Stepfamilies before Blending

Sitting in a sunlit reading room at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I pored over letters I knew from genealogical records and internal evidence were the material remains of a stepfamily. The letters were full of the typical familial references used in the eighteenth century and today: mother, father, sister, brother. I noticed fine pencil markings gently correcting these references, however. Mother became stepmother and son became stepson, and so on. The editor, perhaps a descendant organizing family records for donation, made the corrections based on more modern sensibilities. Why was the accuracy of the letters so important? Was respect for the “real,” now dead, mother the motivation for the editor? What strong motivation made someone deface an historical document in this way?

If to be middle class meant to have a certain kind of family structure, one centered on children and run by an idealized mother, how could a supposedly evil stepmother, for example, do the job?

I share his/her desire for precision, at least as a researcher. If everyone is named Father and Mother, then who is who? In other words, how does one find stepfamilies in the past? There were actually a number of alternative names used to refer to family members. For example, a stepfather could be a stepfather, but he could also be referred to as a father-in-law or even a father. Accuracy aside, these naming patterns could reflect relative familial closeness.

These inscriptions in eighteenth-century documents remind us that stepfamilies are not a new familial structure or a pathological symbol of the so-called deteriorating, modern, American family. They are as old as the hills. George Washington was both the father of our country and a stepfather to two children. To be sure, in early America, death, not divorce, created stepfamilies, but regardless of how they were formed, stepfamilies were common then as now. Today, according to a recent survey, 42 percent of us say we have some sort of step-relationship. Purveyors of “family values” still use our negative feelings about stepfamilies to further their agenda, however. Now children raised in remarried families come from “broken” homes. Americans, nonetheless, idealize a past when families remained “intact.”

The topic of stepfamilies has attracted sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, even literary scholars interested in fairytales, but few historians. Historians seem to assume that, at best, these families were somehow the same as other families or, at worst, were as troubled as the fairytales suggest. Stepfamilies were unique in some ways. In fact, they became more distinctive as ideas about the form of an ideal, middle-class family changed at the end of the eighteenth century. If to be middle class meant to have a certain kind of family structure, one centered on children and run by an idealized mother, how could a supposedly evil stepmother, for example, do the job? New comparisons of stepfamilies to first-marriage families made stepfamilies clearly the inferior form, especially stepmother families.

 

The idea of a stepfamily itself is closely linked to nuclear families as well as to the white middle class. Nuclear families were inherently fragile. When a partner died, particularly in early America, the surviving member needed help. Informal marriages and complex living arrangements among the poor, as well as Native and African traditions of polygyny, often proved more resilient than the nuclear family. They often managed loss of a spouse without the collapse and complete reconstruction of the family system. The very idea of a stepfamily, therefore, I would argue, is a profoundly white, middle class notion in early America.

For the white, middle class population, stepfamilies were rooted in bereavement. The “step” label linguistically derived its meaning from the word stepbarne. A stepmother or stepfather was someone who took on the care of a child that was grieving—an orphan. Over time this label took on a negative connotation, particularly for stepmothers, or stepdames as they were sometimes called. A stepmother became a generic term in early modern England for a terrible mother, whether she was remarried or not. A woman who murdered her own child, for instance, would be characterized as a stepmother. By the eighteenth century, “step” was used almost always with reference to a stepmother. Stepmothers tried to “step” into the role of a dead mother. Sentimental ideology assured their failure.

In addition, during the Revolution a new cultural character emerged exemplifying the negative image of stepmothers. Britain, the Mother Country, morphed into the Revolutionary character of Stepmother England; her wickedness, not a metaphorical remarriage, earned her the title of stepmother. “Farewell! Farewell, infatuated, besotted stepdame.” So John Adams enthused to his beloved Abigail after signing the Declaration of Independence, echoing references to stepmother England that had begun to appear in the American press during the French and Indian War. The year after that costly war ended, England had turned to her colonies to both foot the bill and to house the large British army. As Americans began rioting in the streets over “taxation without representation,” the press followed suit with a campaign against Stepmother England. One writer in the New York Gazette warned his countrymen that their new, wicked stepmother country would only stop her unjust behavior once she had “STAMP[ed] on thy bowels.” The Stamp Act had exposed her as she “cast off the mask” of an indulgent mother. She had become a “cruel step-mother, unbounded in her malice” who had clearly “resolved to stamp them to the earth.” The colonies, now cast as “insolent, undutiful and rebellious” stepchildren by their formerly supportive mother, suffered as their inhuman stepmother drained, vampire-like, their “vital blood.” Unlike the pure venom aimed at stepmothers or stepdames, stepfathers were spared much of this vitriol.

“In-law” was the formal term in early America for those individuals we now refer to as step-relatives. An “in-law” meant just that: a mother or father “in-law” only. This label in a will or a court record made for accuracy, but in other contexts the term could have a sharp edge.

For example, Mary Pilkington’s Mentorial Tales, first published in London in 1811 and later available in the United States, included a story titled, “The Amiable Mother-in-Law; or, Prejudice Subdued.” Pilkington considered that “Of all the antipathies natural to childhood, that against mothers-in-law, in general, is the most forcibly imprest; and the little tongue, that scarcely can lisp in broken accents, is taught to express its hatred of the name.” In this story, the widower in question chose for his next wife a family friend and “a great favourite” of one of the daughters. Unfortunately, “From the moment that one of the daughters lost her amiable parent,” her caretaker gave “the account of stepmothers’ cruelty” so that “her infant mind imperceptibly became prejudiced against the character, long before she knew what the word prejudice could mean.” In fact, “The very sound of mother-in-law excited in her bosom a sensation bordering on contempt and hate.” Although the woman had carefully cared for her stepdaughter after her mother’s death, the girl’s ignorance “prevented her mind from being improved, and prejudice has supplied the place of experience, and taught her to indulge opinions, which the liberal and intelligent must despise.” This stepmother began the hard but ultimately successful work of subduing her stepchild’s prejudice. In this more explicitly didactic version, the author hoped that “those young persons who have unfortunately been prejudiced” against stepmothers could take this as a cautionary tale.

 

Often people made no distinction between biological and step-relations, at least in how they referred to these individuals. Stepmothers were simply mothers and stepfathers were simply fathers. The death of a parent rather than divorce made this transition easier with no one left to hold the revered titles. Mother and Father were in fact the monikers expected in a properly functioning and properly mended sentimental family. This may have been the most common pattern of naming stepparents, but these terms for some still carried a remnant of their former meaning. Using them to refer to stepparents sometimes felt like a betrayal to a dead parent.

Richard Norton, a budding lawyer studying in Virginia, confided to his newly remarried father in 1817 that the idea of a stepmother rather than the actual woman his father had chosen irked him. He would never call her mother. “I feel for her the most sincere respect &, an affection as great as I ever felt for one whom I never saw, & with whom I had no personal acquaintance; but, at the same time, I candidly confess that I cannot feel for her that filial love & affection which a son ought to feel for a mother—I consider the name of mother as sacred—as comprehending in its meaning the warmest affections & tenderest charities of the heart, & to apply the title where these sentiments do not accompany it appears to me a kind of hypocrisy.” The hapless Mrs. Norton never had a chance to win her stepson over. Richard died young, never meeting his “new mother.”

A stepchild comfortable with using the terms Mother or Father to refer to a stepparent could result in a dizzying complexity when parents and stepparents were both the subjects of the same conversation. Mather Byles saw himself as having two mothers. He was a Congregationalist minister turned Anglican, loyalist, and eventually exile. Finding himself at the end of the Revolution in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Mather was far from his aged father of the same name in Boston. His half-sisters, Katherine and Mary, “rocked the Cradle of reposing Age” for his father. When Mather’s father finally died at the age of eighty, he wrote to his half-sisters about his grief. Although they were all moved, they were also resigned to the senior Byles’s passing, given his advanced age. The sisters worried about the estate, however. Mather assured them that he would help them with the specifics. “Rest satisfied, my dear Sisters, that in the Settlement of our Fathers Estate I have no Interest distinct from your’s. Let us convince the World, by our Example, that such Matters may be easily accommodated upon the plain Principles of Equity, Candor, & mutual confidence: & Nothing, in my Opinion, can be plainer than this; that ‘it would be highly unjust to blend the personal Property of our two Mothers with that of our Father.'” For these children of a stepfamily the idea of two mothers seemed natural, both women deserving the revered title.

My examination of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American newspapers revealed that “stepbrother” and “stepsister” were almost never used. A simple “brother” or “sister” referred to one’s sibling and that included stepsiblings, half-siblings, and even one’s in-laws. The siblings often found common cause, and that was certainly society’s expectation. The bad feelings of a divorce perhaps being absent smoothed the road. The issue of inheritance was also clear—one inherited from one’s natural father. Stepparents were not obligated to leave their stepchildren a legacy or even support them. Without a battle over resources, the brothers and sisters of stepfamilies seemed to find friendship more often than conflict.

The children of John Lay of Lyme, Connecticut, demonstrated their ingenuity when confronted with the unusual circumstance of two children from two marriages, both named John. It was not unusual to find parents naming a child after a dead sibling. What was unusual in the Lay family was that John had a son, John, in his first marriage who survived his mother’s death and his father’s remarriage. Nonetheless, when his father remarried, he named a son from this second marriage John as well. When the father John died he distinguished between these two children in his will: “My son John which I had by my former wife” and “John whom I had by my present wife.” When another child, the brother and half-brother of the “Johns,” died he also needed to distinguish between the two men. Peter Lay left a legacy to “John Lay, my younger Brother” or “my brother John Lay Junior” as well as to “my Elder brother John Lay” or “John Lay Senior.” Both “Johns” were his brothers. One was older, his half-brother, and one was younger, his biological brother. It is clear such creativity was preferable to using a term to clarify the relationship. Brother was better than half-brother.

Does naming still reflect emotion in stepfamilies? I began this essay by mentioning that our first president was a stepfather. I’d like now to turn to the family of our first divorced president, Ronald Reagan. How did the moniker of “step” work in this modern presidential family? Patti Davis lost her half-sister, Maureen Regan, to melanoma at the age of sixty. According to a Newsweek article at the time, Davis, the daughter of Ronald Regan’s second marriage, felt Maureen resented her relationship with their father. The half-sisters went through “years of distance and tension.” “Many times we just seemed angry at each other.” But over time, according to Patti, their relationship changed for the better. “I don’t know when Maureen and I dropped the word ‘half’ and began referring to ourselves as sisters; it’s only important that we did.” The name they chose for one another reflected their feelings. The term “step” implied conflict echoing a not-so-distant past.

Families today do not reflect the cultural ideal of heterosexual, first-marriage couples with children. We are more varied than ever. Cohabitating couples and same-sex marriages join with stepfamilies as the overwhelming majority of families today. Why do we cling to an ideology about family structure that was contested since the nation’s founding? Blended families sound like they combined effortlessly. “In-law” has its own baggage in modern America. Mother and Father as alternatives work less well with stepfamilies of divorce, with two individuals still alive and carrying the same name. Maybe we should reclaim “step” and make it a neutral term? People in stepfamilies still struggle with cultural prejudice and work to name their relationships in part to reflect their feelings. We have not broken free from this familial past or the prejudice that stepfamilies (particularly stepmothers) still endure.

 

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

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Lisa Wilson is the Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of American History at Connecticut College and the author of A History of Stepfamilies in Early America (2014).

 

Seasons of Misery is a great book. I’d like to begin with that comment because we are not meant to fawn in this colloquy; we are meant to open up questions for discussion. And all of my questions that follow really amount to just this: How do we think about early American legacies today? And should we be thinking about them at all?

Let me open those framing questions with two particular moments. The first comes from the famous preface of Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness, where he dismisses Jamestown for lacking coherence—a settlement that cannot serve his purpose as a point of origin for “America” and therefore gets sidelined for a narrative that begins instead with the Puritans in Boston. Miller, as we all know, sought a clear narrative, a comprehensive and coherent legacy, a way to say that early America laid the foundations for the predicaments and possibilities we have today.

Four decades later, David Shields suggested a different sort of project. In a review of several works, he called for and celebrated scholarship that focused on early America without any desire to move beyond it—scholarship that cared about early America on its own and did not treat it as merely the beginning of a better, more interesting, more aesthetically pleasing and intellectually compelling literature or culture that came later. His review marked a dramatic shift in early American literature. Perhaps it had been building for some time, but around 1990 several scholars began more explicitly detaching early America from longer narratives of American literary history. In particular, scholars separated their subject matter from the question of Americanization. The Puritans had always been the prime culprit here with Errand into the Wilderness, Sacvan Bercovitch’s The Puritan Origins of the American Self, and so on. Such work focused primarily on genealogical narratives: origins mattered because they led to today.

Origins matter in Donegan’s work as well, but in a much different way: not because they lead to something else, but because they so often lead nowhere at all. It was the sixth trip to North Carolina that led to the Lost Colony, and all the other attempts failed as well. In the absence of a story leading from the past to the present, what kind of questions can emerge? For Donegan, the key question is not how settlers became American, but rather how they became colonial. Becoming colonial, Donegan shows, is a process of loss with very little gain; it is the disorientation of no longer being English, but not necessarily the new orientation of being something else either. Donegan dwells in the incoherence of Jamestown because it is precisely that lack of coherence which signaled the new formation of colonial (not American) identity. And in so many cases, the result of so much disorientation and incoherence was a suffering that resulted from, and produced, violence; and a violence that led to further suffering. What we see in Donegan’s book is story after story of bewildering confusion and death.

There are two questions I’d like to raise from this account for further discussion. In separating out those first years of settlement from later representations of them, are we interested in what David Shields celebrates: “an early American literature that does away with genealogy”? Or are we in fact still interested in genealogy, guided into the study by misguided genealogies in order to rewrite the story at its start? The Lost Colony, as Donegan demonstrates, is a nice tale we have come to tell that mythologizes and disembodies the misery of the actual experience, making it palatable for a modern audience. What gets lost in the myth of a Lost Colony is the terror of a people who were abandoned yet again in one more failed English attempt at settlement. The story of a Lost Colony, Donegan explains, “replaces the violence that arose from not knowing with a melancholy arising from loss; it disavows a history of failed colonization through a mystery about wandering off into the woods.” Yet in revealing the function of this legend and its mismatch with experience, Donegan seems motivated, in part, by a desire to unmask the myth.

This approach seems clearest in the chapter on Plymouth, where Donegan adeptly demonstrates the difference between the immediate experience of mortality and later representations of it—the way historians recast pilgrim suffering as a sacrifice paving the way for American society. In showing how pilgrim mortality held little meaning in the process of being experienced—that it had not yet been corralled into significance—Donegan rewrites origins as confusion, but she does so specifically because origins still matter: “What follows is a comparison of two kinds of reckoning with catastrophe: the actual disposition of those physical remains left in the wake of death; and the discursive reckoning with those remains in the writing of the colony’s history.” She does both of these well, but what I want to know is this: Is the first kind of study ever enough without the second? And does it ever proceed without the shadow of the second? Or, are we continually drawn back to questions of origins and genealogy, always hopeful, in spite of ourselves, that we can set the record straight?

The second question I have is blatantly unfair and self-serving. In her survey of four sites, Donegan includes two that Perry Miller and others specifically mention and reject: Jamestown and Plymouth. Meanwhile, she does not discuss the site that so much focuses the attention of Miller, Bercovitch, and—I hope in a much different way—me: Boston. Which leads me to this question: Was Boston different? Was it an exception to the general rule of settlement and the general process of becoming colonial? Or did it follow the same patterns? Seasons of Misery in many ways successfully overturns false celebrations of English settlers—showing the way, for example, that later histories portray pilgrim sacrifice as the beginning of something (the seeds of American society), while treating Native American deaths as the end of something. But in reading such accounts I began to wonder if this book made its point so well about its four chosen “chaos zones” that, in an odd way, it justified the choice of Miller and others to start with Boston, to see Boston as a unique kind of origin with potentially different results and ramifications—a place, in short, that was not quite so chaotic.

Almost all scholars today turn away from theses of Puritan origins, and we do not want to re-venture large-scale claims linking Puritans to the whole of American culture or treating them as an exception to general rules. We know the dangers of exceptionalism all too well. But this question about Boston raises a different sort of query: is there a middle ground between an early American literature detached from later American histories and the Miller-Bercovitch-Puritan-origins exceptionalism so largely now debunked? Can we write new genealogical narratives that take the initial incoherences of colonial identity and trace them forward? To put it differently: does becoming colonial tell us, in the end, anything about becoming “American”? It would seem that early America must have some connection to later formations of American self-conceptions, American cultures, and American literatures. And in fact, scholars in Native American studies often now emphasize continuity, the continuing presence—the long links—between then and now, precisely to overturn a prior generation’s use of termination narratives to confine Indians solely in the past. Are we now confining European settlers and their cultures to the past? And should we?

Perhaps we still need to resist the pull of genealogical work and set aside questions of “Americanization” as things inherently misguided and morally dubious. But I am not so sure. Over the last two decades we have passed through a positive period—where scholars reasserted the significance of early American literatures and cultures in their own right; now, perhaps, we may want to find new ways of writing long stories that link early American literatures to later traditions of American literary history. After all, I’d suggest, those longer narratives are seemingly always implied—seemingly always in the background—even when a good book like Donegan’s focuses so acutely and perceptively on the first, flawed, incoherent experiences of English settlers.

 

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

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Carried away by “an inundation of Yankee furniture,” New Orleans cabinetmaker Thomas P. Willard announced in an Orleans Gazette advertisement of June 7, 1820, that he had “landed in the wooden country in the Parish of St. Helena where he can make the article of Bedsteads as cheap as the Yankees, and much more adapted to the taste of the Louisianians” (fig. 1). Willard’s notice reflects early mythologizing of an opportunistic Yankee versus genteel Southern Cavalier or aristocratic planter. (A history existed by the Civil War era that the North had been settled by Puritan Roundheads and the South by English Cavaliers, speaking to an English-inspired cultural divide.) Willard’s ad further points to the dramatic increase in imported northeastern goods to the port of New Orleans following the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and simultaneously highlights a contemporary demand for furniture specifically appealing to local taste. As one might infer from Willard’s exasperation with the flood of “Yankee” goods, some surviving Louisiana-made furniture of his era evinces northeastern influence.

Early fine furniture of the Deep South is just beginning to be discovered and appreciated by American historians for its relationship to social and political history. In spring 2009, sixty years after Joseph Downs, American Wing curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, quipped that “little of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore,” in his lecture Regional Characteristics in American Furniture, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation announced its savvy acquisition of an unmatched Louisiana Creole inlaid mahogany armoire, ca. 1810-30 (fig. 2). “Creole,” from the Latin verb creare (to breed), derives from the Spanish criollo or more directly from the Portuguese crioulo, meaning native to locality; as an adjective it generally refers to people or products native to the New World or to people of Old World parentage, and much later to those of mixed African and European origins. The term also applies to aspects of material culture, including architecture and crafts. The intermingling of stylistic influences apparent in objects like this armoire has given rise to the newly defined “Creole style,” reflecting a fusion of French, French Canadian, West Indian, African, and Anglo-American aesthetic tastes.

 

This cabriole-leg armoire was likely constructed for a wealthy planter or merchant by a French émigré or by one of thousands of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) refugees who arrived from Cuba in the wake of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Between 1791 and 1812, following the revolution, the number of émigrés arriving in New Orleans from Saint-Domingue surpassed 15,000. Several thousand more lighted on Baltimore, Philadelphia, Norfolk and New York. Surviving New Orleans indenture contracts show that Saint-Dominguans frequently entered the cabinetmaking trade. Made to furnish a stately Vieux Carré (or French Quarter) townhouse or outlying plantation manse, the armoire, crafted after French models, evokes Louisiana’s Gallic heritage. Heavily decorated with typical American Federal inlay patterns (including a neoclassical urn), this cabinet underscores an old guard French Creole populace’s well-documented resistance—if gradual acquiescence—to the rapid phase of Americanization following the Louisiana Purchase. For example, American eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century furniture crafted outside of Louisiana is often “inlaid” (as opposed to painted or carved), meaning that pieces of contrasting wood or other material are set into its surfaces to form decorative patterns. In Louisiana, most furniture remained unembellished and the appearance of fashionable neoclassical designs on locally made armoires heralded an influx of Anglo-Americans and imports.

 

Discovered in a Natchez, Mississippi, antiques store in the 1970s, Williamsburg’s armoire remained in a private collection until recently placed on museum display. Elegantly poised on traditional French carved pieds de biche (deer feet), it stands apart from any other known wardrobe (or clothes press)—painted, inlaid, or carved—crafted in this country during the Federal era. In comparison with the many that have been documented in and around New Orleans, its façade is far more extravagant, with lively patterns that scarcely permit the eye to rest. The frieze is festooned clear across with seven inlaid three-tiered swags with dainty checkered string bows suspending bellflower tassels. The doors’ figured mahogany surfaces bear four fictive panels defined by satinwood borders and barber-pole banding, all surrounded with a guilloche pattern of treble stringing. A center or “false” stile (door divider) is decorated above with a serpent-handled urn from which erupts a leafy vine with red berries; below is an elegant inlaid strapwork pattern calling to mind eighteenth-century fretwork. (These stile inlays are incongruous in appearance with other patterning on the piece, as well as on other Louisiana examples. This may indicate the use of stock inlay on the rest of the piece with an original pattern devised for the stile.) Canted stiles are inlaid with acanthus leaves and stringing. Finally, original brass fiche or “French” hinges allow the doors to open fully, revealing an interior belt of drawers whose skirt echoes the external apron.

While nothing is known of its history prior to its twentieth-century life, it is probable that the cabinet was crafted in the Vieux Carré, where dozens of cabinetmakers produced related pieces in the first few decades after the Purchase. While noted in the extensive armoire catalogue of the new regional study, Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735-1835, it has remained unexamined in any methodical way. It challenges us to peer more closely, re-considering not only details of inlay and construction, but the cabinet’s relationship to its counterparts. What might it teach us about the history, local use, and craftsmanship of such cabinets?

 

Armoires have been in use since antiquity. The word armoire is derived from the Latin word armarium, meaning a place for storing arms. The related terms armoire, armarie, aumaire, and almaire all abound in French literary references, many of which are listed in the entry on the topic in Henry Havard’s classic tome, Dictionnaire de L’Ameublement et de la decoration, Vol. 1. One of the earliest depictions appears in a Ravenna mosaic at the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia (425-450 CE) (fig. 3). A mosaic lunette shows the Roman martyr St. Lawrence near a flaming gridiron. Nearby stands a cabinet, its doors open to reveal the Gospels resting on shelves within.

One may still hear such wardrobes called “armers” in the Deep South, where they were ubiquitous in an era before built-in closets and pantries became de rigeur. An ad in the New Orleans Louisiana Advertiser of December 6, 1827, for “Bedsteads, Armours, &c.—Received per brig Ivory Lord, an invoice of high-post Bedsteads, Armours, &c. for sale by C.D. Jordan, 35 Gravier street” seems to confirm the duration of such regional pronunciation as well as the importation of these objects from the northeast (fig. 4). The similarity of the word “Armours” to amour humorously reminds us of countless dramas in which hapless lovers are forced to hide inside such cabinets, a scene captured by Jean-Honore Fragonard in his print L’Armoire of 1778 (fig. 5).

For example, Louis Aragon’s Surrealist play L’Armoire à glace un beau soir (“The mirrored armoire one fine evening,” 1923), takes an armoire as its focal point and begins with a husband Jules returning home to find his wife Lénore guarding a wardrobe. The play takes as its main action the escalating conflict between the couple over the hidden contents of the armoire, presented as a metaphor for female and domestic interiority. In his analysis of Aragon’s play, Gray Read calls the armoire “a ridiculous object, an errant house within the house that modern architects tried to eliminate by designing built-in closets integral to the wall.” While Aragon’s modern play points to his central prop’s anachronistic qualities, the cabinet remains a classic feature in a timeless drama of illicit love. More traditionally, armoires are associated with marriage and the establishment of household. In keeping with European custom, the friezes of Louisiana armoires are occasionally inlaid with ciphers that personalize them. Such monograms, as well as other pictorial patterns, sometimes derive directly from silver engraving books of the period.

 

In the 1930s and 1940s, before their historic value was generally recognized, antique Louisiana armoires could be purchased for as little as forty dollars. Sparked in part by the Colonial Revival that was so popular at the turn of the twentieth century, interest in such artifacts gained ascendance among collectors and scholars throughout the United States. Today the appearance on the market of an inlaid Louisiana armoire is quite rare. A catalogue of extant examples would include the finely preserved cabinets featured in various private and museum collections. Ideally, it would include others that are often overlooked by scholars, cabinets in poor condition or that have been the object of heavy restoration. Even if not worthy of exhibition, such careworn pieces have scholarly value. Under careful examination by experts, they reveal clues that support the research of our most well-preserved and sophisticated surviving period furniture. For example, while for many decades the Williamsburg armoire was unconnected with other examples, it may now be confirmed to have siblings from the same workshop. Since the related examples are not fully intact, they went unrecognized until the preparation of this article.

 

First, at Destrehan Plantation, originally established on the Mississippi’s winding River Road in the eighteenth century, there remains an armoire bearing a frieze that precisely matches that of the Williamsburg cabinet (fig. 6). The inlay treatment was clearly produced by the same hand, though perhaps the craftsman used a stock pattern. Seven swags (six three-lobed swags with half-patterns at either end) embellish the frieze. Though some of this armoire is replaced, including the doors and cornice, the back panel is original and its vertical members bear beaded edges.

A second related cherry armoire in a private collection bears a frieze of the same swag treatment and the back’s vertical members have beaded edges, too (fig. 7). The apron of this armoire bears an inlaid acanthus flanked by oval-shaped stringing patterns echoing the Williamsburg apron. Highly refined legs on all three bear the same profile. These details exemplify how specific modes of construction used by craftsmen in particular workshops help us to link their works together. By grouping the details of frieze inlays, legs, and beaded edges, we can safely attribute the three aforementioned armoires or “Williamsburg group” to the same shop.

 

To date, only one other piece is known to have a similar inlay pattern: a Creole headboard now in the New Orleans Museum of Art (fig. 8). Bearing a single swag at its center, its arched crest echoes Spanish baroque cathedral facades found in colonial Mexico. Together with its Anglo-American inlay, it speaks to the amalgamation of cultural influences in the Lower Mississippi River Valley.

Until the three objects surfaced, the Williamsburg armoire stood alone. It had been loosely associated with the so-called “Butterfly Man” group, consisting of about twenty-six known armoires, of which eleven are inlaid. (This anonymous craftsman’s cabinets are named for the consistent appearance of a butterfly or “flying Dutchman” interior patch, applied to reinforce the glue joints of the side panels.) The identity of the Butterfly Man is a mystery, yet at least one local inlay maker, George Dewhurst of 29 Bourbon Street, would have been well-versed in Anglo-American patterns from Boston to Lexington, Kentucky, to Baltimore, places he lived as he migrated south.

All of the Butterfly Man armoires strongly resemble one made for Stephen Girard (1750-1831) of Philadelphia in 1796 by Saint-Domingue émigrés Jean-Baptiste Laurent and Charles Domballe, suggesting that the Butterfly Man hailed from Saint-Domingue, too (fig. 9). Girard, Philadelphia’s most prominent trader, was a merchant, banker, and philanthropist and one of the four wealthiest Americans at the time of his death. He bankrolled the War of 1812 and financed the first national bank in Philadelphia, then the capital. That the Laurent-Domballe armoire was made for him for a payment of eighty dollars provides only a slight hint of his involvement in the Saint-Domingue economy and extensive network of cargo ships moving goods among ports at Bordeaux, New York, New Orleans, Cap-Français, and Havana. Girard’s household collection, still largely intact, remains on display at Girard College, which he founded, and includes china from Canton and Nanking where he also traded.

 

The similarity of the Butterfly Man’s handiwork and the Williamsburg group to that of Laurent and Domballe’s work is unsurprising. Importantly, the Williamsburg armoire is distinguished from the Butterfly group by particular construction details: a different cornice profile, more attenuated legs (minus a notch at the knee), and the lack of the characteristic butterfly-shaped patches on the interior walls. Further, the Williamsburg group’s inlaid swags are three-tiered and the Butterfly Man group bears two-tiered examples. Finally, profuse and detailed inlay patterns, including the serpent-handled urn, differentiate the Williamsburg armoire from the Butterfly group, which is decorated with more restraint.

Regardless of who the inlay maker was, the cases of the Butterfly Man and Williamsburg group were probably crafted by one of the manygens de couleur libres (“free men of color,” the descendants of free Africans and mixed peoples) who practiced cabinetmaking in New Orleans. While no invoices survive, a rare Courrier de la Louisiane advertisement placed by cabinetmaker Philippe August in August 1808 offers for sale his entire inventory of mahogany and cherry wood furniture including 16 clothes presses (armoires) and a number of bedsteads and tables (fig. 10). In addition, August sold one lot of cherry wood and his chest of carpenter’s tools, including saws, benches, a holdfast, a turner’s wheel, and, importantly, inlay-related materials. Identified in the local notary Narcisse Broutin’s act of August 1808 as “un homme de couleur libre,” August may have been one of the considerable influx of Saint-Domingue émigrés of mixed racial parentage. While there is no firm link between August and the objects discussed here, his advertisement presents a tantalizing possibility.

 

It is worthwhile to consider the Williamsburg armoire as a foil to a more provincial cherry and cypress cabinet (ca. 1815) long part of a Louisiana collection. It is also exuberantly inlaid though less sophisticated in execution overall (fig. 11). A rustic version of Colonial Williamsburg’s “high-style” Creole armoire, it may represent the work of one of the many Anglo immigrants (les Americains) to Louisiana. For example, the War of 1812 brought a contingent of troops from Kentucky (“Kaintucks”), some of whom remained in New Orleans and entered various trades; cabinetmakers would have replicated what they discovered in local woodworking in their own style. If it was crafted elsewhere, Louisiana French influence seems apparent.

Recessed-panel doors are dramatically outlined in barber-pole inlay. Eight paterae punctuate the stiles, skirt, and false stile. Intriguingly, the frieze consisting of an elaborate strapwork pattern is interrupted by a later addition of a wooden roundel, which stands proud of the armoire’s surface. Inlaid into its surface is a leafy vine, as well as a calligraphic flourish in the center, perhaps meant to be a cipher. The leafy vine visible in the roundel at top is also inlaid into the apron. It is probable that both the roundel and its matching decoration on the skirt were later additions, perhaps meant to satisfy the purposes of a subsequent owner who wished to add ornament or to personalize the previously owned object. It is worthwhile to consider that patterns of ownership led to alterations in embellishment, adding to an object’s rich texture and historical resonance.

 

A bespoke piece, Colonial Williamsburg’s Louisiana Creole armoire represents the zenith of Louisiana antebellum craftsmanship, itself supported by a booming economy of sugar cane and cotton production. New Orleans’ tri-caste racial society of whites and Creoles, free people of color, and slaves, together with transplanted “Yankee” craftsmen, all contributed in various ways to its genesis. Careful detective work in surviving plantation homes and private collections has revealed two related cabinets, newly establishing the Williamsburg armoire as part of a yet unidentified workshop’s series. Divested of contents for permanent exhibition, this cabinet still opens to reveal salient details of construction that enlarge our understanding of its origin, production, and use.

 

Further reading

For detailed discussion about the polarities between Creoles and Americans see Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Lodgson. Creole New Orleans, Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge, 1992). Related terminology is defined in Jay Dearborn Edwards and Nicolas Kariouk Pecquet du Bellay de Verton, A Creole Lexicon: Architecture, Landscape, People (Baton Rouge, 2004). See also Rolph Trouillot and Thomas Fiehrer, eds. Who/What is Creole? especially “Culture on the Edges: Creolization in the Plantation Context” (New York, 1999): 8-28; See also Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2008); Karen L. Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011); William R. Taylor, “Cavalier and Yankee: Synthetic Stereotypes” in Myth and Southern History, Vol. 1: The Old South, Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, eds. (Champaign, Ill., 1989): 133-144; Allison Burkette, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Armoire: Lexical Variation in Case Furniture Terms,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 33 (2007): 315-339.

Recent works about Louisiana furniture include Jack D. Holden, H. Parrott Bacot & Cybèle T. Gontar with Brian J. Costello and Francis J. Puig, Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735-1835 (New Orleans, 2010); Cybèle T. Gontar, “The Butterfly Man of New Orleans: A Rare Group of Creole Style Armoires Identified.” The Magazine Antiques 173:5 (May 2008): 136-145; Cybèle T. Gontar “Furniture Collecting in Louisiana.” Antiques and Fine Art (Summer 2010): 206-213; Gontar, “The Campeche Chair in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Metropolitan Museum Journal, 38 (2003): 183-212; Gontar, “Spanish Chairs in the New Republic,” The Magazine Antiques 176:4 (Summer 2010): 78-82.

For an overview of local architecture see Malcolm Heard, French Quarter Manual: An Architectural Guide to New Orleans’ Vieux Carré (New Orleans, 2000); Jessie Poesch and Barbara Sorelle Bacot, Louisiana Buildings, 1720-1940 (Baton Rouge, 1997); and Creole Houses, Traditional Homes of Old Louisiana. (New York, 2007).

On Stephen Girard see: Wendy Caroline Wick, “Stephen Girard: A Patron of the Philadelphia Furniture Trade,” (M.A. Univ. Delaware, 1977); Albert J. Gares, “Stephen Girard’s West Indian Trade, 1789-1812,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 72:4 (October 1948): 311-342; and George Wilson, Stephen Girard: America’s First Millionaire (New York, 1996).

Other sources include: Gray Read, “Aragon’s Armoire,” in Surrealism and Architecture, Thomas Mical, ed. (London, 2005): 31-40; Joachim Poeschke, Italian Mosaics, 300-1300, trans. by Russell Stockman, (New York and London, 2010): 108-119, plates 31 and 34; Louis Aragon, L’armoire à glace un beau soir, in L. Aragon, ed., Le Libertinage (Paris, 1924), trans. Jo Levy (London, 1995); Pierre Verlet, French Furniture of the Eighteenth Century, trans. Penelope Hunter-Stiebel. (Charlottesville, Va., 1991); Estill Curtis Pennington, “Chaste Taste: Decorative Motifs in Early Kentucky Furniture,” Kentucky Historical Society Chronicle (Summer 2009): 15-34; Frances Hayden Rhodes, “Yes, Mr. Downs, There are decorative arts south of Baltimore:” A Story of a Statement and its Repercussions, 1949-1997. A research essay presented to the Members of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, March 14-15, 1997.

Another source is a Worth Point podcast with Martin Willis and Susan Doherty.

The author thanks David Jaffee, Steven Huber, Thomas Fiehrer, Tara Chicirda, Stephen Latta, Edward Polk Douglas, and Nancy J. Roberts for their kind assistance.

 

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

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Cybèle Gontar teaches art history at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and is a principal author ofFurnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735-1835 (2010).

 

 

It is, for the two main characters, one of the more tedious moments in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck and Jim are saddled with the self-styled “Duke” and “Dauphin,” a pair of rogues who fleece the denizens of Mississippi River towns any way they can, among them selling tickets for bogus Shakespeare performances and then skipping town before those denizens can execute their plans to exact revenge. One night after a particularly good haul, Huck and Jim enjoy a rare moment of respite from the increasingly imperious demands of the sleeping hucksters, and converse quietly on their raft.

“Don’t it ‘sprise you, de way dem kings carries on, Huck?”

“No,” I says, “it don’t.”

“Why don’t it, Huck?”

“Well, it don’t, because it’s in the breed. I reckon they’re all alike.”

“But, Huck, dese kings o’ ourn is reglar rapscallions; dat’s jist what dey is; dey’s reglar rapscallions.”

“Well, that’s what I’m a-saying; all kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.”

“Is dat so?”

“You read about them once—you’ll see.”

Huck is speaking rhetorically here. Even if there was an obvious way to do so, Jim wouldn’t read about them, because he can’t: He’s illiterate and he’s a slave. Depending on his location, learning to read would be discouraged if not illegal (not that it would likely stop Huck from teaching Jim, even if, as his current state of mind in harboring a fugitive suggests, he’d be afflicted with guilt about it).

But Huck is literate. We’re told early in the book that he attended school regularly over a period of months, to the point where the tough-loving Widow Douglas, who’s raising him with her sister Miss Watson, says he was “coming along slow but sure, and doing very satisfactory.” She’s not even embarrassed by him anymore, he reports. Indeed, Huck’s education might well have continued a good deal longer had not his n’er-do-well pap returned. Irritated to learn that his son has been in school, pap demands that he read a book. Huck obliges with “something about George Washington and the wars.” Appalled, his father knocks the volume away. “If I catch you about that school I’ll tan you good,” he says. “First you know you’ll get religion, too. I never see such a son.”

To some extent, however, the damage has already been done. Huck summarizes the state of his education this way: he “could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don’t reckon I could ever get any further than if I was to live forever. I don’t take no stock in mathematics, anyway.”

But he does take stock in history. There’s an unmistakable overtone of pride as he proceeds to explain to Jim why kings of all kinds are mostly rapscallions: “My, you ought to seen old Henry the Eight when he was in bloom. Hewas a blossom. He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head next morning.” Huck not only conflates the factual story of Henry VIII with a fictional one from The Arabian Nights; he then goes on to attribute William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book to his Tudor successor a half-millennia later. He also confuses him with George III in the following capsule summary of the American Revolution:

Well, Henry he takes a notion he wants to get up some trouble with this country. How does he go at it—give notice—give the country a show? No. All of a sudden he heaves all the tea in Boston Harbor overboard, and whacks out a declaration of independence, and dares them to come on. That washis style—he never give anybody a chance.

Jim listens attentively to this lecture. But the pupil doesn’t understand why the particular king he’s currently stuck with smells so much. (“We can’t help the way a king smells; history don’t tell no way,” Huck replies.) Jim notes that the Duke is less troublesome than the Dauphin pretender to the throne of France. But, he concludes, “I doan’ hanker for no mo’ un um, Huck. Dese is all I kin scan’.” Huck agrees. “But we’ve got them on our hands, and we got to remember what they are, and make allowances. Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.” Huck then goes to sleep, leaving Jim on watch as the raft courses the river. He later observes that Jim did not wake him when it was Huck’s turn to cover.

 

This anecdote is funny on so many levels—and so moving in its conclusion—that it would be ham-fisted to try and unpack the reasons why. For our purposes, what matters is the way a sense of history informs the way these two people decide how to handle the situation in which they find themselves. They’re going to make “allowances,” even if neither believes that the Duke or the Dauphin are using the authority they’ve arrogated to themselves legitimately. For Jim, such a conclusion is largely the result of moral criteria and situational pragmatism. These considerations are at work for Huck as well, but he also self-consciously applies the lessons of history, for his sake as well as Jim’s, and both make an active decision to abide by that lesson, at least for the time being.

Rarely, however, has a history lesson been so evidently garbled. Of course the key word in the previous sentence is “evidently”: in fact, such garbling takes place many multiple times every single day. That’s because most people aren’t Ph.Ds in history, or history majors. Most have not even taken a history course since finishing high school (if indeed they took one there). It’s also because those who have enjoyed such privileges have nevertheless been subjected to bad teachers, inaccurate information, or changing generational sensibilities (if not all three). A sophisticated grasp of history is the exception, not the rule, and one thing that defines a sophisticated grasp of history is a consciousness of the way that the past keeps changing, both in terms of how it’s interpreted and the information available. Yesterday’s common sense is tomorrow’s myth, and history is perpetually in between.

Not that this stops any of us from using history. We couldn’t stop even if we tried, even if we’re told, and accept, that the very concept of a “lesson” is epistemologically suspect. A sense of time is as deeply human as a sense of place—or, for that matter, a sense of smell. It orients us. A person who believes, out of some inevitable combination of lived experience and received wisdom, that you can’t fight City Hall is likely to act differently than someone who thinks that history (U.S. history, anyway) is a story of progress, even if the actions of either person in light of such beliefs will not be entirely predictable.

This is not an argument for historical primitivism. As with many things, informed instincts, conscious thoughts, yield results that we experience as better, just as such disciplined attention can help one blow a horn or swing a bat with greater grace and efficiency. I realize this is not a self-evident truth, and that indeed across time and space many people have argued that intellectualizing experience can actually get in the way and impair our experience of the world. Indeed, one of the painful joys of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is watching a child unlearn a 200-year-old lesson that it’s wrong to steal someone else’s (human) property.

Though it may appear so, I don’t believe the satiric exchange I’ve cited here finally condemns the value of a formal education, historical or otherwise. However appallingly inept, Huckleberry Finn learned, with the help of books about “George Washington and the wars,” that kings are rapscallions. Thomas Jefferson, who cared deeply that the next generation of Americans be educated in the ways of republican virtue, would surely be satisfied with—in fact he explicitly argued in favor of propounding—this historical judgment, notwithstanding Huck’s attribution of his Declaration of Independence to Henry VIII. But hey, nobody’s perfect, least of all Jefferson.

 

To be sure, Huck’s reading of history confirms both his beliefs and his experience. History almost always does. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing; sometimes, as in this case, it’s helpful to get reassurance. I’m willing to believe that you pay close attention to versions of history with which you strongly disagree. I’m also willing to bet that it doesn’t happen all that often. But even when we place ourselves outside the cozy confines of our predispositions, the limits of the human ability to apprehend reality means that there will always be loose ends, unanswered questions, and subversive propositions in the stories of the past that we tell and hear. It’s these things that give history its vitality, its kick. And there’s always the possibility that the holes in our stories can keep us honest.

Of course, staying honest may seem like the least of our worries. To teach history is to live with two other discomforting realities. The first is that one must almost always ply one’s trade aware of one’s minority status—that with the possible exception of your colleagues, you spend most of your time among people who know, and likely care, less than you do about the past. You never know for sure if your students are actually performing the tasks you’ve decided are in their best interests, and, notwithstanding the chimeras of assessment that beguile those enchanted by a dream of empirical accountability, you never know for sure if they’ve actually mastered what you hope they have for any longer than the time it takes to complete an exam (if that long).

The other reality is that while you like to think of yourself as part of a community of scholars, more often than not that community is virtual, only fleetingly glimpsed at conferences, or on the pages of publications like this one, whose importance may well be as much psychological as they are intellectual. To a perhaps surprising degree, our labors are reminiscent of a group of people whose work historians have been tireless in deconstructing in recent decades: missionaries. The gospel we spread is finally a matter of faith, if not in terms of content we know to be true, then certainly in terms of our confidence that our efforts to spread it will bear fruit.

And so we soldier on. But if our goals can only be partially realized at best, they may yet be all the more sweet for precisely that reason. In a time when many of us feel the walls of empire inexorably closing in, we may find satisfaction in the knowledge that for a society born of revolution, there are consequences in condoning and even encouraging children in the belief that kings are rapscallions. There’s always the hope those lessons will persist whatever regime may be in power, and be furthered by those, like Jim, who hear them expressed implicitly and explicitly, often when it’s assumed no one is listening. Huck is wrong on the facts and right on the truth when he expresses the wish for “a country that’s out of kings.” There were still kings in Mark Twain’s time; there are still kings in ours. But where there’s history, there’s hope. It’s just a question of where you look for it.With this essay, I complete my labors as columnist and editor for The Common School feature of Common-Place. I do so in effect coming full circle; three years after publishing my first piece for the magazine, “National Character,” on Daniel Day-Lewis as historian, I have decided to embark on a book-length exploration of the issues I raised in that piece (and this one). I am grateful to Ed Gray and Cathy Kelly, editors of Common-Place, and especially to administrative editor Trudy Powers. It has been one of the great privileges of my career to be a part of this community of readers and writers. —JC

 

This article originally appeared in issue 11.2 (January, 2011).

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Jim Cullen teaches history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (2003) and other books. The following piece is from a work-in-progress, currently titled “Sensing History: Hollywood Actors as Historians.”

