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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Technology of Democracy

The material history of the U.S. ballot

Check one:

Americans vote by secret ballot: Yes  No 

Voting is a private act: Yes  No 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surfing and Navigating

Or, life with books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Publishes an Early American Book?

From Codex to Kindle

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

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

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

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

"The Book-Binder." Page 38 of William Darton, Jack of all Trades; For the Use of Good Little Boys (Philadelphia, 1808). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — “The Book-Binder.” Page 38 of William Darton, Jack of all Trades; For the Use of Good Little Boys (Philadelphia, 1808). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig. 2. Nouvelle Orleans Capitale de la Louisiane. From Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane, tome second (Paris, 1758): 263. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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

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

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

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

The Civil War At 150: Afterword

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Money Was Different

A look backward

Visitors to the United States often complain, “Your money all looks alike.” Ones look like fives or tens or twenties, with the same color combinations—black for the faces and muddy green for the backs. Thoughtful Americans might agree with their guests: our currency does look very much alike, with the same limited, and deadly, choice of portraits and views. And it’s been that way forever, right?

Wrong.

There was a time when America’s paper money reveled in the offbeat, the inconsistent, the colorful. There was a time when it came from thousands of places rather than one, when local scenes and notables predominated, and when Americans were accustomed to receiving threes, fours, sevens, and nines along with fives and tens. There was a time when American currency was interesting, was actually intended to communicate with its audience and not simply to serve as an aid to commerce. This money dominated most of the American nineteenth century.

From the colonial period through the end of the Civil War, Americans were more dependent on paper money than any other people in the West. There was an excellent reason for this reliance: they had little choice. Like other transplanted Europeans, the early immigrants to English America spent much time and energy in the search for precious metals. Unlike many others, they were unsuccessful in their quest. It would not be until the middle third of the nineteenth century that two factors (the discovery of gold and silver in the 1840s and the modernization of the minting process) would create the possibility of enough “hard money” for everyone. And by that time, a robust, alternative tradition had grown to maturity, one based on paper and not on metal.

The paper era started out in Massachusetts, where colonial authorities hit upon the idea of issuing paper certificates to purchase the supplies and pay the troops the Bay Colony was expected to contribute to the first of an interminable series of English wars against the French in Canada. This was in 1690: the notes were printed from engraved copper plates (probably the work of silversmith Jeremiah Dummer), the troops were paid, the supplies, purchased. The Crown pledged to pay Massachusetts for its trouble, in specie, at war’s end.

Fig. 1. An 1814 five-dollar bill for the Gloucester Bank, a typical Perkins product. Courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection, Smithsonian Institution. Photo by the author.

That pledge was crucial; the certificates were as good as gold because everyone knew that “real” money stood or would eventually stand behind them, insuring their redemption. But then someone in the local government hit upon a clever, and epochal, idea: since everyone knew that the paper was good, why not leave it in circulation instead of retiring and destroying it once the English specie had arrived? The current monetary situation wasdesperate. It was done, and when the other colonies saw that the wrath of God did not descend on Boston, they got into the game themselves. By 1750, a paper tradition had been firmly established.

The medium posed problems, of course. It was subject to counterfeiting, and there was always the temptation to issue more of it than could be readily redeemed. But if paper threatened, it also attracted: it enabled generations of Americans to build roads, start workshops and factories, expand farms, grow cities and towns. In a very real sense, our early economy was built on thin air, on promises to pay, on optimism, on lack of viable alternatives, and by sheer will. And the miracle is that the whole thing worked.

One can divide our early paper’s story into two chapters. The first, lasting from 1690 to the early 1780s, featured notes from public sources—colonies and succeeding states; a new insurgent authority, the Continental Congress; and occasional cities or towns. The period from the early 1780s to the mid-1860s relied on currency from private issuers—mostly banks but also factories, canals and railroads, and, on occasion, some more unusual participants, including a hotel in Dixon, Illinois, and an orphan’s institute in Fulton, Ohio. There was a good reason for the shift from public to private money: the War for Independence had been fought with “official” currency issued by the national and state governments, and it had become virtually worthless by the end of the conflict. When a group of lawyers, politicians, and businessmen on the eastern seaboard wrote and pushed through a new federal Constitution, the last thing they wanted was more public paper. They prohibited the states from creating more currency, and they were cleverly silent on whether the new national government could do so. They realized that an emergency might someday arise, an emergency so dire that national paper would be required (and one did: we call it the Civil War). But as far as humanly possible, the United States would be a “hard money” nation, where coinage was king.

Fig. 2. An 1822 ten-dollar bill issued by the State Bank at Trenton, New Jersey. Courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection, Smithsonian Institution. Photo by the author.

Then reality intruded. The United States was as short of specie as ever. But the economy was strong and getting stronger. If it were to reach its full potential, the money supply would have to be increased, and quickly. Paper was the only viable solution. But the public powers had effectively put themselves out of the running. What was left?

Banks were left. The Constitution was silent on the matter of note-issuing private banks, presumably because its framers had never anticipated their necessity. But barring a miracle, these were exactly the sorts of institutions that would have to carry matters forward. And so they did: a handful of note-circulating banks opened their doors in the 1780s and 1790s, a few more in the first decade of the nineteenth century, many more after the War of 1812, and an avalanche between the 1820s and the early 1860s. It has been estimated that around eight thousand banks and other institutions issued paper money of their own.

Of course, there were a number of risks involved. How did you know whether a bank was solvent or even extant? Who rode herd on the bankers? What did their notes look like? How were their notes supposed to look? At bottom, there were two interrelated problems. They had cropped up well before 1800, and they would have to be solved at once, were the promise of paper to reach its full potential. First, notes must be made far more difficult to counterfeit than they currently were. Second, new methods of production must be found and married to improved security. The goal would be paper money with an absolute consistency of design, identical notes that could be produced in any quantity desired. If experiments to safeguard and mass-produce paper currency had been carried to their logical conclusion back in 1800, we might have had money looking very much like our money today: the same portrait here, the same curlicue there, etc. But they were not carried to their logical conclusion—at least, not yet. What happened and how it happened make a fascinating tale.

Fig. 3. This note was issued by the Jackson County Bank in the late 1830s. Courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection, Smithsonian Institution. Photo by the author.

The key player was a genius from Newburyport, Massachusetts, named Jacob Perkins. Perkins was a sometime inventor and dedicated self-promoter, very skilled in working with metals. Shortly before 1800, he began tinkering with the concept of printing currency from steel plates rather than copper ones. Steel would outwear copper by a factor of six, but it was proportionally harder to engrave.

Perkins made two contributions to the engraving and printing conundrum. He devised a method for softening and hardening steel at will: a design could be engraved in soft steel, hardened, and then used to print anything, including money. But just like the unsung Boston genius of 1690, Perkins carried things a logical and absolutely crucial step farther. He devised a transfer press, wherein designs could be replicated an infinite number of times.

He began with a design engraved on a soft piece of steel. Harden that piece, clamp it in a press, and force a soft steel cylinder over the flat plate often enough and you’d eventually pick up the original design, in relief. Harden the cylinder and force it repeatedly over a flat piece of soft steel and you’d have your original design back again. Add various touches, harden the plate, and you’d have a steel printing plate, ready for work. And you could make an infinite number of plates in this fashion, each identical to all the others.

Jacob Perkins had invented a technology so elegant, and so perfect, that security printers would rely on it for the better part of two centuries.

Fig. 4. A note from the Monmouth Bank, showing cautious experiments with the application of a second color, typical of the 1840s. Courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection, Smithsonian Institution. Photo by the author.

The inventor had perfected things a year or two prior to 1805. He then built a large printery in Newburyport and waited for orders to flood in. A substantial trickle repaid his efforts, but matters did not quite go as he assumed they would. Figure 1 shows a typical Perkins product, an 1814 five-dollar bill for the Gloucester Bank. Note the complexity of design. All of the work for the face and for the back (unlike many other printers, Perkins favored biface notes) could effectively be done by means of large plates with holes allowing for “customization” (the denomination, the name of the bank, and the place of issue). These notes were extremely difficult to counterfeit—so much so that the state of Massachusetts mandated that every bank in the state (which then included Maine) apply to Jacob Perkins for their paper money. But if his products were difficult to forge, they were even more difficult to love; they look downright homely now, and they must have given a similar impression two centuries ago.

So bankers were of mixed minds. While they appreciated what the inventor had accomplished, they were looking for variety. And a growing group of printers was soon meeting the challenge. In essence, Murray, Draper, Fairman, and Company (the Philadelphia firm where Perkins worked for a few years after winding up his own printshop) and all who followed would give the bankers what they wanted—individualized money—while using Perkins’s methods to achieve it.

Fig. 5. A note from the Southern Bank of Georgia is a typical product from the 1850s, a decade which saw an expansion of the use of the second color and a new confidence and quality of engraving. Courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection, Smithsonian Institution. Photo by the author.

Over the next half century, America’s currency grew increasingly ornate, as engravers and producers grew more confident. It may be of interest to look briefly at a progression of “typical” obsolete notes. Our first example dates from 1822, a ten-dollar bill issued by the State Bank at Trenton, New Jersey (fig. 2). Murray, Draper, Fairman, and Company printed the note, employing Perkins’s methodology to do so. Vignettes on notes from this period are fairly simple and small: the transfer press still lacked the force necessary for more ambitious work. Our next piece dates from the late 1830s, and it shows how far the technology had evolved in a few short years (fig. 3). The work is larger now, although the bill still has a “cut-and-paste” look to it. Inspiring allegories were the order of the day. This note was issued by the Jackson County Bank, which closed its doors almost as soon as it had opened them, victim of the hard economic times then current.

Almost all of this early currency was uniface, and all of it was printed in a single color, black. By the 1840s, cautious experiments were beginning with the application of a second color, sometimes called a “protector,” intended to safeguard against counterfeiting and alteration. A note from the Monmouth Bank was also intended to commemorate a Revolutionary War battle and the man at the helm, George Washington (fig. 4). The decade of the 1850s saw an expansion of the use of the second color and a new confidence and quality of engraving. A note from the Southern Bank of Georgia is a typical product from this decade (fig. 5). The trend continued through the early 1860s, and the second tint now became an integral part of the design, as on a dollar bill from Baltimore, Maryland (fig. 6). Back printing was also being reintroduced here and there. America’s private currency was beginning to resemble the first of the federal currency that would soon supplant it.

Fig. 6. A dollar bill from Baltimore, Maryland (early 1860s). Courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection, Smithsonian Institution. Photo by the author.

Almost from the beginning, issuers demanded and engravers supplied pictorial elements, portraits and vignettes, for America’s private currency. The artwork was there to foil forgers: counterfeiting was always a problem, in part because the bankers and others had not followed Jacob Perkins’s idea of absolute conformity of design and in part because of widespread illiteracy and lack of acquaintance with fiscal objects. But there were other reasons to favor portraits, stories, and scenes on your money. Beauty on your bank notes might make your products more popular with the public than those of your competitors—an admittedly minor factor but one which must be taken into account in places with many currency issuers. There was a final reason for the connection between the pictorial and the paper. Bankers and others came to see their currency as a way of telling Americans about themselves—about their country and its unique destiny, its past, its prosperity, and its strengths. Through the seven decades of the obsolete note, issuers would have almost unlimited chances to recount the American story.

By the 1830s, paper money usually presented more than one portrait or vignette. By 1850, the common arrangement was three or four images—a large central scene, plus a smaller scene or portrait on either end, and, perhaps, a tiny image at center bottom. During the years between 1830 and the early 1860s, at any given time there were several hundred currency issuers. Each was responsible for, say, half a dozen denominations, which almost always differed from each other in terms of their visual content (so that a lower denomination couldn’t be raised to a higher one by someone gifted with a pen). The designs of the notes tended to be changed every few years to ward off counterfeiting. While popular images were used by many banks because their recycling saved time and expense for everyone, there were still many hundreds, probably thousands, of images that were “one-offs,” expressions of a particular point of view at a particular time and place. These images reminded me of prehistoric insects forever frozen in amber, and I finally wrote an electronic book about them, Pictures from a Distant Country.

Fig. 7. "Fifty Cents: Shin Plaster," H. R. Robinson, 1837. One person's opinion of the (frequently unsupported) paper money of the day. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — Fig. 7. “Fifty Cents: Shin Plaster,” H. R. Robinson, 1837. One person’s opinion of the (frequently unsupported) paper money of the day. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

The most fascinating thing I found about these old notes was the progression they displayed—not only an evolution in printing expertise but a progression in how people and objects were portrayed, from simple, black-and-white, either/or depictions in the beginning to far more nuanced images towards the end.

And the end finally came. A great war, the Civil War, found North and South needing more paper money than the banks could ever provide. Like it or not, the national government got back into the currency business, from which it has never departed. And the road to monetary conformity lay open.

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

R. G. Doty is Senior Curator of Numismatics at the Smithsonian. He is the author of eight books and the editor of two more, and he has also written about two hundred and fifty articles, radio scripts, etc., all dealing with various aspects of numismatics from ancient times to the present.

The Narratives of the Later Lives of Frederick Douglass: Old-Age Autobiography Before Senescence

Old age and even one’s experience of old age, like so much else, is socially constructed. While certain long-held prejudices and accounts of aging have remained fairly static, much has changed with regard to how we understand aging and the elderly. In the later years of the nineteenth century, prior to the development of senescence as a unique and distinct stage of life, the meaning of old age was up for debate. Not only were people unsure about what number of lived years qualified one as an old person, but the meaning of old age itself was in flux. These meanings had special import to those who lived and aged through this period of contested and changing descriptions. The concept of chronological aging suggests an inevitable, even, and incremental process, but this is not the only way in which aging has been experienced. In the late autobiographical writings of Frederick Douglass, we find a different accounting of the past and a different narrative strategy that adds new dimensions and chapters to our understanding of the senescent subject. What I term the old-age autobiographical project is not to be understood as the mere incremental addition of narrative to an already established life story, but rather a process of revising, filling out, and reshaping of the entire life narrative. Unlike the diachronic narrative fixity of chronological aging, which can only point to decline, old-age autobiography synchronically expands the possibilities of the past by reexamining and making new meaning from past events and experiences.

1. “Hon. Frederick Douglass,” black and white lithograph by Kurz & Allison (Chicago, no date). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

With the 1904 publication of his two-volume Adolescence, American psychologist and president of Clark University G. Stanley Hall brought the term adolescence into circulation as a unique phase of life and a subject of psychological and sociological research. Adolescence had a wide-reaching impact on American culture and transformed the structure and shape of lives and the life narrative. Eighteen years later, in 1922, at the end of his academic and administrative career and two years before his own death, Hall published Senescence: The Last Half of Life, an important study of old age. Senescence has all the ambitions of his earlier volume and for Hall, this study was understood to be the proper bookend to his scholarly career. While Americanists have devoted much attention to what one scholar has called the fin-de-siècle culture of adolescence, representations of old age remain relatively unexamined and undertheorized. As was the case with adolescence, there were major social and cultural reconfigurations brought about with the medicalization and psychologizing of aging.

Modern, by which I mean secular post-Enlightenment, autobiography tends to follow the plot associated with chronological aging: the autobiographer starts with his or her earliest memories and narrates steadily toward the present. Old-age autobiographical writing, by the nature of autobiography’s necessary fiction of the steady and teleological unfolding of time from the past to the present, forms a complex site of negotiation between any possible senescent authoring subject and its other, the younger autobiographical subject.

Numerous questions arise at this temporal juncture of past and present: Is there increased pressure to give a meaningful shape to lived experience as one ages? Do older autobiographers use different strategies than younger writers in representing the self and the life narrative? Is there a meaningful difference between the senescent autobiographer who revises an autobiography written at an earlier stage of life and the older autobiographer composing and writing his or her life for the first time? This last question is of particular interest when examining autobiographical writing in the last half of the nineteenth century. This was a moment in which countless people took up autobiographical writing, and many of these were to revise their texts as they aged. For the old-age autobiographer, revision can cause complications. As one ages, the distance between the authorial “I” who wrote the previous text and now, in revising, writes in the present, and the autobiographical subject only increases. The conclusion, the telos of the autobiographical project, shifts and the autobiographer faces a choice in how to close that temporal gap.

It seems rather obvious, but autobiography is a bit of an old-age genre; there is, as G. Stanley Hall writes, an “inveterate tendency of the world to hark back to past stages of life.” “As part of the process of reorientation,” he wrote, “I felt impelled, as I think natural enough for a psychologist, to write my autobiography and get myself in focus genetically.” For Hall, autobiography provided a systematic approach, through deductive introspection, to the orientation of the present to the past. Roy Pascal, in his great book on the autobiography, glosses the genre as “the reconstruction of the movement of a life, or part of a life, in the actual circumstances in which it was lived.” It’s easy to see why the retrospective mood of autobiography might be attractive for and associated with older writers. Reconstruction of life, to some degree, requires as its source material the fragmentation produced by the temporal drift, the movement, of (many years of) lived experience.

I’ve been calling the turn of the century the awkward age of autobiography, which has, of course, a deep irony. At this moment in the long nineteenth century, the popular phrase “the awkward age” refers not to the older ages but to the teen years, and especially the teen-age of a young woman. Yet oddly enough the awkwardness experienced by Henry James’s young protagonist Nanda, in the novel from which I have lifted that phrase, is what connects her with the elderly Mr. Longdon. James’s awkward coupling fits an age in which the future was quite uncertain and the past complex. It was right at this time, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, that the form of autobiography was becoming rather strange, from third-person narration to fragmented, partial, and non-linear accounts of the past. Many of the older autobiographers who had begun to launch their awkward formal experiments with their writing were, in part, responsible for this change to the genre. Old age during the fin-de-siècle had not yet coalesced into a set of cultural short-hands and norms; it was a moment prior to the idea that old age was a disease from which we could be cured and before the psychoanalytic account of the mid-life crisis and the so-called depressive anxiety of old age. The fluid meaning of old age is what enabled aging authors to remake autobiographical writing. The various authorial strategies used at the turn of the century reveal that old age is more than the summing of years lived, the teleological vision of chronological aging. Rather they demonstrate that advancing in age cannot and should not be reduced to the dominant narrative mode that Margaret Morganroth Gullette has called the plot of decline.

Frederick Douglass’s life and his work span the nineteenth century, and the changing form of his autobiographical project as he entered old age offers an important alternative to the plot identified by Gullette. Douglass was a young man of twenty-seven in 1845 when he published The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a text that would come to define his public persona. Douglass would continue to rehearse—for he much preferred oral delivery—and revise this self-creating and self-defining text throughout the next fifty years of his life. He published two major revisions of this autobiographical fragment: My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855 and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass in 1881/1882, issuing a revised edition of this later text in 1892/1893. While comfortably within what he called in The Life and Times the “sunset” of his life, Douglass continued to revise the material that made up his Narrative and his origin story in order to bring “unity and completeness” (his terms) to the text that had become his life. Compelled to write because his public life continued, Douglass continued his revisionary autobiographical writing until the final edition of 1893.

2. “The Life & Age of Man,” hand-colored lithograph by James S. Baillie showing the eleven stages of life, each compared to an animal (New York, 1848). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Old-age autobiography pulls itself in multiple temporal dimensions as it seeks to make new meaning from the past while avoiding falling into either a decline or progress narrative. Douglass well understood the power and limitations of self-writing. Writing autobiography, for Douglass, was simultaneously a freeing endeavor, a freedom practice, and a rigidly structured and heavily constrained activity. He imagined writing itself as making possible an expansive filling out of narrative. In an important and oft-remarked upon passage in The Narrative of the Life, Douglass describes learning to write surreptitiously in used copybooks belonging to Thomas, the son of his master. Douglass describes inserting his own hand, his own text, in the spaces left between the source text and Thomas’s copy. This depiction of self-making was crucial to his self-representation, and all of Douglass’s later autobiographical works preserve this image of what we could call his scene of writing. In continually adding to the body of his Narrative through his extensive revision, Douglass uses his own autobiographical writing to produce the additional space, in the form of the many new pages added with each revision, through which he could expand his practices of self-making. This self-making process was remarkably compatible with old-age autobiography in that this mode, old-age autobiography, provides Douglass with an alternative accounting mechanism to the teleological fiction of progressive chronological aging.

Although all of Douglass’s autobiographies contain a version of the copybook passage, a description of his process found in his 1893 revision of The Life and Times provides a key figure, the notion of “rounding up” and completing, for his old-age autobiographical project: “As I review the last decade up to the present writing, I am impressed with a sense of completeness; a sort of rounding up of the arch to the point where the keystone may be inserted, the scaffolding removed, and the work, with all its perfections and faults, left to speak for itself.” Douglass’s “completeness” included, of course, finally giving in to public demand for the details of his escape from slavery. In 1845, in the original Narrative of the Life text, he explained that he had two reasons for not including this part of his life narrative: that doing so would prevent others from escaping as he had done, and that he would risk the lives of the people who had helped him by publicly identifying them. By 1881 he feels safe enough to fill in the gaps created by these previously withheld details. It is not just that the times have changed, although that is most certainly true. Douglass himself has changed; he has become an old man and has had numerous additional experiences that enable him to recast and reconfigure the meaning of the past. Some of the gaps in Narrative of the Life can now be filled, of course, because he is no longer worried about risking his life or the safety of others, but his autobiographical revisions are multidimensional and not driven by the norms of linear chronological completion.

If the way in which I have been describing old-age autobiographical revision as enabling, for Douglass, certain experiences of freedom and self-determination, these same sorts of revisionary practices also involve certain unavoidable constraints. Recasting autobiographical revisions through aging studies enables us to see ambivalences that the dominant aging plot of decline has foreclosed. For someone like Douglass, revision is inextricably linked to his need for publicity, but his continual self-revision of his autobiography is also existential. Douglass’s life is his project. His coming to literacy and his story, written by himself, was simultaneously a creative and public act. In continuing to write autobiography, he adds to the existing public story by separating himself from the earlier image of him as a sixteen-year-old slave. At the same time, we might want to consider that The Life and Times does not participate within the same literary genre as the 1845 Narrative. Douglass, we should note, never uses the term “autobiography” (it is still quite new, but available at the time) in the text of The Narrative and he does not introduce the term into the body of his text until the 1892 revision of The Life and Times. While The Life and Times continues to avoid the emplotment or fictionalizing plots that James Olney argues must be excluded from the slave narrative, it is most certainly not a slave narrative. Douglass avoids fictionalization, but the form of The Life and Times is no longer guaranteed by what has now, because of his advanced age, become only one of many episodes in his life.

3. Title page for a late nineteenth-century edition of *Life and Times of Frederick Douglass*, which was enlarged from Douglass’s 1855 *My Bondage and My Freedom* (Hartford, Conn., 1881). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Perhaps this is as good a point as any to ask why it is that we neglect nearly all of Douglass’s other writings, including The Life and Times, in favor of the hypercanonized Narrative of the Life? Eric Gardner calls our reduction of the rich nineteenth-century archive of black literature to essentially just the slave narrative a form of tokenism that risks “ahistorical misreadings of texts (and authors).” Do we neglect The Life and Times because it is much longer than Narrative of the Life? Or maybe we neglect it because it is written by the much older Douglass and thus takes the form of the composite text of the old-age autobiographer. Old-age autobiography, as I have described it, is non-teleological in that it refuses to fall in line with the norms of the plot of decline. Douglass’s old-age autobiography is expansive, both in and across time, rendering it a composite form of the slower rhythms of evental time and quicker pace of chronological plotting. It is the uneven reading experience produced by the patched together combination of these two temporal modes that has left many readers frustrated and has caused us to neglect this important text.

Nineteenth-century scrapbooking, like the old-age variant of autobiography that I have been describing, was a popular composite archive of self-history, and Frederick Douglass, like many other nineteenth-century Americans, was a scrapbooker. He even encouraged others to keep scrapbooks to record the history of black Americans. Douglass used his scrapbooks to save material he published, essays and announcements addressed to or concerning him, editorials on civil rights, and reports of the many acts of racist violence and hatred, in addition to material relating to the various government offices that he worked for or had dealings with. Douglass used his numerous scrapbooks to collect, layer, and document his life, what Ellen Gruber Garvey would call “writing with scissors.” Many of the newspaper clippings included in Douglass’s scrapbook from 1892 discuss his advancing age. Columnists and writers call him a “senile negro scoundrel” and a “superannuated person.” Derisive comments on Douglass’s age and appearance, his “beginning to show marks of age,” also, strangely, appear in the prefatory matter “Comments of the Press Upon Frederick Douglass” included in the advance copies of The Life and Times. Like his highly organized scrapbooks, The Life and Times records Douglass’s life not by emendation but by addition. Douglass’s autobiographical narrative resembles his scrapbooks in that both serve as steadily accumulating major testaments to his role in public life. Both the scrapbook and his autobiography are anti-teleological forms that demonstrate an alternative to old age’s plot of decline.

We see an example of the process of what we might call old age revision by emendation when, in 1892, Douglass adds, right after and beyond the former edition’s conclusion, a new third part to the 1881 text of The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. In the opening section of the late revision of The Life and Times section, under a first chapter of “Later Life,” Douglass situates and frames his narratives and the numerous lives that he has lived up until this point: “It will be seen in these pages that I have lived several lives in one: first, the life of slavery; secondly, the life of a fugitive from slavery; thirdly, the life of comparative freedom; fourthly, the life of conflict and battle; and, fifthly, the life of victory, if not complete, at least assured.” Yet it would not be the case that “victory” had been achieved.

In this section Douglass, in effect, restarts his autobiographical project but he does so now from the vantage point of old age. He includes an autobiographical apology, the traditional opening move for almost all forms of self-writing in the nineteenth century, for his recursive autobiography that offers a justification that remains in tension with the life of victory: “I have … been embarrassed by the thought of writing so much about myself when there was so much else of which to write. It is far easier to write about others than about one’s self. I write freely of myself, not from choice, but because I have, by my cause, been more forced into thus writing. Time and events have summoned me to stand forth both as a witness and an advocate for a people long dumb, not allowed to speak for themselves, yet much misunderstood and deeply wronged.” While political needs once more drive his writing, he adopts a different set of autobiographical conventions as both he and the century age. These conventions, registered in the form of his prose, invoke the synchronic dimension of old-age autobiography as he revises his existing diachronically structured text.

Old-age autobiography provides Douglass with different strategies for thinking about his own past and the passing of years than the rigidly structured linear scheme that can only lead into the future and into decline. We see an example of this when Douglass describes how, following emancipation, he was initially at a bit of a loss about where to redirect his energy. He has something like a vocational crisis. “Outside the question of slavery,” he writes, “my thoughts had not been much directed, and I could hardly hope to make myself useful in any other cause than that to which I had given the best twenty-five years of my life.” While contemplating this feeling, he is called upon to give a commencement address at Western Reserve College. He recalls the event of this speech as not a push into a new direction, another political cause, but in fact a realization that his previous work was not yet complete. “It won’t do to give them an old-fashioned anti-slavery discourse,” he writes. And then, in a parenthetical aside: “(I learned afterwards that such a discourse was precisely what they needed, though not what they wished; for the faculty, including the President, was in great distress because I, a colored man, had been invited and because of the reproach this circumstance might bring upon the College.)” Douglass describes his realization that what was thought “old fashioned” was not a sense of being obsolete or out of time, but rather a deep demand to return to his work: “Though slavery was abolished, the wrongs of my people were not ended. Though they were not slaves, they were not yet quite free.” Douglass depicts himself undergoing a renewal of the demand for him to speak; this renewal comes in the form of a recommitment of his own narrative project. Not dogmatic, but firm in his resolve, Douglass returns, once more, to address an old-fashioned topic because his project is not yet complete.

Acknowledgments

This article was originally delivered as a paper on a panel titled “Senescence and Old Age” and organized by Nathaniel A. Windon for a C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists conference in March of 2016. I would like to thank Nate and my fellow panelists for their immensely helpful comments and feedback.

Dixie Land Songster

As the preceding slides suggests, Confederate songsters did not shy away from “foreign” material. For instance, “Mary of Argyle” is a much-loved, centuries-old Scottish folk song. Similarly, “The Girl I Left Behind Me” can be traced to eighteenth-century Dublin. Yet both songs emphasize indeterminate longing and a deep desire for a far-away lover. As a result, these are perfect love songs for the Confederate national moment—no matter where they came from.

