At a foot long and no wider than an adult’s hand, the Conuropsis Carolinensis, the Carolina Parakeet (MCZ 67853) glows in cool greens, blues, and yellows. Its arched wings, useless, contorted claws, dangling tag, and lone glass eye remind careful viewers of the artifice of its preservation (fig. 1). It has survived for over two centuries, moving from its home in Kentucky, to Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, and finally to a quiet drawer in the Ornithology Department of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. The species represented by MCZ 67853 has been extinct for decades and was a favorite of naturalist Alexander Wilson (1766-1813), who almost definitely collected, sketched, and wrote about this particular bird.

When I first learned about this specimen, I wondered what it could possibly offer beyond its illustrious provenance and curious status as an illustration of a lost species. Yet, as I looked closely at this colorful bird and tried to piece together its life history, I realized that this small creature is both a carefully collected scientific specimen and a consciously constructed object, and maybe, something more: a memory, a story—perhaps even the likeness of a lost friend.

The Parakeet and the Naturalist

This Carolina Parakeet came into the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) in 1914, as part of a large collection of birds. Prior to their acquisition by Harvard, the specimens had been in the Boston Museum and were probably purchased by Moses Kimball in 1850 from the Peale Museum. By 1914, their original labels, cases and mountings had already been lost and Walter Faxon of the MCZ worked to reconstruct the history of these things. The next year, he published his findings under the title “Relics of Peale’s Museum.” He traced the long, tenuous history of the collection of birds from their origins at the center of American natural history—once housed perhaps in the rectangular glass cases depicted in Charles Willson Peale’s 1822 self-portrait The Artist in his Museum—to Harvard’s halls. The parakeet was among an unspecified number of Peale birds Faxon branded as the models for Alexander Wilson’s illustrations, which form the basis of his well-known work, American Ornithology. For Faxon, this was a useful and exciting bit of ornithological detective work that might assist his peers in understanding Wilson’s definitions of species by comparing his drawings to existing specimens. Faxon did not waste time describing the details of every species. The brightly plumed parakeet merited just over one line of text, “Conuropsis Carolinensis (Linn.). M.C.Z. No. 67853. Original of Wilson’s figure 3, 1811, pl. 26, fig. 1.” Taken together, Wilson’s vivid plate and the small stuffed bird are a visually compelling pair (fig. 2).

Alexander Wilson, a Scottish-born poet, emigrated to America in 1794 after writing verses in protest of the local manufacturing elite (fig. 3). Upon his arrival in America, he made his way to Philadelphia and developed an interest in natural history. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Wilson befriended the naturalist William Bartram and considered himself Bartram’s student, as he learned the craft of recording specimens in the wild. As a member of Philadelphia’s natural history crowd, Wilson figures in Peale’s Exhumation of the Mastodon (1806-1808) painting. He is the lone character, in mustard pants and a blue jacket, on the left side of the painting, surveying the busy scene of discovery and recovery with folded arms. As many scholars have detailed, for Wilson and others in the early republic, natural history was a key to defining and recognizing the possibilities of the new American nation.

While lesser known today than John James Audubon (his posthumous competitor), Wilson gained fame as a naturalist from his single great work, American Ornithology or the Natural History of the Birds of the United States Illustrated with Plates Engraved and Colored from Original Drawings Taken from Nature, the foundation of ornithological study in the United States (fig. 4). Wilson catalogued America’s birds in these nine volumes from 1807 until his death in 1813. His entries for each bird included a sketch, which was engraved by his compatriot Alexander Lawson (among other engravers), a short description, and sometimes a longer, lyrical essay describing the features of a particular bird. As American studies scholar Laura Rigal has noted, these descriptions sometimes turned the birds he observed into “feeling subjects,” whose personalities and character had implications for the future of American identity. As indicated in the title of his masterwork, his drawings were supposed to come “from nature.” This mandated his travel over thousands of miles of rough trails and non-existent paths in search of birds. He gathered images, specimens, and vivid descriptions of 500 birds, including about eighty-five of which he identified and described under new names. Wilson donated several of the birds he collected to Peale’s museum, including, as he noted, examples of the Carolina Parakeet.

In 1810, Wilson roamed from Ohio to New Orleans as he worked on this project. At Big Bone Lick in Northern Kentucky, he encountered a large flock of Carolina Parakeets, which he described in an essay in American Ornithology.

When they alighted on the ground, it appeared at a distance as if covered with a carpet of the richest green, orange, and yellow: they afterwards settled, in one body, on a neighboring tree, which stood detached from any other, covering almost every twig of it, and the sun, shining strongly on their gay and glossy plumage, produced a very beautiful and splendid appearance.

In the midst of this carpet of color, he shot several of the birds. In what modern scientists think may have been an adaptive strategy, the birds were not frightened away by the shots, and hovered around the wounded members of their flock with what Wilson characterized as affection and sympathy. Wilson’s account of the parakeet flitted from a physical description to a careful reading of the character of the birds.

In the midst of the confused and seemingly mourning animals, Wilson realized that he had only slightly injured one of the birds. He decided to keep it as his companion and called it Poll—a generic name for a parakeet since at least the seventeenth century. Wilson initially imprisoned Poll in the stern of his boat in a makeshift cage. He later tied up the small bird in his handkerchief. He placed it in his pocket and carried it with him for over a thousand miles. The living bird initially bit and clawed him; it sometimes escaped and Wilson risked his life to chase through “the worst of the morass” to reclaim the creature. On other occasions, it acted as an object in spite of itself. For example, it served as a medium of communication in his conversations with Native Americans. Wilson explained, “The Chickasaws called it in their language ‘Kelinky’ but when they heard me call it Poll, they soon repeated the name; and, wherever I chanced to stop among these people, we soon became familiar with each other through the medium of Poll.” On other occasions, Poll seemed closer to a sentient being—one who missed companionship. Wilson procured a friend for it, but the friend quickly perished and was replaced with a mirror. The bird was satisfied with the relationship it forged with its own reflection. Eventually, Wilson tamed Poll and it learned to sit quietly by his side. Shortly after they achieved this balance in their relationship, Poll flew overboard one night and drowned in the Gulf of Mexico. Poll had journeyed with Wilson all the way from Kentucky to the sea and was on its way home with him to Philadelphia. In all of these descriptions Wilson described a particular bird and a particular friend. In its watery grave, Poll escaped the fate of many of its compatriots, which Wilson sometimes ate out of necessity, or dissected, or in some cases preserved for donation to Peale’s museum.

Throughout this journey, Wilson recorded his movements and his discoveries through his catalog of birds, in this case for the third volume of his Ornithology. His descriptions of Poll were not as a bird in its own habitat, but as his companion. As Laura Rigal has explained, Wilson did not arrange his book in a Linnaean system or in any other hierarchy as was found in Peale’s museum, but in the order in which he acquired the birds. As he traveled, Wilson had to prepare drawings for an engraver. He would make observations, write notes, and produce drawings, which would then be sent home to Philadelphia for speedy inclusion in the next volume of the project. Because of the great cost and labor involved in producing American Ornithology, which was supposed to be printed in an edition of 200 books, of ten plates apiece, in ten volumes, totaling 20,000 plates, Wilson worked to find subscribers, to collect payments, and to finish the book as rapidly as possible. The state of the early republic’s roads and mail often made this process risky. Wilson sent a large packet of drawings home to Philadelphia on April 28, 1810, but the packet never arrived. Unique data, collected from the field and sketched from nature, was lost. When Wilson returned home, he found his publishing project behind schedule and had to recreate his drawings quickly. His sketches of the Carolina Parakeet were probably in this packet, as he observed the bird around the time he mailed the ill-fated drawings. One of the specimens donated to Peale’s museum would have made a ready model for his new, speedily executed, drawings.

There is an interesting map up at Newsweek‘s web site illustrating what the magazine calls “a surprising correlation between the geographic density of payday lenders [a.k.a. storefront loan-sharking operations] and the political clout of conservative Christians.” South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Utah, and, naturally, Missouri were among the leaders in both categories, followed by nearby southern and western states. Ironically, the Christian usury belt roughly tracks with the William Jennings Bryan coalition.

This correlation will not come as a surprise to anyone who has driven U.S. 231 through Alabama (Cottondale to Montgomery on our way back to the Midwest from Tallahassee) or any highway through just about any small city in Missouri. Evangelical churches and storefront lenders are right up there with convenience stores and Subway sandwich shops as your most common roadside attractions. In Alabama, I would throw in BBQ places and pawn shops.

I would not argue that there is any real connection between legal loan-sharking and evangelicalism, if that is the proper term, but the two phenomena do seem to depend on similar markets: economically stressed, poorly educated people who are perhaps a little too trusting or naive in dealing with their local authority figures, be they payday lenders, preachers, or state legislators. That last category is probably the key one. If there was some way to make a map showing “penetration of state government by predatory ‘small business’ interests,” I suspect it would look very much like the one in Newsweek.

Comments: 

1. […] Correlation between locations of evangelical churches and payday lenders (Publick Occurrences). […]

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This article originally appeared in issue 8.3 (April, 2008).

Jeffrey L. Pasley is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and the author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001), along with numerous articles and book chapters, most recently the entry on Philip Freneau in Greil Marcus’s forthcoming New Literary History of America. He is currently completing a book on the presidential election of 1796 for the University Press of Kansas and also writes the blog Publick Occurrences 2.0 for some Website called Common-place.

On a hot July day in 1796, curious citizens of Philadelphia pushed and shoved as they lined up under the sign of the Black Horse, which hung outside Mr. Leech’s tavern on Market Street. They were all there to witness a “Great CURIOSITY”: a man named Henry Moss who was born “entirely black” but after thirty eight years had miraculously “become as white and fair as any white person.” According to a broadside dated July 23, it was reported that Moss’s “natural colour began to rub off” and his “wool” was being replaced by “straight hair similar to that of a white person.” How, they wondered, could this be true? From eight in the morning until eight in the evening, Moss entertained visitors, who plunked down a half shilling for the chance to view this wonder.

The public’s preoccupation with Moss was unmistakable. According to Dr. Charles Caldwell, for at least those two summer months, the people of Philadelphia were utterly transfixed by the spectacle of Moss. As Caldwell noted in his Autobiography, “[T]he cause of this singular change of complexion was a theme of wonder to everyone.” The doctor went so far as to assert that Henry Moss’s name was as well known to periodical readers as that of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Although Caldwell was prone to exaggeration, we do know that Moss’s popularity prompted him to take his show (which was literally himself) on the road. He toured several American cities where he also drew crowds of curious onlookers.

Today we can glean only secondhand glimpses of this common man’s uncommon life from several conflicting accounts scattered throughout the records of the period. The “spectacle” he created not only sparked the curiosity of the average citizen in search of a thrill; it garnered the attention of the new nation’s leading intellectuals, who speculated, debated, and published their differing views on Moss’s color transformation. Unfortunately, as far as I am aware, Moss did not leave any written documents of his own. Therefore, we cannot turn to him for information. However, we can examine the social and cultural implications behind the differing theories that people in America had about his changing color and speculate on what their keen interest in him can tell us about pressing issues of the period, such as race relations, religion, slavery, and the formation of an American national identity.

First, let us take a look at who was interested in Henry Moss. Like Caldwell, the prominent physician Dr. Benjamin Rush plunked down his admission fee for the opportunity to see Moss for himself. He wrote an account of his visit dated “1796, July 27” and painstakingly pasted a broadside advertising the show into his personal letterbook, which can be found today in the collections of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. The ad for Moss was one of only two items that the busy doctor and civic leader chose to paste into his book. (The other item was the eulogy of George Washington.) Rush was so impressed by what he saw that he discussed the man who had “lately travelled through this city, and was exhibited as a show for money” in an article published in 1799 in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Moss’s condition prompted Rush to propose leprosy as the cause of the “Black Color (as it is called) of the Negroes.” Rush was not the only well-educated Philadelphian to speculate on the causes of Moss’s unusual condition. Benjamin Smith Barton, who, like Rush, was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was also fascinated by the man whom he described in an 1806 publication as a “white negro.” The Reverend Samuel Stanhope Smith, moral philosopher and the seventh president of Princeton (at that time called the College of New Jersey) also commented extensively on Moss’s case in an 1810 republication of his work An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, a work I will return to later.

The few facts regarding Henry Moss’s life that emerge from the records of these eminent men conflict with one another in puzzling ways. Most intriguing, was Moss a slave or a free black man? Smith asserted that Moss was a slave who bought his freedom with the money he earned displaying himself to the curious public in various American cities. If this version of Moss’s life story was true, then for enslaved Africans, white curiosity was a commodity that could be used to buy that most precious, priceless commodity of freedom. Others describe Moss as a free black who was a veteran of the American Revolutionary War. Rush described Moss as a slave, but the broadside he pasted in his book maintained that Moss was born a free man. As proof, the advertisement mentioned a “certificate given by Capt. JOSEPH HOLD, of Bedford County, Virginia,” which states that Moss “was free born.”

Even more confusing are the various explanations proffered for his miraculous change not only of skin color, but also in what people at the time considered significant somatic markers of race such as hair texture. As Rush put it, “[T]he wool which formerly perforated the cuticle has been change into hair.” Moss’s most unusual case was cited whenever authors wanted to speculate on the complex and confused topic of the explanation for man’s racial variation. Barton attributed it to another medical “affliction” called Leucaethopia humana; and in the most influential of the works on Moss, Smith used his case to present his theories about the effects of the natural and cultural environment on skin color. Just as Moss aroused controversy regarding his status as free or enslaved, so he transgressed racial categories in ways that Anglo-Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century found both intriguing and alarming. Like all curiosities, he demanded explanation.

This piece then will focus on providing part of that explanation, not of Moss himself, but of the intense curiosity he generated; not of his medical condition, but of the cultural conditions of the post-Revolutionary United States. Moss captured the imagination of the American people in the very first years of the republic because these new Americans were grappling with the struggle to define the racial identity of the new nation. The idea that environmental factors could change a man’s race was an extremely threatening concept to elite Anglo-Americans residing, as they did, on the far edge of an Atlantic world whose cultural centers were in Europe. Only a few years before, they had formally severed their political affiliation with their “brethren” in Great Britain, the strongest European imperial power of the period. While ties to Britain had come to represent a noose of political and economic oppression during the war years, ties to England were also the cultural and material lifelines for Anglo-American settlers. Many settlers believed that access to fine objects and refined ideas elevated them above the Indians and Africans who were now their near neighbors.