Between January 2002 and April 2003, the interpretation and future of the Liberty Bell and of the Philadelphia property occupied in turn by presidents George Washington and John Adams changed fundamentally and permanently. The official story of the Liberty Bell was newly imbued with social and political context. As a result, the site of Philadelphia’s presidential mansion, which was rented for the purpose from financier Robert Morris, may become a fully interpreted landmark for the first time in its history. Visitors on their way to the new Liberty Bell Center would move across the footprint of the Presidents House, buried since the 1950s under the mall’s public ladies room. What is more, the story told within the house would include not only Washington, Adams, and the development of the presidency, but also and especially the stories of eight enslaved Africans who lived there in bondage to Washington, including two who escaped, one with the help of Philadelphia’s free black community. The real breakthrough is that these would not be told as separate stories but as one. On the very doorstep of the Liberty Bell, and within the Liberty Bell Center itself, visitors would see and experience the troubling interdependence of slavery and freedom in the lives of the founding generation, black and white, and in the nation that emerged from their work. This is all possible, but there is no guarantee at this moment that it will happen. People who have been deeply involved differ profoundly on how the changes came about, on whether the new plan can be considered a success, and on what the whole struggle will mean for this site and others in the future.

How did Independence National Historical Park become the location for what may become the most powerful commemoration of the impact, achievements, and aspirations of people held in slavery ever built in the United States? And what remains to be done to ensure that the commemoration happens, that the content is accurate, and that this site does not become a solitary aberration on the margin of the “traditional” American story? These questions confront everyone involved in the process, and the answers depend upon what view one takes of what has happened so far.

From one perspective, an extraordinary David and Goliath drama unfolded in 2002, as a spontaneously organized group of historians and citizens, self-appointed to safeguard the integrity of this major historic site, took on the Park Service and changed its course. From another standpoint, the story concerns a team of hard-working, well-meaning public servants making practical decisions that made sense, only to be sideswiped by an eruption of public passion. From a third point of view, what happened is that African Americans suffered yet another enormous official betrayal, and can prevent a worse one only by organizing themselves and mobilizing both media and congressional attention. The affair makes fascinating public history because all these versions are true already, and the process is still unfolding. More important, had any element of the story been missing, the affair would have ended quickly in frustration and disappointment instead of enduring to produce a promising draft design and the possibility of a new relationship between the park and the city, as well as between the nation and its history.

The story began in 1790, when President Washington, preparing to move to Philadelphia from New York, corresponded extensively with his secretary, Tobias Lear, about modifications he wanted made to Robert Morris’s house to accommodate his needs. Those letters, tucked away in the archives for two centuries, contain details of what the house looked like before and during the Washingtons’ stay there and outline specific architectural changes made for the first president. They also refer to Washington’s plans for housing the members of his “family,” a term that in the eighteenth century meant his kin and dependents, including enslaved people whom he, following another eighteenth-century convention, routinely referred to as “servants.” Washington and Lear discussed building a new servants’ hall in the rear of the main house for four stable hands, three enslaved black men, and one free white man, and housing others, including Martha’s enslaved maid, Oney Judge, within the main building.

 

In 1974, historians at Independence National Historical Park confirmed in an internal report that President Washington had held slaves while in Philadelphia, both at the presidential mansion on Market Street and at the Deshler-Morris House in Germantown. But the story did not reach the public. When the park began its efforts to redesign the mall in the early 1990s, park officials decided to move the Liberty Bell to a new location close to the site of the presidential mansion, but to do only minor interpretation of the mansion and none at all of its enslaved occupants. Park staff felt that visitors responded to the story of the Liberty Bell on its own, and that adding the presidential story or the history of slavery would just muddy the message.

At about the same time, however, a history buff named Edward Lawler, taking some relatives on a tour of Independence Park, informed his guests that Philadelphia had been the nation’s capital during the 1790s. Pointing out the locations where Congress and the Supreme Court had done their work, Lawler was frustrated and embarrassed not to be able to locate the “White House.” That frustration started Lawler on a painstaking search that eventually led to the rediscovery of Tobias Lear’s letters, the reconstruction of the probable footprint of the Presidents House, and the realization that the front door of the planned new Liberty Bell Center would stand upon the site of the Washington slave quarters. Lawler’s work on the Philadelphia mansion has since won the endorsement of scholars at Mount Vernon, the White House Historical Association, and elsewhere. He shared his research on the house and the presence of enslaved people within it with Independence Park historians, and then in January 2002 published key portions of his analysis in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, the flagship journal of The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

There things might have stayed, except for a rapid and fortuitous concatenation of circumstance and opportunity. Dr. Gary B. Nash of UCLA, who had read Lawler’s article and then come through Philadelphia on a book tour, spurred interested local scholars and institutional leaders to join an ad hoc advisory group that he and Professor Randall Miller of St. Joseph’s University formed. While a citizen’s advisory group, the Independence Hall Association, developed a Website to spread the word about Lawler’s research and sponsored an Internet petition asking the park to rethink its approach to the site, the ad hoc group of scholars offered to assist the park in developing the content for a new interpretation. Nash mentioned Lawler’s research and criticized the park in public appearances and on the radio, creating at once a widening circle of public awareness and considerable resentment among park staff. Stephan Salisbury, a reporter on the city desk at the Philadelphia Inquirer, heard about the issue, decided to read Lawler’s article, and with Inga Saffron, Inquirer architecture writer, wrote a story for the front page of the Sunday paper about Washington’s slaves, the Liberty Bell Center, and the opportunity that was at hand to blend the stories of slavery and freedom right on Independence Mall.

That article, two successive pieces on the Sunday front page, and two op-ed pieces by Dr. Charlene Mires, historian at Villanova University, and Nash and Miller, definitively made the story a public matter. African Americans in Philadelphia and around the country responded with frank outrage. Active work by community leaders, including lawyer Michael Coard, historians Dr. Charles Blockson and Dr. Shirley Parham, activist Sukarnee Rhodes, and others led in the spring of 2002 to the creation of the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC). ATAC sponsored an extensive letter-writing campaign, prepared for a demonstration at the Market Street site, and contacted Philadelphia’s congressional delegation, demanding that the story of enslaved people in the Presidents House get the attention it deserved.

In response to the public and scholarly outcry, National Park Service officials asked Independence Park to address the weaknesses of its approach to both the bell and the Presidents House. Beginning in the early 1990s, Park Service policy had explicitly embraced the interpretation of controversial historical subjects, including Native American history and the history of slavery. Under the leadership of Dwight Pitcaithley, chief historian for the Park Service, and supported by a collaborative agreement with the Organization of American Historians, individual sites were encouraged to reach out to scholars and communities in order to enrich or correct their interpretations. These resources were now put at the disposal of Independence Park.

 

Meetings of park staff with the ad hoc historians and other scholars invited in through the OAH connection secured a revision of interpretation for the Liberty Bell site, moving away from an exhibit that featured the bell as a self-evidently significant artifact and implied that liberty in the United States was an accomplished fact. The revised approach came to include the social and cultural meanings given to the bell by abolitionists, suffragists, and others–then and now–as they struggled, in the words of the Preamble of the Constitution, to “secure the blessings of liberty to [them]selves and [their] posterity.” But interpretation at the Presidents House site remained in limbo through the early summer of 2002, even as construction on and near the site went forward.

In July, riding the strength of its successful letter-writing campaign, ATAC staged a public demonstration at the Presidents House site. Congressman Chaka Fattah from Philadelphia responded by introducing an amendment to the Department of the Interior’s budget resolution calling for the Park Service to address the Presidents House, and requiring that Independence Park submit a design for interpretation of the site by March 2003. INHP commissioned designers Laurie Olin and Vince Ciulla, then invited several of the outside groups to send one representative each to advise the designers on the history of the Presidents House site. That group worked diligently over several months discussing the site and rethinking designs and, in January 2003, unveiled a draft design to the public at the African American Museum of Philadelphia.

The draft design, which can be viewed online at the Website of the Independence Hall Association, has a number of path-breaking features, including monumental statuary evoking enslavement and emancipation, stories of the eight people enslaved there by the Washingtons, structural and textual evocations of the role and importance of Philadelphia’s free black community, and clever spatial and narrative integration of those stories with the diplomatic and political histories of the two presidencies. The centerpiece of the design is a long wall snaking through the site, representing the uncertain boundary between enslavement and freedom and telling the stories of both on panels along its length.

But the design quickly became embroiled in a conflict that has powerful implications for the practice of inclusive public history. Any official version of the history of an injustice becomes a ready target for accumulated anger and grief, while the process of developing historical interpretation offers few openings for usefully addressing those powerful emotions. At the January presentation, the Park Service team blundered into this maelstrom. Their clumsy attempts to control the tenor of the debate were met with direct, even loud, personal abuse. In heated language, people assailed the process by which the draft design had come into being. Despite the considerable involvement of African American historian Dr. Clement Price and Michael Coard of ATAC, other African Americans in the audience had felt excluded and argued for restarting the whole design process. Impassioned voices demanded assurance that African Americans would not have to fight so hard for their history the next time, and that the African American community would not be required to fund the installation. A final group of speakers demanded that a far larger share of the park’s building contracts be awarded to African American contractors.

While these demands sounded like distractions to many members of the audience, to those who espoused them they represented essential signs of good faith, without which it would be irrelevant to examine details of the draft design. People expressed profound unease over all that the imperfect process confirmed about the past and portended for the future. To those with such concerns, the specific merits of the draft design and the park’s timetable for getting the work done were the distractions.

At the time of this writing, the future of the draft design and indeed of interpretation of the Presidents House remains in limbo, suspended by internal divisions in both the activist and scholarly communities. Those who generally support the design are divided over specific content, aspects of fencing and traffic through the site, and how best to mark the location of the slave quarters. And the crucial division remains, growing wider and more personal, between those willing to respect the park’s timetable and make sure that a groundbreaking installation gets built, even if it is imperfect, and those who feel that the betrayals built into the design process are too deep to ignore, even at the risk of indefinitely delaying, or losing the installation itself. Meanwhile, Congress has begun its annual appropriations discussions and the Park continues to build, planning to open the new Liberty Bell Center as close to schedule as possible. For Philadelphia, for the participants, for history, and for justice, much hangs upon the outcome–not least the question of whether failure to find an answer will plant deeper seeds of bitterness between blacks and whites, between scholars and public historians, and between those who have given so much time and energy to the process and the constituencies they tried to represent.

But even without knowing the outcome, there are lessons here of the first importance for the practice of public history. One is Marshall McLuhan’s long-ago assertion that the medium is the message, or the much older wisdom that the ends cannot justify the means. With stories as charged as American slavery, where emotion is as real as reason, there are no shortcuts to good public history. Those involved in revising interpretation at the park tried hard to work within a very tight timetable because the construction was so far along before the controversies emerged into the public eye. As a result, the process became crucially constructed by and for people empowered to speak for others by racial, class, or educational privilege. Independence Park itself bears significant responsibility for the initial delays and subsequent urgency. But it hardly matters for public historians where the responsibility lies in this specific case. Every museum, every historic site, every interpretive process has faced or will face its own version of the same situation. When something of desperate importance erupts upon a process already well underway and accountable to a deadline, what is a public historian to do?

The story of Independence Park suggests two answers, one reactive and one preventative. We can learn from Independence Park’s struggle that, once caught between the irresistible force and the immovable object, public historians should take no half measures. With an issue of such importance, the smartest response is to swallow hard, give in, stop the presses, and roll up our sleeves. In part this is simply tactical wisdom. But a willingness to stop has a deeper philosophical legitimacy as well. History is a living process because human knowledge of the past is always contingent and the timetables of its recovery remain random. If contingency is built into the nature of the material we interpret, then we need to be willing to let the past surprise, unsettle, and delay us. When some neglected piece of the story turns up bleeding upon our doorstep, we do not have the right to tell it to come back during business hours. The people we serve–past, present, and future–deserve our commitment to offer up our timetables to the changing story of the past.

The second lesson from the Philadelphia story, however, suggests that we could prevent this dilemma from arising in the first place by shouldering an even bigger task on our own initiative. Public historians should assume without being told that any history over which we have stewardship anywhere in this country will carry within it charged stories of human experience shaped by race, class, sex, creed, age, or all of the above and more. Prejudice and discrimination in the United States have not been occasional accidents of personal temperament or regional predilection or bad timing. Scholars have shown us again and again that prejudice in all its forms was built into the bone, blood, and sinew of our colonial and national life, of our political and religious beliefs, and of our social and economic systems. Therefore, nothing depends upon the presence of so-called minorities at a site. Whiteness is as much a racial experience as blackness; masculinity just as much a gender identity as femininity, and so forth. We could be interpreting the force and implications of those identities everywhere.

Other passions, notably a thirst for justice, equality, and freedom, coexist with prejudice in our national anatomy, and for that we may be thankful. But being thankful should not make us blind or afraid. It should make us eager: eager to find the stories of injustice that lie all around us and to tell them, share them, unpack them, understand them so that our sites become part of the work of overcoming them. Public history, thus engaged, would be doing work that will help us bequeath to our successors a nation with less pain, less rage, less betrayal, less dishonesty than the one we inherited.

The struggles at Independence Park also suggest something of how historical interpretation might look if public historians acted eagerly to interpret the history of injustice. If, as I very much hope, interpretation at the Presidents House moves to a successful conclusion, then the site will present the stories of enslaved blacks, free blacks, free whites, and less free whites as distinct threads of a single tapestry. The stories of George and Martha Washington conspiring to circumvent Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation law will be echoed and amplified by the stories of Hercules and Oney Judge conspiring to circumvent Virginia’s laws on slavery. Washington’s careful efforts to create a public presence appropriate to the head of a republic will include his early decision not to display the African Americans he held in slavery at state dinners and other occasions. Regional cultural distinctions and debates over slavery in the early republic can be illuminated by the differences between the Philadelphia households of Adams and Washington.

In other words, if we as public historians choose to look for trouble actively and eagerly, and set aside the time needed to plumb the charged and ubiquitous stories of injustice and braid them into our interpretations, our reward will be to find vivid and entrancing stuff capable of electrifying many audiences. We would become custodians not of the private passions of particular collectors, nor of sanitized hagiography, nor of dully “objective” facts, nor of accumulating masses of stories of “special” groups. We would have pulsing in our hands the ongoing history of one of the grandest of human experiments, the living, breathing, active, fascinating, painful, powerful plenty that is the story of the United States.

Further Reading:

For further information on Philadelphia history, Independence National Park, and the Presidents House controversy, see Charlene Mires, Independence Hall in American Memory (Philadelphia, 2002); Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), and Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974); Gary B. Nash and Jean Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and its Aftermath (New York, 1991). To order a printed copy of the original study by Edward Lawler, click here. See www.ushistory.org for a summary of the Lawler article, information about the eight enslaved people, a copy of the Olin and Ciulla designs, and up-to-date links to ongoing Philadelphia Inquirer coverage of the controversy.

Michael Coard, David Hollenberg, Edward Lawler, and Stephanie G. Wolf kindly consented to be interviewed for this article, and Gary Nash generously shared his written reflections. Additional insights were developed at the 2002 Cliveden Institute in Philadelphia, for which the author thanks Dwight Pitcaithley and Dr. Shirley Parham.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

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Sharon Ann Holt is senior historian at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City and a former editor of The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.

Perhaps it’s only fitting that a history of the Dead Letter Office requires an exhumation: or more precisely, that to see the records of the nineteenth-century Division of Dead Letters in the National Archives, you must deliberately misaddress your call slip. So I discovered when I set out to write a history of the nineteenth-century Division of Dead Letters.

The Dead Letter Office in Washington was the obscure section of the Post Office charged with processing undeliverable mail. Until World War I, all undeliverable letters were processed through the central office in Washington. Only the clerks of the Division of Dead Letters were authorized to open them, and only for the purposes of salvaging valuable enclosures and attempting to locate their proper recipients (fig. 1). By law, unclaimed letters were burned, pulped, or otherwise destroyed, and with them all evidence of the clerks’ labor, the failed communications, and the federal bureaucracy that sheltered both. Indeed, according to the finding aids for the National Archives and Records Administration, all that remains of the Dead Letter Office’s operations is a single box of administrative documents: “Miscellaneous records, 1897-1930.”

 

So I was surprised when, after three days of filling out a call slip for the same box with increasing imprecision, a different box rolled into the reading room, this one labeled “1830-1876.” I was even more surprised to find among these records four unsealed letters from 1889, neither burned nor pulped, but preserved in their original envelopes and bound with string. These misfiled and undocumented pieces were the only letters in an otherwise administrative archive.

Here was a riddle: in a non-existent box were four letters that should have been destroyed.

Their presence was evidence that the information system had failed at every point: in the aborted transit of the letters, their survival in the archives of an office committed to their destruction, and the absence of those archives from the public record meant to guarantee their preservation. Why were the letters saved and the archives lost? What would I learn if I followed the American system of communications to its end—and then opened the grave? In the end the letters revealed a forgotten episode of federal surveillance and the incipient arguments it provoked on behalf of civil liberties. The episode would haunt me as I labored to understand the political economy of information in a post-9/11 world.

 

If we’ve long since forgotten the functions of the Dead Letter Office, nineteenth-century Americans had not. The willy-nilly growth of the nation that had made its postal system a logistical marvel also required the establishment of a hub to process misdirected letters. When letters proved undeliverable, they were sent to the central post office in Washington. There, according to one journalist’s report in 1852, clerks labored in “tomb-like” quarters, sorting misdirected love tokens or messages from dead soldiers that languished for months before being “consigned to the paper-mill.” In the early nineteenth century, unclaimed letters were carted off to Monument Square and burned. Reportedly “several hours elapsed before the conflagration was complete.” As the quantity of letters increased, the Dead Letter Office began selling undeliverable mail to local paper mills to be mulched. In 1855, local newspapers charged that the mills harbored a surfeit of misplaced letters, carelessly discarded by postal clerks. These tales circulated so widely through the national press that the Postmaster General ordered an investigation and a visit to the mills in question.

 

During this time, the Dead Letter Office remained a small-scale operation, dedicated to preserving the inviolability of letters against theft and intrusion. In the 1830s and 1840s, Superintendent of Dead Letters M.J. Simpson answered letters of inquiry by hand, assuring patrons of the Post Office that “no letter having an enclosure of any kind . . . escapes the attention of the persons employed to open [them] and none are permitted to touch or open letters, but those sworn men, who are of tried character, and constantly employed on that duty.” The contents of parcels, not subject to the protections of first-class letters, were put on display in the Minor Letters Room of the Dead Letter Office, where they became objects of curiosity for tourists before being auctioned off en masse (figs. 2, 3).

In the decades after the Civil War, railway mail dramatically increased the volume of mail in circulation. Waves of immigration generated corresponding waves of undeliverable mail, with illegible and incomplete addresses marking the lot of transient people from east to west. An even greater glut of printed matter further strained the operations of the Dead Letter Office. Pamphlets, periodicals, and circulars crowded local post offices, offering miracle cures, counterfeit money, fake prizes, and pornography. The mails had become a vast channel for unsolicited information and global traffic in consumer goods.

 

The single Dead Letter Office in Washington was becoming an anachronism. By 1879, the office was processing 216.72 tons of mail a year at a cost of $16,088.76; yet in spite of this volume, as late as 1906 two lone clerks in Washington were employed in the Sisyphean practice of “blind reading,” meditating over inscrutable addresses in hopes of conveying their missives into the right hands. With the opening of new branch offices in 1915 came the end of the central Dead Letter Office in Washington (fig. 4).

More striking than this unremarkable story of Progressive efficiency was the story of liberty and surveillance it obscured, the first hints of which I found in the journals of the Continental Congress. In light of encomia to the inviolability of the mails, one might not expect that the first Inspector of Dead Letters was appointed as an act of war. On October 17, 1777, the Continental Congress authorized postmaster of New York City and Surveyor General Ebenezer Hazard “to examine all dead letters, at the expiration each quarter, to communicate to Congress such as contain inimical schemes or intelligence.” In the wake of the war, Postmaster General Hazard suggested to Congress that the inspector’s authority to report inimical schemes remain (fig. 5). In 1782 Congress renewed the authority, but without the language regarding intelligence. (A long passage stricken from the draft, preserved in the manuscripts division of the Library of Congress, proposed convicting as spies “enemies” or “subjects” of the United States who robbed post-riders.) Only the mandate to preserve “money, loan office certificates, lottery tickets, notes of hand, and other valuable papers” remained in the 1782 act. For the moment, treason took a backseat to commerce.

This respite proved short-lived. The Postal Act of 1792 forbade carriers to “unlawfully detain, delay, or open, any letter, packet, bag or mail of letters entrusted to them.” But the alien and sedition crisis of 1798-1800 rendered these protections temporarily inert. While later commentators frequently extolled the inviolability of the mails, the mandate for surveillance was only shallowly submerged. In the 1830s the Postmaster General banned incendiary abolitionist tracts from the mails. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and opened all mail to inspection, making the Dead Letter Office a locus of intelligence once more.

The four letters that I found in the archives of the Dead Letter Office were all sent within several months of each other in 1889, by the “Merchants’ Union For Collecting and Reporting Delinquent Debtors.” None bore a return address. The letters survive in their original envelopes, unsealed and bound with correspondence from Chief Post Office Inspector Estes G. Rathbone. Rathbone declared the letters unmailable and requested that they be opened by the clerks of the Dead Letter Office, then returned to his office for inspection. Rathbone deemed the letters unmailable not because of malformed addresses, but because he suspected them of being instruments of fraud. Perpetrating a defamatory scheme common in the later nineteenth century, the senders sought to use embarrassing letters to shame recipients into clearing debts that they did not actually owe.

 

As Chief Post Office Inspector, Rathbone supervised a band of cops charged with policing the mails, including Anthony Comstock, whose agitations had contributed to the legal prohibition on obscene matter in the mails. In response to the surge of junk mail in the 1860s, legislators had designated new classes of mail (third and fourth) and criminalized mail fraud, lotteries, and obscenity as a single category of unmailable material. Zealots like Comstock converted these regulations into a new taxonomy of morality represented by “the sanctity of the mails.” (The results of their investigations survive in the Fraud Order Case Files of the Post Office Records.)

These inspectors faced frustratingly strict limits on their abilities to detect fraud and obscenity. In spite of Comstock’s zeal, the 1872 act bearing his name had no provision for enforcement of its anti-obscenity provisions, relying instead on the existing postal laws. These statutes in turn forbade postmasters to detain or open sealed mail. Inspector Rathbone knew that having suspect letters opened was the most expeditious way to ascertain the identity of senders. But his inspectors were not authorized to open sealed letters. Only the clerks of the Dead Letter Office were so empowered.

