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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acknowledgments

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

Further Reading

G. Stanley Hall, Senescence: The Last Half of Life (New York, 1922).

Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, 1960)

Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York, 1994).

Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing With Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (New York, 2012).

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Aged by Culture (Chicago, 2004).

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2 (Winter, 2017).

James E. Dobson teaches at Dartmouth College and is the author of essays on Mark Twain, Lucy Larcom, Shirley Jackson, and Ambrose Bierce and several on computational methods and text mining. He is presently working on two book-length projects: a critical account of the digital humanities, “The Digital Humanities and the Search for a Method,” and a study of fin-de-siècle American autobiography titled “The Awkward Age of Autobiography.”

“Derry Down” and the XYZ Affair

Listen to this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

The version of “Yankee Doodle” criticizing the French is titled “Song, composed during the celebration of August 16^th, 1799, holden [sic] in commemoration of Bennington battle…” The Echo: or Federal Songster (Brookfield, Mass., 1798): 15-17. “The Five Headed Monster; or, Talleyrand Dissected” appeared in the following sources: Commercial Advertiser (New York, N.Y.), August 4, 1798; The Newport Mercury (Newport, R.I.), August 14, 1798; Otsego Herald; or, Western Advertiser (Cooperstown, N.Y.), August 23, 1798; Greenfield Gazette (Greenfield, Mass.), August 25, 1798; Federal Galaxy (Brattleboro, Vt.), September 1, 1798; Impartial Herald (Newburyport, Mass.), September 11, 1798; The Federal Songster (New London, Conn., 1800): 10-12.

Several scholars have dedicated themselves to the mighty bibliographic task of assessing the vast quantity of American secular song in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. See Richard J. Wolfe, Early American Music Engraving and Printing: A History of Music Publishing in America From 1787 to 1825 with Commentary on Earlier and Later Practices (Urbana, Ill., 1980) and Oscar Sonneck, A Bibliography of Early Secular Music, 18th Century. Ed. William Treat Upton (New York, 1964). Online databases are invaluable resources. See Robert M. Keller, Kate Van Winkle Keller, Carolyn Rabson, Raoul F. Camus, and Susan Cifaldi, http://www.colonialdancing.org/Easmes/Index.htm and http://www.danceandmusicindexes.org/EASINew/Index.htm

Folksongs have long confounded scholars interested in tracing and categorizing traditional ballads such as “Derry Down.” For an overview of the history of the field, see Helen Myers, “British-American Folk Music,” in Helen Myers, ed. Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies (New York, 1993): 440-42. An excellent example of folk music scholarship is Charles Seeger, “Versions and Variants of the Tunes of ‘Barbara Allen'” in Studies in Musicology, 1935-1975 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1977). On the idea of “folk” music, see Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories From Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge, U.K. and New York, 2007). On the history of “Derry Down,” see William Chappell, Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time, vol. 1 (London, 1855-1859): 348-53; and Claude Simpson gives a thorough overview of the history of “Derry Down” in Britain in The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick, N.J., 1966): 172-6.

Introductions to music and musicology are numerous, but a classic text on engaged listening is Aaron Copland, What to Listen for in Music (New York, 1957), and Nicholas Cook provides valuable lessons in how to think critically about music in Music: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York, 1998). Discussions of the methods, debates, and history of musicology can be found in the following books: Carl Dahlhaus, The Foundations of Music History, trans. J.B. Robinson (Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1983); Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, Mass., 1986); Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons. Ed. Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago and London, 1992). Richard Crawford provided an accessible and thoughtful discussion of musicology’s usefulness for historians in “A Historian’s Introduction to Early American Music,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 89 (1979): 261-298.

On the history of book consumption and print media in this period, see Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, eds. A History of the Book in America Volume 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010) and Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, Va., 2001). An excellent survey of the multiple ways the United States negotiated its indebtedness to Britain during the period of the early republic is Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford and New York, 2011).

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

Glenda Goodman teaches at the Colburn School in Los Angeles. She completed a PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University in May 2012, and her work on the impact of musical transatlanticism on early American communities has appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly and the Journal of the American Musicological Society. She is in the initial stages of a book tentatively titled Cultural Sovereignty and Music in the Early American Republic.

New Uses for a Children’s Classic

U.S. history is taught frequently in students’ early schooling, often twice in grades K-8, and once more in the guise of state history. Given the chronological nature of the subject, teachers usually “begin at the beginning” and invariably run out of time before reaching the twenty-first century. The frequency with which early American events are taught has had an unexpected consequence: it has helped ensure the longevity of children’s books set during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The ubiquity of titles like Johnny Tremain (set during the American Revolution) and The Witch of Blackbird Pond (set in seventeenth-century Connecticut) is a boon for middle and high school teachers searching for effective ways to introduce students to historiographical debates and the challenge of constructing coherent historical narratives from spotty historical records. When historical novels are juxtaposed with the primary sources that inspired them, they invite readers to think deeply about what it means to “do history,” to conduct the research that lies at the heart of the historical endeavor.

When historical novels are presented as works of historical interpretation, they can also serve as tools that help students learn to “read like historians.” The new Common Core State Standards call for the deliberate teaching of literacy across school subjects, a demand that derives from acknowledgement that each discipline brings distinct skills to bear on the reading and analysis of text. The literature surrounding the Common Core and, in fact, the Common Core standards themselves, however, operate on the assumption that history students primarily require instruction on how to derive meaning from textbooks and historical documents. Given that historians read all texts, including literature, in distinctive ways, this is shortsighted.

Elizabeth Yates’ Amos Fortune, Free Man is one novel that provides a means for students to both “do” early American history and practice reading like a historian. Published in 1950, Amos Fortune, Free Man is a fictional biography of a real man now buried in an integrated cemetery in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. The book won the 1951 Newbery Medal, a coveted award granted annually by the American Library Association to the author of “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.” Children’s books recognized with the Newbery enjoy significantly longer shelf-lives than the industry standard, and Amos Fortune is no exception. While not as widely taught as Newbery winners Johnny Tremain and The Witch of Blackbird Pond, or Newbery Honor Book My Brother Sam is Dead (like Johnny Tremain, a Revolutionary War novel), Amos Fortune does regularly figure in grade-school curriculum. Twelve percent of U.S. states host recommended reading lists on their Department of Education Websites, and of these, half, including the states of California and New York, list Amos Fortune among titles for middle school students. Yates’ novel is also warmly embraced by the Christian homeschool community.

Little is known about the historical Fortune, but surviving documents make clear the remarkable nature of his story. Taken captive in Africa, he died in New England a respected freedman of some means. Fortune was owned by and apprenticed to a tanner in his young manhood, and he practiced this trade in New Hampshire once freed. His business flourished, enabling him, upon his death, to leave a “handsome present” to the church, as well as a monetary gift to the local school. Dividends from the school funds were used for student prizes as late as the 1930s (and later for other educational purposes), but it wasn’t until Elizabeth Yates’ novel appeared at the onset of the Civil Rights movement that Fortune’s name became more widely known.

Yates’ novel celebrates its extraordinary protagonist, but it is a white apologist narrative for slavery. The story begins in an African village where fifteen-year-old At-Mun is captured, marched to the sea, and placed on a Boston-bound slaver. No records of the historical Fortune exist prior to his membership in a Massachusetts household. Yates therefore borrows a literary trope common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to establish his pre-American identity as a tribal prince. This fictional heritage becomes an explanatory device for Yates: Amos’ royal blood gives him the ability to withstand the Middle Passage with self-respect intact. The custom of imagining American slaves as African royalty has a history of its own, however: the practice flattered slave owners by rendering them masters of another nation’s kings. What might it mean, then, for an elite white woman writing in the 1940s to imagine Amos Fortune as an African prince, and to craft his life story as a narrative in which he is grateful for having been brought to New England?

Extant documents reveal Amos Fortune’s status as a slave in the 1760s and then, beginning in 1770, as a freedman, landowner, tanner (with apprentices), husband, church member, and benefactor. In themselves, the legal documents are static, archaic documents that require a narrator to become story. Yates steps into the role, drawing on local histories of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and widely circulated scholarship on slavery to make sense of Fortune’s life. In the novel, Amos’ first master informs his wife that, Quaker principles notwithstanding, Amos could not be freed immediately as he “is part animal now. What would he do but run wild?” (35).

Given Yates’ sources, as well as her social position, it should come as no surprise that she embeds Fortune’s life within an understanding of slavery as a “school for civilization.” The belief that bondage was a necessary way station between African “savagery” and American citizenship was widely embraced by mainstream historians, and the public at large, in the pre-Civil Rights era in which Yates wrote. Amos Fortune is in line with contemporaneous historiography. If the premise that slavery was a “school for civilization” was replaced with one that declared slavery fundamentally oppressive, we might ask, how would the fictionalized version of Amos Fortune—and his masters—differ? How would Amos Fortune read differently?

The slave trade is condemned in Yates’ novel, but slavery is redeemed, in large part because it brings African “pagans” to Christ. In structuring Amos Fortune as a Christian conversion narrative, however, Yates implicates Amos—and by extension, Africans at large—in his bondage. Amos refuses freedom papers when they are offered because “he did not want his life to be apart from [Master] Caleb’s in any way” (46). Amos was content in the Copeland household and he believed political freedom meaningless without the promise of salvation; thus, he wished to secure heaven first. Predictably, his earthly master dies insolvent and Amos is sold to pay the debts.

Yates’ political and religious beliefs—she was raised in a wealthy Catholic home steeped in noblesse oblige and the dictum that “to work when there was no need was to deprive someone for whom there was need”—likely influenced her decision to solve an interpretative problem posed by the records in this way. A 1763 manumission paper declaring Amos free in four years’ time—or upon the death of his master Ichabod Richardson—was drawn but not signed, rendering it nonbinding. When Richardson died five years later, Amos was still enslaved, and Richardson’s will neglected to mention him. This made Amos the property of his heirs. Why did an unsigned manumission paper exist? Yates’ explanation—that Amos turns down freedom—bridges the evidentiary gap and makes for a compelling story. But it also advances a historical argument whose implications most find deeply troubling today. In effect, it transfers responsibility for Fortune’s continued enslavement from his white owners and a flawed system of legal protection to a single disenfranchised slave.

Like the vast majority of children’s novels taught in schools, Amos Fortune, Free Man was widely praised at the time of its publication. Now a half-century later, historical interpretations of slavery and social sensibilities about race have changed dramatically. Yet as its updated paperback cover reveals, the novel continues to circulate briskly, appearing on the recommended reading lists for Alaska, California, and New York. Teaching Amos Fortune, Free Man as “timeless” literature is troublesome, but tapping the novel’s potential to teach students the importance of contextualization and to coach them in reading for historical argument and subtext is pedagogically exciting.

The historical Amos Fortune willed monies to his local schoolhouse upon his demise. Amazingly, those funds continue to benefit students today. A portion of proceeds from the initial bequest paid for publication of Peter Lambert’s educational booklet, Amos Fortune: The Man and His Legacy (2000). This classroom guide provides background information on Fortune’s life and transcribes all relevant historical documents found to date. With this resource and Yates’ novel in hand, students born nearly three centuries after Fortune can hone their skills in historical research, analysis, and thinking as they piece together both the history and memory of his life.

Further Reading:

For historical background on Amos Fortune, see Peter Lambert, Amos Fortune: The Man and His Legacy (Jaffrey, N.H., 2000) and Albert Annett and Alice E.E. Lehtinen, History of Jaffrey (Jaffrey, N.H., 1937). Elizabeth Yates described her research and writing process in “Acceptance Paper: Climbing Some Mountain in the Mind,” in Bertha Mahony Miller and Elinor Whitney Field, eds., Newbery Medal Books, 1922-1955, with the authors’ acceptance papers and related material, chiefly from the Horn Book Magazine (Boston, 1955). For the quotation about noblesse oblige, see Elizabeth Yates, My Diary—My World (Philadelphia, 1981). On Yates’ social background, see discussion of her father, Harry Yates, the Buffalo, New York coal magnate, in Joseph F. Bieron and Suzanne S. Kulp, Orchard Park: Images of America (Portsmouth, N.H., 2003). On the use of Christian conversion as a structuring device for slave narratives, and on the practice of imagining African captives as royalty, see Angelo Constanzo, Surprising Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography (New York, 1987) and Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives, 2nd ed. (Madison, 1979). Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor, as Determined by the Plantation Regime (1918) was the prevailing interpretation of American slavery at the time Yates penned Amos Fortune. On Amos Fortune’s reception history, see Donnarae MacCann, “Racism in Prize-Winning Biographical Works,” in Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard, eds., The Black American in Books for Children: Readings on Racism, 2nd ed. (Metuchen, N.J., 1985).

Sharon M. Draper, Copper Sun (New York, 2006) is a recent historical novel that, while set in the South and not based on a specific historical figure, parallels Amos Fortune by including capture in Africa, the Middle Passage, and ultimate achievement of freedom. Other historical novels to consider include, on captivity, Indian removal, and colonial warfare, Conrad Richter, Light in the Forest (1953), Elizabeth George Speare, Calico Captive (1957), Elizabeth George Speare, The Sign of Beaver (1983), and Joseph Bruchac, The Winter People (2002); on witch trials, Elizabeth George Speare, The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958), Ann Lane Petry, Tituba of Salem Village (1964), and Ann Rinaldi, A Break With Charity: A Story About the Salem Witch Trials (2003); and on the American Revolution, Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain (1943), James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier, My Brother Sam is Dead (1974), Scott O’Dell, Sarah Bishop (1980), Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains: Seeds of America (2008), and M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. I: The Pox Party (2006).

For a broader discussion of children’s historical novels and their role in school curriculum, see Sara L. Schwebel, Child Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms (Nashville, 2011), “Rewriting the Captivity Narrative for Contemporary Children: Speare, Bruchac, and the French & Indian War,” New England Quarterly 84, 2 (2011): 318-46, and “Historical Fiction and the Classroom: History and Myth in Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond,” Children’s Literature in Education 34 (2003): 195-218.

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

Sara L. Schwebel is assistant professor of English at the University of South Carolina and author of Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms (2011).

There is a rich tradition of writing in Spanish on colonial catastrophe, illness, and violence that includes the shipwreck narrative of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (interestingly, now entering the early American canon of colonial works taught in English translation), Bartolomé de las Casas’ A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (often credited with fueling the fires of the Black Legend), and accounts by indigenous or mestizo chroniclers such as Guamán Poma de Ayala’s The First New Chronicle and Good Government and the Inca Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries. Scholars including Beatriz Pastor and John Ochoa have studied what Ochoa calls “the uses of failure” in Spanish American colonial narrative, and José Rabasa has challenged us to consider the violence that is implicit in all instances of colonial encounters. More recently, Charles Walker’s Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and its Long Aftermath explores the social and political aftershocks of seismic catastrophe in the Andes.

How does the question of writing catastrophe change if those involved understand themselves to be the vanguard of an imperial initiative that is also part of their lived experience back at home?

