Benjamin Carr’s Music Sheets

The composer, performer, printer, and publisher Benjamin Carr (1768-1831) left his native England in 1793 to open a music shop in Philadelphia. His father, Joseph, followed suit a year later, starting a satellite store in Baltimore. Combined with the opening of Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theater early in 1794, Joseph’s arrival secured Benjamin’s success. The father-son team pooled resources, meeting the music-sheet demand that theatrical performances generated. Together with his competitor, George Willig, the younger Carr would issue most of Philadelphia’s printed music between 1793 and 1801, when he turned to other pursuits.

Profitable though it was, Carr’s U.S. publishing career began at a turbulent time. The execution of French King Louis XVI in January 1793, combined with the ensuing Terror and the notorious diplomacy of Edmond-Charles Genet, ended the near-universal enthusiasm with which Americans had greeted the French Revolution. And as Haitian refugees poured into U.S. ports that same year, controversy over Franco-American relations grew. For Carr, whose elite, music-reading clients were often conservative, the publication of radical French songs was, on the face of it, a risky venture.

But the public and oral transmission of French revolutionary song, which fueled early American dissent, was a different matter than its private consumption in music-sheet form. Music’s abstraction from performance, via print, freed it from physical expressions like marching and dancing. And song’s separation from public utterance made it seem less politically charged. Silent arrangements of ink on paper and the salon performances that they enabled were safely removed from the volatile contexts in which French revolutionary song initially flourished.

Carr’s printed music reconciled the three most popular songs of the French Revolution to the cultured climate of Philadelphia’s drawing rooms. To be sure, he was not the first to publish these. They shuttled between sound and print from early on, and Carr in fact based his sheets on existing British ones. But each tune nonetheless had an initial purpose other than singing, which editions like Carr’s obscured. “La Marseillaise,” for example, was a march. Though it displays an artful pairing of melody and lyrics, it was devised to coordinate military movement. For its part, “La Carmagnole” was as a ronde, a popular group dance accompanied by song, and “Ça Ira,” a contredanse, came from the ballroom.

Carr’s editions uncoupled this music from bodily action, but not entirely. Despite their remove from extra-musical function, they remain marked by the march and the dance. I begin with the most inherently songful of the three tunes, “La Marseillaise,” and then consider the more problematic cases of “La Carmagnole” and “Ça Ira.” Finally, Carr’s editions of all three tunes informed his storied Federal Overture (1794), enabling it to transcend Philadelphia’s partisan rancor.

“La Marseillaise”

The music that we know as “La Marseillaise,” a title it acquired in the nineteenth century, was first published in Strasbourg in 1792 as the “Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin” (“War Song of the Rhine Army”). It was written in April of that year by an officer, Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, to boost troop morale and accompany their march. A battalion from Marseilles brought the tune to Paris, where in September it became known as the “Hymne des Marseillaise.” At about the same time the song reached London, where various publishers issued it as “The Marseilles March.”

Carr had at least one of the latter sheets to hand when he produced “The Marseilles Hymn” in French and English (“Marche des Marseillois”) in 1793. His and the London editions have identical keyboard arrangements with four English verses based loosely on de Lisle’s. They also separately present the song’s melody with its six original French verses (fig. 1).

 

Allons enfants de la Patrie,

Le jour de gloire est arrivé.

Contre nous de la tyrannie,

L’étendard sanglant est levé. (bis)

Entendez-vous dans les campagnes,

Mugir ces féroces soldats?

Ils viennent jusques dans vos bras,

égorger vos fils, vos compagnes.

Aux armes, citoyens,

Formez vos bataillons.

Marchez, marchez,

Qu’un sang impur

Abreuve nos sillons.

Marchons, marchons,

Qu’un sang impur

Abreuve nos sillons.

 

Come, children of the Fatherland,

The day of glory is arrived.

Against us, the bloody flag

Of tyranny is raised. (repeat)

Don’t you hear, in the countryside,

The braying of these savage soldiers?

They come right into your midst,

To slaughter your children, your wives.

To arms, citizens,

Form your battalions.

March, march,

So that an impure blood

Shall water our furrows.

Let’s march, let’s march,

So that an impure blood

Shall water our furrows.