While Rathbone evidently gave little thought to treating the clerks as instruments of his investigation, the leadership of the Dead Letter Office had other ideas. Acting Superintendent of Dead Letters W.G. Perry refused Rathbone’s dirty work, forwarding the matter for legal review by the Assistant Attorney General for the Post Office. From the tone of his letter, one gathers that Perry had seen more than his share of impetuous postal inspectors: “It has always been understood in this Office,” he wrote, “that the right to open sealed matter reaching the Dead Letter Office is only exercised for the purpose of obtaining information to restore it to the proper owner, except with the class of matter mentioned in Section 433 P.L. & R.”

 

Perry’s exception was a curious one. Section 433 contained the regulations for disposing of obscene material, specifying that it be immediately destroyed unless its sender could be identified, in which case it would be held for inspection. This procedure was the result of compromise. In 1865 the Senate and House had disagreed on whether postmasters had authority to open obscene letters with unpaid postage. They agreed that such mail should be sent unopened to the Dead Letter Office. What happened next was anybody’s guess.

While formally upholding the doctrine of the inviolable seal, legislators had effectively transferred powers of investigation from the postal inspectors to the clerks of the Dead Letter Office. In this respect, the clerks in the Dead Letter Office quietly assumed their original function of surveillance.

Until Perry intervened.

When Rathbone and his inspectors intruded upon the operations of the Dead Letter Office, their public law justifications for surveillance met republican defenses of inviolable letters, intensifying the arguments for both. Assistant Attorney General James Noble Tyner sided with Perry in this case, indicating that to open the letters on Inspector Rathbone’s behalf “would be equivalent to violating the sanctity of the mails, a prohibition of which runs all though the statutes.” Ironically, Perry’s insistence on the “sanctity of the seal” recalled moral language that Anthony Comstock had popularized in his effort to purge the mails of obscenity. Tyner’s opinions mingled this moral vocabulary with that of constitutional law, invoking Fourth Amendment rights to safeguard a person’s papers from search and seizure.

Backed by Tyner’s opinions, Perry returned the suspect letters to Inspector Rathbone, indicating rather gloatingly that his Office had “no lawful authority to open sealed matter sent to it by post-office inspectors, or others [for the] purposes of investigation or prosecution.”

As dead mail, the four letters from the Merchants’ Union For Collecting and Reporting Delinquent Debtors should have been destroyed. But the letters were not dead after all. Postal Inspector J.M Arrington had dispatched them to local postmasters with instructions that they be delivered and then returned to his office: “You can explain to the addressee that the Department wants to know who mailed this letter,” he instructed. Since the proper recipients had opened the letters, technically the letters were no more dead than they were unmailable. Presumably only their delivery and return allow them to be rerouted to the administrative archive of the Dead Letter Office. There they survive, unsealed, despite Perry’s insistence that the Dead Letter Office play no part in aiding investigations. Perhaps Rathbone forwarded them as proof of the senders’ criminality, or as a concession to Perry’s authority. We don’t know.

This obscure skirmish over the statutes for processing unmailable matter represents a neglected chapter in the ongoing conflict between public law justifications for control of communications and its civil libertarian opposition. Contrary to many accounts of American civil liberties, the federal apparatus of surveillance was not simply the innovation of a late-blooming state in World War I, but also a tool used by nineteenth-century reformers, legislators, and administrators attempting to regulate reckless commerce. Federal surveillance of U.S. civilians through the mails has a longer history than is often thought. And although the operations of the Dead Letter Office have become obscure, a global traffic in counterfeit, prohibited, and undeliverable matter continues.

One scholar speculates that Herman Melville read an 1852 Albany Register article entitled “Dead Letters by a Resurrectionist” before imagining the trials of his protagonist, Bartleby the Scrivener, in the Post Office’s “melancholy vaults.” Melville fans will remember that the tale ends with the forlorn discovery that the reluctant clerk had been employed by the Dead Letter Office in Washington before he began work as a copyist at the narrator’s law firm on Wall Street. Many declare Bartleby the hero of the story bearing his name because of his repeated insistence on behalf of workers everywhere that he “would prefer not to”—his refusal to shoulder the burdens of modern life. But it’s the lawyer and narrator, not Bartleby, who struggles with the failures of personal accountability in the world he’s inherited. In this respect he shares the lot of the mid-level bureaucrats assessing the merits of unrestricted commerce versus public security, or the historians trying to do them justice.

That was my story. I conducted this research in the wake of September 2001, which hastened my transition from Wall Street to graduate school. After producing a series of perplexed histories on management accounting and clerical labor, I found myself pledging to produce a history of the Dead Letter Office using the surviving records in the National Archives. Knowing that only one box remained in the archive, I purposely chose what I thought was a dead end. (I figured it would leave me more time to stroll in the park with my dog, Bartleby, a vagrant who appeared—like Melville’s scrivener—on the threshold of my apartment one morning in the summer of 2001.)

If my foray into the archives was more existential than political, however, I proved unable to lose sight of the fact that the democracy I’d been asked to study was also becoming a national security state. On the early train from Penn Station to Washington, I was haunted by an op-ed about the Patriot Act, Capps 2 (Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System), and the Multistate Antiterrorism Information Exchange (Matrix), set to assemble vast dossiers of personal data about U.S. citizens. Passing the inscription at the entrance of the National Archives, which reads, “ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE PRICE OF LIBERTY,” I found the archives transformed by a new approach to security (fig. 6). Even the records of the pneumatic tubes service of the Post Office, through which—pfft—just like that, belle époque missives once circulated beneath the streets of New York, had been classified in the wake of September 11, evidently subject to darker fantasies than mere months before.

Contrary to the myth of the unassailable privacy of the mails, I found that the “sanctity of the seal” had all sorts of loopholes exploited in times of war and peace. And civil libertarian arguments grounded in the First and Fourth amendments were not so much the nation’s founding precepts as nineteenth-century innovations. Exponents of American democracy praised the mails for the free circulation of information they represented. But the mails also provided instruments of moral classification and sites of surveillance in a new, national marketplace of consumer goods. The effort to restrict unregulated commerce and purge the mails of junk exposed contradictions between the ideology and practice of personal security and the freedom of expression. Perhaps there is no such thing as an unremarkable story of progressive efficiency.

 

Further Reading:

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, by Herman Melville, inspired my expedition into the archives of the Dead Letter Office. Taryn Simon’s “Contraband,” a series of 1,075 photographs of confiscated material drawn from the U.S. Postal Service International Mail Facility at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York furthered my interest, as did a middle-of-the-night field trip to the Curseen-Morris Mail Processing and Distribution Center in Washington, D.C., at the annual conference of the Society for the History of Technology in 2007.

David Henkin gives passing attention to the Dead Letter Office in City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York, 1999), as does Richard R. John in Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, 1995). Richard R. John has argued elsewhere that Bartleby’s removal from the Dead Letter Office was a critique of partisanship in clerkship assignments: Richard R. John, “The Lost World of Bartleby, the Ex-Officeholder: Variations on a Venerable Literary Form,” New England Quarterly 70:631 (1997). Dorothy Ganfield Fowler’s Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office (Athens, 1977) and Wayne E. Fuller’s Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana, Ill., 2003) document debates over postal censorship during the nineteenth century.

Record Group 28, The Records of The Post Office Department, 1773-1973, harbors all of the archival collections mentioned in this essay, including the Records of the Division of Dead Letters and the Fraud Order Case Files. http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/028.html#28.3.7. RG 28 is housed in the National Archives building in downtown Washington, D.C. Paging boxes in the Post Office Records involves several steps. The numerical classification of the online finding aid does not correspond to the on-site index, and due to relocations of postal records, the on-site index does not correspond to the physical location of the boxes in storage. Researchers cross-reference the numbers in the finding aid to those in the on-site index. Archivists cross-reference the numbers in the on-site index to the location in the vault. The tag on the box for Record Group 28.3.7, Miscellaneous Records, 1830-1876, which should indicate the physical location in storage, is RG 28, E. 101, No. 27462, Stack Area 7E4, Row 13, Compartment 5, Shelf 2. It lacks numerical classification or listing in the finding aid.

 

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

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In June 2008, Frank Haas had a brief moment in the national spotlight when New York Times columnist Dan Barry told his story. It wasn’t cast as news, really. It was more of a human-interest piece about an unhappy man, a former Freemason who had been kicked out of a fraternity that meant the world to him. The readers learned how Haas had devoted much of his life to being a model Mason since he had joined his lodge in Wellsburg, West Virginia, more than 20 years earlier. He was an engaged and active citizen in his community, and within Freemasonry he served as leader of his local lodge and, beginning in 2005, as Grand Master of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of West Virginia.

It’s almost impossible for any non-Mason living today to read phrases like that— “Grand Master of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons”—without, however briefly, thinking of an aging group of men, in costumes, who are completely and utterly out of step with the times. To be sure, that idea is unfair in a lot of ways: Freemasons in particular have almost always appeared a bit removed from the mainstream, in ways that were and are largely deliberate. From their still somewhat hazy origins in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stonemasons’ guilds, lodges of Freemasons have long appealed to ancient traditions and mythical origins even while they instilled habits of self-discipline and sociability that were suited to life in the modern world. Since its formal organization in 1717, men have joined, taken oaths of secrecy, and participated in often elaborate rituals, many set in and around Solomon’s Temple, that were nonetheless intended to teach precepts of real utility in their own time. The regalia, strange symbols, esoteric dogma, and pompous titles seem odd to outsiders, but they undergird what is to Masons a coherent philosophy of self-improvement and social consciousness that they insist is largely unchanged time out of mind. In the ways that matter, they might say, they intend to be men out of step with their historical moment.

But they appeared anachronistic in all the wrong ways in West Virginia when Haas became Grand Master. He was elected in one of a handful of states with no formal relationship between the “Prince Hall,” or African American, Freemasons and the overwhelmingly white Grand Lodge. (All of the rest are in the former Confederacy.) It wasn’t only race: Discrimination seemed to be pervasive. Many disabled men—even veterans who may have lost a limb in the service of their country—were prohibited from joining for reasons that might have made sense centuries ago, in a lodge of working masons, but were now obscure and centered on ritual, not practicality.

Haas tried to change this, and his proposals rankled many of his more conservative brethren. He met, for the first time, with the state’s Prince Hall Masons, and he sought a new rule to end race-based prohibitions on who can visit a lodge. He worked to allow lodges to support external, non-Masonic charities. He endeavored to end the prohibition on disabled men as candidates for membership. And he won every fight. A majority of the Grand Lodge approved what became known as the Wheeling Reforms in his last days in office.

Reaction came swiftly in 2007. His successor set aside the reforms on allegations of voter fraud. They have never been reintroduced. And when Haas and others continued to speak out about the need for change, the new grand master Charlie Montgomery issued an edict summarily expelling Haas and two other men from Freemasonry without a trial.

The inner workings and political contests within West Virginia Freemasonry, however, were mere prelude. Haas sued. At the very end of last year, he walked into a courtroom in West Virginia and made his case before judge and jury that he had been wrongfully expelled. He sought damages, and he sought a court order to compel the fraternity to readmit him.

When he filed suit, Haas laid claim (unwittingly, as best I can tell) to a facet of our national past that has been nearly forgotten, though it is visible if you blow the dust off of several key early American legal precedents and nineteenth-century treatises. In the decades following the Revolution, a surprisingly large number of Americans did exactly what Haas did. Members and former members called on courts to enter all of those ostensibly private arenas that Alexis de Tocqueville went on and on about—mutual aid associations, fraternities, political clubs, and the like—to correct injustices, to adjudicate internal squabbles, and frequently to decide whether an expelled member had a legally enforceable right to belong again.

The fact that so many people in this “nation of joiners” did so—and that courts in cities and towns across the new nation so often heard their pleas with eager ears—is important in ways that go beyond any narrow interest in explaining the rise of American “civil society” and the roots of our national propensity to join things, however fascinating those questions are. It tells us something about the reach and power of the law in the new republic. It even tells us, really, about early American ideas of how societies could be held together. And though any exploration of this subject ventures far beyond the closed door of the Masonic lodge, Freemasonry and these notions of public and private, legality and illegality, justice and injustice, have crossed paths more than a few times.

 

A safer place to fight

If Thomas Paine’s America in 1776 was already a land where “THE LAW IS KING,” as he shouted in capital letters in Common Sense, then scholars of the last couple of decades have shown that “THE LAW” became somehow more important, more powerful, more culturally pervasive in the early nineteenth century. That is, law, not merely or even primarily as institutionally embodied, but rather as a way of thinking about interpersonal relationships on the small and the large scale, became what Christopher Tomlins has called “the paradigmatic discourse explaining life in America.”

Increasingly, the first generations of American citizens thought in legalistic (or, to use John Philip Reid’s softer term, “law-minded”) ways about efforts to function in groups, be it in the state, the church, or the small, self-created society. And that tendency among American men and women (particularly in urban areas, but also in smaller and smaller communities in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and even the South) to act within theirown voluntary associations in ways that emphasized procedural fairness, legalistic formalities, and compliance with their own originating documents, which they almost always called constitutions, had a number of consequences. Some of them we understand pretty well by now. We know a great deal, for example, about how civic associational life could be a training ground for democratic citizenship.

But the kinds of knowledge gained in associations—emphases on fair procedure, distinctions between ordinary versus supreme law, the gravity of amendment, for example—also helped to nourish the belief among the joiners and organizers of a wide array of associations that members had a right to expect legal protections and judicial interventions when things went wrong. It produced a litigiousness that has, as its direct heir, litigants like Frank Haas.

The drift toward increasingly legalistic modes of self-organization in the early republic can be traced in a number of ways: the kinds of organic documents that joiners drew up, their adherence and non-adherence to their own rules and bylaws, the ways that they talked about procedural formalities to one another and to outsiders. The Connecticut Historical Society has preserved a record book from one women’s reading club—the Ladies’ Literary Society of Norwich, Connecticut, founded in 1800—that contains traces of all of these things. And even though none of these women ever sued the others, it serves to illustrate the growth of a certain mindset among typical joiners in the early national period.

A women’s reading society is a good specimen to examine, because there was certainly nothing necessary about their embrace of procedural formalities. Detailed studies of such groups have shown how closely connected the members generally were. They usually shared religious backgrounds and social status; they were usually friends, often even family. In this post-Revolutionary period, however, what could begin as a society founded on shared friendships, social networks, and familial relationships would be cast, almost instantly, in constitutional, procedurally bound forms. The consequence was a new way of thinking about old relationships, even in voluntary societies founded by women who shared sincere sentimental bonds. This is not to say that participants in small, tightly knit associations of this period cared less for one another after they had drawn up their organizational documents than they had before: it is only to say that they made conscious decisions that, in a formal sense, affection was to have little or nothing to do with their membership.

On March 12, 1800, the Ladies’ Literary Society, some six weeks after they first met, appointed a committee of six women “to frame a set of rules to be laid before the society which they approving shall pass into laws binding on every member of the society.” When the rules were reported on March 19, copies were made for all the members to read closely for discussion at the next meeting. Not coincidentally, one can presume, one of the women’s assigned readings for the day was the U.S. Constitution. By April 2, after some debate, their own constitution “was read and then passed almost unanimously.” It had all those characteristics described above, including a clear distinction between ordinary rules or bylaws, which could be changed by majority vote, and the crucial sections of this fundamental, formative document, which could not.

First and foremost, the women in the club were insistent about the importance of procedural regularity. When delivering the second annual address, in 1802, Miss Mary Tyler made clear that the Ladies’ Literary Society of Norwich had, quite purposefully, chosen to create constitutional rules to give shape to their proceedings. “We shall do well,” Tyler said, “if we pay a strictattention to the rules of our institution: they were formed by the most judicious of our society, and calculated for the good of the whole. We have an equal right to petition for an amendment of any of the articles (two or three excepted) when ever we see room but in departing from them while they are in forced—we are sure of creating uneasiness for our selves and others.” Indeed, at the very next meeting, they, with no intentional irony, showed a real reverence for their constitutional edicts by breaking one: in derogation of their constitutionally unalterable requirement that each meeting begin with a Bible reading, the women began by reading their own constitution aloud, first, and only then moving on to read a passage from First Corinthians.

In short, as Americans at unprecedented rates formed and joined any of the thousands of voluntary associations for mutual aid, for social reform, for profit, for self-edification or for the worship of God, they not only drew up constitutions but also came to favor process over camaraderie, formalities over friendship. And in so doing—and in so often seeking out state-issued charters, thereby connecting associational authority with state authority, as the legal historian William Novak argued a decade ago—they revealed that they conceived of those groups not only as constitutionally organized bodies, but also as organizations that fell within a broader regime of rights and remedies.

It was a mutually reinforcing development: as more joiners in early national fraternal groups came to conceive of their participation as one of well-defined rights and obligations, legal institutions occupied an increasingly important position in the monitoring of those internal relationships—precisely because those institutions were so frequently called upon to intervene by individuals aware of the importance of their own rights. And each time that irrationally disgruntled or legitimately aggrieved members and former members filed suit, voluntary groups and corporations saw still more reason to play by the rules or, at the very least, to always be prepared to make the case in court that they had done so.

One result? Stability. Conflict need not tear associations apart. It could be channeled into legal modes of resolution. Something quite similar had been seen in the corporate boroughs of seventeenth-century England, as historian Paul Halliday has shown, when the court of King’s Bench, a superior court of the common law, began to act as superintendent of corporate disputes and began to order the readmission of political minorities who had been expelled in ways or for reasons not legally justifiable. Raging partisan conflict became transmuted into niggling disputes over procedure, and battles that might otherwise threaten to tear everything apart were fought in a safer place—in court.

A similar tendency appeared in American private associations, with the same result. When John Binns was expelled from the St. Patrick’s Benevolent Society in 1807 owing to a political tiff with fellow printer William Duane, for instance, he called on external authorities—public opinion, at first, and then the courts—to right the wrong. Chief Justice William Tilghman ordered Binns’s readmission in 1810, by writ of mandamus, the same instrument that King’s Bench had so often used in England. He was clear that “the right of membership is valuable, and not to be taken away” without legitimate authority. Such action did not make Binns and Duane friends again: anyone who has read about their feud knows that no power on earth could have done that. But it did mean that those ways of joining together voluntarily that Francis Wayland would soon call “the peculiar glory of the present age” in the antebellum United States might not be torn asunder by internal conflict. People could find, in law, a way to cohere.

Procedural regularity was key, such as the absolutely essential requirement that a member be given notice of any hearing affecting his membership status, and a right to present his side of the story. In 1821, a North Carolina man expelled from a corporation without a hearing won a court-ordered readmission, for instance, on the grounds that “no man shall be condemned or prejudiced in his rights, without an opportunity of being heard.” Courts in the post-Revolutionary decades borrowed liberally from precedents derived from English municipal corporations regarding notice and due process in cases of expulsion, and in about a dozen key cases—ones cited again and again, in court and in the expanding legal literature of the mid-nineteenth century—an American jurisprudence governing the rights of membership took shape.

Throughout the nineteenth century, courts remained ready to intervene if a society expelled a member in a way that was patently unjust or did not adhere to its own stated rules. Some important details would change, however. By the late 1830s, for instance, jurists were in basic agreement that an expulsion would not be reevaluated on the merits: what was decided in the regular course of proceedings would not be overturned, so long as the proper procedures were followed and no malice tainted the process. Courts, however, remained involved, in ways that bore the imprint of the legal culture of the early American republic, a time when the expanding associational world of the post-Revolutionary United States was made to be, not a bastion of arbitrary, private power, but rather a sphere in which all authority was fully bounded by law.

 

Will the real Grand Lodge of South Carolina please step forward?

One of the great legal thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, Roscoe Pound—dean of Harvard Law School, one of the leading proponents of a sociological understanding of law—was also an active Freemason, and over the course of his long career he made frequent forays into the study of its history and philosophy. When he looked at the Craft (a common nickname for Freemasonry among insiders), his eye was inexorably drawn to its jurisprudence and to “what we in America would call the constitution of Masonry.” His perspective on what are called the landmarks, or the “fundamental precepts of universal Masonic validity, binding on Masons and Masonic organizations everywhere and at all times,” is still quoted, debated, challenged, and embraced by Freemasons today.

That idea—that there are certain core principles to which one must adhere if he wishes to call himself a Freemason, or to which any group of men must adhere if they wish to label themselves a Masonic lodge—is, indeed, distinctly constitutional in the American sense of a supreme law of the land, to which all other laws must conform. That there was something “constitutional” in the conduct of Freemasonry should not be surprising, of course. The very term constitution was introduced to much of the world via the exportation of Freemasonry from England: the first time it appeared in French, in 1710, was in a Masonic context, for instance. And James Anderson’s Constitutions of the Free-Masons—the first Masonic book printed in America, when Ben Franklin reprinted the book in Philadelphia in 1734—emphasized certain irrevocable features in what Freemasonry could and should look like. From a very early date with the formation of the first Grand Lodge in London in 1717, Masons were articulate, if not always consistent, about those kinds of constitutional matters.

What might be surprising is that American courts played along, ultimately even assuming a key role in reinforcing the idea that Masonic landmarks were fixed principles, an unalterable constitutional framework. In an 1813 South Carolina case in equity with the memorable name of Smith v. Smith, Chancellor Henry W. DeSaussure was in the uncomfortable position of having to decide which of two rival Grand Lodges was the real deal. A failed attempt at unification in 1809 had left matters more uncertain than ever. The chancellor, a non-Mason, faced the challenge head on, reading the key Masonic texts closely to understand who had the legitimate claim on a pot of money left to the “Grand Lodge of South Carolina Ancient York Masons.” DeSaussure assured the Masons that he would try to understand the dispute on their terms. “I have examined the books, I mean Dermot’s and Dalcho’s Ahiman Rezons, from one end to the other,” he noted, referring to two Masonic guidebooks that spelled out certain “Ancient” Masonic practices, the first published in England in the 1750s and the second in South Carolina by physician Frederick Dalcho in 1807. He was at first disturbed by the claims of one side that the Grand Lodge could do as it wished, without constraint: “after all,” he wrote, “it is not easy of belief that any set of reasonable men, and least of all the citizens of a free country, should consent to bind themselves so absolutely and irrevocably under the power of others.”