Given that my own research deals with colonial and eighteenth-century Spanish America, while reading Seasons of Misery I kept coming back to the same questions: how is writing catastrophe different in early Anglo-America and Spanish America? How is it the same? How are the key terms that Donegan is working with—catastrophe, settlement, colonial and colonization—understood in the texts and contexts with which my Latin Americanist colleagues and I work?

I was particularly intrigued by Donegan’s argument that “One reason to pay attention to settlers’ misery and the discourse surrounding it is to complicate an account of conquest that sees English colonists as imperial agents who imported and enacted the prerogatives of possession based on convictions of cultural superiority, legal entitlement, and religious imperative … [and] to make a distinction between colonization as an imperial project and becoming colonial as a lived condition.” This argument has implications for accounts of Spanish conquest, I believe, despite the obvious differences between English and Spanish imperialism and the Protestant and Catholic religious ideologies that undergirded the imperial project. Spaniards “became colonial” in Spanish America in the context of viceregal institutional frameworks that both empowered and limited them, leading to a particular kind of colonial estrangement.

One question that I’d like to consider is the relationship between conquest, settlement, and empire. How does the question of writing catastrophe change if those involved understand themselves to be the vanguard of an imperial initiative that is also part of their lived experience back at home? In other words, to what degree does the medieval Spanish Reconquista, which played out over seven centuries, attenuate or complicate the incommensurability of Spaniards’ New World experience? By the end of the fifteenth century, those living on the Iberian peninsula—Christians, Jews, Muslims—had come to understand themselves in relation to each other and acted on that understanding in ways that, as we all know, led to oppression, censorship, expulsion, and death as well as more felicitous instances of convivencia and cultural crossings. Spaniards arrived in the New World already having defined themselves in opposition to an Other—someone whom they were not. Spanish debates about blood purity had already been playing out across the emerging Spanish empire for some time as it began to expand westward as one facet of a drive to consolidate and unite an imperial project, led by the “Catholic Monarchs” Ferdinand and Isabel, that was explicitly Spanish and Christian. As Patricia Seed has examined in her chapter on Spain in Ceremonies of Possession, the Reconquest provided the model for Spaniards in the Americas for their approach to conquest and their dealings with the indigenous population. For example, Seed posits that the infamous “requerimiento”—which was read to indigenous peoples in Spanish or Latin, calling upon them to submit to Spanish domination—was a protocol for conquest with often overlooked roots in Islamic jurisprudence.

Donegan’s call for “a shift in the evidentiary basis of analysis” is compelling. She notes that many accounts “studiously avoid the uncertainties of contingent temporality in favor of a perpetual present tense that is able to stabilize, authenticate, and transmit information. They represent colonial presence in America in terms of what is becoming known” (24). The same is true for the Spanish American “relación,” which attempts to present information in a controlled and organized way in response to an imperial request. But the story about what really happened must often be read between the lines. Ivonne del Valle does this by comparing official accounts of Jesuit missionaries in northern Mexico with the private letters they sent home to family and friends—epistolary renderings of suffering, illness, fear, and isolation.

Donegan maintains that English settlers “were not simply reporting on present conditions; they were also struggling to construct an identity out of the incommensurable experiences of being English and living in the New World” (2). This is undoubtedly true. But Donegan might have discussed further what that “Englishness” meant for the settlers of Roanoke and Jamestown and the British West Indies. By the same token, what does “Spanishness” or “Iberianness” or “Castilianness” mean—beyond what is being held on to? Moreover, what do these categories mean for different community demographics? In the case of Spanish America, at least initially, there were many fewer instances of families, women, and children traveling to the Americas. How does that condition how misery and suffering are experienced and described?

Another issue has to do with structure. After considering the cases of Roanoke and Jamestown, Donegan turns her attention to the Caribbean in the chapter “Barbados: Wild Extravagance.” She offers a reading of how the “torrid zone” calls for the creation of a new discursive framework for writing misery that she calls “colonial tropic” (in a nod to Srinivas Aravamudan’s notion of eighteenth-century “tropicalization”). One obvious explanation for the placement of this chapter at the end of the book has to do with chronology: the experience in Barbados came later. But I’m curious about whether the colonial spaces of the early Caribbean, understood as “beyond the line” in the eyes of Europeans, must also always be “beyond the line” when one tries to incorporate them in one’s scholarly work?

This raises broader questions, I think, about how we do Atlantic Studies or Transatlantic Studies or comparative studies generally in ways that recognize the complexity of metropolitan and colonial networks and that don’t impose contemporary geographic or cultural or disciplinary configurations. How do we go “beyond the line” to generate a more inclusive consideration of comparative colonial experiences? This roundtable is one example, as is the work of our colleague Ralph Bauer, of a dialogue between authors and texts from the English- and Spanish-speaking colonial world. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel also invokes this kind of interdisciplinary and multilingual scholarly approach in her book From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse. Martínez-San Miguel proposes that texts by Columbus, Cortés and Las Casas can be read as “minority discourse” because they all represent a process in which a metropolitan discourse has been “deterritorialized.” By “deterritorialization,” she means that the discourse has been removed from its original and authorizing context, and this might be another way to think about Donegan’s notion of “unsettling” early American narrative about colonial settlement. Unsettled and inspired, I’m delighted to be part of this conversation, and I want to congratulate Kathleen Donegan on a book that has pushed me to think in new ways about my own work on colonial Spanish America.

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

On November 15, 1850, at the American Hall in Hartford, Connecticut, Otis Bullard debuted his “Panorama of New York City,” a 3,000-foot-long painting depicting the streets, residents, and sights of lower Manhattan. The exhibition’s six-foot-high canvas was rolled, in several sections, onto cylinders, and then slowly unfurled before an audience who had paid twenty-five cents each for a two-hour presentation. Like other moving panoramas, Bullard’s transformed its subject into a pictorial narrative: from the corner of West Street and Cortlandt Street, the panorama’s virtual stroll took viewers down to the Battery, then east to Broadway, and then back uptown along the city’s most famous thoroughfare to Union Square, where the exhibition concluded. Starting his panoramic tour at the island’s westernmost edge, where disembarking ferry and steamboat passengers encountered the waterfront hotels of West Street, Bullard placed his viewer in the position of a visitor arriving from the mainland United States.

This was no accident, for the panorama’s virtual tourism was carefully marketed to viewers in small cities and towns far enough away from New York that they would be willing to pay to “see the elephant” in painted form at their local concert hall or church. Over the course of the work’s seventeen-year career, during which time it was seen by hundreds of thousands of Americans, Bullard’s panorama was never exhibited anywhere in or near New York City itself. While residents of cities such as St. Louis delighted in seeing their streets and buildings represented in the many Mississippi River panoramas of the late 1840s—stories circulated of people gleefully recognizing their homes up on the canvas—the “Panorama of New York City” was made for a distinctly nonurban audience.

Bullard’s panorama, originally a visual medium, exists today only as the elusive object of written texts: promotional materials, newspaper testimonials, a descriptive pamphlet, and a few other scattered documents (fig. 1). Though the panorama’s original paintings have been lost to history, these surviving artifacts have much to teach us about the marketing and presentation of Bullard’s work, and about the meaning of New York City in the mid-nineteenth-century national imagination.

Perhaps the most surprising lesson of his story is that, though the moving panorama is often seen as a modern form of visual storytelling, one that invites analogies with the twentieth-century motion picture, in the hands of Bullard it was a technology of nostalgia. Front and center in the exhibition of the “Panorama of New York City” was the artist himself, whose careful, and carefully staged, labor invoked a model of artisanship that looked back to a pre-urban past. The workmanlike brushstrokes, like the orderly progress of the moving image itself, promised viewers a stable perspective from which to witness the spectacle of the modern city. By presenting the morally suspect metropolis neatly framed by the panorama’s rhetoric of integrity and respectability, Bullard offered audiences an inoculation against urbanization and the social and economic chaos it threatened to bring with it.

The story of Otis Allen Bullard and his moving panorama is very much a story of nineteenth-century America. Born in 1816 in Steuben County, New York, Bullard apprenticed during his teen years as a sign painter in the shop of Augustus Olmstead, a local wagon builder. In 1838 he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he retrained in the art of portraiture under local artist Philip Hewins. Over the next few years, Bullard enjoyed a successful career in New England and upstate New York, painting portraits of many prominent families, including the Dickinsons of Amherst (he painted a ten-year-old Emily along with her two siblings in 1840 [fig. 2]). By the early 1840s, the popularity of daguerreotypy had begun to undermine his business. Bullard would need more than portraits to survive.

Relocating to New York City in 1843, Bullard encountered a different kind of marketplace than he had ever known before. Though he continued to work in traditional forms—he found some business in New York as a portraitist, and embarked on a series of historical and genre paintings depicting scenes from small-town American life (fig. 3)—the city afforded the struggling artist both the subject matter and the capital necessary to change the scale of his ambitions. Perhaps inspired by the Mississippi River panoramist John Banvard, he began pursuing the idea of painting a huge moving picture of New York City in 1846. Armed with capital from George Doel, an English-born financier, and business savvy from Albert Norton, a managing agent, Bullard began to create the panorama, an undertaking that took four years and ultimately cost $15,500. Like countless other men of his generation, Bullard began his working life as an artisan and ended it as a businessman.

Drawing on his own experiences as a rural-born artist confronting the metropolis, Bullard portrayed New York from the perspective of a well-informed visitor who was nevertheless an outsider. He presented a city in which the republican ideals of respectable labor and trade were giving way to a social landscape in which everyday actions such as walking down Broadway, or riding a stagecoach, were class-inflected performances. By exhibiting the social divisions of antebellum New York within the solid frame of Bullard’s production, the panorama invited audiences to imagine themselves outside the new urban vocabulary of bourgeois wealth and lower-class poverty. The moving panorama thus offered a dynamic bridge between the preindustrial and industrial eras: at once an artistic and economic undertaking, the “Panorama of New York City” blended craft and spectacle in rendering the modern city—and the new social order it represented—a commodity that could be marketed to the masses.

By 1850, New York City had emerged as a prominent symbol of industrialization’s chaos. In the work of Lydia Maria Child, George G. Foster, George Lippard, Edgar Allan Poe, and other first-generation urban writers, the city appeared as a bewildering realm of class conflict, violence, immorality, psychological alienation, financial instability, and social flux. Against such a backdrop, Bullard’s panorama offered provincial audiences a way of both seeing and not seeing the new metropolis: It presented a carefully expurgated picture of New York, one that, through careful strategies of selection, omission, perspective, and narrative presentation, effaced many of the city’s most troubling realities as it neatly mapped out the upheavals of northern antebellum life.

At the same time, the panorama offered audiences a way of seeing themselves. Unlike works of urban journalism or popular fiction, or even other visual media such as traditional painting and engravings, the moving panorama presented the individual spectator with the opportunity to look at a canvas as part of an audience that was both physically present and imaginatively projected into the future and the past. After all, the “moving” form that the panorama so often took in the United States meant that it was both moveable in its style of exhibition and portable in its ability to travel across the Northeast and Midwest, to places such as Rochester, Worcester, and Cleveland. At each stop, the panoramic audience saw the painted metropolis from the stability and familiarity of their own local environment.

If New York was a spectacle by which the stability of nonurban life was defined, the moving panorama offered a singular medium for drawing such a contrast. Whether their subject was California, the Mississippi River, or New York, panoramas promised unimpeachable realism: buildings were shown in proper scale and colors, just as the figures that appeared were said to be portraits of actual people. But just as significant was the narrative logic, the story-telling, afforded by the movement of the canvas. The descriptive pamphlets that survive from the popular Mississippi River panoramas of the 1840s suggest how the moving canvas sought to defuse the controversies symbolized by pictures of steamboat fires, Native American removal, and slave plantations; however troubling the implications of these pictures, they were quietly resolved as the canvas rolled across the stage, telling a broad tale of the national past, present, and future (fig. 4). Rendering violence as spectacle, the moving panorama kept pace with the process of modernization by enfolding instances of disorder or conflict into a panoramic tale of the developing and expanding nation.

Images of flatboatmen, highlighting the difficult manual labor of their work and the face-to-face nature of their trading practices, shared the canvas with pictures of failed and utterly desolate towns planned by financial speculators; such juxtapositions offered cautionary tales of ungrounded and irresponsible economic ambition during an age of frequent financial panic. In addition, Mississippi River panoramas often included cross-sectional images of a typical steamboat, revealing the different classes of accommodations available to travelers. Given the narrative progression followed by the Mississippi River panoramas—from the relatively undomesticated lands of the upper river to the bustling commerce of the region from St. Louis down to New Orleans—the spectacular appearance of a burning steamboat late in the exhibition suggested the potentially dangerous implications of unchecked industrial development. In these and many other ways, the moving panoramas of the 1840s and 1850s offered American viewers a mass cultural form large enough to frame the economic anxieties, social tensions, and political conflicts of the age; if the panoramic eye could take in the disparate elements of national life in one exhibition, the nation itself could cohere as a symbol capable of containing such multitudes.

In the case of Bullard’s work, the panorama taught audiences how to make sense of a new kind of social landscape. Before presenting the street-level “perspective” scenes that made up the bulk of his painting, the “Panorama of New York City” began with a “Bird’s-Eye View” in which, Bullard explained in his narration to the audience, “we suppose ourselves to be elevated considerably above New York City; looking down upon it” (fig. 1, see “Bird’s Eye View”). Looking south from Union Square, and with New Jersey visible in the not-too-distant background, he helps viewers locate the city’s major arteries, which organize the more detailed scenes that are to follow: “The finest hotels and stores in New York are situated in Broadway,” while “Fifth Avenue isone of the finest streets of private residence in the city.” Bullard also sets up New York as a place where class stratification can be mapped by neighborhood: The “most wealthy and fashionable families in New York … generally reside north of Washington Square and on the west side of Broadway. The poorest class of inhabitants reside east of the Bowery.” There is no chaos here, the viewer is assured before being brought down to street level, only a new kind of landscape.

This new landscape required a new way of seeing, and Bullard stood prepared to instruct his audience in it. Until his death in 1853, he often delivered the narration that accompanied the panorama himself. Whether Bullard was present at the exhibitions or not, the descriptive narration called attention to the decisions about selection and presentation that allowed the artist to properly stage the city for the viewer. “We now pass through the centre of the Battery,” the audience was told at one point. “By that means we have a finer view of the bay and shipping.” At moments such as this, Bullard invited his audience down to street level, only to reorient their vision from that of the urban dweller to the broad, all-encompassing perspective for which the panorama was named. By moving back and forth between the street-level and the wide-angle, the panorama allowed viewers to organize every detail of urban life within the “bird’s eye view” that opened the exhibition. In this way, Bullard’s depiction of New York kept the city simultaneously in view and at arm’s length.