In the years following the Revolution, Americans teetered between the promise of a glorious future as an independent nation and the cultural insecurity held over from their colonial past. Although undeniably proud of their newly won political independence, the former colonials still aspired to many of the European cultural and material standards of refinement and civility. The Founding Fathers placed a great deal of importance on purchasing the proper and most up-to-date furnishings to outfit their bodies, homes, and cities. Aware that many Europeans thought they inhabited the outer edges of civilization, many Americans bristled at signs of disdain at their lack of refinement both personal and material. Taking his cues from the popular imported etiquette books of the period, the young George Washington, in an effort to try to make up for the lack of an English education, painstakingly copied out tenets from Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation. Self-conscious about his lack of British training and desirous for a career in the British military, he wrote out maxims such as “Sleep not when others Speak;” “Put not off your Cloths in the presence of Others;” and “Kill no Vermin as Fleas, lice ticks & c in the Sight of Others.” Years later, in the midst of fighting Revolutionary battles, General Washington took time out of his military planning to supervise the purchase of the most fashionable porcelain dishes from Loyalist merchants to decorate his headquarters. Far from being a superfluous detail, the general knew that if the rebels were victorious, he would need to have the proper imported objects befitting a gentleman and a leader of a civilized new nation. Washington understood that fine objects had diplomatic uses, for a fine set of china would help earn the respect of his British counterparts who had treated the colonial militia with very little respect during the French and Indian War. These issues were painfully important to a man who while aspiring to climb the ranks as a British officer experienced discrimination due to his colonial status.

It was not only the American Revolutionary leaders who felt the effects of cultural insecurity. Washington’s desire to make an impression with fine objects was not unusual. When travelers came to the United States from across the Atlantic they often remarked upon how eager their hosts were to gain their approval. For instance, Margaret Hall, the wife of a visiting British naval captain, wrote to her sister in London that her American hostesses were continually asking her if the food they served and the entertainment they provided were comparable to fashionable dinner parties in London. Although Mrs. Hall politely declined to give an answer, when writing to her sister she noted that if they had to ask if they were equals, then they were obviously not.

Boastful expressions of national accomplishment often took the form of matching or outdoing the accomplishments of the British. Foreign visitors also commented upon how much the average Americans bragged about even the smallest of national “firsts,” from inventions such as the banjo clock to the production of lead pencils using domestic graphite. While these markers of material development may seem minor when judged by today’s standards, at the time they signaled material growth and development in a nation that still depended upon British imports not only for luxury items of refinement and polish, as is often assumed, but for necessities of everyday life, such as tools, textiles, pottery, books, scientific journals, and medical equipment. Not only did Britain regain the pre-Revolutionary American market after the war, the amount of trade grew significantly due to increased consumer desire for British goods. Although politically independent, the United States of America continued to be tied materially, culturally, and economically to Great Britain.

Self-consciousness about fashion and manners was just one of many concerns about life in a new nation. As in other emerging nations, American society and culture was characterized by insecurity and instability. It is in this milieu that race, and in particular, the color of the skin, took on new and charged meanings for Anglo-Americans. While it is not within the purview of this brief piece to untangle the skeins of the various arguments about racial theory, nor to evaluate the merits of the various medical explanations proffered regarding Moss’s transformation, I would like to suggest some of the social ramifications for the American nation that were at stake in the debate about the Moss’s curious change in color.

Clearly, the debate about the origin of racial differentiation was not simply an academic matter, without social consequences; the origin of racial difference was integral to determining the relationship between the races. The public curiosity about Moss and the keen scientific interest in his condition can be explained as expressions of the anxiety experienced by white settlers in America. If black Africans and tawny Indians could become white when their environments changed from condition of savagery to civilization, as some hypothesized was the case with Moss, might then the opposite happen? Would those who were now white become dark when they ventured into savage surroundings? What Anglo-Americans were not nearer savagery than refined Europeans?

Early racial theory in America reflected a triangular relationship among “civilized” Europeans, “uncivilized” Natives and blacks, and uncertain white Americans in between who could potentially move in either direction. When Henry Moss put himself on display he offered the American public an opportunity, not just to see a curiosity, but to indulge their curiosity and their fears about just what kind of a nation and a people they were now and were in the process of becoming. Moss made money because race and nation were tangled in fascinating ways. While Americans, literate and illiterate, turned out to see (and touch) Moss, Europeans interested in America and its racial puzzles turned to Samuel Stanhope Smith, who produced one of the very few works by an American author read at this time by Europeans. In his Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species Smith engaged the increasingly heated debates about the origins of mankind and the question of racial differentiation. The topic had both scientific and religious significance because those who believed the divide between races deep enough to cut men into different species seemed to challenge the Mosaic account of man’s common descent from Adam and Eve. To Smith, this seemed heresy. Reflecting his belief that the principles of religious and scientific truth were compatible, Reverend Smith defended the Biblical account of man’s origin by arguing that all men had indeed descended from common ancestors, but exposure to different “climates” and “states of society” had altered men’s physical appearances. His rather simplistic theory asserted that exposure to the “savage state” roughened and coarsened features and darkened the complexion, while conversely the civilized and highly cultivated state served to polish and refine features and lighten the skin.

While Smith’s theory may have defended the Biblical tenet of man’s common origin, it raised dangers of a different sort. If he was right, then what would happen to Anglo-Americans living in the rough environs of the New World? It would seem that the author was aware of the rather alarming implications of his theory, for he twisted his line of argument into some rather inelegant contortions in order to avoid implications about the looming possibility of white degeneration.

An important part of his argument involved an explanation of how Anglo-Americans had maintained their superior level of “civilization” and physical “beauty” while living in a dangerously uncultivated environment, side by side with Indian “savages” and African slaves. According to Smith, the superiority of Anglo-Americans living in the wild environs of the new United States depended on their high degree of civilization. Smith assured readers that “society in America” was increasing in “refinement.” Yet the uncomfortable fact remained that at the time that Smith was writing, the degree of cultivation of the so-called “arts of civilization” achieved by the new nation was a far cry from that of Europe. Smith insisted, however, that even if the worst happened, and Anglo-Americans were to “sink into a state of savagism,” their European decent would prevent them from complete regression to savagery.

The key to Smith’s argument, then, was the physical features of Anglo-Americans. White skin and other features that were shared with people in Europe were equated with the civilized attainment of European societies. Conversely, the dark physical features of Natives and enslaved Africans were equated with savagery. Smith argued that physical features were a reflection of long-term exposure to a particular geographic “climate.” But the physical features were also influenced by what he called the “state of society,” which entailed such things as “manners” and “language,” and for Europeans, entailed the “arts of civilization.” According to Smith, the “state of society comprehends diet, clothing, lodging, manners, habits, face of the country, objects of science, religion, interests, passions and ideas of all kinds, infinite in number and variety.” He argued that “each of these causes makes small variations on the human countenance” and that the “different combinations of the whole” as well as local climate “will be adequate to account for all the varieties we find among mankind.” Smith’s argument contained both hope and fear–hope that Americans could become more refined by attaining the arts and manners of Europe, but also fear that living in the same uncultivated environment that had made Natives into savages might also make Anglo-Americans uncivilized.

Smith looked to physical evidence to discern both the possibilities for a higher civilization, as well as signs of degeneracy into savagery. As proof of the attainment of civilization in the climate of America, Smith cited examples of Africans living in the United States. He noted the lighter skin of “domestic servants” (as opposed to “field slaves”), who worked and lived in close proximity to more civilized Anglo-Americans. Smith used Henry Moss as a prime example of his theory in practice. Moss was not a man with a disease. He represented the future of a dark race become intimate with civilized refinement. The physical proximity of African Americans like Moss to civilized Anglo-Americans in increasingly refined American cities would produce men and women with lighter skin color.

But what of Anglo-Americans who lived with Natives? Were they in danger of reverting to savagery and darkening into savages? While conceding that the harsh natural conditions of North America did affect Anglo-Americans, by darkening their complexions, Smith assured readers in an extended footnote, “The Anglo-Americans . . . will never resemble the native Indians. Civilisation [sic] will prevent so great a degeneracy either in the colour [sic] or the features. Even if they were thrown back again into the savage state the resemblance would not be complete; because, the one would receive the impressions of the climate on the ground of features formed in Europe.” According to Smith, the physical features of Anglo-Americans who lived in proximity to savage tribes protected them against degeneracy. Because the physical features they bore were originally created in the climate of Europe, even when not reinforced by a continued practice of the civilized arts, Anglo-Americans would be protected against complete reversion to savagery.

Samuel Stanhope Smith’s book was more than an early example of American theories of white racial supremacy; his ideas reflected the triangular structure within which white Americans in the post-colonial period defined their lives. Vulnerable to charges of being inferior to Europeans, they faced such fears by defining darker people as being less civilized. In trying to refute definitions of America as primitive and uncivilized, Anglo-Americans distanced themselves from African Americans and American Indians, displacing the taint of savagery solidly onto other groups. The visceral fear that white Americans expressed about becoming savage was tied to the insecurity of their hopes for becoming more civilized and for measuring up to the higher standards of Europe and Great Britain. People in the early republic were vulnerable to being measured and dismissed within the hierarchies set in place during the colonial period.

Smith was concerned about the possibility of Africans becoming more civilized, since it reflected on the Biblical tenet of the unity of mankind, but he was also addressing the need for Americans to establish the new United States as a civilized nation. Could savage peoples, born in inhospitable climates, be made more refined? His answer was yes. And if savages could become tamer in the wild climate of America, then surely white Americans were in no danger of regression into a lower state of society. The need to reassure European audiences that Anglo-Americans would not degenerate was evident, and it was here that white supremacy based upon physical features functioned most clearly. It was whiteness, embodied in blood ties to Europe, that protected one’s civilized status.

The fascination of American men of letters with Henry Moss, the African American seeming to turn white, however, mirrored their denial of the possibility that whites might turn black. Henry Moss brought them good news, of a sort. Black men in good circumstances could turn white. But this was a culture profoundly inconsistent in its grants of whiteness. According to some, encounters with civilization were turning Moss white. But more intimate encounters with “civilization” produced pale children who were not called white. No child produced in coerced sexual liaisons between enslaved women and white slave masters could be considered white. The very possibility (denied through legal enforcement and intellectual erasure) would have signaled an acceptance that whiteness was not the refined object that would protect Americans of European descent against degeneracy. Such was the hope produced in a post-colonial moment of insecurity and vulnerability in America.

Whether or not Henry Moss was aware of the particular debates on racial theory going on at the time, he was undoubtedly sensitive to the curiosity he provoked and the money he could earn from it. His ability to profit from putting himself up for display is a literal illustration of how whiteness was a commodity in American society at this time. The intense intrigue with his miraculous transformation in color suggests uncertainty and anxiety about the permeability of racial borders in the first years of the nation’s existence. Although concerns about racial hierarchies clearly existed throughout the colonial period; independence changed the nature of the debates in significant ways. Now the racial identity of the new United States of America–which was tied to international pronouncements of what nations were considered civilized and what savage–was at stake. The same fears that spurred the interest over Moss’s uncertain racial and physical condition lead to efforts to legally secure white supremacy in the U.S.

It is in this context that we can understand the Naturalization Law of 1790, which limited citizenship to “free white persons” who had resided in the United States for at least two years and were willing to swear loyalty to the Constitution. What might have remained a permeable boundary between white and black, free and enslaved, necessitated by the proprietary practices of slavery, was transformed by this law (which incidentally remained on the federal books until 1952) that explicitly limited eligibility for citizenship to whites. This piece of legislation reflected the hopes that Americans could successfully erect what they considered one of the main pillars of the project of nation building–that of securing the nation’s racial frontiers. Moss’s case, just a few short years later, revealed the difficulties and perhaps impossibility of that task. The vulnerabilities of the nation in a period when its very survival was still uncertain created the desire for an object to protect the aspirations to civilization, and whiteness as a commodity became the foundational possession of national belonging in post-colonial America.

And so our story ends where it began, with the American public’s curiosity about a man called Henry Moss. As I have suggested, he represented a New American of a troubling sort–a man of mixed and confusing racial signs, with an ambiguous past and an uncertain future. The same perhaps can be said about the nation as a whole. We cannot be certain whether Moss was black or white, slave or free. What we do know is that like many Americans of his generation Moss discovered ways to turn uncertainty and curiosity to profit in his new nation’s capacious markets. In his commercial ambitions and in his odd ambiguities, perhaps Moss was the quintessential American, the “new man.”

Further Reading:

Today’s readers can read a reprint of Samuel Stanhope Smith’s, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), originally published in 1787 and revised in 1810. Winthrop D. Jordan’s introduction to this work is particularly informative and well presented. A classic popular work that treats some of the issues raised here is William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815-59 (Chicago, 1960). For a study on the construction of “whiteness,” see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), in particular chapt. 1, “‘Free White Persons’ in the Republic, 1790-1840.” For an article on the significance of the concept of “whiteness” in the American legal system, see Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (1993).

This article originally appeared in issue 4.2 (January, 2004).

Kariann A. Yokota is an assistant professor of American studies and history at Yale. Her forthcoming book, A Culture of Insecurity: The Early American Republic as a Post-Colonial Nation examines the links between racial oppression and Anglo-American inferiority vis-à-vis Great Britain in the years following the Revolutionary War. She has also done research on African American and Asian American relations in the twentieth century.