He relaxed only when he realized that “in reality we perceive plainly by these very books of authority, that there is a limit to this power. In the first place we find the expression of a constitution repeatedly used, which implies some fixed principle independent of ordinary legislation.” DeSaussure found that fundamental rules, or landmarks, existed, ones that “are sacred and not subject to be altered or affected by the edicts of the Grand Lodge itself.” He could base a judgment as to which Grand Lodge constituted seceders on those “ancient land marks of the craft.”

He was savvy enough, too, to be aware that the claim could be made that he was reading Americanisms into Freemasonry. He preempted the argument: “Nor was this limitation to the absolute power of the Grand Lodge, a new principle introduced into the regulations of this country, from the tendency which all private societies have to conform their principles to those of the government under which they live.” Rather, Dermot’s Ahiman Rezon, he noted, described landmarks the same way, if not more pointedly, even though it was “framed under a monarchial government.” The chancellor came to a conclusion in the case at hand (a conclusion nowhere near interesting enough to justify the amount of detail it would require to explain), and Masonic scholars and jurists to this day cite Smith v. Smith as an instance of an American court applying Masonic law to decide a case. In that moment, Masonry looked and appeared like a welcome element in a constitutional republic, even embracing judicial review to palliate conflicts as they arose.

Thirteen years later, everything looked different. A group of Masons kidnapped William Morgan in upstate New York in 1826 because he was preparing to publish some of the secrets of Freemasonry. He was forced into a carriage while shouting “Murder! Murder!” and was never seen again. It was a scandal that almost spelled the end of Masonry in America.

Yet there was no change in this basic idea that all associations, even Freemasons, ought to be fully encompassed within a broader legal regime. Indeed, that was precisely the point. When Morgan disappeared, it was not the allegations that he was kidnapped to prevent his revealing Masonic secrets that sparked the rise of a full-blown anti-Masonic movement in the months and years to come, in New York and throughout the Northeast. It was not even the idea that Freemasons may have murdered him for threatening to reveal their inner workings. Such shocking claims would have aroused attention, to be sure. But they alone could never have generated the first organized third-party movement in American political history.

Rather, it was only when it began to seem that Freemasonry was fully removed and isolated from the superintending power of the law—when some twenty grand juries and a series of trials and legislative investigations all made little headway in investigating the Morgan affair—that people in much of the nation responded with organized fury. It was only then that growing numbers of men and women began to organize politically, to form new counter-associations, to publish newspapers and magazines, and to doubt whether Masonic law and the rule of law could ever coexist in the American republic.

Those questions of legal superintendence of private associational activity did not exist in a vacuum. There were other powerful cultural impulses at work, not least the desire to preserve the young United States as a Christian republic, one that appeared to be threatened by the allegedly anti-Christian and politically subversive potential of Masonry. But the anti-Masonic literature does reveal the extent to which many Americans had come to embrace a particular view of the proper relationship between voluntary associations and the wider legal regime. In the wake of Morgan’s disappearance, it was becoming clear just how uncomfortable most Americans were with the idea of a separate, Masonic jurisprudence, one shielded from the will of the people by secrecy, oaths, and even violence.

For Masons were not lawless, by any means, and everyone knew it. Freemasonry, like so many other organizations, had turned to procedure and well-articulated internal regulations to help their lodges function. As historian Dorothy Lipson has observed, however, they were then “vulnerable to the charges that they overlapped the jurisdiction of the civil courts, competed with the discipline of the churches, or invaded individual rights.” In the wake of Morgan’s disappearance, it appeared they had erected a legal system that had no place in a republican nation. The extremes to which critics of Masonry would go to prove this point bordered on the ridiculous. The Vermont Antimasonic Convention in 1831, for example, made one of its first orders of business the creation of a committee to examine the degree to which Masons lived by their own legal code, and they quoted everything they could get their hands on to show the depth of this Masonic legalism, even a line in a song: “Our laws all other laws excel.” From this, the committee drew the conclusion that “Here we are not only told, that masons have laws, but it is more than intimated that other laws cannot counteract them, and that the summum bonum of those laws are in the secrets of the art.” The conclusion, then, was no joke.

The repercussions of the anti-Masonic movement were massive. Freemasonry emerged as a shell of its former self: New York’s 500 lodges in 1825 dwindled to seventy-five a decade later, and the number of Masons nationwide was probably more than halved to 40,000 by 1835. It bounced back, as we all know, growing especially in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the 1940s and 1950s. In this modern nation of joiners, Masonry had top billing—and more than four million members—at its high point in 1959. But there were important ways that the legal framework established in the first third of the nineteenth century remained more or less unchanged. American associational life was not so much a multitude of jurisdictions as it was a wide array of opportunities for individual voluntarism that all fell within a larger regime of law.

 

The questionable outcome of Haas v. Montgomery

Local readers in West Virginia—subscribers to the Charleston Gazette or the Daily Mail—found out what happened to Frank Haas, but the readers of the New York Times never did. That’s probably because the outcome was not terribly surprising. He lost. Today, juries are more than ready to believe the idea that, as defense attorney Jack Tinney is reported to have said, “What this case is about is internal Masonic politics. It’s petty. It has no place in the courtroom.”

As evocative as the case was of some interesting facets in our history, by December 2010 it was unlikely that Haas would have found receptive ears, even though he was expelled without a hearing, as guaranteed him in Masonic procedure, which required that he receive notice, formal charges, and an opportunity to call witnesses and to mount a defense. Rather, the twelve jurors opted not to involve themselves in the Masonic factionalism that had left Haas reeling.

This despite the fact that Judge Carrie Webster had charged the jury properly as to the relevant law: “If the members of a voluntary organization, such as the Masons, violate their own rules and expel a member on some ground not recognized by their ‘article of agreement’ or without notice or trial,” she told them, “they are liable for such purely arbitrary action.” And, more directly still, she told the jury that the regulation that the Grand Lodge had asserted gave them authority for summary expulsions “did not give the Defendants the authority to capriciously and unilaterally expel Mr. Haas.” Early American jurists would have read, recognized, and supported those legal principles.

But the 2010 jury did not. A factor that may have assuaged them in this case is that Haas has actually become a Freemason again, though he had to move to Ohio to do it. During the two years between his expulsion and the trial, Haas established residency in Steubenville, Ohio, and became a member of the Ohio Masons, a fact that likely undercut his claim that he was entitled to a legal remedy. (West Virginia’s Grand Lodge responded in early 2010 by severing all ties to Ohio Freemasons.) As political theorist Judith Shklar has noted, we tend to think today that pluralism is the best safeguard against the injury of exclusion. Americans did not always think so. The Irish printer John Binns not only had other Irishmen’s social clubs and democratic political societies that he could join. He did join them, becoming a member of the Hibernian Society along with organizing and joining other political associations. But that fact did not stop the Pennsylvania Supreme Court from acting to protect him from arbitrary dismissal.

Courts began to allow private groups greater leeway to decide internal matters long before the Civil War, but for reasons that in no way support the idea that groups such as Freemasons should be able to act arbitrarily to terminate a person’s membership. About the time that Tocqueville described an America in which people were “forever forming associations,” in the 1830s, courts were beginning to withdraw from immediate superintendence of certain associational practices. Judges and juries were more likely to defer to decisions made internally, so long as the proper procedures were followed, than they had been a generation before, when in several often-cited cases courts appeared willing to evaluate the merits of membership decisions made by private associations. But that turn toward a hands-off approach happened because of a growing consensus that, when people joined associations, they ought to be trusted to come to their own articles of agreement, whatever they may be. If a voluntary society acted, legitimately, under those agreed-upon powers to suspend or expel members, there was little that could be or should be done. It was akin to an individual’s right to enter into contracts as he or she saw fit. That contractual view of the matter prevailed during the “Golden Age of Fraternalism,” in the later decades of the nineteenth century.

The corollary was no small matter, though: both the member and the association must abide by those agreed-upon procedures, as judges would say again and again through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. And this would not change. There remained an emphasis on procedures, policies, and rules that had become culturally pervasive in the post-Revolutionary years. “In departing from them,” as Mary Tyler had told the members of her Ladies’ Literary Society in 1802, “we are sure of creating uneasiness for our selves and others.” According to jurisprudential practices that took shape in the early republic and remained true long after, uneasiness might just come in the form of legal fees and subpoenas.

Before his expulsion, Haas worked to make his organization more inclusive and, to his eye, truer to its Masonic ideals. His Masonic brothers disagreed with him. Such was their right. But when he was expelled without any chance to speak in his own behalf, in a manner that violated Masonic procedures, he earned his day in court. The long history of these kinds of conflicts shows that a decision to intervene would have been a conservative judicial policy in defense of Haas’s “right of membership.” And it may ultimately have meant that West Virginia Freemasonry would have moved in a direction that, at least from my perspective, seems to be the right one, ending its exclusionary policies based on race and disability.

Haas’s ordeal within West Virginia Freemasonry exposes some of the dangers of allowing private associations to operate arbitrarily, in ways that affect the personal rights of their own members without accountability. The first generations of American citizens were acutely aware of the importance of fair process, which they believed to be crucial both to democratic government and to many other, smaller forms of social intercourse. And thus they were committed to protecting it by law, within private associations and throughout the republic. Understanding that world can help us to comprehend why people such as Frank Haas might have chosen to hire a lawyer when someone told him he could no longer be a Freemason. What is more, it can help us understand that people like Haas should always have a chance to make their case.

Further reading:

On law and association in the early United States, see William J. Novak, “The American Law of Association: The Legal-Political Construction of Civil Society,” Studies in American Political Development 15 (2001): 163-188; Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); and my own study of the Binns-Duane dispute in “A Common Law of Membership: Expulsion, Regulation, and Civil Society in the Early Republic,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 133 (2009): 255-275. On the English experience, see Paul D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650-1730 (Cambridge, 1998).

The key works on the growing importance of law in the generations immediately following the Revolution are Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York, 1993); and Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009).

On Freemasonry, Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), remains the starting point. Both Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930 (Princeton, N.J., 1984), and Dorothy Ann Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut (Princeton, N.J., 1977), provide useful information on legalism within Masonic institutions. For a quick introduction to the broader, transnational history of Masonry, see Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (Philadelphia, 2006). On the jurisprudence of Freemasonry, see Melvin Maynard Johnson, ed., Masonic Addresses and Writings of Roscoe Pound (New York, 1953). On anti-Masonry, the key works remain William Preston Vaughn, The Antimasonic Party in the United States, 1826-1834 (Lexington, Ky., 1983); Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826-1836 (New York, 1998); and various works by Ronald P. Formisano, especially his latest: For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008).

 

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

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Kevin Butterfield, who is not a Freemason, is an assistant professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma. He is writing a book on the evolution of the concept of voluntary membership in the early United States.

Last spring, our early American travel writing class at Swarthmore College visited the American Philosophical Society Library (APS) in Philadelphia. Knowing the APS Library is home to the Lewis and Clark journals, we hoped to catch a glimpse of the celebrated travel accounts we had studied in class. Charles Greifenstein, associate librarian and curator of APS manuscripts, graciously received us and treated us to a “treasures tour.” We brimmed with awe as the white-gloved curator carried one of William Clark’s red morocco journals around the table and shared his expertise on its textual history. This, we thought, was the highlight of the trip!

Then came an unexpected delight. Greifenstein pulled out an obscure eighteenth-century manuscript and distributed photocopies to each of us. Joking that he had not yet mastered all 12,000 linear feet of APS manuscripts, he proceeded to read the three-page handwritten account as we followed along on our own individual copies. In the several places where the curator paused over a word or phrase, students quickly chimed in to decode indistinct signifiers and script abbreviations. Greifenstein was impressed with the students’ uncommon adeptness in reading and navigating a hastily written eighteenth-century manuscript.

As the anecdote suggests, the students were already experienced in reading early American scribal texts before going to the APS, and the greater purpose of this column is to share an undergraduate transcription project that fostered a deeper understanding of early American manuscripts as archival and cultural texts. Fortunately, our travel writing class didn’t have to travel far to locate manuscripts suited to our study, as Swarthmore has its own archival treasure on campus, the Friends Historical Library (FHL). Established in 1871, FHL is a hub of Quaker research, housing extensive collections documenting the history of the Society of Friends in Pennsylvania and contiguous areas since the seventeenth century. Quaker missions and the Friends’ strong tradition in journal writing made for a perfect combination of archival work and study in early American travel.

The transcription project aimed to provide FHL with clear and accurate digital transcripts of previously unpublished archival materials while giving students of early American literature firsthand experience in textual studies and manuscript culture. To prepare for the project, FHL curator Christopher Densmore and visiting assistant professor Keat Murray sifted through the library’s manuscript collections and selected five journals, which were dated from 1783 to 1844 and documented Quaker travels and missions from Canada to the southern states. The archives staff then worked rapidly to scan and upload digital images of 386 manuscript pages for remote student access through a surrogate digital platform. To train student transcribers, Murray drew from his own research and a similar project that he and Densmore had created the previous academic year. He also conducted brief training sessions using digital images of a 1796 Quaker manuscript and an exemplary transcript to introduce the transcription process and the peculiarities of early American English script. Students then visited FHL to see the journals and speak with Densmore about the FHL’s store of manuscripts, Quaker journaling practices, and Friends missions among Native peoples. Simultaneously, Murray divided the manuscript pages into sections, assigned them to students based on their preferences, and then set them loose to begin transcribing through digital means. Over the next several weeks, students reported on their progress in class, sharing their observations, insights, and frustrations. By week ten of the semester, they had finished their individual sections and edited them, at which time they sent them to the professor to be compiled and edited a second time (gasp!) before being sent to the Friends Historical Library, to be filed in hard copy and digital forms. The project concluded with student reflection papers on their archival work and critical analyses of selected transcribed journals as travel writing.

The transcription project enriched the students’ educational experience in ways that typical literary study does not. Students’ archival work complemented the research we consulted on early American manuscript culture and Quaker journaling and biography. Moreover, working firsthand with manuscripts enhanced our study of writings originally composed and circulated in script long before being transcribed into print. At issue, for instance, were important questions about how writings by Columbus, Bradford, Knight, Woolman, Ashbridge, Longinos Martinez, and Lewis and Clark were rendered in print. As students gained transcription experience, questions of textual production, authorial revision, editorial intervention, and textual variants among different editions loomed larger in their encounters with early American texts. The responsibility of transcribing a text also sparked many more student questions about the historical and cultural implications of (re)textualization than reading a “Note on the Text” in a new edition of an old book. In short, matters related to the history, production, and evolution of a text as a text did not have to be prompted by the professor but figured seamlessly into class discussion and student papers.

From the students’ perspective, transcribing was sometimes frustrating, but they were quick to affirm the project’s pedagogical benefits. Initially, many transcribers struggled to make sense of eighteenth-century handwriting, in both the physical and literary sense. One student echoed the team’s anxiety about erring:

Probably the most frustrating aspect of transcribing for me was spending a lot of time deciphering a word[,] only to realize, after having read more of the text, that I had gotten it completely wrong … [for instance] I transcribed ‘Complanter’ instead of ‘Cornplanter’—a very frustrating, but slightly entertaining, error.

Despite this, the student found the work both educational and rewarding after connecting with the narrative voice and the sentiments threaded into the text:

The most enjoyable part of the transcription process was gaining a sense of each author’s voice. Towards the end of transcribing each of the journals, I began to have a rough idea of how [Sarah] Emlen or [Joshua] Sharpless was going to finish a certain paragraph without having read it yet.

While several transcribers remarked that a lack of end punctuation and other writing conventions hindered their comprehension, one student noted how this quality quickened her reading and commanded her attention:

Unintentionally carried along by the unrelenting flow of action, I transcribed the last twenty pages … in one session in a futile search for end punctuation.

Another student processed the encounter with script differently, noting how his cognizance of the subject-object relationship in travel writing helped him to understand his ambivalence toward an author textualized in script:

[The difficulty in reading script] is associated with the point made in class that it is easier to interpret print, because it’s more like analyzing an object … there’s nothing morally problematic about critiquing it; however, a person’s handwriting conveys that this is a subject being analyzed.

The challenge of deciphering script was compounded by the complexity of interpreting what, for the student, is a more immediate presentation of a textualized subject.

On a different level, the project acquainted students with the benefits of scribal media in our time of rapid technological change. One student expressed a discovery that was common to the class, noting that the project illuminated the richness of archives:

Seeing the stacks of original Quaker manuscripts (that have not been transcribed) made me realize the contribution and dynamic role of libraries in the dissemination of knowledge … In a world of digitization, it is easy to forget that many works are still preserved in their original format and perhaps only exist in their original format. Though digitization facilitates the circulation of information, seeing the physical text offers a unique experience and perspective [that] allows for a deeper appreciation of the text.

After adjusting to the responsibilities and the labor of transcribing, students became well-versed in the Quaker texts and were eager to discuss them in critical and comparative contexts during class. Students occasionally worried about being “invasive” in personal documents, but these feelings were soon supplanted by a sense of pride in making previously unused documents more accessible to a wider public, especially when they began to see the journals as culturally rich historical documents. One student, for example, examined how Sarah Emlen’s 1825 journal doubles as a record of her physical travels in New England and her spiritual “travail” to resolve tension between mind and soul. A few other students interrogated the implicit personal and Quaker interests in two very different accounts of Native life, one by Joshua Sharpless’s reports about the Seneca (1798) and one by David Knowles about the Cherokee (1839-1844). Students also took a keen interest in several other topics coursing through Quaker travel writings, such as Quaker spiritual self-examination, the hospitality of Quaker hosts, Friends community networks, non-Quaker religious cultures and communities, and travelers’ strong curiosity about natural phenomena.

 

A sample transcript will illustrate our methods and procedures for rendering a clear transcript of a scribal text. Students used a set of guidelines and a code of symbols for supralineal, sublineal, struck, and truncated words as well as for bracketing editorial marks for pagination and undeciphered characters. Below is a page from “Notes of Joshua Sharpless’ Tour Amongst the Indians 1798” and a section of the corresponding student transcript.

The Chief presently asked us, if we woul†[d] like to see his people in general Council, we let him knowthat we would, as soon as \it/ was Convenient, andtommorrow at 10 OClock was \therefore,/ fixed onfor the time; and runners dispatched immeadiately for that purpose \to give notice/. It was two OClock when we arrived here, and sometime after the above Conferrence, Cornplanter came into our appartment, and asked us if we could eat in the Indian way, we informed \him/ we expected we could, and \he/ presently we had some Dinner brought in \some dinner/ in a bark bowl, and a Tin kettle

As the excerpt shows, students documented the manuscript’s orthographical and grammatical peculiarities as well as the contours of the author’s revisionary steps. Textual artifacts like this one clarified for students the fact that a transcript is a research tool for becoming acquainted with a manuscript, not a substitute for it.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of a project like ours stems from its collaborative nature, tapping the talents and energy of students, professor, curator, and archive personnel. Surely, transcription projects can be as diverse as the people who create them and the purposes that drive them. In our case, all parties were instrumental in providing undergraduates with a singular opportunity to make a lasting contribution to archival records and the untold research that it will support. Combining interdisciplinary, real-world, and experiential learning, archival transcription offers students a privileged glimpse into the past and an opportunity to participate actively in the generation of new knowledge.

Student transcribers include Roberto Contreras, Margaret Duszyk, Epiphany English, David Fialkow, Nancy Mandujano, Kari Olmon, Mondira Ray, Sarah Scheub, Kara Stoever, and Zac Wunrow.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 13.1 (October, 2012).

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Keat Murray is visiting assistant professor of English at Swarthmore College. His recent article, “John Heckewelder’s ‘Pieces of Secrecy’: Dissimulation and Class in the Writings of a Moravian Missionary” (spring 2012), reflects his interests in cultures of class, Native studies, textual studies, and James Fenimore Cooper.

 

 

This coin box was created by the Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) in late 1839 to accompany their fundraising scheme, the “Weekly Contribution Plan.” Modeled on the American Anti-Slavery Society’s (AASS) cent-a-week societies which began in 1838, the MASS’s weekly contribution plan sought to raise money for the cause through the collection of small donations at regular weekly intervals sent to the society monthly. Contributing, according to their ability, one, two, or six cents a week in the box, the grassroots members of the movement could raise vast amounts of money with little seeming labor or sacrifice. At a moment when the general financial pressure of the nation had forced large contributors to withdraw their donations from the cause and when the AASS was on the verge of dissolution, the weekly contribution plan sought to provide the MASS’s treasury the funds to sustain itself. By distributing across all abolitionists the responsibility of keeping the state treasury “constantly supplied” with money to support lecturers and produce print, the plan’s penny capitalism attempted to manage market fluctuations while increasing its members’ personal investment in the cause. A miniature of the treasury to which it is dedicated—”TO THE MASS. A.S. SOCIETY”—the box serves as a sign of the treasury’s larger plenitude and transforms its contributors into stakeholders every time they deposit a coin in its slot. The box compounds its cent. It produces money for the cause as well as interest in it.

 

In addition to a treasury, the box also serves as tract. Issued as an “edition” for six and a quarter cents or seventy-five cents for a dozen, the box, according to The Liberator, is “as useful as a tract, as it is convenient as a treasury.” Furnished with “appropriate devices and inscriptions,” the box is covered on every side, as well as the top, with print. The front depicts the kneeling slave framed by rays of light that, in melting the chains of slavery on the Corinthian columns in the foreground, promise her release. Emanating from an arc with the words “Remember Your Weekly Pledge,” the light derives its power from its contributors’ steadfast donations. On one side is a poem titled “A Sabbath Morning Hymn,” by Maria Weston Chapman, which consecrates each contribution as a gift to freedom. On the other are biblical injunctions that remind readers of their duty to deliver the slave from oppression while showing her mercy and compassion. On the top are more quotations from the Bible, which focus on transforming faith into good works. The back lays out the objectives of the weekly contribution plan along with step-by-step directions for how to conduct it. Like most antislavery artifacts, the coin box speaks in several registers: sentimental and religious as well as organizational and instructional. The front image seeks to generate sympathy for the oppressed; the Sabbath hymn and quotations from scripture further increase that sympathy and tie it explicitly to religious duty; and the back explains how good works for the slave are best performed through systematic donations to the antislavery cause. The box’s coordinated message teaches its contributors to turn their sympathy into cents. Through the gathering of cents, abstract feeling is turned into concrete action and sympathy is made to speak.