Claiming that “New York city is more like a foreign city than any other city in the Union,” Bullard’s narration treated the cityscape as both an actual place that could be captured in pictures and as a symbolic realm just beyond the borders of mainstream Americanness. Furthermore, seeing New York as a “foreign” spectacle invited Bullard’s viewers to imagine themselves as a homogenous class securely located apart from the upper and lower extremes of New York society. On the lower end of Bullard’s New York are recently arrived immigrants from Europe. “All grades of life, and people from all countries,” the narration informs us, “can be seen in front of St. Paul’s church every day; it is a favorite place of resort for them.” Accentuating the unassimilated status of one particular group, the narrator tells us that “Three Hungarians are seen in their native costume.” Similarly, nonwhite figures most often appeared on Bullard’s canvas in positions of servitude or buffoonery. A figure is described by the narration as “one of the colored artists of the city, probably going to paint a Panorama somewhere with his white wash brush.” Of another figure, the narration informs us that “[w]e can see all of this servant except his face—that is rather too black!” And a military company is shown heading out for target practice, with “the colored man carrying the target.”

Like so many other representations of the antebellum city, the canvas highlighted the “great contrasts in life every fine afternoon, from the utmost extravagance and wealth to the most abject poverty and misery.” Amid the spectacular parade of poverty and wealth, the pamphlet describes the “accidents and confusion” to be found on Broadway “almost every hour of the day.” Here Bullard depicted an accident “in which the poor milkman got the worst of it,” spilling his milk and water, and in which “[t]he butcher had a pretty hard time,” getting knocked out of his cart and onto the street. Another scene suggests that the city’s rampant profit-seeking was giving rise to a modern pandemonium:

The proprietor of this charcoal wagon, had painted upon the side, “all orders thankfully received and punctually attended to.” He is now about receiving an unexpected order in the rear. The gentleman in this carriage employed a new coachman on trial, and this was his first attempt at driving the horse—his first appearance in public. He didn’t know how to guide the horse, and run him into the charcoal wagon, and followed on after himself. It was said at the time, that he went in this end of the wagon an Irishman, and come out the other end a negro.

This scene presents the city’s common laborers as the victims of a ruthless urban marketplace. As the description of the milkman puts it, these workers are often getting “the worst of it”—though they, too, have been corrupted by urban profiteering (for, as the audience is told elsewhere, the water spilled by the milkman is used to dilute his wares). The audience is invited to laugh at every member of the urban tableau: the nouveau riche “gentleman” who employs an untrained coachman; the overly solicitous charcoal salesman; and the unassimilated foreigner, standing in for a degraded and vulnerable laboring class whose racial integrity is threatened by the servitude required of them. In an urban social landscape in which identity is merely a matter of changeable surfaces, one false move and an Irishman can become “a negro.”

Instead of depicting the merchants, doctors, lawyers, teachers, clerks, and other members of New York’s new middle class (which by 1855 included about thirty percent of the city’s workforce), Bullard filled in the space between the upper and lower classes with undignified laborers. The above passage from the panoramic lecture directs the city’s exploitation and degradation toward the lower and laboring classes; here and elsewhere, the exhibition evaded the complex class politics of antebellum New York, where an urban working class was emerging alongside the burgeoning (and, on Bullard’s canvas, absent) middle class. Instead, the “Panorama of New York City” offered its audiences a way of looking at urban social conflict that allowed them to keep their hands clean as they gazed up at the morally suspect city.

Indeed, a poem inspired by Bullard’s work, written by Ephraim Stowe of Massachusetts, highlights the artist’s careful selection of urban details as a (market-savvy) rehearsal of middle-class moralism: “Had the painter disclosed all of the secrets within, / And brought out the wretchedness, suffering and sin, / That, hidden beneath this magnificence lies, / With sickness at heart you’d turn off your eyes.” Offering viewers a way of both seeing and not seeing New York, Stowe’s Bullard stages for the panoramic audience the selective logic of respectable spectatorship: “But the beautiful painting presents to the view / The City, bedecked in a most charming hue; / Her beauty and grandeur the pencil reveals— / Her poverty, sorrow, and crime, it conceals.” These elements are not simply absent from Bullard’s picture; rather, their absence is itself a visible feature of the panoramic presentation. In describing his picture of the notorious Five Points Neighborhood, for example, Bullard informs his audience: “The characters to be seen around this building at all hours of the day and night are not represented upon the painting. I did not wish to disgrace it with their presence.”

Newspaper accounts similarly treated Bullard’s work as a moral performance on the part of both artist and audience. The Kalamazoo Gazette reported that “every phase of city life and incident, proper to be represented, is introduced.” The notice continues by linking the artist’s own good taste with the presumed ability of the paying crowd to recognize how to read the work’s moral undertones: “No one can view this panorama without admiring the artistic skill, the eminent good taste, in the introduction of incidents, and the patient labor of the artist who brought it out.” And in a move that is typical of these journalistic notices, the Cayuga (Ohio) Chief focuses carefully on the orderly and well-behaved crowd that sits in a local church, watching and approving of the passing images. “During the whole exhibition such is the interest felt by all that you can almost hear a pin drop,” reports the paper. “[S]uch was the case here to crowded houses, in the Baptist Church, and we presume it is so everywhere.” As these newspaper puffs quietly assure their audiences that Bullard’s work constitutes a respectable entertainment, the city functions as a cultural symbol allowing nonurban audiences to imagine themselves collectively beyond the reach of urban corruption.

The panorama’s focus on the surfaces and exteriors of New York City contrasted with both the urban sensationalism of George Foster’s “New York by Gaslight” and the bourgeois progressivism of Lydia Maria Child’s Letters From New York. While each of these writers sought out the city’s interiors, the panorama keeps the viewer’s eyes expressly on its exteriors. Bullard never takes us indoors and he is content to render all inhabitants as representative objects. In a striking contrast to Child’s treatment of urban poverty, in which the figure of the city urchin offers an opportunity for spiritual and moral sermonizing, an anonymous poem entitled “Going to the City” celebrates Bullard’s work for its presentation of “Beggars, whose petitions / Ne’er excite our pity.” And a scene from the panoramic pamphlet describes a peddler on Broadway near Vesey Street as a mere placeholder for the urban poor: “This apple-woman has been stationed at this lamp post for four or five years, selling apples and candy to passers-by. If she should leave for a day, some one else would take possession of her place, and she would probably lose the means of supporting herself and family.” Another passage describing “one of the poor beggar children” depicted on canvas quickly zooms out to capture a whole class of people: “There are over six hundred poor children in the streets of New York begging and stealing. Their parents are generally intemperate, dissipated vagabonds.” In opposition to Child’s quest for intimacy and sympathy, Bullard’s narration moves from the singular to the plural, casting human figures as representative types.

Bullard also invited viewers to gaze upwards at the spectacle of urban wealth. Compare Bullard’s depiction of the affluent with that appearing in a series of articles entitled “New-York Daguerreotyped,” which ran in Putnam’s Monthly beginning in February of 1853. These pieces included engravings of well-known New York buildings as well as extended descriptions and commentary, offering a touchstone for considering Bullard’s own pictures of mid-century New York. In both word and image, Putnam’s portrayed the burgeoning metropolis as evidence of the nation’s capacity to create a moneyed and enlightened social elite to rival that of Europe. The city as a symbol of endless renewal and redevelopment is made in these pages to serve a bourgeois imagination whose taste and refinement contrasts sharply with the lower and middling classes.

At one point, the Putnam’s writer describes the changing character of Broadway, which formerly had been “consecrated to the dwellings of the wealthy” but is increasingly a commercial realm: “Aristocracy, startled and disgusted with the near approach of plebeian trade which threatened to lay its insolent hands upon her mantle, and to come tramping into her silken parlors with its heavy boots and rough attire, fled by dignified degrees up Broadway… Alas for the poor lady, every day drives her higher and higher.” Amid this distasteful mingling of the upper and “plebeian” merchant classes, the magazine educates its bourgeois audience about how to read the city’s architecture: “Too many buildings in New-York show immense wealth to have been expended in their construction, with a lavish hand unguided by correct taste.” Elaborate cornices and wood pediments “painted and sanded in imitation of stone” are part of an urban landscape that requires and invites the ongoing performance of bourgeois refinement. At the same time, Putnam’s witnesses the city’s dining and lodging establishments from the perspective of one who might partake in its luxuries. Of the newest generation of hotel dining-rooms, we are told that “The aesthetics of the table are now more cultivated by our hotel-keepers than was the case a few years ago. The dining-room of the St. Nicholas is an exquisitely beautiful example of a banqueting room, and shows to what a high condition the fine art of dining well has already been carried in this city.”

Bullard, however, places his audience on the street, looking in at urban opulence: “This is the principal entrance to the Astor House—people are seen inside… It is said that there are about twelve hundred rooms … and three stories below.” Here and elsewhere, Bullard includes extensive details about the cost and materials of particular structures and locales, especially when these figures approach the other-worldly. Similarly, the stagecoaches available for hire on Broadway epitomize the city’s conspicuous display of wealth and status: “A fine stage will get more custom in Broadway than an old one. Persons had rather pay their six pence to ride in a fine stage.” One stage, which “took the premium one year, at the Fair of the American Institute,” reportedly cost $1,100. “It was painted very beautifully on the outside, and fitted up with mirrors inside.” The viewer also learns that “Drivers take pride in having six or more horses on a fine stage when it is first brought out in the street,” and that one particular stage included “twenty-two spans of white horses, all driven by one man.”

While the ornamental ideals of the city’s stagecoach owners serve and reflect a culture of ostentatious display, Bullard’s realist ethos implicitly claims for his work a more stable and honest kind of value:

The people we see in the street are drawn from life. There are several thousand portraits upon this painting that would be readily recognized by their friends in the city, by their style of dress and general appearance in the street—have been drawn from the persons themselves at different times they were seen in the street, expressly for this painting.

The painting’s realism defines the city residents entirely by “their style of dress and general appearance in the street” so that the artist can claim to have captured the essence of the city precisely because his eye understands how urban identity privileges the symbolic language of fashion. As the audience looks out at a New York where the “upper ten” announce themselves by how they dress, and by the coaches they employ to carry them up and down Broadway, the panoramic audience pays twenty-five cents to enjoy the respectable entertainment that is the product of Bullard’s labor.

A widely circulated biographical sketch presented Bullard as “one of the noble few, in our country, who have by their own exertions been elevated from adversity to a high and honorable renown.” And a broadside advertising the panorama included a newspaper clipping, under the heading “Young Men, read this!” suggesting that the facts of Bullard’s life “will interest all who have struggled and are struggling with poverty” (fig. 1). The panorama included an exterior view of the Broadway building in which he and his small team of assistants worked, and when Bullard died in 1853, many commentators speculated that his untimely death was due to the astonishing, even superhuman amount of labor required to carry out such an enormous project. Like the wood and canvas of the panorama itself, Bullard’s labor was the solid machinery that framed for audiences the less tangible forces transforming New York as a commercial and financial realm. When read in conversation with the artist’s pictures of the city, the example of Bullard’s life story offered a model of respectable poverty that was in marked contrast with the undignified and nameless urchins displayed on his canvas, and one that viewed noble labor as a route into middle-class stability.

Of course, this careful presentation of Bullard’s labor was itself a product of the very economic forces the panorama claimed to be keeping safely at a distance. The panorama’s managers peddled Bullard’s integrity to markets that imagined themselves as witnesses to the process of urbanization. Even from the planning stages, the “Panorama of New York City” was apparently conceived as a less urban counterpart to another New York City exhibition, John Evers’s “Grand Original, Moving Series of Panoramas.” The Evers panorama depicted Manhattan, the (then separate) city of Brooklyn, the East and Hudson Rivers, and the Atlantic Ocean, and was underwritten by the sarsaparilla millionaire Samuel P. Townsend. Clearly intended for a more urban, working-class audience, Evers’s work—which first appeared in 1849, and which is only known to have exhibited in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.—was advertised to include “The awful and magnificent scene of the ASTOR OPERA HOUSE RIOT” and “The grand and sublime spectacle of the BURNING OF THE PARK THEATRE.” No event in the recent memory of the city invoked the violence of urban class conflict as dramatically as the Astor Place riots, and the panorama’s advertising only reinforced its embrace of working-class sensationalism. In addition, an item in the December 8, 1849, issue of the New York Herald reveals that another artist, presumably Bullard, was at work at an imitation of “Evers’ grand moving panorama of New York.” While a short notice the previous month had recommended the Evers work to its readers, the Herald describes this new work as both unprofessional and distinctly nonurban. It is, the paper argues, “as complete a piece of scene-daubing as was ever got up by a wandering Thespian company in a country barn.”

Bullard and his confederates likely decided that the “Panorama of New York City” would find its audience far outside the city’s borders. While the Evers advertisements promise a near-apocalyptic presentation of the city in flames, Bullard offered the city in frames, assuring audiences that despite the tensions and confusions of urban life, New York was eminently capable of monitoring and protecting both people and property. Thus one view portrays a “vehicle used to convey prisoners in, and about the city,” while another shows the notorious city prison, “The Tombs.” In still another scene we see a policeman walking a prisoner into the station of the city’s sixth police ward. Bullard’s narration continues: “A prisoner escaping: an occurrence that happened while I was making a drawing of the building. Two policemen are seen in pursuit; they soon overtook him.” Here and elsewhere, potential threats to urban order and hierarchy are contained without even a hint of drama or suspense. Though the class conflicts of the Evers panorama are matters of life and death, in the “Panorama of New York City” such conflicts ultimately reaffirm the city’s social order, and are at times (as in the Broadway accidents described above) even lightly comical.

Also noteworthy in this regard is Bullard’s portrayal of city fires. Conflagration scenes were among the most popular highlights of many mid-century moving panoramas, in part because the form’s dependence on lighting effects made for some rather spectacular staging possibilities. Instead of introducing a fire unannounced into the narrative, however, Bullard first describes for his audiences how the city is laid out into eight fire districts: “When a fire occurs in any part of the city, the men at the bells readily know the district in which it is situated, and they make the number of the district known to the firemen, by the number of strokes upon the bells.” Once a fire finally appears several scenes later, Bullard almost off-handedly points out the burning of a relatively undeveloped piece of land: “This fire represents the burning of a mahogany yard, situated near the North river. It gave an opportunity of showing the manner in which the firemen turned out to a fire.” Here again the artist turns an opportunity for sensationalism into an act of rhetorical distancing: “We here see some of the bustle and confusion attendant upon a fire, but we don’t hear any of the noise. This is not represented on the Painting.“

The narrative location of crime, fires, and other urban perils in Bullard’s work ultimately affirmed the city’s capacity to maintain standards of security and control. Though the “Panorama of New York City” acknowledged the real danger of fires in a region populated as densely as antebellum New York, those most vulnerable were either the firemen themselves (who came almost exclusively from the city’s lower classes) or sensation-seekers (who by virtue of their appetites fall short of middle-class morality): “Boys often run with the engines to the fire. They frequently fall down and are run over. There is hardly a fire in New York but what there is some kind of accident, persons being injured in running to the fire, or firemen at the fire.” Whether depicting a fleeing criminal caught without drama, or a burning lumber yard in which no bodies are at any physical risk, the panorama answered the city’s sensationalism, theatricality, and disorder with his panorama’s counter-urban rhetoric of respectability and self-government.

