The Future in/The Future of Bercovitch’s Jeremiad

I begin with classic Anglo Saxon understatement: The American Jeremiad has been invaluable for my work and, safe to say, for that of countless other Americanists. Bercovitch’s notion of the conjunction of the sacred and secular has been a lightning rod for two generations of scholars, and whether they agree or disagree at this point with the vision he represents of a boundless incorporation of dissent and its peculiar implications for the concept of America, there can be no doubt that the idea has provided the grounds for one of the most trenchant discussions in American cultural criticism. But rather than continue to proffer generalizations about the impact of The American Jeremiad, I want simply and briefly to name a few ways in which I have personally been in dialogue with Bercovitch’s ideas about the jeremiad.

It was in pondering Bercovitch’s central notion—that the rhetoric of the jeremiad provides the seeds of America’s exceptional culture of socialization—that I came to think about banishment in the Puritan community. How did the sending out of certain individuals from the community through banishment push the boundaries of the dissent that is so central to his understanding of American culture beyond the bounds of that culture, and how did that push and pull affect the idea of American socialization? Was this form of expulsion, in which the excluded were doubly excluded, yet another manifestation of the appeal to the original idea of community (which was, admittedly, a pre-constitutional community), or was there something novel going on? Moreover, was the community at large represented in the rhetoric of banishment, as Bercovitch argues it was in the case of the jeremiad, or was it the work of only a certain demographic? Sparked again by Bercovitch’s work on rhetoric and its relation to the community was another question at the heart of my work: was the common law, which was central to the banishment debate, another form of jeremiad—all-encompassing, central to the community in a mythological symbolic sense, endlessly flexible, liberating and repressive at the same time?

How did the sending out of certain individuals from the community through banishment push the boundaries of the dissent that is so central to his understanding of American culture beyond the bounds of that culture, and how did that push and pull affect the idea of American socialization?

These were some of the questions that guided me in writing Banished: The Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England, but my current project, which deals in part with Puritan millennialism and cosmopolitanism, arises in part from a Bercovitchean sense of rhetoric and history as well. Needless to say, as a Puritanist, I am indebted to Bercovitch’s work, which is not only informative, rich, and dense but also the very lifeblood of a field—Puritanism—that was close to moribund before he (together with a few others) reinvigorated it. What I’ve learned, however, is how to mine the field in ways that Bercovitch more often than not chose not to do as he sought to use the Puritan period to analyze the socialization process of the nation to come. Where Bercovitch calls the “New England Puritan symbology a transitional mode, geared toward new forms of thought but trailing what Melville scornfully called the aims of the Past,” I have found within it its own futurity, limited on the one hand as Bercovitch notes to the figurations of the Biblical past, but also as unconstrained in its own way as the later nationalist fusion of sacred and secular in his explication of the symbol that is America. Indeed it was unsurprisingly enough again one of Bercovitch’s notions—that in America, even in Puritan times, utopia was not some other place but this place—that inspired some of my current musings on the millennium and the Puritan concept of peace. For when you dwell in Puritan America, you find in the figural thought of the Puritans glimmers of a future beyond the analogy to Israel, beyond the place where the sacred meets the secular and, as Bercovitch would have it, bangs up against it. Less willing perhaps to say with him that things unfolded “here then as nowhere else,” I am repeatedly prompted to wonder about exceptionalism 35 years after his American Jeremiad changed the way we view our world.

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

Nan Goodman is professor in the English Department of the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-Century America (1998) and, most recently, Banished: Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England (2012). She is co-editor (with Michael Kramer) of The Turn Around Religion in American Literature (2011).

“Screw the past!”

Those were my words—approximately—as I abandoned my effort to sleep like a nineteenth-century whaleman. After three claustrophobic hours, I slid from my small, high bunk and managed to avoid stepping on the head of the occupant of the berth beneath. I climbed a ladder to the deck and inhaled the cool air. Screw the past.

It had been a pale attempt to begin with. Although I was sleeping in the mariners’ actual quarters, they were free of the vermin that had cohabited with the sailors of yore. And the ship was not rolling in the ocean, either. It was tethered snugly to a pier in the Charlestown Navy Yard. I spent the rest of the night sleeping on a bench on deck. Every now and again I opened an eye to take in the glittering Boston skyline.

The place where whalemen slept was known as the forecastle. It was usually abbreviated as foc’s’le, which is pronounced something like “foxhole,” and other things. “Foc’s’le” very appropriately undercuts any sense of grandeur that the term “forecastle” might possess. In its design and dimensions, the fo’c’sle reflected shipbuilders’ intuitive understanding of just how little space and air a human being at repose could be granted without compromising his ability to perform heavy labor at a moment’s notice.

The reason for stinting on the whalemen’s accommodation was not spite—although one imagines that if contempt were not present at the outset, the owners and shipbuilders must have had to conjure some as justification. In truth, whalemen just had to make room for the commodities that were the ship’s raison d’être: blubber, baleen, and oil. Sailors were squeezed on the ship so that back on shore lamps could be lit, machines lubricated, and women dressed in skirts shaped like the Capitol dome.

Besides, sailors were not really supposed to sleep. They were supposed to work. And it is in seeing them work that one truly begins to appreciate the whaleship as an intricately calibrated wood, rope, and canvas machine. I had previously visited tall ships at dock, but it was quite a different thing to observe a ship under sail (and to help pull the occasional rope). This machine’s motive force is wind and currents, but its operation depends on two dozen people synchronously crawling, climbing, pulling, hanging, jumping, and swinging. When the first mate shouts “On the fore topmast stays’l, tend the sheets, cast off the downhaul, haul away on the halyard,” the sailors repeat the command, some grabbing ropes and others scurrying up the rigging. They reminded me of a circus troupe. Those aloft then shimmied along ropes, more than eighty feet in the air, tying and untying sails. They also reminded me of steelworkers raising a skyscraper. Native Americans were prominent in whaling in the nineteenth century and steelworking in the twentieth; was there a connection? Certainly the warrior ethos, with its mix of daring and distance from home, united them both.

I wondered who today’s sailors were, where they had learned their craft, and why. The sailors of tall ships are a special lot. They are self-professed “outliers,” “misfits,” “gypsies.” When Tony Horwitz followed up Confederates in the Attic with a book about a tall ship, he was reaching for low-hanging fruit. Here was another group of people born in the twentieth century who were making the nineteenth their home. However, unlike Horwitz’s Civil War re-enactors, none of the Charles W.Morgan‘s crew are hobbyists. They are more highly skilled and professionally trained. Many come through the Navy, Coast Guard and maritime academies, and have advanced degrees in marine sciences and related fields.

Like Melville’s Ishmael, today’s tall-ship sailors are possessed of a certain misanthropy. They treat this condition with a strong dose of the strenuous life. Out of sorts on land, deckhand Joee Patterson said that she and her shipmates take solace in the routine of “hard work, long days, exposure to the elements, and each other.” She believes that this connects her with sailors of the past. (It at least explains how anyone sleeps, or slept, in the forecastle.) In the words of Dana Mancinelli, another deckhand, the appeal is “Neverlandish.” The ship is the “world of pine tar, bow sprits, forecastles, royal yards, moon rakers, cat tackles, gypsy heads, black powder, and clear horizon.” Put that way, the tall-ship life does seem to beat office parks, strip malls, and interstates. Joee and Dana articulate some of the same reasons for shipping out as whalemen in the past—minus dire economic need.

2. The tryworks on the C.W. Morgan. Photograph © Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut.

But they also differ from whalemen of the past because they are women, as are a surprising number of hands on today’s tall ships. They testify to women’s ability to handle the same tasks as men and to forge a place in traditionally male occupations—especially low-paid ones, of course. The Morgan‘s second mate, Sean Bercaw, explained his preference for women officers and hands. “Generally,” Bercaw observed, “women are more cognizant of their abilities; if they say they understand, they do, and if they don’t they’ll let you know.”

Getting things right matters, both for the ship and the future of sail-craft. This cadre of skilled individuals, fluent in the arcane language of the tall ship, represents a thin line of knowledge transmission. They are akin to practitioners of antique musical instruments whose proper use will be lost if that line is broken. Even on a vessel as large as the 113-foot-long Morgan, sailing involves a strong element of touch. When the command is given to “Let the leech luff,” the crew is being told to keep the wind so it fills the sail with a slight flutter on the leeward edge. Those sails are manipulated via miles of rope criss-crossing the masts and yards. The ship functions a little like an orchestra; every voyage is a performance, and an interpretation.

But let’s not forget what ships like the Morgan were built to do: hunt and kill whales. Sitting squarely on the main deck behind the foremast are the ship’s tryworks. The tryworks are a large rectangular brick oven crowned with a pair of not-quite-circular metal cauldrons that make it look like a giant electrical outlet. On our voyage, the tryworks received little attention. They served mostly as a shady place to store water bottles. But historically, the tryworks represented the very heart of the whaleship. They were used to render the whale blubber into oil, in which form it was more readily stored and marketed. Having the means of processing blubber on the boat itself turned the vessel into a floating factory—and an olfactory nightmare. Melville described the smell of the blazing tryworks quite memorably (and un-toppably) as “the left wing of the day of judgment.” Shipboard tryworks made whaling more profitable, more efficient, and hence more intense. The tryworks helped usher in the industrial age.

3. In the film Down to the Sea in Ships (1922), actors ate in the forecastle of a whale ship. Photograph courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts.

The Morgan was, and is, a fine sailing ship. It was also a floating slaughterhouse. It was part of an armada of ships that created America’s first oil boom, one in which the oil was extracted from the heads of whales. In pursuing this precious commodity with abandon, they devastated whale populations in all the world’s oceans. The Morgan is a testament to human ingenuity, but also to its remarkable destructive capacity—even when only wind, currents and a little human muscle could be called to muster.

Like an antebellum plantation with its Big House, fields, and slave quarters, the whaleship challenges us to choose or combine perspectives on its story. The temptation is, of course, to dwell on the elegant: in this case, the fine craftsmanship of the vessel, or the majestic vista from the crow’s nest. Even having climbed only part way up the rigging, I won’t forget that view from on high anytime soon: 360 degrees of water, sunlight, and distant shoreline. Unaccustomed to heights, the one direction in which I did not look was down. Had I so dared, I would have seen the tryworks and the hatches leading below deck—places from which the Morgan’s story looks very different. My unpleasant hours in the forecastle, screw-the-past moment included, had not been in vain. They immunized me against an idealized sense of shipboard life, and highlighted the extraordinary range in the life of the nineteenth-century whaleman. His day encompassed the exhilaration of the crow’s nest, the suffocation of the forecastle and the tryworks, and remarkable hard work in between.

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

Karim Tiro is chair of the history department at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is author of The People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from the Revolution through the Era of Removal and co-editor of Along the Hudson and Mohawk: the 1790 Journey of Count Paolo Andreani.

Moon Shot

I was not expecting to learn anything in particular at the orientation for the 38th Voyage of the whaleship Charles W. Morgan; it was a prelude to the marvels of the voyage itself, where the real action would take place. On a damp, drizzly April a few months before the historic cruise, I joined my fellow voyagers (civilians from a range of backgrounds designated as cultural interpreters) at Mystic Seaport, where I imagined we would be briefed on the ship’s history and renovation, as well as on the importance of the whaling industry within U.S. economic and cultural history. I have been studying American maritime history and visiting Mystic Seaport and the Morgan for years, and I believed—complacently, indefensibly—that I had approached the limits of what this kind of institutional wisdom could teach me. I instead set my sights beyond the orientation day in anticipation of the experiential knowledge, the living act, that I thought my time under sail on the Morgan herself would bring.

I was dead wrong: about the focus of the orientation itself, about our opportunities for institutional action, about the very conditions that create horizons for the imagination. The narratives written about the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan will likely focus primarily on how splendidly the 173-year-old ship sailed; how hauntingly beautiful its days among the whales of Stellwagen Bank were; how extraordinary and momentous an event the voyage proved. But in this space I wish to marvel instead at the logistical and theoretical work that enabled the Morgan‘s triumphant return to sea in the first place. The process by which we voyagers were authorized as institutional partners by Mystic Seaport was conducted with no less a degree of expertise (or a kind of seamanship, say) than the handling of the ship herself. The orientation transformed my sense both of the Morgan‘s 38th Voyage, and of the possibilities for collaborative institutional work. The supposed auxiliary event to the whaleship’s grand time-traveling act taught me a great deal about how we might better invite our students and the public to engage history. As a professor who has held various administrative positions on my campus and in scholarly organizations in recent years, I took from my time with the Morgan an energized and reconceived sense of how to stage participatory projects, both within the academy and under the aegis of other cultural institutions.

Here is how Mystic Seaport did it. The Morgan had not sailed since 1921, and it had not originally been the goal to return her to sea at the outset of the major renovation that concluded this spring (it took five and a half years). That epic alteration in outcome came, in part, from the Charles W. Morgan herself, we were told; as the restoration was in process, the ship seemed to signal somehow her seaworthiness. “We didn’t contrive this; she presented herself,” the president of the seaport, Stephen C. White, said in the museum’s chapel on that cool orientation day in April. “This is our moon shot.” The chills in the room were not from the weather alone. But like the visionary apparatus of the space program to which he alluded, the dream of slipping the Morgan‘s moorings—of casting off from Chubb’s Wharf—was predicated on an enormous amount of logistical work and institutional investment. The scale of this project was far greater than I knew.