The alchemy of this artifact—its ability to convert feelings into money—is augmented by its companion tract, The Monthly Offering. Edited by J. A. Collins, General Agent of the MASS, and published monthly (with some irregularity) from July 1840 until October 1842, The Monthly Offering served as the weekly contribution plan’s official organ. Contributors were asked to buy the box as well as subscribe to the tract for thirty-seven and a half cents a year. The synergy between the box and its companion text is evident in the tract’s title, which transforms contributions into a religious offering and reinforces the plan’s monthly collection schedule. The tract is also a visual replica of the box: it not only duplicates the box’s image on its cover but also, in framing that picture with an ornate border, depicts itself as a box. But rather than being full of money, the tract is packed with print that calls to readers to fill their boxes. Designed to “aid and encourage” contributors in their work of “love and mercy,” The Monthly Offering works like the box to “enlist sympathy for the cause, by holding up to view the suffering and benighted slave” and to remind contributors through its regular arrival to be punctual in their payments. Tales within the tract, such as Maria Weston Chapman’s “Pinda,” do both. Pinda, a fugitive slave, not only gains the reader’s admiration for her loyal affection to her husband and industrious self-sufficiency once in freedom, but also models how to convert that sympathy into antislavery action. At the climax of the tale, just before Pinda, finally free, flees with her fugitive husband from Boston, she becomes a subscriber to the weekly contribution plan. Paying in advance, she offers such a large donation that the box must be opened since her Mexican dollar will not fit in its small slot. “[R]ich in the possession of liberty” though poor in funds, Pinda donates her only savings to extend freedom to others with an “effusion of heart, so lovely and so rare.” Like Pinda, contributors too can express their inner feelings and perform their own freedom by giving money to the slave on the coin box. The Monthly Offering supplements the box in several key ways. It reinforces the box’s message that sympathy is most properly expressed through cents. Moreover, its regular monthly arrival prompts the collection of cents and aids their increase by producing more compassion for the slave. Finally, the tract serves as a concrete emblem of what those cents are meant to fund—more print. The box and its tract, then, enact the larger circuit of sentiment, cents, and print that the antislavery movement more broadly propelled: print creating sympathy, sympathy generating cents, and cents producing more print.

Besides serving as a treasury and a tract, a depository for the cause and a stimulator of antislavery sympathy, the box, described as “beautiful,” also functions as a decorative domestic object. Designed to be placed on a chimney mantle or table in the most public room of the house, the box translates antislavery principles into household knowledge and attaches them to middle-class values. Located in (and physically over) the hearth of the home and placed alongside the parlor’s other ornaments, the box reflects and augments the ideals of middle-class domesticity and benevolence that surround it. Visually, the box’s burning rays of truth extend the warming light of the domestic hearth upward, turning the parlor mantle into an altar to freedom. Discursively, the box speaks the middle-class values of sympathy and savings. It espouses piety and charity as well as punctuality and thrift. As a savings bank, the box instills the habit of self-denial even as it emblematizes economic prosperity. The box teaches contributors to perform “generous thrift”—to save in order to give. As a religious shrine, “a little treasury of the Lord,” whose ritual donation occurs every Sabbath morning, the box sanctifies its cents by transforming them into a gift for the slave. Moreover, by displaying the power of benevolence—its ability to turn pennies into freedom—the box makes an accounting of its contributors’ moral virtue and magnifies its meaningfulness. As a parlor decoration, the box reflects its contributors’ refinement and accentuates their social status. Made for display, the box serves as the external sign of its contributors’ interior states—their “right” feelings of sincerity and compassion. The box’s hymn, which tells of “swelling hearts” and “gracious deeds,” along with the sentimental prose and poetry in its accompanying tract, which is advertised as including the movement’s “best writers,” are signs of the contributors’ culture and refined taste. Serving as a conversation piece, the box encourages sociability along with proper social affiliation. As a sign of its contributors’ economic capital, spiritual goodness, and cultural refinement, the box further compounds its cents by constructing a class consciousness for its contributors.

The box, then, provides in miniature a glimpse into the antislavery movement’s larger workings: its systematized fundraising and centralized structure, its production and circulation of innovative cultural artifacts, and its consolidation of middle-class values. By capitalizing on new modes of consumerism and organization and by utilizing an array of discourses and cultural forms, the antislavery movement installed itself at the heart of antebellum culture and middle-class consciousness. Antislavery succeeded not because it stood outside of an emerging mass consumer culture but because, like the coin box, it compounded its growth.

Further Reading:

Information on the weekly contribution plan can be found in The Liberator for the following dates: December 20, 1839; December 27, 1839; January 31, 1840; February 7, 1840, and March 6, 1840. Descriptions of the box are available in The Emancipator, October 1, 1840, and The Monthly Offering (July 1840): 7. The Monthly Offering was collected in two volumes that were published in 1841 and 1842 in Boston by the Anti-Slavery Office.

For more on the organization of the AASS and its role in the middle-class culture industry, see Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York, 2007); for the place of reform more broadly and abolition in specific in the formation of middle-class identity, see Chris Castiglia, Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham, N.C., 2008).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

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Teresa A. Goddu is associate professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (1997) and is completing a book on the antislavery movement’s role in the rise of mass culture in the antebellum U.S.

“Who painted these paintings?”

Sorting my papers at the beginning of class I asked the student to repeat her question, as several of her classmates joined in. What I remember of the conversation follows.

“These two chiefs,” she explained, “these Indians.”

“Pages thirty-one and forty,’ added a male voice.

Pushing aside my incomprehensible syllabus I lifted up Colin Calloway’s The World Turned Upside Down, a slim volume of Indian voices commenting on the white conquest of eastern America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On pages thirty-one and forty were Lapowinsa and Tishcohan, chiefs of the Delaware, a tribe already betrayed and about to be betrayed again.

 

“Nice paintings,” I offered, and they were.

“No,” insisted the students, “none of the other paintings of Indians in this book is like these. Who did them? What made him see?”

I looked again. All the Indians in Calloway’s other illustrations looked at us as into a mirror, haughty, stiff, and hopeful. The limners who portrayed them had been equally stiff. Their flat colors, profiled poses and routine backgrounds were from a genre somewhere between tavern signs and a parody of the Great Masters. Lapowinska and Tishcohan looked out from wrinkled faces with the insightful eyes of men who had seen too much. The artist was not a master anatomist but he was a European painter who rendered his subjects in a space that once existed, a claustrophobic foreground deep enough for sculptural figures to emerge from the surrounding dark. A clear glaze over each painting intensified the faces, color, and detail. In these works the painter had risen above himself, above technique, above history. He had seen these chiefs for men.

“Who painted these?” my students asked again, “How could he see so well, why was he different?”

I read Calloway’s caption: “Gustavus Hesselius painted the two Delaware chiefs for the Penn family, Proprietors of Pennsylvania, before the treaty negotiations of 1735.”

Then I knew I would be able to seek an answer.

“Gustavus Hesselius” had to be Swedish. My wife’s family is Swedish, our son is Swedish, I speak the language and have done research there. In the last year and more, I have traveled far to find an answer to my students’ question. I’ve left Montana to follow Gustavus Hesselius from Stockholm to New York. Even now, after months of research, I cannot tell you for certain where Gustavus Hesselius got his clear sight during those days in the spring of 1735. But I can try.

I. Gustavus Hesselius is well known to art historians, and his name appears in encyclopedias. The typical entry reads,

b. in Folkarne, Dalarna, Sweden in 1682, nephew-in-law of Bishop and statesman Jesper Svedberg. With his brother Andreas, a priest in the Swedish Lutheran Church, left Sweden in 1711 toward the end of the disastrous reign of Charles XII seeking opportunity in the former Swedish colonies in Delaware. Gustavus and Andreas arrived in Philadelphia in 1712. Their brother Samuel, also a priest, came several years later. Andreas and Samuel soon returned to take up parishes in Sweden but Gustavus, who had studied painting in Uppsala and Stockholm and was the first professionally trained portrait painter in the colonies, found clients for his skills in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Maryland. He married and began a lineage of wealthy and artistic descendants in America. His son John (1728-1778) eventually moved south and painted the great planters of Virginia on the eve of the American Revolution. Gustavus Hesselius died in Philadelphia in 1755, at the age of age 73.

 

This entry alone opens worlds. “Toward the end of the disastrous reign of Charles XII?” By the year Gustavus Hesselius left Sweden, 1711, a fifth of its population had died of battle, disease, and famine in the course of King Charles’s endless war against Norway, Denmark, Poland, Saxony, and Russia. Constant counterattacks against this entire ring of enemies were the only way he could find to save a Swedish empire built up during the Thirty Years’ War. But he could never subdue them all simultaneously. In that same year, Charles endured a humiliating defeat deep in southern Russia and was interned by the Turks when he fled into their territory. Sweden would somehow hold out without him, but when he returned in 1714 to renew his obsessive campaigns his officers would assassinate him to end the nation’s suffering. By then Sweden lay open to conquest. Peter the Great dawdled with reforms while he moved slowly to pluck the Swedish fruit. Pieces of empire fell away like shuttle debris, Kurland, Estonia, parts of Pomerania. “Bishop and statesman Jesper Svedberg?” The patriarchically bearded Puritan whose piety did not prevent him from sweeping together the beginnings of a noble’s estate from the ruins of this crumbling Baltic empire? The man whose son, Emmanuel Swedenborg, would abandon it all to become a mystic? What stories!

And Hesselius’s paintings survive, too, dozens of them, in the Atwater-Kent Museum in Philadelphia, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in the Maryland Historical Society. Art historians have spent decades identifying Hesselius’s paintings, dating them, digging out fleeting references to him in patrons’ letters, and speculating about the painter’s mentality from the ways he arranged pigment around the self-projections of the various members of the colonial elite whose commissions he accepted. Save for brief mention, his ancestors, contemporaries, and children and the historical mansions they inhabited might as well not have existed. One good reason for this focus on the canvases themselves was–and here I reveal Hesselius’s greatest secret–there are no papers. Neither the artist nor his limner son left more than a letter or two and a few legal transactions in the Maryland Archives. Remarks on or about the man in other historical documents are almost nonexistent. He is the ultimate circumstantial case, known only from his milieux, from stray inarticulate facts, and through the rare letter left by himself or others.

Finally in the 1980’s one historian of art, Roland Fleischer, assembled in a great exhibition and its catalog all that was then known of or could be seen by this Swedish painter. Fleischer viewed the paintings in the context of as rich a set of facts about Hesselius as had ever been collected. That was impressive, but the thing I noticed about Fleischer is that he felt a chill go up his spine when he saw the portraits of the Delaware chiefs. He had tried to express in scholarly language the excitement we all felt. “Of the Hesselius portraits, none is superior to these in expressiveness and sensitivity. Many portraits [by others] with more skillful handling are less sympathetically conceived and less capable of evoking the viewer’s interest. Even if Tishcohan and Lapowinska had unusually expressive faces, Hesselius was equal to the task. The nobility conveyed here on canvas is more basic and deeply rooted than that in the majority of eighteenth-century portraits. It rests on the solid foundation of human character and dignity. His powers of personal response to the subject before him were at their peak.”

I read this to my students. Yes, we thought, we felt it too. Though to us the expressions on those two faces were somewhere beyond nobility. Those men had seen almost too much. They knew that they would see more of the same, and that they would not lose their dignity.

Fleischer had also published what was then the only known letter by Gustavus Hesselius. What was interesting was not the letter itself but the fact that its appearance in print led Kathryn Carin Arnborg, an obscure graduate student in art history laboring in the ranks of doktorander at the University of Stockholm, to find another and far more significant letter by Hesselius. “I thought it was interesting that America’s first real portraitist was a Swede and that so little was known about him,” she told me when we met last summer in Humlagorden, the idyllic park in the heart of busy Stockholm. “So I rang up the Carolina (Carolina Rediviva, the great library of the University of Uppsala, sixty miles up the road from Stockholm) and they said, “Oh, yes, our files show that we have one quite long letter by Gustavus Heselius and several by his brother Andreas.” The item by Gustavus was a copy of his first letter home to his mother, written in June 1714, two years after he had disembarked in Pennsylvania, and it contained a revelation for those of us who thought that Hesselius had always seen Native Americans with sympathetic eyes:

Concerning the Indians it is a savage and terrifying folk. They are naked both menfolk and womenfolk, and have only a little loincloth on. They mark their faces and bodies with many kinds of colors . . . The womenfolk shave their head on one side, on the other side they let the hair grow, as long as other women. Here and there bald. They grease their bodies and head with bearfat and hang broken tobacco pipes in their ears, some hang rabbit tails and other devilments, and they think they are totally beautiful.

Some time they eat man meat when they kill each other. Last year I saw with my own eyes that an Indian killed his own wife in broad daylight in the street here in Philadelphia, and that bothered him nothing. While she was dying the other Indians sat around her; some blew in her mouth, some on her hands and feet. I asked one of them why . . . and he answered that a fire coal that would die you must blow on so that it will not go out. When she was dead they all began to shout and had so many awful effects that a man could be scared of them.

Twenty years before his luminous portraits of Lapowinska and Tishcohan, this frightened young immigrant had thought of painting Indian chiefs, but in a very different spirit:

I have always thought of painting an Indian and sending to Sweden . . . Last year one of their kings visited me and saw my portraits they astonished him very much. I painted also his face with red color he gave me an otterskin for my trouble and promised I could paint his Portrait to send to Sweden: but I did not see him later. The king is no better than the others, all go naked and live worse than swine.

When he first met them, Hesselius found Indians repulsive.

Two years after his landing the shock had still reverberated in his letter home. Nothing at home, not even in the collapsing Sweden of 1711, had prepared Hesselius for half-naked aboriginals murdering each other in the streets. Perhaps he still recalled the “filthy savages” he had seen raging in the streets of Philadelphia when, more than two decades later, in 1735, he portrayed Lapowinska and Tishcohan with warts and all. Possibly he meant by the meticulous details, the wrinkled skin, the worn, not spectacular traditional dress and ornaments, that there was still nothing noble about these savages? Their calm gaze and natural stance may have been all he could concede toward the still nobler images his patrons, the Penns, expected Hesselius to deploy to help them flatter the chiefs before they were robbed of their remaining tribal lands. But Hesselius could, on the other hand, have grown in wisdom in the twenty years since he wrote that fright-filled letter. He could have learned to admire the Delaware “savages” who fought so enduringly to preserve their homeland from European and Iroquois rapacity. He might even have become, like his brother Samuel, something of an early anthropologist, seeing in the Indians and their artifacts–in such objects as enigmatic war clubs with mute human faces carved on the killing ball–a lesson in human difference that evoked awe in him. And at the outer limits of human possibility, he might have learned to live with all the manifold “others,” the Indians, Germans, Scotch-Irish, and slaves, who already inhabited or, like himself, flooded into the middle colonies in the years 1712-35. Was it the wisdom of a wide tolerance that made his eye dispassionate? If Hesselius became one of the rare persons living in the American colonies in the eighteenth century who first learned to accept a multiracial society, that was a mystery worth exploring.

Early Pennsylvania would have tested any man’s tolerance. By the time Hesselius painted the Delaware leaders, Pennsylvania and adjoining sections of New Jersey and Maryland had already become the model of a new kind of society never before seen in the western world. Indians who refused to be conquered–for a while the Delaware and, south, the Catawba, and always in the north the Iroquois, once the dreadful power brokers of the continent and now the fast allies of the English in the mutual business of conquest and empire–demanded a place at every table. German immigrants in increasing numbers completed the temporary servitude that often paid for their passages to Pennsylvania. They made farms, became British citizens, and the Lutherans among them entered politics en bloc. Among themselves however the Germans fought constantly over religion, and fiercest were the battles of the Lutheran clergy against the Moravians, a sect of aggressive, successful, often female proselytizers rumored to observe weird sexual customs. In their lexicon, Christ’s wound became a vagina. It was as if the Savior had become female.

On the heels of the Germans came the Scotch-Irish, a wild tribal folk nominally Presbyterian who had been moved to Ireland to help subdue the still wilder Irish but had no use for any government and now moved west and south through Pennsylvania in their tens of thousands, taking land as they pleased, killing Indians to get more. Their practices dated from the era when the Scotch ballads had been conceived. Courtship by stealth preceded marriage by abduction. Hillbillies. My people. One Virginia aristocrat called them the “Goths and Vandals” of the age. Among the free English in the east, the prospering Quakers found themselves challenged for leadership by equally wealthy Anglicans and a few enlightened–as they saw it–Scotch Presbyterians. These religions in turn would be challenged, after 1740, by evangelical “New Lights” recruited from all ethnic groups, passionate laymen who regarded all the old churches and their educated ministers with burning contempt. On the coast a few remnant Swedes and Finns joined the mix, mingling with rowdy lascivious sailors and plausible Irishmen running from the Royal Navy or worse.

An underworld of sweat, despair, and deception played itself out on the roads. In eastern Pennsylvania the rising stream of English, Irish, and German indentured servants working for terms from three to seven years to pay for their passages to America was joined by increasing numbers of African slaves, until 30 percent of the labor force in Philadelphia and its hinterland was made up of one form or another of captives. White or black, all could be bought and sold. Many tried to escape. Thousands of advertisements in the Philadelphia newspapers invited bounty hunters to seize the runaways trying to flee from bondage. Scores of men who were little better off than their victims stalked these runaways. They made their livings by shutting up anyone suspect seen on the road and holding them without warrant in hope of a reward. When caught, the laborers ran away again.

Above the mounting cacophony stretched no established state church–for there was religious freedom here in Pennsylvania–and a proprietary government which, save for a rowdy elected assembly, was run by the Penn family. By this time the Penns had converted to Anglicanism and had become obsessed with turning their ownership of the land into massive profits. They found their efforts violently opposed by nearly every other group in the society when these groups were not distracted by their struggles with each other. Sometimes the several religious and ethnic factions jerked about under the manipulations of Benjamin Franklin, the magician of an apparently mad political system, but at other times Franklin’s clever tongue availed him nothing and he became a chip in the storm. No one ruled in Pennsylvania, least of all the king.

If our frightened Gustavus Hesselius got accustomed not just to Indians but also to this kind of society, he was a most unusual Swede. The newly arrived Hesselius would have had to travel far to become a tolerant man. If we are going to make of him a Jason without Argonauts, journeying toward regions of consciousness never before experienced, we need to know the mental distance we are asking him to leap. To understand how great that distance was, we have to locate him first in the almost otherworldly context of the Sweden from which he came.

Old Sweden was a hermetic social universe. By this I do not mean the collapsing Sweden of Charles XII but the ordinary everyday Sweden Gustavus grew up in, a Sweden whose assumptions endured largely intact until the 1980s. It was an extreme model of the way many eighteenth-century Europeans thought about society. Within Sweden itself, there was one folk, one church, and one true realm. By the eighteenth century the Swedish national self was so completely unified that it stayed behind Charles XII as he led the empire and the nation to ruin by facing more enemies than it could handle in the only posture he knew, attack. Only when the nation was exhausted, one in five of its population dead, its external territories disappearing and Russian armies about to invade, did a few officers shoot the mad king and save the nation. The nation could not save itself. It did not know how to disagree with itself.

It is difficult to grasp the daily control exercised over this unitary society by its tribal state. Under something called the Indelningsverk–the Proportion Works–every village was assigned its share of the soldiers needed to defend the realm, and the empire. Local leaders met to provide a cottage–torp–for each soldier’s family while he was away in service, and when he failed to return they chose a replacement. They equipped their troops as sailors, artillerists, musketeers as specified by the Crown. There was never much debate about how many soldiers a given village should send, because the state church kept nearly perfect track of the population in every hamlet in the land. And in this role, as tracker of the population, the Swedish Lutheran Church was sovereign.

Gustavus Hesselius was raised in the parish of Folkaerna in Dalarna, in the traditional heart of Sweden.

 

Several times a year, usually in early spring and fall, when good weather made traveling easy, the minister came riding to each hamlet in his parish in a predetermined sequence. Nervous hospitality awaited him at the house of the biggest farmer in the settlement. Dressed in starched collars and black hats the host and his wife waited before the door. Every soul in the hamlet was gathered inside, standing in rough order of rank and age, old farmers and their spouses, younger farm pairs with their children, modest cottagers, day laborers, and male and female servants working on annual contracts for subsistence wages and small respect. Servant girls brought in warm drink or perhaps small beer together with aromatic bakelser from the kitchen hearth just behind the great room where the company stood gathered. Soon the minister, still called a priest–prest–lifted up the heavy house-examination book onto the dark farm table, opened it, and called the first name. It always fell to the host farmer to be examined first. The minister looked up from his book, pen in hand.

The pages of the book were ruled into small rectangles containing on the left a column of the names of the parishioners within this settlement by rank and family, their birth dates and ages. To the rightwards across the top of the page unrolled a series of headings. From each name in the left-hand column extended rightward a corresponding row of blank spaces such that every person would receive a score from the minister under each of the progressively unrolling headings at the top of the page. The headings spoke in plain language: “reading,” led the first, then “understanding,” then headings for various parts of Luther’s catechism, and farthest right a place for “notes,” which usually meant behavior. Every soul in the house would be tested by the minister on his or her ability to read and understand the Word of God as offered by the church and interpreted by it in the catechism. Notes were added describing anything unusual in the examinee’s condition or attitude. While not explicitly political, the catechism made clear that loyalty to the king as the head of the church, and so to the monarchical state to which the church belonged, was a duty to God. If you wanted to move, or marry, or take communion, you had to meet the standards set by the state and enforced in public by its local minister. The leader of the local farmers stepped forward. The minister asked the first question.

