Many writers refer to Poe’s opium dependency as if it were certain, and they include no supporting evidence. In a 1909 article in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, George L. Knapp stated that few people knew that Poe “was a confirmed user of opium.” In 1913, historian Harry Cook stated that Poe’s “indulgence in opium and intoxicants increased” in the mid-1830s. Some maintain that opium use inspired Poe’s writings, much as laudanum inspired Coleridge to write “Kubla Khan.” The writer for the Cincinnati Chronicle stated that Poe’s “horrible stories are supposed to have been written while he was under the influence” of opium. In 1881, Dr. Leslie Keeley stated that “The Raven” had been “inspired by the poppy juice.”

Some authorities on Poe have rejected the rumors. In 1946 F. O. Matthiessen, the author of American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, acknowledged that some people “believe that [Poe] was a drug-addict” based on his fiction but added that “on this question, unlike that of Poe’s drinking, there is no sure external evidence.” James L. Machor dismissed the rumors and attributed them to Poe’s literary battles. Some people, he concluded, published “libelous stories” about the writer that other publications then reprinted.

Americans widely used opiates as medicines in Poe’s time, and usage sometimes led to dependency. Prescriptions were not required. Laudanum was popular as a sleeping aid and a painkiller. Paregoric—opium mixed with camphor—was given to fretful babies. The drugs could be dangerous because overdoses could be fatal. There was also the risk of habituation. Habitués typically first took laudanum for medical purposes and then kept using it upon discovering its pleasant effects. They tended to consume the drug alone and then become passive. As a result, their habit might not be noticed, in contrast with the behavior of a drunk person. This is one reason that early on, few recognized habitual opium use as a problem.

Many antebellum writers included opiates in their stories, but the references tended to be fleeting even when the drug use was important to the plot, and they almost never addressed dependency. In these tales, a mother might accidentally give a baby an overdose of paregoric, or a woman might take a dose of laudanum to get a good night’s sleep or, if despondent, to end her life. In an example from “Love and Politics,” an 1849 tale by Miss E. Bogart, Eveline decides to commit suicide due to romantic disappointment. She drinks laudanum but survives. Her true love then asks her to “promise that you will never again swallow a dose of laudanum in a fit of jealousy.” Poe’s friend George Lippard described pleasure-seeking drug use in The Quaker City, a bestseller from 1845. In the novel, a minister who seeks great wealth explains that “temperance folks” like himself need a “little excitement” and that he and others consequently “indulge our systems with a little opium.” Lippard, however, did not present the minister as bearing the effects of opium dependency.

Meanwhile, time and again, Poe’s characters are opium habitués whose condition defines them, as they adopt a melancholy tone and describe fanciful visions. Poe’s characters state that they feel as if they are under the influence of opium in the stories “Loss of Breath,” “The Duc de l’Omelette,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” A central character is dependent on morphine in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” And his narrators are opium habitués in the stories “Life in Death,” “Ligeia,” and “Berenice.” The narrator of 1842’s “Life in Death” eats a large dose of opium and describes its “magical influence” as he looks at portraits. He dwells on “the ethereal hue that gleamed from the canvas.” In his 1838 story “Ligeia,” the narrator admits to being “habitually fettered in the shackles” of opium. And in 1835’s “Berenice,” the narrator states that his disease, aggravated by the “immoderate use of opium,” has gained “ascendancy” over him. As a result of his dependency, he might spend “an entire night . . . watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire,” and he experiences “a morbid irritability of the nerves.” 

Some suggest that the first-person narration of addiction right after the title and “by Edgar A. Poe” led some to assume that such stories were autobiographical. Poe’s friend George Eveleth admitted to Poe in 1848 that he “was afraid, from the wild imaginations manifested in your writings, that you were an opium-eater.” He suspected, however, that he was not, since Poe’s “wildness” appeared in his earlier writings too, and he doubted that Poe could have “acquired the habit when so young.”

There are alternate explanations for the references in his stories. Poe, for example, had read the popular Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. In an 1835 letter to the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, which had just published “Berenice,” he stated that he considered Confessions to be a model worth emulating. Its style, he explained, included “the fearful coloured into the horrible.” Poe scholars Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson suggest that Poe used Confessions as a source when referencing opium in his own works. Also, in the late 1830s Poe became friends with John Lofland, a poet and opium habitué. It is plausible that he also learned about opium dependency from Lofland. 

There is no doubt that Poe sometimes used opiates medicinally. His grandmother gave him laudanum when he was a child to help him fall asleep. In 1845, his sister Rosalie visited him in Fordham, New York, where he was living with his wife, who was also their cousin. Away on business during part of the visit, Edgar came home ill. That night, according to Rosalie, Edgar “‘talked out of his head’ and begged for morphine.” After a few days, his health improved. It is possible that this was evidence of drug withdrawal. It is also possible that he was ill and sought it to help him rest. One example of Poe’s opiate use could also serve as evidence of his lack of familiarity with the drug. The year after his wife died, he told a woman named Annie Richmond that he had bought laudanum following a “long, hideous night of Despair,” and he hoped that she would visit him. He admitted that his dose was more powerful than he had anticipated. He became ill and then recovered. Some point to this episode as proof of his immoderate use, while others conclude that he was not a habitual user, given his inability to predict the impact of the dose. 

Some doctors who saw Poe professionally denied that he was habituated. Dr. John Carter told a Poe biographer that he “never used opii in any instance that I am aware of, and if it had been an habitual practice,” he and other doctors who knew Poe “would have detected it.” In 1896, Dr. Thomas Dunn English published Reminiscences of Poe, an unflattering portrayal of the late writer. English, however, rejected the notion that Poe was an opium user. “Had Poe the opium habit when I knew him,” he wrote, “I should, both as a physician and a man of observation, have discovered it” during the many occasions when he saw him. He dismissed the allegation as “a baseless slander.” The nature of opium’s effects, however, sometimes made the habit easy to hide.

Other evidence is more difficult to dismiss. Helen Whitman was engaged to Poe late in 1848 but ended the relationship due to his drinking. In a letter to her, Poe insisted that he derived “no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge.” “Stimulants” is a peculiarly broad term if he were referring solely to alcohol. (Alcohol and opiates were both characterized as stimulants at the time.) In the summer of 1849, Poe arrived at the home of illustrator John Sartain and begged for his help, as he believed that some men planned to kill him. Poe “piteously begged” him for “some laudanum,” Sartain would recall in 1895. Sartain gave him “a small dose of opium,” to “allay his nervousness.” References to opiates are absent from two other versions of the encounter. It rings true, however, that the agitated poet would have sought out laudanum to calm his nerves.

The strongest evidence of Poe’s opiate usage comes from the research of biographer George Woodberry. As he worked on The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, Woodberry had a helpful research assistant: Amelia Fitzgerald Poe, whose father had been Edgar’s second cousin. In 1884, she visited relatives who remembered Edgar and asked them to share their recollections. She knew that Woodberry’s book could put the author in a bad light, but she rejected the notion that one should not speak ill of the dead. “I fancy that truth is better than fiction,” she explained in a letter to Woodberry, “even though one’s erring relative should be the unfortunate subject.”

Amelia visited Edgar’s cousin Elizabeth Herring, who recalled Edgar’s opium use during the early 1840s. Herring’s recollection is convincing because Poe’s opium use would have been memorable, because she apparently shared her memories unprompted, and because Amelia did not press her on the matter. As Amelia reported to Woodberry:

[Herring] was on a visit to them [Edgar and Virginia] in Philadelphia, where they lived so happily, at the time her cousin Virginia, after singing a great deal one evening, ruptured a blood vessel, from the effects of which she died several years later. [Herring] told me that she had often seen him decline to take even one glass of wine, but says, that for the most part, his periods of excess were occasioned by a free use of opium. I asked if she had any manuscripts or books which she would either lend or sell, but she had nothing.

Woodberry asked Amelia to meet with Herring again, which she did.

In that second session, Amelia asked about Edgar’s opium use. Based on Amelia’s notes, it appears that Herring vividly recalled Edgar’s intemperance. She described not only his opium use but also his friends’ efforts to minimize the damage from his intemperance—likely his use of both opium and alcohol. Amelia wrote:

[Herring] frequently went to see them [Edgar and Virginia] & had the misfortune to see him often in those sad conditions from the use of opium. She says she has seen Mr C or his wife follow him to the gate and take his money & watch away from him when he went out. During these attacks he was kept entirely quiet & they did all possible to conceal his faults & failures. After recovery his penitence was genuine, but he made good resolutions only to be broken.

“Mr C” could have been Thomas Clarke, a publisher who worked with Poe in Philadelphia on a new magazine in 1843 but who ended their partnership partly due to Poe’s drinking. (Figure 5)

While Poe was likely using opium, the efforts to keep him quiet suggest that he was also drinking. In the 1840s, pressure from the temperance movement led many tipplers to abandon alcohol only to substitute it with opium, which was socially accepted as medicine. In 1843, New Yorker George Templeton Strong wrote that “opium chewing prevails here extensively, much more so than people think.” He saw the usage as having “greatly increased” as a response to “the blessed Temperance Movement.” Poe could have switched to opium in an attempt to end his drinking and, thus, end its negative effects on his career.

How then can we reconcile the theory that Poe was trying to hide his opiate use with the fact that characters in several of his stories were habitual users? This contrast calls to mind the title object in another Poe story, 1844’s “The Purloined Letter.” In it, authorities cannot find a stolen document, but Poe’s detective recovers it. While the police assume that the thief had concealed it securely, it was “full in the view of every visiter,” as Auguste Dupin discovers, and it was therefore overlooked. It is possible that Poe’s dependency on opium was, at that time, also both well-hidden and in plain sight.

Further Reading:

For information about Poe’s life, I primarily used Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000). George Woodberry’s finished product was the two-volume The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, Personal and Literary (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909). Woodberry’s correspondence with Amelia Fitzgerald Poe is in Houghton Library at Harvard University.

For information about the nonmedical use of opiates in nineteenth-century America, I primarily used David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001) and H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800–1980 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981).

Several literary scholars have addressed opium use in Poe’s life and writings. Alethea Hayter explores rumors of Poe’s habituation and the opium references in his stories in Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). James L. Machor addresses these topics in James L. Machor, Reading Fiction in Antebellum America: Informed Response and Reception Histories, 1820–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). F. O. Matthiessen weighs in on the debate over Poe and opium use in F.O. Matthiessen, “Poe,” Sewanee Review 54 (April–June 1946): 175–205. David S. Reynolds looks at the opium references in Poe’s stories, and those of his contemporaries, in David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988). Susan Zieger more broadly studies the drug references in the century’s literature in Susan Zieger, Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).

This article originally appeared in February 2022.

Elizabeth Kelly Gray is an associate professor and assistant chair in the Department of History at Towson University. Her book project Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914 is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Rapp’s philosophy-theology was an eclectic mix of grassroots German Pietism, Jakob Böhme, and nascent German Romanticism. The Harmonists were not “Plain” people, like the Amish or Mennonites. In their German idealism they tended to see the world, and especially the natural world, not as fallen but as intrinsically good, it having been created by God—hence their scientific interests, including Economy’s pioneering natural history museum. Music of all kinds was valued, both sacred and secular. The Harmonists were not quite as well-trained instrumentalists as the Moravians, but they were similar in this regard: from the very beginning they considered obtaining musical instruments (and training members to play them) to be a priority. Among other Böhme-derived peculiarities, Rapp also insisted that each community build and maintain a hedge labyrinth with a grotto (an outbuilding built to look rustic on the outside but with a fine classical finish inside) as a spiritual object lesson as well as for meditation purposes.

Rapp’s community survived him, gradually declining in part due to defections and in part because of the adoption of celibacy, first as a preferred mode of living and then as a requirement (possibly in imitation of the Shakers, with whom the Harmonists communicated). The Society disbanded in 1905. Part of the village, including the principal communal buildings, was appropriated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which maintains it as a historic site. The surroundings were redeveloped into the sprawling steel mill and company town of Ambridge by the American Bridge Company, which purchased most of the rest of the land.

My interest in Rapp and his movement originated in my reading on American communal groups during graduate study at Duke University in the early 1990s, then returned after my move to Pennsylvania in 2007—by which time I was, in fact, a member of an unrelated German Pietist group. In January 2020, I spent four days at Old Economy Village (as it is now known) in a restored Harmonist house, walking the former community by day and reviewing its history by night. I was also able to use the community’s extensive archive, maintained on-site by the state.

