a permanent and embattled minority. In this domestic context, a slaveholder’s political tactics were bound to be both conservative and defensive—reliant on the narrowest possible readings of history, law, and the Constitution. Hunter himself had offered these readings in the first hour of his speech. But from an international point of view, such narrowness was obnoxious and even embarrassing.

For Hunter, as for many other Southern leaders during the 1850s, the global “march of civilization” itself depended on slave labor. The economic failure of British and other European emancipations, together with the world’s surging demand for tropical products, demonstrated the international vitality of black servitude. Grandiose Southern rhetoric about “King Cotton,” of course, was the most audible consequence of this view. But as most Southern leaders recognized, slavery’s empire was far larger than the merely American kingdom of cotton. In 1850, as part of another sectional speech that soared well beyond national borders, Hunter had asked about the consequences if “African slavery had been abolished all over the world—in the colonies of France and Spain, in Brazil, in the United States…? I ask how such a policy would have operated upon the world at large? No cotton! No sugar! But little coffee, and less tobacco! Why, how many people would thus have been stricken rudely and at once from the census of the world?”

If slavery was growing weaker within the domestic councils of American politics, it was only growing stronger on the world stage. Global commerce, economic growth—western civilization itself, powerful Southerners believed—proceeded atop a foundation of coercive agriculture. Hunter’s vision of a ceaseless and unstoppable Anglo advance was also a vision of rapidly expanding black slavery. As the “great Caucasian hive” made its way across Latin America, “we shall have to establish some law that would respect the true relations of the races.” Black bondsmen, in other words, must travel in tow with the great white horde. In this sense the slaveholding South stood on the vanguard of international progress. As the home base for an institution that could remake the tropical world, and a successful laboratory for the inevitable race-ordering that would soon spread across the hemisphere, the South occupied a position of particular significance.

And yet for all of his pro-slavery enthusiasm, Hunter retained a national frame of mind. “When I look to the high mission upon which we are sent—the great destiny which is within our reach,” he insisted, almost peevishly, “I can scarcely feel the patience which becomes me in dealing with those who have interposed such obstacles.” The entire Kansas-Nebraska crisis was a mere blip on his imperial radar. Despite the powerful evidence of sectional discord—evidence which he himself had cited in the first half of his speech—Hunter still believed that the United States could summon its “united energies” to play its great part on the world stage. “The empire of the seas,” he announced, “the all-mastering influence of a great example, and the foremost place in the march of civilization, are the prizes to which we may justly aspire.” These lofty goals could only be achieved through a domestic and a foreign policy that respected the larger racial truths wrought by Anglo-American global dominance.

In its confidence about the future global roles of both section and nation, Hunter’s speech reveals the surprising extent to which late antebellum slaveholding leaders—even the most conventional and conservative—remained committed to an ambitious vision of American international power. The domestic battles of the decade, for all their corrosive intensity, could not entirely destroy slaveholders’ faith in the ability of the United States to advance the interests of the South in the wider world. Having enjoyed proximate access to U.S. foreign policy since the Revolution, slaveholders were not quick to abandon it in the 1850s. Historians in recent decades have gradually come to reckon with Southern imperial interest in Latin America, and especially the frantic desire to obtain new slave territory through negotiated purchase or armed filibuster. In fact the South’s aggressive “pro-slavery nationalism,” as one scholar has labeled it, sank even deeper into American politics than we have realized—and helped build complex, intimate relationships that we are only beginning to uncover.

One particularly close bond connected Southern elites to the political leadership of the American armed forces. While the idea of a Southern “martial spirit” has long animated debates in cultural studies and military history, scholars have largely neglected the South’s central role in the politics of late antebellum army and navy reform. The bare fact that elite slaveholders led a major buildup of the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy, all across the 1850s, rests uneasily in a political narrative that culminates with Southern secession from the Union. And yet it is the inescapable truth, clarified by statistics and confirmed by events.

Between 1850 and 1860, men from slave states served atop the War Department for all eleven years, and atop the Navy Department for eight. Southerners chaired the House Naval Affairs committee for eight of the twelve major sessions of Congress during the decade; they chaired the House Military Affairs committee for nine of those sessions. In the Senate, the numbers are twelve of twelve for Naval Affairs, and six of twelve for Military Affairs. But Southern participation in military politics was not a matter of quietly filling committee seats. These men sought and achieved major changes in the structure, size, and capacity of the U.S. military. Led by executive and legislative officers like Secretary of War and Military Affairs Chairman Jefferson Davis (fig. 2), the American armed forces grew to their largest-ever peacetime levels, occupying a historically unprecedented share of the federal budget.

All this was done within the frenzied domestic politics of a dissolving Union. Even as Congress chafed and Kansas bled, “sectional” Southern leaders like Davis remained deeply invested in national military power. Indeed, the future Confederate commander-in-chief was perhaps the one man most responsible for late antebellum military reforms. Such muscular nationalism on the part of such devoted sectionalists is impossible to understand without coming to terms with the larger international worldview that Robert Hunter sketched out in his Kansas-Nebraska speech. As Virginia and Mississippi slaveholders within the American Union, Hunter and Davis genuinely feared the consequences of a strengthened central government hostile to their state institutions. But as Americans in the wider Atlantic World, they were surpassingly confident in both the international power of slavery and the international power of the United States. From this wider perspective, the U.S. military was not slavery’s enemy, but one of its most essential friends.