As I have suggested, the orientation did not touch on the history of the Morgan in any detail (we were all given copies of a book on the topic—no need to waste orientation time on research we could do ourselves). Nor did it focus on whaling. We were instead briefed on the “moon shot” itself: the logistical and conceptual planning for the 38th Voyage. Mystic Seaport conceived of the endeavor as a participatory project that would welcome the involvement of outside contributors and trust in their abilities. The museum engaged scores of institutional partners, among them the maritime museums and boat shops that built (and donated!) the Morgan‘s whale boats; the boats hailed not just from New England but from Alexandria, Virginia, and Cedarville, Michigan, as well as from a Bronx, New York, shop for underserved youth called Rocking the Boat. The museum also received in-kind donations from over eighty partners, representing federal agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Navy; marine supply companies; museums and historical parks; municipalities ranging from Long Beach to Galveston to Vineyard Haven; Real McCoy Rum; and, unexpectedly, the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library. (Many of the renovated Morgan‘s new boards are southern live oak salvaged from Hurricanes Hugo and Katrina; I imagine that the Jefferson Davis contribution falls into this category.)

Logistical planning for the dockside exhibits. Photograph of the 38th Voyage dockside model by Hester Blum, courtesy of Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut.

Four of the major program partners for the project (the city of New Bedford, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, and Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary) reflect the maritime history of the U.S. as well as present ecological and preservationist urgencies, which were the major themes of the voyage. This venture had an education focus, in large part. For students, Mystic Seaport provides a range of K-12 educational programs, with supplementary resources for the current “Year of the Charles W. Morgan.” At most of the ports of call made this summer by the Morgan, the museum staged large dockside exhibitions for the visiting public which included live demonstrations, hands-on activities, whaleboat exercises, historic interpretations, and a live-sized inflatable sperm whale with the crowd-sourced name “Spouter.” The presence of Spouter at the dockside exhibit was designed to show the scale of the whale next to the ship and the whale boats. (Neither the living humpbacked whales that joined the Morgan on Stellwagen Banks nor Spouter was harmed during the voyage.) During the ship’s stay in Boston, docked alongside the USS Constitution, Captain Kip Files threw out the first pitch at a Red Sox game. The collaborative organizational work in the present deepened our shipboard immersion in the collective maritime work of the past.

The “38th Voyagers”—the writers, artists, teachers, journalists, scientists, museum professionals, and maritime enthusiasts in whose company I was honored to count myself—were part of this undertaking. Our participation was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities; a grant reviewer said that this was “far and away the most comprehensive and exciting public history/museum/humanities project I have ever had the privilege to review.” Teaching us precisely how the ambitious venture came about, from conception to grant proposals to logistical planning to troubleshooting to execution, produced a level of investment that went beyond our enthusiasm for the extraordinary nature of the voyage itself. We were behind the scenes throughout our orientation day, whether reviewing logistics whiteboards on possible contingencies, or opening climate-controlled artifact drawers in the Collections and Research Center, or descending into the usually off-limits hold of the Morgan to see what modern electronics had been temporarily installed for the 38th Voyage to meet safety and crew comfort requirements. It made us not only part of the story of the voyage, but better able to tell the story of the voyage—which was, after all, our role.

The logic for the participatory aspects of the project’s conception were laid out for us by Elysa Engelman in a presentation on the theory behind the 38th Voyage. She cited the influence of Nina Simon, whose work is likely familiar to those in museum studies but was new to me. Simon is the author of the book The Participatory Museum and the blog Museum 2.0, and advocates for collaborative “participatory institutions,” in which the authority (here, Mystic Seaport or the Charles W. Morgan) serves as the platform provider for users or visitors, rather than the top-down content provider. In other words, the visitors provide the knowledge and experience, rather than consuming it from an authority. In classroom terms, a participatory museum would be a seminar table with all class members contributing to the discussion. The traditional museum structure would be the large lecture hall with only one professorial voice as the authoritative, non-interactive source of information.

When I would tell academic colleagues and friends that I was going on a cruise on an actual nineteenth-century whaling ship, many people presumed—and why wouldn’t they—that the trip would be long: “a month? semester? a year? how will you charge your phone?” I felt abashed every time I had to confess that my voyage leg was less than 24 hours long, as were all the short, careful transits the ship made along the New England coast this summer. After my orientation at Mystic Seaport, however, I no longer felt any need to justify the voyage length. That training day made me feel embedded in the institutional forces and historical weight supporting and propelling my day of sail. In its arrangement of partners and events, the range of voyager projects chosen, and the transparency of the logistics shared, the caretakers of the Charles W. Morgan demonstrated to us on the training day not simply how to think about this ship or this museum, but about how to conceive of a process of creating a voyage, building a mission, enabling the exploratory wonder of a moon shot.

Institutions get a bad rap, and with good reason; they can be and usually are stifling, faceless, cruel, administratively bloated, and governed by neoliberal logics functioning antithetically to the intellectual missions of higher education and scholarly inquiry. For many of us who work within them, though, there can be moments when the possibilities and paths for institutional good become illuminated. My brief time in the logistics room at Mystic Seaport and before the mast on the Charles W. Morgan made me see how we might multiply opportunities at our own institutions for participatory action: not just on the level of events themselves, but on the structural level that make those events possible. Seaport President White said of the Morgan‘s unanticipated voyage that “the institution had to have the capacity to embrace this possibility.” Scholarly institutions have substantial, pre-existing logistical resources; they should not be so focused on outcomes that they miss—as I might have—the surprising pleasures and revelations of the participatory process. This increased participation can happen when institutions trust in the value and contributions of their intellectual workers—their students and faculty and staff—and provide the resources to allow us, like the Morgan herself, to present ourselves, and launch something previously unimagined.

‘Not in our Neighborhood’

"Norwich City, from the South," taken from History of Norwich, Connecticut, from its settlement in 1660 to January 1845, by Miss F.M. Caulkins (Norwich, 1845). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window.

The SPGNA, American Indians, and the Turn to Foreign Missions in the Early Republic

Hazelnuts. That’s what the girl at the door was selling. But why? Surely that question must have crossed the minds of white inhabitants in Norwich, Connecticut, when a young Indian girl presented her rather unusual wares. In the early 1840s, this Mohegan girl trekked the five miles from the Mohegan reservation north along the Thames River to Norwich, Connecticut, to sell her goods, likely from a basket that she had woven. Such peddling attempts by Natives were commonplace in the nineteenth century, but this particular girl had a special purpose. She was selling hazelnuts in order to collect an offering for the “American Board”—that is, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), founded by New England Congregationalists in 1810. Apparently the white minister of the Mohegan church, Anson Gleason, had visited her parents’ home at Mohegan to solicit donations for the ABCFM and, lacking any money to offer, the daughter instead went into the forest and collected hazelnuts to sell in order to raise funds for “Foreign Missions.” This Mohegan girl wasn’t alone, however, in her fundraising efforts; her family often contributed half a dollar per year to the ABCFM collection, and the mixed white and Indian congregation at the Mohegan Church contributed an annual average of twenty-five dollars between 1836 and 1841.

Hazelnut-bearing North American Native youth as financial supporter of U.S. Protestant foreign missions? If this surprises us, it is perhaps because we haven’t fully understood the continuities and changes within the larger history of missions in North America at the turn of the nineteenth century. At the most basic level, this episode hints at an essential continuity between prior colonial evangelization efforts by Euro-Americans among the indigenous populations of North America and the early-nineteenth century shift toward “foreign” or global missions. During the colonial period, the Mohegans and other New England Natives had repeatedly been evangelized by missionary societies based in the British Isles. The Mohegan Church (and the accompanying school) in the 1840s was a direct legacy of this colonial-era evangelization. And yet, in the opening years of the early republic (1783-1810), a slow shift was taking place, one that increasingly caused the eyes and prayers of Americans to look toward “foreign” fields of missionary service, however defined. And—as in prior eras of evangelistic activity—Native Americans were important to these efforts, in terms of providing historical models and ongoing inspiration and, in some cases, becoming participants and partners in supporting global missionary activity.

At the center of much of this early national activity was a missionary society that in itself embodied and facilitated these transitions: the Society for Propagating the Gospel among Indians and Others in North America (SPGNA). Founded in 1787, it was the first missionary society in the new United States, predating the better-known ABCFM (1810) and even the New York Missionary Society (1796). In many ways, the SPGNA spanned an older colonial world and an emerging internationally minded early American republic. Its founding revealed the deeply politicized nature of such ongoing Indian evangelization in the early republic and the eventual turn toward global missions. The SPGNA also embodied the three primary (and overlapping) missionary impulses of the early nineteenth century: Native, domestic, and foreign. Precisely because it fills this strange void, the SPGNA is often overlooked in the history of Christian missions and missionary efforts (whether domestic or foreign) in the United States. Its members and founders—drawn from the elite of New England society—were humanitarians who hoped to spread literacy, education, and their particular brand of activistic Congregationalism to all corners of the North American continent, and even beyond.

Although the SPGNA officially limited its scope to North America, its members clearly saw their missionary organization as part of a grand unfolding Protestant evangelistic drama that included domestic works of literacy and education right alongside missionary efforts in more remote locales around the globe. The sermons, publications, and foci of the SPGNA suggest that “foreign” missions did not necessarily mean “overseas.” Instead of a sharp division between “domestic” missions and “foreign” missions, the SPGNA’s records suggest that, from the perspective of 1787 or even 1800, much of the western regions of the North American continent were just as “foreign” as destinations like Africa or India. In short, this essay suggests that the notion of “foreign” was an unstable and constantly changing category. By the 1790s, there was a continuum of foreignness envisioned by East Coast humanitarians, one that started in the central and western portions of North America and ended in the more remote portions of the globe. The SPGNA, while often overlooked, served as a transitional missionary society, bridging an older, colonial Native-focused missionary effort and an emerging globally centered movement that had as its goal nothing less than the evangelization of the entire world.

One of the repeated themes from the reports and published sermons on the SPGNA in its first twenty years of operation was the intense difficulty—near impossibility—of successful Indian Christianization

The Society for Propagating the Gospel among Indians and Others in North America (or The Society with the Long Name, as later generations called it) had at least two origins. The most immediate and formal beginning was in in 1787, when the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK; founded in Scotland in 1708) contacted a few leading ministers and philanthropists in Boston with a request. The SSPCK was in charge of some funds that were technically reserved for North American missions and, following American independence, its leaders felt that the money should be administered by individuals or an organization based in the United States. The money, in fact, was largely the result of an enormously successful fundraising trip undertaken by the famous Mohegan Presbyterian minister Samson Occom. Between 1766 and 1768, Occom toured the British Isles, raking in over 12,000 pounds in contributions toward the evangelization and education of North American Natives. When Occom’s sponsor, Eleazar Wheelock, used much of the money to found Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1770, the SSPCK overseers of some of the funds declined to give Wheelock unrestricted access to the rest of it, since they—like Occom and others—disagreed with Wheelock’s use of the funds.

This unexpected offer of funds from the SSPCK caused Massachusetts ministers and humanitarian-minded civic leaders to spring into action. In 1787, they petitioned the Massachusetts state legislature for a charter, which was given on November 19, 1787, for a “Society for Propagating the Gospel Among Indians and Others in North America.” Largely Congregational, the SPGNA preceded the early revivals of the so-called Second Great Awakening in the 1790s. As such, it is not simply an example of a typical early nineteenth-century “evangelical” missionary or reform society (as perhaps with the founding of the ABCFM), but it did later benefit from and draw participation from revival-minded individuals. The SPGNA over time seemingly diverged theologically from the ABCFM and other conservative Protestant “evangelical” missionary societies. During the controversies over Unitarianism (the belief that only God the Father is fully God) and the ensuing church splits within Congregationalism, the SPGNA decided to draw equally from Unitarian and Trinitarian Congregational churches for its membership, a move that caused later commentators to assert that it had turned Unitarian, which was not entirely true.

But the SPGNA was also rooted in the colonial period. In 1762, New England humanitarians had tried to incorporate their own missionary society, “The Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians in North America.” Although the Massachusetts governor and legislature approved its formation, the Board of Trade and Plantation in London revoked its corporate charter in 1763, largely under pressure from the Anglican archbishop and King George III, who argued it would interfere with the Anglican SPG’s own missionary efforts in North America. This rejection would not quickly be forgotten. John Adams mentioned the interference of the SPG in his 1765 essay, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” and nearly 140 years later, in 1898, one SPGNA official suggested that perhaps this unilateral denial should have been mentioned in the Declaration of Independence: “He hath forbidden us to form societies for the conversion of the Indians.” The continuities between 1762 and 1787 were clear: the name of the society only changed slightly, and seven of the proposed original 1762 founding society members were listed among the twenty-one founding members of the 1787 society.

Studies of American foreign missions have often supposed a sharp beginning in the U.S. with the founding of the ABCFM in 1810. But American Protestant missionary efforts were deeply embedded in a proximate colonial past and usually trailed missionary efforts out of England. (And to be sure, Protestant missionary efforts lagged far behind Catholic ones for centuries.) That is to say, American missionary societies in the early republic are best understood as being intimately connected to both the colonial period and to European missionary efforts, particularly those in England and Germany. From the perspective of people on the ground, and from the longer vantage point of the historian, the ABCFM was simply yet another Protestant missionary society for work in “foreign” fields. In the years prior to the American Revolution, several main missionary societies were formed and operated out of the British Isles. These included: the New England Company (1649; rechartered in 1662; Independent/Congregationalist); the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (1698; Anglican); the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1701; Anglican); and the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (1708; Presbyterian).

