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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fugitive

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

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

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

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

Jackson and Stowe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

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

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

In this issue of “Common Reading,” we bring you a conversation about an important aspect of our modern predicament, as seen through historical and anthropological lenses. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, an anthropologist at UNC-Chapel Hill, and Mark Peterson, a historian at UC-Berkeley and editor of this column, discuss two books, one new and one old, and their collective implications for our world, in which ever larger corporations, with unfathomably sophisticated tools, are engrossing and enclosing ever more of the collective wisdom and potential knowledge of our societies.

Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld:

Several years ago, in the mountains of Ecuador, I watched as burning tires melted doughnut-shaped ruts into the asphalt of the Pan American Highway. Bands of protestors stood by, steeling themselves for the arrival of soldiers. In March 2006, Andean natives had rallied to fight a free trade agreement between Ecuador and the United States. After ten days of stonewalling the activists’ demands, the national government declared martial law. In the town of Peguche, leaders called for residents to radicalize the strike (fig. 1). On a side street near their main blockade, teenage boys jabbed sharpened re-bar between the cobbles, prying up fist sized rocks. Further up the road, women sat on a curb surrounded by empty mineral water bottles and plastic jugs of gasoline, tearing white sheets into long, even strips—wicks for their anarchical bombs. As the strike accelerated toward its climax, the national media focused with increasing anger on one question: what were native peoples so concerned about? The details of the treaty were arcane; the consequence for native careers seemed remote.

Many protestors admitted they did not know the details. What they feared, though, was that their subsistence crops, their medicinal plants, and their ecological knowledge all were at risk. U.S. companies empowered by the treaty struck native peoples as an imminent threat, poised to convert Andean talents in farming and healing into corporate property. A pamphlet circulated at the Peguche blockade, insisting that with the free trade agreement, “indigenous people and peasants will be obligated to mono-culture, to use seeds treated in the laboratories of the United States (transgenetic).” Protest banners proclaimed, “Corn, Wheat, Potatoes are our Life: Out with the Treaty” (fig. 2). Put simply, with stones, Molotov cocktails, steel bars, and blockades, Indians were arming themselves for war against corporations bearing U.S. copyright and patent laws.

In Common as Air, Lewis Hyde sketches how we got here. Since World War II industrial economies have remade themselves as “knowledge economies.” Studios and laboratories have supplanted shop floors as the source of wealth. Monsanto, Pfizer, Microsoft, and Disney stake their future on the “know-how behind the goods” rather than material goods themselves. With the new technology of digital copying and the Internet, inventors can sell and resell the same idea infinitely and at little cost. And as the returns on capital multiply, the United States government has proved a willing ally in defending corporate ownership of ideas, aggressively exporting “knowledge laws” and forcing trading partners into compliance. The backlash against these American laws and their increasingly global reach raises a question: does this regime of intellectual property law represent something intrinsic about the United States—not just its economy, but its culture and society? After all, copyright law is rooted in the U.S. Constitution. Did the founders of the republic incline its citizens toward a commercial enclosure of knowledge and creativity?

In a wonderful exploration of this problem, Hyde tacks back and forth between political philosophies of James Madison, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, on one hand, and instructive moments of American creativity, on the other: Ben Franklin’s electrical experiments, Bob Dylan’s songsmithing, and Martin Luther King’s sermon writing. Seeking a language that could stand as an alternative to “exclusive copyright,” “private ownership,” and “intellectual property,” Hyde joins other writers who turn “to the old idea of ‘the commons’ as a way to approach the collective side of ownership.” The commons discourse turns out to be archaic and arcane. Hyde tells of “estovers,” “stinting,” and “beating the bounds.” The point, though, is not really to argue that the Founding Fathers conceived of science and invention as akin to harvesting in wild wood and shared fields. Rather, through his exploration of the commons, Hyde gains a set of heuristics—questions about communal duty, about the limits of exploitation, and about individual liberty—that guide his inquiry into early American writings on copyright and monopolies in commerce.

Hyde states somewhat drily that for America’s revolutionaries, “intellectual property is ultimately a republican estate. It is the intangible equivalent of the tangible res publicae (roads, bridges, harbors) of the Republic itself.” His meditation on the commons, though, reveals that estate as a dynamic composite of public duty, freedom, and uncharted lands. The commoners who gather in their perambulations to knock down encroaching fences, who hold themselves back from overgrazing their shared property, and who preserve the untamed wastes along with their plowed fields strike a balance between private affairs and a shared space of possibility.

Mark Peterson:

But isn’t the commons, in both its tangible sense as shared material resources, as well as its metaphorical sense of intellectual or knowledge resources, something more than just “possibility?” Doesn’t the traditional idea of the commons also have something to do with preserving a margin of security, or even a modest degree of comfort, in a hostile world? The firewood to be gleaned or the food to be gathered on the commons gave peasants comfort or warmth beyond what their own meager individual resources might yield, comfort they relied on as part of their due for the service they performed for their lord and their neighbors. Couldn’t the same be said of the right to sing a traditional song, or to use a clever new tool for getting work done a bit faster? To enclose these through copyright or patent is to rob someone of real comfort and security, not just possibility.

RCM:

Yes, and the tangible value of these resources, intellectual or otherwise, comes through in Hyde’s discussion of the equally tangible duties, burdens, and costs required to maintain the commons. Throughout much of the book, Hyde’s central concern is the interdependence of private interests and civic obligation. He tracks the ways that eighteenth-century thinkers proposed a structure of law, and assumed a manner of comportment, “such that the public domain might inherit from the private.” The “Republican Two-Step” he comes to call it, “first autonomy, then service.” The model here is a life career in which one matures from a partial, individualized, private self to the full dignity of a public life. Hyde uses the life course of the young John Adams to show the meaning of this process. Upon the death of his father, Adams inherited a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, becoming for the first time a freeholder, a taxpayer, and a voter at town meetings. To Adams’ initial dismay, the town elders also expected him to become a bridge builder, standing him to be elected as Braintree’s surveyor of highways. Hyde writes that Adams’ protests as to his ignorance about the bridges mattered little; “everyone had to take a turn at town offices.” With property comes duty—not as an optional act of charity, but a requirement, intrinsic to the nature of property ownership within the community. And since the corporate towns of Massachusetts were the ultimate source of that property, the bodies that granted land in fee simple to the original inhabitants, then the town had every right to set the terms of property ownership.

This lesson would be generalized to knowledge and learning. If the drafters of the Constitution conceded the utility of granting monopoly privileges to authors and inventors, they saw this privilege as a limited one. With patents and copyrights come service; first private gain, then public use. Hyde quotes Jefferson: “certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. It is equally certain it ought not to be perpetual.” Jefferson’s certainty rested in part on a faith that “ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition.” It also lay in the conviction that “citizens can never be truly self-governing until they have a lively public sphere, a free flow of knowledge, religious liberty, and so on.” Citizens cannot passively await the appearance of a public sphere; they are duty-bound to create this cultural commons with their contributions.

All the talk of duty, service and obligation, though, risks misrepresenting the public sphere as only a burden, where virtue overshadows joy, morality tops creativity. Yet, as he builds his case, Hyde keeps his eye on all that is untamed, abundant, accidental, and random within a commons. It is these same qualities that set the potential for inventiveness in a knowledge commons. Hyde begins with Locke. The philosopher had observed that nature is a “wild common” lacking the improving hand of man (23). A vision of uncultivated “wastes” inspired dreams of plentitude; the commons appeared to Locke and others to be a primordial “commodious world.” Contemporary anthropologists (and the ancient peasantry) might dispute Locke’s vision of abundance on prosaic, ecological grounds. Typically, wastes remained uncultivated commons because the poverty of their soils and treacherousness of their slopes rewarded individual labor so meagerly. Humans traveled lightly on this land, passing by occasionally to harvest what they could, neglecting it at other times, and allowing the survival of wild plants and feral animals.