Unlike the somewhat lethargically steady Robert Hunter, Jefferson Davis was first and foremost a man of action. A West Point graduate, Davis left the Army in the 1830s, built a reputation for sizzling states’ rights oratory in Mississippi, and then rejoined the military when war broke out with Mexico in 1846. Heroically wounded at the battle of Buena Vista, he made a quick return to politics and soon established himself as one of the Deep South’s most vigorous defenders of slavery. Like Hunter, the more well-traveled Davis believed deeply in the vitality of black servitude beyond American borders. “[T]he products of Mexico,” he informed Congress in 1850, “have dwindled into comparative insignificance since the abolition of slavery. And it is also on that account that the prosperity of Central and Southern America has declined, and that it has been sustained in Brazil, where slavery has continued.” Over the rest of the decade, Davis would remain equally committed to both American power and hemispheric slavery.

Also like Hunter, Davis occupied a position of notable influence in Washington. Named President Franklin Pierce’s Secretary of War in 1853, the Mississippi veteran was the most highly ranked Southerner within an administration devoted to Southern interests. Friendly contemporaries thought Davis was “the very soul of President Pierce’s cabinet”; the anti-slavery press imagined that he “sustains the border ruffians [in Kansas], countenances the Cuban filibusters, wields President Pierce … commands the army and navy, and, a la plantation, whips [Secretary of State William] Marcy and [Attorney General Caleb] Cushing up to their dirty work.” In truth, Davis did not rule over the Pierce administration like a plantation overseer, but there is little doubt that he was in a strong position to carry out a program of military reform.

Secretary of War Davis made it clear that his most fundamental goal was to expand the size of the national army. In the last four decades, his first annual report observed, the United States “has increased in population more than eighteen millions, and in territory a million of square miles,” but “the military peace establishment of this country has been augmented by less than four thousand men.” The current troop count was “manifestly inadequate.” In his report, Davis was careful to insist that he did not want to build up a “large military establishment” for its own sake. The ingrained legacy of the Revolutionary era, which distrusted the very notion of any standing army whatsoever, made this disclaimer a necessary rhetorical tactic for all military advocates in the early nineteenth century. But it did not prevent Davis from asking for significantly more officers and more army units. “[T]he experience of the last forty years,” he argued, “has demonstrated the wisdom of maintaining, in peace, a military establishment that is capable of the greatest expansion in war.”

It was not until the summer of 1854 that Secretary Davis made any real headway in his effort at army expansion. Half a continent away from Washington, near Fort Laramie in the Nebraska Territory, a dispute between white migrants and Sioux Indians had exploded into violence. On August 19, 1854, U.S. Army second lieutenant John Lawrence Grattan led a small detachment of soldiers into the Sioux camp to apprehend an Indian charged with killing a migrant’s cow. Young, totally inexperienced in Indian affairs, and possibly drunk, Grattan showed little concern that the military lacked the formal authority to adjudicate such local quarrels. He arrived in a belligerent mood and demanded the accused culprit be produced at once; when Sioux leaders refused his request, tensions mounted. With groups of Indian warriors maneuvering around the Army band, a nervous American soldier fired first into a crowd of Sioux. The firefight quickly became a rout. Heavily outnumbered from the start, Grattan and his 29 volunteers were all killed.

News of what was soon called the “Fort Laramie Massacre” set off a storm of protest across the country. In Washington, the Pierce administration responded with vigor. Immediately organizing a punitive expedition against the Sioux, Davis also seized on the frontier bloodshed as evidence for his larger argument that the Army needed more men. The Secretary’s public campaign began in the press. As early as October, an essay composed by the “Friends of the Administration” appeared in the Charleston Mercury, lamenting the “late melancholy annihilation of Grattan and his followers,” and demanding that the Army grow in size to prevent future conflicts.

Davis worked hard to keep the administration’s pro-military talking points consistent. When Pierce’s official newspaper organ, the Washington Union, attempted to alleviate the War Department’s responsibility for Indian attacks by discounting the possibility that there were not enough troops in the West, the Secretary reacted at once. Writing directly to the Union‘s editor, Davis upbraided him for seeming to credit the idea that “there was no lack of troops for the protection of the frontier.” Such a mistaken notion, he declared, “may be an embarrassment to the Administration in its efforts to obtain the necessary increase of the Army.” If the paper covered Indian affairs in the future, Davis promised that the War Department would happily provide information underlining “the propriety of increasing the number of mounted troops as well as those of other arms.” The correction came swiftly: the very next day, the Union ran another column on “Indian Massacres,” this time making it clear that the puny size of the Army was in fact a danger to American settlers in the West. The Secretary of War “must have more troops at his disposal, or the sad intelligence must continue to reach us of the butcheries and violations of women and children by the savages.” Thereafter the administration’s pro-military propaganda machine functioned in rather better order.

When Davis delivered his second annual report to Congress in December, he remained on message. The United States, the Secretary wrote, possessed just 11,000 men to cover 10,000 miles, in land inhabited by 40,000 Indian warriors. “That this force is entirely inadequate to purposes for which we maintain any standing army, needs no demonstration; and I again take occasion to urge the necessity of such immediate increase as will at least give some degree of security to our Indian frontier.” Davis described the bloodshed in Nebraska as “the result of a deliberately formed plan, prompted by a knowledge of the weakness of the garrison at Fort Laramie …” It was vital to the administration’s military expansion program that the Laramie incident be viewed in this light. Along with his ally Adjutant General Samuel Cooper—who would later serve as the highest-ranking officer in the Confederate Army—Davis worked overtime to suppress competing accounts of Lieutenant Grattan’s encounter with the Sioux.