Consequently, Anglo-American men and women were no strangers to “foreign missions,” even in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Stories of Catholic missionaries circulated throughout the Atlantic, often involving caricatured methods used by Jesuits and Franciscans in the Americas to Christianize indigenous populations. English Protestants might have been critical of such activity (as conducted by Catholics), but they were nonetheless incredibly aware of it. Roger Williams, for example, in his Christenings Make Not Christians (1645), articulated (and criticized) a widely held caricature of global Catholic missions as falsely baptizing tens of thousands of Natives, a critique Cotton Mather and others repeated well into the eighteenth century.

But more positive models of global missionary efforts also circulated in the early eighteenth century. In the 1710s, missionary-minded Protestants in America and England eagerly read reports of the evangelistic efforts by pietistic Lutherans in the Danish colony of Tranquebar on the eastern coast of the sub-continent of India. Reports of the missionary successes there first circulated in 1709 as Propagation of the Gospel in the East: being an account of the success of two Danish missionaries, lately sent to the East-Indies, for the conversion of the heathens in Malabar, with several subsequent editions through 1718. Copies ofPropagation of the Gospel in the East reached Cotton Mather, the prolific, busybody Boston minister whose own correspondence included a far-flung range of European intellectuals. Mather promptly began corresponding with the author, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg. In 1718, John Ernest Grundler, another missionary in Tranquebar, sent Mather a Tamil New Testament.

Mohegan Church, Uncasville, Connecticut. Photograph by the author.

These foreign Protestant missionary efforts left a deep impression on Mather. When he was asked to preach a sermon before the NEC commissioners in 1720, Mather used a strategy that SPGNA sermons exhibited a century later: placing the evangelization of New England Natives alongside global Protestant efforts. While putting into print an admiring account of the efforts of John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew in New England, Mather included a description of the progress of the gospel in Tranquebar. His conviction that they were two parallel movements accomplishing the same goal must have been strengthened by actually holding in his hands the 1663 translation by John Eliot of the entire Bible into Massachusett/Wôpanâak and the 1715 Tamil New Testament from the opposite side of the globe. Mather celebrated this global Protestant missionary effort as the “glorious design of propagating our holy religion, in the Eastern as well as the Western, Indies.” English ministers and magistrates kept tabs on and participated in more general Protestant missionary activity in the eighteenth century, including the NEC, the SSPCK, the Anglican SPG, the Moravians, and the efforts of other smaller evangelistically minded denominations, such as early Methodism. These missionary societies and denominations employed hundreds of individuals over the century before the American Revolution, some of which (the SPG and Moravians especially) served in global contexts, outside of English-speaking regions.

The American Revolution put an end to much of the British-sponsored missionary activity in North America, especially in New England. The SPG was not welcome in the United States (particularly after the acrimonious debates over the Anglican attempts to install an American bishop in the 1760s, and the perceived role of the SPG), and the NEC largely redirected its funds to Canada after the American Revolution, although a very small trickle of money continued to older missionary locations in New England and New York until 1796. Beginning in the early 1790s, British Protestants began turning their eyes toward other foreign lands, especially those in the East Indies. In 1792, English Baptists formed the Particular Baptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Heathen, and in 1795, the non-denominational London Missionary Society was founded. William Carey, one of the first missionaries sponsored by the Particular Baptist Society and sent to Calcutta, India, was especially influenced by the writings of colonial North American missionaries to Natives, including David Brainerd and John Eliot.

But American independence also stimulated humanitarian activity and organization in the United States. Even as American Protestants kept tabs on English missionary developments, by 1800, dozens of states, towns, and denominations had pulled together domestic aid and missionary societies that worked among local and distant populations. The earliest ones (after the SPGNA) included the Society of the United Brethren for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen (founded by the Moravians and incorporated in Pennsylvania in 1788), the New York Missionary Society (1796), the Northern Missionary Society (1797), the Philadelphia Missionary Society (1798), the Missionary Society of Connecticut (1797), and the Massachusetts Missionary Society (1799). The SPGNA stood as the earliest of such missionary societies, prompted into action by a Scottish foreign missionary society and enacted by local humanitarians who had a long history of colonial evangelization of Native nations.

In North America, the public revival of missionary efforts to Native Americans through the SPGNA after the American Revolution was surprisingly politicized in a variety of ways. On the one hand, these early missionary societies valorized the prior generations of English missionaries in New England—John Eliot, Thomas Mayhew Sr., Daniel Gookin, David Brainerd—whom they largely saw as successful in their efforts. The wider public saw it differently, however. Many Americans in New England viewed past missionary efforts as a waste of time and resources. Consequently, early SPGNA public notices and announcements had a defensive tone and quality to them, as if they were trying to win over a highly skeptical public. An SPGNA notice in theIndependent Chronicle in 1791 stated that it was “well aware of the difficulties, which attend the gospeling the Indians, and the prejudices against the attempt, which the expenditure of vast sums in the ineffectual pursuit of this object, have excited in the public mind.” SPGNA leaders countered such pessimism by proposing a “hitherto unattempted” methodology, that of educating Indian children in religion, practical trades, and “the various arts of civilization and domestic life.” In fact, however, nothing about this plan was new at all, as the SPGNA leaders must surely have known. Schools had been central to Native evangelistic efforts in New England from the mid-seventeenth century and were ongoing in various Indian communities in New England and New York, even as this SPGNA notice was being printed. Perhaps to win over a greater following (and funding), the SPGNA also spent considerable time describing the planned practical outreach to poor rural whites in New England, a plan they implemented in subsequent years.

The original 1787 seal of the society, with the biblical and symbolic theme of evangelism as gathering in the harvest. Cover, "Handbook of the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America, 1787-1964," Richard D. Pierce, ed. (Boston, 1964). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — The original 1787 seal of the society, with the biblical and symbolic theme of evangelism as gathering in the harvest. Cover, “Handbook of the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America, 1787-1964,” Richard D. Pierce, ed. (Boston, 1964). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

In fact, one of the repeated themes from the reports and published sermons on the SPGNA in its first twenty years of operation was the intense difficulty—near impossibility—of successful Indian Christianization. And in 1804, when John Lathrop preached the first annual sermon to the members and interested parties of the SPGNA, he was surprisingly frank: “Although the Society has given all the aid in its power, towards the support of Missionaries among the Indians, it cannot say, that much good hath resulted from that part of its labours,” he confessed. Still, such dour assessments were almost always countered by optimism, in part by looking at past successes of missionaries, and by thinking about current global efforts by other denominations and societies. SPGNA leaders also justified their ongoing efforts by saying that even if only one soul was saved, the efforts would be worthwhile: “If the value of one soul is far greater than of all the treasures and glories of the world, surely the salvation of one, and especially of a number, must be an ample recompense for all the arduous and expensive means, which have been employed for its accomplishment.”

Some New England observers disagreed with Indian evangelization for other reasons, however: they saw it as deeply hypocritical. As the eminent statesman Samuel Dexter Jr. wrote to Peter Thacher on June 14, 1788, just one year after the founding of the SPGNA, “[The Indians] are now, as they ever have been, deceived and defrauded by public bodies, as well as individuals. And, while things remain so, should national, or particular governments, whether European or American, call upon their people to pray for the conversion of the Indians, it would be mocking of Heaven; and if attempts should be made by any of them to effect it by sending missionaries, it would be as irrational as for a cruel planter in the West Indies to discourse to his African slaves of the merciful and benign Spirit of the religion of Christ.” Most Native leaders would have agreed, as 200 years of prior critique of white colonialism had made clear. But Dexter was a minority voice on the issue, and West Indian planters and American land speculators alike found evangelization to be a useful tool in accomplishing their goals. And, despite his doubts, Dexter himself signed on as a member of the SPGNA and personally contributed to its work.

This public re-engagement with Indian missions had political resonances in other ways as well. The very year of the SPGNA’s founding, 1787, was the same year the Northwest Ordinance was signed, which triggered a decade-long battle of resistance against U.S. westward expansion by a wide collection of Native nations on the western edges of the United States. Article Three of the Northwest Ordinance contained impossibly idealistic language regarding the treatment of Native Americans:

The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty, they never shall be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorised by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity shall from time to time be made, for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.

Despite professions to the contrary, the Northwest Territory ended up being a massive land grab that involved the invasion of Indian lands and the conquest of sovereign Indian nations. But the federal government’s vision for Native Americans in these territories very much lined up with the missionary fantasies of instilling “Religion, morality and knowledge,” along with good government, schools, and education. SPGNA leaders were well aware of this larger continental context and even quoted from the Northwest Ordinance. And in their original petition to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1787, the founders of the SPGNA highlighted the political importance of Native missions. Of widespread concern was the fact that “the British are practicing every art to induce the Indians to retire from among us, into the more interior parts of the continent, that they may secure to themselves exclusively the benefits of the fur trade, and their alliance in any future rupture.” The SPGNA, then, would counter these devious British designs by more securely allying Native nations within the boundaries of the United States to U.S. interests.

Title page, A Discourse, delivered before the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America, at their Anniversary Meeting in Boston, November 3, 1808, by Abiel Holmes, D.D., Minister of the First Church in Cambridge (Boston, 1808). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

All of this sheds light on why local governments and the U.S. federal government actively promoted and funded missionary efforts among Indian nations in the early republic, particularly more numerous western ones. Likely the very first instance of this was the SPGNA, which for the first decade or so of its existence received 150 pounds each year directly from the state government of Massachusetts. Massachusetts Governor John Hancock signed his name (less famously, perhaps, than to the Declaration of Independence) to a proclamation in 1788 calling on state residents to “contribute according to their abilities” to the SPGNA. Later SPGNA sermons called on the Massachusetts legislature to renew their funding for Indian missions. In subsequent decades, the SPGNA even appealed directly to the U.S. Congress for aid in the education of Indian children, as it did in February 1817. Similarly, the ABCFM, founded in 1810, received $2,500 from the U.S. federal government each year, a standing commitment that dried up only in the 1830s when ABCFM missionaries defied the 1830 Removal Act. Fascinatingly, the SPGNA’s political importance was symbolized in its very meeting spaces at times: in the Massachusetts Senate chamber on January 3, 1788, and in the Suffolk County courthouse in May of that year.

After the revolution, Americans looked two directions simultaneously: westward and globally in a growing spectrum of “foreign.” For the SPGNA, interest in Native Americans remained strong, but this interest shifted noticeably over time from local New England Native groups who were (wrongly) seen as largely invisible, unimportant, and dying out, to Native nations that were perceived to be larger, more militarily potent, less Christianized, and more important politically. In the early years of its existence, SPGNA efforts focused (somewhat selectively) on Natives in Maine, on Martha’s Vineyard, in Rhode Island, and in New York. In most cases, these were simply extensions of prior missionary outposts started in the colonial period under the NEC. The relative disdain for local Native groups can be felt even in the official sermons of the SPGNA. In 1808, Abiel Holmes addressed the members of the SPGNA and, after affirming the history of Native evangelization in New England by colonial missionaries, asserted that their focus should be elsewhere. “Where is the field of our labours?” Holmes queried, “Not in our neighbourhood, but in a distant wilderness.”

Even as early as 1814, SPGNA missionaries were sent to “Western Indians.” By 1843, the society deemed it “necessary to discontinue missions to the Indians of the Narragansett and other tribes, once flourishing but [then] rapidly disappearing in New England.” That same year, money was set aside to hire a Native preacher and to support a boarding school among the Cherokees in the southeast, indicating a more decisive turn to more remote Indian nations in North America (and, in some ways, more closely mirroring the work of the ABCFM among North American Natives). By 1883, SPGNA missionaries had served in distant regions such Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, western Canada, Washington State, and Dakota, among other places, in addition to East Coast locales.

In this way, international missionary societies seemingly envisioned the American Midwest and the western borderlands of North America as the outer fringes of “the world.” That is to say, the line between the global and the western U.S. was increasingly blurred. It is not surprising that American missionary societies should so easily conflate American Indian and foreign missions. After all, for most of the colonial period, North America was very much a foreign mission field for British missionaries, as the name of the Anglican SPG indicated (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts). Later observers noted this as well. In 1860, S. M. Worcester stated of early New England missions to Natives: “And now, what classifying or denominating term is it proper to apply to the missions of the first settlers of New England and their immediate descendants? Were not all these ‘foreign parts?’ Was it not all heathen ground, and so considered for a long period by Christians on both sides of the ‘900 league ocean?'”

Title page, The American Universal Geography, Or, A View of the Present State of All the Empires, Kingdoms, States, and Republics in the Known World, and of the United States of America in Particular: In Two Parts, Vol. 1, by Jedidiah Morse (Boston, 1793). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

One person’s foreign is another person’s domestic, of course, but the notion of American Indians as belonging to a foreign “other” land was reinforced in the colonial period and aided in the blurring of lines by American independence between the North American west and the rest of the globe. To East Coast humanitarians in 1790 (as well as to soldiers who fought on the ground), the North American continent west of the Ohio River was an entirely foreign land, with large Native groups and sporadic outposts of Spanish, French, and English traders and old military forts. Even in the 1830s Sarah L. Huntington, who was then working among the Mohegans in Connecticut, noted to a friend regarding the views of the ABCFM, “You know all the Indians are regarded by that body as a foreign nation.”

In fact, the ways that East Coast humanitarians surveyed, described, and assessed the moral vacuity of international lands echoed the descriptions and language regarding the relatively unorganized and unsettled western regions of the North American continent. As Amy DeRogatis has argued in Moral Geography, cartographic enterprises and publications by missionary-minded New Englanders always contained within them normative assessments of morality or its apparent lack. Jedidiah Morse, in his popular The American Universal Geography, quoted the 1787 Northwest Ordinance regarding the need for religious and educational order to be brought to that vast territory: “Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Morse might have found the culture and civilizations of China and India to be inherently more interesting than and superior to those of western Natives, but they were (in his view) still in need of the same religious salvation and moral uplift that only Christianity could bring.