The poems of “Kingdom” are spirit-drawings, in the tradition of the Harmonists’ erstwhile Shaker acquaintances. On occasion they quote bits of Harmonist texts. “The knot has partly tightened,” “a machine with living wheels,” “a larger theater,” “time, the secret affirmation,” and “Because whatever needs to be done in this world must be done by human beings” are all fragmentary quotes from George Rapp’s only published work, Thoughts on the Destiny of Man, in Silvia Anna Rode’s modern translation. “Through Fallen Church Windows” was one of the Harmonists’ better-known hymns, written by the community physician, Johann Christoph Müller, in 1816. Other poems take aspects of Harmonist belief and daily life as points of departure, for instance their Fourth of July celebrations (the Harmonists’ pietism was not incompatible with American patriotism), their carefully-documented kitchen gardens, the community’s complicated well-and-water system, Rapp’s abiding interest in alchemy (following Böhme), and Rapp’s two trials for heresy in Germany. There are also a few nods to Gertrude Stein, who as it turns out was also familiar with Böhme.

Where We Live Now, vs. Where We Live Now

The question of “community” (utopian or otherwise) is a vexed one. My graduate work was animated by a wider investigation into what “community” could mean in an American context—especially when enacted, or attempted, under adverse circumstances. My dissertation, later published as Southern Workers and the Search for Community, involved one such attempt, or loose association of attempts, that crested in the textile union movement’s activities and failures in the American South between the 1930s and 1950s. In the background of this work stood the subsequent narrative of the civil rights movement, which, however partial its victories, however embattled those victories remain, provides something like a positive narrative line. Winners typically tell their stories. Losers typically don’t. “Community” always involves risk. 

The history of American utopian experiments is varied—quixotic, even. And it is almost always told, when it is told, from the point of view of the losers, since most American utopian communities ended sooner or later (usually sooner) in wreckage. I was especially interested in those that lasted awhile—in the Shakers, for instance, or the Black town movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And I was especially interested in the limitations of community—the edges of the polis, however beloved: where community fails, where and whom it excludes.

The Harmony Society’s history was one of (initially) radical inclusion and economic struggle, and then of substantial economic prosperity, succeeded by an extended period of declension and radical exclusion following a major schism in 1832, after which new members were discouraged. Ironically, what the society lost over time in terms of its spiritual aspect (not to mention its membership) was balanced by the success of its economic investments, which remained lucrative, in particular its investment in coal and oil reserves at the onset of the nation’s rapid industrialization. Its sense of itself as a community evolved over time in conjunction with its spiritual and economic bases. Ultimately its fit with American capitalism was perhaps too neat. This arc places it in close parallel with another, more infamous utopian experiment, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community, although I suspect Rapp himself would have preferred a comparison with the Shakers, or with Iowa’s Amana Society.

It was winter when I was in residence at Old Economy Village, with drifts of dirty snow across the borough of Ambridge. While the core of the Harmonist village remains to some extent fixed in time (by virtue of state preservation), the more outlying bits, including many original Harmonist houses, are now interwoven with early twentieth-century company housing, much of it decaying. The bulk of the abandoned steel mill rises to the immediate north. The Harmonists’ church was acquired and repurposed by Lutherans. The cemetery, devoid of markers, is unsignposted; I walked past it repeatedly (thinking it was an empty lot) before someone corrected my misapprehension. The site of the original labyrinth is now Ambridge High School’s football field. One could say the tension between devotion and commerce, between visionary aspiration and the marketplace, isn’t done yet on this site, although the Harmonists’ voices have ceased.

Further Information

Old Economy Village’s website is here. Because the Harmony Society’s archives survived mostly intact, it has been a favorite among historians, as reflected in the partial bibliography reproduced at the end of its Wikipedia entry.

For those interested in the Harmonist labyrinths, a useful introduction may be found here.

The archives at Old Economy Village are part of the Pennsylvania State Archives. For more information, see its site.

The Harmony Society’s dedication to musical culture (of all kinds) is one of its sustained, and sustaining, threads, and the musical archives of the Society are vast—although in the early decades, as with nearly all other materials, they are in German. Some of the intriguing materials I did not consult, but wish I had, were the “Cook Book of Philippine Claus” (1880), “Instructions for Dyeing Silk” (ca. 1830), the “Maker’s Marks” associated with Economy’s handicraft industries, the “Medical Books” (divided into two classes, one enumerating “herbs, plants, and  fruits,” the other “recipes and cures”), a play written by a member (dated 1804), various folders of poems and prayers written by Harmonists, various registers of meteorological phenomena (including several “Thermometer Books”), and a folder mysteriously labeled “Survey Questionnaires, 1845-1880.”

From “Kingdom”

GEORGE RAPP (III)

Five gnomons, best

as settlement.

There is no war.

Mercy corresponds.

Sweep the loam

with vigor.

Lambs plot there.

Or the vats twang.

Glow is any glass

the night measures.

Preach it

to the prime loss.

Blend of tendency.

To settle & to mourn.

Great breaths

of them, did you.

Fire has a surface,

yes or no.

Let a wind chasten.

Is not a cloister

sentence represents.

A suit

against water,

every blue triumph,

what will you wear

master citizen.

Will you expose

the animals. Acute

angle. Refusal,

that ministry.

Gather it in you.

Gloss its wreaths.

Is breaking

is broken before.

& after, a hospital.

Austere

in the way of things,

an orchard’s worth.

The blond

color of darkness.

Completed, waiting.

GEORGE RAPP (IV)

To tame a merit.

Rapprochement lit

from within.

Wive the apologia

& then

reason adjacent

adjusts accordingly.

Not separate,

balance captivates.

Would you call it

education.

Or, a stamina.

Now the priests

unfasten.

They have heard

together

listening. Whip

measure’s

fine stitch. A canon

of empathy borders.

Would you

acclaim (it; others).

Practice

change in turn,

include carpenters.

Together, a touch.

A tone.

Not separate

the future’s gap

bright among flies.

& so it lingered.

A wide door

smelling of lilac.

It was not cruel,

never. But smaller.

Fancy

what would

become of that.

Years drenched in

when. Some family.

GEORGE RAPP (X)

An obligation to come

is what we announced,

he must come,

they must come,

there must be coming,

there must be arrival.

Very well

said day, a mistake.

Tomorrow is careful.

A few steps up

& there, you have it.

There beneath

the flying of a silk kite.

We are not

so confused. Only,

we await. They must

come, they must

arrive. We have set

music to watch

for them, their arrival.

We have beaten

every bound. Water

is warmer in summer.

Acquaintance

protects the verb

from its source.

Make a copy

of your country, sir.

In colored inks.

Did they yield, then.

It was October.

Senses were royal.

A blade crept in still.

Only small wars

now. You catch them

with a knotted string,

with a loud brass tray.

We continue

to await. Prepare

to await, yes,

I saw it in Pittsburgh.

Why install

a cross when you can

install a cross.

I don’t mean one

alone. I mean many

people on foot

mostly. Or by river

on boats awfully large

or else quite small.

GEORGE RAPP (XI)

Alchemy the rejection

of time

within time. It leads

to a cup. Water inside

the question:

how much water.

You can sacrifice a lot

in Beaver Falls.

Dear girl, dear refugee.

Let us rise

into the English

tongue, fleshy shelter.

Not above

reading in newspapers.

I have received

your announcement.

What might the stage

withhold.

I mean from us.

Or from others, yes.

To be ill or to be burnt.

A lot is like this,

apricot roots

twining. Please

do not return, please

do not make any

unnecessary

& invariably foolish

decisions

such as a change

in your name.

Signed carelessly.

& yet the rich emotion.

How splendid

the performance,

did you find a life

there. Swallows

abusing the eaves

joyfully. A presence.

As a bruise

in an aching sinew.

Would you lave it.

Would you

kindly disabuse

that remedial thorn.

GEORGE RAPP (XII)

If objects attract then

I needs nothing.

A chair. A tumbler.

Grace bewilders,

this much is veritable.

Of course saints

wander. Literature

is the true map

of this. Like all maps

it is dead, but only

just. Pronounce

the faiths of the dead.

In the rye field

an oblation of breath.

Outside vs. inside,

objects in the sense

that senses intromit.

My vest & cap.

My hand against

the frozen, shriveled

figs on their bough.

They are still.

They are still enough.

They are both

higher & lower.

Ruin of purslane

amidst the invisible.

Yes of course

all prepositions

are haunted.  One loop

secures another

& in this way

the deep fish marvel.

C/O GEORGE RAPP, ECONOMY, PA.

Recollect choirs.

Distilling a majority.

Recollect choirs

in the vicinity.  Type

of choir, vicinity.

Recollect pleasing

moments in which

tones figure.  Figure

of a tone, winter

summer spring fall.

We pass in this

as laughter.  Or,

something doubtless,

a plan.  A brother.

Emigration catches

its breath with one

callused hand.

Where is the other.

Soprano descant

in the blown thicket,

dried apples cast

down a balcony.

Be quiet now & rest.

In the span’s umbra.

As befits souls

a lengthening flare.

Taxidermied break.

What do you see.

I see nation, I count

guns in the snow.

All of it as essence.

What then

can rest clasp

to itself, a flange,

what dim academy.

Peace in trenches.

In shops.  In arbors.

What news is this.

Break the butcher

down, in catalogues.

A form of speech.

A form speech took

while recollecting.

This article was originally published in February, 2022.

I’m the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), which won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021). Other recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in APR, Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, New England Review, Yale Review, Iowa Review, Conjunctions­, New American Writing, etc. I live in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania and teach at Bucknell University. As you know, my Ph.D. is in U.S. history, from Duke, and I’m also the author of a historical monograph, Southern Workers and the Search for Community (University of Illinois Press, 2000). In 2021 I was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Bluejacket’s telling pointed to a geological truth that would take geologists more than a century to even consider. Modern geology now affirms that parts of present-day West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio once constituted the floor of the Iapetus Ocean, a 600-million-year-old extinct body of water that preceded the formation of the Atlantic Ocean. The Iapetus once separated the ancient continents of Avalonia and Laurentia. Roughly 420 million years ago, tectonic activity brought these two landmasses together, closing the Iapetus and trapping saltwater under a new supercontinent, Pangea. Pangea eventually separated, forming the distinct continents of Africa and North America and the ocean that now separates them. The salty waters and residue of the Iapetus became locked beneath the central Appalachians and have gradually seeped upward through millions of years of geologic history, re-appearing at the earth’s surface in the form of licks, springs, and seeps.

Lands bounded in by the Appalachians to the east, the Mississippi River to the west, the Great Lakes to the north, and roughly the Cumberland River to the south constitute an uncommonly salt-rich region of North America. These mineral pockets became magnets of human and nonhuman migration to and across Bluejacket’s ancestral lands. This is because large mammals, like humans, need salt to survive. Though it can vary in compound structure and mineral ratio, all forms of salt consist primarily of sodium and chloride. Sodium chloride—salt’s main homogenous compound—allows animals to retain hydrating fluids, process essential nutrients and minerals, and support microcellular processes critical to circulatory, muscular, and nerve function. Humans reliant upon large mammals for food recognized this dependency: “in all the western states,” one early nineteenth-century visitor to Kentucky observed, “they are obliged to give salt to the cattle. Were it not for that, the food they give them would never make them look well.”

In the Ohio Country, salt commonly took the form of mineral-rich mud or saline springs. Most large mammals in the region consumed their fill at mineral licks. American settler John Filson, for instance, wrote in 1784 that “Noblick, and many others, do not produce water, but consist of clay mixed with salt particles; to these the cattle repair, and reduce high hills rather to valleys [then] plains.” Even if mundane in purpose, salt licks were miraculous sights to behold. Filson wrote of the “amazing herds of Buffalo” that came to the licks, and how “their size and number, fill the traveller with amazement and terror, especially when he beholds the prodigious roads they have made from all quarters, as if leading to some populous city; the vast space of land around these springs desolated as if by a ravaging enemy, and hills reduced to plains.” Filson wasn’t fabricating; on May 18, 1774, a British survey party travelled up the Kentucky River “to a Salt Spring, where [they] saw about 300 Buffaloes collected together”—sights, smells, and sounds no doubt seared into the surveyors’ senses.