The “Panorama of New York City” implied that true middle-class refinement was possible only outside the borders of the city and the forms of class consciousness offered by urban life. Nowhere is this clearer than in the exhibition’s final scene, which depicted a space associated by 1850 with a bourgeois ideal of comfort and security: the residences surrounding Union Square Park. As the descriptive pamphlet reads, “There is a policeman, or keeper of the park, here stationed to keep out improper characters and dogs, to preserve order and keep persons off the grass; and it is a safe place for parents to send their children for play and exercise.” Removed from the spectacular parade of wealth and poverty seen farther down Broadway, the scene offers a closing image of upper-class security that defines such a status by the protection the city itself offers from the “improper” and potentially dangerous classes that move freely farther downtown.

When the city’s more respectable workers are finally mentioned in Bullard’s final scene, they are not only disconnected from the work that they perform during the week; they appear, paradoxically, as an absence. As the description continues, during the week “we see this park thronged with little children,” while on Sundays it “will be thronged with the working classes.” Such phrasing suggests that the view on canvas is not a Sunday view—that is, these workers do not actually appear before the audience. Perhaps even more tellingly, the narrative “we” that looks up at the painted scene resides somewhere between the uptown families seen throughout the week, and those who work such long hours that Sundays are “nearly their only days for recreation and pleasure.” Bullard’s exclusion of these mechanics sets up an implicit contrast between the urban laborer and the panoramic audience, who enjoys the leisure of the exhibition as the mechanics are off at work.

With the city’s police keeping a careful eye out for “improper characters,” Union Square offers mechanics only a weekly parody of respectability in which their families are entitled to briefly loiter in the reflected light of bourgeois exclusivity. Having taught his audience how to view the city from within the bounds of propriety, Bullard closes by highlighting the unbridgeable, almost ontological gulf between working class and bourgeois identity in the modern city. By framing such a dilemma as a distinctly urban phenomenon, the panorama offered a collective identity—homogeneous, white, nonurban—unfractured by a city-based class system in which labor and capital are kept conspicuously apart.

In the months before his death, Bullard completed a painting that vividly illustrates his panorama’s idiosyncratic way of witnessing and containing the spectacle of urban life. “Horse Trade Scene, Cornish Maine” (fig. 5) centers on a rural horse trader who has presumably just completed a transaction with a departing gentleman. In the background, through the open side door of a tavern, the viewer can just make out a broadside advertising “Bullard’s panorama of New York City,” to appear “this day” at a local hall. The painting depicts the kind of face-to-face economic transaction that would increasingly distinguish small-town American life from the complex financial transactions and speculations of urban capitalism. Of course, as the inclusion of the panorama broadside suggests, this small-town integrity was essentially counter-urban, depending as it did upon the distant-but-visible city for its own articulation. Bullard’s panorama promised its audiences precisely what it brings to “Horse Trade Scene”: a portable city framed, as it is in Bullard’s late painting, by the rhetoric of honest exchange and unpretentious realism.

“Horse Trade Scene” also reflects the careful marketing of Bullard and his work as a link between small-town commerce and an urban economic landscape that loomed in the distance. In 1854, the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser recognized the fundamentally commercial nature of Bullard’s exhibition:

We wish to tell the merchants and shopkeepers of New York that the panorama advertises widely and generally—more so than it can be done by any other single medium. In the western towns their shops and stands are seen by those persons to whom it is important to them that the information should be communicated, and the exact location of the different places of business becomes fixed in the minds of the spectators… . In Bullard’s panorama every sign and name is seen as distinctly as on Broadway, and over eighty thousand are represented faithfully on canvas. Thus the western dry goods merchant beholds the sign and name of some wholesale firm with whose reputation he has become acquainted probably through the medium of the papers, and when he visits New York for the first time, he bends his steps at once to the familiar spot.

Clearly aligned here with the mercantile interests of the industrializing North, the panorama was nonetheless appearing before audiences who (in some cases) imagined themselves as only distantly connected to the commercial activity on display before them. As an 1854 review from the Ohio Cultivator promised, “Our country friends may pay their twenty-five cents to see this safely.” And in fact, even the business-minded piece from the Buffalo paper remarks that “no little fun can be obtained from watching the upturned countenances, open mouths and staring eyes of the ‘country volks’ who have never seen the Broadway elephant.” As the writer concludes, Bullard’s scenes of New York “are almost incomprehensible to novices accustomed only to country life or the miniature turmoil of a smaller city.” Pointing at Broadway with one hand and at the wide-eyed country yokels with the other, the Buffalo writer articulates a middle ground from which the city is demystified as an economic entity; seen panoramically, New York merely comprises thousands of individual “merchants and shopkeepers” who have been made “familiar” by Bullard’s painting.

By peddling both New York City and the artisanal accomplishments of Bullard, the managers promoted New York’s mercantile activities while keeping the panorama’s own connections to the city’s marketplace out of view. Selling the panorama as the well-crafted product of honest labor, Bullard’s team made it more palatable to audiences who might be distrustful of an urban commercial venture. Of course, the very fact that this market strategy emerged out of New York City’s increasingly speculative economy only reaffirms the far-reaching implications of those forces Bullard claimed to be containing within the frames of his picture: the “Panorama of New York City,” after all, was an economic venture born in the very city it claimed to be keeping safely at a distance.

Though the unprecedented economic growth of New York throughout the 1850s meant that Bullard’s painting became more obviously out-of-date every year, it continued to find success in the marketplace as a piece of cultural nostalgia. In “Going to the City,” the panorama is a delightfully premodern technology (“Though the Locomotive / Run a trifle faster”), and Bullard’s painted city a quaintly fictional projection of the nonurban imagination (“Happy is the urchin / Humming rural ditty”) (fig. 1). As the refrain, “With a nimble ‘quarter’ / Going to the City,” repeats in each of the poem’s ten stanzas, the “Panorama of New York City” embodies a welcome predictability that opposes the seeming chaos of present-day urban life. For the price of a “nimble quarter,” the viewer gets to experience a simpler, less modern New York, one that contrasts favorably with the New York of the late 1850s. As the reader is reminded, “Hoops were never worn in / Eighteen Hundred fifty.”

Bullard’s unique and colorful story highlights the difficulty of generalizing about the moving panorama as a cultural phenomenon. Though, for example, the medium is typically associated with the formation of an American middle class in cities such as New York, Bullard’s work rejected the very premise of an urban middle class—not only by eliding this class in his pictures of 1850 New York, but by offering a middle-class respectability that was defined against the stratified logic of urban social life. And while it is often tempting to imagine these early “motion pictures” as a proto-cinematic medium aligned with the forces of modernization, we have seen how the “Panorama of New York City” offered a way of witnessing the city that was firmly grounded in the ideals of the early nineteenth century. Finally, the story of Bullard’s work complicates the broad claim that moving panoramas brought distant regions closer to an emerging mass audience. In fact Bullard’s panorama appears to have succeeded in the marketplace by keeping the burgeoning metropolis, and the new world it represented, safely at a distance.

Further reading

A copy of the descriptive booklet from Bullard’s panorama can be found in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago. The American Antiquarian Society holds one of the few extant copies of the “Brief Sketch of the Life of O.A. Bullard,” which includes a number of press clippings praising the exhibition. In addition, broadsides advertising the panorama can be found at the AAS and the New York Historical Society. An invaluable resource on Bullard’s panorama (including a careful reconstruction of the exhibition schedule) is Joseph Arrington’s “Otis A. Bullard’s Moving Panorama of New York City” in New York Historical Society Quarterly, 44:3 (1960): 309-35.

The most informative book-length studies of the panorama phenomenon in Europe and the United States are Stephan Oettermann’s The Panorama, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York, 1997) and Bernard Comment’s The Painted Panorama (New York, 1999), though neither of these studies specifically mentions Bullard’s work. John Francis McDermott’s The Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi (Chicago, 1958) provides a valuable overview of five different Mississippi River panoramas. These panoramas are also the subject of a chapter in Thomas Ruys Smith’s River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi River Before Mark Twain (Baton Rouge, 2007).

For an excellent discussion of mid-nineteenth-century literary and journalistic treatments of New York City, see Stuart Blumin’s introduction to George G. Foster’s New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches (Berkeley, 1990). To better understand the class dynamics of antebellum New York, see Bruce Laurie’s Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1989); Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1790-1850 (New York, 1984); Stuart Blumin’s The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge, 1989); Sven Beckert’s The Monied Metropolis: New York and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (New York, 2001); and David Scobey’s “Anatomy of the Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York,” Social History, 17:2 (May 1992): 203-227. Finally, anyone curious about pre-1900 New York can learn something from Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 2000), by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace.

Thanks very much to the following institutions: the Winterthur Library, especially the Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera; the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; the American Antiquarian Society; the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago; the New York Public Library; the New York Historical Society; the Brooklyn Public Library; and Swirbul Library at Adelphi University. Special thanks to Joe and Jay Caldwell at the Caldwell Gallery in Manlius, New York, for bringing their Bullard painting to my attention. I am also very grateful to the editorial staff at Common-place, especially Cathy Kelly and Trudy Powers.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.4 (July, 2011).

Peter West, assistant professor of English at Adelphi University, is the author of The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture (2008). He is currently working with a team of co-editors on a five-volume collection of documents related to the panorama in England and the United States, to be published by Pickering and Chatto.

Hendrick Aupaumut has had many collaborators, but it wouldn’t be entirely correct to say that he has worked with many of them. Aupaumut, an eighteenth-century sachem of the Mohican tribal nation, produced many English-language texts that exist in published forms today because someone else put them into print. (This is no doubt in addition to the Mohican-language texts that this bilingual tribal leader also produced.) The first and most often read English-language example is Aupaumut’s “A Short narration of my last Journey to the western Contry,” a handwritten journal that he composed when selected by President George Washington in 1792 to negotiate with what Lisa Brooks (Abenaki) calls the “United Indian Nations”—a confederation of indigenous tribal nations in the Ohio Valley (including the Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware) that were challenging the new United States. Although Aupaumut’s negotiations did not ultimately result in peace between the United States and the United Indian Nations, the journal that he supplied to Washington after his journey is quite significant for many reasons, not the least of which is that it provides an indigenous perspective on this important historical moment. Years after it had been read and copied by the Washington administration, the journal somehow ended up in the hands of Philadelphia antiquarian Benjamin Coates. It was then printed—without Aupaumut’s permission, input, or even knowledge—in the 1827 edition of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s Memoirs.

But just as interesting and important is the short “History” Aupaumut wrote of his Muh he-con-nuk Nation. In what follows, I compare how Electa Jones (a historian working in western Massachusetts in the middle of the nineteenth century) and Kristina Heath (a contemporary Mohican/Menominee writer) have engaged with Aupaumut’s “History.” I first look at how Jones included Aupaumut’s “History” in her Stockbridge, Past and Present; or, Records of an Old Mission Station (1854) and then at how Heath uses Aupaumut’s “History” as the basis for her Mama’s Little One (1996). Indian texts have been mobilized for many purposes over the years, and there’s no such thing as a neutral reproduction of Aupaumut’s text. Briefly tracing how this particular text has been deployed shows us how Jones places Indianness in the past of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and how Heath uses it for the continuance of Mohican culture. In other words, Jones’s orientation to Mohican culture is that it is a historical artifact, but Heath calls attention to and indeed enacts Mohican culture in the present and into the future. As I hope to make clear, Heath turns Aupaumut’s “History” away from the colonial context of Jones’s Stockbridge, Past and Present and places it into a framework of ongoing indigenous history and tradition.

We believe that Aupaumut wrote his “History” sometime in the early 1790s. Because it is written in English, we suspect that the “History” was intended mainly for a white audience. (It most likely existed alongside an oral Mohican-language tradition told to and passed down among the Mohican people.) Even so, the only extant versions are those that appear within other texts from a slightly later period. Scholars have yet to locate an “original”; all we have is the way that “History” has been used in (and mediated by) other writers’ work. One version appeared in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1804), another in the First Annual Report of the American Society for Promoting the Civilization and General Improvement of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1824), well before Jones included Aupaumut’s “History” in her Stockbridge, Past and Present. Scholars tend to look to Jones’s text when reading Aupaumut’s “History” because it is, as Hilary Wyss points out, the most complete of the three extant, fragmentary versions. When we look at Aupaumut’s “History” included within Jones’s Stockbridge, Past and Present, we might be tempted to ask: how faithful is Jones’s copy to Aupaumut’s missing “original”? How “authentic” is Jones’s text, or the intertwined Jones-Aupaumut text?

Questions of authenticity can often be of central concern for those approaching Native texts, but aren’t there other interesting questions we can ask? Or, perhaps, is there another set of questions we could pose that get at entirely different—but just as pressing—concerns? For example, what role does Aupaumut’s text play in Jones’s text? What effect did its inclusion have? What choices did Jones make in terms of how to contextualize Aupaumut’s text? How does Jones’s framework affect how we read Aupaumut’s text? Put simply: How did Jones do things with Indian texts, and what can we learn from asking such a question?

Jones includes Aupaumut’s “History” as part of a chapter on “Indian History” within Stockbridge, Past and Present, as an interesting aspect of the town’s background. In the chapter, she chronicles the group of Mohican Nation Indians who lived there during the eighteenth century. While one might expect Jones to treat Aupaumut’s “History” as the “pre-history” of Stockbridge “proper”—as something that comes to an end with permanent white settlement—it might be more fitting to say that Jones includes Aupaumut’s text and the subsequent chapters she writes on the Stockbridge Indians as one of the more distinctive features of Stockbridge’s past. On the one hand Jones’s text partakes of nostalgia of the vanishing Indian: “And the Red Man too; —oh, how little do we think of him! How little do we know of him! How seldom, how very seldom, does the public prayer ascend for the children of those who once lived in these valleys, hunted in these groves, angled in these streams, worshiped where we bow, and were the STOCKBRIDGE CHURCH!” (10). But Jones also draws attention to their continued existence elsewhere: “They have ‘melted away’ indeed, but not like many of their race. They still have a national existence, still hold the religion which they learned upon this spot, and still love, with true Indian fervor, the homes and the graves of their fathers here” (10). Later in Stockbridge, Jones traces the Mohican paths through Ohio to Wisconsin (where the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians resides today). She suggests, in other words, that relocation is not the same as irrelevance; the story of the Mohicans is still important to the story of Stockbridge, even though they may have left.