On Capitol Hill, Davis’s army proposals quickly ran into political controversy. The same Thirty-fourth Congress that had just witnessed the furious sectional clashes over slavery in Kansas now took sides in a passionate and wide-ranging debate about Indian relations, racial identity, and the military responsibilities of empire. What was striking about this debate, however, was that most leading Southerners now argued on behalf of federal power. Slaveholders like Robert Hunter, who only months before had denied the government’s authority to do so much as regulate slavery in the territories, now spoke loudly in defense of the national army, and insisted that America’s central military establishment must reflect its international clout.

Sam Houston set the tone with a long speech that indicted U.S. Indian policy across the decades. Although he hailed from Texas, the iconoclastic Houston was an ambivalent Southerner who had opposed the extension of slavery into Kansas. Now his January 1855 speech demonstrated that he also held serious doubts about the nature of U.S. imperial power on the North American continent. Almost every instance of Indian aggression in American history, Houston alleged, “has been induced or provoked by the white man, either by acts of direct aggression upon the Indians, or by his own incaution.” The Fort Laramie incident was no exception to this rule. Houston rejected the administration’s call for four new Army regiments, avowing that he preferred to civilize the Indians rather than simply exterminate them.

The response to Houston’s heresy was swift and furious. Following several speeches by outraged Southern senators, Pierce administration ally Augustus Dodge of Iowa declared that Houston’s position smacked of the “the carping spirit of Abolition.” Like Africans, Indians were decreed by God “to give way to the Anglo-Saxon,” and “that philosophy which blubbers over it is sickly indeed.” It was no wonder, then, that Houston had “opposed every increase of our military force.” For Dodge, it was vital that the administration receive its troop requests, not only to safeguard the frontier, but to reject the radical abolitionist logic that looked unkindly on the U.S. Army.

No Southern legislator quite replicated the raw simplicity of Dodge’s pro-slavery, pro-military position. But the lines of battle were clearly drawn. Anti-slavery Northerners like Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and William Seward of New York voted unanimously against the four-regiment bill. Pro-slavery Southerners, meanwhile, played a critical role in guiding the military expansion plan through Congress. In the House, acting Military Affairs chairman Charles Faulkner of Virginia worked closely with Secretary of War Davis to shepherd the four-regiment bill through committee and onto the floor. In the Senate, pro-slavery leaders like Robert Hunter, Stephen Mallory of Florida, and Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi all spoke enthusiastically in favor of military increase. None of them seemed too concerned about either the dangers of a “standing army” or the concentration of federal power in Washington. Even after the ordeal of Kansas-Nebraska seemed to cast a dark cloud over the future of the Union, slaveholding elites largely retained their confidence in the imperial muscle of the U.S. Army. “If we will stretch from ocean to ocean,” declared George Badger of North Carolina, “we must necessarily multiply our military means.”

There was no question that Southern leaders saw the process of American expansion in essentially international and imperial terms. As part of his rejection of military force, Houston had likened westward settlement to European imperial doings in Asia: all across the world, he observed, advanced nations were “seeking to civilize and christianize men on the banks of the Ganges, or the Jordan, or in Burrampootah”—why should the United States not do the same with its western indigenes? More powerful and more representative Southerners accepted Houston’s imperial analogy but rejected his “sentimental” conclusions. Jefferson Davis, for instance, drew his understanding of frontier deployment from the lessons of European colonialism. His first annual report had announced a particular vision for the role of the military in places like Nebraska, Oregon, and New Mexico. The wide open West, Davis declared, was simply too vast to protect in its entirety. Instead, he proposed concentrating troops in large numbers at “commanding positions” where they might intimidate the native population through striking exhibitions of power. This vision of military deployment—which implicitly acknowledged the U.S. Army as an occupying force in fundamentally hostile territory—had much in common with European experiences in Africa and Asia.

In his 1856 report, Davis made the link explicit: “The occupation of Algeria by the French presents a case having much parallelism to that of our western frontier, and affords us the opportunity of profitting by their experience.” French policy “leaves the desert in the possession of the nomadic tribes”; outposts were established on the limit of settled areas, and fortified with “strong garrisons,” capable of dispatching large “marching columns” into native territory. For Davis, French colonialism in Algeria was not a moral blot, but an instructive example of imperial military organization. In the absence of the much larger Army he would have liked to build, this French plan—dependent on vigorous displays of force to subdue a racially inferior population—made practical sense. The Secretary of War refused to “blubber” over the fate of either Africans or Indians held in the grip of a superior power. Betraying no qualms about the parallel between the United States’ democratic manifest destiny in North America, and France’s imperial subjugation of North Africa, Davis was unsentimentally satisfied to league his nation, and his army, on the side of empire.

A vision of the United States as a great international power, indeed, shaped the whole of Davis’s activities in the War Department. Besides his plans for troop increase and frontier deployment, the Secretary suggested reorganizing Army bureaucracy on the model of the Prussian general staff, sent a delegation of officers to Europe to study munitions and military administration in the Crimean War, and even waged a lonely battle to bring camels into Army service (the animals, had, after all, been used with great success by French and British empires in the desert regions of Africa and the Near East). Like Robert Hunter, Davis understood the United States to be a great nation among other great nations. With a massive and growing population, a newly won continental empire to manage, and commercial interests in every corner of the world, the United States in the mid-1850s was well on its way to a triumphant role in global affairs. Whatever the damage that sectional strife had done to American domestic politics, Davis evidently believed the country’s international destiny was as grand as ever.