“Darling Nelly Gray” is also a song of longing, but its inclusion in a Confederate songster is surprising given that it was written by Benjamin Russell Hanby, an ardent abolitionist. The song tells the woeful tale of an unnamed Kentucky slave whose lover, Nelly Gray, has been sold further south. Even in The Dixie Land Songster version, the lyrics are in the first person, meaning that a Confederate reader might find him- or herself singing, “Oh! my poor Nelly Gray, they have taken you away / And I’ll never see my darling any more. / I’m sitting by the river and I’m weeping all the day / For you’re gone from the old Kentucky shore.” Would Confederates have missed the irony of such a performance? (After all, southerners would have been the “they” who took Darling Nelly Gray away.) Perhaps. Or perhaps not. It is possible that Confederates simply ignored the political message of the song and enjoyed its lilting melody and somewhat vague, Christian lyrics.

Blackface minstrel airs, British folk tunes, and patently abolitionist songs: such is the stuff of Confederate songsters, which provide a heterogeneous record of literary and musical nationalism in the making. As Confederates struggled to imagine a new political community, popular song had a particular purchase on the hearts, minds, lips, and ears of new southern nationals.

But these songsters also embody a paradox. Though partisans of a white-supremacist, pro-slavery, and anti-democratic republic, Confederates seem to have been more or less comfortable with an admixture of diverse genres, traditions, and sources—especially if that admixture could be used for Confederate nationalist ends.

Such irony wasn’t lost on one pro-Union reader. The Boston Athenaeum’s copy of the Third Edition of the Bonnie Blue Flag Song Book—another Blackmar and Brother publication—includes a particularly agitated piece of marginalia. Next to the lyrics for “Annie Laurie,” another Scottish folk song, someone has written “stolen—how mean to try to palm this off as Southern Literature!” It may have been mean but it was also wholly commensurate with the rather messy musical, popular, and print cultures of the American Civil War.

Musical Sleuthing in Early America

“Derry Down” and the XYZ Affair

Listen to this:

Example 1: “Derry Down.” All audio examples and transcriptions created by the author.

This is “Derry Down,” an English ballad that was popular in the United States in the late eighteenth century. With its regular phrases and lilting melody, it is easy to hear why this song was well liked, but who could have predicted this unassuming tune could become a musical touchstone for political debates? Yet it did.

A history of the early republic could be told through song, for virtually every event in domestic and foreign politics was reflected in popular music. As partisan wrangling dominated early national politics, popular songs were regularly deployed by writers, editors, publishers, and compilers eager to traffic in those most addictive goods: political news and opinion. Hastily penned lyrics appeared on single sheet broadsides and in songsters (pocket-sized bound volumes), in plays and pedagogic books, and on the pages of newspapers and periodicals. Because sheet music was a specialized subset of the print trade, most of these songs appeared with lyrics only, the tune listed by name directly under the song title. British tunes such as “God Save the King,” “The Vicar of Bray,” and “Yankee Doodle” were among the most frequently featured songs because they were familiar and convenient. Despite the seeming dissonance between the songs’ origins and their use in post-Revolutionary America, Federalists writers at one end of the political spectrum and Republicans on the other end shared this pool of tunes when fighting their proxy political battles in music.

“Derry Down” was frequently recruited as a weapon in those battles, one of many songs co-opted by partisan lyricists in the ever-escalating competition to shape the nation’s political beliefs in the 1790s. Songs set to “Derry Down” began appearing in the American colonies in the 1770s, when both loyalist and patriot writers adopted the tune to propagandize during the Revolutionary War. In England “Derry Down” was typically used to present humorous stories and political topics, often tinged with wicked sarcasm and biting satire, and these songs were republished frequently in America in the 1780s and 1790s. More than two dozen discrete versions appeared by 1800, always without music. (The tune’s distinctive refrain, “Derry down, down, down, derry down,” which was retained with each new set of words, made it highly recognizable for singers, listeners, and readers.)

When the international diplomatic debacle known as the XYZ Affair erupted in April 1798, “Derry Down” was ubiquitous in the musical responses that popped up in the print sphere. This scandal, named for the code names of the offending French officials (“X,” “Y,” and “Z”) who had insulted and attempted to extort bribes from American envoys in Paris, sent jarring political and musical shockwaves across the Atlantic Ocean. Incensed Americans jettisoned once-popular French songs like “Ça Ira” and the “Marseillaise,” which were replaced by gleefully patriotic ditties such as “Hail Columbia” and “Adams and Liberty.” Savvy Federalist scribblers, seeing an opportunity to score political points against French-sympathizing Republicans, generated aggressively partisan songs that expressed their self-righteous indignation. Featuring bellicose verses directed against the French, these songs obliquely chastened Republicans for their foreign friends’ treachery. For example, the hyper-Federalist collection of songs, The Echo, or Federal Songster (published in Brookfield, Mass., in 1798) included a version of “Yankee Doodle” featuring the lines, “If Frenchmen come with naked bum, / We’ll spank ’em hard and handy.” The emphasis on “spank” is in the original.

Particularly popular was a version of “Derry Down” titled “The Five Headed Monster; or, Talleyrand Dissected. A new song for the jolly Tars of America,” which appeared in New York’s Commercial Advertiser on August 4, 1798. “The Five Headed Monster” was repeatedly republished in the final years of the eighteenth century, appearing in six newspapers in New York and New England in August and September 1798 alone, and in James Springer’s Federalist Songster, published in New London, Conn., in 1800. (This was not the only use of “Derry Down” in answer to the uproar; another version appeared the following year in New Jersey’s The Centinel of Freedom on September 10, 1799.) “The Five Headed Monster” recounts the diplomatic misadventures suffered by the U.S. envoys. Although the scandal was based on insults and extortion, an escalating maritime drama underlay French-U.S. tension, and this theme was picked up in the song. French ships had been attacking U.S. and British vessels since the outbreak of French-English aggression in 1793. Following the U.S.-Britain Jay Treaty of 1795, which French and American Republicans alike viewed as dangerously conciliatory to Britain, French attacks on American ships increased. With the election of Federalist John Adams as president in 1797, French treatment of the United States grew still more hostile. Particularly outrageous to Americans was France’s stated plan for American sailors: when the French seized British vessels, any American sailors who had been forced to work on those ships would be treated as pirates.

This naval preoccupation is evident in “The Five Headed Monster.” Highlighting the duplicity of the French government (the so-called “Five Headed Monster”) and sympathizing with the plight of American sailors (called “tars”), it adopted the colloquial style of a sailor song to capitalize on Federalists’ newfound popularity. President Adams is depicted as the “State-Pilot” who addressed his “mess-mates” in the second stanza:

When the sky was o’ercast, and the Thunder of War,
By John our State-Pilot, was heard from a far,
Says John to his Mess-mates—”let’s look out for breakers,
“For, believe me, my friends, that the French are no Quakers.”

The envoys, too, are presented as lusty tars, crying out “Avast!” when confronted with French foreign minister Talleyrand. The minister and his aides are cast in the roles of piratical villains, deemed thus in the lyrics: “You’re a plundering blood thirsty, vapouring crew.” Audiences in 1798 would have understood that the faux-sailor song was meant as a reminder of the many reasons for Francophobic ire, by extension promoting the Federalist Party’s saber-rattling response.