Jones includes Aupaumut’s “History” as part of a chapter on “Indian History” within Stockbridge, Past and Present, as an interesting aspect of the town’s background. In the chapter, she chronicles the group of Mohican Nation Indians who lived there during the eighteenth century. While one might expect Jones to treat Aupaumut’s “History” as the “pre-history” of Stockbridge “proper”—as something that comes to an end with permanent white settlement—it might be more fitting to say that Jones includes Aupaumut’s text and the subsequent chapters she writes on the Stockbridge Indians as one of the more distinctive features of Stockbridge’s past. On the one hand Jones’s text partakes of nostalgia of the vanishing Indian: “And the Red Man too; —oh, how little do we think of him! How little do we know of him! How seldom, how very seldom, does the public prayer ascend for the children of those who once lived in these valleys, hunted in these groves, angled in these streams, worshiped where we bow, and were the STOCKBRIDGE CHURCH!” (10). But Jones also draws attention to their continued existence elsewhere: “They have ‘melted away’ indeed, but not like many of their race. They still have a national existence, still hold the religion which they learned upon this spot, and still love, with true Indian fervor, the homes and the graves of their fathers here” (10). Later in Stockbridge, Jones traces the Mohican paths through Ohio to Wisconsin (where the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians resides today). She suggests, in other words, that relocation is not the same as irrelevance; the story of the Mohicans is still important to the story of Stockbridge, even though they may have left.

Most importantly for my purposes here, Aupaumut relates a practice that was “considered as communicated to them by Good Spirit,” where “The Head of each family—man or woman—would began with all tenderness as soon as daylight, to waken up their children and teach them, as follows: —” (18). Then, in a quote within a quote (Jones quoting Aupaumut quoting the Mohican “Head of each family”), the text details the lessons imparted by Mohican parents to their children. The lessons include instructions on assisting the elderly, telling the truth, being industrious, and obeying the counsel of the sachems and chiefs. Unlike the rest of the “History,” this section is structured by the rhythm of repetition. The direct address to “My Children” opens each lesson and signals both acoustically and typographically when each new message commences. And although not on the printed page, the lessons also repeat in lived time—as Mohican ancestors impart the lessons to their children, to their children’s children, to the eighteenth-century present people of the Mohican nation, and to the future children of the lasting Mohican nation.

Drawing upon this idea of repeating lessons into the future is how writer Kristina Heath (Mohican/Menominee) decides to do things with Indian texts in her own book, Mama’s Little One. Heath grew up on the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians’ reservation in Wisconsin, and she encountered Aupaumut’s “History” in an undergraduate course on Mohican history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. In 1996, she wrote, illustrated, and published Mama’s Little One with Muh-he-con-neew Press. Adapted from Aupaumut’s “History,” the text describes a Mohican mother waking her young son in the morning and depicts the dialogue between the mother and son as she teaches him the important lessons laid out in Aupaumut’s account. Here, Heath beautifully depicts the female “Head of family” teaching her son, as Aupaumut says, “with all tenderness.”

Heath’s book is a fantastic example of a Native writer performing what Scott Richard Lyons (Ojibwe/Mdewakanton Dakota) calls “rhetorical sovereignty,” the right of indigenous peoples to represent themselves as they see fit. Heath neither assumes that Aupaumut’s text-within-Jones’s-text has been either compromised or not compromised by its inclusion in a white text. Rather, Heath turns to Aupaumut’s text-within-Jones’s-text as an Indian text that reflects a complicated layering of Indian-white interaction—a text that invites questions and discussion rather than conclusions—a text that insists that something be done with it. And what Heath decides to do is produce Mama’s Little One, a book that performs rhetorical sovereignty by using the earlier text as a particular kind of historical document and re-using it in a specifically tribally centered way—not only as a record of the past (as Jones does in Stockbridge) but also as a message to Mohicans now and to Mohicans of the future. Heath sets Mama’s Little One at the turn of the nineteenth century—when Mohicans gathered wood to heat their wigwams and hunted food to feed their families—but it has pointed contemporary resonance. The loving dialogue between mother and son (re)performs both the tradition laid out in Aupaumut’s “History” and enables today’s Mohican parents to do the same for their children, for their children’s children, and so on.

Indeed, the narrative structure of Mama’s Little One posits a Mohican past, a Mohican present, and a Mohican continuance into the future. There are no vanishing Indians here. Heath incorporates Mohican words such as “Mah ose” (grandfather), “Noh” (father), and “Guka” (mother), and she provides a glossary for her readers. This anticipates readers—both Mohican and non-Mohican—who don’t know the Mohican language. As such, it has much in common with other indigenous language revitalization efforts, such as those of Stephanie Fielding (Mohegan), Jessie Little Doe Baird (Wampanoag), and those supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages grant programs. Further, Heath’s book, along with other Native-authored children’s literature, features prominently in educational and enrichment programming, such as children’s literacy events and reading times held at the Arvid E. Miller Library and Museum at the Mohican reservation or at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, where children’s librarian Gabrielle Keys used Mama’s Little One in her programming. Indeed, Heath makes a different choice than Jones with regard to how to do things with Indian texts. For Heath, Indian texts are neither fixed nor timeless but rather part of a vibrant, responsive, and utterly contemporary cultural practice, and her approach enables others to continue using Indian texts in this way. In doing so, she joins other contemporary indigenous writers such as Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, tribal historian of the Mohegan (a different indigenous nation), who use tribal history and traditions in their contemporary work, both fiction and historiography. Tantaquidgeon Zobel’s 1995 tribal history, The Lasting of the Mohegans, provides a useful rhetorical cue: rather than conceptualize Aupaumut’s “History” as simply history, Heath uses Aupaumut’s text to fashion what we might call a “Lasting of the Mohicans” into the future.

Further Action:

One might ask, in addition to our teaching and research, what things should we scholars today do with Indian texts? And how? We perhaps could simply support the writing and reading of these books. First, we can support the tribal institutions that make the production of texts such as Heath’s Mama’s Little One possible. The Arvid E. Miller Library and Museum is the cultural center charged with storing the archives of the Stockbridge-Munsee people, with providing the Stockbridge-Munsee members access to their history, and with keeping that history alive. The Miller Library and Museum, under the direction of manager Nathalee Kristiansen, also is undertaking a new building fund. A new and much-needed facility would allow the library more storage, more displays, and more programming based upon and geared for the Mohican people, thus preserving tribal histories and supporting vibrant cultural projects. If one thing you wanted to know how to do with Indian texts is how to support the building of a tribally centered place to produce them and to keep them, you should visit the Library and Museum Web page of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians. Second, we can support the writing and reading of these books by buying our own copies to read. Certainly one could order one of the few remaining copies of Mama’s Little One owned by large online retailers, but if one thing you wanted to know how to do with Indian texts (here, Mama’s Little One) is how to buy them directly and more economically, one should contact Leah Miller, elder historian of the Mohican Nation.

Further Reading:

Aupaumut’s “History” is extant in Electa Jones, Stockbridge, Past and Present: Or, Records of an Old Mission Station (Springfield, Mass., 1854); Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, first ser., vol. 9 (1804); and First Annual Report of the American Society for Promoting the Civilization and General Improvement of the Indian Tribes of the United States (New Haven, 1824). See also Kristina Heath, Mama’s Little One (Gresham, Wis., 1996). For more on how Hendrick Aupaumut worked for the future of the Mohican Nation, see Dorothy Davids, A Brief History of the Mohican Nation, Stockbridge-Munsee Band (Bowler, Wis., 2004); Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis, Minn., 2008); Hilary Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst, Mass., 2000); Rachel Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, 2008); Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill, 2000), and “Historical Introduction to Hendrick Aupaumut’s Short Narration” and “Hendrick Aupaumut and the Cultural Middle Ground,” in Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology, eds. Kristina Bross and Hilary Wyss (Amherst, Mass., 2008); David Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, 2010); Alan Taylor, “Captain Hendrick Aupaumut: The Dilemmas of an Intercultural Broker,”Ethnohistory 43.3 (1996); and Katy Chiles, Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America (New York, 2014) and “Tribal Sovereignty, Native American Literature, and the Complex Legacy of Hendrick Aupaumut,” Tennessee Studies in Literature (Fall 2015). For more on the Mohegan tribal nation’s history, see Mohegan tribal historian Melissa Jayne (Fawcett) Tantaquidgeon Zobel, The Lasting of the Mohegans: Part I, The Story of the Wolf People (Uncasville, Conn., 1995). For more on how James Fenimore Cooper confused the Mohegan tribe with the Mohican tribe and was absolutely wrong about their extinction, see Drew Lopenzina, Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period (Albany, 2012). For more on rhetorical sovereignty, see Scott Richard Lyons, “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?”, CCC 51:3 (2000).

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Kristina Heath, Leah Miller, Nathalee Kristiansen, Jessica Christensen, Paul Erickson, Drew Lopenzina, and Kelly Wisecup.

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

Katy Chiles is associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee. Her book, Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America, was published in 2014. She is currently working on a book project about race, collaboration, and antebellum American literature.

In her beautifully devastating book Seasons of Misery, Kathleen Donegan powerfully argues for the unsettling nature of colonial settlement in early America. Dwelling in moments of misery, she uses literary analysis, narrative history and trauma studies to defamiliarize received accounts—allowing us to attend to the narratives’ deep distress, to consider suffering and violence together, and to disrupt “critical analysis of early colonialism as a vehicle for national ideology.” In asking us to reimagine colonial settlement, Seasons of Misery is a tremendously fertile book, and I would like to use my time today to demonstrate how it opens up new critical possibilities—in particular, following my own interests, how we might use Donegan’s book to rethink disability and trauma in this early period.

To do so, I want to turn to Donegan’s discussion of the Jamestown catastrophes and the narratives of its leaders John Smith and George Percy. Percy led the colony through a series of catastrophes—not just Native attacks and the Starving Time, but what Donegan refers to cumulatively as “the worst misery known in England’s early American settlements.” Thus, she writes that when Percy penned his “catastrophic history, the ‘ill and odious wound’ of Virginia was manifestly opened.” John Smith left before the worst. Glossing the differences between the two leaders’ accounts, Donegan explains: “If Smith writes history as autobiography, Percy writes history as abjection.”

Nevertheless, as she tells us, Smith did not leave Jamestown unaffected. On his way back from visiting unruly settlers upriver, a bag of gunpowder exploded in Smith’s lap. William Simons gives an account of the scene in Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia: “Sleeping in his Boate … accidentallie, one fired his powder-bag, which tore the flesh from his body and thighs, nine or ten inches square in a most pittifull manner; but to quench the tormenting fire, frying him in his cloaths he leaped over-board into the deepe river, where ere they could recover him he was neere drowned.” Smith was forced to leave his post, traveling first back to Jamestown and then across the Atlantic with untreated, “grievous” wounds. Whether or not John Smith was “accidentallie” castrated necessarily remains a matter of speculation. What is almost certain, however, is that Smith bore the bodily marks of his time in the colony for the rest of his life.

This pair—Smith’s body and Percy’s narrative of the “‘ill and odious wound’ of Virginia”—provide an exciting opportunity to use Donegan’s analysis to enrich our understanding of early America. Smith’s body and Percy’s narrative draw together trauma and impairment in the period of colonial settlement. In her comparison of Smith and Percy’s accounts, Donegan writes: “To put Percy and Smith into relation is to recognize why catastrophe, as well as possibility, was foundational to early settlement writing.” Holding the two together, what also grows clear is that John Smith told a story of “possible worlds” but also returned with his body disabled for some time, and marked for a lifetime, by the colonial encounter. The legacies of Percy’s time in the colony were not corporeal but cognitive and narrative.

Through this pair, then, we might reenvision what scholars have registered as the notoriously conflicted relationship between trauma studies and disability studies. As James Berger argues, although the two seemingly share much in terms of subject matter and character—both “concerned with devastating injury and its lasting effects” and with the “problematics of representation”—”connections between trauma studies and disability studies are nearly nonexistent.” “We could propose, facetiously,” Berger continues, “that disability studies is marked by an inability to mourn, and trauma studies by an inability to stop mourning,” but we should, after Berger, seek to reconcile the aims of the two fields and strengthen their “share[d] … interest in reform, seen as a radical remaking of social structures, institutions, and norms.”

The problems are sizable because the fields’ strategies are often at odds. Metaphor, for example, is a key feature of trauma studies, and an infamous hobbyhorse for disability scholars. But other points of tension include: How do we reconcile trauma studies’ “posttraumatic, post-apocalyptic landscape of symptoms and signs,” to use Berger’s language, in which “all that preceded it and all that follows after now take meaning from that single moment,” with disability studies’ insistence on the “more mundane and anti-apocalyptic”?

It is here that Donegan’s argument about the centrality of catastrophe to colonial identity can help us propose new solutions. If, as Donegan writes, “English settlers became colonial through the acute bodily experiences and mental ruptures they experienced in their first years on Native American ground,” then lasting physical, mental, and narrative changes were common to the act of colonial settlement. In other words, Donegan allows us to see the settlers as a mentally and physically marked population. Her account makes room for both Smith’s body and Percy’s narrative, creating a space in which we might acknowledge trauma as a defining structure of colonial identity while also understanding the bodies and minds produced out of the colonial encounter to be myriad—or perhaps, to use Chris Mounsey’s term, variable.

Following Donegan, then, we might understand that since the act of settlement necessarily unsettled the bodies and minds of colonial subjects, it created a variable population—one in which altered physical, mental, and narrative forms represented the common states of settlers. As Donegan argues: “Representing the initiation of colonial life as a new world of misery allowed settlers to write from within the breach of a ruptured Englishness, to witness the wages of becoming colonial, to express their bewilderment, to justify their violence, and to claim the singularity of their experience all at once.” It is here, in the crucible of contact Donegan describes, that we might hold trauma and impairment together, seeing them as common and defining experiences of settlement in the British Atlantic.

Further reading:

For more on trauma and disability, see James Berger, “Trauma without disability, disability without trauma: A disciplinary divide,” JAC (2004): 563-82, and Daniel R. Morrison and Monica J. Casper, “Intersections of Disability Studies and Critical Trauma Studies: A Provocation,” Disability Studies Quarterly 32:2 (2012).

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

“Like Jeremiah’s figs, The good, are very good, indeed—The bad, too bad for pigs.”

Confusion embarrasses the fig. In Genesis the fig feeds Adam and Eve in their innocence and clothes them with its leaves in the awakening of their self-knowledge—the first recorded instance of “too little, too late.” Commentaries aligning the new United States with an Edenic state defined by plenty and tranquility cited 1 Kings 4:25: “And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, from Dan even to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon.” Nineteenth-century African-Americans regularly drew on the same passage as the rhetorical measure of freedom and equality, often in contexts of new church building from Louisiana to Liberia: “I can say for the first time since our existence as a church that we assembled in our own church and held quarterly conference; and partook of the Lord’s Supper on the Sabbath, under our own [vine and] fig tree.” Christ in the Gospel of Mark curses the fig into barrenness, a signal action given the fecundity of the fig in the time and region. Gustav Eisen, the nineteenth-century authority on figs, traces its origins to Arabia and the earliest perfection of its cultivation to the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates in present day Iraq. The fig entered the Mediterranean world with the ancient Greeks and over the millennia found its place as commodity, staple, and luxury around the world.