 

Carr’s score betrays the contradictory impulses at work in “La Marseillaise”—its songful complementarity of music and text, on the one hand, and its military functionalism, on the other. Let me first highlight a few places where the music reflects the meaning of the words. One begins with the seventh line of the text (“Ils viennent jusques dans vos bras”), where the lyrics take a grim turn. Here the music shifts from the buoyant major mode to the sullen minor, which persists until the refrain (“Marchez, marchez”) brings the return of the major mode.

More localized text expression happens on the word “est” (“is”) in the second line of the text, and with the word “mugir” (“braying”), at the beginning of the sixth line. In the first case, although the alignment is unclear in Carr’s printing, “est” is matched with a long, high note. Such emphasis is normally reserved for a more striking word, and here “gloire” (“glory”) would have been a more conventional choice. But instead de Lisle pairs the more important note with the less important word, creating a musical surprise. He thus depicts the arrival of “the day of glory,” which jolts the Fatherland’s children into action.

With the exception of “Mugir ces féroces soldats,” de Lisle begins each line of his text at a rhythmically weak moment. All the other lines start with transient notes, but “mugir” begins with a heavy, sustained tone. Here de Lisle also omits the usual pause between phrases, so that “mugir” seems to arrive early. And he enhances this surprise by altering the pitch of the syllable “mu-” from what is expected. This abrupt melodic change combines with the rhythmic displacement of “mugir” to convey the enemy’s crude braying.

Such examples suggest that de Lisle wrote the words of the first verse before its music, a view that is further supported by his allotment of the same amount of music to each line of text. There is an exception to this, however. About half-way through the score, beneath the words, “La General,” a series of repeated notes imitates a drum. This is an insertion and may have originated in the London source(s) from which Carr copied his edition. The “General” was a rhythmic signal that instructed armies to arise and prepare for the march, so here it amplifies the commands given in the lyrics: “Aux armes, citoyens / Formez vos bataillons.”

Since it did not accompany the march itself, however, the “General” was an artificial addition to de Lisle’s song. Two centuries earlier, the music theorist Thoinot Arbeau had notated the rhythm used to regulate the movement of French armies. It consisted of eight beats, the first five of which were struck, and the last three of which were silent. The first four beats were sounded with one stick, but the fifth was hit with both, creating an accent. This suggests a modern transcription in two bars of duple meter (ex. 1), the same amount of time to which de Lisle assigned each line of his text.

Example 1. Transcription of march rhythm in Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesographie (Langres, 1589).

When repeated, Arbeau’s rhythm forms a pattern with which we can compare de Lisle’s tune (ex. 2). The melody doesn’t follow it strictly—that was the drum’s role. Instead, it provides embellishments that keep the music interesting. But even so, the rhythmic framework is evident. Most of the notes in bars one, five, and seven, for example, correspond with the strokes of the drum. When the drummer rests, the tune becomes rhythmically freer, consisting either of held notes and rests or multiplied activity. In the intervening bars, the pulse is more insistent.

Example 2. Opening quatrain of “La Marseillaise,” as edited by Carr, overlaid with march rhythm.

Eighteenth-century French armies marched at one of two tempos. The pas redoublé, or doubled step, was used for short maneuvers and had a cadence of 120 steps per minute, whereas the pas ordinaire, or standard step, was approximately half as fast. “La Marseillaise” worked with both. If the step was assigned to the quarter note (four per bar), the song served as a pas redoublé. If the step was assigned to the half note (two per bar), then it functioned as a pas ordinaire. Since a regulation step was twenty-four inches, a single verse of “La Marseillaise” represented a walking distance of either 272 or 136 feet.

Even though it was conceived as a song, then, with a tune shaped to represent its words, “La Marseillaise” is marked by the movement of soldiers. In music-sheet form, its ink symbols betray its former embodiment. In 1796, Carr reissued this tune in two collections of nonvocal music, his Evening Amusement and Military Amusement. Once he had made it into a parlor song, it was possible to publish arrangements of “La Marseillaise” that abstracted it not only from extra-musical function, but from verbal meaning, too.