 

As those assembled rose one by one to be examined, it became obvious that there was a terrible democracy in the process. By the end of the day the meanest servant girl, rising last, could visibly outperform the stumbling master of the greatest farm in the parish. Everyone heard and everyone knew. To remove some of the sting the pastor kept his scores in code, but the meaning of these thin lines with crossing lines and dots above had long since become an open secret in the congregation. The bell-ringer had told his wife. Now they could follow the pastoral hand as he put the dots of highest distinction above the servant girl’s score that he had never entered for the farmer their host. Social pressure proved an effective spur to learning. By 1711 nearly the whole Swedish population could read fairly well and understand the Word and the world in the way their state and its church wished.

In every house in Sweden hung an embroidered picture of the hierarchies of authority in the nation. At the top of the picture was God, beneath him the king, who in principle must obey God, and below the king came the descending channels of secular and religious authority down to the individual household. Within the household the husband ruled over his wife, children, and servants, but his wife had authority over children and servants as well. The hustavla was the Swedish world at a glance. Like all his countrymen, Gustavus Hesselius had this picture in his head when he emigrated.

II.  He had never seen anything like Pennsylvania. He was nauseated by more than just the Indians. His first letter home opens with a conventional pastoral praising the beauty and abundance of nature in the new land, but when he depicts the people of Pennsylvania he makes no attempt to disguise his disgust. “The people here in this city are mostly sinful and ungodly, a mixture of many religions. The teachings of the Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Papists etc. are a hindrance for our pure religion among our Swedish, who could easily be seduced. Therefore the parsons must daily travel around to them and teach them. God help brother Andreas!”

It is not in character for a Swede to use an exclamation point. Faced with all the people of Pennsylvania, Gustavus employed several. And while he seems to be alarmed about religion alone here, he is really using code words to give us his reactions to Pennsylvania’s people and society as well.

Every European knew that the Anabaptists had taken over the city of Muenster early in the sixteenth century and transformed an orderly burgher town into a sty of mad prophecy and free love. Catholics and Lutherans had joined forces to take the city, slaughtering the leaders of the movement together with most of their followers and hundreds of innocent victims. “Anabaptism” became a code word not just for religious heresy–after all, the very Catholics and Lutherans who had united to kill the Anabaptists called each other heretics–but for the way unregulated religious sentiments always created deadly social anarchy. In Sweden a stable religion carefully regulated by the state was the fabric around which national identity was woven. To lack a state religion was to subsist without group identity on the borderlands of chaos.

But Hesselius’ fear of all of the religions in Pennsylvania save his own appears a little irrational even by the standards of the day. Only a few dozen Anabaptists lived in Pennsylvania at the time Hesselius arrived, so they were no immediate threat. The “Papists” and Presbyterians he adds to his epistolary list of horrors were not remotely as alarming to a European as the anarchists of Meunster. From a Lutheran perspective the additional presence of Catholics and Presbyterians was not good, but elsewhere in the world each of these churches was a stable state religion. Only a handful of Catholics had settled in Pennsylvania at the time, and they could lose their property whenever Britain decided they had become too active a force in the colony. There was no danger from the Papists. Why, then, did all of these religions alarm him?

What frightened Hesselius was they were all there, and others on the way, different religions behind which lay different social groups, some from disorderly areas of Europe. He was also troubled that amid such excessive diversity many persons lived outside any church. “The people here in this city are mostly sinful and ungodly, a mixture of many religions.” “I have married a Calvinist,” he told his mother in the same letter, as if he could not believe he had done such a thing. By then he’d been three years on his own. But he assures Mama that his wife is pious, virtuous and god-fearing even so, and that “she wishes soon to leave this Sodom for our old Sweden.” Shortly thereafter he implies that the Indians’ religion is deviltry, moving the location from Sodom to hell. He all but tells her the smell of the Indians made him sick.

Swedish nausea was not unusual. Consider the Reverend Nicholas Collin, who arrived from Uppsala in 1771 to take up a rural Swedish pastorate and soon clambered his way up to the ministry of Gloria Dei, a Lutheran parish in Philadelphia itself. While he stayed on until his death in 1831, his attachment to America was chiefly conditioned by his ability to mingle with the elite of Philadelphia society, most notably in the ranks of the American Philosophical Society. As time went on his parish came to be surrounded by newer and poorer districts of the city. Collin reacted with violent distaste when the real diversity and “disorder” of America gathered beneath his window at night to wake him so he could marry them. He kept a special notebook in which he scribbled remarks furiously annotating the marriage records of his church, lamenting simultaneously the teeming “America” that came knocking on his door in Philadelphia and the revolution that had made it worse:

Came Margaret Power, who was married to John Martin, on the 22^nd of December last, for a new certificate, as he had taken the first from her, and had left her on the very evening of the marriage. She was a widow, 27 years old, and he 26; natives of Ireland.

A Negro came with a white woman, who called herself Eleanor King, widow of a sea captain. They were refused.

Sunday. At night came a party, and with strong entreaties called me out of bed. On my refusing to marry the couple they went off in a vicious manner, throwing a large stone against the entry door.

A French captain of a privateer came with a young lady, from Baltimore. Begged very hard but refused.

A Swedish mariner came to engage my service in his intended nuptials: refused until he produced testimony of the woman’s character. Warned him not to forget his national character in this foreign alliance.

A Negro came with a white woman . . . I referred him to the Negro minister . . . having never yet joined black and white. Nevertheless these frequent mixtures will soon force matrimonial sanction. What a parti-colored race will soon make a great portion of the population of Philadelphia.

This wasn’t a population you could invite to a husfoerhoer.

The frequency with which national and racial differences are noted distastefully in these cases make it clear that Collin is not objecting simply to “disorder,”–though he definitely complains that bad laws from a weak state mean that there is no way to control a disobedient population–but that ethnic and racial diversity lies at the foundation of that disorder. He confirms this when he comments on his own marriage records: “From this will be seen,” he observed disdainfully, “what multifarious intermixing takes place continuously.” He continued the record obsessively, as if he were taming the disorder by condemning it in secret with his pen or leaving a record for God to avenge. In 1795, he wrote, “Oh, when shall I be cleared from this detestable place.” He had thirty-six more years to go. He never made it back to Sweden.

Nicholas Collin traces a trajectory Gustavus Hesselius had started upon but, I believe, never completed.

Hesselius, Collin, and their Swedish compatriots were not alone in their dismay at Pennsylvania. Nor was such dismay a European monopoly. Immigrants from New England experienced a similar revulsion. One such immigrant who arrived a few years after Hesselius was Benjamin Franklin, who was acquainted with Nicholas Collin and inwardly shared his sentiments. In many respects New England was another Sweden.

Puritan Massachusetts and Connecticut were also unitary societies with tribal governments. By the early eighteenth century, the Puritans had lost some of their original control of the colonial government in Massachusetts but still maintained a “New England Way” known for its tribal sense of identity. Only saints had the right to vote in church affairs or in colony elections. The rest of the people were presumably saints-in-waiting. Every tenth man, usually a saint, was a “tithingman,” who supervised the morals of ten families including his own. Certain of these practices ebbed with time, but far into the eighteenth century reactionary Puritan tribesmen would dominate the lower house of the colonial government and control the established church.

In 1723 young Benjamin Franklin fled Boston, Massachusetts, to take refuge in Pennsylvania. The young man had displeased both Increase and Cotton Mather, the archdeacons of the Puritan world. He ran to Philadelphia in 1723 lest the Mathers put him in jail or make his life miserable. Franklin throve in his new home, but Franklin’s reactions to his new home were quite complex. At first, no one thought him a Puritan. He began as a simple tradesman and soon progressed to scientist, politician, and man of the world. The diverse society of Pennsylvania did not seem to bother him. Franklin became a needed mediator between the factions of a divided society quarreling within a disturbed government, and in this role it was useful to have a reputation for tolerance. But when things did not go his way he could call down vengeance on his enemies like an Old Testament prophet. His enemies were usually people who were different from himself. He hated the Scotch-Irish, whom he secretly despised as barbarians, and of all people the Germans, who had had the effrontery to vote against his candidates for the colony’s legislature. When the Germans failed to support him he used a published essay to lash back at them and at “dark skinned” immigration in general:

Why should the Palatine boors [the Germans] be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will soon be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion.

Which leads me to one remark: That the number of purely white people in the world is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawney. And in Europe the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only being excepted, who with the English make up the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers increased. While we are scouring our planet by clearing America of woods, and so making our side of the planet reflect a brighter light to the inhabitants of Mars or Venus, why should we in the sight of superior beings darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa by planting them in America, where we have an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red?

Benjamin Franklin could leave Puritanism behind, but Puritanism–in the form of a desire for one people, pure and moral, under a single leadership–his–never left him. Nicholas Collin would have been insulted to be called “swarthy” but otherwise he and Franklin would have seen eye to eye. Nothing in their early lives had prepared them for Pennsylvania.

There were other reactions to the horrors of diversity. Consider Joseph Martin, an orphan boy raised in righteousness on his grandfather’s farm deep in rural Connecticut. In 1776 he left his simple but impoverished life as a farm laborer to join the revolutionary army. Private Martin marched with the army to camp in Valley Forge in the hard winter of 1777. His officers assigned him and other Connecticut lads to collect food for the army from local German farmers because the polite New Englanders were more effective foragers than the ominous “one-eyed men”–the eye-gouging Scotch-Irish–who had joined the Continental Army there in Pennsylvania and from points south. In the spring, when the British army evacuated nearby Philadelphia, troops from Pennsylvania joined Washington’s army to help pursue the British back across New Jersey and into New York. Martin came along but hung back, assigned to forage on the rich farmers of Jersey. While he was resting by the side of the road the American army’s “baggage train,” as it was called, creaking along miles behind Washington’s regiments, caught up to him. Last in the line of wagons came Pennsylvania’s “baggage,” a rowdy collection of teamsters, camp followers, wounded, and shirkers from every folk group in that colony. The one-eyed men were there; so was everyone else. Franklin would have named it Hell on Wheels. Martin was transfixed:

Our baggage happening to be quite in the rear, while we were waiting we had an opportunity to see the baggage of the army pass. When that of the middle states [Pennsylvania, New Jersey] passed us, it was truly amusing to see the number and habiliments of those attending it; of all specimens of human beings, this group capped the whole. A caravan of wild beasts could bear no comparison with it. There was “Tag, Rag, and Bobtail”; some with two eyes, some with one, and some I believe with none at all. They beggared all description; their dialect too was as confused as their bodily appearance was odd and disgusting. There was the Irish and Scotch brogue, murdered English, flat insipid Dutch [German], and some lingoes which would puzzle a philosopher to tell whether they belonged to this world or to some undiscovered country.

More fascinated than repelled, Private Martin had discovered America.

I’m not sure Gustavus Hesselius ever made it this far.

III. Yet the paintings did not lie. There is evidence beyond the enigma of oil on canvas to tell us that Gustavus Hesselius began to cross a threshold many Americans then and since have been unable to cross. What happened to him in Pennsylvania changed him progressively but the transformation was latent in his past, a past that distinguished him from his brothers Andreas and Samuel, who did not stand the course but left American to return to Sweden.

The secret lies in a closer reading of Gustavus Hesselius’s first letter home, and in what is known about his life experiences in Pennsylvania and nearby in Maryland and New Jersey over the next forty years.

He began to change already before writing the letter. I believe he knew this and that he wrote the letter in part because he knew he was changing and needed to assure his mother and perhaps himself that she would not lose him entirely. In the simplest sense, of course, he had waited two years to write her because he needed to know that clients would seek out his services and he could earn a living. Unlike his brothers, he was a freelance artist with no churchly sinecure to guarantee him income. Only in 1714 was he certain he could stay a while, though probably he did not know how long. Brother Andreas had surely used his first official report back to the Swedish Church to ask Uncle Svedberg to tell their mother, the bishop’s relative, that both he and Gustavus had arrived safely across the sea. Gustavus could not have written her a detailed message before being certain he could stay at all. But by the time he wrote her he had already broken convention powerfully. The first thing he had done once income appeared certain was not to write his mother but to marry, and in marrying he had passed over the many attractive young women of the Swedish congregations who for generations provided good wives to imported Swedish clergy–including one of his brothers and later Nicholas Collin–to take the hand of a Calvinist.

In choosing to marry Lydia Getchie he sent a double message, one of several signs in the letter that he had a more complex reaction to his new environment than his words of revulsion might indicate. On the one hand the lady was a Calvinist from a unitary society expressed in a tribal state, Connecticut, so she shared certain assumptions with her husband and probably shared his dismay at what appeared to be Pennsylvania’s chaos. On the other hand she was a Calvinist, a religion regarded by Lutherans and Anglicans alike as fanatical and disreputable. The only real Calvinist states included the Netherlands, an internally divided and declining power, a few Swiss cantons, contentious Massachusetts, tiny Connecticut, and a Scotland notoriously rent with bloody struggles between shifting combinations of highland Catholics, lowland Calvinists, and the imperial English. By comparison, Lutheran Sweden and Anglican England stood in the top rank of powerful European states. They prided themselves on being stable sovereign powers possessed of substantial empires. Precisely because its empire had begun to fray at the edges, no nation had more confidence in the rightness of its religion than Sweden. To marry a Calvinist was déclassé and a flirtation with heresy if not anarchy. Hesselius had done something bold. For whatever reason, loneliness, lust, ambition for her dowry, a sophisticated wisdom that leaned him toward the new fashion for tolerance, or all of these at once, he had stepped outside his own intolerant framework. This meant that he had some heavy explaining to do to mother.

Because Hesselius knew his mother would be horrified, he broke the news to her in crafted form in his letter. He conceded that she would be shocked, but he did it in a way that clearly put a touch of humor on the news, admitting that Lydia’s father is a “Presbyterian or Calvinist a mean odd fellow,” a cartoon Calvinist. But, he observes lightly, the man might yet be saved because his other daughter has married an Anglican parson, “so we can hope for the best.” There is a nice mix of conventional shock and worldly insouciance in this passage that his mother may read as she likes. Besides, the old man has placed his substantial estate at the couple’s disposal “while I stay here in this country.” He then amplifies this implied promise to return home when he affirms that his bride has converted to Lutheranism and is really an honorary Swede by virtue of her virtuous demeanor and her intentions to move promptly back to Sweden with him. It is at this point that he refers to Pennsylvania as “Sodom,” something he half believed at this stage but that was also useful in diverting Mama’s attention to greater evils than a once-Calvinist bride.

Hesselius’s letter shows in many ways a more complicated man than my students or I imagined. He is, for example, overwhelmingly ambitious. His father-in-law’s stone house and fine gardens are lovingly portrayed. “Since I came to this country I have earned 600 pound,” he notes (a good living for a minor nobleman in England ) and “I lived a year with Master Easton one of the most noble English.” The passages that report his revulsion with the natives also strain with his desire to paint them. Art and ambition combine to make him say, even as he reports behavior vile to his sensibility, “I have always thought of painting an Indian and sending to Sweden.” But art alone speaks when one of their kings is astonished by viewing the painter’s oil portraits and, to return the compliment, Hesselius takes his own red pigment to mark the king’s face in Indian fashion. For an instant the artist touched the face of the other, painting the face of strangeness in a strange manner, and asking in wonder what this other way of painting meant. But when the king does not return to sit for Hesselius he and his like become “swine.” Still, just as in the letter we can see that his religion was already bending to embrace one converted Calvinist and her Anglican brother-in-law, so here for a second we can witness Hesselius and an Indian chief gazing at one another, each wondering what magic lay in the art of the other. I do not think this Hesselius is a conventional man. His later life would confirm this impression.

As the years passed word of his professional skills spread through the colonial elite. Commissions for portraits mounted, and it became clear that Gustavus and Lydia would not move to Sweden. He produced scores of works, dozens of which survive. Collectively these paintings tell us that the searching eye of the trained painter could override Hesselius’s ambition as well as his prejudices. He became a portraitist of men, not of women. The absence of paintings of women in his oeuvre puzzled art historians until they turned up a rare piece of documentary evidence that explained the dearth of women. By chance one of his foremost patrons, James Logan, chief justice of Pennsylvania, wrote to a friend that Hesselius would do his likeness but that his wife had refused to be painted by the Swedish artist. In so many words Logan described her complaint as, “He paints what he sees.” Hesselius’s renditions of his sitters’ faces, noted the chief justice, struck most of Pennsylvania’s gentlewomen as too “unflattering.” Gustavus’s ruthless eye took him places he did not want to go. When he lifted his pigment to daub a tribesman’s cheek, when he studied the signs of age in a woman’s visage, his eye ruled him. Whatever he felt about Indians or however much he wanted a commission, his painter’s eye drew him along, whispering, “Accept. Accept. Paint what you see. Nothing human is foreign to me.” Ambition, a fashionable tolerance, and his eye motivated this man, and this time the eye won. Rather than compromise, he went on painting men.

By the time Hesselius accepted a commission to paint a large mural in St. Barnabas Anglican Church in nearby Maryland in 1720, it became clear that he could never remain in the Lutheran fold. Jesper Svedberg had ordered the Swedish Lutheran clergy in America to maintain friendly relations with the Church of England, and, on the way to Pennsylvania, brother Andreas had persuaded the bishop of London to contribute financial support to the Swedish mission there from the Anglican missionary funds for America. The bishop gave gladly, as his church was short of good priests who would go to America and the Swedes preference for moderate religion and strong civil government fit nicely with Anglican goals in the colonies. But Anglicans were not Swedish Lutherans. They served a wealthier clientele and cultivated a stylish stance as religious citizens of the world who were able to see good in many other faiths. When St. Barnabas offered Hesselius a substantial commission to do a mural of the Last Supper, it offered him several temptations. The growing fashion for tolerance among men of the world may have joined social ambition and a good fee to persuade him to take this commission, but, as will become apparent, I suspect that his eye was engaged by this new faith as well. Accepting the job would draw him closer to the visual world of Catholicism, yet another of the religions whose multifarious presences had so alarmed him (though not enough to keep him from his Calvinist bride) in 1714. In all events after he completed the work he spent as many of his Sundays in Anglican churches as in Lutheran, and joined at least one Anglican congregation as member in full communion. From then on he was as much Anglican as Lutheran.

Unlike the still fairly barebones Lutherans, many sophisticated Anglicans had begun to move back toward the Catholic pictorial tradition. Lutheran priests no longer whitewashed religious paintings out of frenzy for the unvarnished word of God, and churches in Sweden had begun to indulge in baroque decorations and occasionally in paintings (indeed, Hesselius had done an altarpiece for a local Lutheran church in 1715, the first religious painting in the colonies). But Lutheranism like most Protestantism remained essentially a religion of print and of the mind. The vivid images of the Protestant tradition still lay in the minds of their despairing believers. The Catholic pictorial tradition, however, was literal, and it stretched back unbroken for centuries. In that church no infusions of reforming asceticism had ever broken the passionate attachment of lay believers to vivid physical representations of Christ, Mary, and the saints. Catholic patronage had generated an abundance of great religious art by the masters of the Renaissance whose art Hesselius had studied in reproduction while training in Uppsala. Throughout the Catholic universe an abundance of statues and colorful plaster or canvas surfaces displayed the miracles and mysteries on which popular faith was grounded. Catholic reformers complained that the people thought that the images were the saints they depicted.

Anglicans had never fully rejected this tradition, and now in the middle of the eighteenth century high Anglican congregations like St. Barnabas returned more eagerly to an appreciation of the spiritual value of pictorial representations than some Lutherans were prepared to do. Anglican piety had never been entirely demysticized. The churchwardens commissioned Gustavus Hesselius to paint “ye History of our Blessed Savior and ye Twelve Apostles at ye Last Supper. Ye institution of ye Blessed Sacrament of his body and blood.” When Gustavus Hesselius promised to do a mural at their church, he entered a world of visual piety that his Anglican friends took seriously, and that he had never fully experienced. To some of his brothers in Luther, it must have seemed impure superstition. To him, it may have become pure pleasure. The painting is gone, but the clue to his reaction lies in something he did after. He became an Anglican but, years later, not long before his death, he painted out of his own need the most passionate of representations in all Christianity, the Crucifixion, which he exhibited in the window of his home in Philadelphia. It must have caused talk. If this is the Crucifixion that John Adams later saw in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic church in 1774, it was Catholic indeed: “A picture,” writes Adams, “of our savior in a frame of marble over the altar, at full length, upon the cross in agonies, and the blood dropping and streaming from his wounds.” Did Hesselius’s eye and heart finally lead him from a Calvinist bride to a Catholic piety made for a man with a pictorial imagination? There was no fashion in this, so he would have had to keep it secret.

In 1720 he also sold the land in Maryland that he had named “Swedenland” and the following year became a naturalized British citizen, in Maryland. He could never go home to Sweden, metaphorically or literally. Greater Philadelphia was his home. His children attended the English-language services at their Swedish church, not those in Swedish. Eventually he made his home in Philadelphia itself. He continued to do well. Part-Lutheran and part-Anglican, possible sentimental Catholic, once the groom of a Calvinist, he had become everything that in his letter home to his mother he had claimed to despise.

IV. Gustavus’s brother Samuel met an altogether different fate. Samuel arrived in Pennsylvania in May 1719. From the moment he arrived Samuel spent as much time preaching in Anglican churches as in Lutheran, eventually acquiring an Anglican congregation of his own. When he left Pennsylvania to return to Sweden in 1731 most of the letters of thanks for his efforts were from Anglicans, not Lutherans, and the English priests praised his broad piety and enlightened faith. He was not as popular with some of the Swedes he had been sent to minister to because he was willful and was accused of scandalous behavior, but also in part because he was the first Swedish Lutheran missionary to America to try to convert his Lutheran services entirely to the English language. He could not rest content as a man of the world himself, unless his fellow Swedes in America too joined the world. In this initiative he reversed the whole purpose of Sweden’s great mission to its people stranded along the Delaware littoral, which had been to preserve their national character in the midst of Pennsylvanian chaos. He was an assimilationist. He perceived that the English religion, culture, and language would become the matrix for whatever order would emerge in this tangled land. His effort failed, and he was roundly criticized by some of his countrymen.