Native to Asia, the fig (ficus carica) came to the Americas in 1520, imported by the Spaniards to Hispaniola, five years before it made its way to England from Italy. Captain John Smith noted its existence in Virginia by 1621, the cultivar having been transplanted from Bermuda. Jane Pierce of Jamestown, the fruit’s first Anglo-American devotee, harvested 100 bushels in 1629, an amount that suggests the presence of a sizable fig orchard and preservation endeavor. By the early eighteenth century the cultivar had gone feral. John Larson’s 1709 account describes the Carolina version: “Of figs we have two sorts: One is the low Bush-Fig, which bears a large Fruit. If Winter happens to have much Frost, the tops thereof die, and in the Spring sprout again, and bear two or three good Crops. The Tree-Fig is a lesser Fig, though very sweet. The Tree grows to a large Body and Shade, and generally brings a good Burden; especially, if in light Land. This Tree thrives no where better, than on the Sand-Banks by the Sea.” Almost two centuries later, an unknown photographer captured the portrait of a Hog Island, Virginia, family with a fig tree of staggering proportions in the background (fig. 2). Visitors to the Virginia barrier islands frequently remarked on the local figs as a delicacy: “Some 300 people inhabit this island and throughout the year, and excepting those employed in the lighthouse and life-saving service, gain a livelihood from harvesting sea food. The unique features of the place are luxuriant fig trees, which bear abundantly season after season, the great number of ever present musical mockingbirds and also the primitive customs of some of the natives.” No less a dignitary (quite literally) than Grover Cleveland enjoyed island figs as the conclusion to a hunters’ banquet: “The big kitchen attached to the club was turned over to the best island cooks. There were oysters from the shores of the island, terrapin, turkey, roast beef and wild fowl of every variety, prepared in every culinary style. At dessert some preserved figs, raised on the island and the club’s special pride, were served.”

The Cyclopedia of American Horticulture described the fig as “a warm-temperate fruit” that, with protection from cold weather, could be grown in most parts of the United States. The fruit, the Cyclopedia continues, “is a hollow pear-shaped receptacle with minute seeds (botanically fruits) on the inside.” In essence, what is taken as the fruit of the fig is its flower, a blossom that grows inside out and is pollinated by a specialized wasp that enters through the tiny opening at the base of the “fruit.” Like the fig, the wasp is an exotic import and the fertilization of figs for seed in the United States is historically quite limited. Thus, the propagation of the fig from its earliest introduction into the Americas has relied on various strategies for rooting branches either clipped from the tree or bent to the ground and covered. In many areas of the South, the fig went “native” to the extent that commentators on the countryside saw it as a natural and incidental element in the domestic landscape. Jefferson Franklin Henry, formerly enslaved on a Georgia plantation, drew a distinction between orchard fruits and those that flourished on the margins of cultivated ground: “The orchards was full of good fruit sich as apples, peaches, pears, and plums, and don’t forgit them blackberries, currants, and figs what growed …round the aige of the back yard, in fence corners, and off places.”

Left in the wild, the fig sends out runners that can be cut for new plants. Significantly, figs with documented nineteenth-century and earlier histories are essentially clones of much earlier root stock—arguably making it possible to locate and continue an early American cultivar with some measure of genetic integrity. The resilience of the fig in warmer environments, its ease of propagation, and its productivity inspired one Southern author to group it in a gazetteer of Fruits That Never Fail!: “This delicious and healthy fruit—of which we have many varieties—grows almost spontaneously everywhere,” adding the caveat that “fig trees are not entirely here—they need a slight protection of pine tops or similar shelter, while young, succulent, and tender—severe winters often nip them quite sharply, but their recuperative power is astonishing.” Gardeners of all persuasions cultivated a variety of figs. Favored strains in the southeastern United States included Black Genoa, Black Ischia, Brown Turkey, Brunswick, Green Ischia, Celestial, Lemon, Havana, Large Blue, Alicante, and White Marseilles. Many of the varieties listed for sale by nineteenth-century nurseries survive in Southern gardens. The Celestial, Lemon, Brown Turkey, and other figs have been documented on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland where they sport local names—sugar figs, Crisfield whites, Hog Island, and Westerhouse green. Each variety, black and green, possessed a distinctive appearance, ripening schedule, and flavor profile. Intensely sweet and favored for preserves, sugar figs (a variety of Celestial) appear in early August. Westerhouse green figs mature in late September and offer a complex flavor at once sweet and floral. Hog Island figs, with their rich and slightly musty flavor, are also well-suited for preserves and are harvested in late August and early September (figs. 3 and 4).

A tractable tree, the fig can be trained to grow espaliered on a trellis, pruned as a tree, or simply left to its own bushy devices. Untended fig trees in the American South grow fifteen feet and more in height and as much or more in circumference. The bark ranges from pale slate gray on old growth to a greenish brown on new shoots. The leaves are deeply lobed and large with the number of lobes depending on the variety. Depending on the severity of the preceding winter, the first fruits (known as breva figs) ripen as early as late June. The largest crops, however, appear in late summer and are short lived. Because different varieties ripen in successive intervals, fig growers have been able to keep fresh figs on the table from late July until the beginning of October. For most families, though, fig season was defined by a summer moment of plenty and delight.

Although the fig ultimately achieved the status of a commodity crop in late nineteenth-century California, its greater incidence was as a seasonal treat of painfully limited market availability. Fig growing in the northeastern and Midwestern sections of the United States typically took the form of a hobby that involved sometimes extreme strategies for wintering the sub-tropical plants. In the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, fig cultivation in less temperate areas was the privilege of those with the means, labor, political inclination, and polite scientific knowledge to devote to the nurture of delicate plants under glass. Fig culture in the American South, however, offered a more conflicted narrative, one that blurred lines between the exotic and the everyday, the fragile and the hardy, slavery and freedom. Figs all too often anchor sentimental childhood recollections of antebellum plantation life in the South:

There were fruit trees in our garden; peaches, apricots, pomegranate and figs. We loved the figs most, of which there were several varieties. Our especial pride was the large black fig tree. There were six of us, three girls and three boys. Four of us were white and two were Negroes… Every morning in season would find us at our favorite fig tree. The boys would climb into its branches while the girls stood below with extended aprons to catch the fruit as we dropped them. Some times there came a voice from above in complaining tones—…Now Jennie! I see you eating.’ …Oh,’ would be the reply, …That one was all mashed up.’ …All right, now don’t eat till we come down.’ Then when we descended we took large green fig-leaves, placed them in a basket, laid the most perfect fruit thereon, and one of us would run to the house with it …Don’t eat till I come back.’ …We won’t.’ … When the messenger returned we went to our favorite nook in the garden and after dispatching about a dozen figs apiece we rushed to our breakfast with appetites as unappeased as if we had fasted for a week.”

Concealed within nostalgic constructions of the fig and idylls of rural Southern life is the continuing implicit link between the Garden and the Fall.

The enslaved people of Monticello likely found little of Edenic solace in Thomas Jefferson’s offhand observation that saw the ripening of the fig crop as an occasion for light labor. Writing from France in 1787, Jefferson recorded his observations on a tour through the south of France:

The fig and the mulberry are so well known in America, that nothing be said of them. Their culture, too, is by women and children, and therefore earnestly to be desired in countries where there are slaves. In these the women and children are often employed in labours disproportioned to their sex and age. By presenting to their master objects of culture, easier and beneficial, all temptations to misemploy them would be removed, and this lot of the tender part of our species much softened.”

The reality of picking and processing figs on other Southern plantations, however, did not accord with Jefferson’s sensibilities. James Roberts, born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and sold south to a southern Louisiana plantation, described in his memoir the labors of harvesting and pressing figs:

First a layer of sugar, then a layer of figs. The figs are gathered off the bush when ripe, and the box is filled up as described. Then the box is put under the hand-press, and the press is screwed down upon them. What the women and children gather in the day, the men pack at night. In the morning, at the blowing of the horn, the women and children go out again to the wood; then at night, after a heavy day’s work, the men must pack all they have gathered; and that is the rule while the figs last, which is from the first of August to the first of September.

Unlike Jefferson’s vision of gender appropriate labor, Roberts’s account placed fig culture in a context of heavy seasonal work.

Jefferson’s interest in the fig involved him in epistolary exchanges with friends and agents as he sought vital cuttings from the Mediterranean for transplantation, sent cuttings of his own to acquaintances for their gardens, solicited and gave advice (practical and political) on fig cultivation, and ordered dried figs from Europe for his Virginia table. In 1794, for example, he wrote to George Wythe: “Knowing your fondness for figs, I have daily wished you could have partaken of ours this year. I never saw so great a crop, and they are still abundant. Of three kinds which I brought from France, there is one, of which I have a single bush, superior to any fig I ever tasted any where.” Jefferson’s October figs were surely cultivated under protection and represented a rare autumn treat. Out of season, dried figs were a dessert staple for elite tables.

The art of drying figs invited periodic correspondence to nineteenth-century American agricultural papers. Earlier contributions tend to emphasize the political and economic advantages discovered in the cultivation and preservation of a homegrown exotic. A correspondent to the Southern Cultivator in 1850 succinctly addressed core themes linked to fig culture including its ever increasing presence in the gardens of poorer families, its underutilized abundance, and its political connotations: “Considering how cheaply figs may be grown, to any desirable extent, in the Southern States, and how many poor families there are who might cure and put them up for market, it does seem wrong that this country should pay from one to two millions of dollars a year to foreigners for Smyrna and other Mediterranean figs.” Thirty years later the same lament reappeared in the same paper:

Among the many varieties of fruits adapted to our Southern zone, the fig has not received all the attention it deserves, viewing it for commercial purposes. True, few gardens throughout the country are without a fig tree, but beyond supplying the table with the fruit in a fresh state, no use is made of it. No attempt seems to have been made to grow it on a large scale, for the purpose of drying the fruit and bringing it in competition with the imported article.”

The response to these declarations was modest at best. Occasional correspondents submitted various approaches to drying figs for market, but in the end the Southern fig thrived as a dooryard staple for seasonal family tables, never achieving the status of a valued market commodity.

The humid environs of the South tended to frustrate preservation efforts and require a variety of chemical and mechanical interventions. In 1852, the editors of Southern Cultivator published a correspondent’s instructions on “How to Dry Figs:”

When the Figs are fully ripe, (but not cracked open) gather them carefully on a dry morning after the dew is off. Make a weak lye of wood ashes, and having placed the Figs in a sieve or colander, pour it over them once or twice, but do not allow them to remain standing in it. Then have ready a syrup made of half a pound of sugar for each pound of Figs, boil them in this until they become transparent—then dry them on dishes in the sun, and when packing them away, sprinkle over the layers some finely pulverized sugar. Try this, and if it fails to produce a delicate and luscious article of dried Figs, you are at liberty to call me no HOUSEKEEPER.”

The editors accompanied the instructions with a challenge to their “fair” readers that encouraged “ladies” to submit their own recipes (and boxes of dried figs) for judgment. The winner received a library of periodicals (including Godey’s Lady’s Book) and books “the lady may desire.” The blending of agricultural science with housekeeping and refined femininity in the original recipe and the subsequent contest captures a transitional moment as fig culture moved from masculine traditions of polite intellectual discourse and horticultural experiment to the feminized realm of domestic arts.

During the Civil War years, Southerners desperate for increasingly rare commodities as diverse as food preservatives and ink turned their attention to the possibilities offered by the fig. “The juice of the skin of our blue fig is abundant,” noted Confederate surgeon Francis Porcher, “and of a deep, brilliant red color; a half-page written with it a few days since had the appearance of having been done with red ink…I have seen blue cakes resembling indigo, intended for dyeing, and marked fig blue—probably extracted from the skins of the fig.” Porcher additionally recommended the fig stems for use as pipe stems and molasses. “Figs,” he added, “are excellent pabulum for vinegar,” and recommended that “vinegar should be constantly replenished with over-ripened figs.” A correspondent to the Southern Cultivator suggested fig pickles as a military ration: “Figs, properly pickled, are generally preferred even to cucumbers by those who have tried them; and large quantities should be put up for army use.” The principle advantage of fig pickles lay in their medicinal qualities: “The sharp acid of this pickle renders it a very grateful addition to the table, in spring when the bilious state of the human system demands vegetable acids, and early fruits are still unripe.” In the decades following the Civil War, the Southern Cultivator continued to note the medical efficacy of the fig, generally in syrup, beneficially acting “on the kidneys, liver and bowels, effectually cleansing the system, dispelling colds and headaches and curing habitual constipation.”

The culinary uses of figs were remarkably limited. A mid nineteenth-century writer for the Southern Cultivator neatly summarized the possibilities: “As a breakfast dish, ripe and luscious Figs are unrivaled—being more light, digestible, and wholesome than almost any other fruit. They also make a very rich and delicate preserve, and there is no reason why the whole Union may not in time be supplied from the Southern States with dried Figs, equal to those of Smyrna.” Fresh figs remain a seasonal pleasure for many households and homemade fig preserves still stock many Southern pantries. Home-dried figs, much touted throughout the nineteenth century as a new Southern commodity, remain an uncommon item at the grocery store.

In the later decades of the 1800s, the preservation of figs turned increasingly toward methods of “putting up” the fruit. Putting up recipes generally fell into one of two categories: preserving figs in a spiced sugar syrup or, less common, pickling. Although directions for pickled figs appeared in nineteenth-century publications, it was the less favored approach. A mid-century recipe for pickled figs begins “we do not know of a superior pickle or relish, nor one which will …keep with so little trouble,” and conveys something of the sense of the tartness and crisp texture of this accompaniment:

Select figs of a fair size and good quality—the common large white variety is excellent. When they are just swelling to ripen, but not soft, pick them without bruising, and let them stand in salt and water for two or three days. Then take them from this pickle, put them in a glass or earthenware jar, (not glazed) and pour over so as to entirely cover them, scalding hot vinegar, sweetened with good brown sugar, at the rate of one pound to the gallon, and highly flavored with mace gloves [cloves?], pepper and allspice. (The sugar and spices should be put into the vinegar before it is set over the fire to heat.)

The author enthuses, “Let every good Southern housewife try it.”

Figs preserved in sugar syrup remain the enduring favorite in Southern larders. Bessie Gunter’s Housekeeper’s Companion, compiled from recipes contributed by Eastern Shore of Virginia friends and their families, contains a representative example for preserves: “Scald the figs and let stand till cold. Make a syrup of one pound of sugar, a half pint of water to each pound of figs. Let the syrup come to a boil, then drop in the figs and cook slowly until done. This recipe is for little brown figs.” The quality of fig preserves in syrup varies considerably despite the fact that the basic recipe is nearly universal. Again, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where many families put up fig preserves at summer’s end, home cooks use their own variations on the standard nineteenth-century combination of boiling sugar syrup, spices, and figs. Violet Trower of Exmore peels her figs and cooks them slowly until the syrup is a deep caramel brown. Phyllis Walker of Bayford does not peel her figs and her syrup is considerable lighter in color and viscosity. Both are excellent. Because we do not have surviving jars of fig preserves from the nineteenth century (at least not survivals that could be consumed without life threatening consequence), our knowledge of early American flavors and palates can only be imagined through their modern iterations. Considering the transformation of sugar alone, the archaeology of taste remains a problematic endeavor.