Within SPGNA reports and activities, one can observe the distinct shift in missionary strategy toward global awareness that was soon replicated in the dozens upon dozens of various missionary societies, most particularly in the ABCFM after its founding in 1810. Although in the early years of the SPGNA global evangelistic efforts were not necessarily a pressing concern for Boston humanitarians, within two decades that had changed entirely. Starting in 1804, the SPGNA sponsored public annual sermons for members and a wider public that were intended to raise support for and interest in a wide variety of Protestant missionary efforts, of which the SPGNA was a part. In the first decade of these annual public sermons, two main themes stand out: first, an homage to colonial precedents for Native evangelization, and second, an effusive recognition of a far broader, global context for missionary efforts. Regarding a clear colonial heritage, Abiel Holmes’s sermon in 1808 lauded “The pious and successful labours of the Mayhews, the Bournes, and the Sergeants, of Wheelock, Brainard, Hawley, and Kirkland”—all colonial missionaries—along with the one who stood the tallest, John Eliot.

"Map of the World from the Best Authorities," engraved by Amos Doolittle (Boston, 1796). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window. — “Map of the World from the Best Authorities,” engraved by Amos Doolittle (Boston, 1796). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window.

But the strongest theme of these early SPGNA sermons was global Christian missionary efforts, from the first century CE to the early nineteenth century. John Lathrop’s inaugural SPGNA sermon in 1804 placed the SPGNA in a longer heritage of Protestant missions (primarily in England and Scotland). He also connected the work of the SPGNA to the global efforts of these prior missionary societies, including work among Indians in the western regions of the U.S. (near the Mississippi) and Natives in Paraguay. This theme continued in 1805, when Levi Frisbie, the pastor of the First Church in Ipswich, Massachusetts, preached a sermon before the SPGNA in which he declared that the New Testament command to “Go teach all nations; go preach the gospel to every creature,” extended “to the swarthy African, the plundering Arab, the roving Tartar, and the wandering Savage who traverses the wilds of America, from the desert plains of Patagonia to the dreary mountains of the frozen pole.”

Similarly, in 1810—the same year the ABCFM was formed—Jedidiah Morse delivered a lengthy address to the members of the SPGNA that captured this increasingly capacious vision for how the SPGNA fit into a much larger narrative of Christian history. Starting with the emergence of Christianity in the first century, Morse took his hearers and readers on a whirlwind tour of global Christian expansion up through his own day and age. Christian missionaries—and, notably, “Christian and civilized nations”—had slowly been spreading over formerly “Unknown Lands” in the Americas, spreading the light of “science and religion” over those “dark regions.” Tellingly, Morse placed the SPGNA into a seamless continuum of global missionary activity. For Morse, there was no sharp division between the North American continent and the rest of the world; in many senses, both were foreign fields of sorts. Morse seemed especially admiring of the Moravians, who were serving as missionaries in the Americas, the Caribbean, the West Indies, and other global locations. Within his own lifetime, Morse noted that missionaries were being sent out from Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, Holland, and the United States to serve in foreign fields.

Perhaps more controversially, Morse believed that the proliferation of missionary societies between 1790 and 1810 indicated that God was “preparing the world for some grand revolution.” And what, in fact, would such a “grand revolution” look like? According to Morse, it would involve:

a more extensive commercial intercourse among the nations; by wards, conquests, and revolutions; by raising up a modern Alexander [the Great], to subjugate a large portion of the world; by an increase and diffusion of knowledge derived from travellers, and enterprises for discovery; especially by means of Missionaries, who are already scattered in every part of the world, and every day are increasing in number, and exploring some new region; not only learning the languages of the nations, but communicating the knowledge of their own; by all these and other means, which Divine providence may ordain, may not the English and French languages become to the world, what the Latin and Greek languages were before the Christian era?

Morse’s “grand revolution,” in other words, was nothing short of an anticipated program in cultural, religious, linguistic, and militaristic imperialism, emanating from the United States and western Europe. And it wasn’t just Morse’s idea. In an 1813 sermon before SPGNA members, Joshua Bates proposed as his central thesis (as the later published version indicated in all capitals): “THAT THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IS DESIGNED ULTIMATELY TO PREVAIL THROUGH THE WHOLE WORLD, AND HAVE A GENERAL INFLUENCE ON THE CHARACTER AND CONDITION OF ALL MANKIND.”

Map, "New England by Ashur Adams," taken from A Compendious History of New England, Designed for Schools and Private Families, by Jedidiah Morse, D.D., and Rev. Elijah Parish, A.M. (Charlestown, Mass., 1804). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window. — Map, “New England by Ashur Adams,” taken from A Compendious History of New England, Designed for Schools and Private Families, by Jedidiah Morse, D.D., and Rev. Elijah Parish, A.M. (Charlestown, Mass., 1804). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window.

But the SPGNA didn’t simply shift its efforts overseas in light of the spreading enthusiasm for global missions. Instead, they inserted themselves and their continental focus into the emerging global drama of Protestant missions, primarily by directly connecting world missionary effort and “domestic” missions like their own. Joshua Bates, in his 1813 SPGNA sermon, asserted that “the different immediate objects of missionary societies all unite in one grand object. Whether, therefore, you contribute, to send missionaries to heathen lands, or to supply the destitute with the preached gospel in our own country—whether you aid in translating the scriptures into other languages, or furnishing them for the poor, who speak our own language, you are still promoting the same glorious cause.” And Elijah Parish, in his 1814 SPGNA sermon, after giving a little mini-tour of the globe highlighting nations that do not “know God” (including Natives of Pacific islands, Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetans, along with the “sovereign Lama”), asserted: “Nor are we the only people engaged in this good work. All Christendom seems to be roused by the same impulse. From Petersburg to Calcutta, we hear the same strains of Christian benevolence.”

SPGNA leaders urged action, since they strongly believed that evangelization of North American Natives would contribute directly to the unfolding of a global divine plan. “The Gospel is now spreading with incredible rapidity, into the dark recesses of Europe,” Abiel Holmes told the SPGNA members in 1808, “traversing the immense regions of Asia; and penetrating even the inhospitable deserts of Africa. . . . . [H]ave we not just cause to expect an universal propagation of the Gospel? Yes: The time will come, and will not tarry, when the Pagan idolater shall cast his idols to the moles and to the bats; when the Indian Powows shall be silenced by the songs of Zion; when the Vedas of the Hindu, the Shasters of the Gentoo, and the Koran of the Mahometan, shall be exchanged for the HOLY BIBLE; when the religion of the Brahma, the Institutes of Menu, the rites of the Lama, the Zend of the Zoroaster, and even the laws of Confucius, shall be superseded by the glorious Gospel of the blessed God. The Lord will assuredly hasten it in his time.” By placing their own efforts alongside global missionary endeavors, SPGNA leaders inserted themselves into an imagined global evangelistic drama.

Broadside, "Commonwealth of Massachusetts," by John Hancock, esquire (Boston, 1788). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window. — Broadside, “Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” by John Hancock, esquire (Boston, 1788). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window.

But this wasn’t simply a rhetorical stance. Although missionary efforts to Natives in the early republic have often been interpreted as separate from global, foreign missions, at many points they intersected, silently, intentionally, and importantly. In 1818, Jason Chater, a Baptist missionary sent out from England to Ceylon, sent his copy of the 1663 Indian Bible (translated by John Eliot and Native linguists into Massachusett/Wôpanâak) as a gift to the Society of Inquiry Respecting Missions at the Andover Theological Seminary.

Other examples abound, including the ABCFM-funded Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. Founded in 1816, its opening was inspired by the increasing number of Native Hawaiians that the China trade brought to New England coastal towns. The first class of students in 1817 included seven Hawaiians, two Bengalis, an Abenaki (New England) Indian, and two white New England youths who later were sent to Hawaii as missionaries. By early 1819, the student population included individuals from Canton, Tahiti, Malaysia, and Indonesia, along with a sizable population of Cherokees and Choctaws from the American southeast. Notably, however, six additional students were from the Iroquois Confederacy in New York: three Oneidas, two Stockbridge Natives, and one Tuscarora. SPGNA missionaries had served among the Iroquois for almost three decades by 1819 (particularly at New Stockbridge and with the Oneidas), and the NEC, SSPCK, and Eleazar Wheelock had promoted and sponsored schools and churches in Iroquoia for half a century before that. In particular, the two Stockbridge students at the Foreign Mission School in 1819 hailed from New Stockbridge, New York—precisely where SPGNA-sponsored missionaries had served for many years.

In other ways, too, these two histories and movements were connected. The Mohegan Church, which sits today on Mohegan lands next to the Thames River in south central Connecticut, was partially the result of an early 1830s campaign by Sarah L. Huntington and other interested individuals. Partially imposed upon and partially welcomed by the Mohegans (especially Lucy Occom Tantaquidgeon and her daughter Lucy Tantaquidgeon Teecomwas), the little church building became an important symbol of the Mohegans’ civilization and Christianization—enough, at least, to stave off removal, by some accounts. In 1832—just after the official opening of the Mohegan Church—this little Indian chapel became a launching pad for global Protestant missions. In that year, a crowd gathered at the church for a commissioning and send-off sermon for a group of Protestant (white) missionaries under the auspices of the ABCFM heading to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). A small offering was collected of only several dollars, but it marked the beginning of Mohegan support of ABCFM missionaries, which led to the door-to-door sales of hazelnuts by a young Mohegan girl a decade later. And Sarah L. Huntington (Smith), who helped found the Mohegan Church in 1831, shortly thereafter departed as a missionary to Syria with her husband in 1833.

"The Reverend Samson Occom," lithographer unknown. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — “The Reverend Samson Occom,” lithographer unknown. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

So closely intertwined were the missionary efforts to Natives and global indigenous peoples, in fact, that when Norwich, Connecticut, leaders recounted the missionaries sent out from their town in the 1840s, the list blended seamlessly from the missionaries to Native Americans (starting with Samuel Kirkland in 1766 to the Oneidas in New York) to western North America (Cherokee and Oregon), and finally, globally. Missionaries named farther down the list included ones sent to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), Ceylon, Madira, Syria, Africa, and Singapore.

Although the important role of the SPGNA in galvanizing foreign missions has been overlooked in recent decades, this has not always been the case. In a 1937 sesquicentennial publication, George E. E. Lindquist noted that the SPGNA “may with apparent justice lay claim to be a forerunner of missionary organizations, established in the early part of the 19th century (several of which have celebrated their centennial in recent years). . . In fact, the modern missionary movement came into being, indirectly at least, as a result of the impetus furnished for the conversion of the North American Indians.” Twentieth-century commentators continued to see the SPGNA as the legacy of colonial missionaries, even as they recognized that the contexts had changed dramatically. In 1933, George Hinman published a study of missionary work among Natives for the SPGNA, in which he noted: “This psychology of a subjugated race constitutes one of the most serious obstacles in the way of the work by the government and the churches to bring the Indian into a homogenous American life. The problem is not as simple as it was when Roger Williams, and John Eliot and David Zeisberger began their work with the Indians.” Similarly, Lindquist’s sesquicentennial publication included reference to John Eliot and an image of Samson Occom.

Nineteenth-century global missionary societies—including the SPGNA—had self-consciously placed themselves as the spiritual descendants of colonial evangelistic efforts among Natives. But there was a deep irony in this claim to spiritual heritage, for even as these global efforts built upon early New England activities, the evangelistic project in New England was far from complete (as defined by whites, at least). In many ways, the turn to global missions was in fact spurred by the possibility of more productive prospects overseas than among the somewhat religiously recalcitrant Natives on the East Coast who were largely Christianized and had been repeatedly evangelized for almost two hundred years. The leaders of the ABCFM certainly understood this to be the case. In its second annual report, the ABCFM noted that although there were still “many millions” of unconverted Natives in North America, and the attempts to fully evangelize them “have been attended with so many discouragements,” the solution was to shift missionary efforts toward the “more promising field” of southern Asia without entirely giving up on Native evangelization. The SPNGA leaders agreed regarding the difficulty of Indian evangelization, although they never shifted their primary focus away from Native Americans. Instead, they placed their own work in a larger expanse of foreign and even global missions, even though they never actually sent their own missionaries to those more “more promising” global fields.

In the end, the idea of a Mohegan Christian Indian youth selling common hazelnuts to white Norwich residents to support global Christian missions may indeed be the completion of a full circle rather than an anomaly to be explained. The American Protestant turn to “foreign” missions was built on the back of a far longer history of Euro-American Protestant missions to North American Indians, and indeed, often in conjunction with Natives themselves. The SPGNA, as Lindquist noted, stood in between these two worlds—colonial and early republic, Native and global—and, indeed, facilitated the expansion of one into the other.

Frontispiece portrait of Mrs. Sarah Lanman (Huntington) Smith, painted by Samuel L. Waldo, engraved by John Sartain, taken from Memoir of Mrs. Sarah Lanman Smith, late of the mission in Syria, Under the Direction of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, by Edward W. Hooker, pastor of the First Congregational Church, Bennington, VT (Boston, 1839). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Edward E. Andrews for his insightful comments on a previous draft of this essay, Nan Wolverton for her help with the selection of the images, and the staff at the Newberry Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, American Antiquarian Society, and the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum for their guidance and aid.