“La Carmagnole”

“La Carmagnole” became popular in Paris at the same time as “La Marseillaise.” It, too, accompanied French army maneuvers and reached America via Britain. But here the comparison falters. “La Carmagnole” was rooted in oral practice and the ronde, a rustic dance in which participants formed a ring around an object like a tree or liberty pole. Dancers circled left and right, moved in and out from the center, and made special steps at melodically marked moments. The sung tune was their only accompaniment. The song had no definitive text apart from its title (which designates a coat imported from Italy by French laborers) and its militant refrain. Verses were often made up on the spot to commemorate local issues and people. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, the head librarian at the French National Conservatory identified more than fifty verses that were paired with the following chorus:

 

Dansons la carmagnole,

Vive le son, vive le son,

Dansons la carmagnole,

Vive le son, du cannon.

 

Let’s dance the carmagnole,

Long live the sound, long live the sound,

Let’s dance the carmagnole,

Long live the sound of the cannon.

 

Given its popular origins, music publishers aiming to cast “La Carmagnole” as an elite diversion faced a challenge—one that Carr’s 1794 edition met head-on. Arranged for solo voice and keyboard, it was copied from an existing London sheet and includes four French verses along with a self-standing version for the guitar (fig. 2).

This sheet departs radically from the renditions of “La Carmagnole” that sounded in the public spaces of Philadelphia. It is framed by an introduction and conclusion for the keyboard, which provides accompaniment throughout. This becomes conspicuous when an out-of-context chord (an A7) appears with the first repetition of “vive le son” on page two, and when this is echoed by an acute dissonance (an F-sharp against a C major chord) during the next repetition of the same text. An amateur keyboardist would have struggled to play this music at the tempo of the dance, so salon performances of “La Carmagnole” were comparatively slow.

Like the music itself, the visual arrangement of Carr’s “Carmagnole” gives the impression of a methodically crafted song rather than an unrefined, semi-improvisatory dance. For the already songful “Marseillaise,” it sufficed to combine the voice and keyboard on a double staff. The vocal part of “La Carmagnole,” by contrast, is printed separately from the keyboard part, on a third staff. This makes it look independent, even though the keyboard mostly doubles it. For part of page two (the second line of combined staves), however, the melody is entrusted to the voice alone. “La Carmagnole” was thus changed from a vocally accompanied dance into an instrumentally accompanied song.

Verses for “La Carmagnole” were short and simple. The most famous ones took aim at Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI:

 

Madame Veto avait promis (bis)

De faire égorger tout Paris, (bis)

Mais son coup a manqué

Grâce à nos canonniers.

Monsieur Veto avait promis (bis)

D’être fidèle à son pays,(bis)

Mais il y a manqué;

Ne faisons plus quartier.

 

Mrs. Veto had promised (repeat)

To slaughter all of Paris, (repeat)

But her coup has failed

Thanks to our gunners.

Mr. Veto had promised (repeat)

To be true to his country, (repeat)

But he has failed;

Let’s show no mercy.

 

But these didn’t make it into Carr’s edition, which begins more generically:

 

Le cannon vient de résonner, (bis)

Guerriers soyons prêts à marcher. (bis)

Citoyens et soldats

En volant aux combats.

 

The cannon have sounded, (repeat)

Warriors are ready to go. (repeat)

Citizens and soldiers

Are flying into combat.

 

The repetition of each line in the opening couplet reflects the call-and-response manner in which it was originally performed. Parallel musical units are normally assigned to such repeated text, but not in this case. The first statement of “Le cannon vient de résonner” is set to a lilting tune whose rhythm matches the words. We expect this to be answered by a unit of the same length (as in ex. 3a), but it is instead followed by an extended phrase, with which it forms an asymmetrical pair (ex. 3b).

Example 3a. Expected setting of opening text repetition in “La Carmagnole.”

Example 3b. Setting of opening text repetition in “La Carmagnole,” as edited by Carr.

Example 3a is fictional and shows a symmetrical response to the initial statement. The main difference between this normalization and the phrase as it appears in Carr’s edition is the placement of the word “de.” In example 3a it is assigned to a fleeting note, but in example 3b it is emphasized by duration and by placement on a strong beat. Carr is not to blame for this faulty accentuation, though, because the “Carmagnole” tune wasn’t devised to suit its text. Although we don’t know what the step entailed, this otherwise unaccountable phrase must have accompanied a distinctive moment in the “Carmagnole” dance.

Along with “La Marseillaise,” Carr included the melody of “La Carmagnole,” without words, in his Evening Amusement of 1796. And he later reissued the texted version from the plates he had made in 1794, including it in his Collection of New and Favorite Songs(ca. 1800). He thus published it one time less than he would “Ça Ira.”