Because they attracted large mammals, mineral licks also attracted hunters. This had been the case at Big Bone Lick for at least centuries—and possibly over 10,000 years—prior to European arrival. Located just south of the Ohio River in present-day Boone County, Kentucky, Big Bone earned its English name from massive skeletal exposures that captured the awe and attention of both Indigenous peoples and Euro-American newcomers. In a 1762 letter, James Wright relayed the origins and significance of Big Bone Lick according to “two Sincible Shawanese Indians”:

There were many roads thro this Extent of land, larger & more beaten by Buffolas and other Creatures, that had made them [Shawnees] to go to it . . . they [Shawnees] had indeed a tradition, such mighty Creatures, once frequented those Savannahs, that there were then men of a size proportionable to them, who used to kill them, and tye them in Their Noppusses [back straps] And throw them upon their Backs As an Indian now dos a Deer, that they had seen Marks in rocks, which tradition said, were made by these Great & Strong Men, when they [sat] down with their Burthens . . . that when there were no more of these strong Men left alive, God had Kill’d [the] last 5 [buffalo] . . . they [Shawnees] supposed them to have been Killd by lightening — these the Shawanese said were their traditions.

Thousands of years of migration to and from Big Bone remained visible—and useable—in the mid-eighteenth century. Visiting the lick in the early 1760s, British trader George Croghan commented on the “large road which the Buffaloes have beaten, spacious enough for two wagons to go abreast and leading straight into the Lick.” Apparently unbeknownst to Croghan, four roads converged at Big Bone, each up to fifteen feet in width. The most important road crossing through Big Bone was Alanant-o-wamiowee (the Great Buffalo Path), one of the oldest in eastern North America. The corridor originated somewhere in present-day Illinois, where bison converged by the millions to migrate toward Kentucky and Tennessee. The path spanned 225 miles across northern Kentucky, connecting at least four major springs and licks along the way.

Like stars, salt resources oriented the movements of mammals and their hunters for millennia. The result was an intricate web of trails, traces, and roads that facilitated and directed human movement. Reconstructed maps of Indigenous roadways through northern Kentucky show paths starting and ending at places like Es-kip-pa-ki-thi-ki and Upper and Lower Blue Licks, all sites of major salt springs and licks. Shawnees had departed the Ohio Country during the early seventeenth century in response to war, disease, and political instability. We may imagine their eventual return to places like Lower Shawneetown, at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio rivers, occurred along these familiar pathways. Through the eighteenth century, Shawnees continued to reinforce the significance of these veritably ancient networks. 

Salt production was also part of the diverse economies dominated by Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth-century Ohio Country. This was especially true at Lower Shawneetown, where its residents engaged in a generations-old practice of exploiting rich local springs. Visiting the bustling Lower Shawneetown in January of 1751, British trader Christopher Gist noted that “The Indians and Traders make salt for their horses” from a local spring “by boiling it.” As A. Gwynn Henderson has demonstrated, local salt makers seemed to have replaced their shallow ceramic pans, which their predecessors had used since at least the 1100s through the early seventeenth century, with kettles by the mid-eighteenth century. When a hunting party departed Lower Shawneetown for Big Bone Lick in 1755, for instance, they took kettles and two captured colonists with them “to make salt.” Perhaps they intended to use the salt to treat hides, season or preserve meat, or supplement their trading wares.

Salt making was no small task. Even the strongest, cleanest brine required close watch, constant maintenance, and physically demanding labor to ensure a useable final product. As Susan Sleeper-Smith and A. Gwynn Henderson have suggested, salt making seems to have been one of the many industries managed by Indigenous women in the Ohio Country. Perhaps that is why one group of Shawnees, who captured Daniel Boone and a group of squatters in the winter of 1777-1778, forced the male captives to make salt while travelling northward along the Scioto River. Whether it was the physical taxation or the embarrassment of doing women’s work under the orders of Indigenous men, the captives came to resent the task of salt making. One captive, James Callaway, refused to carry kettles and salt forfeited by William Brooks. When a Shawnee man took out his tomahawk, Callaway responded with dramatic defiance—“strike! I would as lie here as go along, and I won’t tote your kettle”—after which the salt-making gear was assigned to someone else.

If salt making supported the economic primacy of Indigenous women within their communities and networks, it could also make them targets of gendered colonial violence. In early 1778, a group of Munsee Delaware women were making salt at a spring near the Mahoning River when American soldiers murdered them. Intended to be a retaliative campaign against British-allied Seneca and Cayugas, American general Edward Hand’s bloody foray into the eastern Ohio Country reached a sinister climax at the Mahoning spring, where the women, according to American correspondence, were tragically misidentified as potential enemies. The soldiers’ actions and justifications laid bare the violence Indigenous women faced as colonialism intensified in the Ohio Country. In the minds of their killers, the women’s presumed affiliation with male-dominated warfare rendered their lives discardable, relevant only as tokens in conflicts among men. Yet the women’s unguarded presence at the spring reminds us that Indigenous women in the Ohio Country often moved, labored, and acted autonomously. In doing so, the Munsee Delaware women also reinforced this particular spring’s place within Indigenous spheres of knowledge, movement, and management. 

American invasions mark the start of a more widely known chapter in the history of salt in the Ohio Country. Between 1780 and 1790, dozens of saltworks cropped up throughout the Ohio Country. Digging wells, expanding furnaces, and siphoning brine, settlers considered themselves titans of industry and tamers of wilderness. Early settler James Collins, who founded a saltworks near Goose Creek in 1785, wrote in a letter to a colleague “of the early times about Bullitt’s Lick—when the fires of an hundred salt furnaces gleamed through the forest, and the Wyandot sat on Cahill’s [K]nob and looked down on five hundred men on the plain below.” One late nineteenth-century historian alleged that “the Indian hated to see the white man thus engaged” in salt making at Bullitt’s Lick because “it seems like an invasion of the rights of the owner of the soil, and the very industry of the settler was a perpetual reproach.” In addition to severing connections that were thousands of years old and suffocating local environments, these operations also attracted more settlers and provisioned local militias, thus functioning as critical nodes of settler colonial sustenance and commerce.

Indigenous peoples repeatedly rejected such disruptions. In 1780, for instance, “a company of Indians” attacked a group of American men who “were on their way from Bryan station and the fort at Lexington to Mann’s Salt Licks . . . for the purpose of procuring salt.” A similar episode occurred in April 1783, A similar episode occurred in April 1783, when American Colonel John Floyd as well as his brother and another person “going to the [Bullitt] Saltworks were fired on by Indians,” an attack that quickly proved fatal for both Floyd and the unnamed third person, each of whom died right at Bullitt’s Lick. Between 1781 and 1788, vaguely identified “Indians” travelling to and from the Ohio River targeted at least two salt-making parties and another group surveying lands with potentially useable licks and springs.

The attacks prompted white men living and laboring in upper central Kentucky’s salt industry to seek state protection. In May 1793, some 75 residents petitioned to Kentucky governor Isaac Shelby for “a guard of men to be stationed at the mouth of Salt River.” The petitioners “apprehend[ed] but little danger from any other quarter than from the westward of the Ohio,” which was “the general crossing place for the Indians . . . doing mischief on any part of this frontier.” Whether Shelby ever provided state protection at Bullitt’s Lick is uncertain, but Indigenous men did not readily relinquish their ability to move and mobilize power south of the Ohio River. As late as March 28, 1795, the Kentucky Herald reported the “last Indian depredations” in Clay County, a commercial pocket in the heart of the state. “A gentleman just from the salt works,” wrote the Herald, had described how “the Indians stole a number of horses from that place last week, and that they also killed a man on Goose creek.” 

Fighting back wasn’t the Shawnees’ only strategy to maintain access to salt resources. In the summer of 1783, a group of Shawnee hunters convened with three Kentucky settlers south of the Ohio to trade. The Shawnees requested “licker and sault,” and the American traders reportedly secured assurance from a nearby militia commander that traders would soon bring salt to Shawnee towns. Treaties also became another means of negotiation over salt. In the 1803 Treaty of Fort Wayne, Indigenous leaders ceded control over the Grand Saline at the mouth of the Wabash River to the U.S. government. Their price was an annual annuity of 150 bushels of salt that would “be divided among the several tribes in such manner as the general council of the chiefs may determine.”

The few histories of salt in the Ohio Country often start and end with American industry. In these narratives, Shawnees and other Indigenous peoples are treated as peoples without a past or future. But as Susan Sleeper-Smith has recently shown, Indigenous prosperity in the Ohio Country offers critical precedent for the trajectory of American expansion into the region and, more significantly, Indigenous peoples’ ability to retain access to vital spaces, resources, and networks. Indeed, early American salt makers exploited productive precedents established by generations of people who had engaged with salt resources for thousands of years. This deeper history of salt shaped space, relations, and power dynamics during the eighteenth century in ways both explicit and obscure.

As the tumultuous salvation of the Shawnees’ Go-cum-tha and her Wash-et-che reminds us, salt’s ability to invite both creation and destruction to the heart of Shawnee homelands was hardly contradictory and hardly ancient history. That great salt water that drowned and drained the region’s lands long ago remained just as powerful and potent generations later, emerging in the form of brine seeps, mineral springs, and salt licks that helped to orient life across the Ohio Country.

Further Reading

George Bluejacket, “A Story of the Shawanoes,” recorded at Wapaughkonnetta, Ohio (October 29, 1829); trans. and ed. John Allen Rayner (March 1886), via Kansas Memory, https://www.kansasmemory.org/item/210156/.

Stephen Warren, The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Harriette Simpson Arnow, Seedtime on the Cumberland: Life in the Cumberland River Region of Kentucky and Tennessee, 1780-1803 (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1960).

Eric J. Wallace, “Making Salt From an Ancient Ocean Trapped Below the Appalachians,” Atlas Obscura, Jan. 8, 2018.

Honor Sachs, Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), esp. ch. 2.

Ian W. Brown, Salt and the Eastern North American Indian: An Archaeological Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Peabody Museum, 1980).

Thomas D. Clark, “Salt, a Factor in the Settlement of Kentucky,” Filson Historical Society Archives, May 3, 1937.

Paul N. Eubanks and Ian W. Brown, “Certain Trends in Eastern Woodlands Salt Production Technology,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 40, No. 3 (2015).

James L. Murphy, “Above the Salt: Test Excavations at the Scioto Saline, Jackson County, Ohio,” Ohio Archaeologist 54, No. 2 (2004): 38-42

Stanley Hedeen, Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2008).

Kenneth B. Tankersley, Michael R. Waters, and Thomas W. Stafford Jr., “Clovis and the American Mastodon at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky,” American Antiquity 74, No. 3 (2009): 558-67.

Walter Fewkes, John R. Swanton, and William Edward Myer, Forty-Second Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1924-1925 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1925).

John A. Jakle, “The American Bison and the Human Occupation of the Ohio Valley,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112, No. 4 (1968): 299-305.

Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

Gwynn Henderson, “The Lower Shawnee Town on the Ohio: Sustaining Native Autonomy in an Indian ‘Republic,’” in The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promise Land, ed. Craig Thompson Friend (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 25-55.

Gwynn Henderson, “Dispelling the Myth: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Indian Life in Kentucky,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 90, No. 1 (1992): 1-25.

James Duvall, ed., Early Documents relating to Mary Ingles and the Escape from Big Bone Lick, (Burlington, KY: Boone County Public Library, 2008).

John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1992).

H. Bogart, Daniel Boone and the Hunters of Kentucky (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1881).

Isaac Lippincott, “The Early Salt Trade of the Ohio Valley,” Journal of Political Economy 20, No. 10 (1912): 1029-52.

Robert E. McDowell, “Bullitt’s Lick: The Related Saltworks and Settlement,” Filson Club History Quarterly 30, No. 3 (1956).

John A. Jakle, “Salt on the Ohio Valley Frontier, 1770-1820,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 59 (Dec. 1969): 687-709.

Reuben Gold Thwaites, Early Wester Travels, 1748-1846, 5 vols. (Cleveland, OH: The A. H. Clark Company, 1904-1907).

Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, eds., Documentary History of Dunmore’s War, 1774 (Madison, WI: Democrat Printing Company, 1908).

Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, eds., Frontier Defense on the Upper Ohio, 1777-1778, Draper Series vol. 3 (Madison, WI: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1912).

Richard Collins, Collins’ Historical Sketches of Kentucky: History of Kentucky, ed. Lewis Collins, vol. 2 (Covington, KY: Collins & Co., 1874).