Capital in the Twenty-first Century in the Eighteenth Century; or, Piketty and the Humanities

This forum began at the spring 2015 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) conference in Los Angeles, where James Mulholland and I organized a roundtable to discuss what Thomas Piketty’s then-bestseller Capital in the Twenty-first Century might mean for scholars and students of the eighteenth century working in the humanities. After all, the book’s economic history does reach back as far as the 1700s in its effort to understand the present, and Piketty makes frequent and surprising references to novels, especially those by Jane Austen and Honoré Balzac. While a great deal has already been written on the book, the vast majority of that writing has been by economists, and even when political scientists and philosophers have engaged with the book (as in the online seminar at Crooked Timber), questions about Piketty and the humanities still seem underrepresented in the dialogue.

This forum therefore follows up on our roundtable by launching such a conversation. Taken together, the short essays gathered here point out the ways in which numbers and graphs constitute narratives, and insist that data’s stories are just as constructed as those found in words and novels. It moreover behooves us to bring the tools of the humanities to interrogate these narratives and the stories they tell in order to understand better how they work on readers (both now and in the past), to identify what they include and exclude, and why. To this end, we hope this forum points toward possibilities for developing a critical business humanities, an endeavor made all the more necessary in a neoliberal age in which the human is increasingly defined in terms of numbers.

Julia Abramson shows us how an understanding of the knowledge and discourse practices of the French Enlightenment helps us to recognize the larger political project of Piketty’s book and its surprising success among the U.S. reading public. For Abramson, Piketty’s data is at once a magnet attracting the attention of economists, and a screen that shelters an argument for general readers about social and political forms of justice. Dwight Codr asks where to locate the human and determine its status within the field of political economy that emerged in the eighteenth century. Bringing the novelist Henry Fielding to bear on Piketty’s archive and arguments, Codr offers a reverse reading to Abramson’s: rather than using numbers to smuggle in an argument on behalf of the human, Codr asks if Piketty uses the tools of the humanities (such as novels) to cloak the inhumanity of economistic understanding. Olivera Jokic turns this dial further to suggest that Piketty treats seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political economists as storytellers rather than proto-scientists. Thinking about Piketty’s own data as a narrative, Jokic asks whether there might be a poetics of statistics.

Suvir Kaul interrogates Piketty’s curious blindness to the long historical relationship between capitalism and colonialism. While he brings an extended archive of eighteenth-century novels and other texts to bear on Piketty’s narrative, Kaul also suggests that this oversight is perhaps less the result of Piketty’s limited literary archive than his mode of reading it. Piketty emerges as a financial reader of Jane Austen rather than a materialist one who might recognize the often violent relations of production and exchange beneath the apparent banality of economizing numbers. Piketty may read novels, but he reads them rather like a business major after all. James Mulholland exposes Piketty as both such a reader and writer—a business allegorist who, for example, names economic problems for literary characters—and wonders whether such an approach (one aligned with the field of behavioral economics) is really the humanities at all. Mulholland concludes by turning to the work of digital humanists who have shown—using the very algorithmic tools on which the business world relies—that while Piketty’s economic numbers may be unassailable, his literary ones are fundamentally flawed. But Mulholland also raises the question of whether digital humanities marks the ascent of a neoliberal literary studies, or whether it promises an antidote to neoliberalism’s increasing encroach on the academy.

We thank the editors of Common-place for hosting this forum, and look forward to discussing with readers the ideas, questions, and possibilities raised by these essays.

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

Michelle Burnham is professor and chair of the English Department at Santa Clara University. She has published widely on early American literature, including books and articles that aim to bring the fields of literary and economic studies into greater dialogue with each other.

The Technology of Democracy

The material history of the U.S. ballot

Check one:

Americans vote by secret ballot: Yes  No 

Voting is a private act: Yes  No 

If you answered yes to both questions, your response would reflect the Wikipedia entry for voting booth. But I was interested to discover that my early September Google search on “privacy of the voting booth” ranked the Wikipedia definition at number five. The ahistorical, low-tech definition is elbowed out by references to the technology of voting privacy: four companies offer their catalogs of products and accessories for election officers.

The technology of voting is at the heart of essays by Patricia Crain, Lisa Gitelman, and Laura Rigal. Their thoughts on this subject were prompted by questions posed by the notorious hanging chads of November 2000. But eight years later, they remain intensely relevant. The nature and function of the ballot, the ballot box, and the voting process, these papers make clear, have been contested matters for a very long time.

The disputed result of the 2000 election brought questions of materiality and meaning, which are frequently studied in academic settings, to the streets and the courts. The eerie notion of the weight that could be sustained by the seemingly fragile hanging chad found strong and suggestive parallels in the historical record illuminated in the three papers that constitute this section of the Common-place special issue on politics.

Ever since these provocative papers were presented at the SHARP Conference in Williamsburg in July 2001, they have been seeking a venue that would ensure their publication at an election season. As the editor of a print publication that is much less nimble than Common-place, I was delighted when this journal’s editor and guest editor, Edward Gray and Jeff Pasley, offered a place for these fine essays.

The ballot is the focal point of each of these essays. Its paper, ink, and mise-en-page (layout)—its authorship, publication, and reception—each of these elements of the ballot conveys a message about its origins, intentions, and meaning. Along the way this object, which would seem to be fixed, offers many opportunities for human intervention and interpretation. Patricia Crain worked in the collection of paper ballots at the American Antiquarian Society (four boxes containing eleven folders of ballots from across Massachusetts for national, state, and local elections ranging from 1811 to 1888, when the party “ticket” was replaced by the secret ballot). In her discussion of twenty-seven of these ballots, she recreates the context for which the ballot was created. In few instances were they plain and unadorned; rather they have been preserved as examples of printed ephemera that reflect conscious choices of technology such as paper dimensions, brightly colored inks, and graphic elements. As Crain indicates, these choices allowed for a high level of political advertising to be embedded within the paper on which a vote would be cast. These graphic elements included references to the preservation of the Union (1860), a Union naval victory over the Confederacy (1864), and a last-ditch effort seeking home rule for the South in 1876 using candidate Samuel Tilden’s engraved signature.

Lisa Gitelman moves the story forward into the era of the voting machine, in particular, the 1980s era VotoMatic—the patented alternative to physically marking a ballot with a pencil. Activated by a voter who made a selection by punching a hole in a card, the results of the vote were tabulated by a sorting device and prepared for dissemination. Congress had a long history of skepticism about machines and voting, although those debates seemed to have receded into the mist by 2000 when the results in the Florida presidential balloting were so blurred that their interpretation fell to the courts.

Laura Rigal’s reading of George Caleb Bingham’s The County Election has particular resonance when read in conjunction with the essays by Crain and Gitelman. Although Bingham was responding to an election lost by a narrow margin, previous interpretations of this painting portrayed it as representing a golden age of voting. Not so. Rigal reads the painting as a statement by an artist who had been actively involved in Whig politics in the1840s, as painter of banners, speech-giver, and ultimately candidate. This unsuccessful foray into politics resulted in this painting—set in his hometown, Arrow Rock, Missouri—which captured the racial and social dynamics of a “paperless,” viva voce election. In contrast to the impression provided by The County Election, nearly half of the town’s one thousand residents were African American. The political and economic lives of the riverfront, commercial community depicted here and its base in Saline County has been richly documented in historical studies. Rigal’s reflections on the visual representation of the hot-button issues of a contested election and its subsequent recount collapse the distance between that election and those of our own day. One might have thought that such problems would have been swept away with the introduction of the secret ballot after 1888.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Caroline F. Sloat is director of scholarly publications at the American Antiquarian Society and editor of the society’s journal, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society.

Surfing and Navigating

Or, life with books

Some months back one of my favorite newspaper columnists, Leonard Pitts Jr., departed from his usual subjects to wax about the fate of reading. Pitts writes for the Miami Herald, and his column often appears in my local paper, The Tallahassee Democrat. Pitts has an ear for political B.S., especially when it cloaks racism. It turns out that when Pitts is not chiding the ignorant and reactive among us, he enjoys books, many of them very long.

Unfortunately, Pitts tells us, he’s been feeling less and less able to indulge this passion. The old days when he’d curl up with a long novel seem to have given way to rushed gulps of prose on those rare occasions when he can actually pick up a book. This personal change, Pitts suggests, reflects a much broader problem—one about which we’ve heard a great deal lately. Pitts wonders if the problem doesn’t owe something to a change in the way we read—a change brought about by the Internet. In place of the ideal—sustained, engrossed investment in a single book—we’ve all come to exemplify the new reality: flitting about among bits of cyber-text like bees in a flower bed, we’ve become habituated to a frenetic and impatient kind of reading, one that makes sustained attention to a single text very difficult.

Much as I admire Leonard Pitts, I think he and legions of others who share his fear have gotten this one wrong. The idea that we’ve lost the capacity for sustained absorption in what’s between the covers of a book is based on a conception of reading and of books that has never really held true. Let me illustrate my point in two ways, one, autobiographical and the other historical.

In terms of the autobiographical: although I edit an online journal and spend part of every day searching the Web for bits and pieces of information—information for columns such as this one, for undergraduate lectures, for scholarly papers, and for a brain that irresistibly craves such inevitably disappointing data as my latest Amazon.com ranking—I can’t stop thinking about books. This obsession is constant, long-standing, and at times verges on mania. The Web has done nothing to temper my interest in books. In addition to thinking about books, I read books—many of them. But my experience as a reader does not exactly follow the pattern put forth by people like Nicholas Carr, who’s recent Atlantic Monthly article, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” (which Pitts mentions), contains the following observation: “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle … My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

What exactly is this “deep reading”? If my experience is any indication, it’s a red herring. For me, reading printed books has always included a certain amount of drift, even a bit of Jet Skiing. Almost immediately upon starting a book I ask myself—usually while reading—what will I read next: should it be more fiction? a history book? current events? pure escape? enrichment? This is not simply the stuff of daydreams. These are relational questions: what most naturally follows from what I’m reading now? What will add to the experience of the present book? Will it be something related by topic or by genre? The process is almost identical to what happens when I go hunting on the Internet for answers to a research question. But the cognitive parallels of reading and Web surfing don’t begin to capture the depth and extent of my thinking about books.

I never leave home without a book—what if the car breaks down? what if I get to my kids’ school early? what if I’m stuck in an elevator? This always involves a choice. Should I bring something half-read, or should it be something uncracked? When I go out of town I spend more time choosing my reading matter than packing my clothes. I can never pick just one book. If I’m on vacation, I may need something related to work—something grounding to counter whatever escape reading I’ve brought. If I’m taking a work trip, I have to balance work reading with escape—who doesn’t need a little schlock, even after the most congenial conference? Then there’s the ever-aching fear that I might’ve selected badly. What if I’m stuck on a plane with a bad book? To control for such catastrophes I always select several titles when I travel, even if I’m gone for just one night. You never know when you might be lying awake in some hotel room wishing you had a nice emotionally antiseptic book about the Reformation or a little historical fiction à la E. L. Doctorow.

My bedside table looks like a Joseph Cornell box for the book obsessed. The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review are piled next to disorderly stacks of novels, history books, and miscellany. I rarely get more than fifty pages into something without adding something else to the piles. At the moment, I’m halfway through Roberto Bolano’s Savage Detectives, but because I like to bring unread books on vacation, I left Bolano a few weeks ago when we went to the beach. Now joining Bolano next to the bed are David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (I’m on page 63), and in the adjoining pile sits Arthur Herman’s To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Emma Rothscild’s Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment, and an old paperback copy of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In a third stack are Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly and a copy of the second volume of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. I haven’t cracked O’Brian yet—I’m holding off like a kid saving that last piece of Halloween candy.

The bed-side detritus can create its own microclimate of anxiety. (Don’t add more to the pile until you’ve actually finished something; but what to finish? Do I care enough about the British Navy to read Herman’s 569 pages on the subject? I loved what I read of Bolano, but is this really the time for surrealist satire? How likely is Rothschild to answer my question about Adam Smith’s views on money?) So, I occasionally move unread or partially read books from the bed-side table to one of four specially designated shelves in my book case.

I should confess that long books have a prominent place on these shelves of partially read or unread books, and I could rehearse the tired claim that modern life means no time for an eight-hundred-pager. But I read at least two hundred pages a week. Surely within the month I could manage something as gripping as Anna Karenina or Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, both of which have been sitting unread for at least two years.

I think the real reason for my aversion to very long books has to do with another aspect of my book fetish: a need to display what I’ve read. I could place on the shelf a well-worn copy of Thomas Pynchon’s 1085-page Against the Day, but in the same six weeks of reading, I could add to my “books I’ve read” shelves (as I’ve done over the past few months) Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism, Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History, Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution, Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Frank Norris’s The Pit, and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. But the array on the shelf—the Ishiguro, a mass-market paperback bought at Gatwick airport, and the Norris and Dreiser with their cool green Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics covers—gives me vast pleasure. It reminds me of what I was thinking when I decided to follow Norris with Dreiser and why I got interested in Strauss after reading Popper, whom I came to after reading books by Mark Lilla and John Gray (the John Gray who did not write Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus).

It is partly this sense that my books constitute a sort of map of my mind that explains a secondary but closely related obsession. There is nothing that gives me more pleasure than book shopping. I would have to acknowledge that I find this more pleasurable than actual reading, the latter involving that ever-present fear that I’m reading one thing when I should be reading something else, something better, more entertaining, or more informative. I spend entire days browsing bookstore shelves. I troll Amazon.com endlessly, dumping things in my shopping cart in preparation for a strange act of ritual self-flagellation where I purge what I don’t really “need,” a virtual reenactment of a ritual I’ve performed in every decent bookshop between here and London.