To witness the decline of the Enlightenment in American culture, one could do worse than to begin by examining the case of Jane C. Rider, the “Springfield Somnambulist.” The Enlightenment, of course, was a set of scientific, philosophical, and political attitudes circling around the idea that all natural phenomena could be explained in secular, mechanistic terms. Most prominent, and problematic, of these phenomena were those associated with “human nature”–from man’s political strivings to monstrous births, from human disease to the color of one’s skin–all of which were governed by natural forces that were discernable by a careful eye and explicable by a rational mind. Even apparently supernatural or irrational states such as hallucinations, religious visions, trances, outbreaks of insanity, and dreams could be traced to such operations as the circulation of blood through the organs and into the brain, a circulation that might be impeded by poor diet, physical trauma, or unnatural practices. In 1812, Benjamin Rush, the dominant American medical figure of the Enlightenment (and a signer of the Declaration of Independence), described somnambulism, or sleep walking, as “a transient paroxysm” of the brain, “accompanied with muscular action, with incoherent, or coherent conduct.” Rush recommended bleeding, gentle purges, low diet, exercise or labor, avoiding “exciting causes,” and perhaps a “draught of porter, a glass of wine, or a dose of opium” as remedies.

In the spring of 1833, Rider, a well-liked servant of a reputable family in Springfield, Massachusetts, began to act very oddly in the night. This nineteen-year-old daughter of “a respectable mechanic” first experienced intense, intermittent headaches, especially on the left side of her cranium; she slept more than usual; and she reported feeling highly sensitive to the light. Eventually, she began to rise from her bed while still asleep. On some occasions, the Springfield Republican reported, she seemed to perform a somnambulistic parody of her normal work routine, as when “she has got up and set the table for breakfast, with as much regularity as she does when awake, selecting the right articles, and placing them upon the table exactly as they should be.” But more often something was slightly askew: “She frequently goes to the drawers where her clothes are kept, changes the position of the articles, or takes them out, and in some cases has placed some of them where she could not find them when awake.” Some of her behaviors bordered on the marvelous. One night, an eyewitness reported, she threaded a needle twice, sewed a piece of fabric to make a bag for boiling squash, then searched the house for a squash and, not finding one, threw in a piece of meat, and placed the bag in a pot of water over the fire. All of this she accomplished with her eyes closed, and “in a place where there was not sufficient light” to see what she was doing. Other actions seemed at first more mundane: often, she just sat up in bed talking to herself, reciting poetry, praying, or singing. Even here, though, something strange was going on, for when she awoke Miss Rider generally could not repeat the same tunes or lines–most of which seemed to have been learned in her early childhood.

Many in the town of Springfield, as elsewhere during this period of religious revival, took such cases as evidence of a heightened spiritual awareness. In the weeks before the Springfield Somnambulist’s case was reported in the local papers, the Republican ran an account of a “sleeping preacher,” an adolescent girl from New Haven who would arise in her sleep to preach the gospel. When word spread about this miracle, locals flocked to her home, and “the fervor of her praying brought forth a kind of simultaneous panting from all around her.” But in the case of Jane C. Rider, her employers sought a medical cure rather than an exploitation of spiritual prowess, and so they summoned Lemuel Belden, a local doctor with an interest in mental functioning. A graduate of Yale College and a firm believer that all mental processes could be explained by physiological rather than paranormal processes, Belden sought both to banish her troubling symptoms–which must have been increasingly vexing to her employers–and to explain her case to the wider public. In order to do this, he had to pierce the spiritual fog surrounding somnambulism, a fog that was traceable, in large part, to the practices of Franz Anton Mesmer and the “animal magnetizers” of Europe.

In February of 1778, Mesmer announced in Paris his discovery of an invisible “superfine fluid” that surrounded and penetrated all bodies, connecting them in a magnetic chain that, when properly accessed and controlled, served as the key to healing all disease. Mesmer was adept at putting his patients into epileptic-like fits or somnambulistic trances, in which state he would run his hands over the patient’s body, seeking the magnetic poles that controlled the flow of fluid. Sometimes he put groups of his convulsives in special tubs containing “mesmerized” water, in which the patients would transmit the invisible fluid to one another with the aid of special iron rods and ropes linked to their thumbs. At other times he sent them outdoors to form human daisy chains around mesmerized trees; or, alternatively, he brought his patients indoors where their mesmeric flow would be harmonized to the sounds of special mesmeric music wafting from a glass harmonica (the master conducting the proceedings in a lilac taffeta robe). When his subjects were in such states, Mesmer claimed that he could restore the equilibrium of the body’s supply of animal magnetism and cure all ills.

Mesmer’s combination of showmanship and mysticism combined with what today seems an outrageous appeal to the language of Enlightenment to make his new “science” one of the most hotly debated topics of pre-Revolutionary France; it eventually spread across the continent, and indeed across the ocean. As the historian Robert Darnton explains it, part of Mesmerism’s initial appeal was that it promised a rational explanation for illness that strongly resembled the period’s other astounding discoveries. If the public could accept the presence of electricity running through lightning rods, gravity holding one down to the ground, and helium lifting one off of it, then why not believe that an unseen fluid harmonized the individual body with all of nature? And given the sorry record of “legitimate” European medicine in the period, a profession that one historian of medicine recently noted was as likely to kill a patient as to cure her, it is no surprise that Mesmerism–which at least did no damage–successfully passed itself off as the cutting edge of Enlightenment science. By the time Lemuel Belden took on the case of Jane C. Rider, the concept of somnambulism was thoroughly entwined with mesmeric theories and practices. But mesmerism itself had undergone significant changes in the intervening years. Mesmer’s followers, most notably the Marquis de Puységur, advanced the notion that “artificial somnambulism” (as the mesmeric trance was often called) was a purely spiritual state induced only by the power of a properly trained “operator” over a (usually female) subject. Mesmeric or magnetic fluid, they believed, was still a material–if intangible–substance, but mesmerists increasingly spoke of it as an aspect of divinity itself, something that resisted the mechanistic explanations of the Enlightenment. And the mesmeric subjects, in addition to being healed, were increasingly thought to be gifted with clairvoyance, extrasensory perception, and mind-reading capabilities.

To this point, there were occasional outbreaks of American enthusiasm for mesmerism, but it was known mostly through casual discussions of European fads in journals. The mesmerists’ attempts to bring their new science to the new world had been dealt a series of grievous blows as far back as 1784, when Benjamin Franklin participated in a royal French commission that pronounced Mesmer a fraud. Not long afterward, the Marquis de Lafayettte tried to interest George Washington in artificial somnambulism, leading an appalled Thomas Jefferson to circulate copies of the French commission’s report. These pillars of the American Enlightenment, then, had little taste for the more arcane psychic investigations of some of their European counterparts.

And yet “natural somnambulism” manifestly existed, and along with it came strange powers that even Benjamin Rush could not ignore. We often read, he wrote, “of the scholar resuming his studies, the poet his pen, and the artisan his labours, while under [somnambulism’s] influence, with their usual industry, taste and correctness.” Lemuel Belden was most fascinated with Rider’s visual prowess. While she was somnambulating with closed eyes, she could read “a great variety of cards written and presented to her by different individuals” and “told time by watches.” Investigating further, he found that with wadded up cloths in her eye sockets and two thick blindfolds around her head, she could still read the cards and even write, dotting the I’s in the correct places. She also had an increased receptivity to musical tones and to certain memories. But in her trance state she mistook her father for a little boy in the village and in general did not notice or properly recognize her surroundings.

It is not clear whether crowds started flocking to see Rider perform her extraordinary feats before or after Belden took the case and began to publicize it. One might suspect him of charlatanism–he would not have been the first and certainly not the last to exhibit a somnambulist for financial gain or popular attention. And one might suspect that Jane C. Rider herself had some conscious role to play in putting on a show: as word spread of her deeds, she conveniently began to “fall asleep” more often in the daytime; and villagers seemed to have an uncanny sense of when these fits would occur–indeed few if any came away dissatisfied. The servant may well have found, and enjoyed, a ticket to fame by shamming and embellishing some of her strange sleep habits; the doctor, wittingly or not, began to assume a role not unlike a carnival barker, as he put her through various public tests. But what happened next in the career of the Springfield Somnambulist suggests that her condition was not entirely a put-on.

In order to shield Rider from the strain of a “constant succession of visitors” and provide her with the “seclusion which seemed essential to her cure,” Belden had her removed in November 1833 to the State Lunatic Hospital at Worcester. The first state-run asylum erected on “modern” principles, the Worcester hospital had opened in January of that year. At first this seems an odd choice. By the time Rider was admitted, there were approximately 164 inmates at the asylum, more than half of whom had been sent from jails, almshouses, and houses of correction. Many of them were violent, and eight of the first forty had been convicted of murder. In fact, as Gerald Grob has shown in his study of the Worcester hospital, jail keepers were often motivated to send insane convicts to the asylum, not to protect them from ordinary criminals, but to protect the ordinary criminals from the “furiously mad.” The early history of the Worcester asylum seems to confirm for American asylums French historian Michel Foucault’s influential thesis that the European asylum movement–for all its humanitarian rhetoric–was little more than a mechanism for the thorough segregation of the insane from bourgeois society. And yet the humanitarian rhetoric of the asylum was no mere fig leaf for segregation. The first wave of public asylum superintendents justified massive expenditures from the legislature and their own novel powers to rescind the liberties of mentally afflicted citizens by pointing to extraordinary cure rates resulting from their system of treatment, which consisted of careful attention to both the medical and environmental conditions of the insane. The “moral treatment,” as it was known, was shown to cure the great majority of all cases of insanity, even the most violent among them. Some estimates (later disproved) put the cure rate at over 90 percent, and in the more successful asylums over half the admitted patients were discharged as cured within a year.

Into this unlikely environment walked–perhaps while sleeping–the young Jane C. Rider. One can speculate on several reasons for her admission. First is that as a serving girl she was becoming increasingly inconvenient to her employers. Why should they continue to support her when her sleeping self undid all the work that her waking self was charged with performing? And what about all the gawkers showing up to witness the strange theater performed by their domestic? The asylum offered a humane way for the family to get the troublesome servant off their hands, and at public expense. Asylum treatment was far better, for the image of the family, than to abandon her to an almshouse. Second, Belden himself saw an opportunity to expand his solitary observations within the emerging science of psychiatry. (The name had not yet been invented, but most historians date the origins of the psychiatric profession to the emergence of what was then usually called “asylum medicine.”) The superintendent of the asylum, Samuel Woodward, had been one of Belden’s mentors, and even had examined Belden on his matriculation from Yale (according to the Woodward family papers at the American Antiquarian Society). This case offered Belden a chance to bolster his professional ties to an eminent man of science. And finally, for Woodward, Rider was already a notorious case; if he could devise a cure, it would be another feather in his cap. And it was surely a relief to be offered such a fascinating specimen who was neither a furious maniac nor a convicted murderer.

As Belden and Woodward tackled the case, they cast themselves in the familiar scientific role of champions of the Enlightenment dispelling the darkness of mysticism and ignorance. There was absolutely no doubt for either man that Rider’s case depended, as Woodward wrote, “on physical disease,” and that it would “gradually disappear, if a judicious course be pursued.” Praising the initial investigations of his younger trainee, Woodward–acclaimed as one of the leading medical minds of New England–wrote that his and Belden’s views on the causes and treatment “perfectly coincide.” But despite Belden’s training at Yale and Woodward’s status as an examiner there, Woodward’s mentoring of Belden was in some ways a case of the blind leading the blind. Woodward himself had not attended medical school and knew little about the newer approaches to medicine in general and to the study of insanity in particular that were being fashioned in Europe.

And contrary to the united front they presented in the final write-up of the case, we can see in their course of action at least two theories of the disease operating simultaneously, with crude attempts to join them together. Belden seemed convinced at the outset that the seat of Rider’s troubles was her digestive tract. Before she was admitted to the asylum, he started her on a course of emetics (to induce vomiting); while this did not cure her, he and Woodward experimented with her diet throughout her stay in Worcester. For his part, Woodward decided early on that Rider’s case could be explained by the principles of phrenology, the fashionable science of skull shape as an indication of character, in which he was growing increasingly interested: at this time he was writing letters to the great scientist of brain bumps George Combe, begging him to visit Worcester. The soreness in Rider’s head, Woodward believed, indicated that one of the brain’s regions or “faculties” was overexcited or distended, causing not only pain but enhanced sensory perceptions during her trances.

Both men, though, rejected the mesmeric twaddle that passed for so much scientific thinking regarding somnambulism in Europe. The extraordinary feats of night vision that had made for such good theater in Springfield could not be explained by the dubious workings of “animal magnetism,” which was said to have caused people to discover “the contents of a sealed letter by merely applying it to the pit of the stomach or the back of the head, or what is stranger still, [to detect] the secret thoughts of another only by contact, or without contact, if placed in a certain magnetic relation.” No, Rider’s case would only “admit of a solution on less questionable principles.” When she read those cards with her eyes closed, her sockets filled with rags, and a blindfold tied around her head, “she actually saw.” A tiny amount of light must have penetrated the bindings, which was enough for her retina, with its “increased sensitivity,” to record a sense impression; and “a high degree of excitement in the brain itself [enabled] the mind to perceive even a confused image of the object.”

But how to “cure” such a case? As with so much early-nineteenth-century medicine, the answer was essentially to try everything until something worked. Rider herself had been taking laudanum and ether before bed to help ward off the fits, and, as Belden wrote in an article for the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, “this she was permitted to continue” until it was established that the drugs were ineffective. In order to “subdue that irritability of the brain which formed the basis of the disease,” she was bled copiously, and then had her feet put in a warm bath with mustard flour. Her head was shaved and her scalp “blistered,” or cauterized. She was given a laxative and told to exercise, and her diet was strictly monitored. But the paroxysms continued, and so she was treated to a virtual pharmacy full of drugs, whose names conjure up a repertoire of discarded medical techniques: a nitro-muriatic bath, tincture of stramonium, guaicum, carbonate of iron with extract of conium, emetic of ipecac, sulphate of zinc, calomel, opium, sanguinaria, the liquor potassae arsenitis, purssiate of iron, sulphate of quinine, and nitrite of silver. There is no detailed record of how Rider responded to these interventions, but Belden does tell us that “some medicines… were almost invariably followed by a paroxysm.” One can indeed imagine that a helping of opium followed by the powerful sedative conium might very well bring on something resembling a somnambulistic fit. During one of these paroxysms, Rider cried out, “My head, my head, do cut it open!” Whether this is better explained by phrenological principles or by the massive intake of drugs is an open question.