MP:

So, in an ecological sense, it may seem surprising that Massachusetts turned out to be one of the places in the Americas where “commons” practices, and a “commonwealth” form of government, took hold with great tenacity. Compared to Mexico, Peru or Hispaniola, where natural barriers of mountains, high desert and rainforest resisted farming and preserved wildness, New England’s ecology easily sustained a comfortable human existence. But from an imperial point of view, the strength of commons and commonwealth in Massachusetts is no surprise at all. Peru, Mexico, and the Caribbean all yielded commodities of incredible value to Europeans—gold, silver, sugar—and so the various conquistadors seized and enclosed these territories as rapidly as they could. Massachusetts was a “wasteland” from this perspective, yielding almost nothing that England lacked. Oliver Cromwell called it “poor, cold, and useless.” Yes, the indigenous peoples or English colonists could subsist comfortably enough in its temperate climate, but there was nothing there that any self-respecting imperialist really wanted to enclose. That’s why, as late as 1630, it was still open to middling Puritan dissenters and their utopian dreams of a godly commonwealth.

RCM:

Although Hyde does not take up the ecology of the commons with this kind of specificity, he does have a sense for humans’ complicity within it. The collective defense of the commons—the beating of the bounds, the destruction of encroachments, stinting—promoted its generative wildness by holding the extractive technologies of market and polity in check. The practice of the commons removed fences and undid covert investments. When strongly held, such habits make possible “the practice of the wild, one whose first condition is the simple freedom to wander out, unimpeded, beyond the usual understanding and utterance.” Enter a living commons and have the chance to “contact with what lies outside our knowledge.”

All this consideration of the “practice of the wild” may divert readers away from copyright, obligation, and the public domain, but Hyde circles back to these concerns when he takes up the topic of liberty and what it meant to men like Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, and Noah Webster. Again, Hyde reflects on the freedoms afforded in an ancient England of commons and manorial estates. Here a model of liberated action could be found in the “fee simple,” or “allodial,” holdings, of those families fortunate enough to hold their estate without having to pay the vassal’s duty to the lord, a model that English colonists readily translated to North America, where there were no lords to pay, or where the lords were far removed, an ocean away from the settlers. But if the fee simple estate promised independence, it did not end an expectation of service. Rather, for Puritan thinkers, allodial estates relocated duty to the “conscience of the autonomous citizen.” Freedom becomes a social and moral condition, not a mere releasing of a person from bondage. Indeed, eighteenth-century writers equated individual liberty with licentiousness. It was “the freedom of beasts rather than that of human beings. Humanliberty, on the other hand carried with it an obligation to serve the public sphere.”

It is in this public condition, the free person’s necessary engagement with public life, that Hyde locates a deeper source of intellectual and creative liberation. The first step lies in personal effacement. Inventors, writers, and scientists stand to gain by disidentifying with their ideas, restricting their own claims on them, and allowing them the liberty to circulate. As Franklin wrote in the midst of the Revolution, “I have never entered into any Controversy in defence of my philosophical Opinions; I leave them to take their Chance in the World.” By stepping back from his or her creation, the public-minded citizen draws others into the debate. What might have been limited, private opinion instead becomes a public proposition about the world, a topic of shared conversation.

The second step toward freedom lies in joining others. Here Hyde jumps ahead to the twentieth century and engages the revolutionaries of the 1960s. As a teenager, for example, Bob Dylan immersed himself in the songs and lyrics of others, spending weeks listening repeatedly to records of Robert Johnson, copying his words on scraps of paper, listening to Woody Guthrie albums as if in a trance, playing Bob Nolan’s “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” in his head constantly. Losing himself in the work of someone like Woody Guthrie, Dylan realized that he was “feeling more like myself than ever before.” In a similar vein, the Reverend Martin Luther King assembled the “I Have a Dream Speech” from a host of thinkers: Gandhi’s ideas of soul force, James Baldwin’s and Malcolm X’s metaphors of promissory notes turning to bad checks, Archibald Carey’s refrain “Let freedom ring,” which Carey used in his 1952 address to the Republican National Convention. Not only did the power of the public sphere shine in the lyrics of Dylan and the speeches of King; that sphere itself became transformed through these men. In Hyde’s telling, the generative force of people such as Dylan and King grew from the way they were freed to travel in an ungated American cultural commons and the way they exercised their freedom in a form of public service, as dutiful members of a collective. Woody Guthrie’s work, itself borrowed and remade from countless earlier sources, is more powerful today than it was in 1960 because Bob Dylan also borrowed from it and shared it, making it something new yet again.

This conjuncture of service, freedom, knowledge, and the public sphere is what makes the lesson of eighteenth-century American revolutionaries matter for twenty-first-century Andean rebels. Assembled at the barricades in 2006, highland Kichwa people were not just fighting free trade laws. The activists, leaders, pamphleteers, and bomb makers were seeking to open a new Indian future in the contemporary world. If part of the struggle was political, aiming for increasing autonomy, another part of it was cultural, aiming to enhance their creative power. One of the most pernicious marks of colonization is the consignment of Andean knowledge to the realm of the local, the traditional, and ultimately the past. Indeed, domination entails the persistent interference with the knowledge-making of the colonized. The Stamp Act that forced residents of the North American colonies to pay more for a college degree than those in Britain is but one small example of the way in which power inheres in barring subjects from interaction and intellectual engagement, in forcing upon them a parochial isolation.

Andean leaders are well aware of this. In the course of the modern indigenous movement, they have established a university, created a scholarly journal, and built Websites. They are pushing for an Indian public sphere, for the growth and application of native knowledge. In Common As Air, Hyde spells out both the requisites and rewards entailed in making a durable cultural commons a reality.

MP:

But lest we underestimate what Hyde and the Andean protestors are up against, consider a still more recent set of events. On August 15, 2011, Google purchased Motorola Mobility for $12,500,000,000, at a price that was 63 percent higher per share than the going rate on the stock market. Why? Not because Google wants to become a manufacturer of cell phones. It’s all about the patents.

Google’s major corporate competitors in the business of capturing and shaping the world’s time and attention, Apple and Microsoft, recently acquired thousands of patents for the technological devices and know-how most useful in this cunning art. Not to be left standing out in the dwindling technological open fields, Google jumped into the enclosure game with its pricey purchase, buying Motorola’s 17,000 patents in order to rake in and fence off as much of the knowledge domain as possible. If Andean leaders in their new universities are going to put something of value on their Websites, Google is going to know about it, and figure out some way to extract advertising money from the process of directing anyone’s attention toward it.

When early American leaders, in imitation of English precedents, wrote patent and copyright powers into the United States Constitution, they presumably did not envision the possibility of a “person” who might acquire 17,000 patents in a single stroke with a mountain of money, a “person” whose lifespan might be perpetual, or a “person” with no real social relationships or public responsibilities. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution speaks of “Authors and Inventors,” not corporations, as the potential beneficiaries when it grants Congress the express power to pass laws that will secure “for limited Times … the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” But the Constitution nowhere recognizes or makes any specific provisions for the existence of corporations, which are the creations of legislatures in the individual states.

In an ordinary human life span of three score years and ten, a citizen of the republic (a John Adams or a Benjamin Franklin) might be expected to have an intrinsic sense of when the moment arrives for step one—individual accumulation—to cease, or at least slow down, and step two—public service—to commence or accelerate, in the performance of Hyde’s “Republican Two-Step.” But if a corporate “person” can live forever, with no responsibilities to the public and no social liabilities, and can find no limit to its accumulative capacities and desires, then why should it ever feel the need to move from step one to step two?

By toggling back and forth between the eighteenth century and nowadays, Lewis Hyde’s Common as Airskips across the era in which corporate personhood took on its modern form, and thus underplays an essential element of this larger story. To fill in this gap, let me turn to an older work, Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin’s classic study, Commonwealth (1947), written in a different era but for purposes strikingly similar to those of Lewis Hyde.

The Handlins, like Hyde, wanted to know how we got here. Their project was sponsored by the Committee on Research in Economic History, a New Deal-era endeavor to explore the historical relationship between government and economy. As the Handlins described it in the preface to their revised edition, “the guiding question when the research began was an assessment of the extent to which laissez faire was important in the American economy before 1860.” At the time they began their project, it was widely assumed that prior to the New Deal, government had played little part in the American economy.

