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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Provenance: Unraveling the Tangled Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Manuscript’s Own Pages: Key to the Mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ralph Potts’s Musical Life in England and America

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

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

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

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

Table 4: Moods of Psalmody: Frequency of Occurrence

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Project description and goals

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contributors

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

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

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

Structure and content

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

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

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

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

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

Working with undergraduates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

Dear Chef Fuller,

Chef, I hope this note finds you in good health and spirits. I am sure as you read this you are busy planning your next banquet in heaven. I am writing you for several reasons. I first take this time to thank you for creating such a powerful legacy for myself and for future chefs, both black and white. Your legacy will be shared as long as I am living. As I am writing you, I am sure you are looking down from heaven marveling over the events of this past weekend.

As you saw, I hosted a feast in honor of the feast you held at the Bachelor’s Retreat at the end of the Civil War some 150 years ago. True to your legacy, it was only offered to eighty guests and served in the style for which you were famous, Russian Service.

The feast commenced in the hallowed rooms and halls of the Bachelor’s Retreat. The guests were treated to the food of your apprentice, Tom Tully. Chef, you would be so proud of the chef he has become. He has taken the reins from you and has done you well. As I watched in awe of the excitement felt by guests on the grounds of the Bachelor’s Retreat, a strong gust of rain fell upon 103 Church Street. It was my thought that you and the great chefs of your day sat around the banquet table in heaven and cried tears of joy. No guest was discouraged by the rain. They continued to eat, drink, and hold communion with one another. But you must have known what was happening.

Once the time came for the guests to march to McCrady’s, as they were lead by the re-enactors of the 54th regiment, the rain ceased. Divine intervention is my thought!

Once the guests settled in their seats in the Long Room, I gave words of welcome as I know you would have done. Silence filled the air as I spoke of you and your work. I needed to let the guests know why they were there and the importance of what you did for the city of Charleston. I always wondered why you decided to hold that feast at the time you did. We all know that the political climate in the city was not good. However, you saw fit to bring people together centered around a bountiful banquet. It truly shows who you were as a man as well as a chef. I have always admired you for that.

The feast of 2015 was a year in the making. First, I was approached by Dr. David Shields, a university of South Caroline professor who knew of your great legacy. He introduced you to me and he thought I would be the best person to stand in for you. Unfortunately, no record of the menu existed. However, we were able to find bills of fare from the many events you hosted, and I was able to piece my menu together using your most celebrated dishes from your massive culinary repertoire. I could not hold this feast without serving both your turtle and oyster soup. In today’s time, it is hard to find turtle soup in Charleston. You can, however, find it in the great restaurants of New Orleans. The guests were treated to an array of pickled vegetables, relishes and the famous Bradford watermelon pickles set on the table upon arrival.

I decided that we would feature three trays of proteins in honor of the meat and fowl you sold at the Bachelor’s Retreat. We started with a poisson tray featuring fried whiting, poached bass and your famous shrimp pie, all served with sauces such as Worcestershire, mushroom, walnut ketchup, and caper butter sauce. We moved from there to poultry, consisting of duck à l’orange, capon chasseur and squab with truffle sauce. Lastly came the viande tray with heaping portions of boeuf à la mode, venison with currant sauce and a wonderful lamb with mint sauce. Along with these items, various starches and vegetables were served. After dinner and before desserts,there were glasses raised in toasts to the event and hopes for a better future in the city of Charleston. Then once again guests were greeted with a bounty of desserts that included Charlotte Russe, almond cake, punch cake, blanc mange, and vanilla and pineapple ice cream. Your teacher, your mentor Eliza Seymour Lee, would have been proud. Please tell her when you see her that her great-great-granddaughter is a lovely woman. Before the night was finished, I offered my praise and love to the many cooks and chefs who shared their time and talent with me, as I think you would have done. As the guests made their way out of the building, a feeling of great pride came over me as each guest came to shake my hand and commend me on a job well done.

Chef, it is my hope that when you looked down upon me, you were able to say, “well done, chef, well done.” When I was asked to stand in your place, I was overwhelmed with what that truly meant. How would I be able to make you proud? Would this reconciliation have the same impact as it did some 150 years ago? I know as I spoke and cooked that your spirit was channeled through my body and that all around me felt your great presence. I also hope that you were touched by Jonathan Green’s rendition of you. As you know, there were no pictures of you to be found. The rendition was well received by all who saw it.

Chef, I want to once again thank you for your great legacy and vision. I only hope that I will leave one as great as yours, and that as I walk into my kitchen, you place your hand upon me.

I look forward to joining you and the other great chefs at the banquet table in heaven.

Sincerely,

Kevin E. Mitchell

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Kevin E. Mitchell, CEC, CFSE, ACE chef instructor, Culinary Institute of Charleston, who studies the history of African American chefs and southern foodways. He oversaw the recreation of the famed African American chef Nat Fuller’s reconciliation dinner held in Charleston in 1865.

Notes on the religious tract

Several years ago, while researching a book on nineteenth-century American religious print and visual culture at the New-York Historical Society, I came across An Address to Christians that was bound with a sermon by Bishop Beilby Porteus. I had never heard of him. But his address, or what I took to be his address, made a powerful case for the use of evangelical tracts (usually eight- or twelve-page pamphlets that addressed the reader in a familiar tone about the need for repentance), arguing for their distribution on the familiar byways of everyday life, where people would be likely to pick them up in passing. When I checked biographical information on the author, I found that he wasn’t American but was the bishop of London at the end of the eighteenth century and was important for, among other things, his opposition to Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. I was intrigued by the British connection because I’d naively assumed that American Protestants had written the tracts they enthusiastically disseminated. In fact, as I looked into the matter, I found that the Americans imported British tracts and emulated the London Religious Tract Society (RTS), founded in 1799. At the time of my discovery, my attention was trained exclusively on American print and image production, but I noted the British debt and hoped one day to pursue it.

That day came half a dozen years later in the shape of a book on the history of the tract in Europe and North America. As a fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia, I was able to trace out the fuller debts of the Americans to their British counterparts. Two people at the Library Company, Connie King and Holly Phelps, had spent several years while at the Free Library of Philadelphia cataloguing the collection of books of the American Sunday School Union (ASSU). The collection included a large number of books published by the RTS, which had allowed the ASSU to republish its materials. Dozens and dozens of RTS books in Philadelphia (now at the Free Library) display editorial blue lines indicating the portions that the ASSU’s editors had determined were to be used in American editions of the British publications.