A song like “The Five Headed Monster” wears its political heart on its sleeve. But while the lyrics conveyed forceful messages to the eighteenth-century public, the music also spoke to listeners. Perhaps it didn’t communicate in terms as literal as the words, but “Derry Down” carried cultural and political connotations, and listeners could decode these musical signals. Moreover, the style of the melody itself set the tone by which the words were interpreted. Thus, uncovering the meaning of the music can help reveal the significance of such popular political songs.

Historians typically shy away from discussions of music’s musicality, but by doing so they unintentionally neglect the important emotional and connotative dimensions that make music meaningful. Music can track historical events, commenting on and illuminating facets of the past. But it does more than that: it can also expose underlying cultural trends, and often taps into historical characters’ personal experiences. What follows, then, is an exercise in using methods of the scholarly study of music to uncover the unspoken meaning of the song “Derry Down.” Much like art historians, musicologists study musical works as aesthetic objects and contextualize music in history. We examine music making as a process of social and cultural expression, and analyze the intersection of music and philosophy, psychology, and related fields. As a discipline with nineteenth-century German origins, musicology has traditionally taken Western classical music as its object of study, but today musicologists are an omnivorous sort, eager to pursue an ever-growing variety of music and increasingly taking cues from ethnomusicology’s openness to music from a range of times, places, and peoples. Play us some music, and we want to listen carefully through our musicological headphones and peer closely through our musicological spectacles.

Popular music in early America poses certain challenges to the musicologist. Songs are like little knots with several strands that need to be unraveled. As I already noted, most often the sources do not contain any actual music, only lyrics, so the first task is to identify the tune and find out what it sounded like. In the cases where the intended tune is not indicated, when telltale textual signs (like an unusual poetic meter) are lacking, and there is no recognizable refrain, this can be next to impossible, stopping a musicologist in her tracks. But when the tune is identified in the source, as in the case of “The Five Headed Monster,” this first task is easily accomplished thanks to collections of English ballads and popular songs that provide commonly received versions of the melody. Once we know what the tune sounds like, we can evaluate the relative merits of different settings and speculate about the evolution of musical taste in America.

We could stop there, contented with our detective work and critical assessments, but there is a second, trickier task that beckons: to understand what connotations this music carried in late eighteenth-century America. This is an elusive but more rewarding goal, and two musicological paths lead to it for “The Five Headed Monster.” One path follows the tune back in time, uncovering the melody’s history and showing how that background influenced Americans’ taste for the tune in the late eighteenth century. The second path focuses on the late 1790s, considering how “The Five Headed Monster” was consumed—if it was performed, how it circulated, and thus what the social and political reverberations of the song could have been. As we shall see, both these lines of questioning force us to grapple with the fact that the tune was not a fixed artifact but a dynamic entity. The tune itself changed over time, and its meaning also changed as each new set of lyrics left a residue on the melody.

The immediate pay-off of this musicological investigation is twofold. The evidence is scanty and difficult to parse, but by working with it we come to a fuller understanding of the responsive quality of early American musical life, which was characterized by audiences’ tastes for simple but catchy melodies, music from abroad, and densely referential and clever treatment of cultural and political texts. At a deeper level, these materials probe the connection between music and politics and the relationship between music and identity—complex topics of ongoing interest in musicology that also resonate with many other disciplines.

Tunes can tell many stories, and “Derry Down” is no exception. In the century that preceded the XYZ Affair, “Derry Down” played myriad roles: it represented a folkloric take on English hierarchy in the late seventeenth century; it tracked the rise of commercialized popular music, metaphorically moving from the country to the city in the first half of the eighteenth century; and it participated in the large-scale transfer of cultural artifacts and practices from Britain to the American colonies that accelerated rather than slowed as the eighteenth century drew to a close. During the eighteenth century, as the accidents of transmission beset the melody’s contours and rhythms, it gradually changed. The tune’s connotations also changed, as the melody evolved and as new layers of meaning accumulated with each additional set of lyrics. By 1798, the many versions of “Derry Down” jangled against one another, and we can listen to the clanging of the rich cultural heritage that accompanied the musical responses to the XYZ Affair.

There are two kinds of questions we can ask about a tune’s background, and both pertain to change. First, we ask about the structural elements of the music—did the music itself change over time? Second, we ask about the cultural significance of the music—what meanings did people invest in the song, and how did those meanings change over time? We are hunting down clues about how the music sounded, and how that music made people feel. Understanding how music changed without knowing why is dissatisfying. Understanding how individuals felt about music without knowing what the music was yields an incomplete view of the past. That is why these two lines of questions work best together. As with a surprising new pitch in baseball, we want to understand what is different and how it works, why the change was made, and how players reacted to it.

Within the larger frameworks, which we might call “the music itself” and “music’s meaning,” are nested many other possible questions, most notably questions about musical taste and music’s social role. What about this tune made it desirable for frequent recycling? How did the song’s genre (a ballad) bear upon its appeal? What variants of the tune developed when it was transmitted orally, and what do those changes tell us about how the song was being used? In a larger study, we might ask what such modifications to the melody reveal about the geographic displacement of performers, and how such ruptures led to innovations in oral and written sources. At a theoretical level, we could ask about the abstract ideas tied to the melody. These would be ideas with which the lyrics interacted obliquely or challenged head-on, and we could analyze how those ideas morphed over time.

Orienting ourselves toward communities (the typical domain of ethnomusicologists), we might ask questions about the groups of people the tune excluded or included, or what it meant when competing groups each claimed the tune as their own. Such questions lead to far-reaching reconsiderations of how we organize and study music, especially songs like “Derry Down,” whose versions seeped across national boundaries and appeared on several musical platforms—lowly broadside ballads and middle-brow comical ballad operas, for example. With these questions, tunes like “Derry Down” become kaleidoscopes. Angled to catch the light, they reflect different facets of history through their prisms.

1. "The Ballad of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury," in Wit and mirth: or, Pills to purge Melancholy, printed by William Pearson for Henry Playford (London, 1719). Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. — 1. “The Ballad of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury,” in Wit and mirth: or, Pills to purge Melancholy, printed by William Pearson for Henry Playford (London, 1719). Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

The process by which new versions of “Derry Down” came about in the first place has a long history. Fitting a preexisting melody with new words is called contrafacting, and the resulting new song is a contrafactum (pl. contrafacta). For example, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” is a contrafactum of “God Save the Queen.” In Europe, sacred and secular contrafacta date from the medieval period, although the practice is much older—Middle Eastern sources show contrafacta from the fourth century. Contrafacting a melody wholesale was convenient for purveyors of song in the eighteenth century because using a familiar melody meant no music had to be printed, and consumers could immediately sing the new song. In some cases, the contrafactum separated entirely from the cultural milieu of previous versions. For instance, a bawdy secular song could be sacralized, adopted into the liturgy and divested of its profane associations. In other cases, a tune carried its connotations with it from version to version, inking every set of new lyrics with an unwritten secondary message. Such messages served as powerful reminders of tradition and heritage, even when the lyrics themselves represented a complete break with the past. Like many popular melodies in late eighteenth-century America, new versions of “Derry Down” referenced the song’s past simply by labeling the tune with one of its traditional English titles. With these constant reminders, audiences were attuned to the underlying connotations the tune carried from previous contrafacta.