What the Handlins found was strikingly different. By studying the role of the state in economic affairs in Massachusetts, they came to the initial conclusion that “laissez faire” was not even a relevant term in the commonwealth’s early history. The directing hand of the General Court was so prevalent, and so unquestioned, in countless aspects of economic life as to make “discussion of the development of economic policy in terms of laissez faire hardly meaningful… The hundreds of laws regulating the flow of water to mills, setting the time for the taking of alewives or providing for the inspection of potash were a challenge. What was their meaning? Why did men enact them? What function did they serve?” To answer these questions, the Handlins investigated the history of corporations, the economic institution of the early republic most closely associated with public policy.

This is precisely the point where the Handlins’ subject coincides with Lewis Hyde’s. For, like patent and copyright law, the corporation in the early republic was initially designed to perform an intricate dance, a variation of the Republican Two-Step. If patents and copyrights were meant to benefit individuals immediately and the public in the long run, the case with corporations would be roughly the opposite. The public would immediately benefit from the legislature’s creation of corporations, because corporations would take on useful tasks that lay beyond the means of any individual to perform, and which the state lacked the resources to manage on its own.

To offset the risks of such large ventures, the commonwealth could grant special privileges to corporations, such as unlimited duration, monopoly privileges, and the right to sell shares with limited liability to investors. The net result would be a public good—a reliable bridge across the Charles River, for instance—at minimal cost to the citizens at large. Eventually, the corporate undertakers and their investors might profit from the venture, but only if it actually provided the intended public good.

RCM:

Of course, to this day in the United States, do-gooders of all stripes form corporations, albeit non-profit ones, to carry their cause forward. The corporation in the U.S. in fact seems to take on a bewildering number of forms, from a small-town youth soccer program to an international software company. Yet for all the differences, each seems to share a fundamental quality: that of being a private initiative that stands apart from and perhaps in opposition to the state. Was a close alliance between the state and corporation in pursuit of the public good a historical anomaly, a particular innovation of the colonists?

MP:

Well, the corporation as a tool to advance the state’s interests had a long history before American colonization. But the likelihood that the chartered corporation would be the form through which the commonwealth of Massachusetts expressed its economic will was perhaps enhanced by the fact that Massachusetts was created as a chartered corporation by King Charles I in 1629. And the widely varied functions and purposes for corporations (though perhaps not youth soccer clubs) predated the colonization projects as well. The pre-modern state created corporations to promote a wide variety of public interests; international trading companies (the East India Company being perhaps the most famous), educational institutions (Harvard College was granted a corporate charter by Massachusetts in 1650), and civic corporations, designed to conduct the complex tasks of ruling urban spaces like the City of London, or, on a far smaller scale, the individual townships that made up the commonwealth of Massachusetts.

There was essentially no limit on the functions that a corporation could be created to perform—it could trade for spices, teach algebra, govern a colony, send missionaries to distant lands, or promote musical knowledge—so long as the state saw a public good that justified the creation of this privileged entity. Nor was there a uniform set of privileges that accompanied corporate status. The East India Company’s charter allowed it to raise its own army and navy to protect its interests. Not so for Harvard College. Ideally, the corporation would be granted powers and privileges appropriate for the public good it was meant to serve. At the time of Massachusetts’ independence, the corporation’s history offered many variants and many purposes, of which the “business” corporation was but one version.

By fighting an expensive war for independence, the individual states and the United States as a collective were left with a crushing burden of debt. The impoverished states had little spare fiscal power to promote economic development directly, through taxation and public spending. Therefore, the chartered corporation seemed like an ideal solution, a way to develop transportation infrastructure (turnpikes, bridges, canals) or to encourage manufacturing without spending non-existent state funds. If the public benefitted from a corporation’s activities, then granting the corporation certain privileges, such as a regulated monopoly on bridge tolls, seemed a small price to pay.

But the story the Handlins tell in Commonwealth is, like Hyde’s story in Common as Air, a tale of unintended consequences. The Handlins explain how the institution of the chartered corporation in Massachusetts was transformed between 1774 and 1860, under the pressure of the egalitarian forces of a democratic republic, and in the context of underlying conflict between commercial interests and the concept of the public good. The story is a complicated one, and Commonwealth often makes for difficult reading—it lacks the luminous clarity that Hyde, the poet, offers in Common as Air. But there are two key issues around which the Handlins’ story turns, and both of them are directly relevant to Hyde’s story as well.

First, limited liability. For many of the purposes that corporate entities were created to fulfill, individual members of corporations found themselves performing tasks that they would not have undertaken as private individuals. For example, when the Massachusetts towns conducted their business, the individual town officers, chosen by their fellow citizens, were not personally liable for damages. If a bridge that John Adams was charged to build within Braintree collapsed and a farmer lost a wagonload of hay, Adams would not pay for the loss. If there were damages to be paid, the town as a whole shouldered the blame. Without such protection, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to convince private individuals to take up the burden of serving the corporate body politic. For obvious reasons, this privilege also spilled over to the participants in business corporations chartered to perform a public good. If the same farmer’s horse went lame crossing a bridge built between two towns by a chartered corporation, then the corporation as a whole, not the individual directors, investors, or employees, shared the blame—individual liability for acts of the corporate body was limited in the corporate charter.

The question grew more complex when considering the extent of the financial liability of the members to the corporation. For the civic corporation of the town, there was ultimately no limit on the town’s ability to assess its citizens to pay the town’s debts. If a town, that is, a citizens’ corporate collective, decided to build bridges, and if the ultimate cost of the bridges turned out to be twice what the town expected, the citizens could be assessed as much as necessary to pay the extra costs—there was nowhere else to turn, after all. Ideally, this collective financial liability of the body as a whole provided a check on what the townspeople as a corporate entity would take on (and, in its nightmare worst-case-scenario, this speaks to the situation that countries like Iceland, and the various members of the European Union, have been facing in the past few years).

But what about a business corporation? If a bridge cost twice as much to build as expected, who was liable for the corporation’s debts? Could a bridge corporation assess (or tax) its members or investors to an unlimited degree in order to pay off its debts, the way that towns could? The Handlins describe a series of decisions from the early nineteenth century in which the Massachusetts courts said, essentially, no. Although investors were, like townspeople, members of a corporate body, their liability for its obligations was limited. Why? Because without this added privilege of limited liability, it would prove impossible for corporations to gain investors and share the risks, to raise the funds necessary to carry out their tasks. In that case, the public purposes sought by the state in chartering the corporation would go unfulfilled.

RCM:

It is striking that a public purpose still guided rule-making at this point for business corporations. As you mentioned earlier, the modern U.S. business corporation provokes so much anxiety in a place like Ecuador because it seems to have enormous privileges but no responsibilities save returning profits to investors. How were corporations able to so simplify their objectives and divest themselves of civic duties?

MP:

The limited liability decisions proved to be the beginning of a separation between the civic corporation and the business corporation. The purpose of this distinction still appeared to be the promotion of the public good, to facilitate the commonwealth’s desire that business corporations would have the tools they needed to take on large and useful projects. But with this subtle change, the law of the commonwealth elevated the individual financial interests of investors in the business corporation, giving them an importance comparable to the public good in a way that was very different from the civic corporation.

The second critical change in the nature of corporations also seemed to stem from the desire to promote the public good. This was the rise of general incorporation laws, a process in which the monopoly privileges of chartered business corporations were gradually undermined. In the old monarchical regime, privilege was not a problem. That world was hierarchical, and all persons were decidedly not equal before the law. The crown had the power to reward those who performed notable public services for the kingdom with special honors and privileges. But in the newly formed American republics, privilege was a problem, and the privileged status of the traditional chartered corporation, a child of the old order, would inevitably be challenged in the new. Here, the famous Charles River Bridge case, ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1837, offers the clearest example of this transformation.