In order to manage my book-buying habit, I’ve been developing a twelve-step plan that involves as the first step (I haven’t figured out what the other eleven will be) creating lists. I find that if I write down titles I crave, there’s a chance I’ll eventually lose interest and save myself some money. The consequence of this is that I have book lists everywhere—on my computer desktop is a .doc file entitled “Book List,” which includes such titles as Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society and a novel called I, Roger Williams. There are also paper lists and my Amazon.com lists, which include my “Shopping Cart,” my “Saved for Later” list, and my “Wish List.”

All of these somewhat compulsive behaviors require thought—substantial, sometimes even deep thought. When I’m browsing in a book shop, I’m thinking about what I’ve read and what I will read, what I happen to be writing about and what I might want to write about in the future. The titles I stack in my arms are likely to have some relation to these things, although that relation can be distant and obscure, which is precisely why the books become important. The day I bought Frank Norris’s The Pit, a book about money and greed that arises around the Chicago futures market at the turn of the twentieth century, I was thinking about the history of money. Norris led me to Dreiser, which I thought might tell me something about where Darwin (an intellectual inspiration for these “Naturalist” novelists) might fit in contemporary views of money.

This sense that one’s books are a map of one’s mind is something I acquired from my older brother Steven who, at the age of fourteen, decided not to spend the summer at the country club (where I, aged ten, was eating Francheesies—a healthful all-beef kosher dog wrapped in bacon and topped with melted American cheese—and tumbling off the high dive, until swim cramps sent me to the basketball court to play bean-ball with two obese twin brothers who’s names I can’t recall). Instead, he spent the entire summer on my parents’ sofa reading the fifty-two volumes of Britannica’s Great Books, which my father had received in 1952 as a college graduation gift. I don’t think anybody was under any illusions that the full set was ever actually read. But its presence on my brother’s shelf, displacing the Dungeons and Dragons figures and a Frank Frazetta coffee-table book, suggested what one person could know.

Once in college, Steven started coming home with all sorts of interesting looking things—I remember most the Marx-Engels Reader and A. O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being. Eventually, I began to do more than simply marvel at the ever-swelling shelves in his bedroom. I began to buy my own books, many of which I actually read. The habit really took off in my third year of college, the point at which books supplanted records as the media of addiction. Books yielded longer-term pleasure (who wouldn’t tire of the most depressing rock band of all time, Joy Division, who’s single “Love Will Tear us Apart Again” was among those featured on the first mix tape I made for my Sony Walkman, purchased in the summer of 1982 at one of those electronics shops that’s perpetually going out of business, à la Zohan), they were cheaper than records, and nobody seemed too bothered by a college kid spending his money on books. Two stamped steel bookends that had previously embraced some of my parents’ books (Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer among them) had migrated to my desk where they became the cornerstones of my first library.

In those days there were literally dozens of used bookshops. That was Chicago. And we were Chicagoans, an apparently book-happy people. Fifty-seventh street between the Illinois Central tracks and University Avenue on the South Side; Lincoln Avenue between Fullerton and Addison; Clark Street all the way to Evanston. In the summer I’d ride the book circuit on my bicycle. It would start on the Southside, at Powell’s, then up the lakefront to Fullerton or Diversey, then over to Clark and Lincoln, and then up Clark to Evanston. I’d come home with a knapsack filled with used books: a pocket paperback edition of Bellow’s Herzog; another of Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition; a Kierkegaard Reader; a first edition of The American Hegelians, edited by William Goetzman, which I’d snatched from the “Recent Arrivals” table of O’Gara and Wilson Booksellers. All of these books would be read, carefully annotated, and proudly displayed in book cases that had evolved into that undergraduate apartment fixture: 1 x 10 pine boards stacked between gray cinder blocks.

The need to buy and display my books has meant that I have a very strange relationship with lending libraries. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel borrowed from a library. The very idea is anathema to me. Half the pleasure in reading a book comes from the ritual closure involved in placing the read tome in the correct place on the correct shelf. This is a carefully weighed decision, sometimes based on when a book was read, sometimes based on its subject matter, and sometimes according to its cover design. (I try to keep most of my now out-of-print green-covered Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics in one place.) In terms of the utility of book ownership, other than Saul Bellow’s novels and a few history titles, I rarely reread my books. But I do like to mark my books with pencils (never, never, a pen!) or by folding the corner of a page—usually to mark a choice quote. Hence, I note in Barry Unsworth’s Losing Nelson, the corner of page 55 is folded over. It contains a passage I thought I might read in a class I teach on Captain Cook.

Sea battles in those days so peculiarly designed for mutilations and maimings. A hail of missles. Shrapnel from the cannon-shot, razor-edged projectiles from sliced and splintered timbers, whizzed through the crowded decks. Selective, however—death not a reaper but a sort of crazed sniper, here a face shorn off, there a leg carried away. Men rarely died in swaths. Sometimes, of course, when a ship was raked fore and aft—this was the fire Horatio had to suffer at Trafalgar, when he drove into the French line at right angles. But death in daily dress was the gouger, the slicer, the lord of eviscerations and lopped limbs. And he, my Horatio, pacing back and forth on the quarterdeck, pausing to observe the progress of the battle, stars and ribbons prominent on his breast, showing no haste, showing no fear, as if he were out on a Sunday morning stroll, looking at birds or clouds through his telescope.

Given my line of work, I do of course make heavy use of libraries. But this rarely has anything to do with true reading and doesn’t even begin to sate my addiction. The books I borrow are almost an entirely different species of thing from the ones I purchase. I feel no compulsion to actually read them or otherwise render them monuments to my personal learning. I don’t even know that I look at them as things to be read. They are more properly things to be pillaged, a lot like a Website or a catalog. They contain small bits of information to be mined; one roots around in them and picks at them like an intellectual vulture. But almost never are they accorded the level of intimacy granted the books I’ve purchased for my own library.

My point in all this is simply that for me reading is about much more than one person and one book. It is a broadly relational exercise, facilitating kinds of networks of knowledge not unlike those described long ago by that philosophical progenitor of the Internet, Marshall McLuhan. When I read, I think about other books, I think about acquiring books, about the relationships among books read and not-yet read, and I codify all those relationships in my personal library.

This omnivorous and omnidirectional relationship to books is, of course, not unique to me (there are plenty of bibliophiles out there who could teach me a thing or two about book worship). Nor is it unique in the history of the book. Since its invention in the fifteenth century, the printed book has given rise to all sorts of variations on the one-reader-one-book mode of reading. From the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, readers, from Erasmus to Thomas Jefferson to Mark Twain, assembled apercus, bon mots, and notable passages into commonplace books. Virtually everybody who was anybody in the Western world kept one of these reader’s digests. Before the mechanization of printing and papermaking made books widely affordable, these books could function as a virtual library, charting one’s path through the material of reading.

In the late nineteenth century, commonplacing gave way to scrapbooking, a craft that allowed readers to recombine fragments from books, magazines, and newspapers, with cheap prints, photographs, and other illustrative matter. Again, these scrapbooks could function in lieu of personal libraries, or they could—as commonplace books often did as well—supplement personal libraries as a roadmap of one’s learning.

Even the nineteenth-century novel, the thing that most epitomizes the one-reader-one-book ideal, often appeared in serial form. Readers of Dickens, Stowe, Trollope, Melville, Twain, and many others got their fixes from installments that appeared in newspapers, magazines, or cheap, paperbound installments. If a reader intended to settle in for an intimate and engrossing week with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she would have to await the appearance of the full text; if she wished to have that text assembled into a single convenient package called a book, she might have to pay a book binder or sew the binding herself—all of which made the book an even more personalized object and something likely to be displayed as a source of self-knowledge and an artifact of familial gentility.

These habits of book ownership and reading are often related to technological change. Obviously the printing press changed the way people read, but it seems to me that since then, changes in information technology have done more to change what people read than how they read. Gutenberg’s moveable type and the linotype machine may have made all sorts of texts available to all sorts of people, but as the universe of print expanded and as people found themselves having to navigate an ever-expanding textual realm, the basic habits of reading that Leonard Pitts and so many others associate with the Internet have long been in place. As long as there have been books, there have been readers surfing and navigating.

Perhaps, then, I can leave Leonard Pitts with one final suggestion. Rather than seek calm solitude in what’s on the book’s pages, build yourself a library and marvel at its calming effects. You will immediately grasp what Borges meant when he wrote, “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”

Who Publishes an Early American Book?

From Codex to Kindle

Content with slow uncertain gains,
With heart and hand prepar’d he stood
To send his works to distant plains,
And hills beyond the Ohio—flood…
—Philip Freneau, “On the Death of a Republican Printer”

The publication of American writing has a long and thoroughly transatlantic history. The first printing press in British America was up and running in Cambridge by 1639. But for the rest of that century and beyond, the vast majority of books purchased and read by colonial subjects were printed in England. American printers tended to concentrate on short books, almanacs, broadsides, newspapers, and other ephemera, whereas major works by American authors, including Roger Williams’s A Key into the Language of America (1643), Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America (1650), Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), and Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects (1773), typically got shipped to England for publication and were then reimported back to the colonies. Even Benjamin Franklin, who published the first novel in America (he reprinted Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1743) and a number of other books besides, had his own Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751) first published as a pamphlet in London. (His Autobiography —that quintessentially American book—was first published in its entirety in Paris, in a French translation, in 1828.)

By the time Franklin the printer became a leader of the American rebellion against the British crown, the domestic production of printed matter—as of other homespun goods, like blankets and soap—was understood to be essential both to the immediate cause of economic and political independence and to the ongoing work of national self-definition. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776), Joel Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus (1787), Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison’s The Federalist (1788), William Bartram’s Travels (1791), Elihu Hubbard Smith’s American Poems (1793), Hannah Foster’s The Coquette (1797), and Charles Brockden Brown’s quartet of major novels (1798-1800) were all first published in North America. All of these books were reprinted in England, and many other American books, including J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), and John Neal’s Brother Jonathan (1825), were still initially printed abroad. But the transformation of the book trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—by new technologies, increased automation, hybrid formats, cheaper distribution, population growth, and the conjunction of literacy and leisure—dramatically enhanced the competitiveness of modern American publishing and made it possible for cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York to emerge as regional and protonational publishing centers to rival London.

The rivalry intensified, of course, as the stakes—both commercial and cultural—continued to grow. Englishman Sydney Smith’s notorious animadversion (“In the four quarters of the globe,” he asked in 1820, “who reads an American book?”) was already out of step with the times, for this was precisely the moment when books by American authors, such as Washington Irving, were becoming both popular and profitable internationally. Antebellum American authors from James Fenimore Cooper and Lydia Huntley Sigourney to William Cullen Bryant and Nathaniel Hawthorne did not need Smith to inspire them to pursue a literary program of cultural nationalism on the world stage.

As it turned out, what many ambitious American authors really did need was an extension of U.S. copyright protection to foreign authors. Rather than take big financial risks on protected but unproven American authors, many American publishers preferred to maximize profits through cheap, unauthorized (but legal) reprintings of works by foreign authors, who were not only denied compensation but also often received no acknowledgment of authorship whatsoever. This state of affairs was hard on authors on both sides of the Atlantic. And, because of the promiscuous diffusion of unauthorized and uncredited reprinting, it also made hash of notions like Sydney Smith’s (and our own) that the national literatures of Britain and the United States were, in the early nineteenth century, perfectly discrete and readily distinguishable from one another.

More meaningful differentiation came later, if fitfully. In 1845, for example, New York’s Wiley and Putnam launched their Library of American Books series, which, under the direction of Evert Duyckinck, contracted with a formidable array of American authors for original works, including Margaret Fuller’s Papers on Literature and Art; Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, and Other Poems; William Gilmore Simms’s The Wigwam and the Cabin; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse; and Herman Melville’s Typee. By 1847, however, the series was already defunct—insufficiently profitable in an era when there was still no easy conformation of literary culture to cultural nationalism. After midcentury, the increasing centralization of markets and, ultimately, the emergence of international copyright law in the 1890s helped make “American literature” into both a more profitable and a more culturally self-assured phenomenon. The emergence and later (often much later) canonization of such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Henry James seem, at least in retrospect, to mark the certain beginnings of a consequential and lasting national literary heritage, as do the retrieval and republication of earlier American authors in projects like Charles L. Webster and Company’s ambitious eleven-volume series A Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (1887-1890). This massive anthology reached back across three centuries to assemble and nationalize well over one thousand authors, from John Smith, William Strachey, and John Cotton to Catharine Maria Sedgwick, John James Audubon, and William Ellery Channing, along with up-to-date selections from the post-Civil War period.

In the twentieth century, works by early American authors gained new levels of support and prestige from both public and private sectors. In 1934, Congress established the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). Since then, the NHPRC has supported the publication of an extraordinary number and range of American writers, including William Penn, Elizabeth Drinker, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and Chief John Ross, to name just a few. In 1963, the Modern Language Association—a professional association of scholars of literature and language—launched its Center for Editions of American Authors (now the Center for Scholarly Editions or CSE). To date, dozens of CSE-supported and approved editions of early American books have appeared, including Edward Taylor’s Upon the Types of the Old Testament, Cotton Mather’s autobiography Paterna, the poetry of Benjamin Tompson, novels and other writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Sermons, and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.

These editions have been a magnificent gift to devotees of American literature and history. However, the editorial apparatuses that augment these editions are often quite elaborate, based as they are on exhaustive research on manuscripts, variant printings, and other materials. Consequently, they sometimes distract readers whose interest in these books is not the same as a professional scholar’s. Some volumes are bulky and hard to hold. Others are prohibitively expensive, while others still have lapsed out of print.