In naval affairs, too, Southern leaders expressed their confidence in America’s global position. The North Carolinian James Dobbin, Davis’s counterpart as Secretary of the Navy under Franklin Pierce, worked strenuously to expand the U.S. Navy between 1853 and 1857. To maintain “our proper and elevated rank among the great Powers of the world,” Dobbin urged, the United States must build up both its coastal defenses and overseas fleets. Over the course of the 1850s, Dobbin and his predominantly Southern allies in Congress succeeded in adding thirty new steam vessels to the Navy.

Along with Robert Hunter and Jefferson Davis, Southern naval advocates argued that U.S. sea power was a vital weapon both to protect slavery overseas and to manage the intractable racial problems associated with imperial expansion. “It is manifest destiny which is bearing the red man of the country westward upon a receding wave into the great ocean of annihilation,” observed Hunter’s Virginia colleague Thomas Bocock, the House Chairman of Naval Affairs, in 1854. “It is manifest destiny which will ever make a strong vigorous and healthful race overrun and crush out a weak and effete one … All these considerations urge on us the necessity of preparation … And there is no mode so appropriate as a proper increase of our Navy.” In fact, neither Hunter nor Bocock were spread-eagle expansionists who supported every possible American territorial annexation. But even these sectionally stalwart Virginia conservatives saw the international future of the United States in essentially imperial terms. In that light, for all their worries about the stability of the Union, they believed that a larger U.S. armed forces enhanced rather than endangered the security of both slavery and the South.

Their collective achievement in military policy, over the course of the Pierce administration, was not insignificant. In his four years as Secretary of War, Davis oversaw an Army that grew from under 11,000 to nearly 16,000 active troops—hardly an overwhelming total, but still a relative increase of almost fifty percent. The four-regiment bill of 1854, which added over 4,000 men all by itself, was responsible for the largest total one-year army expansion in the peacetime history of the country. None of these increases, of course, meant that the American armed forces, on land or at sea, approached the strength of the leading European powers. But in relative terms their growth was considerable, as military appropriations figures show. In 1852, the year before Davis took control of the War Department, the Army budget stood at $8.5 million; by 1857, the year he left, that figure had risen to $19.2 million. Naval spending, meanwhile, jumped from $8.9 million in 1852 to $12.7 million in 1857. Together, major military expenditures in the same period rose over $14 million in total, and climbed from 39 percent of the total federal budget to over 47 percent.

The sectional partisanship that disfigured much of the domestic politics of the 1850s did not fatally undermine military expansion. Defensive Southerners often brandished strict constructionalist rhetoric to block internal improvements, western homesteads, and, of course, attempts to settle the slavery question in the territories. As the sectional crisis mounted, such domestic politics of nation-building were viewed with increasing skepticism by nervous slaveholders. Their doubts about the spread of centralized domestic power, always serious, were only heightened by the anti-slavery turn in Northern politics. In both an ideological and practical sense, the South’s leadership was less committed than ever to building a national community at home. Yet in military and foreign policy, more often than not, Southerners were to be found in the vanguard of federal growth, activity, and enterprise. Beyond army and navy expansion, Southerners in Congress and in the press led a successful campaign for the reform and enlargement of the U.S. diplomatic corps. An 1855 bill, the brainchild of Louisiana representative John Perkins, increased the number of ministers abroad, added a secretary of legation to each mission, and raised diplomatic and consular salaries around the world. Only six years later, Perkins would chair Louisiana’s state secession convention, but for now, he argued, America’s “great advances in wealth and power” demanded large-scale State Department reforms. “The age of entire national isolation has passed,” Perkins crowed. A powerful, modern, interconnected government like the United States required an army, navy, and diplomatic system to match.

This concurrent enthusiasm for diplomatic reform is revealing, because for all their zeal about army and navy expansion, few Southerners sought to involve the country in war. Jefferson Davis might demand unprecedented military appropriations and deliver aggressive speeches about American dominance of the Caribbean, but in the key moment of 1854 he refused to stand up for a Cuban filibustering attempt that might involve the United States in a serious international conflict. In the other diplomatic imbroglios of the 1850s—generally over British interference in Central America—a few Southern hotspurs were quick to urge military action, but in every case they were overruled by a more cautious and more powerful Southern mainstream. Leading slaveholders, in other words, understood that military power was desirable, even if military action was not. A suitably strong armed establishment, declared Robert Hunter in 1856, added to the American “sense of security; it adds to the respect which foreign nations may feel for us; and I confess that I desire to see this country placed in such a condition that no foreign Power shall ever direct a gun in menace upon our coast without feeling that they do it under the responsibility of aiming at those who have guns enough pointed in return…” For like-minded Southern leaders, peace, strength, and slavery were mutually reinforcing. A powerful, well-armed American state, at ease with Europe and dominant in its own hemisphere—this was the surest possible guarantee for both the South and its slave institutions.

As they looked around the globe in the 1850s, Southern slaveholders saw everywhere vigorous and well-armed European states expanding their influence at the expense of supposed racial inferiors. “The nations of the world are engaged in the great race for position and for empire,” declared the New Orleans editor James D.B. DeBow—Great Britain in China, India, and Australia; France in North and West Africa; Russia in Central Asia. Whatever their individual opinions about each of these ventures, the powerful Southerners who backed military expansion saw America’s international destiny in much the same terms. Black slavery, too, fit seamlessly into this overarching imperial paradigm. Within that model of global development, the U.S. Army was an essential tool—the most convenient physical arm of a larger world system that upheld the twin principles of white racial domination and imperial expansion, all the way from Algeria to New Mexico. Even the fiercest quarrels between North and South, slaveholding leaders trusted, could not overturn this great truth.