During the course of my research for this book, I discovered that American tract publishers were not indebted only to British Protestant authors and publishers. For example, Johannes Gossner’s The Heart of Man, was published in Pennsylvania in 1822, translated from Gossner’s original German text first published in 1812. Gossner had been a Catholic priest who converted to Lutheranism and became an advocate of missions. His Heart book drew from Catholic as well as Protestant sources; in fact, he derived the illustrations from an eighteenth-century Catholic work entitled Spiritual Mirror of Morality (1732). I was struck by the thin pamphlet’s integration of word and image: in ten engravings, the booklet plotted out the life of the Christian soul. It begins with the soul’s subordination to the forces of evil (fig. 1), shown as animal symbols of the seven deadly sins inside the sinful heart. At the heart’s center is the grisly figure of Satan, derived from the ancient deity Pan—half-goat and half-man—whose powers included fertility and whose behavior was suitably libidinous. Ensuing pages portray the soul’s conversion, sanctification (picturing the animals outside the regenerated heart), momentary backsliding, and the soul’s final salvation in death. The emblematic imagery applied the Pietist theology of conversion and the sanctified life to a series of images that plotted the lived religion of Evangelical Protestantism. But with nowhere to locate the Heart book in the narrative that was taking shape in my mind, I decided to file it away in memory as something to return to when the time was right.

I spent sabbatical leave one fall at the University of Cambridge, where I knew the university library would provide the sort of resources I needed to pursue the American-British connection wherever that might lead me. One of the first things I learned after setting to work there was that Bishop Porteus hadn’t written the tract I had attributed to him. A search of his collected tracts and sermons turned up nothing that matched the Address I’d read in New York. Upon closer inspection, it became clear that the tract had been published with the Porteus sermon. It wasn’t until I got to Cambridge and began reading tracts produced by the RTS that I came across one by a clergyman of whom I’d never heard, one David Bogue. There I was happy to find the very words I had first read at the New-York Historical Society. In fact, Bogue’s Address was the first tract of the RTS’s prodigious series of tracts.

In a sermon before the first annual meeting of the RTS in London, Bogue claimed that every biblical author from Moses to David, from the prophets to the apostles of Christ were tract writers. Indeed, even “God himself becomes the author of a short Religious Tract: with his own hands he wrote the Ten Commandments of the law.” Bogue urged his listeners to regard the distribution of religious tracts as extensions of the biblical text and therefore as “a method of God’s own appointment.” The RTS took the message to heart and promptly began to flood England, Wales, France, and the United States with its produce. Within a few years it was sending tracts around the world. The American Tract Society (ATS), in both its Boston and New York versions, was an unabashed imitation of the organization. David Bogue’s essay provided the rationale for the entire British enterprise and for the American adaptation. So I read a good deal by Bogue and his colleagues, especially a fascinating journal that Bogue helped edit, The Evangelical Magazine, which was begun in 1793 and ran until the second half of the following century. The publication was the clearing house for such Evangelical print efforts in England as the Missionary Society, the RTS, village preaching, Sunday school formation and operation, and Bible production and distribution. The two or three dozen editors were true believers in the power of print to spread the word.

One of the familiar problems facing historians is to get behind institutional rhetoric and glimpse the day-to-day operations of an organization like the RTS. That is hard to do, unless one has access to such records as committee meeting minutes, financial records, memos, and incoming and outgoing correspondence. Fortuna frowned when I looked for such documents for the RTS. In 1941, a German bomb destroyed the London storage house where most of the RTS documents were kept. Some items stored off-site survived the war and now make up the spotty but still valuable records housed in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. History, even though written by the winners, still rides on the whims of fortune.

The British Evangelicals behind the tract movement were anxious to get mission work under way because they believed that they could hasten Christ’s second coming by universal evangelism: if every person on the face of the earth heard the Word preached to them, Jesus would come and bring with him the end of time. Yet setting the time, as it was called, was risky. On the one hand, it generated enormous expectations and interests. If the end is coming, it’s awfully nice to know when and under what conditions and how one can avoid the worst of it. On the other hand, if one has the time wrong, disaster ensues, as it has repeatedly done. Putting all of one’s eggs in a single basket tempts fate. The Millerites had it wrong in the United States in 1843. With the aid of an arcane biblical calculus derived from hermetic books of the Bible, this millenarian sect believed it had solved the riddle of Christ’s return (fig. 2). But the secret to any prophetic utterance is an elastic method of interpretation to back it up. A handful of faithful Millerites, who eventually became known as the Seventh-Day Adventists, recalculated their reading of scripture in 1844, when Jesus failed to appear a second time. They concluded that he had never intended to appear but to do something in heaven that would lay the groundwork for his final return.

Many of the British Evangelicals entertained their own notions of the final date, but the group that made aggressive use of print to hasten the end generally avoided setting dates. They felt sure that the general time had arrived, however. The Evangelicals were reeling from decades of intense sectarian infighting and ongoing scrimmages with the Church of England. So in the early 1790s, a group of Dissenters (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists)—denominating themselves Evangelicals—directed their energies toward the global stage on which the British Empire had already taken its place. The Reverend David Bogue was a leader among this group. Bogue and his fellow Evangelicals saw in the launch of the Empire in India and East Asia a providential event and a grand opportunity for Evangelicals. In order to take this step, which meant facing a stark numerical inequality (one contemporary account estimated that there was one Christian for thirty non-Christians in the world), the Evangelicals looked to print. They reasoned that they might counter their small size and modest resources by exploiting the technology of print. Missionaries with printing presses strategically located throughout Asia, Africa, and the South Pacific could disseminate tracts in mass quantity. But the Evangelicals needed an energetic network of cooperation to make this happen.

The further I looked, the more widely spread I discovered the network of mission organizations. In Edinburgh, where the Centre for the Study of Non-Western Christianity offered a wealth of Protestant journals, newspapers, and mission literature, the stock of my historical sources was greatly enriched. I was also delighted to learn from archivist Margaret Acton that next door to the Centre, in New College Library at the University of Edinburgh, were the papers of none other than David Bogue. There I found sermons, diaries, and letters by Bogue. I also discovered that Bogue had written a political tract in the 1790 battle with the Church of England over political rights for Dissenters. But when Parliament decided against the Dissenters, he threw his considerable energy into the cause of Evangelical print. In addition to cofounding the monthly journal Evangelical Magazine, which became a mouthpiece for the new mission and tract societies (Bogue was a leading advocate of the London Missionary Society [LMS], founded in 1796, and the RTS), he founded and operated for years the Missionary Society’s leading seminary for training missionaries. The LMS built on several antecedents such as the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), Die deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft (The German Christianity Society) in Basel, the Moravian Unitas Fratrum, and a Lutheran Pietist organization in Halle, which had supplied missionaries to the SPCK in India for over a generation. What emerged was a global network of print, a vast web of colonies bound together by the circulation of printed evangelical information (and the British penchant for tidy bureaucracy). From London to Madras, Malacca, and Macao, print was transforming Christendom from the continental fortress of medieval Europe to a decentered, ever-expanding global network.