Jane C. Rider’s trances never entirely vanished, but after a few months in the asylum, wrote Woodward, “she has never appeared so cheerful, and in so good spirits.” She even demonstrated that she could return to her proper station in life, as a servant: “In the absence of one of our attendants . . . she has done more or less work in the halls every day.” There is a creepy geniality to some of Woodward’s notes about his researches at this point, which one senses the patient bore rather stoically, with a smile plastered to her face. “During the last paroxysm I applied leeches to her head. She waked during the paroxysm, not a little surprised at her new head ornaments.” Rider wrote a few letters to Belden, expressing her thanks to her doctors and her assurance that her condition was coming increasingly under control. She hoped soon to be released–”not that I am discontented in the least, for I am not. The time has passed very quick and pleasantly. I take a ride almost every day–that I like very much, and think it does me good.” Woodward, of course, had read this letter before it was sent and added his own postscript to it. Rider knew what her doctors wanted to hear and told it to them. It was this, as much as any improvement in her condition, that appears to have occasioned her release one month later; even Woodward admitted that she still had the occasional sleepwalking fit.

The fact that Jane C. Rider never entirely gave up sleepwalking throughout this ordeal should convince us of the reality of her condition, no matter how theatrical it first appeared. And yet at the end of her tenure at the State Lunatic Hospital, her doctors had no real explanation for her condition, other than a vague confirmation of their initial hypotheses. The episodes seemed to be brought on by “the free use of fruit,” particularly green currants, which Woodward suspected that Rider was smuggling into the asylum despite his strict orders. An irregular menstrual flow may also have been an “exciting” (or precipitating) cause; but the doctors, perhaps out of a sense of decorum, said little about their investigations into this matter. Yet at the core, a fundamental mystery remained. As Belden concluded: “If it be asked how a physical cause, acting either directly or indirectly on the brain, can . . . endow [the brain] with the power of perceiving relations to which it had before been insensible, I can only answer, I do not know . . . [W]e here reach a gulf which human intelligence cannot pass.” Woodward was ultimately awed by the extraordinary snatches of memory that Rider’s sleeping self exhibited. This seemed evidence not only of certain overexcited faculties of the brain, but of the fact that “all knowledge once impressed on the mind, remains indelibly fixed there, and only requires a strong stimulus to call it forth.” For Woodward, the marvelous workings of Rider’s brain seemed to augur “a future state of existence” in which “all the knowledge which we gain in this world will, by the increased energy of mind, be restored to the recollection, and be at the command of the will.” Echoing Belden’s sense of the impassable limit of human understanding, he chalked up this astonishing vision to the only god the Enlightenment ever knew, “the grand designs of the Almighty Intelligence.”

Of the Springfield Somnambulist we know little after her “quick and pleasant” stay at the insane asylum. A magazine piece that revisited Rider’s case twelve years later reported that she was “cured” by Woodward and Belden’s treatment and that since then, there had been “no return of the affection.” But if Jane C. Rider slipped into obscurity, by the end of the decade–and throughout much of the century–the American cultural landscape would be full of sleepwalking young women. Reading while blindfolded, responding to the unspoken will of their operators, peering into the minds of audience members, diagnosing their own and others’ medical conditions, and foretelling future events, they somnambulated across stages in lyceums, museums, theater halls, and amusement parlors nationwide. This happened because, despite the best efforts of men of science like Woodward and Belden, mesmerism finally took hold in America after 1836, when Charles Poyen spread the gospel according to Mesmer, and especially Puységur, on a triumphant New England tour. At least seven mesmeric journals were soon founded; numerous scientific and religious books exploring the secrets of sleep, dreams, trance states, and animal magnetism were published; serious writers like Poe and Hawthorne mined the dramatic and philosophical potential of artificial somnambulism; antimesmeric works like Confessions of a Magnetiser (1845) abounded; and mesmeric scenarios were enacted on the minstrel stage and in melodramas. Not surprisingly, the Bellini opera La Sonnambule became one of the most popular musical productions of the period, with such luminaries as Mrs. Wood (Mary Anne Patton) and Jenny Lind thrilling audiences with their renditions of the title role (see figs.).

The historian Robert C. Fuller has written that mesmerism captured the American popular imagination when it ceased to be a “system of medical healing” and became a full-blown spiritual phenomenon that promised the triumph of mind over matter. In the age of Jacksonian democracy, evangelical Protestantism, and Manifest Destiny, mesmerism complemented the American faith in the power of the individual to conquer material circumstances through heroic acts of will. In an essay that was widely reprinted in the U.S., Poyen wrote that “magnetical sleep” was that aspect of human activity that mirrored the “infinite power” of the “divine spirit.” Although he still couched his discussion of somnambulism in physiological terms, describing it as “a peculiar state of the brain and the nervous system,” the mystical power this state unleashed in the individual could only be fully accessed and manipulated by a new kind of priesthood, the tribe of “magnetizers.” As such, American mesmerism marks a point at which Enlightenment thinking slides over into romanticism, with its refusal to grant to rationality the power to unlock all the secrets of nature, and with its fascination with the spiritual powers of the unmoored individual.

If the moment of mesmeric ascent signals the decline of the Enlightenment in American culture, it also marks the site of an ongoing battle between that self-proclaimed bastion of Enlightenment thinking–the asylum–and key developments in American social and cultural life. Many of the same forces that mesmerists claimed could be put to therapeutic use were considered by asylum superintendents to be extraordinary threats to mental health. The orphic pronouncements, the claims to supernatural control over one’s body, and even excessive enthusiasm for new doctrines–all these were treated as symptoms of a mind diseased, rather than as gateways to universal health. This is because for all its novelty, the asylum was at core a paternalistic and socially conservative institution. Asylum superintendents considered settled, traditional practices and ways of life the most healthy, and they believed that the modern emphasis in literature, religion, and politics on the powers of the individual to remake him or herself left solitary individuals at risk to pursue dangerous impulses and follow frightening new doctrines. Mesmerism, too, threatened the authority of the new psychiatric profession by promising a quick, universal solution to imbalances between the mind and the body, precisely the problem that asylum superintendents were proposing to solve in their own institutions. It is not surprising then, that as mesmerism gained influence in American popular culture, so too did it regularly find its way onto the list of “exciting causes” of insanity in the annual reports of American insane asylums.

The story of Jane C. Rider can be read as an episode in the clash between rival systems of mind cure. The asylum movement that “cured” her carried the torch of Enlightenment thinking (humans have power over nature only through the secular exercise of rationality); the mesmerists who ultimately cornered the market in somnambulism and related trance states embodied a popular mystical romanticism (humans have power over nature through their recognition of and manipulation of the divine spark within them). But this is only a partial explanation, for no categories so broad as the Enlightenment and romanticism can explain the fumbling attempts of the doctors, the journalists, the townspeople, the employers, and Jane C. Rider herself to understand what was for all of them a wondrous and horrifying condition. And so we are left at the end with little totems of historical curiosity and pathos: the cloths wadded up in Jane C. Rider’s eyes, those little green currants that were considered to be the source of her woes, and her agonized cries of “My head, my head, do cut it open!”

Further Reading:

Jane C. Rider’s story is taken largely from L. W. Belden, The Case of Jane C. Rider, the Somnambulist (Springfield, Mass., 1834), which also contains selected case notes from Samuel Woodward. Thanks to Patricia Cline Cohen for pointing me to this fascinating little booklet. A useful interpretive frame for the history of mesmerism–as well as the source of my subtitle–is Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). On the American history of mesmerism, see Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia, 1982). No study of nineteenth-century insane asylums would be complete without consideration of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York, 1979); but one must not take all of his sweeping (though generally brilliant) arguments for granted. A more careful–though less critical–study of the American asylum movement is Gerald N. Grob, Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 (New York, 1973). Grob’s work on the Massachusetts State Lunatic Hospital and the career of Samuel Woodward has also been helpful here; see his The State and the Mentally Ill: A History of Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963). An indispensable study of insane asylums within the broad contexts of nineteenth-century politics and society is David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston, 1971). A highly readable and beautifully illustrated overview of ideas about madness in America is Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes, Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness before 1914 (Ithaca, 1995). I wish to acknowledge the excellent research assistance of Jessica Mitchell in preparing this article.

This article originally appeared in issue 4.2 (January, 2004).

Benjamin Reiss is assistant professor of English at Tulane University. He is the author of The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). He is currently at work on a cultural and literary history of nineteenth-century American insane asylums.

First meetings on the Atlantic are well known. There is Columbus and his meeting with the Arawaks. There is Cortés’s meeting with natives on the east coast of Mexico. There is also John White, Thomas Harriott, and the English meeting with the Eastern Algonquians in what became the Lost Colony of Roanoke in 1584. There was also the meeting of Captain John Smith with the Powhatan Confederacy and Pocahontas on the coast of Virginia in 1607. 

This is another first meeting: this time on the North Pacific in the Aleutian Islands. Today this area is part of the state of Alaska. In the mid-eighteenth century when this meeting takes place, it was on one of the more than seven hundred islands on the Aleutian archipelago spanning a distance of thirteen hundred miles. Its residents were the Unangan people, called by their “discoverers” first “Americans” and then Aleuts.

In 1728 Russia’s Peter the Great sent Vitus Bering to explore the existence of a “Great Land” beyond northern Asia and the Kamchatka peninsula. During Bering’s second voyage on September 5, 1741, at about 4:00 P.M. off one of the Shumagin Islands, “Americans” appeared and a first contact between the Russian expedition and these people occurred. This meeting signals the ambiguities and difficulties that would be part of Russian-native relations in Alaska for more than 120 years.

One major reason propelled the first large numbers of Russians across the vast reaches of Siberia: furs. Those fur traders were called promyshlenniki. The traditions of these men go back to the sixteenth century. By the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533-84), they were given the freedom to hunt the Russian forests. They formed their own groups, chose leaders, and shared profits among themselves and their financiers. Their determination for sable destroyed the fur bearing animals around Moscow. By 1560 the price of sable went so high that, according to one writer, “a single pelt could buy a fifty-acre farm.” 

Thus did America’s North Pacific call. It was thousands of miles away. Even in Siberia furs were contested property. Cossacks defeated Bukharians and opened up the area to hunters of sable, bear, and ermine. They also extracted tribute in furs from the natives called yasak. A fur rush proceeded. By the late sixteenth century a line of forts connected western Russia to the fur centers of the far eastern frontier. A feudal system became a permanent feature with tribute demanded and portions of the traders’ profits sent to St. Petersburg. The Siberian Cossack army served as enforcers, but the fur traders themselves attracted a criminal element and soon gained control of much of the system. By 1639 a Russian fort went up on the Pacific near the Sea of Okhotsk, a distance of about 5900 miles across Siberia from St. Petersburg. But the path to cheap furs was not won easily. Mongols and Chinese were serious contestants. In the process of this growing trade, Irkutsk became the center of trade between Russia and China—a key point en route to the fur frontier and then to the Kamchatka peninsula, across the North Pacific from the still unknown Aleutian Islands.

Vitus Bering became the first major explorer of the North Pacific and the Arctic regions. The Dane’s voyages put the Aleutian lands and peoples permanently on the Russian map. After Peter the Great proposed Bering’s journey, the first attempt succeeded in bringing his men thousands of miles across Russia and Asia to Kamchatka and then into the Aleutians. He and his men brought the first Aleutian seals and sea otters to the attention of Russia, forever changing the fate of those animals and that once remote archipelago. 

On his first trip, Bering recognized that by going north and east across from Asia he could find an “Unnamed Land.” In August 1728, while aboard the St. Gabriel in that area we now call the Bering Strait, he tried to negotiate his way to the northwestern tip of the American continent, finally returning to St. Petersburg without success. Whereas it took five years to plan and execute the first expedition to Kamchatka, the second was the work of ten. A mammoth effort with nine hundred men headed out in 1738 with Bering as captain of the St. Peter (or Sv Pert) and the St. Paul (Sv Pavel) under Aleksei Chirikov’s command. Both men made landfall in July, but shortly thereafter lost two boats and fifteen men. Without fresh water or the ability to find out the causes of their misfortune, Chirikov began his return to Kamchatka. Bering too turned back. But tragedy struck. In November Bering’s ship was wrecked off of what is today called Bering Island. That winter both he and half of his men died of scurvy. The following August the others rebuilt a craft and returned to Petropavlovsk in the south of Kamchatka.

The mission of the expedition begun for imperial adventure, expansion, and wealth for Russia in the North Pacific was both an ambitious and an ambiguous one. Although their missions met with disaster, Bering and Chirikov managed to achieve many of their ultimate goals: they mapped territory and proved the existence of the northern reaches of the Americas. The land they saw was now in Russia’s column, and with it a rich source of furs.

What do we know of those first encounters between the Bering expeditions and the men and women of the Aleutians they called “the Americans”? The major scientist on the Bering voyage was the German naturalist, Georg Wilhelm Steller. He documented the principal animals of the Aleutian chain, leaving us the first descriptions of the mammals of the North Pacific: “the sea otter, the fur seal, the sea lion,” and what he called “the hitherto unknown North Pacific sea cow.” 

In Steller’s journal we find the most complete discussion of the first meeting between Bering’s men and Unangan or Aleutian peoples. Becalmed late in the afternoon of September 4, 1741, off what is today called Bird Island in the Shumagin Islands, the St. Peter dropped anchor. “Here,” says Steller, “unexpectedly and without searching, we got to see Americans.” 

After hearing “a loud noise” they thought was “the roaring of a sea lion” the voyagers soon saw “two small boats being paddled from the shore to our ship.” There the men waited “with the greatest eagerness and utter amazement to mark most carefully the boats’ mountings, shape, and design.” The Americans, now a third of a mile away, stopped, and “two men in the boats, while paddling steadily, began to deliver a long, uninterrupted oration to us in a high-pitched voice, not a word of which any of our interpreters could understand.” It was presumed the men were praying or conjuring and that these were the incantations “of shamans or a ceremony welcoming us as friends, since both are customs in use on Kamchatka and in the Kurile Islands.” The men “paddled closer and closer, shouting continually,” and “began to speak to us with pauses between statements.” But it was a hopeless interaction, as “no one could understand their language.”