The earliest version of the “Derry Down” ballad dates from late seventeenth-century England. Ballads, a genre of strophic narrative songs that emerged in the late-Medieval period, offered an entertaining way to tell a story, encouraging communal singing on the refrain. A vogue of satirical, critical, and even rebellious ballads developed in the British Isles in the seventeenth century, and “Derry Down” seems to have grown out of that trend. The ballad genre flourished in the eighteenth century, fueled by antiquarians’ fascination with the past and aided by the print trade’s growing capacity for disseminating music. Broadside ballads abounded, and the ballad opera helped divert the traditional story-telling function of the genre down a still more commercially viable avenue. More than a hundred versions of “Derry Down” appeared in the eighteenth century, making it one of the most popular tunes of the era. The song was associated with rather sharp-tongued comedy from the beginning, and by the end of the century it was firmly tied to social and political satire and farce.

The first printed version of “Derry Down” was a broadside ballad titled “A New Ballad of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury,” which was printed for P. Brooksby in London sometime between 1670 and 1696. Identifying the tune as “The King and the Lord Abbot,” the Brooksby print of “Derry Down” contained no music, but does have the characteristic refrain, “Derry down, down…,” which implies a tune. The first printed music appeared in 1700, in Wit and Mirth; or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (fig. 1 shows the 1719 edition), a collection of songs by the successful playwright and song composer Thomas d’Urfey (1653-1723).

There are three points to note about this earliest printed source for “Derry Down.” First, the melody has five phrases, of which the first two are the same (we’d say AABCD).

Example 2: Transcription of “The Ballad of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury,” mm. 1-4.

Second, the rhythms are almost entirely straight, mostly notes of the same length, with no syncopation and nearly no dotted figures. Third, in the penultimate phrase, the melody drifts gradually down the scale from D to F#, doing so through small turning figurations.

Example 3: Transcription of “The Ballad of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury,” mm. 7-9.

As we shall see, these three elements will change over time. Also noteworthy are the presence of two elements that stay the same: the descending line in the first phrase, and the two distinctive leaps in the melody—one of an octave in the third phrase, and another of a fifth in the final phrase, shown here:

octave and

fifth

2. "Derry Down" in polyphonic setting. In The Musical Century, in One Hundred English Ballads, Printed for Henry Carey (London, 1740). Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois. — 2. “Derry Down” in polyphonic setting. In The Musical Century, in One Hundred English Ballads, Printed for Henry Carey (London, 1740). Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois.

Between 1700 and 1740, “Derry Down” transformed in both small and substantial ways. In the late 1720s and 1730s, the tune was used in twenty-six British ballad operas, including the hugely successful and entertaining The Beggar’s Opera of John Gay (London, 1728). Numerous other versions lampooned authority figures, recounting social embarrassments and criticizing political misfires. One version ridiculed a gentleman for sitting on a priceless Italian violin from one of the famous workshops of Cremona. Several versions criticized Britain’s taxation policies. And a version that was particularly popular in America in the late eighteenth century recounted the foibles of a hapless and lovelorn cobbler. (This was the traditional version best known in America—most of the “Derry Down” contrafacta in U.S. sources were labeled “to the tune of The Cobbler.”)

As “Derry Down” circulated in increasing numbers of contrafacta, the style in which it was sung evolved. Printed versions show an increased use of playful rhythms and ornamental figurations. Most noticeably, the form changed from AABCD to ABCDE, with no repeating first phrase (the final three phrases remained the same). A setting of the tune for two voices and accompaniment in Henry Carey’s Musical Century (1740) shows these changes (fig. 2).

This tune is fundamentally the same as the “Derry Down” version printed in 1700, but certain superficial elements are quite different. First, we can see the same descending first phrase that appeared in the earliest printed version, but instead of repeating in the second phrase the melody hovers around G. Compare this to example 2, and the difference in form is clear.

Example 4: Transcription of “The Melody stolen … Death and the Cobler,” mm. 5-9.

Another change: the melody line (uppermost in the score) is full of dotted rhythms that give the tune a merry air. The treatment of leaps and runs is more dramatic, too: following the octave leap, the melody soars to a high G instead of lowering to D, and the subsequent line plunges down the scale instead of settling in puffs of turning figurations, as did the 1700 version.

1700: Example 5: Transcription of “The Ballad of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury,” mm.

1740: 7-9; transcription of “The Melody stolen … Death and the Cobler,” mm. 12-14.

Intervening printed versions reveal that these changes happened gradually, with the most significant change (to the form) taking hold in the late 1720s and early 1730s. Unfortunately, musical scores of the tune don’t turn up in written sources in the second half of the century, making it impossible to track further changes.

The written copies of the song represent only one mode by which the song was transmitted, for popular melodies like “Derry Down” also circulated orally. Such transmission, when songs were sung among groups of people and passed from voice to voice, was a prime mode by which a melody could be adjusted gradually. A person embellishes a bit here, goes up for a high note instead of down for a lower pitch. Like in a game of telephone, someone else hears it, likes it, and starts singing it that way. The trend catches on, and the next time the song is printed, these changes are notated in music and thus incorporated into the written record of the song. Members of a different community might see or hear the slightly different variant, recognizing it as “Derry Down,” noting that it deviated from what they were accustomed to, and perhaps adopting some of the innovations. Changes to the form of the song represent a more significant kind of innovation, and might have come about through the purposeful modification by a music compiler—but again, it is likely that the change was first made, either intentionally or unintentionally, by someone simply singing the tune. These changes suggest a robust and diverse performance tradition in the eighteenth century.

Having traced the early history of the tune, we can now speculate about what made “Derry Down” so popular for re-texting, and why writers turned to it when they needed a tune to express outrage over the XYZ Affair. Comparing the early and later versions of “Derry Down” shows that the tune became more buoyant, flippant even, by the mid-eighteenth century. Simply put, the changes to the melody made it more enticing and sensational. Furthermore, “Derry Down” dealt in something very valuable: gathered from the early versions, the tune was associated with righteous social and political critique, dressed in the trappings of parody and humor. The music itself supplemented that association, as the melody still churned with nostalgia in its minor mode and gentle lilt, conjuring romanticized images of a simpler time. Besides being memorable and fun to sing, the tune clashed deliciously with the sarcasm of the lyrics, like salt and vinegar.

An important musicological lesson inheres to this journey through “Derry Down’s” history: what we take as “the song” is in fact always changing, and the evidence we have to work with—written music—tells only one side of the story. For a different side we must both dig deeper into the music itself and explore the world it inhabited.

With the survey of “Derry Down’s” history and significance under our belts, we can turn back to “The Five Headed Monster,” one of the songs written in response to the XYZ Affair. What did Americans do with the song “The Five Headed Monster”? There is no evidence of performances—no descriptions of private music making, no newspaper accounts of singing the new political songs. Nevertheless, by analyzing the interaction of the text and the music and examining the materials in which the songs circulated, we can understand how “The Five Headed Monster” was used.