Thus, there have been complaints. The most vehement of all came not from a “civilian” reader but from one of the twentieth century’s most important literary critics, Edmund Wilson, whose 1968 screed in The New York Review of Books asserted that these new scholarly editions of “our classics” were not only incompetently edited and poorly designed in and of themselves but were also “obstructive to their republication in any other form.” The form Wilson himself envisioned was something along the lines of France’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: compact, affordable editions that would be newly and responsibly edited but less cumbersomely annotated. (Readers familiar with the Pléiade series, launched in 1931 and numbering well over five hundred volumes to date, will recognize Wilson’s view of it to be somewhat idealized. For all of their many virtues, the Pléiade volumes are unevenly edited, and they are quite expensive, even when purchased in France.)

The Modern Language Association survived Wilson’s assault, and its Center for Scholarly Editions is still going strong—without being “obstructive” to the republication of American classics “in any other form.” Indeed, Wilson’s vision of an American Pléiade was more or less realized in 1979 with the founding of the Library of America (LOA), a not-for-profit publisher of, in their own words, “the best and most significant American writing.” There are now roughly two hundred titles in print, and the average price per volume today is little more than half that of the average Pléiade volume.

The first books LOA published, in 1982, were Walt Whitman’s Poetry and Prose, Herman Melville’s Typee, Omoo, and Mardi, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Oldtown Folks, and The Minister’s Wooing, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales and Sketches. Since then, LOA’s list has expanded in many directions to include writers from the early seventeenth century to the present day and every conceivable type of writing, from sermons, elegies, speeches, and autobiographies to pulp fiction, journalism, letters, and librettos. The editorial impulse has been expansive, without descending to the merely documentary. “Literary interest,” “greatness,” “quality,” “richness”—the language of aesthetic value abounds in LOA’s promotional material. In a brief film commissioned for its twenty-fifth anniversary, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. pointedly assures viewers that the series seeks to embrace “the rich variety of the American tradition in all of its dimensions … without sacrificing standards … Never does the Library of America say, ‘We’re including these texts because of diversity, for self-esteem reasons, to be ethnic cheerleaders.'” LOA thus embraces its taste-making and canonizing power—though always with a lusty appetite for what its founding president, Daniel Aaron, called America’s “interstitial literature.” “I mean,” he explained in 1981, “those odd works in all forms and genres that collectively add so much texture and color to American writing. In bringing out the most notable writing of travelers, naturalists, social theorists, scholars, and artists, we disclose the luxuriance of a literary landscape so often described in the past as parched and empty.”

Neil Gustafson, a professional actor, portrayed Isaiah Thomas in a one-person play called Preserving All Others, which was performed as a public program in the fall of 1999 and sponsored by the AAS. Gustafson also performed Thomas as part of a K-12 program called Isaiah Thomas—Patriot Printer. The latter program toured to schools and community groups and was witnessed by over seven thousand people during its seven year run from 2000 to 2007. Here, Mr. Gustafson is standing before Old Number One. Isaiah's original printing press now on display in Antiquarian Hall. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts — Neil Gustafson, a professional actor, portrayed Isaiah Thomas in a one-person play called Preserving All Others, which was performed as a public program in the fall of 1999 and sponsored by the AAS. Gustafson also performed Thomas as part of a K-12 program called Isaiah Thomas—Patriot Printer. The latter program toured to schools and community groups and was witnessed by over seven thousand people during its seven year run from 2000 to 2007. Here, Mr. Gustafson is standing before Old Number One. Isaiah’s original printing press now on display in Antiquarian Hall. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

Indeed, LOA relishes its sense of itself as a “rescuer” and “guardian” of American literary treasure, holding to orthodox notions of literary value while also practicing a limited but healthy ecumenicalism. Very much unlike the publishers of the Pléiade, which brought out French translations of Poe, Tolstoy, and Plutarch before getting around to an edition of Proust, LOA is relentlessly nationalist. It publishes English-speaking North American writers almost without exception (a notable exception—one that definitely proves the rule—being a newly commissioned translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America). It publishes English-language writing by immigrants, like Vladimir Nabokov, and by Americans who preferred to live elsewhere, like Henry James and Paul Bowles; by misunderstood patriots, like Thomas Paine, and by misunderstood traitors, like Ezra Pound; by founders, slaves, presidents, conservationists, tycoons, and sometime-anarchists.

Who else might belong in an American Pléiade? According to LOA’s 2008 board of directors’ report, approved authors for possible future volumes include Civil War diarist George Templeton Strong. That’s fair enough, but why not Fanny Kemble? T. S. Eliot, sure. But how about W. H. Auden? Toni Morrison, positively. But where’s Caryl Phillips? Many factors influence such decisions, of course. But it’s not inappropriate to keep asking such questions, especially in light of publisher Max Rudin’s dual characterization of LOA as both “an authoritative national library of American writing” and “a cultural work-in-progress.” The fate of national literatures, including our own, is difficult to predict as nation states themselves undergo the prodigious crises and transformations of late capitalism.

How might earlier American writing continue to fare in this light? So far, there are only about two dozen LOA volumes of writing chiefly or exclusively from before 1850—though these include three of their all-time bestsellers: Thomas Jefferson’s Writings, Thomas Paine’s Collected Writings, and Edgar Allan Poe’s Poetry and Tales. Certain authors who may or may not someday have volumes of their own, such as Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, already appear in compilation volumes, like American Sermons and American Sea Writing. Other pre-1850 authors—Sarah Kemble Knight, Samson Occom, and Maria Gowen Brooks among them—who will never have an LOA volume of their own (if only because their known works wouldn’t fill out the minimum six hundred or so pages stipulated in the production parameters) appear in these and other compilations, including American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.

Then there is the issue of completeness. There is already an excellent LOA volume of some of John Smith’s writings. But will there be another? Do we need another, when we’ve already got Philip Barbour’s three-volume The Complete Works of Captain John Smith? What about William Bradford, who has neither an LOA edition nor any modern authoritative edition of his complete writings? These are questions not only about what the market will bear and about how we might recognize meaningful national continuities between, say, William Bradford and William Styron, but also about what readers presently want and about what they might come to value (or reject) only later. How do you maximize and maintain over time the ready availability of diverse American writings amidst twenty-first-century commercial and cultural vicissitudes?

The answer today would seem to be electronic publishing. LOA doesn’t yet—and may never—try to reach the consumer market with the digitized versions they nevertheless produce and store of all of the books on their list. Someday, perhaps soon, the astral light now cast by LOA’s American Pléiade will be complemented, if not entirely supplanted, by the worldwide glow of server farms, to which all sorts of contemporary readers are already so often turning for reading material of all kinds. More and more, we point our computers’ browsers at what we want to read, instead of lacing up for a walk to the library or the bookstore.

We head to Websites like Google Books, right now the dominant player in the mass digitization of printed matter culled from major libraries. The prospective vision (on which Google trades) of open or minimally restricted access to the entire documentary archive of humanity makes this project fantastically exciting. And the potential consequences for global democratic society are revolutionary almost to the point of being unglimpsable. But the reality of Google Books is quite different, as the most recent legal efforts to rationalize the balance between private interests (of authors, publishers, and Google itself) and the public good make soberingly clear.

We also point our browsers at some much smaller, noncommercial Websites already highly valued by scholars of early American literature. The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition, for example, is producing a digital archive of all of Brown’s uncollected writings, and its creators have designed it, crucially, to complement rather than supplant the six-volume Kent State edition of The Novels and Related Works and LOA’s own one-volume edition of three of Brown’s novels. And Yale’s massive edition of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, projected to reach forty-seven print volumes, is also being digitized in collaboration with the Packard Humanities Institute. Such projects, however, are cost- and labor-intensive, in part because they adhere to such strict editorial and production standards.

Many of us are also devoted to online archives that combine the ambitious scope of Google Books with the not-for-profit ethos of the more academically oriented projects. The Open Content Alliance, for example, is a collaboration among commercial, not-for-profit, and governmental entities, and Project Gutenberg is a more open, all-volunteer, minimally regulated experiment akin to Wikipedia. Both are ready suppliers of numerous early American texts.

Which of these various models and initiatives will continue to thrive and adapt to changing reading behaviors—and how reading behaviors will be changed by them—is hard to predict. Digital display interfaces, such as the Amazon Kindle and the eSlick Reader, currently vie with print-on-demand technologies. Both may turn out to be mere interim stages in the pursuit of what presently seems to be the Holy Grail of electronic ink and paper technologies: a digital book one could leaf through just as if it were made of conventional paper, a single physical volume that could display any downloaded text. In the not-too-distant future, the volume of Poe you hold in your hand could in a matter of seconds be transmuted into a volume of Freneau. Whether Freneau will, as a consequence, be more often or more appreciatively read remains to be seen.

A Newly Discovered Map by Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz

From Mississippi Bubble to “Fleuve St. Louis,” a new portrait of America’s greatest river

Many readers of Common-place know how serendipity can aid in archival research. Some scholars spend days or weeks as well as thousands of dollars to work in an archive, only to find little that advances their project. Others, more fortunate, travel to an archive to read one thing but then chance upon an unexpected document that sends their research in new directions. I am grateful to count myself among a few who have encountered a completely unexpected new document, without even going to look for it, because it found me.

For many years I have had an abiding interest in the eighteenth-century French Louisiana colonist Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, who lived in Louisiana from 1718 to 1734 and wrote a three-volume, 1300-page Histoire de la Louisiane, published in Paris in 1758. In part because his book has never been translated in its entirety into English, Le Page has received limited attention from specialists in colonial American literature and history. To redress this, I have translated about a quarter of the text into English, including his ethnography of the Natchez Indians and narrative of their massacre of 240 French colonists at Natchez in 1729. My efforts have been sporadic, performed in spare hours with occasional help from French-speaking research assistants. I cannot boast of strong html-programming skills, and my Web page, now combined with my further work on Le Page’s rival François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, has the appearance of an amateur production. But because Le Page du Pratz is obscure and has an unusual name, my site has long appeared among the top three results of Google searches, and I periodically receive thanks and queries from people who have consulted it, most often residents of Louisiana or Mississippi who are interested in genealogy, local history, and even topics such as the oyster and fish populations of the lower Mississippi three centuries ago.

The most fortuitous surfer to find my site wrote to me in May 2007. New York City map dealer Martayan Lan had acquired, from an anonymous seller in France, a manuscript map of Louisiana that appeared to be the work of Le Page du Pratz (fig. 1). It depicts a portion of the Gulf Coast and most of the Mississippi basin as far north as the Illinois country and is titled across the top Carte de la Province et Colonie de la Loüisiane, Dans la partie septentrional de l’Amerique; La quelle est arosée du fameux fleuve St. Loüis, avec une explication des environs de ce fleuve, jusques aux endroits les plus eloignez ou sont habitez les français; ensemble la position présente des différentes Nations des Naturels Ameriquains, et ce que chaque partie du païs raporte naturellement (Map of the Province and Colony of Louisiana, in the northern part of America, which is watered by the famous St. Louis River; with an explication of the surroundings of this river, to the most distant regions inhabited by the French, together with the present location of the different Nations of the American Indians, and the natural productions of each part of the country). Robert Augustyn of Martayan Lan wrote to ask me if I could provide a date and some historical background for the map, and because I could not travel to New York on short notice to see it, he sent me a series of detailed scans of the manuscript.

Fig. 1. Map of the Province and Colony of Louisiana, in the northern part of America, which is watered by the famous St. Louis River …, 91 x 62 cms. Courtesy of the Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Click image to enlarge in new window. — Fig. 1. Map of the Province and Colony of Louisiana, in the northern part of America, which is watered by the famous St. Louis River …, 91 x 62 cms. Courtesy of the Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

In the lower-left corner, the map is signed by “Le Sr. Le Page du Prat, ingénieur Machiniste du Roy; architecte pour le civil et pour l’hydraulique.” I was interested to see that this self-description matches closely the one Le Page gave himself when he published a short essay in November 1751 in the Journal Œconomique, a Paris periodical devoted to scientific and commercial topics. The essay was titled “Concernant le Desséchement des Maraïs, & le moyen de faire des levées solides, par M. Le Page du Pratz Ingénieur Machiniste & Hydraulique” (Concerning the draining of swamps, and the method of making solid levees, by Monsieur Le Page du Pratz, Mechanical and Hydraulic Engineer). The article did not mention Louisiana, but it included a diagram of a dredging machine and described issues of soil quality and permeability that must have reflected his experience draining farmland and building levees in Louisiana. In lines that eerily remind one of the levee failures following Hurricane Katrina, Le Page wrote of “le peu de solidité des levées” (the lack of solidity in the levees) (72).

I had found Le Page’s article on marshland drainage many years earlier while reading at the New York Public Library his “Mémoire sur la Louisiane,” a series of twelve installments published between September 1751 and February 1753 in the Journal Œconomique (now available at only a few U.S. libraries). This series contained in abbreviated form the material Le Page later published in his 1758 book, and in between the second and third installments he published the treatise on swamp drainage. A single reference in that article to the locality of his work was also the first clue to Le Page’s whereabouts between 1734 and 1751: “l’experience que j’ai acquies par le séjour que j’ai fait (à Fontenoi-le-Comte en bas Poitou) sur le bord des Marais” (the experiments that I conducted during the time I spent at the edge of the swamps in Fontenay-Le-Comte in Poitou) (74). The Marais Poitevin, a region of coastal wetlands north of La Rochelle, was at that time a remote region inhabited by independent-minded peasants who lived and moved largely by boat. Draining and developing the area was an act of imperial politics as well as an engineering project.