At this point the Russians and Stellar “beckoned them with our hands to come closer without fear.” The Americans signaled too that they wished the Russians to land, and indicated that they would provide them with food and water. Thinking they were in an area similar to the northern reaches of eastern North America, the Russians used Baron Lahontan’s work on the natives of that area to give them clues, and unsuccessfully tried the Algonquin word for water. 

Then one man from the group of “Americans” paddled toward them and continued his welcome with an elaborate ceremony described by Steller: “before he approached us altogether, he stuck his hand into his bosom, took some iron- or lead-colored shiny earth and painted himself with it from the wings of his nose across the cheeks in the shape of two pears, and stuffed his nostrils full of grass; the wings of his nose on both sides were pierced by fine pieces of bone. Then he took a stick of spruce wood lying behind him on top of the skin boat, painted red like a billiard cue and three arshins long. On this he stuck two falcon wings and bound them fast with baleen, showed it to us, and then, laughing, threw it toward our ship into the water.” 

Clearly fascinated by the gesture, Steller remained unable to discern “if it was meant as a sacrifice or a sign of friendship.” 

In exchange Bering’s group threw the man two Chinese tobacco pipes and some glass Chinese beads that they had secured on a “piece of board.” The American man then came closer. In his hand he carried a falcon tethered to a stick which he “presented” to the Russians’ interpreter, who gave him “a piece of Chinese silk and a mirror” in exchange. But rather than really wishing to give the bird as a gift, Steller believed the American wanted only to show the bird and then have the silk put “between the bird’s claws so that it wouldn’t get wet.” This misunderstanding resulted in some tugging on both sides. The falcon was taken and the Aleut man was forced to give up the stick and the bird “and it remained in our hands.” This frightened the “American” and he “paddled a little to the side,” unwilling “to come so close again.” The Russians threw the silk and mirror after him and the island men headed to shore “signaling us that we should follow so that they might give us food and drink.” All this happened as “their companions on shore” kept “calling” and “shouting in high voices.” Again Steller and the others on board could not “figure out their intention.”

Nonetheless, the Americans called for them to land and to eat and drink. Steller writes that “after a short discussion, the boat was lowered in which I, along with Lieutenant [Sven] Waxell, the Koriak interpreter, and nine sailors and soldiers, decided to go ashore.” They took with them “plenty of firearms and sabers” but “covered them all with sail cloth to cause no suspicion.” They also brought “biscuits, brandy, and other trifles to be able to give them gifts,” including pipes and tobacco. On heading toward the beach they found their “presents lay without great regard strewn here and there on the beach.” They also saw “men as well as women (who because of the sameness of their dress could hardly be distinguished from one another), came full of amazement and friendliness toward us, not failing to beckon us constantly ashore.”

The weather made a landing impossible. Steller calls the beach “very rocky” with “the water increasingly turbulent and the wind and the waves so heavy that only with the greatest of difficulty could we keep the boat from being dashed to pieces.” Steller continues: seeing the impossibility of the whole group landing “we had our interpreter and two others undress and wade through the water to inspect a thing or two.” These few were greeted “very respectfully, as if they were very important people.” Island people “presented” them “with a piece of whale blubber, and talked some with them, although neither group understood the other.” They also “saw some huts in the distance.”

The Americans urged the Russians still on their small boat to come ashore. The Russians tried to explain how that was impossible to do. Thus an American “got into his boat” and came out to them carrying water under his arm. Brandy was offered but “immediately he spat it out . . . acting strangely about it, and did not seem at all amused by this supposed trick.” A pipe with tobacco was then tried but this too did not work and the man “paddled away.”

As the “water rose up more and more along with the wind we called our people to the boat.” The Americans did not want them to leave and especially liked “our Koriak interpreter, whose speech and looks fully resembled theirs.” When the Americans offered more whale blubber and iron-colored paint and it was refused “they tried to hold on to them by force gripping them by the arms and forcefully keeping them away from the boat.” As the Americans tried to pull in their small boat at some point there was “no time to be lost” in trying “sweet talk” so “we immediately fired three loaded muskets over their heads at the cliff. Right away our men ran through the water and luckily made it into the boat.” They headed out as fast as they could, returning “to the packet boat” not finding what they wanted but “encounter[ing] what we had not expected.”

It appears from Steller’s sensitive but uncertain account that the man coming with the falcon was there to welcome the Russians and make their meeting a propitious one. Whereas the first spruce wood decorated with falcon wings tied with baleen was tossed to them with pleasure, the wand on which the Unangan American presented the whole falcon was probably nota gift, but rather a sacred source of power. The Russians used force to grab the wand away even when it was clear that it was not intended as a gift. This disturbed both the American native and his comrades watching from the shore. 

This first encounter was a critical one. As in the first meetings in North, Central, and South America, the Aleutians were hardly virgin lands. People inhabited them, people whom the Russians would ultimately force into servitude. These native people would provide the critical link between the fur-bearing sea creatures and Russian power. Men would catch the animals. Women would turn them into clothing and household goods. The sea otter pelts would provide “soft gold” for the China trade and the Russian fur market. Russians tempted them with liquor and tobacco. It was refused, but on the return of other traders in the 1760s, these were accepted and became addictions. Thus these first meetings in the North Pacific changed forever the lifeways of the Aleutian Islands. Bering’s voyage and its first meeting with Unangan men paved the way for new systems of conquest and control among these island people. 

Further Reading:

Some of this material was presented in “Russian and Unangan Encounters in the Aleutians: Economics and Gender, 1728-1764” at the Tenth Annual Conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at Smith College, June 13, 2004. I would like to thank Alan Gallay for his comments there. I would also like to thank Barbara Sweetland Smith, Elizabeth Dennison, Douglas W. Veltre, and Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild for comments on earlier drafts. 

Readings of Georg Wilhelm Steller may be found in Georg Wilhelm Steller, Journal of a Voyage with Bering 1741-1742, ed. by O.W. Frost, trans. by Margritt A. Engel and O. W. Frost (Stanford, Cal. 1988), esp. 99-102. For another account of the same incident see Sven L. Waxel (also spelled Waxell), “Lieutenant Waxel’s Report on the Voyage of St. Peter” in F.A. Golder, Bering’s Voyages: An Account of Efforts of the Russians to Determine the Relation of Asia and America (New York, 1922), I: 270-81. Aleksei Chirikov’s account for September 9, 1741, may be found in Basil Dmytryshyn et al, eds. and trans.,  Russian Penetration of the North Pacific Ocean 1700-1797: To Siberia and Russian America, Three Centuries of Russian Eastward Expansion, A Documentary Record (Portland, 1988), vol. 2.

For works on the early Northwest and Alaska see Robin Fisher, “The Northwest from the Beginning of Trade with Europeans to the 1880’s,” in part 2 of North America, vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, ed. by Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn (Cambridge, Eng., 1996); and James R. Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841 (Seattle and Montreal, 1992). On Bering’s death see Raymond Fisher, “Finding America,” in Russian America: The Forgotten Frontier, ed. by Barbara Sweetland Smith and Redmond J. Barnett (Tacoma, Washington, 1990), 17-31. For the earlier writing, see Hurbert Howe Bancroft, History of Alaska, 1730-1885, vol. 33 of The Works of Hurbert Howe Bancroft (San Francisco, 1886). For the best recent history of Alaska, see Stephen Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony (Seattle, 2002). For a recent and more pro-Russian position see Lydia T. Black, Russians in America 1728-1867 (Fairbanks, 2004). An earlier but less scholarly work is Hector Chevigny, Russian America: The Great Alaskan Venture, 1741-1867 (Portland, Ore., 1965). Also see Svetlana G. Fedorova, Ethnic Processes in Russian America, trans. by Antoinette Shalkop, Occasional Paper No. 1 (Anchorage, 1975); and O. W. Frost, Bering: The Russian Discovery of America (New Haven, 2003); and Gerhard Friedrikh Müller, Bering’s Voyages: The Reports from Russia, trans. with commentary by Carol Urness (Fairbanks, 1986). For a discussion of the role of French writers and explorers in North America see Gordon M. Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill and London: 1997).

This article originally appeared in issue 5.2 (January, 2005).

June Namias was associate professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage from 1992 until 2003. Her publications include White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier, 1607-1862 (Chapel Hill, 1993); and a new edition of Sarah F. Wakefield’s Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees: A Narrative of Indian Captivity (Norman, Ok., 1997). She is at work on a book about eighteenth-century contact and the recent history and people of the Aleutians.

The unresolved issue that underpins Cody Marrs’s Nineteenth-Century Literature and the Long Civil War is how best to mourn. Or, to phrase this with greater particularity, and using the terms of the book itself, how can acts of periodization produce historical frameworks commensurate to the vast trauma and shock of the Civil War? To answer this question is also to put forward an ethics of historicism in which the critic has both a responsibility for acknowledging the rupturing violence of the past while also aiming to tend to its more damaging effects.

Vital to this task of ethical historicism is Marrs’s formulation of the “transbellum,” with particular emphasis on the various permutations of the prefix trans. For him, the Civil War functions neither as a beginning nor an end, but rather as a bridge that pulls a variety of different chronologies, temporalities, and periods, including our own unresolved present, into its own. The transbellum formulates the Civil War as a shaping historical force that refuses to remain placed in a single, settled slice of time. As scholars and, indeed, citizens, we find ourselves perpetually returning to it, caught in a vortex that threatens to pull everything into its midst.

For those familiar with the work of psychoanalyst and philosopher of history Dominick LaCapra, the transbellum might sound an eerily familiar note, as, in his 2000 book Writing History, Writing Trauma, LaCapra casts trauma in similar terms. In his work, trauma can “collapse all distinctions, including that between present and past” meaning that “one is haunted or possessed by the past and performatively caught up in the compulsive repetition of the traumatic scene” in a way that “invalidates any form of conceptual or narrative closure.” For Marrs, the legacies of the Civil War would appear to operate in a similar way, as they travel backward and forward from the moments of tragic loss that occurred in the unbounded, violent, originary years between 1861 and 1865.

Marrs attends to issues of unresolvable mourning particularly in his chapter on Emily Dickinson, which argues that her engagement with the war involved meditating on the dilated and elongated effects of emotional pain. He finds in her “affective focus” a “large part of the reason why…the war outstrips history. Grief is the most unruly of affects: its non-linear durations, lapses, and returns bear little resemblance to the tidy chronologies of newspapers, governments, and creeds.” Similarly, when I read Marrs’s account of Whitman’s poems “temporarily suspend[ing] the very conflict whose devastation not only fills the volume but also limns these brief stunning scenes…[with] pauses before and after loss, moments that either precede or follow death,” I could not help but hear overlaps with the poet and philosopher Denise Riley’s prose poem Time Lived, Without Its Flow. Following the death of her child, Riley tells of how she experienced “suddenly arrested time: that acute sensation of being cut off from any temporal flow,” meaning that she shared, in effect, the time of the dead with her lost son. Accordingly, we can read the transbellum as a way in which authors of the nineteenth century sought to occupy the same traumatic time of those killed in the Civil War. In essence, their work rendered them co-present with the dead, or, perhaps, vice versa.

Yet my interest is less in how traumatic time explicitly permeates Marrs’s work (although this is interesting) than in the way in which this same temporality shapes the historical framework of the transbellum itself. We might read Marrs’s act of reperiodization as a means of critically mourning the Civil War properly. To use LaCapra’s terminology, dividing the nineteenth century into the discrete divisions of antebellum and postbellum risks collapsing the distinctions between absence and loss. The erosion of this distinction, for LaCapra, leads to the creation of salvific, progressive narratives that falsely close off the traumatic past by promising “total renewal, salvation, or redemption.” This closing cannot truly occur if we are to retain a historically responsible ethics, one that is attuned to the rupturing, brutal violence of the past.

Instead, LaCapra argues, we must look toward “other, nonredemptive options in personal, social, and political life” that allow for the proper historical specificity of trauma and narratives that can work through trauma in an ethical way. For Marrs, the false periodization that has so shaped the field would appear to operate like an incorrect and unsatisfying response to trauma, because it closes off the war through a gradual narrative of national overcoming. In this framework, the deep traumatic wound of the Civil War heals with emancipation and the development of a finally unified and inclusive nation-state.

Marrs’s notion of the transbellum offers a vitally important corrective to this narrative. It reveals that the way in which critics have mourned thus far invokes a hollow and triumphalist periodization that has not allowed us to think through the actual rupturing violence of the event fully. However, the transbellum perhaps comes with still darker connotations. If the previous framework of the antebellum and postbellum was essentially a means of sealing off the trauma of the past from the present, might the transbellum essentially be reopening the wound, exposing us, once more, to the shrapnel and collateral damage of unprocessed historical trauma? Marrs’s conclusion suggests that this would be the case. Marrs writes of how the accounts covered in the book “instead of marching through the nation’s sequenced history, radically reimagine it. And by doing so, they provide us, the latter day heirs of this struggle, with temporalities that cut across our most entrenched periodic ideas, categories, and a priori assumptions, which all too often blind us to the war’s myriad times and durations” (157). Vital here are the words “latter day heirs” and “cut across,” as they make clear that the transbellum means, first, that the work of critically traversing the Civil War is incomplete, that we are descendants of that awful conflict, and shaped by it. Secondly, the transbellum means that acknowledging this lineage requires a figurative re-opening of a closed historical wound, creating a new cut.

In demonstrating the ways in which earlier periodizing practices have diminished the force of real historical violence, Marrs’s book starts the work of creating new historical frameworks that might be more ethically and socio-politically responsible. However, in reopening the traumatic wound of history, the book challenges future critics to find other ways of processing these wounds. My instinct is that this endeavor will involve less an alternative periodization as such, which is to say, an alternative set of dates and terms for thinking through the Civil War’s place in nineteenth-century history, than a reshaping of history.