For many decades in the colonial period, the Massachusetts General Court had authorized a ferry to carry passengers back and forth across the narrow stretch of the Charles River separating Boston from Charlestown. The proceeds from this ferry had gone to Harvard College as part of the state’s support for that chartered corporate body’s promotion of learning and knowledge. But in the postwar recovery of the 1780s, as the two neighboring cities rebuilt from the war’s destruction, it was clear that a ferry could no longer handle the growing volume of traffic. The General Court chartered the Charles River Bridge Company (CRB) in 1785, offering its directors and investors a special set of privileges in return for building this useful public amenity. On condition that it continue payments to Harvard College for the lost ferry revenue, the corporation was entitled to keep all the profits from the bridge tolls for a period of forty years, after which ownership of the bridge would be turned over to the Commonwealth as public property, and bridge travel would be free and open to all. In fact, these provisions made the CRB charter granted by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts extraordinarily similar to the terms of early patent law created by the U.S. Congress—a temporary monopoly on the proceeds of the “invention,” followed eventually by permanent public benefit, Hyde’s Republican Two-Step in a nutshell (fig. 3).

Several years later, the General Court awarded a charter to a similar bridge company, farther up the river, connecting Boston to Cambridge. When the CRB proprietors complained that this new bridge would cut into their accustomed revenues, the state responded by extending the CRB’s entitlement to the profits, from 40 years to 70 years, well beyond the likely lifespan of the original proprietors. In the meantime, the CRB proved to be a wild success. A share of stock in the bridge, valued at $333 when issued in 1785, had risen to over $2000 by the 1820s. In the company’s growing desire to protect its investors’ profits (and to defer the public its free travel), we see the practical consequences of the limited liability cases and their elevation of investor interests at the expense of the public good, an exact parallel to the way Congress in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has granted repeated extensions of the length of copyright and patent benefits to their owners.

It was precisely in response to this affront to the good of the commonwealth that the privileges of the CRB were challenged. In 1823, a competing group of investors petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to allow them to build a bridge immediately adjacent to the Charles River Bridge. Eventually, the legislature granted this group, the Warren Bridge Company, a charter which mandated that they turn their bridge over to the public within six years, as soon as the tolls, which were to be fixed at the same rate as the Charles River Bridge tolls, had paid for the costs of construction, plus five percent interest to the investors, (compared with the 600% return that the CRB had already yielded to its shareholders over forty years). A brand new and soon to be free bridge, immediately adjacent to the older toll bridge, would (and eventually did) undercut the CRB and its storied profits, so the CRB sued the state for breach of contract. Although its charter did not say as much, the CRB claimed that monopoly control over the route from Boston to Charlestown was an implicit right in their charter, and that to promote the building of an adjacent bridge therefore violated the privileges to which the CRB investors were still entitled for decades to come.

After a long and complex legal fight, the U.S. Supreme Court finally decided the case against the CRB. In writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roger Taney overruled the sanctity of property and contract arguments, the so-called “vested property rights,” of the CRB, and instead based the decision on yet another definition of the public good. Not only did the CRB’s monopolistic and, for all practical purposes, perpetual control over a popular travel route clearly undercut a vital public interest, preventing potentially better, safer, or faster means of travel from developing, but the very fact of privileging one group, the CRB proprietors, at the expense of all other entrepreneurial citizens who might perform the task equally well, meant that the state was effectively creating a commercial aristocracy, a corporate person possessing rights and privileges denied to all others. The Charles River Bridge case thus paved the way for general incorporation laws, where the corporate form—including the limited liability privileges established in earlier decisions—became available to any business group that wanted to use it.

With Taney’s decision and the subsequent rise of general incorporations laws, the original logic behind the monarchical state’s creation of corporate personhood melted away in the face of demands for equal treatment of all “persons” in republican society. What remained from the corporation’s original purpose was a set of privileges, whose purpose now was nothing more than to advance and protect the business interests of entrepreneurs and their investors. By the end of the Handlins’ story in 1860, the second step of the Republican Two-Step, the corporation’s responsibility to serve a well-defined public interest, has vanished completely.

So now we see more of the story of how we got where we are today. Two intertwined legal institutions, corporations and intellectual property rights, both founded in a monarchical world of privilege, both adopted as temporary and limited privileges to promote the general public good, have each evolved in ways that have diminished the duty to the public, while retaining and expanding on the privileges. We might see these changes as simply the result of greed, the desire among individuals or corporations to see their property and privileges as nothing but commodities, forgetting the role of the state in their initial creation. But at the same time, we can see the changes as natural outcomes in a democratic and egalitarian society, especially with regard to corporations, where the idea of granting privileges to some at the permanent expense of others, as in the Charles River Bridge case, seems anathema to the freedom and opportunity we wish to foster.

RCM AND MP:

Where does this leave the Andean demonstrators in the face of U.S.-Ecuador trade agreements? Where does it leave us all, in the face of Google and its 17,000 new patents? Might an answer lie in carrying forward the logic of Common as Air and rethinking the Republican Two-Step?

For all those who no longer believe in the ability of the state, the citizens’ collective, to identify a public good beyond the interests of any given person, i.e. for “libertarians” (in U.S. terminology) or “liberals” (as the rest of the world uses the term) who see nothing but the market’s invisible hand as the only justifiable good, we ask this: if you can see no coherent way for the state to identify and enforce Step Two—service to the public – then why should the state continue to grant Step One—special privileges to “persons” of any kind? The Constitution gives Congress the power to promote science and useful arts through patent and copyright protection, but Congress does not have to exercise that power, which is a vestige of a monarchical world, and can change the terms of those protections. State law creates the privileges that corporations often use in ways that cause demonstrable harm, but state laws can change these institutions as well. However, we suspect that those who clamor for “free markets” do not actually have the courage of their convictions necessary to give up the privileges. Having lost sight of the civic responsibilities of the Republican Two-Step, they have become equally blind to the service that the state now offers them in the extension of copyrights and corporate liability protection. At times it takes the black smoke of a street protest to remind us just how hardened and lopsided government-backed privileges have become in the United States.

For all those who continue to believe in the commonwealth ideal, that our government can identify measures of public well-being beyond the private interests of individuals (the camp in which we place ourselves), we urge that an active case be made to promote a better understanding of this history in the effort to restore Step Two of the Republican Two-Step. Yes, the privileges of corporations, copyright, and patent may be vestiges of an abandoned monarchical world. But they are also deeply entrenched in our world, probably impossible to eradicate entirely. Our only alternative is to fight for what makes the privileges of corporation and copyright worth preserving. We can once again extend the state’s power, our collective power as citizens, to insist that private property and public responsibility be inextricably linked, and that privilege always be made to benefit the public, and we can create ways to equalize the power of those, like Andean Indians, overwhelmed by the limitless privileges of others. Otherwise, we as citizens of the republic, who created these privileges through our constitutions and laws for the sake of the public good, will stand impotent in the face of the monsters these creations have become.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.1 (October, 2011).

Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld teaches anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Native Leisure Class: Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the Andes (1999); Fighting Like a Community: Andean Civil Society in an Age of Indian Uprisings (2009); and, with Jason Astorio, “Economic Clusters or Cultural Commons? The Limits of Competition-Driven Development in the Ecuadorian Andes,” Latin American Research Review (2009).

One way to tell a drunkard’s story is by the distances he travels. John Gough was born in Sandgate, England, in 1817, and was indentured to a family going to America and sent across the Atlantic. For two years he worked for the family on a farm in Oneida County in Western New York. When it became apparent they would not keep their promise to educate him for a trade, he got permission from his father to strike out on his own. He returned to New York City, alone and “glad to have my fate in my own hands, as it were.” Gough found work as a bookbinder’s apprentice, only to lose the job in the economic downturn. He soon made the wrong kind of friends, and by the age of 17 was already a heavy drinker. He traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, found work and lost it by his drinking. By 1842, Gough had ended up in Worcester, Massachusetts. He had gained and lost more jobs; had married, had a child, and drunk his family into destitution. He stood by, intoxicated, as his son died, and again when his wife died in childbirth with their second child. Gough’s wandering had slowed to standstill when, just 25 years old, he stumbled out of a bar into an unusually cold October night and, not for the first time, contemplated suicide.