Rob Harper, Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

“Treaty of Fort Wayne,” Kansas Kickapoo Tribe, https://www.ktik-nsn.gov/history/treaties/1803-treaty/.

This article originally appeared in January 2022.

Annabel LaBrecque is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at University of California, Berkeley. Her work explores interdisciplinary approaches to the significance of salt throughout North American history. She has previously published research on salt and power in the sixteenth-century Lower Mississippi Valley for the Scottish Centre for Global History.

To understand how Ellms’s book seemed to cause piracy, we can think about Julia Kristeva’s suggestive argument in Powers of Horror: some play out their fantasies by reading literature and are satisfied, but there is always the risk that others, enthralled by the literature, will take the pleasure of the text into the real world. Contemporaries believed that many readers were so inspired by Ellms’s pirate anthology. In 1842 the Captain of the U.S.S. Somers hanged three men for mutiny—one of them, Philip Spencer, was the Secretary of War’s son—after an onboard investigation. (Figure 2) As Commander McKenzie said in a Naval Court of Inquiry, Spencer’s literary tastes “proved” his intentions: “it was one of the amusements of Mr. Spencer, to relate to the young children . . . ‘murderous stories and tales of blood,’ that the chief and favorite theme of his conversation was piratical exploits, and the pleasures of a pirate’s life, and the great object of his ambition was renown as a pirate; that the book which he oftest read . . . was the ‘Pirates Own Book.’” In an 1841 Louisiana courtroom, where lawyers sought to prove charges of nautical piracy against Captain Daniel De Putron, they similarly pointed to the large stock of weapons and a copy of The Pirates Own Book that they had found on his ship. The title of Ellms’s anthology, which oddly lacks an apostrophe, was seen as prophetic: pirates owned the book.

Ellms offered something different from previous pirate chroniclers, making his collection particularly attractive for nineteenth-century readers. Pirates had long featured in newspapers like the eighteenth-century Boston News-Letter, the first regularly published newspaper in the English-speaking colonies. Pirates also appeared in pamphlets and in broadsides, a single printed sheet that served as a cheap form of entertaining news. As a 13-year-old printer’s apprentice in Boston, Benjamin Franklin penned and hawked a broadside ballad about Blackbeard shortly after that pirate’s death. Pirate ballads could have long lives: The Dying Words of Captain Robert Kidd, a beloved pirate ballad, was sung on ships, in taverns, and at camp revivals from Mississippi to Canada for almost two hundred years. (Figure 3) Over time, the lyrics shifted, even changing Kidd’s first name from William to Robert. Still, it and other pirate writings were broadly based in fact and intended to tell a historical, if stylized, story. Such remained true as pirates made their way into volumes, starting with A. O. Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America (1678). Trained as a surgeon, Exquemelin shipped under the notorious pirate Captain Henry Morgan and then penned his account in Dutch; it was quickly translated (with various levels of faithfulness) into German (1679), Spanish (1681), and English (1684). Captain Charles Johnson (once assumed to be Daniel Defoe) followed in 1724 with the English-language General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, another biographical account of Golden Age pirates that was likewise hastily translated, frequently reprinted, and widely read.

Coming a hundred years after Johnson, Ellms updated A General History by including more recent freebooters who tormented U.S. citizens or themselves had U.S. connections. Ellms tells how the vicious Edward “Ned” Low worked in a Massachusetts rigging house; Captain Avery considered settling in New England but needed to dispose of his diamonds first; Charles Gibbs ran a Boston grocery before turning pirate; and Captain Kidd was held in the Old Boston Gaol before being shipped to London and gibbeted. (Figure 4) The Algerine pirates and Barbary Corsairs, who get a section in The Pirates Own Book, attacked many early national ships off the coast of northern Africa. In response, an enraged Congress funded the creation of the U.S. Navy. Even as his miscellany ranged across time and space, then, Ellms continually connected piracy to the United States. Such was both a historic and timely link. New England Puritans had briefly welcomed pirates, and as early nineteenth-century readers would have known, piracy still existed in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. In fact, the Republic of Texas outfitted privateers (pirates with the gloss of legality) starting in 1835. Ellms also pointed out that U.S. law classified the international slave trade as piracy. But although Congress made the act a capital offense in 1820, few were tried for the crime, and only one person was ever hanged—Nathaniel Gordon in 1862—despite estimates that annually as many as 15,000 people were smuggled into the United States. Piracy, Ellms’s introduction told U.S. readers, was all around them and often went unpunished.

Hence, while the United States officially condemned piracy, it was not above ignoring the piratical actions of its citizens or leveraging a pirate’s abilities. It most certainly did the latter with Jean Lafitte, who after plundering ships in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean Sea, established a pirate camp in Barataria, just outside New Orleans. In September 1814, during the War of 1812, a British commander invited Lafitte to join the King’s forces and attack Louisiana. The wily Lafitte pretended to be interested while awaiting a reply to his offer to defend Barataria for the Americans in return for amnesty. Seeing the tactical necessity of aligning with the pirates, General Andrew Jackson agreed to Lafitte’s terms, and President James Madison issued a full pardon. The pirates, in turn, fought “with unparalleled bravery” and worked their artillery “with the steadiness and precision of veteran gunners.” They repelled the British forces twice, killed the British commander, and then as the British rallied and charged, Lafitte sprung out of a trench to fight hand-to-hand. Many pirates were “killed or wounded in the defense of the country” but “their zeal, their courage, and their skill, were remarked by the whole army.” The pirates saved New Orleans. Ellms commends Lafitte’s “judgment” and “sincere attachment to the American cause.” Not content to live a quiet life, however, the hero Lafitte leaves Louisiana to plunder ships in the Gulf of Mexico. While there are odious characters in the anthology, Ellms’s Lafitte suggests that piracy can be both admirable and American, for Lafitte is both a patriot and a pirate. Loosely unified by themes of buried treasure, dismemberment and death, legal encounters, and enslavement, The Pirates Own Book tells readers that pirates are individuals. Each deserves judgement for his specific and sometimes heroic actions, a dangerous position that erodes an equation between illegality and immorality. (Figure 5)

Ellms’s writing style further undermines any presumption that all pirates are bad. Although he lifted from newspapers, pamphlets, and Johnson’s General History, Ellms modernized the language and punched up the drama. Readers are made to sweat, scream, and cringe at the actions of scallywags; they are put in the moment with the pirates. Compare two scenes from Mary Read’s life, one from Johnson and one from Ellms. In both, the pirate Mary Read has fallen in love with a young sailor, revealed herself as a woman, married him, and then decided to fight her husband’s challenger instead of risking his death. According to Johnson, Mary “was to the last Degree uneasy and anxious, for the Fate of her Lover; she would not have had him refuse the Challenge, because, she could not bear the Thoughts of his being branded with Cowardise; on the other Side, she dreaded the Event, and apprehended the Fellow might be too hard for him.” Johnson continues on about the nature of love, finally ending with Mary meeting the man who will duel with her lover, and fighting him “at Sword and Pistol, and [killing] him upon the Spot.” The scene belabors Mary’s emotions, presenting them both formally and in universal terms, only to hurry through her murderous action.

Ellms alters this formula. In his account, we get to the major event (Mary’s killing of the lover’s challenger) in almost half the words. What comes before serves as succinct motive for that deed: Mary “manifested a greater concern for the preservation of his life than that of her own.” Ellms also emphasizes the story’s action with an engraving of Mary thrusting her sword straight through the man’s belly. (Figure 6) Ellms drew most, if not all, of these 18 full-page engravings and 48 partial-page engravings (though someone else would have engraved them). Although some are merely decorative flourishes, most of the images capture dramatic moments, including Captain Condent leaping into the hold to kill an attacker, Charles Gibbs abducting a young woman, and a group of pirates burying treasure. In addition to emphasizing the story action, some of these images are so visually effective that they have become the dominant visual of the pirate. (When one does an internet search for Mary Read, Ellms’s image appears at the top of results. Ditto with Captain Kidd.) Picture yourself in the story, Ellms tells his reader. Immerse yourself in this conjured world: sweat, scream, and cringe with these pirates. Perhaps it is not too much further to imagine oneself as a pirate and, one day, the subject of just such a story.

Although most of his material existed in another form elsewhere, Ellms’s anthology offered something radically new and dangerous. By making pirate stories dramatic and exciting, Ellms transformed pirates from news objects and historical actors to distinctly literary characters. Yes, Ellms was still offering more or less factual accounts. But redressing old tales in snappy, non-judgmental American clothes, Ellms gave readers a way to imagine themselves as swashbucklers and paved the ground for later blood-and-thunder pirate tales. Popular novels like The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main and Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain appear in the 1840s, and the most famous pirate story of all time, Treasure Island, was published in 1881. Both real and fictional pirate anti-heroes sprung from the dangerous imaginative transport of The Pirates Own Book. No wonder nineteenth-century readers were mad for it. (Figure 7)

Further Reading:

• Charles Ellms [anonymous], The Pirates Own Book, or Authentic narratives of the lives, exploits, and executions of the most celebrated sea robbers (Boston: N. Dickinson, 1837).
• Michael Winship, “Pirates, Shipwrecks, and Comic Almanacs: Charles Ellms Packages Books in Nineteenth-Century America,” Printing History, no. 9 (2011): 3-16.
• Paul A. Gilje, To Swear Like a Sailor: Maritime Culture in America, 1750-1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
• “From the New York American of Yesterday. Naval Court of Inquiry,” The North American and Daily Advertiser, January 21, 1843.
• Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, From Their First Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence, to the Present Time (London: T, Warner, 1724).

This article was originally published in January 2022.

Lydia G. Fash, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing (NTT) at Simmons University and the author of The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and various peer-reviewed articles. She is currently working on Pirates & Personhood, a multiethnic project about piracy’s challenge to the political categories of “person” and “citizen.”

In her recent book Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (2019), cultural critic and legal scholar Imani Perry tackles this very question. “People say that white people did not think Black people were fully human during slavery. And sometimes they still say that today,” Perry writes. “I have never believed that was true. Having studied the law of slavery, it is very clear to me that in the antebellum period white people knew Black people were absolutely human. . . . To be treated as other than human when you are human is not a mistake or a flaw; it is a sin without excuse.”

Further, the ethical injunction to substitute “enslaved person” for “slave” actually contains and relies upon the very claim it seeks to refute. That is, in order for the term “enslaved” to recover the personhood of the slave, we must first presuppose that the term “slave” expunges said personhood. The claim that the “slave” is a nonperson is, perhaps in an ironic twist, made most forcefully by the exhortation to replace that term with a better one. Finally, I think we should be wary of purporting to “restore” or “recover” the humanity of the enslaved. As Walter Johnson has noted, this approach assumes that said humanity needs to be discovered or recovered in the first place rather than taken as a given. It also places the scholar, historian, or writer in an almost heroic position—excavating enslaved personhood from beneath the depths of racist historiography. I cannot help but wonder if, in doing so, we are giving ourselves too much credit. It often seems that the case for reparative semantics is more about us and our politics than it is about the historical questions that occasion it. Does the shift from “slave” to “enslaved person” help us think more clearly about the history of slavery, or does it function—as Johnson might caution—as a mere “advertisement of good will”?

Similar problems arise when we consider other semantic substitutions. The term “enslaver,” for instance, often obscures the very historical phenomena it aims to make legible. Indeed, the term can be and has been used to describe any number of individuals and groups involved in slavery and the slave trade: merchants who purchased and sold slaves; ship captains and crew who held them captive; auctioneers who ran slave markets; slave traders who acted on behalf of wealthy planters; overseers on plantations throughout the Americas; managers who ran plantations for absentee estate holders; banks and firms that financed those plantations; institutions and other corporate bodies that owned slaves; and more. Put simply, the broad use of “enslaver” consolidates numerous social actors into a single, ahistorical abstraction. Many so-called “enslavers” did not, after all, own any slaves. To collapse these various social positions into a single identifier is to risk misunderstanding how they together constituted a global slaving system.