The antebellum and postbellum denominations implicitly invoke a graphic, evolutionary and progressivist form of history, in which one gradates and divides that past under the aegis of forward-moving time. I wonder if a more ameliorative model might be a circular one. To think of history as a circle is to acknowledge that we still share the same historical space as the Civil War, with it functioning as the centering but always moving axis of our thoughts. But it also allows for movement within that space. A circular history does not involve recursion, nor even brutally crushing cycles of pain, but rather a speculative attitude in which the critic thinks through what it means to still breathe in the same atmosphere as an unspent historical trauma. It is demonstrably true that the Civil War is not yet over, that, perhaps it never can end, but, within a circular mode, this fact does not mean that we have to ceaselessly return to the past and re-experience its violence. Instead, rather like Whitman tending the wounds of a dying soldier, cradling his slowly weakening head, we can return to the traumatic past of the U.S. with a view, eventually, of one day healing it.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

Edward Sugden is a lecturer (assistant professor) of American literature 1770-1900 at King’s College London.

The True Story of a Manuscript Hymnal Attributed to the Father of Methodism

In 1739, Methodist founder John Wesley made seven copies of a hymnal for his first class, handwriting them because he was not allowed access to printing presses. Through Wesleyan connections, Englishman Ralph Potts (1751 or 52-1816) came to possess one of these manuscript hymnals, bringing it with him when he immigrated to America and eventually settled in Washington, N.C. Potts passed the hymnal to his son, John Wesley Potts. In the late 1800s, the hymnal came into the possession of John F. Shackelford (1846-1921) of Tarboro, N.C., who made the mistake of loaning it to Robert T. Joyce of Mount Airy, N.C. Joyce in turn sent the hymnal to Washington Duke, the famous tobacconist and benefactor of Trinity College (now Duke University), hoping for assistance paying off his church’s mortgage. In the end, Shackelford had to sue for the hymnal’s return. The hymnal then spent many decades as a revered family relic, its peaceful existence broken briefly by a 1981 burglary in which it was stolen, but eventually returned.

Or so the story goes. In reality, this saga is a tangled web of truth and legend, passed down orally through generations of the Shackelford family. Ownership signatures in the manuscript, plus a newspaper article and two letters, document the family’s traditions. The alleged Wesleyan origins have dominated the manuscript’s history, and if they are true, this artifact is a rare find for Methodist and music history. If the story is false, the hymnal is still a valuable document—but what exactly does it document? It is time to set the record straight, to discover what this artifact really is and what tale is really contained within its pages. And what a tale it is: a story of music, religion, and the lives of common and famous people on two continents. Our journey begins by looking outward, scouring the historical record for information about the hymnal and the people connected with it, but the mystery is ultimately solved by looking inward, analyzing the hymnal’s actual musical and textual content. Along the way, we’ll observe how everyday objects affect the people they come in contact with, gain insight about the spread of music and religion in both the old and new worlds, and discover the power of close examination of actual artifacts for learning the true story.

Provenance: Unraveling the Tangled Web

We begin by examining the signatures and newspaper article, saving the letters for later. Six men’s names are recorded inside the hymnal’s front cover board (fig. 1). According to the dates there, the earliest signature is “Jno Wesley, 1739.” The next dated signature reads “Ralph Potts’s Book, July 3, 1780, Dunston.” An undated printed nameplate records “John Wesley Potts.” William Williams of Gates County added his signature but no date. Therefore, his chronological place cannot be unequivocally established, but as we will see, he most likely followed John Wesley Potts. A final inscription records the loaning of the document: “This Book is the Property of John F. Shackelford. Tarboro N.C. October 8, 1897. Loaned to R.T. Joyce Mount Airy N.C. Oct 8th, 1897.” It appears some initial leaves (at least two) have been lost, since all of the first three hymns and part of the fourth are missing. It is tantalizing to speculate on whether other lost leaves contained further clues about the manuscript’s provenance.

The circa 1898 newspaper article tucked within the manuscript’s pages is the earliest published report of the hymnal. It reads:

ONE OF SEVEN COPIES
A Written Copy of Wesley’s Hymns in This State.

Mr. Shackleford consents that Joyce shall loan it to Trinity College. Those who have seen the book say the writing and the music notes are almost as well executed as if they were engraved.

The signatures and newspaper article agree regarding the connection to Wesley, but these claims do not match the historical record. There is no evidence of the other six copies, although this alone does not preclude their creation, given the nearly three centuries subsequently elapsed. However, the claim that Wesley “was not allowed to do any printing” is suspect because Wesley printed several other publications in 1739, including three editions of Hymns and Sacred Poems. In addition, the signature’s format brings its authenticity into question: according to Wesley expert Peter Nockles, Wesley normally neither dated his signatures nor wrote his first name as “Jno.”

Besides Wesley’s alleged signature, the earliest dated inscription is “Ralph Potts, July 3, 1780, Dunston.” Ralph Potts was born in Northumberland, England, in 1751 or 52, and thus could not have been a member of Wesley’s supposed “first class” of 1739. Potts’s life in England remains obscure. He was baptized into the Church of England at Eglingham, Northumberland, but the parish registers give only his name, his father’s name (also Ralph), and the date, July 3, 1752. The historical record is then silent until March 17, 1787, when Potts became a United States citizen, taking the oath of allegiance in Portsmouth, Va., as recorded by the Norfolk County Circuit Court. He must have immigrated not long after signing the hymnal in 1780, since three years of United States residence were required before taking the oath. Potts did not, however, settle permanently in Portsmouth: an 1856 essay in the Annals of Southern Methodism on “Methodism in Washington, N.C.,” states that Potts, “being a merchant of high standing and incorruptible business habits, was induced to come [to Washington, N.C., in Beaufort County] after pushing his fortune, for a certain length of time, in Portsmouth, Va.”

Indeed, by mid-1792 Potts had moved to Washington, N.C., where he would leave a legacy for the town in general and its Methodist church in particular. The aforementioned 1856 essay waxes eloquent: “the Methodist Church in Washington owes the very sap of its existence at this day to his faith, his liberality, to his … unparalleled devotion to its interests.” Arriving on the tail of the congregation’s short-lived 1791 revival, “Father Potts” threw himself into the church, beginning by marrying Mary Hinton, widowed daughter-in-law of the congregation’s founders, Sarah and Dempsey Hinton. He went on to fund erection of their first chapel, dedicated by Methodist bishop Francis Asbury in 1803. On June 9, 1806, Potts, then one of seven trustees, officially gave the building and space for burial grounds to the congregation “for and in consideration of the love & esteem which he hath and beareth for the Worship of God and promoting and Spreading of the Gospel of Christ.”

Potts’s importance among the Washington Methodists is further emphasized by his role as their primary contact for Francis Asbury, receiving mail for the circuit rider and housing him when he arrived. Asbury’s February 1, 1802, diary entry shows the bishop’s consistently favorable opinion of Potts, noting his arrival “to the hospitable shelter of Ralph Potts (of Alnwick, Northumberland) where we had all things richly to enjoy.” The men’s shared English heritage was dear to the bishop’s heart, for Asbury wrote on March 9, 1801, “Ralph Potts, a Northumbrian (Old England) but American-made Methodist, received us as the angels of God.” Asbury’s identification of Potts as an “American-made” Methodist is significant: it suggests Potts converted to Methodism after leaving his native land, and thus had no Wesleyan connections in England. Furthermore, the 1856 essay that spills so much ink praising Ralph Potts is conspicuously silent on the hymnal or any Wesleyan connections, especially given its passing but specific mention that another church father, Thomas Robason, was “a member of the Wesleyan connection in England.”

Ralph Potts died March 30, 1816, leaving his estate to his brother William Potts and sister Ann Scott, both of England; his stepson Joseph B. Hinton; and his three surviving children, now orphans (their mother died in 1806): Ann, Sally, and John Wesley. His will records money, property, slaves, and personal items, but no mention is made of any books, let alone a Wesley hymnal.

Nonetheless, Ralph Potts must have passed the hymnal to his minor son, John Wesley Potts, as indicated by the pasted-in nameplate. John Wesley Potts himself lived only nineteen years after his father’s death, but accomplished much in his short life, briefly attending the University of North Carolina, and subsequently earning a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. His wife Paulina C. Potts died while he was in medical school, apparently leaving no surviving children. Around 1831, John Wesley Potts moved to nearby Tarboro in Edgecombe County, which jurisdiction he represented at the North Carolina House of Commons from 1832 to 1835. John Wesley Potts married Lucy Nelson Boyd on Oct. 4, 1834, in a double ceremony shared with Lucy’s sister Mary, and Thomas P. Hawkins. The newly wedded bliss would not last long, however. The following summer, on July 13, 1835, John Wesley Potts died in Little Rock, Ark., attended by his brother-in-law Thomas Hawkins. The newspaper obituaries do not tell the men’s business in Arkansas; perhaps they had traveled to make their fortunes in that newly opened territory.

From John Wesley Potts’s death in 1835 until 1897, nothing is positively known about the manuscript’s whereabouts. John Wesley Potts did not register a will, an entirely plausible situation given his young and probably unexpected death. His worldly possessions were likely retained by his widow, but the historical record makes no further note of Lucy Potts or her descendants. Lucy may have remarried, thus changing her surname and making her difficult to trace. The manuscript’s signature, “William Williams, Gates County,” probably refers to its owner for at least some of the years from 1835 through 1897. Gates County, North Carolina, is only about seventy miles from Tarboro (fig. 2), and several men named William Williams did indeed live there during these years, but only the barest facts are recorded about any of them, leaving this owner’s story shrouded in mystery.

In 1897, the manuscript resurfaced in Tarboro, now the property of well-to-do businessman and mill owner John F. Shackelford. From this point forward the historical record unabashedly claims the manuscript as a Wesley relic. Two traditions explain how Shackelford acquired the manuscript; both are suspicious, and neither likely came directly from Shackelford. The 1898 newspaper article preserved with the manuscript states Shackelford found it “in Tarbor [i.e. Tarboro] after a fire.” The newspaper cites its original source as the Winston Sentinel, a town nearly 200 miles from Tarboro, and the content overall appears not to have come from Shackelford’s testimony. In 1982, almost a century later, then-owner Joe Grayiel recalled being told “a man gave [Shackelford] a satchel of books and the hymnal was among them.” If either story is true, how did Shackelford or the newspaper learn about the manuscript’s origins and purported history as one of seven copies? The newspaper’s statements about the manuscript’s connection with Ralph Potts and Potts’s residence in Washington are accurate, but if the manuscript was simply “found,” how was Potts’s residence in Washington established, several counties away and over seventy years after his death? It is plausible this information was discovered through local connections, particularly since John Wesley Potts lived in Tarboro as an adult. Perhaps the true story is more innocuous: the Shackelfords collected relics (to this day, similar artifacts are preserved in the family home) and John Shackelford simply bought the purported Wesley relic, perhaps from William Williams.

However he acquired it, Shackelford nearly lost the manuscript in 1897 when he loaned it to fellow mill owner Robert T. Joyce, a prominent citizen and Methodist in Mount Airy. Joyce was apparently something of a historian, for he wrote a short history of Mount Airy for the time capsule placed in the cornerstone of the town’s Methodist church building at its 1894 groundbreaking. Joyce “was to take [the hymnal] to Trinity College to attempt to verify that it was written by Wesley,” according to a 1982 newspaper article.Less than a year after Shackelford’s loan, on August 4, 1898, Joyce did indeed send the manuscript to Washington Duke of Durham, N.C. Rather than requesting authentication, Joyce sought assistance to pay off the mortgage on Mount Airy’s new Methodist church building. After suggesting that the hymnal was a gift (“I send you by today’s Registered mail a hymn book that will explain it’s self… I obtained consent to let you have this for Trinity College”), he proffered a thinly veiled request for needed funds (“To a further statement utterly disconnected with this, I would state for your generous consideration the fact that we owe $2235.00 on our Methodist Church.”). Joyce’s communication is preserved with the hymnal, along with a second letter dated January 27, 1898, from R.T. Miller of Cincinnati to Joyce asking, “Can I buy the manuscript Wesley Hymnal referenced in Winston Sentinel, for my collection of Wesleyana?” Nothing further is known, including whether Joyce responded. The January 1898 date is curious because it precedes Joyce’s August 1898 letter to Duke. Perhaps the year was actually 1899, and Miller mistakenly wrote 1898, as people sometimes do at the beginning of the year. Regardless, the manuscript did not stay permanently in Trinity College’s possession, but returned to the Shackelford family, whose tradition states Shackelford raised a lawsuit to get the manuscript back.

The hymnal passed from Shackelford to his daughter Maud Leggett, then to her heir Joseph Grayiel, resting as a revered relic for many decades until the family home (by then recognized in the National Register of Historic Places as the Redmond-Shackelford House) was burglarized on October 30, 1981. Police initiated an international search, but the hymnal didn’t go far: on February 16, 1982, Tarboro’s newspaper, The Daily Southerner, announced the artifact’s recovery via a clandestine meeting at an abandoned house in nearby Rocky Mount, N.C. Upon Grayiel’s death, the manuscript passed to his niece Gwenda Grayiel Moore, whose initiative to investigate the long family traditions and bring the artifact to wider attention resulted in the research recorded in this article.

Provenance, then, raises significant doubts about Wesley’s connections to the manuscript. Ralph Potts, as the first recorded owner, is the most likely creator, but the historical record is entirely silent regarding Potts’s musical activities, much less a hymnal. Let us, then, turn our gaze inward for a detailed look at the manuscript itself: close examination of the hymnal’s musical and textual content provides specific evidence as to dating, creation circumstances, and use, ultimately identifying it as an artifact of eighteenth-century psalmody.

The Manuscript’s Own Pages: Key to the Mystery

As the name implies, psalmody originally encompassed only singing of the biblical Psalms, but over time the scope broadened to include extra-biblical sacred texts. This sacred music-making tradition emerged in the Church of England in the late seventeenth century and eventually spread throughout Protestant congregations and to America, Scotland, and Wales. At that time, congregational singing had degraded musically, including slow, dragging tempos, spurring formation of parish choirs. In cities, the choirs consisted of charity children, but in rural areas a small group, often young men, would come together to learn music in order to lead and improve congregational singing. These rural choirs might receive tutelage from the resident clergyman, if he was knowledgeable, or from itinerant singing masters who also peddled books of music and musical instruction. Individual musicians created manuscript music books, copying their own parts from the parish’s single copy of a printed hymnal, notating other pieces of particular interest, or trying their own hand at composition or poetry. The current document appears to be one such endeavor, containing 223 texts, 194 tunes, twelve pages of music theory instruction, and an index.