Samuel may have been a catalyst in his brother’s ongoing changes. At the behest of their stay-at-home brother Johan, a doctor and the only Hesselius sibling who could be called a scientist, when he went home Samuel took with him a “chest of curious things” that were to weave their way into his country’s increasing awareness of the wide world. Samuel Hesselius’s chest of curiosities is mentioned in the letters of Killian Stobaeus, the founder of the first historical and ethnographic museum at the university in Lund. From there Staffan Brunius, a curator at the modern National Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm, has traced the objects through the papers of the aristocratic scientist Carl Gyllenborg, who in 1739 left the chancellor’s post at Lund to become chancellor at Uppsala and a founder of the National Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Evidently Samuel sent the chest to Gyllenborg in Lund in 1736 with a request that the objects go to his home university of Uppsala. Some of the objects in the chest may have stayed in Lund–whose museum now hangs on the edge of nonexistence as state support is withdrawn–and the rest evidently followed Gyllenborg to Stockholm where some items are probably in the collections of the Ethnographic Museum, though a few may have come to rest eventually at Uppsala. Samuel and brother Johan had catalogued the collection in the years immediately after Samuel’s return from America, but their catalog has disappeared. Samuel’s letter donating the chest mentions many Native American items including “a stone axe,” “an Indian idol,” and “a belt of wampum,” but because the early objects sent by him and others created a fascination with Indians, the ethnographic collections in Lund, Stockholm, and Uppsala are now so full of similar American Indian artifacts of unspecified origin that we cannot know which were sent by the returning missionary.

It is impossible to know which native objects in Lund, Stockholm, and possibly Uppsala were sent by Samuel Hesselius, but it is possible to know in what spirit he sent them to Gyllenborg. In Skolkloster, the seventeenth-century castle on the inland sea called Maelaren, cached among artistic booty seized by the victorious Swedes during the Thirty Years’ War, is a Delaware war club whose like exists in only two other places, Stockholm and Copenhagen. On its killing ball a mute face has been carved.

 

The face is round mouthed in unreadable emotion. In the seventeenth century such objects were called “curiosities.” They were collected by aristocrats for display in their castles for the sense of wonder they evoked, of distance, of strangeness. In 1736 Samuel sent his “curious things” to Carl Gyllenborg in quite another spirit. Gyllenborg represented a new, “scientific” approach born of the Enlightenment and out of which modern ethnography would emerge. While it was still an aristocratic plaything, the systematic study of strange cultures was about to begin. Just as brother Gustavus’s letter home survived in a copy in the collections of Germund Ludvig Cederheilm because that aristocrat wished to appear an aficionado of the natural sciences, so Samuel’s letter donating his chest of curiosities survives because it was saved by another aristocrat reaching for science, in this case anthropology. But in his terminology, “curiosa saker,” Samuel revealed that the old sense of pure wonder was not dead in him. Creature of human wonder as well as of the Enlightenment, he marveled at the enigmatic objects he forwarded even as in sending them he made himself a scientist and honorary gentleman.

Immediately on Samuel’s arrival in Pennsylvania in 1719, Gustavus began his journey toward Anglicanism and into an ancient and vivid pictorial piety that high Anglicans had never entirely rejected and liberal Anglicans no longer scorned. And soon thereafter, in 1721, he became a citizen of Britain’s world empire, embracing that as well. I cannot help but see Samuel’s wide, tolerant, assimilationist, and, yes, also personally ambitious stance as a spur to his brother’s own growth in these years. Both were becoming men of the world, at home in several traditions. I believe that Samuel’s sense of wonder infected Gustavus as well, and perhaps always had. In 1735, four years after Samuel returned to Sweden and one year before he sent his Indian objects off to Carl Gyllenborg, Gustavus received a commission from the Anglican Penns to paint two Delaware chiefs, Lapowinska and Tishcohan, before a conference that would end in their betrayal. By this time, Gustavus’s ambition and hunger for new experience were beginning to take him far from his origins. His eyes had seen much already. The gazes of his two subjects in the paintings come from the same source of wonder as the silent open mouths of the figures on the Delaware stone clubs in Skolkloster, in Stockholm, and in Copenhagen, or the lost objects from Samuel’s trunk. Samuel and his brother bore simultaneous witness to what was disappearing.

Out of the encounters of cultures, Swedish Lutheran, migrant Calvinist, enlightened Anglican, and Native American, out of social climbing, the uncontrollable passions of the eye, out of a fashionable and socially useful cosmopolitanism and assimilationism, and a not entirely modern sense of wonder, came Samuel, who went home with his chest of curiosities, and Gustavus, who remained to paint the two portraits that so moved my students.

And what happened to Lapowinska and Tishcohan? After their portraits were completed they attended the meeting to which the Penns had summoned them. There they were persuaded to agree in principle to a further purchase of their tribe’s lands in the future. Two years later, under immense pressure, they accepted the Penns’ offer to buy for a fixed sum as much land as a man could walk in a day and a half. On the nineteenth of September 1737, the Penns showed up with three trained runners, the strongest of whom in the next thirty-six hours “walked” off the boundaries of an area nearly a thousand square miles. The Delaware were dispossessed of their homeland. In succeeding years they became vassals to the Iroquois, who called them “women” to their faces at treaty negotiations. The Iroquois sold the tribe’s remaining lands to the Penns and to other land speculators, taking the small profit for themselves.

Coda

Hesselius’s story and the Delawares’ fate are more complicated than they have been rendered here. My portrait of the artist would be different now if I could incorporate the sources that have poured across my desk since writing and submitting it. To me he now seems a more deeply moved, even spiritual, man.

I say this first because of the terrible story of his brother Andreas, with whom he had crossed the Atlantic to Pennsylvania and met his first Indian. In my view news of Andreas’s final fate has to have influenced Gustavus just as he raised his brush to portray the two chiefs. Andreas was thirty years old and a rising star on the faculty at Uppsala when he attracted the envy of Bishop Svedberg. The bishop deliberately sent Andreas to exile in America for ten years, as far as he could send him from all opportunities to shine intellectually. Presumably he did it to punish him for pride but Andreas’s brothers, who loved him, did not see pride in him, nor do I. But I do know university politics in Sweden and to me the story is familiar. Peter, the next eldest and himself a priest, spoke for them all when he publicly lamented Andreas’s banishment to limbo, finding nothing good in it. Svedberg then came down hard on Andreas when some of his first reports home on the Swedes in America did not fit the rosy views of the official line. Pennsylvania was hell for Andreas as well, as both Svedberg and Andreas’s brothers had anticipated. When Gustavus had exclaimed, “God help brother Andreas!” it was because he knew that the spirited and widely learned Andreas would suffer trying to bring orthodoxy–let alone sophistication–to colonial Swedes and Finns used to making their own decisions and tempted by the wide choice of ignorant heresies plaguing the land. Once again, with new knowledge Gustavus’s letter acquires deeper dimensions.

 

Andreas assumed his duties, bearing it so well that even Svedberg grew silent. By the time Gustavus had written, Andreas had already married a local Swedish woman the very day Gustavus wed Lydia, and he twinned with Gustavus’s letter a message of his own informing their mother. When he was allowed to go home after serving his ten years, the parishioners of his Christina congregation gave him warm recommendations. He later admitted that only good books and his interest in botany had enabled him to bear his time in America. His notes at the time also show a remarkable human fascination with the Indians. Enlightenment language occasionally came from his pen, and a draft of a play that summed up the contradictory fantasies about Indians then fashionable in liberal circles, but he was simply a trusting father as he watched an Indian woman cure his sick little son, and spoke only as a reflective fellow thinker when he described the religion of the local tribes. He felt so keenly the destruction that conversion to Christianity worked in Indian converts by cutting them off from all their traditions and companions that he could not bear to fulfill his duty to convert them. Israel Acrelius, who was later sent out to report on the state of the missions to America, would ridicule Andreas for his failure to bring over ‘the heathen,’ but Andreas could not inflict cultural limbo on a people whose views he respected. Most of all, he looked Indians in the eyes. At an early conference attended by Iroquois chiefs, he noticed how the eyes of one chief and his wife revealed an openness and kindness that dispensed with the standard mask of native pride. Perhaps he shared these revelations with Gustavus, who came frequently to his brother’s church.

Andreas had a miserable life after he returned to Sweden in 1723. His wife died in England on the way home. Svedberg sent the widowed man to Gagnef, a parish located near his home in Dalarna but a congregation run by a clique of headstrong elders and a schoolmaster who tortured him for years. Gagnef was worse than Pennsylvania, and far, far from Uppsala. He died a lingering, painful death, probably of cancer in 1733, never having made it back to the center of things. News of Andreas final suffering and death must have reached Gustavus shortly before he painted Tishcohan and Lapowinska, looking into their eyes, seeing in them suffering, endurance, understanding.

The last story is the most dramatic of all. After Lydia died, in 1748 or ’49, when he was only a few years from death, Gustavus Hesselius is reported to have gone to a Moravian leader to help him with the guilt he felt over having beaten his female house slave. Before and after that reported visit, his known contacts with the Moravians increased steadily. The Moravians did not yet forbid slavery, but they were on missions throughout the world to convert slaves, Africans, Eskimos, and all peoples, to their celebratory beliefs. They had already eaten out Pennsylvania Lutheranism from within, pretending to supply qualified ministers while converting most Lutherans to their increasingly unorthodox positions. By 1745 it was becoming known that the Moravians believed the deity was female as well as male, worshipped images of Christ’s wound as a vagina-like opening in which they painted little believers living happily, and celebrated in poetry and on actual occasions the union of male and female sexual organs in marital intercourse. Lutherans and Calvinists throughout Pennsylvania reacted in horror, while the Anglicans looked on with a certain superior amusement.

Despite their reputation, by the mid-1740s Gustavus Hesselius had joined the Moravians, by then about the least fashionable thing he could do. He stood side-by-side with them as they fought the long and sometimes bloody battle for religious preeminence with Swedish and German Lutherans that lasted from 1744 to 1750. His conversion in these years puts the painting of the Crucifixion he hung in the window of his town house in Philadelphia in 1748 in a new light, for the painting now appears not as part of a drift toward Anglo-Catholicism but as a bold public declaration of his adherence to the Moravians and to their vivid revival of the medieval Catholic piety centered on the wounds and blood of Christ. In a letter to the Moravian leader, Count Von Zinzendorf, the Moravian Bishop Cammerhoff tells how seeing Hesselius’s Crucifixion in Philadelphia helped make two slaves aware of Christ’s suffering and open them to this Moravian piety.

Late in his life, then, Gustavus entered the portals of a radically unfashionable religion centered on turning holy suffering into holy joy and actively opening its arms to all peoples alike. I had always suspected that he was a spiritual adventurer, a man of suffering, and of conscience. His daughter and her Lutheran-priest husband barely pulled him back into the fold of respectability before he died. His paintings of Lapowinska and Tishcohan were only the first of his depictions of suffering.

As for the Delaware, already by Hesselius’s death some of them were becoming Moravians too. Their children would live as Moravians at a village named Gnadenhutten.

Sources and Further Reading:

After having completed this work I discovered that Gunloeg Fur had raised the very same set of questions about Andreas and Gustavus and the two paintings in her “Konsten att se,” in Historiska Etyder, published by the department of history at Uppsala University, 83-94 (Uppsala, 1997). Fur’s brilliant opening, and awareness that it is the conditions of clear, tolerant sight of others in a few Europeans that we must investigate, make hers the pioneering work in the field. Without full use of the archival sources in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania or the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, she romanticizes Andreas as a kind of woodland Swede, senses but then drops the importance of Gustavus’s ties to his brother and to the Moravians, and explains the tolerant vision of both by a “marginality” that may not describe either Gustavus or Andreas very exactly. Nonetheless, I have tread inadvertently in her early footsteps, and hope I have been able to refine her depictions of these events so that we can one day return to the issue of marginality with more knowledge.

As far as I know the only fiction in the essay has just been pointed out by one of the students from the class, who remembers that only one of the paintings was in Calloway’s book and that another member of the group had found and brought a copy of the other to that class. I checked the book and, sure enough, there was Lapowinska alone. Otherwise I have not relied on memory. While I here make interpretive choices on larger historical issues, the only unconfirmed evidence specifically on Hesselius and his brothers is a) that the crucifixion John Adams saw in a Catholic church in Philadelphia in 1776 is the one Hesselius placed in his window in 1748, and b) that in the 1740’s he went to a Moravian leader to discuss his guilt over beating his female slave. In both cases respectable older authorities either cited sources inadequately or named sources since lost. I have tried to write the text to reflect the uncertainty of these two claims. Otherwise I have looked up every fact in original sources or in reliable secondary works that footnote specific original sources and are often confirmed by others’ citations. I have not used footnotes not only because this journal in its wisdom prohibits them, or because this is a work in progress, but because there is neither certainty nor science to the origins of tolerance pursued through a myriad of oblique sources. It delights me to write an informed reflection on an issue that I hope can never be resolved and to name the sources only at the end so as to invite others to make the same journey. If we were to find Gustavus Hesselius’s personal papers and they were to reveal a single specific source of his tolerance, I would be disappointed.

We begin with Colin Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down (New York, 1994). For Gustavus himself and his painting, the older and still useful work is Christian Brinton, Gustavus Hesselius, 1682-1755 (Philadelphia, 1938) and the modern classic is Roland Fleischer, Gustavus Hesselius, Face Painter to the Middle Colonies (Trenton, 1987). Fleischer also has an article, “Gustavus Hesselius and the Penn Family Portraits,” American Art Journal 19 (3) (1987): 4-18, a piece which led Carin Arnborg to find and publish Hesselius’s long letter home used here, as “‘with God’s blessings on both land and sea’: Gustavus Hesselius Describes the New World to the Old . . .,” American Art Journal, 21 (3) (1989): 4-17. Arnborg’s essay in history of art at the University of Stockholm, “Gustavus Hesselius in Sweden and Europe from 1682 to 1712” (1989) is in English and very valuable. All of these works list most of the vital documentary sources. Carin Arnborg had the assistance of Swedish antiquarian Lars Oestlund in her work, and she has kindly provided me with copies of his excellent and almost perfectly footnoted private (Xerox, bound) work on Andreas Hesselius, “Andreas Hesselius, Dalapraest och naturskildrare I 1700-talets Delaware” (1993), a work deeply based in a fine reading of original published Swedish sources. It should be published. Oestlund’s earlier Hesselius, Den Bortgloemda Slaeken (Avesta, 1989) covers the family as a whole, has a specific and valuable essay on Gustavus, and is based in many original sources, but is not footnoted and the bibliography includes a few genealogical and antiquarian works that tend to mythologize the Swedes in Delaware, so despite Oestlund’s high standards, specific information from this latter work should perhaps be checked.

Please note that Hesselius’s paintings of the two chiefs have just been moved from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to the Atwater-Kent Museum of Philadelphia, where they are on display. They are well reproduced in William Sawitzky, Catalogue Descriptive and Critical of the Paintings and Miniatures in The Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1942) and are discussed in John C. Ewers, “An Anthropologist looks at Early Pictures of North American Indians,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 33 (1949): 223-35. James Logan’s remarks about Hesselius’s frankness as a painter are in Frederick B. Tolles, “A Contemporary Comment on Gustavus Hesselius,” Art Quarterly (Autumn, 1954): 271-73. A Google search will turn up standard Swedish biographical dictionaries that report on Gustavus Hesselius as on many of the characters described here. Hesselius’s will is reproduced in Francis de Sales Dundas, Dundas-Hesselius, (Maryland, 1938), 111-14; other legal documents including his naturalization are available online through the Maryland Archives. And a search of the digitalized Pennsylvania Gazette will produce a few more legal notices as well as advertisements for Hesselius’s many skills. Still more information on the three brothers in America and on the Swedes in the middle colonies, including an excellent sets of reference to sources in Sweden and here are in Carol Hoffecker et al., eds., New Sweden in America (Newark, Del., 1995), especially the essays by Staffan Brunius, Hans Norman, and Richard Waldron. Here will be found references to some of the classic narratives by Swedish priests and others describing the colony, many of which are available in English, most notably Israel Acrelius’s A History of New Sweden (original published in Sweden in 1759 but the William R. Reynolds translation from 1874–volume 11 in the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania–is available from University Microfilms in Ann Arbor).

Andreas Hesselius’s “diary” of notes on America, immensely revealing of the man, is in English as The Journal of Andreas Hesselius, in Delaware History, 2 (1947), and in Swedish as Andreas Hesselii Anmaerkningar om Amerika, ed. by Nils Jacobsson (Uppsala, 1938). Sadly, Andreas’s bold proposals for reforming the American missions, which aimed straight at Jesper Svedberg’s heart, exist only in the original Old Swedish and printed in fraktur, in the original edition of Kort baerettelse om den Svenska kyrkios naervarande tilstoand I America (Norrkoeping, 1725). Be aware that some of the English translations omit a few pages of the originals. For a sharp contrast to Andreas, and a look at the kind of obedient missionary priest Svedberg preferred, see Andreas Sandels Dagbok, 1701-1743, ed. Frank Blomfelt, (Stockholm, 1988). Then there is the classic work of visiting naturalist Per/Peter Kalm, who spent a day with Gustavus at John Bartram’s farm near Philadelphia, Travels in North America, 2 vols., ed. Hanna Benson, original translation published 1937, Dover edition (New York, 1966).

Together these sources contain a surprising wealth of contemporary information by and about the brothers Hesselius. The unpublished records of the local Swedish community are widely scattered and there are no known collections of Hesselius family or personal papers. Susan Klepp has kindly provided information on the family from the Gloria Dei church records. The best single source of unpublished documents on the Swedes in the greater Philadelphia area is the Amandus Johnson Papers in the Balch Collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Johnson transcribed many revealing documents in Swedish pertaining to the local Swedish community and translated a few. Lars Oestlund used these sources for his work on the Hesselius family and I have benefited from his detailed narrative based partly in them, but I still need to see the full Johnson Papers for myself. They were unavailable for some time because the Balch Collection was being moved into the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, but this week the HSP has at last been able to send me its description of the folders with copies of the contents of the most crucial folders. Johnson’s selections focus on the ministers and churches and so do not at any point dwell on the more secular Gustavus Hesselius. But these slim folders on Andreas and on Samuel Hesselius with miscellaneous documents in Swedish do have previously unnoticed information on Andreas, which confirms the picture of Andreas offered here. The other Jonsson papers are not as promising but on an impending visit I will check them all in case any yet undiscovered bits relevant to Gustavus still hide behind less likely folder descriptions. As for archival resources in Sweden, while I have spent considerable time in Swedish archives over the last thirty years, a recent summer visit to see archivist-friends to search their databases for Hesselius and to speak with Kathryn Carin Arnborg, and a subsequent exchange of correspondence with Staffan Brunius, have not been promising. There are some places to look that have not been searched thoroughly, but seeking Hesselius papers in Sweden beyond those found by Lars Oestlund would take a year of full-time enquiry with no sure rewards. Hopefully dissemination of this essay in Sweden will jog loose some finds. Hans Ling, formerly with Riksantikvarieaembetet, is about to publish further information on the Hesselius family in the online bulletin of the Swedish Colonial Society and has been of immeasurable help in improving this essay.

Staying on the Swedish end of things, Jesper Svedberg’s America Illuminata (1732), the bishop’s abbreviation of his long, somewhat differently titled manuscript Svecium Nova (see below), which virtually no one seems to have read, is available as America Illuminata, ed. Robert Murray, (Stockholm, 1985). And selections from Svedberg’s Levernebeskrivning, original 1729, are edited and modernized by Inge Jonsson, (Stockholm, 1960). These have just come in and Jonsson’s excellent introduction does not make Svedberg at all an attractive character. The correspondence between Andreas and the angry Svedberg is cited in Oestlund’s Andreas Hesselius, but much of it appears originally in Svedberg’s long 1727 manuscript, Svecium Nova seu America illuminata, original in the Library of Uppsala University (copy in the Amandus Jonsson Papers), on which his 1732 America Illuminatais based, and the correspondence in full is in the Cederhjelmska samlingen, Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek, B238. Samuel Hesselius’s collection of curious things and the early ethnographic world of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Sweden are beautifully described in Staffan Brunius’s contributions to Med vaerlden I kappsaecken: samlingarnas vaeg till Etnografiska museet (Stockholm, 2002), a spectacular book available from the national Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm. Brunius has promised to keep me informed of his further progress with Samuel, the collector. For the botanical and zoological side of the same culture, see Yngve Loevegren’s first rate Naturaliekabinett I Sverige Under 1700-Talet (Lund, 1952). The Swedish husfoerhoer and the literacy campaign that made it work are the subjects of Egil Johannson’s life work, and can be sampled in English as Alphabeta Varia, Orality, Reading and Writing in the History of Literacy, ed. by Daniel Lindmark (Umea, 1988). See also Franklin Scott, Sweden: The Nation’s History, revised enlarged edition (Carbondale, 1988).

Private Martin is found in Ordinary Courage: The Revolutionary War Adventures of Joseph Plumb Martin (St. James, N.Y., 1993), Nicholas Collin in The Journal of Nicholas Collin, 1746-1831 (Philadelphia, 1936), key sections reproduced in Life in Early Philadelphia, ed. Susan Klepp and Billy Smith, (University Park, Pa., 1995). The Moravians are best seen through the remarkable new article by Aaron Fogleman, “Jesus is Female: The Moravian Challenge to the German communities of North America,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2) (April, 2003): 295-332. Fogleman and Paul Peukel of the Moravian archives in Herrnhut and Bethlehem have traced the materials on Hesselius for me through the letter book of Bishop Cammerhoff and the diary of Moravian missionary Abraham Reinke. The rest of this story will appear in Fogleman’s book on the Moravian challenge, in 2004. The painter’s son John Hesselius, still less well documented than his father though a portrait painter in pre-Revolutionary Virginia, can be encountered in “John Hesselius, Maryland Limner,” by Richard K. Doud, Winterthur Portfolio 5 (1969): 129-153. The gentrified and artistic world Hesselius’s daughters and descendants married into can be traced under the family name, and under “Wertmuller.”

The main effort to treat the origins of toleration in religiously diverse Pennsylvania is Stephen Longnecker’s Piety and Tolerance: Pennsylvania German Religion, 1700-1850 (Scarecrow Press, 1994), but in this thoughtful work the evidence for conflict and mistrust is almost as convincing as the evidence for mutual toleration until well past 1800.  

 

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

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Kenneth A. Lockridge is professor of history at the University of Montana. His research interests have ranged widely through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North Atlantic society.