As an ingredient, figs appeared in nineteenth-century desserts like fig cake. Bessie Gunter included instructions for two variations on fig cake along with a recipe for an elaborate Fig Ribbon Cake in her Eastern Shore collection. Ribbon cakes originated, contemporary to and not unlike crazy quilts, as a Victorian display of domestic virtuosity and extravagance. An early layer cake variation distantly related to the stack cakes of the Chesapeake Bay and Outer Banks regions, the ribbon cake was a fancy confection composed of three or more layers of contrasting colors like gold and white or red and white. An icing or fruit preserve separated each layer, and the completed cake was frosted. Gunter’s recipe uses fresh figs in an Eastern Shore variant:

White Part. 2 cupfuls sugar; 2/3 cupful butter, creamed together. Add 2/3 cupful milk; 3 cupfuls flour, alternately; 2 teaspoonfuls of baking powder, and then the whites of eight eggs (beaten lightly). Bake in two layers.

Gold Part. Beat a little more than half a cupful of butter and a cupful of sugar to a cream. Add the yolks of seven eggs and one whole egg (well beaten), half cupful of milk and one and one-half cupfuls of flour (mixed with one teaspoonful of baking powder). Season strongly with cinnamon and allspice. Put half of this gold part into a pan, lay on it halved figs closely, previously dusted with a little flour, then put on it the rest of the gold cake and bake.

Put the gold cake between the white cakes using frosting between them, and cover with frosting.

The Ribbon Fig Cake derives in part from the polite culinary culture of Victorian America but it also speaks to a continuing engagement with the vernacular landscape. When Gunter published Housekeeper’s Companion the fig was common to the kitchen yards of rich and poor, black and white. In the summer its bounty provided pleasure for all. Preserved, it evoked the taste of sun and warmth in the dark chill of winter. No longer the cultural privilege of the eighteenth-century landed elites, the fig at the close of the nineteenth century was truly an emblem of hope and plenty in the common landscape.

Further reading

The period sources quoted in this essay are available through a number of searchable online historical collections. The American Periodical Series Online provides access to a variety of nineteenth-century agricultural newspapers and journals including Farmer’s Register: A Monthly Publication, Southern Cultivator, and The American Farmer. Accessible Archives yielded The Christian Recorder and other periodicals in its African-American newspapers collection. Thomas Jefferson’s numerous references to importing and cultivating figs are contained in Barbara B. Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition (Charlottesville, Va., 2008). Quoted materials on the Eastern Shore of Virginia were derived from The Countryside Transformed: The Railroad and the Eastern Shore of Virginia, 1870-1935 (http://eshore.vcdh.virginia.edu/). Materials drawn from memoirs and diaries were located in digital collections of “Documenting the American South,” University of North Carolina Library. These include Sam Aleckson, Before The War, and After the Union: An Autobiography (Windsor, Vermont, 1929); John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina; Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of That Country: Together with the Present State Thereof… (London, 
1709); and James Roberts, The Narrative of James Roberts, a Soldier Under Gen. Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, in the War of 1812: A Battle which Cost Me a Limb, Some Blood, and Almost My Life (Chicago, 1858). References to figs are found occasionally in American Memory, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writer’s Project, 1936-1938, Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/).

Monographic sources include: Stephen L. Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan, The Forgotten Pollinators (Washington, D.C., 1996); Gustav Eisen, The Fig: Its History, Culture, and Curing with a Descriptive Catalogue of the Known Varieties of Figs (Washington, 1901); Bessie E. Gunter, Housekeeper’s Companion (New York, 1889); Peter J. Hatch, “Figs: ‘Vulgar’ Fruit, or ‘Wholesome Delicacy’,” The Fruit and Fruit Trees of Monticello (Charlottesville, 1998); John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina; Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of That Country: Together with the Present State Thereof… (London, 
1709); Francis Peyre Porcher, Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests, Medical, Economical, and Agricultural. Being also a Medical Botany of the Confederate States; with Practical Information on the Useful Properties of the Trees, Plants, and Shrubs (Charleston, 1863); Charles H. Shinn, “Fig,” in L. H. Bailey, ed., Cyclopedia of American Horticulture (London, 1900).

This article originally appeared in issue 11.3 (April, 2011).

Bernard L. Herman is the George B. Tindall Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Folklore at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His recent essays and books cover a range of topics including eighteenth-century urban housing and city life, Eastern Shore of Virginia foodways, the art of Thornton Dial, and uncollectable craft. He currently holds a Guggenheim Fellowship for a book project, Troublesome Things: In the Borderlands of Contemporary Art.

Accuracy versus “Truth” in Television

As a young kid I spent a portion of every summer with my father riding around the back roads of the White Mountains region of New Hampshire. As we worked our way along winding roads and through picturesque villages, I was always on the lookout for the roadside historical markers that are omnipresent in New England. One such marker is on Highway 10 outside of Haverhill, and I would make my father stop there at least once a summer. It read:

This rivers’ junction two miles north was the rendezvous for Rogers’ Rangers after their destruction of St. Francis, Quebec, on October 4, 1759. Pursuing Indians and starvation had plagued their retreat and more tragedy awaited here. The expected rescue party bringing food had come and gone. Many Rangers perished and early settlers found their bones along these intervals (est. 1968).

I became obsessed with the history of Rogers’ Rangers and read every book I could find on the topic once I returned to school. Of course, most of the books available in a middle school library followed a mythic narrative of the Rangers as pre-cursors to today’s U.S. Army Rangers. Robert Rogers, the namesake of the company he founded and commanded, helped to develop the tactics used by Rangers to engage in guerrilla warfare against the French in North America. They could cross any terrain, live off the land, and even skate across New England lakes in the winter to raid a French fort. However, my knowledge of Rogers ended with the Seven Years’ War.

This is a different attempt at “truth” that film and television can work toward: raising issues of representation and including marginalized perspectives.

You can imagine my surprise then when I saw Rogers portrayed in the opening scenes of the pilot episode of Turn: Washington’s Spies as a murderous henchman for the British Army. One of Rogers’ Rangers —not the original unit but a new unit called the Queen’s Rangers, recruited largely from New York and Connecticut loyalists—is shown bayonetting colonial soldiers killed in an ambush. Simultaneously, Rogers is shown urinating and talking to his men about how Washington could have had “men and not boys” if he had been willing to pay him. This portrayal caused me to immediately look up the history of Rogers and the Rangers in the American Revolution, and smashed the romantic view I had held from childhood. This example demonstrates the power of television as a form of public pedagogy: this show challenged my own understanding of the Rangers in a matter of moments.

Whether the portrayal of Rogers and the Queen’s Rangers in the opening sequences of Turn is completely accurate is something of a moot point. After all, we cannot expect any film or television program to be fully historically accurate. Nor should we assume that the historical marker itself is accurate, as these markers are often created during particular periods of overt nationalism and are designed and paid for by individuals or groups with particular views. The combination of the two representations of Rogers’ Rangers, however, caused me to explore the record further, look for divergent or competing perspectives on their role in the American Revolution, and in how Rogers and his Rangers were represented in Turn.

This print of Robert Rogers in a distinctly American setting was one of many published in Europe during the eighteenth century. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

It is this debate over the role of historical accuracy, and more often inaccuracy, in film and television that was the primary basis for a recent panel discussion of academics and Turn producers, writers, and actors. This discussion was held in early February at Phi Beta Kappa Hall on the campus of the College of William & Mary as a preview event to the premiere of the second season of Turn (spring 2015). This location was apt both for the role of the college (Phi Beta Kappa was founded there in 1776) and its many students and alumni (George Washington and Thomas Jefferson included) in the American Revolution, as well as its role as a filming site for the second season of Turn. The panel included four historians and one film studies professor from William & Mary, two executive producers of Turn, the author of the book on which the film was based, who also now contributes as a writer for the show, and the lead actor of the series. Several other actors from the series were also in the audience.

The discussion focused on the role of AMC network executives, the decisions made by the writers in distilling the book Washington’s Spies, on which the series is based, and the decisions made by directors and actors in attempting to translate these written words into the landscape and people of Long Island, New York, circa 1776. Here I use this conversation to explore several core questions about what happens when Hollywood attempts to “do” history, and the ensuing tension between history, memory, and representation in the series.

Accuracy versus Truth

There is a longstanding academic discussion over what happens when history is translated for the big or small screen—be it a Hollywood blockbuster, art house history biopic, or television or web-based serial. Producers, writers, and actors make decisions about how the past should be represented on screen. In the case of Turn, producers and writers need to decide how to interpret and parse Alexander Rose’s 384-page book Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring (2006) into multiple ten-episode seasons. They also need to make decisions based on their potential target audience, their budget, and the available filming locations.

If we assume that no historically based film or television series can be completely accurate, then what level of accuracy should be expected? What separates John Adams, HBO’s critically acclaimed mini-series, from Sons of Liberty, the History Channel’s sensationalist tale of Samuel Adams and other Boston patriots? The producers of both series made decisions about which events to highlight in each episode, which characters to include (as audiences can realistically follow only so many), and which parts of the historical record should be kept as accurate as possible and which could be massaged in order to make a better story or to make a story that will make sense on the small screen. Of course, what ends up on the screen is also very dependent on the quality of the source materials the producers, writers, or filmmakers are working with. Rose’s Washington’s Spies, which includes some sensational accounts of espionage, would naturally lend itself to a historical drama with similar elements on the screen.

At the end of the day, the producers need to put together a product that will have an audience, be it the allegedly sophisticated audience of HBO subscribers, or the young male audience that the History Channel covets. We have to remember that the production costs of a film or series require a much broader and advertising-worthy audience than that required by popular history like Rose’s book. For example, at least 2.2 million people watched Turn‘s season one finale—far more than have purchased the book. These concerns over audience, advertising dollars and ticket sales drive much of the decision-making on the set of a historically based production. These worries certainly outweigh a desire to be 100 percent historically accurate. Producers must make decisions that both help make the complex historical stories from the Revolution understandable in forty-four minute episodic chunks, and “sexy” or sensationalist enough to appeal to young and predominantly male viewers whom advertisers crave. These decisions, however, also mean a reduction of historical complexity and at least some degree of tweaking the past to meet the wishes of the intended audience in the present.

The writers, producers, and cast members of Turn discuss historical accuracy and authenticity with scholars at the College of William & Mary in February 2015. Photo by Stephen Salpukas, courtesy of the College of William & Mary.

However, Craig Silverstein, the showrunner of Turn, remarked that producers do go to great lengths to maintain the chronological accuracy of major events in the series, such as the crossing of the Delaware to launch a surprise attack on Hessian soldiers in Trenton, New Jersey, on Christmas Eve, 1776. However, episode 5 of Turn shows that the information leading to that successful surprise attack is the result of the Culper Ring of spies at the center of the series—despite the fact that the Culper Ring was not actively organized until 1778. This decision was made because the writers and producers needed to make multiple seasons for the series that centered on major events in the American Revolution. How does this chronological tampering affect how history is viewed or understood? This is especially important, because this overstatement of the role and effectiveness of the Culper Ring may influence the audience’s understanding of the history of the Revolutionary War.

When a work of history becomes a work of Hollywood, there is almost always a turn to the dramatic that narrows the story and perspectives while also stretching the historical record. Historical drama is not dramatic without the generic staples of romantic love, family conflict, and the like. Major events are used as series focal points, while love interests and conflicts are created for dramatic purpose or to serve as a metaphor, and conflict and storytelling are used to attract and maintain an audience while larger questions about the history of the time are raised. In the case of Turn, the producers attempt to include the perspectives of women and African Americans, as well as Loyalists, that may challenge audiences’ understanding of that period and who the patriots were. Since Rose’s book lacked the love stories and family conflict, they were created by Turn producers and writers. For example, the main character of Abraham Woodhull is shown clashing with his father, a British Loyalist. This conflict did not exist in the historical record, but works in the series as a metaphor for the war—the child (colonies) pulling away from the parent (Great Britain). This kind of adaptation for dramatization is not uncommon. As AMC executive producer Barry Josephson noted, even critically acclaimed historical biopics such as Patton (1970) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) clung loosely to historical accuracy in order to inject drama. Composite characters are often created to represent the experiences of larger groups of people, and events are added that represent aspects of the war even if they are out of context in the story of the Culper Ring. Josephson explained that the point of making the series is “not about accuracy but about getting the conflict … leading you to the history…[and satisfying] the need to entertain and keep people involved and intrigued.”

The producers argued that despite this focus on conflict, instead of accuracy, their goal remains a “true” telling of events. Instead of portraying the war as many typical history textbooks do, the producers attempt to show how the war sometimes split families between Loyalists and Patriots, portraying the Revolution as more of a civil war than a revolt against an empire. They also aimed for truth by portraying the complicated history of slavery during the war, even in places like Long Island, New York, where the story is set. For example, episode five features Dunmore’s Proclamation, which ostensibly freed the slaves of those rebelling against Britain, but the show reveals that the British used these same freed slaves as part of their own labor force. Finally, the producers work to more powerfully portray the role of women, both in the Revolution, and in the home, where they could not own property and remained the property of their husbands.

Truth also comes in another form in these kinds of historically based dramas. Producers and directors use cinematic elements and narrative to challenge the audience’s understanding of the past. Was Sam Adams really a smuggler and colonial-era gangster, as portrayed in the History Channel’s Sons of Liberty, or was he the son of liberty and patriot as portrayed in popular history and the namesake of a Boston brewery as he is more commonly known? Maybe. At least these alternative representations of the iconic Adams invite audiences to think about the common representations of the past and question their own understandings. In addition to narrative conventions, cinematic elements such as visual imagery and music are used to portray particular ideas and perspectives. For example, the use of African American spirituals in the Turn scene framing Dunmore’s Proclamation would seem more at home in a Civil War film scene focused on emancipation, or a Civil Rights-era film focused on desegregation. This is because it is essentially a scene from one of these films, right down to the music, singing, sentiments, and imagery of African Americans around a fire at night.

This kind of cinematic device, even if not fully adhering to what the scene would have looked like in Long Island at the time of the proclamation, powerfully challenges the audience to think about the role of slavery during the colonial era and the idea that slavery was prominent in places like Long Island and New York. This is a different attempt at “truth” that film and television can work toward: raising issues of representation and including marginalized perspectives. However, this use of iconic imagery and film convention of the gospel spirituals and freed slaves around a fire also reinforces the narrative in film and popular history of enslaved African Americans who did not actively resist slavery. These scenes also do not recognize the perspectives of African Americans who were not enslaved. Turn does attempt to include these perspectives through some of the black soldiers in Rogers’ company of Rangers, even if in a limited way. These roles in the second season include former enslaved Setauket Black residents on both sides of the conflict, one as a spy for the Culper Ring and another as a soldier in the Queen’s Rangers.

‘We care a lot more than other shows, but…’

Rose, the historian and now screenwriter for the show, and Silverstein provided honest and detailed rationales for their changes in the stories related to the Culper Ring and what they are sure to portray accurately. As Rose explained, they go for “authenticity and genuineness” over perfect accuracy, focusing on whether the scenes feel accurate rather than the minute historical details. This emphasis on the feel of each scene is done in part to help the audience make sense of the narrative and perspectives in the show. The writers want to make the stories in the series as relevant as they can and, embracing a perspective championed by social historians, show “real situations that confronted real people at the time,” Rose said, even while erring “toward drama.” They also felt the need to change aspects of the story in order to make it more understandable for the audience. For example, at the beginning of the series, they decided to portray Redcoat regulars in the town of Setauket, though the historical record shows the town was guarded by a Loyalist regiment.

In this case, Silverstein explained, writers thought that showing Loyalist troops in Setauket might be too confusing for the audience at the beginning. Turn does include a more accurate portrayal of the British forces, which included Canadians, colonial Loyalists, Hessians, and mercenaries such as the Rangers, later in the first season. This decision to represent the soldiers in Setauket in easily recognizable British uniforms reflects a key issue with history film and television programs: given the highly visual nature of the medium, iconic images and signifiers such as the British Army’s red uniforms are used to help the audience easily see whose side they should take. To the producers, truth is the ability to translate the larger themes of the story clearly to the target audience—which is broader than the audience for the book—and aligns with the need to help this audience easily understand the story.

What AMC producers found in Rose’s book was a story that they felt would appeal to today’s audience through an engaging narrative, filled with spies and spycraft, set in the relatively well-known context of the American Revolution, and with some easily recognizable characters such as George Washington and Benedict Arnold. When asked why AMC found the project appealing, Josephson said he saw the story of the Culper Ring as “well preserved,” “complicated,” but not well known. It also portrayed an offbeat, behind-the-front-lines perspective on the Revolution that fit their budget, as they “couldn’t afford the battles.” The AMC funding formula means taking risks on projects like Turn, but without the budgets of HBO productions like Game of Thrones or the John Adams mini-series. This smaller pocketbook means that any battle scenes in Turn include far fewer soldiers on the screen than actually fought on the battlefield.

Cindy Hahamovitch, a historian and moderator of the panel, noted that she found this social history perspective to be particularly compelling. She noted that we learn something different about the Revolution when “we tell it from the bottom up.” Another panel historian, Susan Kern, also noted that it was compelling to see stories of “people making complicated choices.” In particular, she noted that Abe and his comrades take actions behind the lines that reflect the divided loyalties among colonists and not just the colonists versus the British. She also noted that it is powerful to show why many colonists supported the British, with roughly ninety percent of Long Island residents supporting the Crown. Rose added that it was also interesting to show how even Loyalists became weary of British soldiers being quartered in their homes and taking their livestock and crops, quipping that as the war dragged on, the British demonstrated Ben Franklin’s aphorism that “guests, like fish, smell after three days.”

Creating Compelling Characters and Sets

You cannot have popular or even compelling historical drama without powerful characters for the audience to love—and to hate. Turn adheres to this formula of creating “good” and “bad” characters much more strongly than it adheres to the historical record. Several of the actors attended the discussion at William & Mary. Jamie Bell, who plays the protagonist, Abraham Woodhull, was on stage and received a raucous reception from the audience. However, the actor Samuel Roukin, who plays antagonist Captain Simcoe, received an even louder mix of cheers and boos. Captain Simcoe, who even in the historical record is presented as a brutal soldier, is also honored with a holiday in Canada. In many ways, his character embodies the powerful roles of perspective and collective memory in history. Would those in Canada, who celebrate Simcoe’s role as lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada and as an abolitionist, have the same reaction to his portrayal in Turn as I had to the portrayal of Rogers? This reminds us that film and television are not only made by someone, but also made for someone—in this case, Turn is made largely for an American audience. Every decision Turn’s writers and producers make is influenced by the historical record, by the art and form of television, and by the need to attract the audience coveted by advertisers. Without this audience of largely young adult males with higher than average education and income, Turn will not likely be renewed for additional seasons.

In addition to helping to attract the desired audience and playing the role of the bad guy, Simcoe is also used as a contrast to the other British officers. The officers portrayed in Turn represent the multiple social classes of the British officer corps as well as the officers’ diverse views on the conflict in the colonies and of the colonists themselves. Simcoe represents the “fire and sword” anti-gentleman officer, while other characters, such as spymaster John Andre, represent upper-class British officers. Yet others, such as the commanding officer in Setauket, Major Hewlett, represent the ideals of the enlightenment. In contrast to Simcoe, Heather Lind, the actor who plays Anna Strong, heroine and Abraham’s love interest, was met with applause at the discussion as she explained her empathy for Revolution-era women after spending days in a corset and an outfit with “a lot of buttons” doing manual labor.

In these depictions, many issues arise when accuracy is sacrificed for audience appeal and drama—especially when it comes to historical attire. Of course, the appearance of people in colonial-era costumes is not out of the norm in Williamsburg, home of Colonial Williamsburg. Hahamovitch remarked that Williamsburg is “the only place in the world where Jamie Bell can wear his costume to the dentist or the store and no one will pay any mind at all.” However, the details of that costume often caused tension on set, with the costumers who were steeped in historical understanding of the period wardrobe coming into conflict with the directors.

For example, Lind described her character’s winter wardrobe—which, if accurate, would have consisted of a pile of blankets. In Turn, however, she is shown wearing a rather fashionable cloak. In a better example of going for “sex appeal” over accuracy, there was apparently a terse discussion over a scene that had Abraham coming out of his house at night. The costumer argued that Bell should be wearing some kind of long nightshirt, while the director wanted Bell “bare chested” and “sexy as hell,” as Silverstein put it, and Bell ended up wearing colonial-esque pajama pants instead. These are the conscious decisions made to create compelling characters for their target audience. The effect is that an audience may have a naïve and romantic view of life in the eighteenth century, a life that includes beautiful people, cleavage, and garments and attitudes likely absent at that time in the colonies.

In addition to creating compelling characters, the writers and director need to fill in the aesthetics of place for each scene. Historian Susan Kern noted that compared to writing history books, when making a TV show, “you need to make a lot more decisions about what everything else should look like in the background—in that world…” The producers explained that this world-building was a major challenge and the reason why much of the filming takes place in locations in Virginia (e.g., Petersburg, Richmond, Williamsburg), with its plentiful historic buildings and settings. Given that the Long Island coast of the Turn era no longer exists, and directors wanted to avoid computer-generated imagery (CGI), they used Shirley Plantation, a historic estate on the James River, as a replacement for a Long Island coastal home.

Their reason for filming on the William & Mary campus was not to depict a colonial-era university but to use the seventeenth-century architecture of the Wren Building as a stand-in for an English palace. A room was needed to serve as King George’s throne room in one of the opening scenes for season two. After scouting various locations, directors settled on filming in the Great Hall of the Wren Building, which is the oldest educational building still in use in the U.S. One of my students, who works as a docent in the building, noted that there was a lot of secrecy when filming was taking place. This may have been in part because a room that normally holds portraits of the three American presidents who attended William & Mary was used as the setting for George III’s throne room, adorned in the scene with CGI-rendered tapestries and decorations fit for a king. It is, of course, quite ironic that a room where separation from King George was likely discussed was used to recreate his throne room. This ability to digitally recreate a setting lends visual authenticity to the production, and thus may lead audiences to believe in the authenticity of the history as well. This is a challenge for the historical profession as the public receives more of its information about the past from visual sources such as Turn and History Channel documentaries than from books.

The many small decisions regarding what characters and settings will look like are a challenge not often faced by historians. As Rose noted, historians often describe what a particular person or site might have looked like but don’t have to describe an entire 360-degree view of a village. The producers of Turn do this for every scene. Rose also explained the daunting task of writing for television. For the current second season, set largely around Philadelphia and involving historical figures such as Benedict Arnold and Peggy Shippen, he had the task of explaining the history and role of Quakers for the audience in one scene. The section on Quakers in his book is over five pages, but in the script, he was allowed two lines and “a look” to portray the relevant history. This leads to even more simplification of Quaker culture in a subsequent episode, as Peggy Shippen tells her lover that they can be married by just saying so—a slight misrepresentation since Quakers do not require a minister to officiate a wedding but do need a congregation to be present. This is an example of the reductive nature of visual representations of history in film and television.

Rose also noted that season two is much more of a “straight spy story” than season one and is filled with intrigue and more recognizable characters such as Arnold and George Washington. Washington’s role was actually diminished in season one at the request of the AMC producers. These genre decisions— whether a history film should be a Western (American Sniper, Zulu, We were Soldiers) or some other genre (such as a courtroom drama)—help a broad audience easily understand what is occurring on screen. If you make a Western, audiences know to expect a good guy, a bad guy and a conflict in a particular, often remote or exotic, setting. In American Sniper, there is a good guy in Chris Kyle (white hat/baseball cap) and bad guy in Moustafa (black hat/head scarf) in the exotic—at least for American audiences— Iraqi cityscape. By casting Turn as a spy story, the audience similarly has recognizable conventions allowing them to easily follow the story, know what to expect, and know whom to root for and against. These conventions include betrayals, fear of being discovered, the use of codes, gadgets and spycraft, and the role of intelligence gathering in creating chaos or triumph. Stories set in history are usually grounded in the genre that fits best, including war films, Westerns, spy dramas, or biopics.

What Was Not Discussed: The Present in the Past

When asked “How risky was it to make a show that was not about zombies?” Silverstein responded that the producers had some initial problems selling the idea for Turn. Fox initially turned them down, thinking that the international appeal and sales would be lacking. But AMC decided to give it a shot. According to the panel, AMC did not want the writing staff to go beyond the archetypes that already existed in the stories or to make it too heroic. In fact, they wanted Washington’s role to be diminished early in the series in order for other characters to develop and for a more social history perspective to bloom. What they did not discuss, however, was how the events of the past fifteen years had influenced the stories and portrayals in season one—nor did any of the historians on the panel make this connection.

But those connections are undeniably present. Starting in the pilot episode, echoes of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are present on the screen, in the dialogue, and in the narrative. Starting with the text introducing the first episode, patriots are described as “insurgents.”

Autumn 1776. Insurgents have declared war against the Crown. Following a successful naval landing, His Majesty’s Army has forced Washington’s rebels into the wilderness. New York City serves as military base of operations for the British. The Loyalists of nearby Long Island keep vigilant watch out for sympathizers, and spies (Original air date April 6, 2014, AMC).

This is the first of numerous language and visual signifiers of the war on terror. As the innovative American officer Benjamin Tallmadge is building his spy network, his operatives are shown using a colonial method of waterboarding as they attempt to make Abraham talk by dunking his head in a bucket of water. This convinces Tallmadge and others from the area that Abraham’s sympathies are with the Continentals. Later, Tallmadge is involved in a sort of rendition act as Simcoe, captured in an ambush of a British company, is held in a secret location and tortured to try to extract information. These scenes are followed by a debate over intelligence strategies with Tallmadge’s commanding officer, reflecting many of the debates over the role of the CIA and NSA in the present-day conflict of security versus civil liberty. As in the present day, the innovative and risky intelligence operations rule the day and the risks are seen as necessary for national security. Thus Washington himself orders a new intelligence network and unit to be formed with Tallmadge as its commanding officer and Abraham, who is to be known by the pseudonym Mr. Culpeper (later Culper), as its primary asset.

Here, as in other works of historical fiction, we learn more about the issues, ideas, and values of the time and place of production and those who produced it than the historical event or characters being portrayed. In season two, the intrigue focuses on the most notorious of Revolutionary betrayals, that of Benedict Arnold, and his relationship with Peggy Shippen. Shippen, whom Silverstein described as the Paris Hilton of Revolutionary-era Philadelphia, provides a dose of drama from the early episodes of the second season. She is portrayed as a socialite with more modern attitudes toward sex, relationships, and the desire for power than a young eighteenth-century Quaker woman would have had—even one viewed as scandalous in the historical record. In one scene, the temptress Shippen has her own wardrobe revision as she is shown waiting—topless, with only a petticoat on—for British spymaster Major Andre in his bedroom. As the season moves on we will undoubtedly see her role as Benedict Arnold’s future wife and accomplice in betrayal emerge. Season two is supposed to bring the story up to the moment when the real Culper Ring becomes most active, 1778 (and the show has just been renewed for a third season).

For viewers and scholars alike, it is important to ask if and how historical accuracy is important. Perhaps, however, it is more pertinent to think about any television representation of the past in terms of the nature of the inaccuracies as well as the purpose of those inaccuracies. It may be more important for us to consider and reflect upon the larger questions about the past that the producers (e.g., director, writer, production company) hope to pose through a film or television show. Further, we should ask ourselves what the representation tells us about both the past and the present, as films reflect the social and political views of the time of production as much as they attempt to tell a story about the past.

If Turn is a form of public pedagogy, what is the resulting lesson? How does this lesson reinforce the nationalistic narrative about the Revolutionary era and the Founding Fathers that most of us received in our schooling and in our visits to historic sites? What does it challenge us to think about differently? These questions may be more important than whether all of the events in the film fit the chronological order in the historical record, or whether all aspects of the representation of clothing and other details are accurate. In the end, we must also remember that while shows like Turn and films like Selma may be seen as historical accounts by some, they are intended to be entertainment that uses history as its source and not its script.

We should encourage people to critique accuracy and inaccuracy, but also remember that we should not hold these films and television programs to the same standard we would a work of academic history. We should also discuss what the director’s motivations might have been for decisions that make the work less accurate, and the effect those may have on how we view the past. It is only when we reach this level of critical thought and reflection that we begin to understand the overall issues in historical representation, collective memory, and how the past is presented and re-presented through media such as the moving image. The hope is that Turn and other historically set films and television programs serve as a starting point for inquiry into the historical record, as the portrayal of Rogers did for me, and not as a substitute for the historical record.

The panel:

Barry Josephson, executive producer of Turn: Washington’s Spies

Craig Silverstein, executive producer/showrunner of Turn: Washington’s Spies

Alexander Rose, author of the book Washington’s Spies

Jamie Bell, actor in Turn: Washington’s Spies

Susan Kern, executive director of the Historic Campus and history professor

Arthur Knight, associate professor, American Studies, English, and Film & Media Studies

Karin Wulf, director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

Joshua Piker, editor of the William & Mary Quarterly and history professor

Moderated by Class of ’38 Professor of History and Chair Cindy Hahamovitch

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3.5 (July, 2015).

Jeremy Stoddard is associate professor of education and an affiliated faculty member in the Film & Media Studies program at the College of William & Mary. His research focuses on the role of media in teaching and learning history and politics in democratic education. His research has appeared in interdisciplinary journals such as Film & History and The History Teacher, and in co-authored books Teaching History with Film (2010) and Teaching History with Museums (2011).