More specifically, the terms “enslaver” and “enslavement” are commonly used in an African context to denote the process by which people are brought into the system of slavery—through kidnapping or warfare, for example. From this Africanist perspective, which remains marginalized in studies of slavery and the Atlantic world more broadly, “enslavement” is not synonymous with the institution of chattel slavery. One precedes the other. Other terminological alternatives bring their own complications. While some advocate using the phrase “kidnapped Africans,” several historians note that kidnapping was only one of several means by which African people were enslaved. And while others urge that the Atlantic slave trade should be referred to as “trafficking,” we must yet recognize that “trafficking” denotes illegal activity. For several centuries, however, the Atlantic slave trade was very much not illegal (even if we wish it had been). In this case, opting for what might seem a more accurate word is actually less accurate—and thus obscures historical fact by foregrounding our own contemporary political concerns. 

The descriptors “self-emancipated” and “freedom-seeking,” meanwhile, seem to privilege individual enactments of fugitive agency while arguably obscuring how those very same acts were enabled by necessarily collective networks of secrecy, solidarity, and sociality. The use of “slave labor camp” also has complex political ramifications. The phrase is most commonly used to describe Nazi concentration camps, as well as Soviet gulags. These historical analogues have indeed been crucial to the historiography of slavery. In his landmark (if timeworn) Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), for example, Stanley Elkins attempted to understand the plantation as an institution through contemporary social-psychological research on Nazi camps. Much recent work on trauma and memory—both critical issues in African diaspora studies—also traces its disciplinary roots to the field of Holocaust studies. If “slave labor camp” evokes a broader, trans-temporal framework for analyzing global forms of forced labor, then it also has the effect of de-emphasizing the historical novelty and specificity of Atlantic slavery.

In closing, I want to think more specifically about the “power” and “importance” of language in matters of historiographical debate. Arguments for reparative semantics insist that “slave” and “enslaved person” necessarily have contrary significations: The one is a nonperson wholly defined by enslavement, whereas the other is a fully complex person victimized by enslavement. Substituting the latter term for the former thus aims to replace one concept with another. Insofar as “enslaved person” functions as a corrective for the term “slave,” however, it arguably signifies merely its own semantic substitution. That is, rather than index a fuller conception of enslaved humanity, the phrase “enslaved person” might in fact signify the replacement of one term by another. In this case, language refers not to an historical object or concept but to itself; the given term or phrase does not produce a more ethical historical framework but instead reflects the semantic process by which such a framework is sought. Put simply, these correctives can refer to us more so than they refer to the historical subjects about whom we think and write.

The “power” of language resides not in its stability but in its contingency. We can urge that “enslaved person” is more ethical than “slave” on the grounds that it disaggregates personhood and enslavement. But what to make of its use of the passive voice? Some commentators have similarly suggested that “slave” should be replaced by “victim of enslavement.” I wonder here what is to be gained by describing the enslaved always with reference to their victimization. And while others stress that terms like “enslaved person,” “enslaver,” and “enslavement” more forcefully represent the violence of racial slavery, I remain ambivalent about our own normative investments in this representation of violence. On what grounds does this emphasis on violence make us better students and scholars? Is the value of our thinking and writing certified by the degree of historical violence borne by our language? Does this corrective terminology help us think better, or does it merely make us feel better? If the latter, we should reflect long and hard about why our own moral standing remains founded upon the re-inscription of violence against the enslaved.

In parsing these questions, I am reminded of Katherine McKittrick’s assertion that “description is not liberation.” “As we see from the work of many scholars of black studies, the liberatory task is not to measure and assess the unfree—and seek consolation in naming violence,” McKittrick writes, “but to posit that many divergent and different and relational voices of unfreedom are analytical and intellectual sites that can tell us something new about our academic concerns and our anticolonial futures.” Language is central to the task of historical analysis, and the project of reckoning with our shared legacy of slavery will never be easy. Nearing this ethical imperative is made all the more difficult by the traps we set along the way.

Further Reading

Ana Lucia Araujo (@analuciaraujo_), “I explained in a previous tweet….” Twitter, Feb. 26 2021, https://twitter.com/analuciaraujo_/status/1365324035748466689.

Jeannine DeLombard, “Debunking Dehumanization,” American Literary History 30, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 799–810.

Jeannine DeLombard, “Dehumanizing Slave Personhood,” American Literature 91, no. 3 (2019): 491–521.

Laura F. Edwards, “Enslaved Women and the Law: Paradoxes of Subordination in the Post-Revolutionary Carolinas,” Slavery & Abolition 26, no. 2 (2005): 305-23.

Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

Christopher Freeburg, Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017).

Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Ariela J. Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 113–24.

Walter Johnson, “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice,” Boston Review (Winter 2017): 11, 13-31, 143.

Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).

Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Imani Perry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Boston: Beacon, 2019).

Nicholas T. Rinehart, “The Man that Was a Thing: Reconsidering Human Commodification in Slavery,” Journal of Social History 50, no. 1 (Fall 2016): 28-50.

Kimberly M. Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

This article originally appeared in January 2022.

Nicholas T. Rinehart is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. His research has appeared in Callaloo, Journal of Social History, Journal of American Studies, MELUS, and American Quarterly, in addition to the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography (Oxford University Press) and Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright (2019). His writing for non-academic audiences has appeared in Transition: Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Public Books, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also co-editor, with Wai Chee Dimock et al., of American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (New York: Columbia Unversity Press, 2017).

As Thomas Andrews observes in his contribution to this retrospective, Cronon’s gift for clarity as a writer leads him to declare in his preface what Nature’s Metropolis will do, and what it will not do. “I have little to say,” he cautions, “about most of the classic topics of urban history . . . Readers turning to this book for an account of Chicago’s architecture, its labor struggles, its political machines, its social reformers, its cultural institutions, and many other topics are likely to turn away disappointed” (xvii). Nature’s Metropolis is known to many historians as a classic of environmental history and, as Cameron Blevins will point out here, spatial history. But for those of us who specialize in African American history, this, too, at first seems to be another one of those topics on which Cronon will have “little to say.” African Americans are absent from the book’s index. A rare mention appears in Cronon’s third chapter, on grain, from Chicago boosters crowing about the efficiency of their city’s grain elevators; by comparison, they ridiculed the continued reliance in St. Louis on moving sack loads of grain from ships to warehouses through “the labor of probably two or three hundred Irishmen, negroes and mules” (112). And Cronon’s exclusion of African Americans from his later chapter examining motivations for rural residents to migrate to the city is curious indeed. 

But Nature’s Metropolis offers a great deal to students of African American history. Much has already been written about black life in Chicago, particularly during the First and Second Great Migrations. The title of Cronon’s work calls forth that of St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s sociological study of black Chicago, Black Metropolis. Cronon’s emphasis on the inseparability of city and country can be fertile ground for African American historians. Post-emancipation African American history is closely tied to urban history, for good reason as thousands of former slaves and their descendants left the Jim Crow rural South for opportunity in places like Atlanta, Detroit, and Chicago. But how might we reorient our perception of that history if we understand cities not as isolated sites of relative opportunity for African Americans, but as tied to their hinterlands? Tied not just in terms of the exchange of money for grain or lumber, as Cronon describes, but also in terms of family and kinship, with consequences both empowering and devastating? Recall, as just one poignant example, that the young black Chicagoan Emmett Till was in Mississippi to visit an uncle when he was lynched in 1955. I am reminded of the twenty black ministers who met with William Tecumseh Sherman in January 1865, with the end of the war and abolition looming, to inform him, “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” Even before this, generations of black pioneers in the Old Northwest built farmsteads of their own, as chronicled in Anna-Lisa Cox’s The Bone and Sinew of the Land. African American urban migrants remained parts of extended families whose own networks stretched from country to city, from slavery to freedom. If, as Cronon shows in his work, capital moved back and forth between city and country, in African American history, we may well trace a similar exchange of things perhaps less tangible but no less central to the American story: family, striving, and love.

                                                                                                            Francesca Gamber

Bill Cronon and the Art of Historical Storytelling

I have just set down Nature’s Metropolis after my umpteenth reading. Each time since I first cracked its cover back in 1993, this landmark book has left me with something new. This go-round, one word cuts right to the heart of what I most admire about Bill Cronon’s magnum opus: clarity.

Nature’s Metropolis makes for beautiful reading because of the laser-focused acuity that Bill lavished on every sentence, paragraph, section, and chapter (not to mention each endnote, data routine, and mortgage map). The book is clear because Bill knew what he wanted to say, he cared about communicating his insights to audiences well beyond academe, and—moving from intention to execution—he understood the alchemical processes whereby crisp, purposeful prose and flawlessly constructed arguments can catalyze pure gold. Thirty years after its publication, Nature’s Metropolis remains a must-read for any serious student of U.S. history because Bill possessed the conviction and skill needed to make big, important ideas accessible. Throughout the book, he takes his readers by the hand and tells them stories that reveal the marvels of such seemingly banal topics as railroad rate-setting, commodities markets, and capital flows. Paradoxically enough, the clarity that strikes me as the book’s defining triumph accentuates these subjects’ complexities instead of flattening them. Writing around the height of the “literary” or “cultural” turn in historical studies—a time when many historians were aping the prolix, jargon-ridden mannerisms of postmodern and post-structuralist theorists—Bill self-consciously chose to advance a more inclusive historical vision.

A book of such richness and quality prompts any number of reactions, but I am hardly the only reader enticed by the lucidity of Nature’s Metropolis. Bill Cronon’s masterful study continues to inspire undergraduates and graduate students, environmentalists and commodities traders, academic historians and regular folks to see something of themselves in the first-person narrative with which Bill famously starts and ends his story—and, more important, to see their own world afresh through the lens of Chicago and the Great West. Many years after my initial foray into this justly treasured book, its crystalline quality continues to impress me as the wellspring of its many wonders.

                                                                                                Thomas Andrews

The Spatial Framework of Nature’s Metropolis

Nature’s Metropolis is a book about spatial flows; think of hogs transported from Iowa feedlots to Chicago stockyards to New York dinner tables, or mail-order goods and lines of credit moving in the opposite direction. It is a history of how the movement of commodities and capital remade the geography of Chicago, its hinterland, and the larger United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. It is, in short, a work of spatial history. Spatial history is, broadly speaking, the study of how spatial relations and geographical patterns shape historical processes. Emerging from the theory-driven “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences in the late twentieth century, spatial history now encompasses digital methods such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software and data visualization. Nature’s Metropolis was an early landmark in this field.

William Cronon weaves a series of spatial concepts throughout Nature’s Metropolis, including central place theory, “first” and “second” nature, and the geography of capital. What sets him apart, however, is the way he historicizes these otherwise abstract geographical models, grounding them in contingency, context, and change over time. For instance, central place theory—the idea of concentric rings of economic activity radiating out from a city—helps explain Chicago’s relationship to its hinterland. But Cronon also highlights how these relationships were dynamic and ever-changing and how Chicago’s rise as a gateway city for national and European markets muddles the city’s status as a central place. 

Cronon’s work as a spatial historian culminates in chapter six, “Gateway City.” Here, he goes beyond abstract spatial concepts. Using the statistical software SAS and SASGRAPH, Cronon collected quantitative data on creditors and debtors during the Panic of 1873 and its aftermath and then analyzed regional bankruptcy patterns through a series of twelve choropleth maps. Unlike the typical maps that appear in historical monographs, these maps don’t just show geographical context; they explicitly advance Cronon’s larger argument about the flows of capital that knit the region together.

From Cronon’s use of spatial theory to the book’s more than two dozen maps and charts, Nature’s Metropolis foreshadowed the rise of spatial history in the decades to come. By the early 2000s, groups of social scientists and historians using mapping software had coalesced under the banner of Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS). This development went hand-in-hand with the concurrent rise of digital history, a methodological embrace of computers to analyze and communicate history. In the book’s appendix, Cronon spends several pages detailing the technical aspects of how he collected and mapped the data—an explicit emphasis on methodology that would define many future spatial (and digital) history projects. The technology has changed dramatically in the intervening decades, with mainframe computer terminals and SAS software giving way to ArcGIS, interactive web mapping, and mobile interfaces. But Cronon’s melding of geographical and historical analysis to illuminate the environmental, urban, and economic history of the United States has ensured that, thirty years later, Nature’s Metropolis remains an enduring model for spatial historians following in his path.

                                                                                                            Cameron Blevins

First Nature’s Sex: Nature’s Metropolis and the History of American Sexuality

The history of environment and the history of sexuality are subfields of American history that arguably share less conversation than any two other subfields I can name. Among environmental historians, Nature’s Metropolis is regarded as a towering and field-defining work. Yet historians of American sexuality seldom write much about it. Yes, they know of Nature’s Metropolis and may have read it in a graduate methods class or perhaps in relation to urban historiography. But the major concerns of Nature’s Metropolis are sometimes assumed to be remote to those that concern historians of sexuality. This is an odd assumption, I would contend, because both the book and historians of sexuality are preoccupied with how capitalist modernity has formed American cityscapes.