The persistence of their faith ultimately exposed Southern militarists to no shortage of cruel ironies after the fracture of the Union. Jefferson Davis’s push for the adoption of troop regiments and better rifle technology left the U.S. Army in stronger shape to rally its forces against the Southern Confederacy in 1861. The naval shipbuilding projects of the late 1850s provided a significant boost for the North’s blockade of Confederate ports during the Civil War. The strength of Southern confidence in American firepower abroad recoiled backward to help destroy slaveholding society at home. For much of the 1850s, however, that confidence survived intact. The domestic cords of Union might be slowly snapping, one by one, but the South’s belief in American international power was still, perhaps, the sturdiest remaining bond.

Further Reading:

The best and most recent biography of Jefferson Davis is William J. Cooper Jr., Jefferson Davis, American (New York, 2000). Davis’s activities in the War Department are most thoroughly reviewed in John Muldowny, “The Administration of Jefferson Davis as Secretary of War,” PhD diss., Yale University, 1959. Robert Hunter awaits a definitive modern biography, but useful information on his political career can be found in John E. Fisher, “Statesman of a Lost Cause: The Career of R.M.T. Hunter, 1859-1887,” PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1968.

On the “Fort Laramie Massacre” and the Pierce administration’s military response, see Paul N. Beck, The First Sioux War: The Grattan Fight and Blue Water Creek, 1854-1856 (Lanham, Md., 2004). A valuable discussion of the antebellum U.S. Army more generally can be found in Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (Bloomington, Ind.,1984). For works that reach beyond the debate over the South’s “military tradition” and attempt to identify political connections between slaveholding elites and the the U.S. armed forces, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York, 2001); John Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of the American Navy, 1829-1861 (Westport, Conn., 1985); and my article, “Slavery and American Sea Power: The Navalist Impulse in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History, 77 (May 2011).

Several important scholarly treatments of the international, modernizing, and state-building impulses among the antebellum slaveholding elite have appeared in recent years. For a stimulating exploration of “proslavery nationalism” across the antebellum decades, see Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New York, 2009). On the political, cultural, and economic ties between the slaveholding South and other hemispheric slave societies, see Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York, 2007); and Daniel B. Rood, “Plantation Technocrats: A Social History of Knowledge in the Slaveholding Atlantic World, 1830-1865,” PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2010.

Other significant works that have sought to reframe the sectional crisis in international terms include Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore, 2009); and Edward Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2008). For recent scholarship on Southern slaveholders and nineteenth-century visions of modernity, see John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009); Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75 (August 2009); and L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers, eds., The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress (New York, 2011).

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4 (July, 2012).

Matthew Karp received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; next summer, he will start as an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. He is writing a book about Southern slaveholders and American foreign policy in the Civil War era.

One of two sessions that members of the American Studies Association’s Early American Matters Caucus voted, back in April, to designate on the ASA’s 2014 conference program as “Sponsored by the Early American Matters Caucus” was the interdisciplinary roundtable on Kathleen Donegan’s Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (2014). The session took place on Friday, November 7, and in a conversation immediately afterward with Professor Donegan, we agreed I would check with Anna Mae Duane, who had been in the audience and therefore part of the discussion, about preparing a follow-up piece to appear here in Common-place.

A year earlier, before the ASA’s 2013 conference in Washington had even wrapped up, one of these panelists, Sari Altschuler, had suggested in conversation that Seasons of Misery would be an especially effective book around which to build a colloquy. In inviting scholars from a wide range of specialties to participate—British imperial history, disability studies, hemispheric studies focusing on the Americas, studies on indigenous peoples, and so on—I worked to craft a session which would demonstrate the range that Seasons of Misery has achieved. The four colonial sites on which the book focuses are Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, and the first chapter, “Roanoke: Left in Virginia,” first appeared as “What Happened in Roanoke,” an essay in the journal Early American Literature in 2013. More recently, Professor Donegan became the latest recipient of the Richard Beale Davis Prize, recognizing the best article published in EAL in 2013. The committee of judges so honored her article for “develop[ing] a counterintuitive approach to colonial history through a bracing model for reading narrative form as a historiographic artifact.” Donegan performs close readings of those English settlers’ various texts to show the profound estrangement they felt, having to survive in sites comprising what she describes as a world of misery. The book extrapolates from overwhelmingly catastrophic, unsettling details to examine larger questions, and the function of the following brief comments was to raise some of those larger questions.

Each comment is indeed brief, in keeping with the approach that the Joyceans have applied to what they have called “living book reviews”; a list of the forty-plus panels I’ve organized and frequently moderated along these lines can be found at this “Two decades and counting” link. In order to avoid having a book’s author simply be The Respondent, I ask that scholar and each of a handful of other knowledgeable, articulate colleagues begin with a four- or five-minute statement laying out an issue or two about the book, in hopes that the group, panelists and audience members alike, will address that point in the discussion that follows. Midway through this Donegan colloquy, after three panelists had each commented on how central the notion of Englishness is in the book, I mentioned that one way to avoid such overlap would be simply to divvy up topics ahead of time—an approach I’ve studiously avoided, figuring that if more than one panelist arrives hoping to discuss a particular idea or meme, such as “chaos zones,” that pattern will be worth noting.

So, following these brief opening remarks about the book, was there a discussion that involved and engaged members of the audience? There was indeed, with Anna Brickhouse, Michelle Burnham, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, and Duncan Faherty among others contributing. The hour and 45 minutes allotted to each session passed quickly, and the conversation spilled over into the hallway; it is conceivable that the program for next October’s ASA conference, in Toronto, could include a session or two that addresses the issues Donegan treats in Seasons of Misery. The catchall theme for 2015, after all, is “The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance.”