In vocal pieces, music can describe and exaggerate—or contradict—the message of the lyrics. This kind of text setting has a long history. Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez is renowned for his nuance in depicting and expressing the text by exercising keen compositional technique to underscore the concrete, and occasionally the connotative, meaning of the lyrics. Other composers could choose to be less subtle (if more entertaining). In a part-song by Italian Renaissance composer Claudio Monteverdi titled “Ardo avvampo,” voices shout “ardo, ardo” (“I burn, I burn”), sounding like a cry for help from a real fire, and gurgle “agua, agua, agua” in overlapping phrases, evoking the image of splashing water. Descriptive and expressive text setting lasted well into the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century German Romantic composer Franz Schubert wrote multi-song cycles in which the piano accompaniment is like a character in the story, murmuring its own account of the singer’s tale of love and loss. In popular music, Cole Porter’s “Every Time We Say Goodbye” switches from a major chord to a minor chord on the lyrics “there’s no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to minor,” and The Music Manprovides classic examples of descriptive text setting (think of the train scene in which traveling salesmen imitate the sound of the train).

3. Verses 1-3 from "The Five Headed Monster," in The Federal Songster, printed by James Springer (New-London, 1800). Courtesy of The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — 3. Verses 1-3 from “The Five Headed Monster,” in The Federal Songster, printed by James Springer (New-London, 1800). Courtesy of The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Alas, “The Five Headed Monster” is no great example of expert and mellifluous text setting. The lyrics are humorous and clever (fig. 3), but despite being in the same basic meter as the “Derry Down” melody, they do not fit particularly well with the tune.

The melody cadences at the end of the second and fourth phrases, punctuating the lyrics at those points and emphasizing the rhymed couplets. In the first three verses, the phrases that receive this emphasis (capitalized for illustrative purpose) are: “…grand-mother EVE…vile Talley-RAND…heard from a FAR… are no QUAKERS…Butchers by TRADE… give us CASH!” Also, the octave leap in the third phrase draws attention to whatever word falls on the upper note. In the verses shown, this means the lyrics “under-STAND…look out for BREAKERS…count it but TRASH” all receive a musical punch.

With these various modes of musical emphasis, a tune can either seem to “agree” or “disagree” with the lyrics. In “The Five Headed Monster,” words that seem significant in the verse don’t always coincide with those points of musical emphasis, and the words that do fall on the cadences and the octave leap seem haphazard. Why should “breakers” and “far” receive emphasis? Very possibly the lyricist composed with only peripheral attention to what the music sounded like and little consideration of the practicalities of singing. Indeed, the ungainliness of the lyrics made the song cumbersome to sing.

The media in which the “The Five Headed Monster” circulated gives us further clues about how it was consumed. Sharing similarities with the field of book history, this line of inquiry asks questions about how songsters and newspapers were used. First, because political songs were disseminated in lightweight print media, they were eminently transportable and circulated readily. A songster might be slipped into a pocket, and a newspaper could easily be carried. Second, as relatively inexpensive and ultimately expendable items, the newspaper copies were regularly shared, and were often read in public spaces. An image comes into focus of informal gatherings, perhaps in taverns or coffee houses, at which the songs were shared, the lyrics skimmed or perused, read or sung aloud and laughed over. Songsters, more substantial and less disposable volumes, invited a more lingering attention to the song lyrics, perhaps in a domestic setting. Here, too, the songster was easily shared, brought to the house of a neighbor or friend for an evening of entertainment.

Finally, visual representations of music making in this time period would also afford clues about how songs like “The Five Headed Monster” were consumed; such pictures (if we have them) can be plumbed for factual information about musical practices, as well as interpreted as aesthetic objects in and of themselves. But even without pictures, we can conjure an image of how this political song circulated, spreading its message both literally through the lyrics and more subtly (but perhaps more persuasively) through the implied critique of the “Derry Down” tune.

The scantiness of the materials and the simplicity of the music might seem to discourage prolonged musicological attention to “The Five Headed Monster,” but the benefits of examining such a cultural micro-phenomenon are significant. For one thing, the intersection of music and politics is a topic of enduring interest. Music’s iconic role in an array of activist movements and at points of social upheaval, such as the Civil Rights Movement and more recently in Tahrir Square, are just a couple of instances that demonstrate why musicologists should care about musical politics, or political music. With “The Five Headed Monster,” and “Derry Down” in general, we gain a keener sense of how music was deployed for political ends—how music supported those goals, but could also sidetrack them. After all, even if the lyrics about the XYZ Affair referred only to France and the United States, Britain was a non-verbal third point of reference in the “Derry Down” contrafacta because of the tune’s English origins. Such songs perpetuated the complex cultural ties between the United States and Britain, while also illustrating the political machinations that took place in the early republic.

Forceful messages about collective self-fashioning are delivered in these sources, making them relevant to ongoing debates about music, culture, and identity. Every printed edition of “The Five Headed Monster” came with the expectation that readers knew the tune “Derry Down.” By taking for granted that the audiences had a shared repertory that included “Derry Down,” songster compilers and newspaper editors were implicitly pushing for a cohesive national culture that presumed English ancestry (or at least a familiarity with English music). A reader who didn’t know “Derry Down” was urged to learn how it sounded, or at least what it represented, because it was so prevalent in public culture. Leaving aside the question of whether the political sentiments expressed in the song lyrics were widely held, it is safe to say that “Derry Down” contrafacta put forth a kind of argument for cultural unity, even if that unity did not (or could not) really exist. This use of “Derry Down” commanded music as a common currency, and thus it was more prescriptive than descriptive of actual collective identity. In fact, in many cases tweaking British musical traditions to project American national identity was effective. After all, songs like “God Save the King” and “Yankee Doodle” were successfully assimilated into U.S. cultural identity by the early nineteenth century. Regardless of whether most Americans believed that the patriotic images inscribed in these songs pertained to their lives, the songs came to symbolize Americanness.

“Derry Down” did not achieve this iconic role, but it was certainly significant in its day; and examining it encourages us to ask far-reaching questions about the role of music in society—for instance, how aesthetic experiences simultaneously influence and are used to express national identity. It served as an abstract vehicle for the ideas and ideals with which political actors honed their distinct identities, taking advantage of the comical and satirical associations of the tune to vouch for specific critiques of powerful figures and foes. Yet the tune was not an empty vessel or a blank slate onto which messages could be chalked; rather, it was a palimpsest, with layers upon layers of meaning from past versions. By tracing the background and transatlantic dissemination and publication of “Derry Down,” and by delving into the music itself, we can begin to see how the contrafacta brought this legacy to bear on the ongoing negotiation of those identities and affiliations.

As we peer at history through the lens of music, however grimy the glass, we find that music to be an invaluable companion to historical research and a rewarding end in itself. Music scholars gobble up materials in their quest for insights into fundamental questions about music’s role in societies around the globe, and working with this material encourages us to keep asking about the larger meanings of music. How does music carry intelligible messages whose meanings individuals and groups can construe, either consciously or unconsciously, solely from the melodies? How do those meanings change over time? What does it mean to study a “piece of music” like “Derry Down” that itself is in flux, changing through oral and written transmission? These are philosophical questions about the essentially transient nature of music’s existence, and always deserve to be asked, even if they are never completely answered.

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

The Technology of Democracy

Surfing and Navigating

Further Reading:

Who Publishes an Early American Book?

Further Reading:

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

Further Reading:

The Civil War At 150: Afterword

Further Reading

When Money Was Different

The Narratives of the Later Lives of Frederick Douglass: Old-Age Autobiography Before Senescence

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Dixie Land Songster

Further Reading

Musical Sleuthing in Early America

Further Reading