How To Do Things with Indian Texts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Action:

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

Acknowledgments

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

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

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

Trauma, Disability, and Colonial Unsettlement

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

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

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

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

Jamestown Cemetery. Courtesy of BillCannon.net.

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

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

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

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

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

On Figs: Sweetness in the common landscape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accuracy versus “Truth” in Television

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accuracy versus Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating Compelling Characters and Sets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Was Not Discussed: The Present in the Past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The panel:

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

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

Alexander Rose, author of the book Washington’s Spies

Jamie Bell, actor in Turn: Washington’s Spies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig. 1. "Ah! Do’nt Mingle," 1835, cover of sheet music for the opera La Sonnamubla by Vincenzo Bellini. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — Fig. 1. “Ah! Do’nt Mingle,” 1835, cover of sheet music for the opera La Sonnamubla by Vincenzo Bellini. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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

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

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

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

Fig. 2. "The Somnambulist's Song," 1847, cover of sheet music, words by Charles Jefferys, music by Vincenzo Bellini. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. — Fig. 2. “The Somnambulist’s Song,” 1847, cover of sheet music, words by Charles Jefferys, music by Vincenzo Bellini. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

How To Do Things with Indian Texts

Further Action:

Further Reading:

Acknowledgments

Trauma, Disability, and Colonial Unsettlement

Further reading:

On Figs: Sweetness in the common landscape

Further reading

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

Accuracy versus Truth

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

Creating Compelling Characters and Sets

What Was Not Discussed: The Present in the Past

The panel:

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

Acknowledgments

Stuffed into a Parakeet: Speculations on Alexander Wilson’s “Faithful Companion,” Specimen MCZ 67853

The Parakeet and the Naturalist

The Specimen

A Faithful Resemblance

Extinction

Further Reading:

Acknowledgments:

Crosses and Gold

Not Written in Black and White: American National Identity and the Curious Color Transformation of Henry Moss

The Springfield Somnambulist: Or, the End of the Enlightenment in America

First Meetings in the North Pacific: Russians and “Americans” in the Aleutians

Further Reading: