Amos Fortune, Free Man: New Uses for a Children’s Classic

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on the assumption that history students primarily require instruction on how to derive meaning from textbooks and historical documents.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.

Fig. 1. Gravestones of Amos and Violet Fortune, Old Burying Ground, Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Fig. 2. Unsigned, and hence unbinding, manumission paper for Amos Fortune. Courtesy of the Jaffrey Public Library, Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

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.

Catastrophe and Colony: Looking South

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).

The City in Frames: Otis Bullard’s Moving Panorama of New York

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.

Fig. 1. "Excursion to New York City, through in two hours, New York City! Bullard's Panorama of New York City!... Worcester in Mechanics' Hall," advertisement/broadside, one sheet, 60 x 43 cm. (October 7, 1858). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click to enlarge in new window — Fig. 1. “Excursion to New York City, through in two hours, New York City! Bullard’s Panorama of New York City!… Worcester in Mechanics’ Hall,” advertisement/broadside, one sheet, 60 x 43 cm. (October 7, 1858). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click to enlarge in new window

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.

Fig. 2. Portrait of Dickinson children (Emily on the left), O. A. Bullard, artist. Oil on canvas, ca. 1840. Courtesy of the Houghton Library (Dickinson Room), Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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.

Fig. 3. Scene in Barn in Genesee County-Boy Making a Charcoal Sketch, Otis A. Bullard, oil on canvas, 19 1/8 x 25 1/4 inches (1845). Courtesy of the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York (Gift of Mrs. Robert Malcolm Littlejohn, Littlejohn Collection, 1961.3.148).

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.”

Fig. 4. "Risley's Original Mississippi," broadside, John K. Chapman & Co., printer (London, 1848). Courtesy The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Click to enlarge in new window — Fig. 4. “Risley’s Original Mississippi,” broadside, John K. Chapman & Co., printer (London, 1848). Courtesy The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera. Click to enlarge in new window

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.

Fig. 5. Horse Trade Scene, Cornish Maine, Otis Bullard, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches (1853). Courtesy of the Caldwell Gallery, Manlius, New York.

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.”

Fig. 6. Otis Allen Bullard, wood-engraved portrait, signed S.W. (i.e. Samuel Lovett Waldo?), W. Howland, eng. Frontispiece from Brief Sketch of the Life of O.A. Bullard,: together with recommendations, and opinions of the press in regard to his panorama of New York City (Buffalo? 1851). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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.

How To Do Things with Indian Texts

Stockbridge Page 1 — Title page from Stockbridge, Past and Present; Or, Records of an Old Mission Station, by Electa F. Jones (Springfield, Massachusetts, 1854). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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.

Stockbridge Pages 2 — Pages 14 and 15 from Stockbridge, Past and Present; Or, Records of an Old Mission Station, by Electa F. Jones (Springfield, Massachusetts, 1854). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window.

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?

Stockbridge Pages 3 — Pages 18 and 19 from Stockbridge, Past and Present; Or, Records of an Old Mission Station, by Electa F. Jones (Springfield, Massachusetts, 1854). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Click image to enlarge in a new window.

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.

Mama's Little One Cover — Front cover of Mama’s Little One, by Kristina Heath (Potrykus). Photograph courtesy of Kristina Heath Potrykus.

Mama's Little One Pages 1 — Pages 14 and 15 of Mama’s Little One, by Kristina Heath (Potrykus). Photograph courtesy of Kristina Heath Potrykus.

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.

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.

Trauma, Disability, and Colonial Unsettlement

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.

Kathleen Donegan, *Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America*

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.

Jamestown Cemetery. Courtesy of BillCannon.net.

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.

On Figs: Sweetness in the common landscape

“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.

Fig. 1. Fig bushes, Eyre Hall, Cheriton vicinity, Northampton County, Virginia. Although their age is uncertain, these figs are associated with the nineteenth-century orangery at Eyre Hall, an eighteenth-century plantation complex. Photograph courtesy of the author.

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.”

Fig. 2. Fig bushes, Hog Island, Virginia (c. 1890). Figs introduced onto the islands in the early nineteenth century flourished. Figs of this variety likely provided the main ingredient in the preserves served as dessert to Grover Cleveland. Photograph courtesy of Buck and Helene Doughty.

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.”

11.3.Herman.3 — Fig. 3. Figs, Willis Wharf, Virginia. Photograph courtesy of the author.

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).

Fig. 4. Fig bush, Willis Wharf, Virginia. This fig was "rescued" circa 1935-40 by Randolph Higby. A succession of hurricanes in 1933 and 1936 forced Higby, a Hog Islander, to the mainland. Along with other family possessions, Higby brought this fig tree. Photograph courtesy of the author. — Fig. 4. Fig bush, Willis Wharf, Virginia. This fig was “rescued” circa 1935-40 by Randolph Higby. A succession of hurricanes in 1933 and 1936 forced Higby, a Hog Islander, to the mainland. Along with other family possessions, Higby brought this fig tree. Photograph courtesy of the author.

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.

Fig. 5. "Ficus carica (condensed figs)," front and back of a trade card (13 x 17 cm.), Brighton Pharmaceutical Co., New York (between 1870 and 1900?). Courtesy of the American Broadside and Ephemera Collection at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — Fig. 5. “Ficus carica (condensed figs),” front and back of a trade card (13 x 17 cm.), Brighton Pharmaceutical Co., New York (between 1870 and 1900?). Courtesy of the American Broadside and Ephemera Collection at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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.

Fig. 6. "Nature's pleasant laxative. Syrup of figs." Manufactured by the California Fig Syrup Co. of California. Front and back of a trade card (13 x 16 cm.), Krebs Lithographing Co., Cincinnati, Ohio, (between 1870 and 1900?). Courtesy of the American Broadside and Ephemera Collection at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — Fig. 6. “Nature’s pleasant laxative. Syrup of figs.” Manufactured by the California Fig Syrup Co. of California. Front and back of a trade card (13 x 16 cm.), Krebs Lithographing Co., Cincinnati, Ohio, (between 1870 and 1900?). Courtesy of the American Broadside and Ephemera Collection at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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.

Roundtable on Turn: Washington’s Spies – Commentary by Jeremy Stoddard: History and Turn

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).

Not Even Past: Six Acres and a Mule or Searching for Vicey Skipwith

It was the first of June in that year of 1888, early dawn and still cool here in Mecklenburg County, Virginia. Vicey Skipwith and her little group of family started out from near the crossroads of Cabin Point for the town of Boydton, our County Seat. That was where those documents of important public and sometimes scandalous private goings-on that involved the law were kept, in the Courthouse. She certainly didn’t want to go to Boydton alone. She had to miss a day’s work—it wasn’t good to miss work at Prestwould on Friday— but she wanted to make sure the claim was filed correctly and in her name.

Yes ma’am, that was a most important day. She hitched up the mule (Vicey was a farmer), and along with Brother Parker (who was what they call our fictive kin), her sister and three of her blood brothers, she left the plantation. By the way, Richard, Solomon, and Esau had to find three other farm hands that were willing to fill in for them at the plantation or they wouldn’t be paid for the entire week. In some ways, our people were still working like before emancipation. Anyhow, they were all dressed up like they were going to church.

Vicey Skipwith was about thirty-four years old and she was like any other first time home owner in today’s world, thinking about her success in buying land and a little house—and feeling good. Riding behind her in the wagon, Celia, Richard, Solomon, and Esau were as noisy as ever. Brother Parker Sydnor, he was an able-bodied and handsome mulatto with his long, naturally curly hair tied back into a pony tail, he sat beside her and took it all in stride—like he owned a town. I can see him now sitting straight, reining the old mule along the eleven miles on the Old Plank Road to Boydton. Also born at slavery time, Parker Sydnor was two years older than Vicey and he was in charge because he was the man driving the mule.

And because of her past, Vicey certainly must’ve felt humbled and in praise of her blessing. So this is what freedom finally means, the thought must’ve entered her mind … to have my own home place. Thank you, Jesus. Praise God. I’m sure she sighed deeply with all the weight of the past coming out. With that sigh of a prayer to God, her feelings must’ve bowed down to the higher power, right there in the wagon.

And so, they got there. Now quieter among themselves, they headed for the back door of the Boydton Courthouse, the entrance for colored people. Vicey couldn’t read or write. But there were people in the family who could. Her sister Celia Skipwith, the nanny for Miss Annie L’s children at Prestwould, had some schooling and even wrote letters. And Brother Parker being from just across the river in Halifax County in “The Forks” went to school soon after emancipation. He was very good at those kinds of things. That Freedmen’s Bureau sent him. After freedom came, a lot of his people got schooling. Some of his people lived right here in Bluestone. They already legally married with some of Vicey’s people following freedom, when colored people could both get married in the church and make their marriages legal with a license from the Courthouse. It was nice for colored women and men to be married both with a license and in church. No more jumping the broom like they did before (fig 1).

Mr. J. J. Crowder, the white man who sold Vicey the parcel—he bought forty acres from Mr. Fulwar and he started reselling parcels to the colored people at a nice profit for himself—of course, he could read and write. And he sold her the mule. But I know that Vicey wanted to be among her own people who could cipher and spell. She wanted to be with one of her own who could read at that fine and precious moment when she finally claimed a little piece of land that would make a farm so that Bentley, her already knee-baby son, and maybe with a good husband, they would have something. She knew that she needed to see the proof of her name on the land, even if she couldn’t read the proof. There had been no time out for schooling for Vicey when bondage was over and those people from the North came and told us that we could go to school. Some of us did. Not enough. Vicey kept on working at the big house with Aunt Lucinda. Life for her was almost just as before at Prestwould.

They say that Mr. Fulwar liked Aunt Lucinda and gaveher one of Prestwould’s cabins before emancipation. Light-skinned, with long wavy hair, blue-gray eyes and really pretty, Aunt Lucinda was also a colored Skipwith born with a twin sister at Prestwould during bondage. But she didn’t take the Skipwith last name. They said that she … well, I won’t talk about that. Some things we must keep behind closed doors. I’ll tell you another time.

Her mother told Vicey that she was born on a Saturday. A Saturday child: that meant that Vicey Skipwith had to work for everything she would ever get. Nobody would give her anything. She knew that these land papers would remain in the Courthouse forever—for everyone to know that she now owned Mr. Fulwar’s old slave cabin along with six and one fifth acres of farm land that used to be his. That funny sounding piece of one fifth meant that the cabin was not on Mr. Hardy’s property line or maybe that strange sounding little cut of land was how the trees, they lined the boundaries, and when that happened there was no even-numbered piece for ciphering.

So Vicey already paid out the sixty-two dollars to Mr. Crowder a few weeks earlier. And now, at that Courthouse, she made her X mark on that deed in front of Brother Parker, the Courthouse clerk and those other witnesses. And the piece of paper became what they call, a legal contract. At the Courthouse, as her brothers must’ve silently watched with hats in hand, Brother Parker read to her that the title was clear. Celia could read it too and nodded in her direction. They understood these things. The court clerk wrote the words “fee simple” next to her name and Brother Parker said that meant that she paid in full. She signed her name with that X and that land at the old slave quarters was hers.

My curiosity about Vicey Skipwith began when her persona became intimately connected to research aimed at qualifying a newly identified pre-Civil War log cabin site for the honor of being listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register. The site was successfully listed on both registers in 2007. The historic log cabin site is named after my great-grandfather, Patrick Robert “Parker” Sydnor (1854-1950), a successful tombstone carver, who intermittently lived in the cabin during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (fig. 2). Vicey Skipwith and Patrick Robert Sydnor were contemporaries of the “First Generation”—formerly enslaved women and men who experienced freedom through the Emancipation Proclamation. As newly freedpeople regardless of their age, those African Americans were the first generation to experience citizenship ratified in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Ninety-six percent of formerly enslaved women and men were non-literate, and very few of the mere four percent who could read and write left behind autobiographical documents that revealed their inner lives and great ambitions. The search for the voice of Vicey Skipwith, whose life spanned the last nine years of slavery, the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, the beginnings of the Jim Crow South, and the 1930s Depression in New York City, was daunting because of her non-literacy. She left no personal papers or letters from her life. Yet, eleven years following the military end of Reconstruction, Vicey Skipwith was among the thousands of newly freed enslaved who amazingly established themselves and purchased land throughout Virginia. Regardless of the quantity of acres, each purchase was a truly remarkable achievement. In this way, the Patrick Robert Sydnor pre-Civil War log cabin site functions as a material artifact of slavery and as an unconventional text for autobiographical truths beyond slavery.

While I have not met anyone who has a living memory of Vicey Skipwith, I met several octogenarians who remembered Patrick Robert “Parker” Sydnor. In the mid-twentieth century, they knew someone who had been an enslaved American and thus, they touched living history. They were children at that time, and out of intergenerational respect, they called him “Uncle Parker.” Although he was a child at the time of Emancipation, Parker Sydnor was still a member of that First Generation. The cabin is historically associated with Parker Sydnor, who was one of its many inhabitants spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

My project has engaged different kinds of challenges, interpretations, and research decisions because many of Vicey Skipwith’s contemporaries were technicians of the spoken word and they passed that skill to the next generation, and the next … They emphasized the texts of speech—collective memories and memory-telling. One of many challenges involved finding written evidence in support of what they told me—about people in the historic past, the landscape or material objects. For example, I’d been told by African American elders in the community that Aunt Lucinda had owned the cabin property. She had not. Her name was not on any of the deeds that I title searched. At some point during countless real and mental journeys to Virginia, I had an “aha” moment that cleared up the confusion of ownership and gift. True to the fluidity of memory-telling, Aunt Lucinda had owned the cabin because it had been given to her, purportedly by one of the white Skipwiths of Prestwould after emancipation, but she didn’t own the land. Undoubtedly, the log cabin could have been a gift. The valuable real estate, however, was not included with the less valuable personal property. Local oral historians had appropriately merged ownership of the log cabin with ownership of the land.

I’m reminded of the skillfully crafted book, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (2006) by historian Martha Hodes. Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly (1831-1877) was an impoverished white woman from New England, who in 1869 daringly married a wealthy sea captain, a man of color from the Cayman Islands. Alongside the intriguing narrative of the “sea captain’s wife,” Hodes has written a captivating account of her own journey of discovery into the ordinary and then extraordinary life of Connolly, as she went from rags to riches through an interracial marriage. Because Connolly was literate, Hodes could effectively conjure her up from the past, engage us with discovery and craft images of a nineteenth-century love story, constructed from the autobiography of letters and biographical actions provided by public records.

In her search, Hodes became a history detective and was able to resurrect a gendered autobiographical voice through the cache of Connolly’s letters. The raw skills of literacy are paramount in these kinds of exciting new discoveries and forensic investigations. Literate subjects leave private and public paper trails for contemporary historians to enjoy through discovery, interpretation, and placement. On the other hand, those of us who research enslaved nineteenth-century women and men seldom have the convenience of discovery that comes with the paper trails of literate people. Hodes was fortunate to research the sea captain’s lady who could read and write—who unintentionally left a wonderful and intriguing cache of letters for our historical fascination.

My Skipwith lady was non-literate throughout her life. She left no such cache. No epistolary paper trails. The central challenge for me was how to create a text for Vicey Skipwith. Given the facts, fiction, and truths, what kind of autobiographical voice could I craft for the larger text that would establish the narrative provenance of a surviving pre-Civil War log cabin? I needed more than routine biographical actions provided by public records. Out of this need, an organic process began to take shape. I sought out local people who were the cultural descendants of Vicey Skipwith’s world. Mecklenburg people liked the fact that there was national merit to their local history. So they talked to me and I listened. I didn’t conduct any formal interviews.

As historical narratives unfold, collective memories often carry the role of filling in the gaps and traces left by written history. During the early stages of the research, there was a potent interaction between written evidence (the facts) and oral witnessing (the collective truths). Fact and Truth: neither is mutually exclusive of the other. More importantly, I wanted to meet the research challenge by enabling material artifacts, such as a standing nineteenth-century log cabin, to act as a conveyer of truths. I could get the facts from written evidence, but how would I access personal truths from among people who didn’t write about themselves?

I place Vicey Skipwith’s story alongside my own journey of discovery—behind-the-scenes research encounters, humorous moments, challenges and expectations that helped me to produce a narrative of this elusive once-enslaved woman. Documentation is one of the prerequisites for a narrative of biographical facts. On the other hand, autobiographical perspectives are based on perceived truths of the subject. Autobiographical truths demonstrate that Vicey Skipwith’s decision to buy farm land in the aftermath of slavery and Reconstruction, gender restraints and the onset of legal segregation, shed light on her ambitions, character and diligence. These characteristics endow on a historic site the kind of meaning that the National Register seeks to honor with its signature recognition. I became a different kind of history detective.

How did I become involved in a project linking vernacular architecture, slavery, the Civil War and the search for Vicey Skipwith? My unexpected journey of discovery began when I had to return on family business to the South of my childhood summers.

After negotiating the hectic airport traffic streaming out of Raleigh-Durham, I settled into the driver’s seat and enjoyed the late morning—sunny, balmy, and quiet except for the hushed sound of the rental car’s engine as I sped north along Highway Fifteen from North Carolina to southern Virginia’s rural Mecklenburg County. Welcome to Virginia. Radar Detectors Illegal. Virginia is for Lovers. I crossed the state line, but I felt that I was crossing over to something more than signs could tell. At intervals there were the battered pick-up trucks and older model American cars going south on the other side of the two-lane highway. I slowed down when an occasional farmer or farm-hand driving his tractor turned onto the highway from a gravel road and travelled a short distance only to turn into the next gravel road. With only that kind of local traffic, I drove for almost two hours, alone on the north side of the highway. Townships and their white painted double-wides trimmed with foundation plants interrupted the forest on both sides of the highway; and intermittent field crops that I couldn’t name signaled small and middle-sized farms as the countryside became more agricultural.

Going back to Mecklenburg County after being away for more than twenty years, I was both uneasy and sad. My grandmother was no longer here to welcome and shelter me from the past. During the intermittent, but wonderful, summer vacations of my childhood and youth, I’d always been with family members in the old southern town of Clarksville: my grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins and siblings. I had never been alone. The older relatives took care of everything. They spoiled us well. After all, being there was supposed to be like summer camp. We only had to play hard, eat well, remember our manners, take our baths on Saturday nights and go to church every Sunday until it was time to leave again at the end of the summer.

My empowering, well-known, feisty, tall and beautiful grandmother confidently did the driving, farming, cooking, shopping, helping the less fortunate, taking care of family property matters and sheltering us from the realities of Jim Crow in the South. As “summer” children, we only knew about southern white people and segregation from a far and emotionally safe distance. Now, my grandmother and the rest of the elders had all passed on. Because of my flexible summer schedule from university teaching in the Midwest, the siblings designated me to come back to Clarksville. Somebody in the family had to deal with the old uninhabited log cabin at the home place. I was anxious because the historical distances were shorter—not even past—and I had not come back to play.

I’d never been in Clarksville by myself, without my immediate family to cushion me from the historical remnants of a rural southern town steeped in antebellum history. One hundred miles south of Richmond and sixty-five miles north of Raleigh-Durham, Clarksville in 1818 became the first incorporated town in Mecklenburg County. It was named after Clarke Royster, a planter and tavern keeper, who also owned—among his extensive estates that included an elegant house, cattle, sheep and hogs—eleven slaves. Clarksville became a home front of Confederate operations during the Civil War. The closest major city in the next county of Pittsylvania is Danville, which is known as the last capital of the Confederate States of America. If you drive through Clarksville and continue north on Highway Fifteen, you arrive at the famous or infamous town of Farmville in Prince Edward County. As a result of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Board of Supervisors for Prince Edward County closed the public schools in defiance rather than integrate. In 2003 Prince Edward County apologized to the African Americans who as students had lost five years—an academic generation—of their education. But on that day of my return, I didn’t remember those epic junctures in Southside Virginia history.

Memories of those summers with my grandmother continued to swirl within and surround me as Highway Fifteen finally brought me to Clarksville (fig. 3). For a few days, I drove about the county conducting family business. I renewed my acquaintance with an elderly cousin who would come with me, and I appreciated her company. Not only did I have a “foreign” sounding name (because of my mother’s marriage to my Honduran, Spanish-speaking father) that many local people couldn’t pronounce, a name that was certainly not “from these parts,” I also “talked different.” I had to gain the confidence of the new people that I met. But during the early trips back for research I would watch their eyes glaze over until they could understand what I was saying.

Not long after my arrival, I went back to the log cabin site with a local history enthusiast—an elderly Mecklenburg County Anglo American with a keen enthusiasm for Virginia history. I’d been introduced to David Arnold in Boydton—the same county seat that Vicey Skipwith had gone to in 1888—and he wanted to see the cabin. We met at the intersection of the old Cabin Point—a name that had been given to the crossroads as long ago as 1798. I stood on the side of the paved county road and David walked through the underbrush up to the cabin (fig. 4). I didn’t want to venture that far because of possible snakes and unambiguous chiggers. After about fifteen minutes, he came back to the road, flushed with excitement. “That there log cabin has a lot of stories to tell, I imagine some from before the Civil War … you can get it on that Register …” I blinked. Was he referring to the National Register of Historic Places?

The U.S. National Park Service (NPS) sponsors the National Register of Historic Places. The NPS requires that a targeted site be researched with documentation that serves as proof of its historical value and national recognition. According to the NPS, the historic integrity of a building or site is “the authenticity of a property’s historic identity … Not only must a property resemble its historic appearance, but it must also retain physical materials, design features, and aspects of construction dating from the period when it attained significance.” While I researched and documented the integrity of the dwelling as a standing pre-Civil War structure, I also wanted to draw attention to how the site displays the cabin’s resonance and association with individual women and men—white and black—of the historic era surrounding the Civil War. The NPS defines association as “the direct link between an important historic event or person and a historic property … Like feeling, association requires the presence of physical features that convey a property’s historic character.”

In the process of establishing the historic integrity and provenance of the nineteenth-century log structure, I also pursued putting together the puzzle pieces of one of the cabin’s early inhabitants and first African American owner, Vicey Skipwith. David’s suggestion initiated six years of journeys that would take me back and forth through the historic past, to Virginia, to the Library of Congress, to many other private and public libraries and historical societies, and to the porches and churches of both African American and white American residents in Mecklenburg County. The log cabin property had once been part of the vast southern Virginia plantation, Prestwould, built by Sir Peyton Skipwith (1740-1805) with his second wife, Lady Jean Skipwith (1748-1826) (fig. 5).

Sir Skipwith made Prestwould into one of the antebellum “big houses,” in the tradition of Berkeley, Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Montpelier. Those elegant Georgian and neo-classical plantation houses embody the history of the elite planter families who created the foundations of the early republic. Similarly, Prestwould epitomized the wealth, character and emblematic ideals of that era in Southside Virginia. Prestwould was built by enslaved carpenters and stonemasons who brought stone for its construction from the plantation’s own quarry. An architectural historian from the Virginia Department of Historical Resources confirmed that the same quarry supplied stone for the chimney of the Sydnor log cabin (fig. 6).

I was fascinated by the fact that Vicey Skipwith was spirited enough to buy a parcel of the same land that her parents had labored on as enslaved workers. From tax records, I established that Vicey Skipwith was the tax payer for her six acres. But I had to do a title search to document the provenance of the property and its connection to Prestwould plantation. David volunteered to come with me and he invited the president of Prestwould Foundation, Dr. Julian Hudson, to meet us at the courthouse. Because my research encompassed historic Prestwould and its original ownership of the Sydnor log cabin, he wanted me to meet Julian.

David and I had no idea how to conduct a title search. Heavy leather-bound deed books were stacked imposingly on the shelves of the public records room at the Boydton Courthouse. Many of the books had beautiful handwritten entries that seemed to date from the formation of the county in 1765; but the cursive penmanship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was difficult to read. I was sitting on the floor reading one of the heavy ledgers from the bottom shelf, when I noticed a pair of khaki-trousered legs standing beside me. Julian Hudson. I hadn’t heard him come in. And so, he had sized me up first. I stood up and introduced myself as David came over. We had been getting nowhere with the title search. Julian looked around the modest room filled with shelves of public records, old bound ledgers, maps and directories. He saw someone that he knew—a lawyer who specializes in estate and probate law. I found out later that Walter Beales is a highly respected Southside “lawyer’s lawyer” who also has an amazing knowledge of Virginia history.

Confidently, Julian walked over to the lawyer, greeted him and posed a statement rather than a question: “Walter, can you help us out here. We’re looking for … ” The lawyer looked at Julian, at me, and at David. I tried to look as helpless as possible. Walter Beales quietly and patiently stopped the work that he was doing for a client and showed us the correct sequence of bound volumes to search. With David and Julian taking command, in less than forty-five minutes we were able to complete the title search that covered more than 200 years of the property’s Euro-American ownership. The title search proved definitively that the Sydnor cabin property had been a part of Prestwould plantation, located in the area that had been the outlying slave quarters, called Cabin Point. The search additionally confirmed the dollar amount that Vicey Skipwith paid for her six and one fifth acres of land: sixty-two dollars. She also paid fifty cents in taxes the following year. Sixty-two dollars in 1888 is the approximate equivalent of $1500 in today’s economy—still a substantial amount of money. I could begin to connect the property “with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history,” as required for the National Register nomination.

After the triumph of that day’s research in the Boydton Courthouse, I thought about how social transformation in our American society enabled me to have ready access to public records that Vicey Skipwith would not have been permitted to access (even if she had been literate). With David, I entered the courthouse through the front door. His associates were white southern men who generously helped me with the title search. When Vicey Skipwith bought her property, she entered the courthouse through the segregated entrance. Nevertheless, she left the courthouse as a property-owning woman-citizen (fig. 7).

When I was not in Virginia doing field work, I immersed myself in reading about women and slavery, Virginia history, vernacular architecture, navigable waterways, material culture, and the Civil War. And every time I went back, I introduced myself to new people, especially the elderly. They were also “libraries.” As an African proverb tells us, when the elders die, libraries are gone. And so, I often went to the elders—black and white—in order to hear them talk through memory-telling. Because the church continues to be an important African American social institution, I attended different churches on the Sundays of my field trips in order to connect to the elders and their informational stories. I needed to know about the generations of people who had their home places where Vicey Skipwith had lived. I talked with local people, trying to get access to the cultural past through the voices of the present.

The elders who spoke with me seemed to prefer to use the less brutal sounding word, bondage. I observed that among them, slavery is still a word that causes emotional memories to collide. Bondage is associated with Biblical stories of injustice, impermanence and ultimate deliverance. “Slavery” as a distinct historical signifier evokes less of the deliverance and more of the atrocities. When the elders started remembering stories about the historic past and slavery, they would often begin with the signifying “we” of collective memory-telling, “When we were in bondage … ” Therefore, calling slavery by another name seems to serve as a shock absorber—bondage is a word that absorbs the distress of knowing about the abject poverty of the enslaved, about the violence and oppression inflicted, and knowing that the system did not make their people ignoble.

Many Mecklenburg County families—African American and Anglo American—are rooted in the antebellum and early republic history of Virginia. For example, J.J. Crowder was the former slaveholder who sold Vicey Skipwith the cabin property. He had bought it from Fulwar Skipwith (1836-1900), the last antebellum owner of Prestwould. Present-day families with the surname of Crowder still live in the county and are direct descendants of that nineteenth-century J.J. Crowder and his wife, Margaret R. Crowder. I was encouraged to telephone one of the Crowders still living in Clarksville. In his late nineties at the time, the contemporary J.J. Crowder was one of the town’s two oldest residents. He was good-natured as I told him about my project. He told me that his forefathers had bought Virginia land in the eighteenth century through charters issued by the king of England as land grants to private investors.

Referring to the log cabin property that had been sold to Vicey Skipwith by one of his ancestors and hoping to prompt any relevant information, I asked him if he knew about the older Crowder properties on the other side of the river, near a church named St. Matthew. He asked, “Do you mean near that white church over there on [highway] 49?” I thought, I’d made it clear that I was referring to African Americans in my research and no, I am not talking about any white church. Somewhat piqued, I replied with authority, “No sir, I’m talking about the black church at 49, after you turn off from the old Lee West store.” There was a slight pause through the telephone, and then he said to me with a bit of annoyance in his voice: “Well, I’m talking about the color of that church building. It’s painted white!”

As I kept going back to Mecklenburg County, I realized that I was not really alone. My grandmother was with me in a new way. She was still prominent in a community where people remembered her through memory-telling. Mentioning her name opened doors for me. The local people were not familiar with my surname because it was not among the names that had created rugged settlements, middling farms, plantations during the formation of Virginia as a Crown Colony of England, or home front operations during the Civil War. African Americans and Anglo Americans alike share those surnames such as Arnold, Burwell, Carter, Coleman, Crutchfield, Goode, Love, McCargo, Skipwith, Sizemore, Sydnor, Yancy.