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

The advent of narrative history in the popular press makes engaging history students seem like a simple task. However, as teachers we are up against myriad competitors that shape our students’ historical sense. From the History Channel, to MythBusters, to Disney’s Pocahontas, students come to class with preconceived notions of what should constitute engaging approaches to history. And for most, analytic articles on Puritan theology or Native American animism will not do. Sam Wineburg, a Stanford professor of education and observer of history teachers, reminds us, “historical thinking, in its deepest forms, is neither a natural process nor something that springs automatically from psychological development. Its achievement … actually goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think. … The odds of achieving mature historical understanding are stacked against us in a world in which Disney and MTV call the shots.” Coaching students to develop these critical and analytical thinking skills is one facet of my teaching. Another is to engage my students’ imaginations.

John Demos, emeritus professor of history at Yale, eloquently describes the importance of imagination: “Clio is a time traveler, and we, her acolytes, delight in following her on long and varied journeys of the mind. Words, pried loose from documents, carry us across the centuries. Our experience is as full and rewarding as our imagination allows it to be. And in these travels imagination is all.” In my teaching, I find that narratives consistently awaken students’ imaginations, enticing them to make the history they are expected to learn their own.

Yet “narrative history” is frequently discussed in opposition to “critical history” or “analytic history,” the argument apparently being that narratives are somehow not suitable to the crafting of complex historical arguments. The core of teaching history at the secondary level, for many of us, is to teach students to read critically and write analytically—that is, to analyze texts and then make arguments about them. The focus is typically not on engaging students in the creation of narratives. The well-worn analogy between the historian and the detective remains popular today—indeed, the PBS show History Detectives perfectly encapsulates the connection, one that is repeated in countless lessons online and in print that lead students to identify and marshal evidence in order to support a thesis. As Peter Stearns asserts, history involves “An ability to form an argument, using data for a purpose, a capacity to glean data from primary sources…[and refine] some capacity for handling diverse interpretations and testing theories about change.” Giving students a framework that lets them see the information they gather as evidence being collected in support of an argument helps them learn the larger skill of thinking analytically about data.

The historians’ tasks of textual analysis and critical analytic writing can be taught in a variety of ways. I have found that, contrary to the opposition within the discipline between narrative and critical history, using narrative to teach these skills helps students connect the habits of thinking like a historian to their own lives, and actively engages them in the content I want them to learn. Wineburg writes, “[h]istory teaches us a way to make choices, to balance opinions, to tell stories, and to become uneasy—when necessary—about the stories we tell.”

This essay reflects themes and ideas presented by Darcy R. Fryer in “Common School” (Common-Place, Volume 12, Number 2). Teaching Early America, as she presents it, provides numerous possibilities to incorporate new scholarship into the secondary school classroom. Here I will share a number of lessons and assignments that I have used successfully to guide students to explore primary and secondary texts. The work engages students’ historical imaginations and builds analytical and critical thinking skills—in short, these lessons teach students how to use historical narrative to make an argument.

I have been teaching early American history for more than twenty years. My primary assignment is to teach the first half of a two-year American history course. We focus on American history from the beginnings (Kennewick Man) through 1877, the end of Reconstruction. Our core text for the fall is Alan Taylor’s American Colonies, which challenges students to see early America through the trifocal lens of environmental history, ethnographic study, and the interconnected networks of the Atlantic world. By explicitly teaching content through a range of media and having students see each medium as a potential model for historical interpretation, students are prepared to craft their own interpretations of history by using narrative.

To understand the clash of cultures in the encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, we watch Bruce Beresford’s film version of Brian Moore’s historical novel, Black Robe. The film is rich, clear, and engaging (although somewhat problematic in its portrayal of the Iroquois). Students analyze how the film’s narrative makes an analytical point about history. For example, in the film’s depiction of an Algonquin band delivering Father LaForgue (based loosely on the Jesuit missionary Noel Chabanel) to a Huron village, cultural misunderstandings ensnare both the Natives and the French. When LaForgue demonstrates the power of writing, some see it as sorcery—the capturing of the spirit. LaForgue encourages this Native interpretation because it imbues him with the special wisdom he believes himself to possess as a Christian, in the process making an argument about the nature of relations between Europeans and Native peoples. We discuss the film, and they read excerpts from The Jesuit Relations. Because the film models for them how to consider historical events through contesting lenses, they are able to write coherently (in an analytic essay assignment) about the clash of cultures.

We also analyze an English woodcut depicting the Pequot War. Like Black Robe, this image requires students to reflect on perspective. Most of my students come to class with simplistic notions about Natives in this period, viewing them as disorganized but loosely allied against the Europeans, noble savages facing a technologically and bureaucratically superior adversary. The more careful observers in my classes notice that the image shows English troops, led by captains Underhill and Mason, attacking a Pequot walled village, aided by members of at least one Native tribe (who they learn included the Narragansett, keen rivals of the Pequot for access to wampum). The woodcut tells a dramatic and violent story of the unstable alliances that shaped seventeenth-century British North America, but it also constitutes a visual narrative that very quickly makes an analytic point about a history my students usually think they know.