From Edinburgh it became clear that I needed to travel to Basel to consult the stupendous archives of the Basel Mission House in order to sort out the German language connection of Anglican and Dissenter missions in India, Malaysia, and Africa. While in Basel, I was shown something I hadn’t seen since visiting the Library Company: the Heart book. This time, however, what I found with the assistance of archivists Paul Jenkins and Guy Thomas were versions of it translated into Indian and African languages. The imagery had also been modified to accommodate cultural differences. Gossner’s symbolizing of the seven deadly sins as European animals didn’t work so well in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (figs. 3 and 4). Important substitutions had to be made in order to translate the moral theology of the New Testament for new cultures. To this end, the Caucasian face atop the heart was replaced by Indian and African physiognomies. A Malayalam version published in 1848 at Tellicherry (on the southwestern coast of India) showed a light-skinned Indian man with a proud lion replacing the peacock, a rat replacing the indolent turtle, an avaricious elephant in place of the European toad, a vicious looking dog in lieu of an angry leopard, and a vulture substituted for the snake of envy. Another edition, published in Tshi or Twi by the Reverend Asante of the Gold Coast in West Africa (now part of Ghana) in 1874, put an African man’s head above the heart, while keeping nearly all of Gossner’s animals in place. The only other difference was to make Satan a horned, dark human male with wings and pitchfork, perhaps because the creature derived from the original Greco-Roman satyr would have been unintelligible to African readers (a later version of the Indian edition even placed a loin cloth about the winged devil).

The role of images in mission history led me to further institutions in Europe. From Basel I went to Rome to consult one of the finest collections of objects gathered by Christian missionaries—the Museo missionare etnologico in the Vatican Museums. I also took the opportunity to visit the Haus Völker und Kulturen (Museum of Peoples and Cultures) and the library of Monumenta Serica, both operated by the Society of the Divine Word in Sankt Augustin, Germany, where I was delighted to find more materials on the London Missionary Society and its early nineteenth-century East Asian projects. What I found there suggested that a visit to Asia was going to be important. So I scheduled a trip to Korea, where Protestant missionaries had arrived in the nineteenth century. At Soongsil University’s Korean Christian Museum in Seoul, I consulted the collection handbook. There I found listed a Korean version of Gossner’s Heart book, translated in 1918 by an American missionary in Seoul. In the end, I learned that Gossner’s book has been translated into at least twenty-six languages and constitutes a kind of meandering trail of global missionary efforts at acculturating Christianity.

If British missionaries and their supporters back home felt that evangelism would spread the faith from its Anglo center, the result was more than they imagined. Today, Asian and African Christianity has replaced European Christianity as the vital engine of outreach and global activity. Korean and African missionaries are now at work around the world, including North America, Europe, and Great Britain! The Associated Press recently reported that one Nigerian group, The Redeemed Church, which has opened over two hundred churches in the United States, seeks to save the nation from demonic forces. Their task is to achieve, through “spiritual warfare,” what Gossner envisioned in his pamphlet circulated in the United States over 180 years ago: the exorcism of evil from the heart. The new missionaries have not proceeded without taking a page from their British forebears: media are key aspects of their outreach. Satellite links, Internet, film, radio, television, and print are their diverse means of communication. For example, the Redeemed Church works through a satellite-television network that is operated in the United States by Dove Media Group, a firm based in Texas and run by Nigerians.

The tract genre has even migrated to the Internet. Not only are tracts available from vendors online, the very medium has gone virtual. Cyber-tracts may be selected from depository Websites and sent to individuals with the tailored sense of purpose that tracts, chosen from categories listed in catalogues, have had since the early nineteenth century. The ATS catalogue of tracts listed dozens of categories among the several hundred tracts in print by 1850. Every problem, every kind of personality corresponded to a class of tracts. Today the categories have changed from rubrics such as “intemperance,” “infidelity,” and “papist” to “substance abuse,” “doubt,” and “other faiths.” But the idea is the same: use media to fashion a compelling connection between message, sender, and receiver.

British missionaries helped forge modern practice by taking printing presses with them wherever they went, learning vernacular languages, often creating the first alphabets for scores of languages, creating schools and charitable institutions, recording oral culture to create the basis for national literatures, producing thousands of ethnographic records, and distributing almost unimaginable numbers of tracts, books, and bibles. The workhorse of this evangelical enterprise was the humble tract, invented in the 1790s by British evangelicals such as Bogue.

Further Reading:

The text I first encountered at the New-York Historical Society was An Address to Christians, recommending the distribution of cheap tracts: with an extract from a sermon by Bishop Porteus. Before the Yearly Meeting of the Charity Schools, London (Charleston, Mass., 1802). David Bogue’s important tract is An Address to Christians, on the Distribution of Religious Tracts (London, 1799). I quoted from his sermon The Diffusion of Divine Truth. A Sermon preached before the Religious Tract Society, on Lord’s Day, May 18, 1800 (London, 1800), pages 10-11 and 41. I have examined the fascinating iconography of the Millerites and Seventh-Day Adventists in Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of Mass Production (New York, 1999). Citations for the many translated editions of Johannes Gossner’s book include: The Heart of Man either a Temple of God or a Habitation of Satan (Reading, Pa., 1822); Book of the Heart (Tellicherry, India, 1848); [Johannes Gossner], Man’s Heart, either God’s Temple or Satan’s Abode, Rev. D. Asante, trans. (Basel, 1874); and The Human Heart, W. M. Baird, trans. (Chong No, Seoul, 1918). An illustration appears in The Korean Christian Museum at Soongsil University (Seoul, 2004), 260. For a study of the Korean edition, see a forthcoming study by Jae-Hyun Kim, “The Heart of Man [The Myeong-Sim-Do],” KIATS Theological Journal, vol. 1, no. 2 (2005): 148-64. I have relied on Ingetraut Ludolphy’s biographical entry on Gossner, “Gossner, Johannes Evangelista,” in The Encyclopedia of the Lutheran Church, 3 vols., Julius Bodensieck, ed. (Minneapolis, 1965), vol. 2: 944-45. For a news account on Nigerian evangelists in the United States, see Rachel Zoll, “African Christianity boom spills over,” Associated Press, March 27, 2006.

The author thanks Stichting Porticus, Amsterdam, for supporting travel during this project.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.4 (July, 2006).

David Morgan is professor of humanities and art history at Valparaiso University and author of Visual Piety (1998), Protestants and Pictures (1999), and The Sacred Gaze (2005).

Historians interested in religion and politics in the early American republic have long seen the American Revolution as the catalyst of profound change, with political independence, disestablishment, and nation building stimulating religious growth. Only recently, however, have historians begun to investigate how conceptions of “religion” and “politics” changed in relation to each other in the aftermath of the Revolution, with religion reshaped in the context of mass politics, and politics freighted with an expanding array of religious interests and competing visions of religion-inflected nationhood. As the eight stimulating essays in this issue show, the meanings of religion and politics moved in several directions at once in the early republic. With multiple versions of the relationship between religion and politics proliferating through cheap print, freedom of expression, and geographic expansion, the religiously splintered, relentlessly politicized construction of national identity was anything but consensual.

Each one of these lively essays highlights a different aspect of religion’s relationship to politics.

Kate Engel‘s essay on Jedidiah Morse and the Illuminati scare of the 1790s points to the gap between hysterical reactions to religio-political change on one hand, and historical clarity on the other, about exactly what was changing, and how religion and politics operated to mediate it. If the momentous shift toward secularization identified by theorists of American religion began to take shape in the 1790s, where did that shift begin, and how was it related to what anxious writers like Morse thought was happening?