Because psalmody was transmitted through a fluid mix of printed books, manuscript compilations, and oral tradition, hymn tunes and texts were frequently mixed and matched, and tune names likewise varied. Therefore, the best way to identify tunes is by the melodic content, and texts should be identified by the opening words (text incipit) rather than the title. Nicholas Temperley’s Hymn Tune Index uses these methods to catalog English-language hymn tunes printed up to 1820 and was the primary resource for analyzing the manuscript, supplemented by an early version of Nikos Pappas’ Index of Southern and Western Sacred Music and full-text searching of sacred poetry collections. Analysis of every hymn tune and text reveals a particular selection whose very inclusion is evidence against Wesleyan connections and facilitates dating, particularly by identifying two pieces of art music and three printed sources for the content

The simple presence of hymn 151, “The Despised Nazarene,” is an argument against Wesleyan origins. John Wesley denounced this text in the preface to his 1787 A Pocket Hymn Book, For The Use Of Christians Of All Denominations, explicitly naming it along with only one other hymn (“that which begins ‘A Christ I have, what a Christ I have'”) and calling it “doggerel double distilled.” Despite the two hymns being “hugely admired and continually echoed from Berwick-upon-Tweed to London,” Wesley had no love for the texts, saying, “I earnestly entreat all our preachers not only never to give them out, but to discountenance them by all prudent means, both in public and private.” Wesley’s criticism may have been partially due to his disgruntlement over Robert Spence’s 1783 Pocket Hymn Book,which included these two hymns but was otherwise largely pirated from one of Wesley’s own hymnals. Regardless, the manuscript’s inclusion of “The Despised Nazarene” is evidence it was not created under Wesley’s guidance.

Two other pieces contradict the 1739 date associated with the alleged Wesley signature because they are not actually hymns but the melodies from oratorio arias composed after 1739. Hymn 154, entitled “A Celebrated Hymn,” is “The Hymn of Eve” from Thomas Arne’s The Death of Abel (1744). Hymn 157, “Pious Orgies,” is from one of George Frederic Handel’s most popular oratorios, Judas Maccabaeus (composed 1746, premiered 1747). These selections must have been copied into the hymnal after 1744 and 1747.

Three printed hymnals (ca. 1754-1768), all from England, were identified as sources for sections of the manuscript’s content by their sharing a number of the same texts, tunes, and tune names in close proximity or the same sequence, a strong indicator of copying since tunes and texts were frequently recombined in the eighteenth century.

Aaron Williams’ The Universal Psalmodist, probably the first (1763), second (1764), or third (1765) edition, is the apparent source of hymns 80 through 90, detailed in Table 1. The minor deviations in tune names may suggest imprecise copying or the existence of an intermediate source, a distinct possibility since The Universal Psalmodist was in wide circulation, including a version printed in the colonies under the title The American Harmony (multiple editions 1769-1774) by Massachusetts Anglican parish clerk Daniel Bayley.

Table 1: Hymns in Manuscript and Aaron Williams, The Universal Psalmodist (1763-1765)

The second printed hymnal represented is Benjamin Milgrove’s 1768 Sixteen Hymns as they are sung at the Right Honorable the Countess of Huntingdon’s chappel in Bath. Book I. The Countess later (1781) seceded from the Church of England but aligned herself with Whitefield, not Wesley. As shown in Table 2, the manuscript’s hymns 124-130 occur in the same sequence in Sixteen Hymns, though only seven of the sixteen hymns were copied. Sixteen Hymns does not include tune names, and the manuscript follows suit. The tunes in Sixteen Hymns contain three or four parts, and the penman transcribed the two lower parts almost verbatim, but omitted the upper parts. The only notable, though inexplicable, difference in the transcription is the frequent omission of anticipatory “graces” (melodic embellishments) before cadences (ends of musical phrases). The texts are also carefully transcribed, with the first verse placed between the staves of music, just as in Sixteen Hymns, even though this is otherwise uncommon in the manuscript.

Table 2: Hymns in Manuscript and Benjamin Milgrove, Sixteen Hymns … (1768)

Bookseller and publisher of Methodist connections Thomas Butts provided a third printed antecedent, for hymns 142 through 149, in his 1754 Harmonia-Sacra, as detailed in Table 3. The omission of a tune name for the manuscript’s hymn 143 in both sources supports the connection between the manuscript and the 1754 edition of Harmonia-Sacra specifically because later editions include a tune name for this selection. Harmonia-Sacra is also the earliest printed source to associate the texts, tunes, and tune names for hymns 146, 148, and 150.

Table 3: Hymns in Manuscript and Thomas Butts, Harmonia-Sacra (1754)

A collective look at the earliest date each tune appeared in any printed source suggests further specifics of the creation timeframe. Of the 194 tunes, 125 (75 percent) were first printed from 1746 to 1775. The tunes cluster particularly thickly in the 1750s and ’60s, with 73 of the tunes (44 percent) first printed from 1754 to 1763. These dates are incongruent with the 1739 creation proposed by the alleged Wesley signature, but, remembering that printed volumes are often used for some time after publication, they accord nicely with creation beginning in 1780, the year Ralph Potts signed the hymnal.

An increasing degree of correlation to printed sources in the hymnal’s later sections suggests additional creation details. Hymn 80 is the first hymn with a specifically identified printed antecedent, and many hymns before number 80 are not found in their exact combination of tune and text in any English-language hymnal printed before 1820. Of the twenty-two unidentified tunes, six appear before hymn 30. These early hymns might represent a local repertory, perhaps from an itinerant singing master who provided initial or intermittent choir leadership, or even composed by Ralph Potts himself, and therefore most likely were entered in England, because singing schools were common in England but not in Virginia and North Carolina, and also because Ralph Potts’s inscribed place of residence was Dunston. The later hymns were likely added as Potts continued as a psalm singer, encountering these tunes and texts either aurally or in written form. Potts’s residence when he entered these later hymns is ambiguous, but America’s lesser access to goods and travelers slightly favors creation in England.

The frequency and distribution of duplicates and the variations in layout reinforce the argument for creation over time. Of the manuscript’s 223 texts, 71 repeat texts already included, reducing the number of unique texts to 152. Only rarely are the tunes using the same text grouped together, even though grouping would have saved both space and effort, especially given that there is little duplication among the tunes: 183 of the 194 hymn tunes are unique, and even among the repetitions, only two are nearly exact duplicates; the others are variants.

The hymnal uses several different content layouts. From the beginning through hymn 122, the layout is very consistent: text on the left, corresponding music on the right. After hymn 122, both layout and content shift. Seven canons are inserted between hymns 122 and 123, and from hymn 123 forward, one verse of the text is generally written between the staves of music, with additional verses often present on following pages. Hymns 152 through 154 and 156 through 158 consist of the previously noted oratorio arias plus four anthem-style pieces, and hymns 196 through 225 are texts only with no corresponding music.

As a rule, the manuscript contains only two or three verses of each text, even if more are needed to form a complete thought, apparently constrained by space. For example, hymn 24’s text is obviously a versification of Psalm 23, yet it breaks off halfway through (fig. 3). Odd as this practice may seem, it is not abnormal. English country psalm singers often copied only a few verses to jog their memory and sang the rest by heart. Likewise, tunebooks printed in America between 1698 and 1810 often included only one stanza.

Ralph Potts’s Musical Life in England and America

Further examination of the hymnal provides information on Potts’s choirs on both sides of the Atlantic and suggests psalmody reforms were working in the English parish where Potts first learned psalmody, as evidenced by the parts included, “moods in psalmody” used, rhythmic features employed, near absence of fuging tunes, inclusion of music instruction material, and absence of camp-meeting songs.

The particular musical parts contained in the hymnal suggest it was initially used by a man (Ralph Potts) in a parish choir of men and, at least at times, women and/or children. Each hymn is dutifully headed “Tenor,” but most selections actually contain two parts: tenor and bass. In eighteenth-century psalmody, the tenor and bass were the most important parts (the bass provided the harmonic foundation and the tenor carried the melody) and, at least in theory, were sung by men. The two upper parts (alto and soprano, assigned to women and children) did not contain the melody and were often considered optional, even though most printed hymnals included all four parts.

Though most selections stand fairly well with only tenor and bass, hymn 126, copied from Milgrove’s Sixteen Hymns, does not (fig. 4). The second half opens with a brief imitative section. In Sixteen Hymns, the tenor enters first, followed by the two treble parts in turn, and finally by the bass. The manuscript’s presence of only tenor and bass parts gives the unmusical impression that the tenor sings alone for four full measures before the bass entrance.

“Moods in psalmody” are a theoretical principle of eighteenth-century psalmody similar to modern time signatures. They are notated via similar symbols and indicate the meter (number and subdivision of beats in each measure). Unlike modern time signatures, however, moods also imply tempo, a carryover from earlier times. The manuscript’s musical instruction helpfully defines the moods in psalmody:  and 3/2 are “Adagio, Very slow”;  and 3/4 are “Largo, a little quicker”; and finally,  and 3/8 are defined as “Retorted, very Quick.” An additional mood, even quicker than retorted time, occurs fifteen times in the manuscript, denoted by 2/4. The instructional material also distinguishes between “common time,” with measures divided into two or four beats, and “triple time,” with measures divided into three beats. Table 4 demonstrates the preference for the quicker moods and triple time, where the three main beats resist equal grouping, giving the music rhythmic thrust.

Table 4: Moods of Psalmody: Frequency of Occurrence

Modern scholars sometimes classify psalm tunes according to their rhythmic composition. The oldest rhythmic style is the “common-tune,” not to be confused with the common time mood, although, like common time, it consists of measures equally divided into groups of two or four beats. Furthermore, common-tune style is characterized by long note values of equal length and stress without written embellishment. This “old way of singing” grew slower and slower over time, creating the situation reformers hoped to rectify by forming parish choirs and writing new tunes with varied note values and rhythmic motion. The manuscript includes only nine hymns in the common-tune style, plus three additional hymns in triple time which contain only note value of a half note or longer. This preference for tunes with quicker tempos, rhythmic variety, and triple time, in conjunction with the earlier observation that seventy-five percent of the manuscript’s tunes were first printed between 1753 and 1784, suggests the choir was leading the congregation in learning the newer tunes.

Despite their desire to remedy the old way of singing, some clergy believed choirs were rather too successful in reforming parish music because choirs, once trained, were not content merely to lead basic psalmody but sought to perform complicated anthems and even dabbled in secular music. Around 1740, the “fuging tune” emerged. These imitative pieces became popular among musicians and a thorn in the flesh of church officials who complained of their complicated nature (excluding the congregation from joining in), overly lively character (inappropriate for solemn worship), and propensity for each part to sing different words simultaneously (obscuring the text). The manuscript, however, contains very few fuging tunes, suggesting this choir stayed true to its role of encouraging congregational singing. The manuscript’s seven canons and six anthems might represent a small deviation, if they were used during services rather than on non-worship occasions.

Reformers would have been pleased that at least one choir member took active interest in music fundamentals, filling twelve pages with basic music theory. As might be expected of personal notes, the information is broad-ranging, skipping from topic to topic. It includes tables typically found in psalmody instruction materials; explanations of clefs, key signatures, musical notation, and intervals; and a mnemonic poem for finding “mi,” the note eighteenth-century theoreticians used to identify keys.

But what of the Washington Methodists? Singing was important in American Methodism. Though the only explicit mention of singing in Washington is an incidental statement that figurehead Sarah Hinton “not only sang and prayed in public, but exhorted also in the presence of all conditions of men,” the context implies that music was not rare, but a normal activity not worth mentioning. Furthermore, it seems unlikely Potts would have learned psalmody, brought the manuscript with him, and not continued to make music in Washington. Indeed, as a church leader, it would have been normal for him to not merely participate in singing but to lead it, and the manuscript indicates he certainly had the knowledge and ability.

As we envision Ralph Potts leading American Methodist singing, one style is strikingly absent: the camp meeting song. Camp meetings were integral to American Methodism from around 1800, including in Washington, for two young men were converted at a nearby town’s camp meeting in 1806. These open-air meetings featured “lively,” emotional singing with simple texts and melodies, frequent use of refrains, and texts full of personal pronouns like “I” and “my.” In the manuscript, the texts balance their focus among the individual, the group, and God and his works; refrains and choruses are nowhere to be found; and the presence of canons, composed art music, and music theory rudiments furthermore suggest the calmer, more studied approach characteristic of the Church of England, English Methodists, and earlier American Methodists.

Conclusions

Provenance, correlation with printed works, and musical content analysis all indicate this hymnal is not a Wesley relic but the personal possession of Ralph Potts and an artifact of eighteenth-century psalmody. Yet, a perplexing question remains: when and how did the story of Wesleyan connections originate? This tale likely emerged in the years between John Wesley Potts’s 1835 death and Robert T. Joyce’s 1898 letter to Washington Duke, mixing a bit of truth (Potts’s emigration from England, status as a Washington Methodist patriarch, and naming of his son after the Methodist founder) with a bit of legend (Wesley’s authorship and Potts’s Wesleyan connections). The mysterious William Williams, John Wesley Potts’ widow Lucy, or other, unrecorded, owners are the most likely candidates for creating or contributing to the story, which may have grown up over time, gathering embellishments as oral traditions tend to do. John Shackelford or Robert T. Joyce are also possibilities, though it seems more likely the Wesley connection was created prior to their involvement. Despite the Wesley story’s spuriousness, it was largely responsible for the careful preservation of this document and the colorful glimpse it provides into the history of everyday people and eighteenth-century psalmody.

Further Reading

For additional information on psalmody, see Nicholas Temperley’s The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979). Temperley’s The Hymn Tune Index of hymn tunes printed with English-language texts up to 1820 is available free online and as a print publication (New York, 1998). Two scholarly compilations of psalmody contain representative music and valuable introductory material: Nicholas Temperley and Sally Drage’s Eighteenth-Century Psalmody, Musica Britannica vol. 85 (London, 2007) provides an English focus, while Richard Crawford’s The Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody, Recent Researches in American Music vol. 11-12 (Madison, 1984) takes an American perspective.