The same could be said of New Orleans, founded at the time Le Page arrived in the colony and depicted in the inset in the corner of the manuscript map. The regular square street grid that became today’s French Quarter resembles the plat of countless U.S. small towns, but to eighteenth-century French eyes such a design was a radical innovation. The inset map matches very closely the engraved map of the city published in Le Page’s 1758 book (fig. 2). Both depict only a few public buildings, among them the Ursuline convent and hospital located at the east or downstream end of the city and constructed in 1732-1734. The convent was one solid clue to the map’s date. Given this and because Le Page wrote that he returned to France in 1734, it seemed likely that he would have drawn the map shortly after his return. Like many contemporary cartographers of Louisiana, Le Page enhanced his map with narrative history by adding an “Explication des Chiffres,” descriptions of notable features and events keyed to numbers (“Chiffres”) on the map. Chiffre 14 refers to the Natchez revolt of 1729 and to the Natchez nation as “tres belle et tres affable” (very attractive and very friendly), consistent with Le Page’s strong sympathy for the tribe and friendship with its leader Serpent Piqué, as expressed in his book. Another temporal parameter is the fact that although the map shows a “fort des chicachas” (Chickasaws) near the “Rivière de la Mobile” (today the Tombigbee River), there is no reference in the “Explication des Chifres [sic]” to the French attack on the Chickasaw town of Ackia in May 1736. If he had known of the battle when he drew the map he would certainly have referred to it. In his 1758 book, Le Page perceived the need to bring his history of the colony up to date, beyond the year he returned to France, by including a narrative of the 1735-36 Chickasaw War, and so he copied it from the work of Dumont de Montigny, who had published Mémoires historiques sur la Louisiane in 1753.

At first glance the map may not seem like the work of one of the best-informed Frenchmen in colonial Louisiana, and it bears little resemblance to the fold-out frontispiece map in Le Page’s 1758 book (fig. 3). Instead it appears as a simple branching tree of the Mississippi and its tributaries. On these waterways Frenchmen traveled in canoes, pirogues, and flatboats, for they rarely voyaged overland. My study in Paris archives of the manuscript maps by Dumont de Montigny and by other engineers, missionaries, and soldiers had taught me that the skills of a surveyor rarely coincided with those of a gifted writer. Yet technical training in engineering, surveying, and mapmaking carried a great deal of prestige in the French military and in colonial society in the early eighteenth century. Le Page was not a military officer, but he was eager to boast of his skills as an engineer, whether dredging canals or drawing maps.

For my own interests the most intriguing thing on the newly discovered map is a conspicuous absence. In 2005, I wrote in Common-place about the voyage of Moncacht-apé, a Yazoo Indian whom Le Page claimed to have met at Natchez in the 1720s. A long episode in his book (volume III, chapters 6-8; translated on my Website) and a somewhat shorter version in his articles in the Journal Œconomique were devoted to a first-person narrative by Moncacht-apé of how he traveled up the Missouri, crossed the height of land to a “Belle Rivière,” and descended this river to the “Mer de Sud” or Pacific Ocean. In the upper-left corner of his 1758 published map, Le Page indicated the “route de Mon-cacht-apé” from the upper Missouri River northward to the “Belle Rivière,” a river which flows westward off the corner of the map. Of course, the dream of a route through the continent to the Pacific continued to entice explorers until the time of Lewis and Clark, who took Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the abridged 1763 English translation of Le Page du Pratz’s book with them on their expedition. Thus it is significant that the new manuscript map does not include the “Belle Rivière” or any indication of a route from the Missouri River to the Pacific. Instead, Le Page simply wrote next to the upper Missouri, “Rivierre du Missouris qu’est toujours trouble. Elle a 800 lieues de cours elle passent dans les prairies immenses” (Missouri River which is always turbid. It is 800 leagues long and flows through immense prairies). The stated distance, 2400 miles at 3 miles per league, is quite accurate, as is the reference to its muddy or cloudy water.

When I wrote about Moncacht-apé for Common-place, amidst a flurry of celebrations of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, I was excited by the possibility that an obscure Indian had accomplished the transcontinental journey decades before Meriwether and William or the erstwhile Alexander McKenzie achieved it. But I tried to temper my excitement with skepticism. The more I have read and learned about Le Page du Pratz, the more I have found that his writings in the 1750s were embellished with fantasies: a romantic primitivism that defended Native Americans (whom he called “naturels” rather than “sauvages”) against the short-sighted blunders of French officials and a clever imagination that exploited the dreams of French colonizers even as they faced the possibility that defeat in the Seven Years War would mean the loss of Louisiana and Illinois. The new manuscript map appears to prove once and for all that the Moncacht-apé story is a fabrication.

Fig. 3. Carte de la Louisiane (1757). From Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane (Paris, 1758). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Of the many words on the map, references to events in the history of French Louisiana are outnumbered by the many references to minerals and food. Le Page’s goal seems to have been to promote the value of the colony through its fertile prairies, abundant wildlife, and plentiful foodstuffs. This kind of boosterism could be lucrative insofar as the author might be able to sell land claims or raise money from investors to finance an expedition to exploit such resources. I recently discovered that Le Page wrote up a proposal in 1750 to lead such an expedition back to Louisiana. But making such claims also carried risks, particularly in light of the still-powerful memory of the Mississippi Bubble’s bursting in 1720. Le Page sailed to Louisiana during the brief period when large sums of money were invested by concessionaires (including Le Page himself) in a pyramid scheme concocted by the infamous John Law. There were several promotional tracts published, rumors circulated of silver or gold mines along the Arkansas River, and thousands of settlers arrived hoping to develop the region’s riches. Yet nearly all these investors lost money, and the Louisiana Colony obtained a reputation not unlike Enron, as a scam perpetrated by politically well-connected crooks. The manuscript map downplays hopes of silver and gold and promotes instead less valuable minerals and especially food, such as “arbres fruitiers” (fruit trees) and “de fraizes, champignons, Morilles et simples Medicinales” (strawberries, mushrooms, Morels and medicinal herbs). Le Page in his book praised the skills of Native American healers and explained how he had collected herbs to send on to France (his efforts should not be confused, however, with those of Jean and Louis Prat, the leading French doctors in New Orleans at the time). The map expresses a special interest in chestnuts (chataignes or marrons in French), which were much more common before a blight decimated the trees in the early twentieth century. We read, right across the middle of the map, “Dans presque tous les Costeaux du païs il y a des chataignes faites comme des glans, et l’on ne les distingue que par le gout, le bois et la feuille … sans doute que ce sont les glans que l’on dit que nos premiers peres mangeoient” (On nearly all the hills of the country there are Chestnuts made like acorns, and one can distinguish them only by the taste, the wood and the leaf … no doubt these are the acorns that it is said our first fathers ate). These lines are a version of the pastoral utopian vision often deployed in promotional tracts, and his map is a promotional tool from a distant and optimistic past. This map makes a rich contribution to American history, and so I was very pleased when it was subsequently purchased by the Library of Congress and made available to the public and on the Internet. Who knows if another work by Le Page may soon come to light.

The Civil War At 150: Afterword

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings

When we think of the place of Civil War memory in American life, we are apt to think rather narrowly—of reenactors and rebel flags, kitsch and cultural dysfunction. The preceding essays paint a more heartening portrait—of college students poring over the war diary of a free black woman from Philadelphia; of runners marking the Sand Creek massacre; of a National Park Service engaged in reflective self-assessment; of Kentucky rejoining the Land of Lincoln; of a movie industry grappling with the kidnapping of free blacks into bondage; of the dawning awareness that, as a country, we never fully forgot that the war was about slavery, and we never gave up the fight for equality. We are fighting for it still.

None of this is to declare victory. As Barbara Fields said in 1990, the Civil War will be fought until what was promised is finally delivered. Slavery was defeated only to be replaced by debt peonage and then by whatever it is that we have now. Once it was chain gangs, Jim Crow, and grandfather clauses effectively gutting the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Now it is the prison-industrial complex, resegregation, and voter suppression. Such disasters are caused by systemic forces and a massive failure of political will—but not by a failure to remember the war right. Indeed, it is partly because we do remember the war (mostly) right that we can identify these problems as problems.

History can be empowering but it should be deeply humbling. History is our burden as well as our gravity. It is what we live down as well as what we carry forward.

Closing this special issue on the Civil War at 150, I find myself curious about how the war will be remembered fifty years from now, at its bicentennial. I do not mean to speculate on whether we will be touring Gettysburg in flying cars. (Electric cars would be marvelous enough.) Rather, I wonder about the place of the Civil War in a future generation’s cultural memory. Here it may be instructive to examine the academy itself, not because the academy drives the culture—it rides the same wave—but because the academy is the tip of that wave, leaning out, breaking first. There are two broad (and largely reconcilable) forces at work in Civil War historiography today. The first is completing the important work of putting slavery and emancipation at the center of the war’s causes, conduct, and legacy—and it is trickier work than you might imagine. No serious scholar now denies that slavery caused the war. (Charles Dew iced this case with Apostles of Disunion in 2001.) But proving that the South seceded to defend slavery is not the same as proving that the North went to war to destroy it. This case has been made with greater urgency and effectiveness only in the last ten years. Chandra Manning demonstrated how the Union Army became abolitionized from the bottom up; James Oakes has shown that virtually every Northerner, including Lincoln, who pledged “not to interfere with slavery where it already existed” was essentially lying because they, like Southerners, believed that to contain slavery was to kill it; and Caroline Janney has suggested that none of this was ever wholly forgotten in the “romance of reunion.” All of these scholars, and a host of others, are heirs to the neoabolitionist tradition, stretching back to W.E.B. Dubois, and holding increasing sway since the Civil Rights Movement.

Toiling beside them has been another group of scholars, the heirs to what has been called the “new revisionist” tradition, who, while emphatically agreeing that the destruction of slavery was a good and a great thing, find little to celebrate in a country that enslaved people for centuries and then had to kill 750,000 in the process of (finally) doing the right thing, which frankly was done rather haphazardly and without sufficient safeguards. This emphasis on the greed, imperialism, and destruction that grew into and out of the war has been called (in informal circles) the historiography’s “dark turn.” But in truth, the difference between the two schools is simply one of emphasis. The neoabolitionists see a conflict that can be redeemed by its results: the freedom of four million people. The neorevisionists welcome the results but remain skeptical of the process. Though they tussle occasionally, the two traditions need each other. The neorevisionists keep the historiography from veering into self-righteousness or triumphalism. The neoabolitionists keep the historiography from veering into despondency or nihilism.

It is not a debate that can sustain a fifty-year historiography, however. With the humanities in a (partly contrived) crisis, historians are under tremendous pressure to justify their relevance. Certainly this is why all of us seem to have agreed without talking about it that we should begin to define ourselves as historians of a particular theme as much as a particular place and time. We are historians, then, of happiness, or capitalism, or the environment, or education, before we are historians of the antebellum South or turn-of-the-century Chicago. This gives us some claim to usefulness; in an increasingly global, “so-what” culture, we do not study the past per se—we study timelessly important things in the laboratory of the past.

We can sometimes diverge on the question of what we think we’re accomplishing in our laboratories. Some of us are what I would call “how-things-work” historians. We study, say, the “plantation-industrial complex” because we want to understand capitalism. Others of us are what I would call “social justice” historians. We seek not merely to understand past systems of social injustice but implicitly to overthrow new ones. In both cases, though, the present value is front and center. And this is as it should be. Presentism—turning the dead into political sock puppets spouting a party line—is a historical sin worthy of condemnation. But present value? Our work should better have that. “The Earth belongs to the living,” Jefferson said. Or, as Nietzsche noted, “We want to serve history only to the extent that history serves life.”

The essays collected here betray an academy eager to serve life. Gone is the handwringing over objectivity. Gone is the hectoring tone. There may still be morals stitched into our work, but they are stitched deep, less obvious, more forgiving and more flexible. As academics, we seek to guide, teach, and inform, but we don’t have all the answers, and we know that.

The American people have come a long way too. They are content for their heroes to be less admirable; they feel a little less admirable themselves, and they are increasingly comfortable with the simple fact that history is mostly bad news. As Americans, it took us a long while to realize this. (To be fair, Russians had Ivan the Terrible. We had James Buchanan. We could work around him.) But now we begin our survey courses with the depopulation of a continent and end with the betrayed promise of Reconstruction. Everyone has agency; everyone makes a bad end; and students expect little else.

This is as it should be. History can be empowering but it should be deeply humbling. History is our burden as well as our gravity. It is what we live down as well as what we carry forward. In a tradition stretching back to Shakespeare and to Homer, history reminds us that we are none of us perfect and that we are all of us going to die. Mostly, history is a way of owning our smallness before time without being paralyzed, of finding ourselves in a flexible existential space, beyond blame, braced to do better, cognizant of the difficulties ahead. History, then, was and remains a morality tale. It is only the moral that changes. Today we often use history to teach the very real value of diversity, of inclusion, of social justice, of speaking truth to power, of exposing capitalism to criticism, of confronting the inescapable reality that good countries do great wrongs that admit of no palliation. But we do so hoping that, fifty years from now, if we’re very lucky, the Civil War will have all the relevance of the War of Jenkins Ear. And then, like historians of old, we will sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings and slaves, of midwives and milkmen and everyone in between—if only to remind ourselves how much we have to be thankful for, and how much to be sorry for.

The Future in/The Future of Bercovitch’s Jeremiad

“Screw the past!”

Moon Shot

Further reading:

‘Not in our Neighborhood’

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Capital in the Twenty-first Century in the Eighteenth Century; or, Piketty and the Humanities

The Technology of Democracy

Surfing and Navigating

Further Reading:

Who Publishes an Early American Book?

Further Reading:

A Newly Discovered Map by Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz

Further Reading:

The Civil War At 150: Afterword

Further Reading