Nature’s Metropolis argued that the capitalist transformation of the American West proceeded through the commodification of the nonhuman world with, at each stage, the nonhuman world becoming more estranged from the particularity of its emergence and living variation, its “first nature.” Heterogeneous nature was reified as exchangeable, abstracted objects, and once so commodified they became the substance of capital, finance, debt, loans, and futures contracts. The physical worlds emerging from this assemblage—Chicago, most notably—were no less “nature,” but they were nevertheless a “second nature,” a human redirection, if not mastery of “first nature” (xix).

Nature’s Metropolis describes these processes as distributed and diffuse. Technologies of abstraction and production were not located exclusively in the metropolis but also in peripheral landscapes popularly characterized as “closer” to nature. Similarly, these processes operated through individual bodies sorting individual kernels of corn, but it was also composed of commodity flows where markets traded on the futures of those aggregated commodities. The capitalism described in Nature’s Metropolis is, like the repressive hypothesis, laid across the entirety of the social body and it bridles the multiplying nonhuman energies within that body: corn, meat, trees—things that grew, multiplied, and varied through the uncanny immanence we call life.      

This point is central to how the book describes the moralized meanings ascribed to the nature/culture boundary. “The boundary between natural and unnatural,” Cronon writes, “shades almost imperceptibly into the boundary between nonhuman and human, with wilderness and the city seeming to lie at opposite poles—the one pristine and unfallen, the other corrupt and unredeemed” (8). Later he described the ambivalence nineteenth-century Chicagoans attached to that moral geography:

If the city was unfamiliar, immoral, and terrifying, it was also a new life challenging its residents with worldly success, a landscape in which the human triumph over nature had declared anything to be possible. By crossing the boundary from country to city, one could escape the constraints of family and rural life to discover one’s chosen adulthood for oneself. Young people and others came to it from farms and country towns for hundreds of miles around, all search for the fortune they believed they would never find at home. In the words of novelist Theodore Dreiser, they were ‘life-hungry’ for the vast energy Chicago could offer to their appetites (13).

This is the same history of sexuality John D’Emilio provided in “Capitalism and Gay Identity” and that George Chauncey offers in Gay New York, although one in which sexuality is hustled in through euphemism. Nineteenth-century Americans, of course, understood precisely this “triumph” over “nature” and “the constraints of family” in explicitly sexual terms, with the race, gender, and class-mixed spaces of urban America, and Chicago in particular, a major source of sexual anxiety and “appetite.” The empirical fact of America’s emergent urban sexual subcultures in the period is beyond dispute, even if this framing relegates them to the “second nature” of social forms freed from a static and ahistorical “familial constraint.” But what sex is then “first nature” in Nature’s Metropolis?                            

In the late nineteenth century, the physical transformation of the bodies of livestock through improved breeding led to dramatic productivity gains in American agriculture. In fact, by 1900, livestock were the second largest asset class in the United States, after land, and were worth more than the entire capitalized value of the railroads. The logistical improvements described as “the annihilation of space” were coextensive and interwoven with these bodily transformations. For example, aggressive and rangy “long-horned” cattle did well on cattle drives, but they were disasters in confined railcars. Similarly, the growth of corn feeding and finishing as a value-adding process depended on the in-breeding of European shorthorns that added weight from grain-feeding efficiently. 

Much of this is euphemistically described as the transition from “extensive” to “intensive” livestock breeding. The sanitized syntax of “intensivity” conceals the technologies, not to mention visceral interspecies interactions, necessary for all this mating to be made. The bodies of breeding animals were the focus of capillary biopolitical governance invested in selectively reproducing livestock life. This governance encompassed a wide array of objects and actors, much of it underwritten by the late-nineteenth-century American state: institutions like breeding associations that guaranteed robust national and global markets for breeding stock; reliable adoption of pedigrees and access to breed herd books to track lineage; improved technical understandings of mechanisms of inheritance and the biology of animal reproduction; record keeping practices to assess and evaluate traits; movements to eradicate scrub animals and limit their influence on bloodlines. Beyond bodily improvement, still other developments reshaped the reproductive behavior of livestock in light of the temporal demands of markets. These included, first and foremost, the more systematic monitoring and regulation of fertility, which could only be accomplished through the increasing spatial organization of animal breeding and the systematic segregation of breeding from feeding stock. This trend reached its apotheosis in the “breeding crate,” a box that physically confined swine during sex, supported the weight of large boars, and prevented small sows from fleeing them. Meanwhile, breeders devised and publicized elaborate feeding and exercise routines, as well as aphrodisiacs, to synchronize animal desire with the calendar demands of the market. 

In short, the redaction of animal reproduction in Nature’s Metropolis—its organization and regimentation—is the process by which animal sex is re-natured and narratively ascribed to a self-sufficient heterosexual nature. Farmers need only skim the fat from an innate animal heterosexuality, and the material and ideological organization of that process falls from the purview of historical analysis. The capitalist transformation of the American West described in Nature’s Metropolis was propelled by an intensive deployment of these technologies to produce and multiply new forms of life at ever greater rates, and we must see this relationship between capital and non-human reproduction as key to the functioning of industrial capitalism in the period. Such an approach would be indebted to Nature’s Metropolis, but it would also seek to write a history Cronon that did not, a history as profound for our knowledge of sexuality as for our knowledge of the environment: that is, a queer environmental history.

Gabriel N. Rosenberg

What’s not in Nature’s Metropolis also makes it great

When I think about Nature’s Metropolis I think about movement. Cronon draws readers’ attention to distance, time, and the increased pace of movement of everything as America industrialized. To Cronon, things change just as much when they move across space as they do when they move through time. Admittedly Nature’s Metropolis influenced countless historians, including myself, to use the word hinterland more than we should, and it probably convinced the same amount to make forays into geography.

The force facilitating the increased pace of movement was abstraction, a concept not unique to this book but one which Cronon illustrates so well that the term gains new implications. In Nature’s Metropolis, abstraction is, in short, when the material becomes intangible, fluid, and most importantly, more manipulatable by people. Cronon shows what happens when configurations of atoms—a bushel of wheat, a pork belly, or a log—become a numerical value. This focus on commodities, distance, time, speed, and abstraction means that people are the least memorable part of the book. When I first read the book while training in labor history in graduate school, this lacuna was off-putting, as my margin notes express. It was also inspirational.

After reading, rereading, and assigning Nature’s Metropolis in my classes, I became convinced that what happened to commodities also happened to labor as America industrialized. Clocks, double-entry bookkeeping, punch cards, all the parts of the modern wage system made labor-time into abstractions which, like Cronon’s commodities, became intangible, fluid, and manipulatable. When labor-time becomes a number—the product of time worked and wage rate, for example—it could then be moved over great distances at rapid speeds. Trains, telegraphs, and telephones allowed payment to be transferred to a logger in the woods of Wisconsin from a bank in Chicago, once proof of work was sent to the bank. Making labor into abstractions opened new avenues of labor exploitation compared to times and places when labor-time was represented as a product sold locally by its producer. We can’t credit Cronon with conceiving of the idea of abstraction, but he can be credited with focusing attention on the mediums of abstraction and movement.

Directly inspired by Nature’s Metropolis’s focus on mediums, I began to research a unique medium of abstraction and movement, the “driving” of free-floating individual logs on American rivers. While log driving might seem pre-modern or antiquated, once this process was systematized around the 1860s, it greatly increased the speed and efficiency of the movement of forest products and labor. When individual logs were marked or branded for driving, this mark came to represent not just the value of the tree but also the value of the labor that went into producing the log. While the log itself was valuable, the value was connected only to the mark. The actual owners of logs could no longer claim those logs if they were erroneously left unmarked, if they were nefariously re-marked, or if they lost their marks on the drive. The medium of abstraction created the conditions for the increased manipulation and exploitation of abstracted labor-time. 

Once someone reads Nature’s Metropolis they can’t help but see the world in terms of abstractions in motion. Moving into the information age, labor-time has become more easily and more commonly abstracted, sometimes with troubling results. According to the study referenced below, time clock algorithms are abstracting labor at an astounding rate and volume. The authors estimate that some $15 billion have been stolen from workers through keystrokes and computer errors. Labor is treated so callously because modern economic relations demand that abstractions move nearly instantaneously.

Nature’s Metropolis reveals present problems with media of abstraction and provides foresight into future problems. The idea of “income share agreements” for college students, originally proposed by Milton Friedman in 1955, has gained popularity in the last five years. Under this proposed system, students could avoid college debt by engaging in agreements with investors who would fund their education in exchange for a share of future income. Given the level of student debt in the U.S. this is not on its face reprehensible. The reader of Nature’s Metropolis, however, would be quick to wonder what might happen when student-investments are transformed from curious undergraduates into abstractions that can be traded on four-year future markets, or even bundled into investment vehicles. It is no exaggeration to say that Nature’s Metropolis changed the way that I comprehend the world, revealing the layers of fictions that sit on top of, and shape, labor, nature, and economic relationships in the past, in the present, and in possible futures.

                                                                                                            Jason L. Newton

Further Reading

Anna-Lisa Cox, The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018).

St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1945).

Jo Guldi, “What Is the Spatial Turn?,” Spatial Humanities, Scholar’s Lab, University of Virginia, 2011, http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/.

Newspaper Account of a Meeting between Black Religious Leaders and Union Military Authorities, in New-York Daily Tribune, February 13, 1865, Freedmen and Southern Society Project, http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/savmtg.htm.

Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, Creating Abundance Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Broadway Books, 2016).

Gabriel N. Rosenberg, “No Scrubs: Livestock Breeding, Eugenics, and State Power in the United States, 1919- 1933,” Journal of American History 107, no. 2 (September 2020): 362-87.

Gabriel N. Rosenberg, “A Race Suicide Among the Hogs: The Biopolitics of Pork in the United States, 1865-1930,” American Quarterly 68, no. 1 (March 2016): 49-73.

Joshua Specht, Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-To-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Elizabeth Tippett, Charlotte S. Alexander, and Zev J. Eigen. “When Timekeeping Software Undermines Compliance,” Yale J.L. & Tech 19, issue 1 (2018).

Richard White, “What Is Spatial History?,” The Spatial History Project, 2010, http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29.

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010).

Rebecca Woods, The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

This article originally appeared in December 2021.

Contributors:

Francesca Gamber is a member of the editorial board of Commonplace. She is the Principal and Faculty in History at Bard High School Early College Baltimore.

Thomas Andrews studied with Bill Cronon at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches and writes about the social and environmental history of the U.S. West at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Cameron Blevins is Associate Professor, Clinical Teaching Track at the University of Colorado Denver. A leader in the field of digital history, he is the author of Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West (2021).

Gabriel N. Rosenberg is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and History at Duke University. He is currently writing a history of livestock breeding and its relationship to human race science, tentatively titled, Purebred: Making Meat and Eugenics in the Modern United States.

Jason L. Newton (https://capitalismstudies.charlotte.edu/postdoctoral-fellow) is the post-doctoral fellow in the history of capitalism and environmental sustainability at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He tweets @Jason_L_Newton and his work can be found here.

Aunt Chloe begins her account by explaining that learning to read under slavery demands a general craftiness of approach. Her description of literacy as something “some of us would try to steal” echoes narratives by formerly enslaved authors such as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, who trope the acquisition of literacy as a trickster’s game. In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass recalls “using my young white playmates . . . as teachers” by bribing them with bread in exchange for lessons from “a copy of Webster’s spelling book in my pocket.” Brown, whose ingredients for reading include a “spelling-book” and a “stick of barley sugar,” also describes using bribery to learn his ABCs, and learns to write by challenging schoolboys to writing contests on outdoor fences. Such accounts emphasize that learning to read as an enslaved (or in Brown’s case, recently enslaved) person requires imagination and constant reinvention—of fence into slate, of play into study.