Kirsten Fischer‘s essay on the world-traveling philosopher John Stewart calls attention to the heterodox religious ideas coursing through the Atlantic world in the midst of revolutionary political change. Unlike Jedidiah Morse, who upheld biblical revelation and ministerial leadership as essential for social order, Stewart espoused a materialistic form of monism based on respect for the vitalism within matter as the key to both egalitarianism and social order. Stewart’s ability to expound on his heretical ideas throughout the early Republic reflected a tolerance for radical new ideas that coexisted with, and perhaps helped inspire, American anxiety about social chaos.

Supporting Fischer’s findings about American hospitality to heterodox ideas, Chris Beneke‘s essay argues that religious coercion in the early republic was relatively minimal. Challenging historians who take the passage of state laws against blasphemy as evidence of the political power evangelicals wielded, Beneke points to the rarity of actual charges of blasphemy, the political freedom Jews and Catholics found, and the general popularity of irreverent and secular thought. While evangelicals developed impressive organizations to promote their religo-political visions, their achievements fell far short of their aspirations.

While Fischer and Beneke highlight the extraordinary political freedom for religious expression that existed in the early republic, Maura Jane Farrelly points to the strong reservations about this freedom expressed by the Roman Catholic Church, and to real tension between religious freedom in the U.S. and nineteenth-century Catholic teaching. While scholars specializing in American Catholic history have long recognized this tension, hyper-vigilance with respect to protestant intolerance has led other scholars to reduce concern about the growing influence of Catholicism in the early republic to simple bigotry.

Eric Schlereth‘s essay on Robert Dale Owen further complicates historical understanding of the relationship between religion and politics in the early republic, and Catholicism’s role in that relationship. Focusing on Robert Dale Owen, a political leader from Indiana with a colorful background in religious infidelity, Schlereth calls attention to the power Owen achieved among Democrats, the political party strongly supported by Catholics. With puritanical Whigs opposed to both Catholics and free thinkers, and Democrats opposed to Whigs, religious combinations operating within party machines help explain Owen’s success.

Linford Fisher‘s essay on “foreign” missions reveals another combination of religious forces with far-reaching political implication. Rooted in European missionary societies active during the colonial period, American missionary societies became bases of America’s global outreach in the early republic. Once on the periphery of European empires, America became an imperial center, with missionaries in foreign fields exporting religio-political theories developed in America along with programs for individual salvation.

Seth Perry‘s essay on religious performance suggests how fraught with irony such evangelical efforts could be. Focusing on the life of “crazy” Lorenzo Dow, Perry shows how successful Dow became in parading his own apostolic poverty as a critique of the wealth and political authority of religious elites. After amassing considerable property as a result of his success as a religious performer, Dow entertained the idea of establishing a religio-political empire of his own.

Looking into much darker forms of religious interaction with politics, Edward Blum‘s essay on Satan shows how importantly religious hatred and fear figured in antebellum political discourse. Casting political opponents in league with Satan, both explicitly and by innuendo, not only sharpened differences to the point of denying any possible resolution, but also conjured visions of imminent chaos engulfing all. These appeals to Satan, Blum argues, gave rein to hatred and disorder as they paved the way to war.

Each one of these lively essays highlights a different aspect of religion’s relationship to politics. Their diversity illustrates the different directions this relationship took in the early republic, and the historical understanding to be gained by resisting simple ideas about how that relationship worked. No less important, this splendid collection reveals the unstable boundary between religion and politics in the early republic, and the porous character of that boundary as Americans vied with each other to define the nation.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3 (Spring, 2015).

Amanda Porterfield is Robert A. Spivey Professor of Religion and professor of history at Florida State University. Her most recent book is Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the Early American Nation (2012).

This article originally appeared in issue 12.3 (April, 2012).

A former National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. He is the author of The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda-award winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses, forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2013. An assistant professor at Temple University, he lives in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Rewriting the history of the early republic

Certain kinds of historical writing alter our understanding not only of people, places, and events but also of nations and eras. Sometimes historians introduce new evidence that highlights anomalies in existing explanatory schemes. And sometimes they provide perspective on issues of present-day concern. The emergence in the 1990s of a “new” institutionalism in historical writing on the early American republic did (and continues to do) both. It built on the realization by a small cohort of mostly younger historians that the regnant social and cultural paradigm that had dominated history departments since the 1960s had become unduly confining—a relic, as it were, of a very different age. This shift in historical thinking was energized by a desire to make the history of the United States comprehensible for a generation for whom the passions of the 1960s had been supplanted by a new constellation of concerns. The media, public finance, and the military are but three of many topics that, though of obvious contemporary relevance, were largely ignored by historians of the early republic until quite recently. In turning to such topics, the new-institutional historians have sought to write a history of early America that is more realistic, less sentimental, and more open to international comparisons than the history they remember learning in school or encountered in most of the textbooks taught in introductory college survey courses.

These new institutionalists, many of whom now occupy prominent places in the historical profession, are respectful of the enormous body of fine scholarship on social and cultural topics that is the most enduring legacy of their immediate forbears. Yet they quarrel with this scholarship in at least two ways. Their first quarrel concerns their disinclination to characterize the early republic as precapitalistic and stateless. The anomalies in the historical record are simply too great: to envision the early republic as precapitalistic simply does not square with what we now know about the slave trade and land speculation, to name but two of the many inconvenient truths that historians of this period often neglect. And to deny the existence of the early American state—or even to characterize it as “innocuous” or “weak”—trivializes the existence of congeries of federal government institutions in realms as different as banking, communications, and what we today would call intellectual property.

The second problem with the received wisdom is more of a matter of temperament. To be blunt, new institutionalists have grown impatient with the often-precious text parsing that has come to pass for serious historical analysis among more than a few historians who claim to have taken the linguistic turn. The new institutionalists are more interested in how things worked than in what people believed and are skeptical of historical writing that ignores huge swatches of social reality in a quixotic quest for the authentic and the pure.

An old institutionalism flourished in history departments for several decades before the Second World War. Its practitioners treated institutions as more-or-less stable entities with venerable pedigrees and wrote learned and often perceptive books and articles on particular businesses, government agencies, and cultural institutions. The new institutionalism, in contrast, treats institutions as bundles of rules that are constantly evolving and that interact with social and cultural processes in unpredictable and sometimes idiosyncratic ways. Contingency is in; inexorability is out. Old institutionalists searched for origins, which they referred to as “germs”; new institutionalists track outcomes, which they conceive of as “legacies.”

Among the most distinctive features of the new institutionalism is its practitioners’ reluctance to regard the rise of the United States as inevitable. For too long, in their view, the history of the United States has been regarded as decisively different—for better or worse—than the history of any other modern nation. No longer is the existence of a uniquely American society taken for granted. No longer are the country’s major institutions presumed to be nothing more than the stage upon which its supposedly “real” history has been played out. And no longer is the country’s institutional development assumed to have followed some “exceptional” trajectory that distinguished it from, say, Germany or France. Indeed, no longer is it assumed that there has, in fact, existed an American society from time immemorial. If the new institutionalists have a mantra, it is this: institutions beget institutions, shape social relationships, and influence cultural conventions. Specific institutions do things: in the lingua franca of the history profession, they have agency. Configurations of institutions, in contrast, are not agents, but have effects that no group or individual willed. The distinction between agency and effects was underscored over two decades ago by the sociologist Theda Skocpol in a justly celebrated manifesto entitled “Bringing the State Back In.” This essay remains a foundational text for the new institutionalism of today.

Given the indebtedness of the new institutionalism to social science, it is perhaps not surprising that some of the most suggestive recent historical writing on the early republic to take the new-institutionalist turn originated in disciplines other than history. In Shaped by War and Trade (2002), for example, political scientist Ira Katznelson delineates the centrality of the military to early nineteenth-century American state building; in Creation of the Media (2004), sociologist Paul Starr details the lasting legacy for the media of certain key decisions (or what he calls “constitutive choices”) made in the late eighteenth century; and in the Cambridge Economic History of the United States: The Long Nineteenth Century (2000), economist Richard Sylla documents how an analogous set of decisions shaped the history of public finance.

Among historians, the new institutionalism has found a home in a variety of fields. Among its champions is the distinguished cultural historian Thomas Bender, whose Nation among Nations is perhaps the most ambitious attempt by a historian to underscore the society-shaping influence of some of the nation’s largest and most powerful institutions. In pointed contrast to Gordon S. Wood’s Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992)—a locus classicus of the older, society-centered history that the new institutionalists reject—Bender neither takes the rise of the United States for granted nor assumes that its rise is rooted in social relationships that are in some mysterious way more fundamental than the institutional framework in which these relationships evolved. Bender is by no means alone. Certain insights of the new institutionalists have also found their way into at least one college history textbook: Inventing America (2nd ed., 2006), cowritten by Pauline Maier, Merritt Roe Smith, Alexander Keyssar, and Daniel J. Kevles. 

The following three essays in Common-place’s special politics issue highlight a few of the possibilities of the institutionalist turn. They touch on three topics that the new institutionalists have begun to explore: namely, the media, public finance, and the military.

The growing convergence between the new institutionalism and the large body of distinguished historical writing on social and cultural themes is cogently underscored by Sean Adams in a thoughtful essay on the shifting significance of the public career of John Quincy Adams. Once derided as a hidebound elitist hopelessly out of step with the rising currents of a democratic age, Adams has been lionized in recent years in venues as diverse as Steven Spielberg’s popular film Amistad and Daniel Walker Howe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning What Hath God Wrought. The new Adams is portrayed as a visionary statesman who, following a failed attempt as president to mobilize the federal government to promote the public good, harnessed the media to reframe the slavery issue as a struggle over civil liberties. Sean Adams (no relation) concurs. The key to John Quincy Adams’s success lay in his resolute mobilization of an institution—in this instance, the constitutionally mandated right to petition—to forge new links between the government and the governed.

The enormous significance of nineteenth-century public finance is brilliantly illuminated by Max Edling’s compelling comparison of the tax-gathering apparatus of the United States and of Mexico. In Sinews of Power (1989), British historian John Brewer famously demonstrated that the military might of the British Empire rested on the superiority of Britain’s tax-gathering apparatus over the tax-gathering apparatus of its archrival France; in his essay, Edling makes an analogous comparison between the United States and Mexico. If the early American state is compared with the early Mexican state—rather than, say, the American state during the Cold War—then it no longer makes sense to characterize it, as the influential Princeton University historian John Murrin once did, as a “midget institution in a giant land.” On the contrary, it emerges as a highly effective institution that helped the country wage war, expand its boundaries, and forestall recolonization by Great Britain or France.

Gautham Rao strikes a similar note in his tightly focused case study of the establishment in the early republic of marine hospitals in ports large and small. The Treasury Department established these hospitals to help maintain the health of the sailors who staffed the country’s merchant marine. Like the post office, the customs house, and the land office, the marine hospital was a tangible reminder of the reach of the newly established federal government. The hospitals were funded not from general revenue but rather from a tax on the mariners’ salaries, which customs officers collected when mariners came into port. By providing thousands of Americans with high-quality medical service, these institutions highlighted the vital role that the federal government had come to play in the provisioning of heath care. The rationale for the marine hospitals was not only humanitarian but also economic and military. Lawmakers regarded sea-borne commerce as a vital economic sector and, in the absence of a large navy, were determined to ensure that the government had at its disposal a cadre of highly skilled seafarers should the country find itself at war with one of the major European powers.

The consequence of state building for the Indian tribes of North America is the theme of the essay by Jeffrey L. Pasley. From the Indians’ perspective, the early American state was a powerful institution indeed. Not only did the military force thousands of Indians to relocate, most notoriously during the administration of Andrew Jackson; it also built a vast network of roads through Indian territory, which limited tribal autonomy, while establishing a large and sprawling “welfare” state apparatus to educate Indians, which devastated their culture. It is one of the many ironies of the social and cultural paradigm that its practitioners evinced great sympathy for the so-called victims of history without paying more than cursory attention to the very institutions that were responsible for their victimization. This is one of the several omissions that the new institutionalists are doing their best to correct.

Taken together, these essays show how historians are returning once again to the perennial questions of power, economics, and nationhood, questions that, with a few conspicuous exceptions, an earlier generation neglected. In this way, they aspire to write a history of the United States that takes nothing for granted. It is a history in which the rise of the nation to world power is no longer foreordained and in which its development becomes a chapter in a global history of modernity, rather than a unique event whose origins spring from a bewitching brew of social circumstances that in some mystical way set the United States apart from the rest of the world.

Further Reading:

For an up-to-date overview of recent historical writing on the early republic in the new-institutionalist tradition, see Mark R. Wilson, “Law and the American State, from the Revolution to the Civil War: Institutional Growth and Structural Change,” in Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins, eds., Cambridge History of Law in America, Volume II: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1789-1920 (Cambridge, 2008): 1-35. For a recent collection of new-institutionalist essays, see Richard R. John, ed., Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America (State College, Pa., 2006). The introductory essay to this collection includes an extensive bibliography of recent scholarship on new-institutionalist themes. Skocpol’s celebrated essay, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” can be found in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985): 3-37. For a stimulating critique of the social and cultural paradigm in historical writing by an eminent sociologist who has written widely on historical topics, see the late Charles Tilly’s Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (1984).

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

Richard R. John is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he specializes in U.S. cultural and institutional history. His publications include Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995) and many essays on topics in the history of communications and public life. He is also the editor of Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America (2006). He has recently completed a book manuscript on the history of early American telecommunications, which will be forthcoming in 2009 from Harvard University Press.

The yellow envelope bore a scribbled return address, and I recognized the handwriting of my former newspaper colleague, a man who gave up a steady job to write a biography of Mark Twain’s best friend, Gilded Age minister Joseph Twichell. Inside the envelope was a three-page printout from a microfilm reader and a card that read, “Saw this and thought of you. Love, Steve.”

Do we ever see the precise moment when life changes?

In May 2004, my newspaper buddy sent me a story published in the Hartford Times in January 1928, a piece he had stumbled across in the course of his own research. I was then a longtime reporter and editor at the Hartford Courant and under contract to coauthor a book on slavery in the North for Ballantine Books/Random House.

Between newspaper investigations and research for the book, I had been studying Connecticut’s relationship with enslavement for two years, eight hours a day, and most weekends. I know there is always more to learn, but I felt confident that I understood the general outline of the story of my state.

However, this nearly eighty-year-old newspaper clipping documented something I had not expected: voyages aboard three eighteenth-century slaving ships, two that sailed from New London to the west of Africa and one voyage from West Africa to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. The article detailed the acquisition of the ships’ logs several years earlier, and described, with cheerful bonhomie, the mariners’ rough lives aboard the ships. Bound together in an eighty-page notebook or log, records of all three voyages appeared to be in the same handwriting and were made between January 1757 and August 1758.

I knew that Connecticut was a powerhouse in the West Indies trade—a story that scholars Thomas Truxes and Joseph Avitable are making clearer every day—with huge investments in exportable goods, ships for transporting those goods, and a trade system that was creating New England’s first fortunes, but no one had suggested to me that my state was also on the front lines of the slaving trade or that men from the Connecticut colony were on the ground in West Africa, buying men, women, and children.

I don’t know why I was so dismayed to learn about Connecticut’s role in the slave trade. After all, I already knew that the colony had been sending horses, livestock, food, and lumber to Caribbean sugar plantations, which the historian Adam Hochschild has described as a system of “slaughterhouses.” And I knew from months of reading eighteenth-century newspapers and court records that there was nothing benign about Connecticut’s approach to enslavement. The humiliation, beatings, and killing uncertainties of life as an enslaved person anywhere were experienced in my home state, too. But the clipping revealed what seemed to me to be a much darker part of the story.

I told my editor at the newspaper that I was going to spend a morning reading the microfilm of these voyages. The accounts have been in the collections of the Connecticut State Library in Hartford since 1920, when they were acquired from a North Carolina woman prompted by financial need to sell some of her late husband’s collection of maritime documents. I printed out a few pages of the log’s middle voyage, which described buying slaves at a place called Bense Island.

“Show Rob,” my editor said, simply. I took my small collection of pages down to Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center on Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition to show Robert Forbes, my mentor and guide and then second in command at the Gilder Lehrman Center. I could ask Rob any question, betraying my stupidity, and he would never judge me or act offended by my lack of knowledge. Instead, he would recommend reading for me in response to specific questions or scholars for me to consult.

Rob is a calm and patrician guy, but when I showed him the pages of the logbooks, he jumped from his chair, saying, “Where did you get these?” I had thought he would be familiar with my documents, but he was dazzled and began to repeat, in an amazed way, “Bense Island! Bense Island!”

In the fortuitous way that later became typical of this project, and which made me feel that God or Allah or some sort of supreme being was helping me, the world authority on Bense Island was on a National Park Service Fellowship at Yale and in the next room.

Bense Island, today called Bunce Island, is a tiny island at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, in Sierra Leone, West Africa. It is the size of a football field, has been abandoned for two centuries, and holds the ruins of the last slaving castle built there by the English in 1796. The jetty where the shackled Africans were shoved down to the longboats—the upriver side of the island is at the limit of navigation for the ships that came from New England and Europe to trade—is still intact. The beach is still littered with eighteenth-century detritus such as Venetian beads and cowrie shells, bits of old bottles, pipes, and ship’s ballast. There are even cannon bearing the cipher of King George III, though their wooden carriages have long since rotted away.

Joseph Opala, who teaches at James Madison University, was on a fellowship at Yale to help develop a plan to explore, document, and stabilize Bunce Island.

Trained as an anthropologist and the son of a man who fought in the Polish Resistance, Joe discovered Bunce Island just before finishing a stint in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone in the 1970s. He spent the next twenty years teaching in Sierra Leone and exploring the history of the slave trade on the Sierra Leone River. Forced out during the country’s long and brutal civil war, he now returns several times a year to visit friends and his grown adopted son and to continue the work of saving Bunce Island.

Joe is sly and irreverent, a born teaser, but he went, quite literally, pale when Rob and I showed him the pages from the logbooks. “Where did you get this,” he said. “I need to see the rest!”

I began to feel that I was onto something that might be, to the scholarly world, a new piece of the story, or, at least, solid illumination of something very important. Joe said he thought he had seen every piece of original paper on the island—in London, in Africa, and everywhere in between—but he didn’t know about these voyages.

He and Rob were clear about what should happen next: I needed to verify the names that appeared in the texts of the logs, trace the paths of the voyages, and see if I could find other slaving ships and captains that might have sailed from New London during the same period. I needed to be sure that these ships’ logs were genuine and that, although they are extremely rare, they were part of a larger story of that region’s eager participation in the slaving trade.

The extraordinarily accommodating Connecticut State Library agreed to photograph the logbooks for me, so that I was able to work with a readable copy of the original. A newspaper friend who understood mid-eighteenth-century navigational techniques took a copy and plotted out the three voyages, using the longitudinal notations the log keeper made every two hours.

Benedict Arnold made the next part of my job harder because on September 6, 1781, he had burned down New London’s waterfront, destroying the New London custom house and its decades of shipping records. I couldn’t find the kind of consistent archival documentation I needed for my period and turned to New London newspapers of the era for those precious “Enter’d in” and “Clear’d out” listings under “Custom-House New-London.” I wanted to find the names of the men in the ships’ logs—perhaps at the helms of other vessels. I wanted to know whether other ships were sailing from New London to Africa.

New London’s first newspaper was established in 1758, and it was a gold mine for me. Most of the ships in the customs listings were headed for the West Indies, but in just a few short weeks of research I found other men and ships heading for or returning from Africa (sometimes dying there). In the Boston News-Letter and other early newspapers, I found references to New London men in Africa, enough to be confident that the voyages in my logbooks weren’t an anomaly.

At the same time, I spent about eight weeks, full time, researching birth, church, military, and probate records also in the collections of the Connecticut State Library. I still have not been able to nail down the identity of the log keeper, though I believe his name was Samuel Gould. The commander in the first voyage, a Middletown, Connecticut, resident named John Easton, was fully a man of the slaving trade, a man who was skilled in its practice and profited from it. I found him on slaving voyages aboard a brig called the Pompey, and his obituary in the Hartford Courant said he died of something “brief and painful.” I found his will in the state archives. He was a man who loved beautiful things, and from that last inventory of “chocolat bowles” and silver swords, I could imagine the interiors of his Connecticut River home in Middletown, which was torn down during urban renewal.

I found the captain of the third logbook voyage in state records and in a series of letters at the New-York Historical Society, grousing about how no one wanted to buy his rum. These voyages, I learned, were made at what was the high-water mark of slaving for the American colonies. The trade was perfectly legal and increasingly profitable, for both South Carolina and Georgia needed laborers to grow rice. Bunce Island, which drew captives from hundreds of miles north and south, sold people who were among the best rice growers on earth.

As I continued to learn about the world of the slaving trade and to verify details contained in the logs, a trip to Sierra Leone began to seem like the logical next step, as well as the one to which my soul was drawn. Less than five months after first reading the newspaper clipping my friend had sent, I was on a plane to Freetown, to see the long coast my narrator had described, the islands where he had provisioned his ships, and his Bunce Island.

Joe Opala, as well as a videographer and photographer, had gone over several days ahead of me to hire local men to clear the Bunce Island ruins of brush, to secure use of the boats we would need, and to make other arrangements. My newspaper, the oldest continuously published newspaper in America, old enough to have been sued by Thomas Jefferson and to have published advertisements for runaway slaves, paid for the whole thing.

You don’t show up in a predominantly Muslim country during Ramadan and just start asking questions. In addition to getting immunized, securing special visas, and making the necessary preparations before visiting one of the poorest and most war-wracked countries on earth, we tried to ready ourselves mentally. We needed to build our narrative in film, words, and photographs in just a few weeks; this was an expensive trip, and there wouldn’t be a chance to go back and get what we missed the first time. In a country described by the United Nations as the least livable on earth, we needed to stay healthy, to work hard, and to be compassionate and sensitive to the suffering people we encountered each day.

Joe Opala had suggested that, in addition to the dozens of Wal-Mart watches I planned to distribute as gifts, I bring copies of the ships’ logs that described Bunce Island to give to local African leaders.

One afternoon on Tasso Island—where eighteenth-century slave traders had reprovisioned their ships—we were entertained by musicians, dancers, and a handsome stilt walker who climbed a tree while wearing his stilts. There are several villages on Tasso, which has neither electricity nor running water, and all the people who were able came to Sangbulima Village for the festivities. Speaking in Krio, which a villager then translated into Temne, Joe introduced me to the island’s blind and ancient chief, Alimamy Rakka. Surrounded by a hundred islanders, with an inner ring of tribal leaders, I gently touched the dry, worn skin of the chief’s arm and then put my hand on the pages from the log, pages which described buying slaves in April 1757.

“Dear honored sir,” I said, “my country is very sorry for this, and we are not going to stop exploring until we know the whole story.” I felt terribly nervous and shy, and when we got home to Hartford and saw the videotape of that moment, I could hear that my voice was shaking. I said a little more, but I don’t remember the words. I do remember wanting to cry.

A little later in the ceremony, a young sub-chief in a robe and headdress of brilliant green offered to buy me. I think he was just being polite and wanted to convey that an attractive woman had come to his village, to acknowledge that in a manly way. I don’t really think he wanted to buy me, but he offered the men in my party twenty cows. My translator quickly piped up that I was “a fifty-cow woman,” which dissolved even the pretend negotiations in laughter.

Later that afternoon, I saw Bunce Island for the first time. As our little speedboat approached the island, I could see parts of the fortress through a scrim of trees dappled by sun. The air was chokingly hot and still, and because the island is abandoned, everything seemed very quiet. As I slid down off the side of the boat and waded ashore through the warm surf, monkeys began to scream at us from the treetops.

Joe Opala and I crossed the jetty and then walked up a short rise through thick vegetation. Suddenly, we were at the empty doorway that led into the fortress proper. The ruins are roofless, and trees grow up through windows and holes in the walls, but you can see the layout of the fortress—where women and children were held in an enclosure separate from the men, where captives were examined for sale, and where their armed captors sat with guns. There is a small enclosure where gunpowder was stored, and it still has its roof. In 1791, Englishwoman Anna Maria Falconbridge visited the island and saw naked men in chains crouched around a tub of rice.

I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, and the brick walls seemed to tower above me. I knew that this place of heat and buzzing insects was a place of terror and suffering and the grief of exile. From the 1680s until the end of England’s involvement in the slave trade in 1808, Bunce Island was a place where human beings were sold. Unlike Cape Coast Castle or Senegal’s Goree or the dozens of slaving operations on the West African coast, the fortresses on Bunce—I visited the last one—were not converted from military or other uses. This island was always about slavery. (Because of the island’s history and the fortress’s extraordinary state of preservation, an international effort is underway to stabilize and protect the ruins and the island itself. The desperate poverty of current Sierra Leone, however, and the difficulty of getting to the island—one must rent a boat in Freetown—complicates every effort. Joe Opala told me very recently that the eighteenth-century cannons that once guarded the fortress are being stolen and sold for scrap metal in Malaysia.)

“Lying at Bense, taking in slaves, wood, and water,” my log keeper had written in 1757. I kept that on a slip of paper in my pocket.

A few days later, we returned to the island, and I walked to the small graveyard where white traders and mariners are buried. I saw the grave of a man mentioned in the first voyage in the log—an English slave trader named William Cleavland whose schooner had passed close enough to the Africa to hail the New London ship and call out that he had thirty slaves on board. Thomas Knight, an Englishman who supervised slave trading on Bunce for eighteen years, was also buried in this cemetery.

Using paper and graphite I’d brought from Connecticut, I tried to trace the words on his headstone, but the stone was rough and in the sweltering heat the graphite was melting onto my hands before I could rub it against the paper. In frustration, I pulled the paper away from Knight’s worn gravestone and saw that only one word was legible: Memory.

Further Reading:

A special supplement on this trip was published in the Hartford Courant in April 2005. The story, photographs, and maps can be seen on its Website. For firsthand accounts of the slave trade, readers can consult John Atkins’s A Voyage to Guinea, Brazil and the West Indies in His Majesty’s Ships, the Swallow and Weymouth (first published in 1735 and reprinted in London, 1970); Alexander Falconbridge’s An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (first printed in 1788 and reprinted in New York, 1977); Anna Maria Falconbridge’s Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone During the Years 1791, 1792, 1793 (reprinted in Liverpool, 2000); as well as Robert Harms’s The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York, 2002). Scholarly descriptions of the trade include Christopher Fyfe’s Sierra Leone Inheritance (London, 1964); Bruce Hancock’s Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 ( New York, 1997); and Bruce Mouser’s A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown, 1793-1794 (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), which manages to be both a first-hand account and a scholarly book with helpful descriptions.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.1 (October, 2009).

Anne Farrow is the managing editor for the Encyclopedia of Connecticut History Online, a project of the Connecticut Humanities Council, the Office of the State Historian, and a consortium of Connecticut museums and libraries. She is the coauthor of Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery (2005).

“Bubbles, Panics, & Crashes: A Century of Financial Crises,” Baker Library Historical Collections. November 10, 2009-May 3, 2010, Harvard Business School, Baker Library. Curator: Dr. Caitlin E. Anderson.

The beautifully designed exhibition “Bubbles, Panics, & Crashes,” currently to be seen at Harvard Business School’s Baker Library, aims to enhance our modern-day conversation about financial crises with an assemblage of items from the library’s historical collections. The exhibition both resonates with today’s headlines while reminding us, as well, of oft-ignored experiences from the past. At the heart of a campus training the next generation’s top business executives, this space—which is usually devoted to more upbeat themes—has been given over to the darker aspects of the modern economy. Structured around four historical panics (1837, 1873, 1907, and 1929), the show covers a century of economic trauma. Without a heavy-handed interpretive framework, it nonetheless provides fascinating glimpses into the workings of American business and identifies a confluence of factors that caused each recurring collapse, among them asset overvaluation, negligent banking practices, erratic government policy, and the ebbs and flows of global capital and trade.