Many hymnals and other primary sources referenced in this article are now digitized and available for viewing and full-text searching via Google books and electronic subscription packages such as Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

On Ralph Potts and the artifact’s history, an 1856 article attributed to John S. Long discusses Potts at length, providing a valuable early source: “Information From an Old Record; Or, Methodism In Washington, N.C.,” Annals of Southern Methodism (1856): 239-257. Potts is also mentioned in Francis Asbury’s journals, referenced below, and his American citizenship is recorded in Elizabeth B. and Bruce Wingo’s 1784-1884: 100 years: Naturalizations and Declarations of Intention: Norfolk Borough/City; Norfolk County (Now Chesapeake); Princess Anne County (Now Virginia Beach); Portsmouth; Eastern District Court Virginia (Norfolk, Va., 1987). Ralph Potts’s will is transcribed in Betty J. Camin’s Beaufort Orphans (Raleigh, N.C., 1984-1985) and his real estate transactions, including donation of the church building and property, are recorded in the Beaufort County deed books, which are housed in the Beaufort County, N.C., courthouse or may be examined via microfilmed copies in libraries. Many other books on Washington, N.C., history reference Ralph Potts and the early Methodists, but accuracy of this information is spotty and it is best to go back to the earlier sources.

For more on Francis Asbury and early Methodism in North Carolina, see the excerpts from his journals compiled in Francis Asbury in North Carolina: The North Carolina Portions of the Journal of Francis Asbury (Nashville, 1964) or read all three volumes of his journal for a broader view: The Journal of Francis Asbury, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York, 1852).

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

Nara L. Newcomer is head of the Music/Media Library at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and formerly assistant music librarian and associate professor at East Carolina University. She is also an organist, pianist, and church musician, and her research interests span music and librarianship.

In September of 1797, George Washington wrote to Clement Biddle, the manager of his Philadelphia business affairs, requesting the purchase of an encyclopedia. The recently retired first president specified that he wanted two copies, for both practical and ideological reasons. On the one hand, he had promised to give one set of the encyclopedia to his secretary, Tobias Lear, and he also desired to have a copy for his own library. Just as importantly, Washington wanted to personally “encourage” the encyclopedia’s success by supporting the printer’s “undertaking the work” (fig. 1).

In the summer of 2011, George Washington’s Mount Vernon began its own search for an encyclopedia, though one published in a vastly different medium. The organization decided to pursue the development of a digital encyclopedia, aiming to create a central repository of information about Washington, his world, his estate, and the history of its preservation. With a new academic research library opening, Mount Vernon was eager to establish itself as a location for academic research and emerging scholarly technology. However, beyond a generalized idea that an online encyclopedia was necessary, the details of what the project would look like, how it would function, and what information it would provide remained to be determined.

I began working as the encyclopedia’s editor in June of 2011, fresh off completing my doctorate in American history. In addition to my background in academic history, my graduate training included a secondary field in public history as well as practical experience working on digital history projects, including a consideration of the 1919 Chicago race riot and a photographic documentation of immigrant history in New York City. However, these experiences were largely independent, supporting individual research projects rather than the broader goals of an institution. In anticipation of my new position, I wondered how my past experiences prepared me for this project. Further, as someone who had always planned a career in academia, how would my experience working at Mount Vernon satisfy my love of working directly with college-level students? The following essay explores the process of building the Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington in an attempt to answer these questions and as a means to understand the challenges and opportunities present in creating a large-scale digital history project.

Project description and goals

The ability to quickly and efficiently publish digital content provided the time to partner with writers on improving their essays rather than simply dictating changes.

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of online, historically oriented encyclopedias, presumably in response to the popularity of (and equal parts skepticism toward) Wikipedia. For Mount Vernon, the opening of a new research library provided an ideal opportunity to develop and launch an academically oriented digital project. The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington opened in September of 2013. The library has three primary objectives. First, it collects and preserves books and letters of George Washington and enables scholars and students to access these materials. Second, the library features outreach programs that will give special attention to students and teachers. Last, as part of the new library’s mission, Mount Vernon has launched an ambitious fellowship program aimed at supporting the work of scholars of the Revolutionary era and early republic.

The Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington fits within the library’s overarching goal of providing the public with information and materials to facilitate the study of history. As outlined by the encyclopedia’s mission statement, the site serves as “the central location for historical information about George Washington, the Mount Vernon Estate, and the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association (MVLA).” Founded in 1853, the MVLA is the oldest national historic preservation organization in the United States, and has owned and operated Mount Vernon since 1860. The library includes the MVLA’s institutional archives, which contain important documents in understanding the story of historic preservation in the United States. The opening of a new library presents an opportunity to make these materials more broadly available to both scholars and the public. To support this goal, the encyclopedia not only documents Washington’s life but also provides entries focusing on the history of the preservation of Mount Vernon.

One of the primary goals of the project is to present encyclopedia entries that serve as vehicles for the promotion and proliferation of primary source materials from Mount Vernon’s collections. Encyclopedia entries provide narrative context, while images illustrate material culture and offer access to primary source materials such as manuscripts, prints, fine and decorative art, and periodicals. The encyclopedia also includes short video clips of scholars commenting on issues related to entry subjects, a feature that will continue to expand, particularly with new scholars visiting Mount Vernon as fellows.

The encyclopedia aims to appeal to a broad user base, though three groups compose the core audience: history scholars, students, and teachers. Entries strike a balance between scholarly rigor and general accessibility. A focus on clear and concise language ensures that entries are accessible to a broad audience, not just scholars of the time period. And while the length of each article is limited to no more than 1,000 words, authors both provide basic information and develop a readable and compelling narrative.

In order to provide verifiable information and encourage further research on a topic, all entries have full footnote citations as well as a bibliography of secondary works cited in the essay. Footnotes include links to digitized sources, frequently connecting to the Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition. Similarly, whenever possible, the bibliography links to digitized copies of secondary source work. Entries also include a link to the Mount Vernon library catalogue for materials related to the subject that are housed in the new library, or with other members of the Founding Fathers Library Consortium, which currently includes the libraries at Gunston Hall (George Mason’s home) and Stratford Hall (the Lee family plantation).

Contributors

The digital encyclopedia is a collaborative project, bringing together contributions from Mount Vernon staff as well as a diverse group of scholars at various professional levels. Most authors have a background in American history, though a few art historians and scholars of American literature are also represented. Moving forward, fellows researching in the new library will also have opportunities to write for the encyclopedia, particularly on topics relevant to their work undertaken at Mount Vernon.

The majority of our contributors are either PhDs or en route to completing their doctorates. Writers are largely recruited through a formal call for papers that has appeared on the websites of professional history organizations and related disciplines. It was important for the project to engage scholarly experts to emphasize the quality and accuracy of the encyclopedia’s content. On a personal level, interaction with the writers has been one of the more rewarding aspects of this project, leading to any number of interesting discussions on historical topics both related and unrelated to Washington and Mount Vernon, as well as exposure to a broad range of research interests and publications produced by contributors.

A Web environment presents a rare opportunity with respect to the editorial and peer review processes. The ability to quickly and efficiently publish digital content provided the time to partner with writers on improving their essays rather than simply dictating changes. Collaboration was particularly important for development of the Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington, as entries are intended to be Washington-centric. Some excellent entries were written as first drafts that were general in tone, providing a broad, encyclopedic overview of a topic. These entries needed to be re-crafted with attention to the subject’s Washington or Mount Vernon connection. Working in tandem with writers ensured that these well-written pieces would appear in the style necessary for inclusion in this particular encyclopedia.

Structure and content

The encyclopedia’s taxonomy consists of eighteen different categories, organizing entries by subject. Topics encompass a range of fields including social, cultural, military, political, and culinary history (a topic recently explored in Mount Vernon’s museum). This approach is meant to support Mount Vernon’s mission of educating the public in all aspects of Washington’s life and legacy. The method also attempts to make Washington’s nearly mythological stature more approachable and resonant. As a result, the encyclopedia has the conventionally expected entries on topics such as the crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776 and the mythology surrounding Washington’s false teeth. However, other entries consider more esoteric topics connected with Washington and collective memory, such as pieces on Washington’s birthday centennial, and portrayals of Washington in popular culture.

The encyclopedia also explores the history of Mount Vernon as a plantation, estate, and community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To represent daily life at Mount Vernon, the encyclopedia provides a wide variety of entries, including ones on the plantation’s structure, the physical growth of Washington’s land holdings, and slavery at Mount Vernon. The encyclopedia further considers Mount Vernon’s place in culture, with entries ranging from Henry James’s short story “Pandora” (which features Mount Vernon prominently in its climactic scene), to an exploration of pilgrimages to Mount Vernon in the nineteenth century. Finally, the encyclopedia focuses on the history of preservation at Mount Vernon, with entries on subjects such as MVLA founder Ann Pamela Cunningham, the early activities of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, and Mount Vernon during the Civil War.

The essay on Edward Everett is instructive regarding the goals of the project. Everett had a diverse, compelling career, including time spent as the president of Harvard. He also has the distinction of being the other speaker besides Lincoln to address the November 1863 dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg. The Everett entry exemplifies how the encyclopedia integrates primary source materials within an encyclopedia narrative. Opening with general background information on Everett, the entry narrows toward a narrative focusing on Everett’s specific connections to Mount Vernon as one of the early, prominent fundraisers for the site’s preservation. The text describes Everett’s lectures and writing on the “Character of Washington” that emphasized the need to save the first president’s estate. The encyclopedia’s narrative is supported by images of relevant primary sources (fig. 2).

Below the narrative is a copy of the Mount Vernon Record, the MVLA’s main fundraising periodical from 1858 until 1860. Clicking on the image opens a copy of the Record with an article reporting on Everett’s attempt to raise funds for the preservation of Mount Vernon. The primary source document directly supports the argument in the entry narrative, but can also be used as a stand-alone research resource, independent of the entry. The encyclopedia includes accessible images, and Mount Vernon encourages their use for non-commercial classroom and personal research projects by scholars, teachers, and students, with appropriate credit to the image source.

Reading further in the Everett entry, the user will come across another primary source document, a ticket from one of Everett’s public orations in support of Mount Vernon. The object in the Everett entry helps researchers visualize the cultural history of Mount Vernon as a nineteenth-century institution while simultaneously documenting the organization’s efforts to preserve the mansion (fig. 3).

Working with undergraduates

As the project has evolved, the encyclopedia has welcomed the contributions of select undergraduate writers. Through a working collaboration with Professor Denver Brunsman at George Washington University, students from the “George Washington and His World” course were introduced to digital history as well as the process of formal review and publication. Students selected entries based on their research interests, frequently picking a topic that tied in with their larger semester research papers. To be considered for publication, students were expected to conduct the requisite primary source research and to write compelling and historically accurate narratives.

Students were formally evaluated through a double, non-blind review process. Professor Brunsman edited first drafts to ensure that entries were focused and on the path toward publication. An improved version was subsequently sent to me for review. I judged entries at that point as either being publishable or requiring further revision for re-submission. The project broadened students’ exposure to primary source materials, particularly digital sources, and allowed them to explore ways to utilize those sources when crafting a narrative. Throughout the process, students learned the valuable lesson that effective historical writing takes time, re-evaluation, and revision. The partnership was a tangible success for both the students and the encyclopedia: every student—seventeen in total—produced an entry published in the encyclopedia. The partnership will be undertaken again during the fall 2013 semester.

Students were asked to reflect on their experiences writing for the encyclopedia, and responses were overwhelmingly positive. One class member explained that it was “the first class I have taken where I worked so closely with my professor and a museum professional.” Another student reported that having an entry published was the highlight of his undergraduate experience, while one celebrated her discovery of Washington’s “highbrow and, at times crude, sense of humor” in researching correspondence surrounding donkey husbandry at Mount Vernon.

Interestingly, the most negative response to the project centered on one student’s level of stress in writing for a publicly accessible resource. The student characterized the experience as being “really intimidating,” though ultimately worthwhile because she enjoyed the research and the process of writing. This critique was insightful. For current students—raised and educated in a digitally oriented environment—there is little to no difference in the cachet attached to digital versus print publication, and this generated a certain level of stress (as well as excitement).

There is a possible advantage to this anxiety. Motivated by their desire to be published, students produced entries that were exhaustively researched and well-written. The promise of being published by the end of their semester motivated students to craft high quality work and thus expand the scope of their experience in historical research and writing. The experience also points to an exciting possibility for public historians who miss academia and close interaction with students. Expanding the boundaries of the project to include undergraduates has been enriching on a personal and professional level, sparking feelings of reward similar to those of a classroom instructor. As historians continue to re-define potential career paths, those in the digital humanities with an unsatisfied pedagogical desire would be wise to explore the rich opportunities to connect with the academy.

The expansion of digital resources has provided historians with new opportunities for scholarship through access to abundant research materials; there are particular opportunities for those studying members of the revolutionary generation. With more readily available primary sources, there is an opportunity to examine this oft-mythologized generation through a more all-encompassing method, including not just traditional lenses of politics and ideology, but also analyzing the day-to-day lives of these figures and their personal interactions. As such, it is hoped that scholars and the public alike will continue to use the digital encyclopedia as a means to acquire a more expansive knowledge of the world at large, just as Washington desired for himself when purchasing his own encyclopedia 216 years ago.

Further Reading

On George Washington’s place in popular culture, see Scott E. Casper, “The Washington Image in American Culture,” A Companion to George Washington, ed. Edward G. Lengel (Hoboken, N.J., 2012); Edward G. Lengel, Inventing George Washington: America’s Founder in Myth & Memory (New York, 2011); Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York, 1987).

On the history of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and its place in the history of preservation, see Scott E. Casper, Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine (New York, 2009); Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums (Washington D.C.:, 1999); and Elswyth Thane, Mount Vernon is Ours: The Story of the Preservation and Restoration of Washington’s Home (New York, 1966). For the most complete primary source account of Edward Everett’s role with the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, see Edward Everett, The Mount Vernon Papers (London, 1860).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.1 (Fall, 2013).

Adam Shprintzen serves as the Digital and Archival Historian at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, where he manages and edits the Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington. Shprintzen is also a scholar of nineteenth-century America and the author of The Vegetarian Crusade: The Rise of an American Reform Movement, 1817-1921, from the University of North Carolina Press (October 2013).