For Douglass and Brown, learning to read requires the possession of books. Yet as Aunt Chloe makes clear, the “book” is an object class that enslavers are eager to prevent enslaved people from encountering. She comments that “Our masters always tried to hide / Book learning from our eyes,” using a phrase—“Book learning”—that evokes dialect speech but also highlights the particular technology of the book, which she frames as property her white enslavers claim for themselves. Unlike Douglass and Brown, Aunt Chloe and her fellow enslaved people must attempt to gain literacy without bound books. Instead, they “try to steal / A little from the book,” as if books were the enslaver’s stores and learning to read a fugitive act of gleaning.

The book as object is often associated with the performance of mastery. Beth McCoy and Jasmine Montgomery have gone so far as to argue that the “Western book,” with its hierarchical, ordering material logic, is “antiblack.” In “Learning to Read,” Harper suggests that the master views the bound book as one of his tools. Yet she also demonstrates how this assumption works to enslaved people’s advantage. The character “Uncle Caldwell,” for example, secures reading material by physically deconstructing his book:

I remember Uncle Caldwell,

   Who took pot liquor fat

And greased the pages of his book,

   And hid it in his hat.

And had his master ever seen

   The leaves upon his head,

He’d have thought them greasy papers,

   But nothing to be read.

In an 1867 issue of the American Missionary magazine, a Methodist preacher identified only as “Uncle Charles” recalls learning to read while enslaved using a “primer” that he “used to carry . . . in my hat.” Whether Harper knew of this account or others like it, her take on this scene emphasizes the lengths to which Uncle Caldwell goes to conceal his reading. By transforming a bound book into a collection of “greasy papers,” Uncle Caldwell deploys expectations about format to invite white misreading of his actions. Nineteenth-century audiences frequently used printed pages for purposes other than reading, including for insulating clothing. The greased, unbound papers that Uncle Caldwell carries thus ask to be viewed as disposable waste rather than components of a book. For Uncle Caldwell himself, however, the pages are texts rich with meaning; the “leaves upon his head” evoke not trash worn by a person whom white society deems disposable, but the laurel crown of a scholar. (Figure 2)

Harper’s decentering of the bound book throughout “Learning to Read” emphasizes that the reading experience need not always turn on mastery and cohesiveness, nor must it always look the same for each person. Aunt Chloe notes that the enslaved people who “steal / A little from the book” must “put the words together / And learn by hook or crook.” This image of “put[ting] the words together” depicts reading as a creative act of both dismantling and reauthoring. It also recalls a creative teaching strategy that the Mohegan minister Samson Occom describes using to instruct Indian children in his “A Short Narrative of My Life” (1768). To better serve children whose “Eyes can’t distinguish” printed letters, Occom writes out “an Alphabet on Small bits of paper, and glue[s] them on Small Chips of Cedar,” which he places on a classroom bench for students to pick up, move, and organize into words. In Occom’s classroom, breaking away from book does not impede learning but rather enables him to meet his students’ needs.

The experience of “Mr. Turner’s Ben,” another character in Harper’s poem who learns to read without a book, likewise demonstrates that cultivating the skills required for literacy need not even involve text on a page. Aunt Chloe states that Ben “heard the children spell, / And picked the words right up by heart, / And learned to read ’em well.” Without access to a book, Ben must hone his ability to listen carefully and memorize what he is hearing. His learning process challenges the perceived dominance of written language over oral literacy. For Ben it is not interacting with a spelling book but learning “by heart,” or internalizing knowledge, that eventually enables him to read words “well.” (Figure 3)

Harper herself was attuned to the close relationship between spoken and written words, and she employed both modes of communication as an author seeking to broaden her reach. Scholars including Frances Smith Foster have demonstrated that nineteenth-century African American print culture invited participation from nonreading listeners as well as people who could read and write. Harper and other nineteenth-century Black authors built community by giving public recitations of their texts—recitations that invited comment from nonreaders—in addition to circulating printed copies. One has only to read aloud a poem such as “Learning to Read,” with its lilting rhyme and cadence, to understand that Harper designed her works to be heard as well as read.        

Harper’s attention to spoken language does not mean that she ignored the significance of setting her words in print. She published in a wide range of print formats, including newspapers, pamphlets, and books. Meredith McGill has shown that Harper also frequently republished her works in different formats and leveraged cultural assumptions about format to alter the perceived meaning as well as genre of her writing. (For example, as McGill demonstrates, when Harper’s poetry appears in pamphlet rather than book form, it asks to be read not as lyric but as collective exhortation.)

Such attention to the materiality of print on Harper’s part—and the importance of newspapers and pamphlets to her career more generally—is good reason to think beyond “the book.” Yet is also true that unbound, non-book artifacts were vulnerable to destruction and wear. As an author writes in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, “newspapers . . . [are] ephemeral caskets, whose destruction entail the destruction of the gems which they contain.” By contrast, as scholars including P. Gabrielle Foreman have argued, texts published in “book form” evoked cultural associations with permanence and enduring value. (Figure 4)

Perhaps it is due to Harper’s understanding of unbound print’s heightened ephemerality that she does not fully reject the book as object in “Learning to Read.” A bound volume finally appears near the end of the poem in the form of Aunt’s Chloe’s Bible—a quintessential work of enduring value. Ignoring those who say she is too old to start reading, Aunt Chloe sets out to learn “to read my Bible” in her purposeful manner:

I got a pair of glasses,

And straight to work I went,

And never stopped till I could read

   The hymns and Testament.

Then I got a little cabin

   A place to call my own—

And I felt independent

   As the queen upon her throne.

In these stanzas, book possession and the act of reading become signs of Aunt Chloe’s freedom and self-ownership. Although this last scene is set after the Civil War, it is Aunt Chloe who teaches herself to read, not the “Yankee teachers” whose arrival to “set up school” she mentions earlier in the poem. Her refusal to wait for white approval to begin reading gestures to the wartime and post-war labor of Black educational activists, who set up schools and managed robust educational networks in the U.S. South prior to the arrival of white missionaries. Countering white northern narratives in which formerly enslaved African Americans must be lifted from ignorance, Aunt Chloe shows that with the right resources she is perfectly capable of determining her own path. (Figure 5)

As Harper would write in a letter published by William Still in his revised Underground Rail Road Records (1883), “a room to myself is a luxury that I do not always enjoy.” Armed with her book, glasses, and a room of her “own,” Aunt Chloe models a world in which material security does not hamper Black women’s intellectual pursuits. In the poem’s final image, she reads her Bible in her “little cabin,” enjoying the stability and privacy previously denied Uncle Caldwell in his own quest to read. If Uncle Caldwell’s hat-concealed pages register the scarcity and trickster strategies that characterize reading under slavery, Aunt Chloe’s bound Bible projects a desired reading future in which she no longer must hide but can lay claim to her place at the table.

Further Reading:

For a comprehensive introduction to Harper and her writings, see Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1990). Other primary sources referenced in this article include Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), republished in Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., Douglass Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), passage quoted on p. 224; William Wells Brown, “Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown” (1853), republished in M. Guilia Fabi, ed., Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (New York: Penguin, 2004), passage quoted on p. 22; Samson Occom, “A Short Narrative of My Life” (1768), republished in Carla Mulford, ed., Early American Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), passage quoted on p. 870; “North Carolina,” The American Missionary 11 (Sept. 1867): 194-95; William Still, Still’s Underground Rail Road Records (Philadelphia: William Still, 1883), passage quoted on p. 777. Digitized copies of Frederick Douglass’ Paper can be accessed via the Library of Congress.

On Frances Harper’s relationship with varied print formats, see Meredith McGill, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press in Cooperation with the Library Company of Philadelphia, 2012), 53-74 (see especially 62). For other critical treatments of “Learning to Read,” see Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E.W. Harper, 1825-1911 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 163-64.

On the book as “antiblack object,” see Beth A. McCoy and Jasmine Y. Montgomery, “Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return and the Antiblackness of the Book as an Object,” in Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print, ed. Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne (University of Wisconsin Pres, 2019), 131-46. On the relationship between African American literature and unbound print, see P. Gabrielle Foreman, “The Christian Recorder, Broken Families, and Educated Nations in Julia C. Collins’s Civil War Novel The Curse of Caste,” African American Review 40 (Winter 2006): 705-16; Eric Gardner, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Michaël Roy, “The Slave Narrative Unbound,” in Against a Sharp White Background, 259-76.

On the ways nineteenth-century Black activists fostered their own schooling networks and advanced education during and after the Civil War, see Hilary Green, Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); and Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (New York: New York University Press, 2019), whose concept of “purposeful womanhood” offers a generative frame for interpreting Aunt Chloe’s knowledge seeking activities. On alternative ways of knowing and modes of literacy acquisition practiced by enslaved people, including eavesdropping and “stealing” an education, see Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Other important critical work on nineteenth-century African American print culture that has informed my thinking here includes Frances Smith Foster, “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture,” American Literary History 17 (Winter 2005): 714-40; Carla L. Peterson, Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); and Derrick Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

This article originally appeared in December 2021.

Madeline Zehnder is a Postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia. Her book project, tentatively titled Made to Move: Pocket-Sized Print and its Uses in Nineteenth-Century America, investigates the role of format in shaping diverse print cultures of the nineteenth-century United States.

In the first year of the conflict, Americans were still processing the escalating scale of war and its devastating consequences. This process included a drive for material connections, especially to the war’s first major battle which the Richmond Dispatch described as possessing “interest and significance” seldom attached to “battles ever before fought.” Material culture fused the front lines to the home front, as soldiers collected and conveyed things from the battlefield. Whether out of total indifference to the Federal dead or out of a macabre fascination with their handiwork during battle, bones were included among the artifacts. A local citizen related that the Confederates had boiled bodies to remove the flesh and obtain the bones as relics. Although Confederate soldiers rarely wrote about the collection and use of bones, Dick Simpson of the 3rd South Carolina Infantry opined to his sister: “We have had no opportunity to collect the trophies from the battlefield . . . But Dick Lewis was here yesterday and promised to get some things from the Fourth Regt such as sword, bayonet, pistol, balls, and if you want it we can send you some yankee bones.” It is the matter-of-fact mixture of swords and bones that makes the entry so chilling.

The testimony of Rhode Island governor William Sprague IV, who had fought at the battle of Bull Run, proved the most damning. He and a party of men went to the spot of Ballou’s grave. Once there, no body was discovered. Instead, Sprague related, the body had been “taken out, beheaded, and burned.” Nearby they found a shirt belonging to Ballou. The party gathered “up the ashes containing the portion of his remains that were left, and put them in a coffin together with his shirt and the blanket with the hair left upon it.”

Newspapers marveled at the stories from Bull Run. While some tales were—indeed still are—difficult to corroborate, Northern audiences consumed and believed them. The Liberator, for example, published large sections of the Senate Committee’s report. The piece leveled the charge, “Inhumanity to the living has been the leading trait of the rebel leaders, but it was reserved for your Committee to disclose, as a concerted system, their insults to the wounded and their mutilation and desecration of the gallant dead.” The Liberator told how the bodies of United States troops had been left to decay in open air, while bones were “carried off as trophies.” The former point carried great weight. The victors in battle were supposed to bury the dead of both sides. And, in fact, a young Georgia soldier told his parents shortly after Bull Run, “Wee will Hav to burry the Yankeys today to keep them from stinking us to death.” Yet, the rebels fulfilled their obligations inconsistently. John Reekie’s powerful 1865 image, “A Burial Party, Cold Harbor,” demonstrated the consequences of unfinished work. Included in Alexander Gardner’s 1866 publication, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, the image captured badly decayed bodies from the battles at Gaine’s Mill and Cold Harbor. Bones and rags—not uniformed corpses—are splayed across the stretcher. Gardner, a social activist and staunch abolitionist, used this image to chasten white Virginians: the “sad scene . . . speaks ill of the residents” who “allowed even the remains of those they considered enemies, to decay unnoticed where they fell.” (Figure 2)

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which carried clear-eyed images and stories of the Civil War, used the atrocities as inspiration for a grim cartoon. “The Rebel Lady’s Boudoir,” printed in May 1862, depicts a scene of domestic inversion. A fabricated letter reads, “My dearest wife, I hope you have received all the little relics I have sent you from time to time.” He most recently included “a baby-rattle for our little pet, made out of the ribs of a Yankee drummer-boy.” The sitting room is portrayed as a perverse cabinet of curiosity. Skeletal remains line the walls. Skulls, leg bones, and arm bones have been incorporated into furniture and tableware. Death incases domesticity. As with many cartoons of the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century, an unattended child is left to her own devices while the mother neglects her socially prescribed duties. In this case, the toddler plays with a skull. The spoils of war are represented as a series of dark trophies. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper successfully created exaggerated depictions of white Southerners’ savagery for political fodder. (Figure 3)