To help students become more conscious of the complexity of historical events, I have created a lesson called “Fateful Years: Seventeenth Century Crisis in North America.” In it, students are asked to develop their own narratives in order to better understand the notion of historical patterns. Their charge is to gather primary and secondary sources, and use them to tell the story of conflicting perspectives on the causes of the Pueblo Revolt, Bacon’s Rebellion, or King Philip’s War —all of which occurred within seven years of each other, but in vastly different parts of the North American continent, involving different players, and driven by entirely different causal forces. Students read their sources, determine key historical actors, actions, and chronologies. Then they dramatize the conflict in a simulation or “play” of sorts. They are assessed on their understanding of the different points of view and the coherence of their narratives, both in the simulation (and script) as well as in a reflection essay. Students remember this lesson, and genuinely enjoy it. In fact, they advocate for more student-crafted simulations as the year progresses.

The major research project for the fall semester is designed to encourage students to pull together all these new skills of historical thinking (point of view, continuity, change, chronology) and incorporate them in creating a piece of analytical history. Using the annual theme and framework of National History Day, students choose topics, generate “reporter” and “essential” questions, and take notes in a shared “Google doc” so that I am able to monitor their progress and give constructive feedback. National History Day (a bit of a misnomer) is a structured series of presentations where students share their work before judges and the public. I am not so much interested in the competition that History Day engenders, but in the process of creating a project. My students often use local archives, museums, and sophisticated online archives to find primary sources, and read current scholarship on their topic. For example, students in recent years have used materials in the Massachusetts Historical Society to create projects on the Essex Junto, Cotton Mather, and John Adams. Students have used the American Antiquarian Society for research on Noah Webster and John B. Gough and the temperance movement. One student traveled to Sheffield, Massachusetts, to interview scholars about Mum Bet (Elizabeth Freeman) and the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. Another went to the Portland Historical Society in Maine to find a treasure trove of documents on the Maine Law of 1851. Together with current scholarship from JSTOR and books from interlibrary exchanges, my students are able to do real historical work, and they are excited to put those skills to use. Here is one example.

One student recently became interested in the story of the alliances between the Narragansett and the Puritans in the seventeenth century. As he read accounts of the Narragansett, he found himself asking questions about the causes of the destruction of the tribe in the so-called “Great Swamp Massacre” of December 1675. He knew he needed to do more than simply provide a narrative of the events. Eventually, he crafted a thesis about the diplomatic and racial (ethnic) causes of the massacre, and tied it to a long-term pattern of Native removal. For his project, he then wrote a script (using free storyboarding software called Celtx) and started filming. He travelled to South Kingston, Rhode Island, and trekked out into the woods to the actual site to get some shots, but the principal body of his film was a narrative driven by document analysis. To gild the lily, he wrote original music for the film and played it on his violin and guitar as the soundtrack. His film, “The Great Swamp Massacre,” was 10 minutes long and a remarkable demonstration of his ability to think historically and present a complex view of a historical event. His film was shown at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture conference in Boston that year—quite an achievement for a high school student!

Demos notes that “[i]t is … strangely jarring for us to see or touch some pieces—some physical chunk—of the panorama of the past. Confronted with artifacts (instead of verbal description), imagination goes limp, sensation intervenes…The effect [of artifacts] was immediate, and visceral, and acute anxiety. So here is the way it looked and was: no mere words could quite have conveyed the feeling.” My students grapple with that distance and try to make sense of it for themselves.

Stéphane Lévesque argues that the goal of history teaching is to “devise a conception of history and identify procedural concepts of the discipline relevant to twenty-first-century students, to give students the means to a more critical and disciplinary study of the past,” and to encourage students toward “disciplinary history” rather than “memory-history.” But the divide between discipline and memory, between argument and narrative, need not be so absolute. By providing different models of historical inquiry, guiding students as they analyze primary and secondary sources toward a specific project, and then coaching students as they research and craft their own historical narratives (in films or websites, for example), we can help students use narrative to discover the power of historical thinking.

Further Reading

The best books to start to understand “historical thinking” are Samuel Wineburg’s Historical Thinking and other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple, 2001) and Stéphane Lévesque’s Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the Twenty-First Century (Toronto, 2008). Also see the website Historical Thinking Matters (historicalthinkingmatters.org), Peter Stearns, “Thinking Historically in the Classroom” (Perspectives, October 1995), and the collection edited by Donald A. Yerxa, Recent Themes in Historical Thinking: Historians in Conversation (South Carolina, 2008). The core fall text for my class is Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America (Penguin, 2002), although I have recently considered using Daniel K. Richter’s Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, 2011), but have yet to switch. The Native image referred to in the article is “The Figure of the Indian Fort or Palizado in New England” (London, 1638). For more information on National History Day, see the analysis by Scott Scheuerell in The History Teacher 40:3, and their website (www.nhd.org).

This article originally appeared in issue 12.3 (April, 2012).

Charles L. Newhall is a history teacher at St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers, Massachusetts, and co-editor of the Common School column. His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the early national republic.

One of the hardest things about teaching the early American segment of the U.S. History survey is that it comes at the beginning. In a classroom in which the interpersonal dynamic has not yet gelled, in which reading and writing skills may be rusty, in which minds keep turning back to the summer just past, we tackle captivity narratives penned by frontier housewives and indignant missives from semi-literate indentured servants. There is little opportunity for a gradual, gentle, skill-building re-acquaintance with historical study; if the vicissitudes of seventeenth-century language and diction don’t discourage the students, the intricacies of Puritan theology may.