From that moment until his death in 1886, Gough would transform these facts of his early life into an extraordinary career as a temperance lecturer. As a drunkard, Gough had been “utterly alone in the world,” he later wrote, “forgotten by God, as well as abandoned by man.” Yet by 1844, he was the headliner of a national temperance convention in Boston (fig. 1). Over the next four decades, Gough traveled by carriage, railroad, and steamship to tell his story to audiences in churches, theaters, town halls, and auditoriums in every part of the United States. By the end of his life, Gough’s speaking engagements added up to over 11,000 lectures and some 500,000 miles of travel across North America, as well as two tours of England, and other appearances in Europe. In the course of these travels, Gough became known as “the apostle of temperance,” a role model and emblem for the largest and longest lasting grass-roots social and political movement in U.S. history, and arguably the most popular lecturer of his lifetime.

The story that Gough told about the suffering caused by his alcoholism and his eventual recovery would become a staple of American culture, both high and low. A distinctively modern genre of confession, it anticipates the late 20th century interest in pathographies, a genre of biographical writing focused on personal disaster and dysfunction, ranging from James Frey’s fictionalized memoir A Million Little Pieces to “reality television” dramas such as Intervention. By situating Gough’s story of hard times within the context of the early 1840s, we can learn new things about the historical origins and cultural functions of this kind of narrative in American life. How did a working-class drunkard with little formal education become a narrator of hard times to society at large? How did Gough’s story circulate, and what might his celebrity tell us about the evolving meaning of class in nineteenth-century America? What role did he play in helping Americans think about the powers of the will in the midst of impersonal social and economic circumstances of modernity? To follow Gough’s story among the philanthropic, commercial, and ideological interests that brought it into the public sphere and kept it there, is to discover a surprisingly modern politics of culture: contests over the collective meaning of personal suffering, and competing ways of packaging moral authority in the marketplace of culture.

The story Gough told did not begin its public life in American culture as a written text. It was, rather, an oral genre that drunkards improvised about their personal suffering and recovery among the Washingtonians, a grass-roots movement that began in 1840, when six artisans in a Baltimore tavern pledged to stop drinking. Within months, as news of their reform spread, hundreds of local chapters were formed, enlisting thousands of members primarily in the northeastern and Midwestern states. This movement introduced a new story about drunkards to the public sphere of social reform. The story was new because of its plot, which ended with the redemption of a class of persons which, in older narratives of temperance activists, had been consigned to death, or written off in the statistical profiles of crime, madness, and poverty. The story was also new, however, in the way it was told, which Abraham Lincoln described in an address to the Springfield Washingtonians in 1842: “When one who has long been known as a victim, stands up with tears of joy trembling in his eyes, to tell of the miseries once endured, now to be endured no more forever, of his once naked and starving children now clothed and fed comfortably; of a wife long weighed down with woe, weeping, and a broken heart, now restored to health, happiness and renewed affection … how simple his language; there is a logic, and an eloquence in it, that few, with human feelings, can resist.” As Lincoln’s description begins to suggest, the story’s appeal derived from its sincerity and authenticity. What made the drunkard’s story “irresistible” was its joining of a Christian allegory of redemption to a sensational melodrama of domestic suffering. In telling their stories, drunkards exemplified a secular salvation that was freely given to all who might choose the humble grace of sobriety by signing the total abstinence pledge. Given the depths of the worldly hell from which they had suddenly risen in 1840, the Washingtonians were all the more miraculous for their “eloquence,” the simple language and logic by which they described the realities of poverty and deprivation.

Gough only lived to tell his tale of wretchedness and woe because a stranger tapped him on the shoulder, and invited him to a meeting of the Washingtonian Temperance Society in Worcester. To this group, Gough first spoke in public about his poverty and abjection, and by their simple creed and example—to talk only from personal experience, and to help other drunkards—Gough learned how to shape this experience as a story. As it was ritualized in the fellowship and outreach of the Washingtonians, the “experience story” offered Gough and countless other drunkards a script for ethical practice. Before neighbors, acquaintances, and strangers who had cast them in morality plays about vice and failure, drunkards asserted their autonomy—their capacity to choose a path besides the one to which they had been consigned by circumstances of birth, by the fatalities of habit, the accumulation of poor options, and bad decisions. Offering hope to others trapped in the despair from which they had risen, the public telling of their stories allowed drunkards to reclaim their very humanity, what they invariably called their “nobility” and “independence” as men. Unable to rely on the education and privilege that previously identified temperance reform with middle-class gentility and professional expertise, these reformed drinkers could nevertheless offer each other friendship, planting “their standard of moral government” on “the noble and manly feelings of human sympathy and love.”

Gough’s story began to leave a paper trail when, just two months after his reformation, he was enlisted by the Worcester Washingtonians to go on a speaking tour of the surrounding region. In the first of several scrapbooks in which Gough documented his speaking career, his first clipping was from The Worcester Waterfall, a paper edited by his fellow Washingtonian Jesse Goodrich. Dated December 31, 1842, it announced, “this talented and worthy young mechanic is about to commence the business of lecturing.” For the next six months, the paper supplied its readers with steady coverage of Gough’s appearances, as they began in nearby towns of Upton, Sutton, and Norfolk, and branched out to New Hampshire and Maine. Correspondents in these towns reported on the sizes of his audiences and on his success in getting pledges even from among “hard drinkers” or “hard cases,” praised his effectiveness as a speaker, and promoted him to other communities. A January 28 “Letter from Sutton” declared Gough to be “the man above all others, for the work in which he was engaged.” Goodrich not only publicized the intensive schedule of Gough’s engagements, but also handled bookings on his behalf at least until the fall of 1843. In return, Gough served as a subscription agent for Goodrich, selling to the local readers along his path a newspaper that was busy selling him. Throughout Gough’s first years on the lecture circuit, Goodrich continually ratified his institutional identity as “the Washingtonian lecturer” and the devoted emissary of “Washingtonian principles.” Meanwhile, the network of Washingtonian papers with which Goodrich exchanged news continued to certify Gough as “the Washingtonian lecturer,” his words as touching “the Washingtonian chord.”

From the outset, then, this “business of lecturing” in which Gough and Goodrich collaborated was devoted to selling Washingtonianism as a brand in the marketplace for reform. With the rapid spread of the movement, the publicity surrounding the missionary outreach of the original Baltimore group in New York and lectures by reformed drunkards had already become a familiar, if not notorious, feature of the cultural landscape. During a visit to Dedham, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1843, for example, Gough received coverage from the Norfolk American, a political paper which, as the Norfolk Washingtonian reported, “had never uttered a syllable in favor of a Washingtonian lecturer”: “we think him the best lecturer we have heard of that class of men called ‘reformed drunkards.’ He is a foreigner by birth, an Englishman we should suppose, from his correct pronunciation. His own experience as an intemperate man, tho’ dreadful, is not more terrible than that of many others of that unfortunate class of men, but in truthful descriptions of scenes of misery produced by drunkenness we have never heard him surpassed.” As the notice suggests, a tale of suffering, however impressive on its own, loses its novelty upon repetition. Before Gough set foot into a hall or church with his own experience, then, the Washingtonians had turned the drunkard’s misery into a predictable genre of lecture delivered by “that class of men called ‘reformed drunkards.'” If the content of Gough’s story seemed old hat, however, the quality and style of his “truthful descriptions” had never been seen or heard before.