Even avid students of American history will learn new things from the exhibition’s focus on not just the central drama of these crises, but on various overshadowed affairs and subplots. The panic of 1837 is most often presented in the context of Andrew Jackson’s Bank Wars, and visitors will accordingly enjoy a display of the plethora of privately issued bank notes whose reckless proliferation, according to some accounts, precipitated the crisis. At the same time, the exhibition includes a section on the lesser-known failure of two of New England’s most eminently conservative banking institutions, a result of their misguided investments in Maine timber lands in search of better returns. The curators also attend to the collapse of numerous merchant houses around the world that was the result of the panic. We thus learn about the global reach of American commerce by reading a transoceanic correspondence between Boston merchant John Perkins Cushing to his partner, the Chinese merchant Houqua, observing that the “immense speculation in wild lands” in the American West meant “every description of property has fallen in a most alarming degree.” The partnership dissolved when Cushing shifted his resources and energy to financing railroads, a logic which guided many who were similarly prompted by the crisis to channel their money away from maritime trade and toward industrial investments.

Most textbooks cite the failure of Jay Cooke’s banking house in New York as having triggered the crisis of 1873. But “Bubbles, Panics, & Crashes” widens our perspective beyond the immediate national context by shedding light on the destabilizing role of European investment in American railroad securities. In this light, the United States appears as less of an industrial power in its own right and becomes something of a developing nation, flooded by foreign capital during a European credit bubble, and then left teetering when the money supply swiftly contracted. Thus, alongside images of the Northern Pacific Railroad cutting through vast, sparsely settled territories, the exhibition traces the web of capital to Germany, whose leading financiers helped underwrite that railroad’s construction. The hand-drafted contracts establishing Cooke’s business presence in London (a common practice for all major American financiers), and forming an all-star financial syndicate of American and English banking houses (including Cook, Morgan, Barring, and Rothschild), again highlight the global scope of business in those decades.

The sections on the later panics continue to treat the vagaries of modern business practices. Financial innovation, “much of it unregulated and poorly understood” (the curators thus echoing recent punditry), was deeply implicated in the panic of 1907. In the years leading up to the crash, life insurance executives had an almost free hand in investing some $20 billion of their policyholders’ savings. While enjoying lavish society balls that made a mockery of their presumed stewardship role for “orphans and widows,” industry leaders kept lax accounts, traded their clients’ money with little or no supervision, and were even known to purchase securities from syndicates in which they had a vested interest. Trust companies, which used aggressive investment strategies to produce high yields for much wealthier customers, were also caught “overextended” when crisis hit in October 1907, leading, most notably, to the failure of New York’s Knickerbocker Trust and the suicide of its president, Charles T. Barney. Whereas the crash of the New York Stock Exchange remains the emblematic event of 1929, the exhibition redirects our attention to smaller, regional stock exchanges, such as Boston’s, which thrived in a nonexistent regulatory environment. The urban real-estate bubble of the 1920s in cities like New York and Miami, whose foreclosures began to mount in 1926 and peaked in 1933, also receives its due attention.

If nineteenth-century crashes traditionally examined within national and local frameworks are treated here with an enhanced emphasis on their global dimensions, the approach is reversed when we move into the twentieth century. Worldwide crises like the Great Depression are perhaps counter-intuitively traced back to local causes: real-estate ventures and regional stock exchanges. The point, in both cases, is the same, namely, that the interconnectedness of the economy meant that no crisis was a contained incident. They all transcended geographical boundaries and cut across industries and economic sectors. World-encompassing flows of investment could cause devastation on the local level, just as “overvalued” real estate in particular locales could trigger instability that reverberated all over the globe. Indeed, economic panics are telling historical moments that reveal the structural complexities of the interdynamics between the global and local. The exhibition points to their usefulness for scholars who aim to broaden the frameworks of their analysis beyond the nation state.

More generally, the exhibition is most striking for how it sheds light on business “as usual.” Crises bring the architecture of the world economy into sharp relief and often signal important turning points. In this sense, massive collapses are to be found on the same continuum as the smaller ones that occur daily under the “perennial gale of creative destruction,” to use Joseph Schumpeter’s all-too-familiar phrase. The show is less illuminating when it recaps conventional wisdom about the roots of these crises, casting them as diverging from the otherwise rational workings of a stable market environment. The scholarly literature on the question leads to what seems to be an analytical dead end, alternating between the immutable (“financial crises have happened before, and … will happen again”) and the entirely contingent (“historically specific accidents under irreproducible conditions” [my emphasis]). This interpretive impasse might account for the exhibition’s many references to avarice, ignorance, and duplicity, which in themselves offer little in the way of a fully historicized explanation.

The reliance on psychological or deviant factors to explain economic crises taps into a venerable trope that is as old as the boom-bust cycle itself and is inscribed in the very terms “panic,” “speculative bubble,” and, more recently, “irrational exuberance.” The notion that human passions distort rational market behavior has only recently gained traction in the discipline of economics itself, but, as we can see in perhaps the most interesting aspect of this exhibition, it follows in the footsteps of a long line of institutions and individuals who sought to protect the market from the ruinous effects of crowd psychology. “Bubbles, Panics, & Crashes” nods to this tradition when it refers in positive fashion to institutions such as Boston’s Suffolk System, an antebellum regional central banking arrangement that “curbed the excesses of the rural banks” of Massachusetts, or Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency, which in the wake of the 1837 panic began to offer credit information as an effort to systematize lending practices. It features Elizur Wright’s life insurance tables, based on mortality data, that aimed to scientifically manage the industry’s risk, and Harvard Professor James M. Landis, whose work inspired SEC financial regulation. There are many more who deserve a place in this important tradition, including the president of the Second Bank of the U.S., Nicholas Biddle, mugwump reformers Henry V. Poor and Charles Francis Adams Jr., banker J.P. Morgan and President Theodore Roosevelt, and continuing on up to today’s chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke.

Symptomatically, the involvement of Wall Street’s most respected firms in the events of the past few years—and in every historical crisis included in this exhibition—shows that ostensibly conservative private actors can hardly claim to have had a stabilizing role in the marketplace. These institutions always had access to the best information and mathematical models, so there is little reason to believe that better science would have made a difference. Even in the case of publicly appointed regulators such as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who at a recent hearing seemed to be at a loss for words in explaining the crisis, pinning it on a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami,” the cure can sometimes be as bad as the disease. Government oversight could be effective, to a degree, and a welcomed necessity. However, the longing for an authority capable of policing that ever elusive boundary between irresponsible speculation and legitimate business tactics will remain painfully unrequited.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.3 (April, 2010).

Noam Maggor is a Ph.D. candidate in History of American Civilization at Harvard University. He studies the history of American capitalism, and is currently writing a dissertation on urban governance in the late nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the lower middle class.