Readers of Frank Leslie’s may have recalled an image from Harper’s Weekly published in the fall of 1861. Using an autumnal reference, the print portrays Confederate president Jefferson Davis as a zombie-eyed grim reaper. The rebellion he leads has resulted in widespread death. He callously collects the human harvest trudging forward without thought of the consequences or costs. Playing on similar themes in June 1862, and coinciding with the release of the report on rebel atrocities at Bull Run, Harper’s Weekly published a cartoon featuring specimens of “Secesh Industry.” A goblet made from a Yankee skull, a necklace from Yankee teeth, a paperweight from a jawbone, a reading desk composed of a human skeleton, and various items made from hair composed the array of grim objects. (Figures 4-5)

The desecration of Union graves at Bull Run were an exceptional moment. No other cases of widespread grave plundering have been documented. Instead, Confederate soldiers—like their Union counterparts—more typically collected materiel from the battlefield. But white Southerners’ first major encounter with their foes and their subsequent actions, as well as public reactions, are nonetheless revealing. The Civil War challenged Americans’ preconceptions about death and burial. The war’s killing fields forced participants to grapple with the great “existential crisis brought on by the war.” Confederates questioned the prevailing social importance of sentimentalism through the collection, display, and use of bones. Furthermore, Northern cartoons referencing these atrocities placed familiar cultural touchstones and contemporary concerns in tension with one another, thereby both confirming and challenging prevailing tropes. Visual depictions and printed accounts created a new discourse that turned rebels into barbarians and paved the way for a more savage war. This episode, therefore, while anomalous, highlights the broader cultural transformations of the Civil War era and demonstrates that while romanticism was never fully supplanted, the era challenged prevailing orthodoxy. (Figure 6)

Further Reading:

Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the American Civil War 1861-1865 (1866; repr., New York: Delano Greenridge Editions, 2001).

Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Department of Arms and Trophies, Catalogue of the Museum of Flags, Trophies and Relics Relating to the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Present Rebellion (New York: Charles O. Jones, 1864).

Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence and the Culture of War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Joan E. Cashin, “Trophies of War: Material Culture in the Civil War Era,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (Sept. 2011): 339-367.

“‘My Very Dear Wife’—The Last Letter of Major Sullivan Ballou,” Manassas National Battlefield Park, https://www.nps.gov/articles/-my-very-dear-wife-the-last-letter-of-major-sullivan-ballou.htm.

Robert Grandchamp, “‘O Sarah!’ Did Sullivan Ballou’s Famed Letter Come From Another’s Pen?” HISTNET, Nov. 2017, https://www.historynet.com/o-sarah-sullivan-ballou-letter.htm.

Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (1981; repr., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Robin Young, For Love and Liberty: The Untold Civil War Story of Major Sullivan Ballou and His Famous Love Letter (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006).

Simon Harrison, “Bones in the Rebel Lady’s Boudoir: Ethnology, Race and Trophy-hunting in the American Civil War,” Journal of Material Culture 15 (Dec. 2010): 385-401.

Kirk Savage, ed., The Civil War in Art and Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

United States Congress, Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1863).

Stephen Berry, ed., Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

This article originally appeared in November 2021.

James J. Broomall is an associate professor of history at Shepherd University and director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War. He is a cultural historian of the Civil War era and often works on public history projects. The University of North Carolina Press published his most recent book, Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers. He is currently working on a project about art and artifacts from the Civil War era.

The author wishes to acknowledge and thank James K. Broomall, Benjamin Bankhurst, Peter S. Carmichael, John McMillan, Matt White, and Tish Wiggs for reading drafts of the essay. The final piece benefitted greatly from their suggestions as well as the guidance of Commonplace’s editor Joshua R. Greenberg and board members. Moreover, participation in the 2021 American Social History Project’s NEH Summer Institute, “The Visual Culture of the American Civil War and Its Aftermath,” profoundly shaped the essay’s direction and content. Finally, large portions of the work were written while on sabbatical leave granted through the generosity of Shepherd University and its Department of History.

In 1843, Audubon set out on a last adventure, traveling up the Missouri River and out the Yellowstone. He felt his age, turning 58 that spring. (Figure 1) A year earlier, he had settled his family into “Minniesland,” his country estate in northern Manhattan. With his great work on Birds of America behind him, Audubon was anxious for a last chance to see the creatures of the American west and to collect specimens for a catalogue of the Quadrupeds of North America. He described squirrels, rats, porcupines, beavers, wolves, and buffalo and visited the Mandan and Assiniboine villages devastated by the smallpox epidemics that swept the northern plains in the 1830s. And Audubon sent Morton another five skulls. (Figures 2-4)

Morton and his skull measurements have long been part of the scholarship on American racism, but what happens when we draw Audubon into the racial drama? Should Audubon’s connection to Morton send a shiver through the history of this remarkably talented, complicated man?

By 1843, Audubon was famous, well known as an artist and naturalist. But he had never been a rich man, and his ambitious projects needed support. He counted on the forts and trading posts the U.S. government maintained in the West and on a network of naturalists who helped collect specimens and sell books. Morton, president of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, sustained Audubon’s connection to the scattered players in the world of American science.

Morton was a generation younger than Audubon, but the friendship between the two men ran back through the 1830s. Morton, with his institutional connections, helped assure Audubon a place in the country’s scientific establishment. He settled some of Audubon’s debts when the artist was in England and soothed his worries about upstart rivals. In return, Audubon looked for skulls for Morton. European craniologists weren’t ready to share their skulls with the Americans, although Audubon did find Morton a portfolio of sketches. 

Morton had begun gathering skulls in the early 1830s, an avocation he shared with European colleagues bent on finding ways to map differences among humans. In 1839 Morton published his speculations about racial hierarchy in Crania Americana, a lavish atlas of human skulls. (Figure 5) By his calculation, skulls with the greatest internal capacity had belonged to members of the Caucasian race, and therefore Caucasians had bigger and better brains. The contention is absurd, but, at the time, it had the sheen of objective science and appealed to those hunting for a racist logic to defend holding people of African descent in slavery.   

To make his case, Morton needed a lot of skulls. He turned to travelers, soldiers, and adventurous naturalists like Audubon. Decades of violence against the native peoples of the Americas and the brutal poverty of African American communities gave Morton and his colleagues an advantage among skull hunters. He was particularly proud of his collection of Native American skulls. “The Indian crania contained in this series,” he wrote, “have received my especial attention, both in respect to their number and authenticity for they have been collected with great care by the gentlemen whose names are associated with them.” Among those gentlemen was “J.J. Audubon, Esq.”

We know that before heading out to St. Louis in 1843, Audubon stopped in Philadelphia and spent a Sunday with Morton. The two men looked over Morton’s collection and discussed the plants, animals, and people Audubon would find on his travels in the West. Audubon’s “Missouri River Journals” capture a countryside alive with the animals he had come to see—rabbits, turkeys, porcupines, marmots, groundhogs, Pouched Rats, swallows, finches, “a great number of Parakeets,” and on and on. He delighted in the seemingly endless abundance of living things. Audubon and his companions killed wolves and buffalo, skinned foxes and hares, chased running antelope, and traded for pelts of badgers and grizzly bears. (Figures 6-7) 

The prairies seemed to abound in animal life, but Audubon reserved very different descriptive phrases for the native peoples he met on hot July days at Fort Union, such as “miserably poor, filthy beyond description.” He also saw remains of human communities—Mandan and Assiniboine villages devastated by the smallpox epidemics that swept the northern plains in 1837. “I have been hearing much of the prevalence of scurvy, from living so constantly on dried flesh, also about the small-pox, which destroyed such numbers of the Indians,” he wrote, “Among the Mandans, Riccarees, and Gros Ventres, hundreds died in 1837, only a few surviving: and the Assiniboins were nearly exterminated.” (Figure 8)   

The epidemic had been devastating, Audubon knew. During the weeks spent at Fort Union, he penned an account of the “fearful ravages” of smallpox. He must have known that a people “nearly exterminated” left few to help bury the dead. The skulls Audubon collected for Morton that summer earned casual mentions in his journal. On June 18, he and his companions puzzled over when it might be best to “take away the skulls, some six or seven in number, all Assiniboin Indians.” On June 22, walking over the prairie, “I found an Indian’s skull (an Assiniboin) and put it in my game pouch.” And on July 2, he and a companion “walked off with a bag of instruments to take off the head of a three-years dead Indian chief, called the White Cow.” They tumbled the coffin out of a tree burial and found a body wrapped in two buffalo robes and “enveloped in an American flag.” They took the head, Audubon wrote, and left the rest on the ground.

Morton’s catalogue also credited Audubon with contributing the skull of a 50-year-old Blackfoot man named “Bloody Hand,” along with the heads of two “Upsaroooka” men, both about 40 years old. And two skulls: “1230. Assinaboin Indian of Missouri: woman, aetat. 20. I.C. 85. 1231. Assinaboin woman, aetat. 18. I.C. 85.”  “Nos. 1230 and 1231, from J.J. Audubon, Esq., A.D. 1845,” Morton added. Audubon’s memory of the “Indian skull” tucked in his game pouch and Morton’s measurements are all we have left of these two young women—a small trace of racism’s heavy toll.

Scholars once suggested that the mother of the Saint-Domingue born Audubon was of African descent, although evidence suggests rather that his mother was a French-born chambermaid. Audubon constructed an American identity built partly on a foundation of white racism, a fact worth acknowledging. Audubon dressed in the buckskin of an American frontiersman, trafficked in specimens recruited to serve a malicious science of racial hierarchy, and bought and sold a handful of people he enslaved. Although Audubon archives hold only a scant trace of the Assiniboine women, his biographers give us something more on the people he owned, particularly two men, who traveled with him down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where he sold them. The two men disappeared into the cotton economy, while profits from their sale were used to support Audubon’s work on The Birds of America.

I started looking at Audubon’s connections to Morton last fall when a woman from the National Audubon Society wrote to ask about ties between the two men. She told me they were thinking about the racist traces that stain so many of our institutions and about the “whiteness” of birding. Did Audubon’s connection to “scientific racism” matter? And then Morton’s skulls came back into the news with renewed outrage over human remains still in collections at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Audubon’s role in our racial reckoning is small. His life was not simple, but he lived with advantages accrued by whiteness. Some of those advantages stuck with him even after he died in 1851. Unlike the women whose skulls he plucked off the prairie or the man he called “White Cow” whose coffin he tumbled to the ground, Audubon remains buried in New York’s Trinity Cemetery and Mausoleum, on a plot that once was part of his estate at “Minniesland” on land that once belonged to the Lenape. His wife and sons buried Audubon in a modest grave, but in the 1880s, members of the New York Academy of Sciences began collecting dimes from school children and dollars from Gilded Age A-listers—Rockefeller, Huntington, Carnegie, Edison, Vanderbilt, Morgan, and dozens of others—to raise a monument over the crypt of the artist ornithologist. You can find it near 155th and Broadway. (Figure 9)

Following Audubon’s story leads us back to graves robbed and lives lost and asks us to pay attention to scraps hidden in shadier moments of Audubon’s marvelous art. White racism buoyed the careers of men like Morton and Audubon, but it’s worth remembering that neither Morton nor Audubon had a lock on talent, beauty, or brilliance. Consider Audubon’s contribution to Morton’s collection and acknowledge the ghosts that haunt this archive. Mourn for the unburied dead, for naturalists whose talents were squandered picking cotton and artists whose skills disappeared in communities “nearly exterminated.”

Further Reading

Audubon described collecting the human remains he sent to Samuel George Morton in his “Missouri River Journals.” The journal is included in the indispensable Library of America edition of John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings (1999), edited by Christoph Irmscher. Daniel Patterson also edited an edition of The Missouri River Journals of John James Audubon (2016) along with original commentary. The American Philosophical Society has digitized Audubon’s correspondence with Morton, and it is available online. Readers interested in Audubon’s biography and his place in American arts and letters can turn to Alice Ford, John James Audubon: A Biography (1989); Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (2004); and Gregory Nobles, John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman (2017).

This article was originally published in November 2021.

Ann Fabian reviews books and writes about cultural history and natural history. She is Distinguished Professor of History, emerita, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She explored Morton’s practices in The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (2010).