Gough’s life as a public speaker was launched by the Washingtonians, but it flourished because he found ever-larger audiences within the temperance movement and eventually beyond it. Gough found these audiences by acquiring two new, influential patrons: Moses Grant, a prominent philanthropist and civic leader in Boston who throughout the 1830s and 1840s sought to publicize the link between drinking and poverty; and Rev. John Marsh, who served as “corresponding secretary” of the American Temperance Union. Like Goodrich, Grant and Marsh organized Gough’s appearances and took an active hand in marketing him in the press. Both men had years of experience in the organization and promotion of temperance from within the mainstream of protestant philanthropy and the reform press in the Northeast. Through their many contacts with philanthropists, ministers, and temperance societies, they opened doors for Gough that had literally been closed to the Washingtonians. In August of 1843, for example, Grant brought Gough to Boston for his first official lecture in the city, essentially giving him the mainstream movement’s stamp of approval. Grant advertised Gough’s special suitability for observant Christians, and promoted an appearance at the Odeon theater by noting in the Boston Recorder that his “Sabbath Evening addresses have been so very acceptable in our city.” Due in large part to Grant’s influence, Boston’s Mercantile Journal began to follow Gough’s appearances both in and out of Boston, including in their detailed coverage frequent references to scripture readings, prayer, and the ministers in his company.

As if poaching him from the minor leagues, Grant and Marsh broadened Gough’s appeal, and helped him transform a mission of reform into a vocation. Marsh read about Gough’s speaking in Worcester in a newspaper, and by the fall of 1843 had hired him as an agent for the American Temperance Union, the preeminent mainstream temperance organization which since the 1830s had developed a bureaucratic, centralized infrastructure linking together local associations, publishing and circulating reports, and sponsoring regional meetings and conferences. “I felt that such an instrument of rousing the public mind should not be lost,” Marsh later wrote, “and I made arrangements with him to go through the State of New York, and to speak with me in all the principal towns and cities.” Marsh took Gough on a speaking tour where he spoke in churches of all denominations, to the Auburn State prison, and even to colleges, which “released the students from their evening studies, that they might hear the young orator, who admirably adapted himself to such an audience.” Giving hundreds of lectures before larger, more respectable audiences, a “reformed inebriate” was transformed into an “orator” despite his working-class background.

As Gough’s story traveled out of the lecture hall and onto the printed page in 1843, his reputation as a speaker spread to what we would now call the mainstream press. Take, for example, the first clipping in Gough’s scrapbook featuring his name in a headline: “GREAT MASS TEMPERANCE MEETING AT FANEUIL HALL—MR. GOUGH,THE DISTINGUISHED WASHINGTONIAN.” Appearing in the Daily Mail, one of Boston’s major dailies, the paper introduced Gough to a general audience, offering some biographical background. It could not assume, in contrast to temperance papers, that its readers were adherents to the “cause” or “reform.” Rather, the article sought to explain why “he appears to be the chief attraction of the day”:

Mr. Gough is really a genius, sui generis, and a perfect genius for the Washingtonians. His broad mouthed denunciations of rum selling, his eloquent and pathetic descriptions of personal suffering, his endless budget of stories, anecdotes, songs, “gaieties and gravitas,” is enough to move a heart of stone, or make an inebriate explode with laughter.

Within the genre of Washingtonian address, the Mail set Gough apart as a “genius, sui generis” for his resources and tactics as a performer. Along with the expected attack on rum-sellers and accounts of personal suffering, Gough brought emotional depth and range, employing an “endless budget” of stories and songs that allowed him, despite a cold, to give “most abundant satisfaction” to “one of the most crowded audiences that ever congregated within the walls of old Faneuil.” Like so many other reviews that Gough received in his first two years as a lecturer, this article gives special emphasis to the diversity of his appeal, which retained the Washingtonian’s common touch of the barroom humor appreciated by inebriates, while engaging a whole new constituency who had seemed beyond the reach of reform: “In some instances, hundreds of the most gay and fashionable young men have walked up and signed the pledge, after hearing his discourses; young men that no other influence on earth could move to such a step.” Suggesting that the special “influence” Gough exerted on even “the most gay and fashionable” was of a piece with his skills as a performer, the article closed by telling readers to attend his next lecture that evening: “Mr. Gough will ‘both speak and sing’ to the great edification and amusement … of all who may choose to attend. Go and hear him, by all means. It is as good as a play, and twice as useful.”

So what, then, made this reformed drunkard’s story so compelling to diverse people—”as good as a play, and twice as useful”? Gough had learned to tell a story from his father, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars who, though unable to temper his “stern discipline” and “military habits,” earned his boy’s affection by reenacting battles he had witnessed “until my young heart would leap with excitement,” as Gough later wrote. Gough learned to read and write when he spent a couple of years at a local seminary. He discovered his speaking voice while reading aloud to his mother as she did piecework as a seamstress, when strangers stopped by their cottage “attracted by my proficiency in this art.” It was in the bars of New York, however, where Gough would hone his talents as a performer: “I possessed a tolerably good voice, and sang pretty well, having also the faculty of imitation rather strongly developed, and being well stocked with amusing stories, I got introduced into the society of thoughtless and dissipated young men, to whom my talents made me welcome.” When he found himself without work, his teenage “longing for society” led him to drinking; when his drinking made him unable to keep work, he sought jobs on the stage, eventually leaving New York for stints with theater troupes in Providence and Boston. As alcoholism took hold of Gough’s life, he put his performance skills to work nursing his addiction: “After every other resource had failed me,” Gough wrote, “my custom was to repair to the lowest grogshops, and there I might be usefully found, night after night, telling facetious stories, singing comic songs, or turning books upside down and reading them whilst they were moving round, to the great delight and wonder of a set of loafers who supplied me with drink in return.”

From the dislocation, isolation, and despair to be found at the margins of economic and social life, Gough furnished the stock episodes of the drunkard’s picaresque that he would go on to deliver, night after night and year after year, from the lecture platform. Working without notes, Gough used mimicry and variety to dramatize his own experiences. Reporters invariably commented on the “graphic” nature of his “illustrations,” his rapid shifting among “scenes,” his “personations” of villains and victims along the drunkard’s path. I”n the evolving media environment of the 1840s, it was Gough’s inventions as a performer that enabled him to render “truthful descriptions” of already well-known miseries, giving “to motive and appetite and principles life-like and breathing existences that all can recognize.” In the comfort of the lecture hall, Gough’s “vivid transitions from argument to pathos” made the social world of intemperance emotionally accessible and physically present, from the “mincing steps” of stumbling inebriate to the genteel hypocrisies of “the social glass.” Making experience a vehicle for social witness, Gough gave anonymous facts the narrative power of allegory. As the New York Tribune declared in 1844: “You can almost hear the sigh—the cry—the curse—the low jest—almost see the thin wife, the bloated husband—the days of light and the days of darkness—the scenes of happiness, and the midnight hours of despair—as they are to be seen in many a street of our city, as they are found in the downward track of almost every drunkard.”

In both the grog shop and the lecture hall, Gough used the same skills as a storyteller—dining out, so to speak, on his uncommon ability to enlist sympathy from diverse audiences. In putting his personal suffering on display to win the the affection of thousands of people who would gather to see him across the United States, however, Gough converted the insecurity and emotional need that marked his experience of poverty and degradation into habits of a new sort of moral personality—a mission to convey, as widely as one man could, the reality of the drunkard’s suffering, in its most quotidian and sensational details. That mission required freeing social activism from the cultural spaces and proprieties to which it had been confined. As the Providence Journal noted, Gough was “able to display his surpassing power of imitation, anecdote, and humorous remarks to much better advantage in a hall principally devoted to secular uses than he can do with propriety in a church or place devoted entirely to religious worship.” Gough became especially famous for his “thrilling” and “terrifying” impersonation of the delirium tremens. Indeed, in 1843 he made his first public appearance in Boston in the lower hall of the Boston Museum, just months before the 1844 debut of its first theater production, The Drunkard, which featured the tremens as a sensational climax but was sold to respectable audiences of women and children as a “moral lecture.” He was sometimes referred to as an “evangelical comedian”: people “who dare not patronize a theater, and therefore do not know what acting is, go and laugh safely with Gough, the great platform actor.” As the truth of Gough’s story came to be measured by the range and accuracy of its telling, Gough’s career as a lecturer perhaps helped to popularize a taste for theatricality. Indeed, the story of moral agency he repeatedly testified to on the platform would, in print, be objectified as acting—the ability to bring personal experiences to truthful life for the entertainment of an expanding middle class.