Teaching the colonial segment of the survey is hard for another reason, too: the seventeenth-century European settlement of North America was about as messy and amorphous as a beginning can be. More and more, I realize that my introductory lessons on colonial America are filled with things that didn’t work and things that didn’t last. Puritanism: an extraordinarily compelling yet ultimately fleeting religious movement. Indentured servitude: an ugly way station on the path to a slavery-dependent economy. The enterprising Dutch colony of New Netherland: conquered in 1664, briefly recovered, then gone for good. The vast French colony in Quebec: tumbled into British hands in the 1760s. Indigenous political power: profound in the seventeenth century, yet rapidly eclipsed in the eighteenth. All of these phenomena were vital in shaping early America, and I can’t imagine teaching the colonial segment of the survey without mentioning them. All the same, I sometimes wonder what it is like for a novice history student to sit through weeks of lessons about a social and political scene that will be utterly displaced by mid-semester.

Historians now have scholarly books to tell us that trial-and-error in an atmosphere of hopeful confusion was precisely what colonial America was all about—notably The Jamestown Project, in which Karen Kupperman depicts the eventual creation of a successful colony at Jamestown as the culmination of a long period of discussion, experimentation, and repeated regrouping after failure. Nor was America the only focus of interest; in The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in An Age of Expansion, 1560-1660, Alison Games places English colonization of North America and the Caribbean within a larger context of how Englishmen and women learned to interact with, trade with, and colonize other parts of the world. This recent scholarship has led me to play heavily on the themes of exploration, experimentation, failure, and regrouping in my elective course on the Atlantic world. Alas, these themes fit less easily into the fast-paced colonial segment of the U.S. History survey, and they’re surprisingly absent from the early chapters of U.S. History textbooks.

U.S. History textbooks tend instead to emphasize comparisons, geographic, racial, and imperial. I grew up with this approach: the colonial American history I learned in high school was framed as a comparison between New England and Virginia; the colonial American history I learned in college was framed as a comparison between New England, the Middle Colonies, and the Chesapeake. Land and climate shaped colonists’ lives in many ways, and considering how geography impinges on economic and social life is a fine way to begin a course. Yet I’m leery of making geographic comparison the centerpiece of the colonial unit. As April Lee Hatfield points out in Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, even the earliest American colonists were aware of settlements beyond their own regions. They communicated with them, copied them, learned from them, and reviled them. They moved, sometimes over long distances. While many aspects of early American life were bound by geography, many others transcended it.

One might make a similar point about race. Gary Nash’s Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, first published in 1974, was an instant classic that urged historians to take Indians and Africans seriously, as full participants in early America, and to avoid dismissing indigenous society as simple or static. Teachers and textbook authors learned this lesson well; a generation later, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could teach colonial America without paying focused attention to the Atlantic slave trade, African-American life in slavery, European settlers’ interactions with American Indians, and indigenous power in warfare, diplomacy, and trade. Yet the more closely historians examine racial dynamics, the more complications emerge. There were whites who lived as Indians, Indians who lived as whites or in some “middle ground” between, and white servants who lived and worked and fraternized with African slaves. The survey teacher’s challenge is to depict the stark ways in which race shaped colonists’ lives while simultaneously helping students understand that the “red, white, and black” distinction was cloudier in the America of 1650 or 1700 than it was in the United States of 1800 or 1850.

In class, I get a good deal of mileage out of asking students to critique the textbook paradigms. We compare and contrast seventeenth-century New England and seventeenth-century Virginia, and then I ask if this is a sufficient overview of early American society. No, say the students, there were Middle Colonies, and not everyone was of English descent. Eventually someone adds in the Caribbean, and the Lower South. I introduce the inevitable “settlers and Indians” lesson by writing the phrase “Indians’ New World” on the chalkboard and asking the students what they think it means; we brainstorm a lengthy list of how life changed for the people who were already in the New World when the others arrived.

While it’s fun and fruitful to insert snippets of recent scholarship into class discussion, I am starting to wonder if the time has come for a substantial revision of the standard U.S. History textbook narrative of colonial America. I long for a textbook narrative that places the themes of experimentation, failure, and innovation front and center; that explores but does not overemphasize geographic differences, with some attention to the coastal-frontier divide as well as to north-middle-south; that conveys the messiness and uncertainty of the process by which European colonists came to coexist with, rely on, and exploit Native Americans and Africans.

I long, too, for a textbook narrative that offers students more of a sense of historical change within the colonial era. The span of time from Jamestown to the end of the Seven Years’ War is roughly equivalent to the span of time from the American Revolution to the New Deal, some five or six generations. Yet most of us tend, in teaching the colonial segment of the survey, to organize information geographically and thematically more than chronologically. I’ve found that the question “How was British North America in 1750 different from British North America in 1650?” stumps students more than almost anything else I ask them about the period.

Any enthusiast for early America is likely to struggle with the survey teacher’s task of teaching it quickly, as a prelude to the main event. But perhaps we can embrace its prelude quality, rewriting the colonial segment of the survey to highlight all that recent scholarship offers on the topics of experimentation, innovation, failure, flexibility, borrowing, and distinct change over time.

Further reading

Two engaging recent books that emphasize the complex cultural background to British colonization and the themes of experimentation and innovation are Karen Kupperman’s The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, Mass., 2009) and Alison Games’s The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (Oxford, 2009). In Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2007), April Lee Hatfield makes the case that trade and contact with other colonies decisively shaped seventeenth-century Virginia, especially in its approach to slavery. Gary Nash’s Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America (sixth edition, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 2009) examines the major ethnic and racial groups that constituted colonial American society. The phrase “Indians’ New World” comes from James Merrell’s book The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (New York, 1991). I first learned to think about periodizing the long stretch of colonial American history from Jon Butler, who, in Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), analyzes the decades from 1680 to the mid-eighteenth century as a discrete era.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.2 (January, 2012).