Gough acquired remarkable celebrity as a performer by carrying his story among an array of spaces, networks, and media that were rapidly reshaping education and leisure in antebellum America. By 1844, he had traveled 12,000 miles, and gotten 29,000 signatures from people who, after listening to Gough tell the true story of his own experience, had promised to abstain from alcohol. He kept meticulous notes about these travels, piling up the stats of a major-league slugger for the temperance movement. In 1847, for example, he spoke 240 times, traveled 7,313 miles, visited 102 towns and cities, and obtained 10,936 names. In the years ahead, as newspapers amplified his reputation to regional and national audiences, Gough ceased to be the “instrument” of any particular faction of temperance reform, and built an independent career as a temperance lecturer. From the meticulous memoranda books that Gough kept on his lectures from the 1840s to the 1870s, it becomes clear that public lectures were generating a consistent revenue stream, and could support the most effective performers with an often-sizable income. In that sense, the circulation of Gough’s story coincided with the commercialization of the public lecture. By 1853, for example, Gough had gotten over his discomfort with charging admission, and was making $25 to $50 a lecture. In 1857, he earned a total of $10,000. His annual income grew in subsequent decades, so that by in the 1870s, he was making as much $26,000 a year. As these numbers demonstrate, a working-class man turned his experience of suffering in nineteenth-century America into an asset that was both commercial and moral, by cultivating a professional identity and national celebrity as a public speaker (fig. 2).

Over the course of his career, Gough carved out a social mission for his public speaking that blurred political activism, education, evangelism, and entertainment. As he did so, organizations and entrepreneurs staked competing claims to the meaning of his story, seeking to define its value as it moved among diverse spaces and institutions in the marketplace for culture. To whom did this drunkard’s story belong, and what obligations did Gough assume in its telling? Could the moral lessons of the drunkard’s suffering be separated from the realities of social inequality in which it was clothed? In John Gough’s relationship to the Washingtonians, these questions came to have very public consequences, as one drunkard’s suffering came to be fought over by new and old factions within the temperance movement—the object of ideological conflicts over the meaning of class in American life. They would have consequences as well for how John Gough came to identify with his own experience as a drunkard.

Although short-lived as a formal movement, the Washingtonian revival posed a dramatic challenge not only to the tactics of the reform establishment, but to its cultural authority as well. Equipped with personal experience alone, drunkards testified to seemingly universal and transcendent truths unmediated by the sectarian and political prescriptions by which temperance had been addressed by professional elites throughout the 1830s. As The New England Washingtonian observed in 1843, the laborers of their movement “are the hard working people … The meeting-house and the state house have other matters to attend to. They have sects to build up, and laws to make. The true reformer is not at home in such places. He can’t take off his coat in them. He can’t speak in them.” In taking off their coats and moving outside political and religious institutions, these “true reformers” were attacking the utility of the literary training, educational privilege, and middle-class gentility which ministers, doctors, and lawyers had brought to temperance reform. Defending the forum it offered to the voices and plot lines of indigent and degraded people, the paper added that it never pretended to furnish “an establishment for a marble center table, or that it would contain a feast of literature on which the Scholar might feed to satiety.” For those professional reformers who had feasted on innumerable lectures, sermons, convention proceedings, and pamphlets throughout the 1830s, the absence of literary and scholarly attributes in the experience story attested to lack of moral credibility. The occasional charlatan who passed the hat as a Washingtonian speaker, the many reformed men who relapsed, the barroom vulgarity and humor with which they seasoned their moral lessons: all of this merely confirmed a prejudice held by many that no man who had become a drunkard could be trusted with his own self-control, let alone as a paid agent of social reform. To hitch the water wagon to any recovering alcoholic was to gamble the credibility of the temperance movement on personal character which experience had already proved to be unreliable.

Allying himself with the temperance establishment, and Marsh in particular, Gough made himself a target of radical Washingtonians seeking to protect their movement from “sectarian” agendas of politics and religion. In offhand comments made during an address he gave in August of 1844, at Tremont Temple in Boston, Gough reported that he had been informed “by the leading Washingtonians that Washingtonianism, as an ism, was dead. The reason assigned for this was, that the people in these places had become disgusted with the many follies dragged before the public in connection with Washingtonianism,” including not only “theatrical exhibitions, & c.,” but “infidelity.” Gough had just returned from a lecture tour of western New York, which Marsh had organized with the explicit purpose of engaging ministers and philanthropists who had been alienated from Washingtonianism. As Gough later recalled in his third and last autobiography, Sunlight and Shadow (1881), he found that long-time temperance leaders—”faithful men… who had endured persecution for the truth’s sake”—were being “thrown into the background,” dismissed as “old fogies, slow, men who did not understand the first principles of reform.” Meanwhile, “men became leading reformers who were not qualified by experience, or training, or education, to lead,” and “reformed drunkards sneered at those who had never been intemperate, as if former degradation was the only qualification for leadership.” One can imagine how, in the early 1840s, such polemics seemed to turn the world on its head: having never been drunk, the good ministers were unfit to lead temperance reform.

In making these comments, Gough was defending the many educated, ordained “friends” who had brought the former drunkard to their homes, escorted him to towns and villages, counseled him in his struggle for faith, and tutored the former artisan in how to conduct himself on the public stage. But Gough’s words merely confirmed the suspicion of some of his brothers that he had become the puppet of his ministers. “For these utterances I was subjected to an attack which, being the first, wounded me sorely,” in which he was “called to account for mixing orthodoxy” with his temperance appeals. A Washingtonian paper attacked Gough in October of 1844, noting that he “is a reformed man, and has ample evidence in his own glorious experience of the all-conquering power of the true Washingtonian principles, and motives innumerable to lay before the poor inebriate in urging his reformation, without going into the future world for them—motives connected with this life, with the poor sufferer’s own temporal well-being and happiness.” Gough could have drawn on the “ample evidence of his own glorious experience,” but rejected common sense in favor of metaphysical questions of salvation in order to address the “future world” of the reformed. Such criticism assumed that temperance was a “holy cause” whose “all-conquering power” was proved by personal experience. Substituting theology for the presence of truth in the drunkard’s own experience, Gough was diverting attention from “motives connected with this life,” from what ordinary men could know and verify by reference to their own “temporal well-being and happiness.” Other papers piled invective onto these arguments in subsequent weeks: “A religious bigot and ignoramus.” “Perverting the cause to sectarian ends.” “Dwelling on a set of motives which he knows never had any politics in promoting this glorious reform.” To these critics, Gough had squandered the example of his own life for the sake of entirely speculative theological claims about eternal life. In short, Gough had drunk the Kool-Aid of religious ideology, and was now peddling theoretical “motives” for reform, polluting the revelations of the drunkard’s suffering with sectarian politics.

The break from “Washingtonianism” that ensued from Gough’s comments would be painful and personal, haunting him for the rest of his life. Despite the fact that Washingtonians had saved his life, he could barely bring himself to mention their name in the first two autobiographies he published, in 1845 and 1861. In his last autobiography, however, Gough would seek to vindicate himself by turning to his scrapbook, where clippings about his career had, with the passage of time, assumed the aura of historical evidence. “I have before me two volumes of scraps collected from the temperance papers of 1844-46. This was about the time when some of the societies would have no members but those who had been drunkards; who would permit no minister of the Gospel to take any part in their exercises; who occupied the whole of the Sabbath day in meeting, relating experiences, and singing songs that were occasionally objectionable.” Decades later, Gough would, in writing, swear on his personal experience to vindicate himself: “I was a Washingtonian rescued by the spirit of Washingtonians,” he wrote, “and testify of what I know in saying that more than one minister of the Gospel shut the door of his church against these men, because he could not sit still and hear in his own pulpit, before his own people and the children of his charge, such loose and sometimes vulgar utterances as were occasionally heard.” In testifying “of what I know,” Gough insists that Washingtonianism was a ministry of “spirit” rather than the body. It was a kinship he acquired by being rescued through love and compassion, after all, rather than by sharing the physical and verbal traits of a social class. But “these men” claimed the experience of degradation itself as a badge of social honor: not to bear personal witness to impersonal spirit, but to claim exclusive ownership of a profane body, identified by loose and vulgar language, by the rudeness of its songs and impiety of its conduct.

Balancing the debts his suffering had incurred among the Washingtonians with the credit it had brought him on the lecture circuit, Gough could only reenter the drunkard’s body second hand, as a character to be played on the lecture platform. It might be for comic or tragic effect, but Gough’s achievement, in the course of telling his story no less than living it, depended on turning away from the drunkard’s experience of privation. It was a life he could only share with shame, as the mortified body from which the Washingtonians had reclaimed a soul, a circumstance from which an individual had asserted his freedom. To now wear this hairshirt of degradation with working-class pride was to give up the spiritual authority of humility. To be deserving of sympathy, after all, required showing others—especially the nondrinkers in the house—a desire for social respect: self-conscious recognition of the propriety and dignity of one’s person, repudiating not only drinking but the cultural environment in which it had occurred. Gough would carry the drunkard’s suffering as personal and professional baggage, and would act it out on the stage, to sensational and lucrative effect, as a vehicle to alter the conduct and mores of others. But the degradation and despair that had owned him for seven endless years were nothing he cared to own now, as the collective identity and autonomous culture of the working class.

This drunkard’s story is worth telling, in part, for what it tells us about historical meanings of class, and how forms of communication enter into the scripting of social difference. For Washingtonians, the “moral government” of community depended on toleration and respect for social differences produced by inequality. As Gough presented himself in public, night after night, it came to require something else: that individuals free themselves from the stigma of class difference by embracing seemingly universal norms of civility, and become “respectable.” It would be tempting to find in Gough’s professional success some betrayal of his working-class origins, an abandonment of the democratic creed of the Washingtonians. And yet, in the very frequency and intensity of his movements on the lecture circuit, Gough seems to have maintained solitude in the midst of his fame. Though he befriended many prominent reformers throughout his life, he turned down invitations to dinner parties of local worthies in towns and cities he visited, as though unable to abandon his difference as a drunkard: “The more I mingle with the wise, the pure, the true, the higher my aspirations, the more intense is my disgust and abhorrence of the damning degradation of those seven years of my life.” Carrying a working-class ethos of Washingtonianism into an expanding marketplace for leisure and entertainment, perhaps this itinerant storyteller also brought—if only for an hour or two—news of our capacity for identification, despite the facts and fatalities of social difference (fig. 3).

We still have much to learn about how we live with stories: about the way that otherwise impersonal plots, voices, images, phrases, and stereotypes that make up our common repertoire of culture become intimate attributes of personal identity, mutual attachment, and social difference. To follow Gough’s movements through diverse spaces and institutional identities—from churches to theaters and auditoriums, from missionary agent to civic actor—is to perhaps learn new things about how stories are valued: not for their intrinsic art as what people in the academy now define as texts or literature, but for their social missions, as tools of personal and collective welfare, for the remaking of individuals and communities. In reading over the thousands of notices that Gough pasted into his scrapbooks, we can never hear the sound of his voice, or see his body. Like the nineteenth-century readers who encountered his story in the newspapers, we are left with the aftermath of Gough’s presence, in the paper wake of experiences that, we are repeatedly told, cannot be described. In the ephemeral and corporal presence of humanity which he embodied for so many people in the nineteenth century, Gough’s paper trail perhaps testifies to what John Dewey described in an 1888 essay as the democratic faith in the individual as a moral personality: “an ideal of spiritual life, a unity of will” for the whole community, in a world that continues to be reshaped by the divisive forces of secular liberalism and capitalist modernity.

Further reading

On the media context of social reform, see Augst, “Temperance, Mass Culture, and the Romance of Experience,” American Literary History 19:2 (2007) 297-323. On popular traditions of autobiography in the context of early American print culture, see Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, 2000). For interpretations of antebellum temperance narratives, see Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago, 2005); Glenn Hendler, “Bloated Bodies and Sober Sentiments: Masculinity in 1840s Temperance Narratives,” Sentimental Men: The Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley, 1999), Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, eds.; John W. Crowley, Drunkard’s Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair, and Recovery (Baltimore, 1990); John W. Crowley, “Slaves to the Bottle: Gough’s Autobiography and Douglass’s Narrative,” Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature (Amherst, 1997), David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal, eds.

Class dimensions of Washingtonian revival and temperance reform more generally are discussed in Ian Tyrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800-1860 (Westport, 1979); Jed Dannenbaum, Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Washingtonian Revival to the WCTU (Urbana, 1984); Joseph Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana, 1963). Temperance reform has been interpreted more recently from the perspective of gender in Elaine Frantz Parsons, Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Baltimore, 2003); Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, 2002); Holly Fletcher, Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2008).

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

Thomas Augst is associate professor of English at New York University. He is the author of The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (2003) and the coeditor, with Kenneth Carpenter, of Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States (2007).

The Literary Paradises of Hurston and Bartram in a High School Curriculum

Early American literature is not commonly taught at the high school level. There are many reasons for this: diction is florid, page counts are high, novels are nonexistent, and a more painless nod to the colonial period is easily managed with a study of The Scarlet Letter or The Crucible. If the typical goal of high school literature classes is to inculcate a love of reading in students and to expose students to writing worth mimicking, then the most prudent course is to cleave to the latter half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During my years teaching some of the most popular curriculum standards, though, I have found that opportunities abound to incorporate earlier texts.The Great Gatsby cries out for excerpts from Ben Franklin’s journals, and the references that Anne Petry makes to the Junto in her novel The Street do as well. Study of Ralph Ellison requires supplementary readings in the Transcendentalists to help unpack allusions to Emerson and the Golden Ball. Even one Brit Lit high school stand-by, Jude the Obscure, requires reference to an early American antecedent: Thomas Hardy’s model for the Bible altered and improved by the iconoclastic Sue Brideshead was surely modeled on Thomas Jefferson’s Life of Jesus of Nazareth.

But none of the pairings I list above complement each other as well as the works of two Florida writers, one of the eighteenth and one of the twentieth century: William Bartram’s Travels and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. To begin with, the biographies of these two writers make for a fascinating comparison. Both approach their highly poetic and philosophical depictions of Florida with concrete backgrounds in the sciences: Hurston with her anthropology background and Bartram with his familial background in botany and naturalism. Both were single minded and wary of aligning themselves with grander political projects: Hurston was famously rebuffed by contemporary novelists like Richard Wright for refusing to take up the race issue, while Bartram turned down Jefferson’s invitation to join the Lewis and Clark expedition. Both were avid travelers, explorers, writers, gardeners, thinkers, and Florida enthusiasts.

Both authors write about nature as a lens to think metaphysically about human life. In other words, both Bartram and Hurston appear to be “watching God” through nature.

As a student of anthropology under Franz Boas and a lover of her home state of Florida, Hurston probably read Bartram’s Travels. Although no direct reference to these early American travelogues appears in her writing, she was certainly conscious of the tradition. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road, Hurston tells an anecdote she frames as the turning point of her education, when a teacher recited for the class the poem “Kubla Khan.” Her affection for that teacher, the drama of the reading, and the stunning imagery of the poem cemented her love of learning. This is the only specific reference that Hurston makes to the curriculum of her formal schooling, and one can only wonder if she recognized her native state of Florida in the imagery of the poem. The fact that Coleridge, in writing “Kubla Khan” (among other poems) took inspiration from Bartram’s travels down the St. John’s River is well documented in the poet’s notebooks.

Since Hurston was an innovator in bringing Southern black dialect into her fictional dialogue, diction is a natural focal point for literary study of her works. The same holds true for the study of William Bartram, not because of regional idiom so much as the pure foreignness of elevated eighteenth-century writing to the ears of contemporary adolescents. Look at how these two descriptive passages, because of their similar attitudes toward a storm, throw one another’s language nicely into relief. Hurston writes:

Ten feet higher and as far as they could see the muttering wall advanced before the braced-up waters like a roadcrusher on a cosmic scale. The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed its chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed to be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.