“Ça Ira”

Like “La Carmagnole,” “Ça Ira” originated as a social dance, albeit a more sophisticated one. Composed by a Parisian theater musician named Bécourt, it was initially called “Le Carillon National” and its earliest known printing is an arrangement for two violins. As a contredanse, “Le Carillon” had roots in the English country dances (which, despite their name, were genteel) introduced at the court of Louis XIV, and was performed by four couples in a square formation. The music was played through four times, giving each pair a chance to lead. Among the dance figures indicated in an early Paris edition are the rigaudon, pirouette, hand-turn, and English half-chain. Like all contredanses, “Le Carillon” is in rounded binary form, meaning that it has two musical sections, the first of which returns after the second.

This dance became a song during the early French Revolution. Its verses were as varied as those of “La Carmagnole,” but it had a consistent refrain, set to a repetitive tune:

Example 4. “Ça Ira” refrain.

The original verses were devised by a street singer named Ladré, and became popular during preparations for Paris’s Fête de la Fédération of July 1790. The first one was as follows:

 

Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,

Le peuple en ce jour sans cesse répète,

Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,

Malgré les mutins tout réussira.

Nos ennemis confus en restent là,

Et nous allons chanter “Alléluia.”

Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,

Quand Boileau jadis du clergé parla,

Comme un prophète il a prédit cela;

En chantant ma chansonette,

Avec plaisir on dira,

Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira.

 

Oh, it’ll turn out well,

The people on this day incessantly repeat,

Oh, it’ll turn out well,

Despite the mutineers, all will succeed.

Our enemies remain confused,

And we shall sing “Hallelujah.”

Oh, it’ll turn out well,

When Boileau spoke of the clergy,

Like a prophet, he predicted as much;

By singing my little song,

With pleasure you’ll say,

Oh, it’ll turn out well.

By default, songs have one note per syllable of text. Because Bécourt wrote his melody for nonvocal instruments, however, it has stray notes that don’t correspond to the lyrics. This becomes a problem when setting the second line of Ladré’s text, a likely solution to which is shown in example 5a. At least one Parisian printer had other ideas, however, as seen in example 5b.

Example 5a. Plausible alignment of “Le peuple en ce jour sans cesse répète” in “Ça Ira.”

Example 5b. Alignment of “Le peuple en ce jour sans cesse répète” in “Ah! Ça Ira” (Paris: Frère, 1790).

In the same Paris edition, the assignment of text to music becomes altogether haphazard at times. Example 6 shows three successive settings of the phrase, “Ça ira,” each of which differs in terms of rhythmic emphasis, and none of which is desirable when compared to example 4.

Example 6. Indiscriminate accentuation of “ça ira” in “Ah! Ça Ira” (Paris: Frère, 1790).

Bécourt’s tune resists songfulness in further ways. The simplicity of its opening phrase is both a virtue and a vice: it is rhythmically memorable but has almost no melodic interest. A bigger problem, however, arises from the fact that Bécourt wrote his melody without consideration for the range of the human voice. In its original form, it reaches from a low G (near the bottom limit for a bass or alto) to a high B (near the upper limit for a tenor or soprano). This led the foremost historian of French revolutionary song to describe “Ça Ira” as unsingable, but we know that it was sung nevertheless. Performances of “Ça Ira,” especially those by popular crowds, therefore edged closer to rhythmic shouting than to song.

Such considerations deterred Carr from publishing “Ça Ira” in an arrangement for voice and keyboard, in the manner of “La Marseillaise” and “La Carmagnole.” As far as we know, he never issued it with lyrics. The challenge of transforming a dance with revolutionary words into an urbane song, while considerable in the case of “La Carmagnole,” may have seemed insuperable in the case of “Ça Ira.” Carr’s first edition of it, from 1793, was an arrangement for solo keyboard, which he combined on a single page with Philip Phile’s “President’s March” (fig. 3). He later reproduced the melody alone in three different collections: the Philadelphia Pocket Companion (1794), Gentleman’s Amusement (1795), and Evening Amusement (1796).

In each of these editions, Carr presented “Ça Ira” as a wordless, instrumental arrangement of a popular song, but it remains marked by its origins as a dance. In figure 3, notice that the tune begins (half-way down the page) with an incomplete bar. The music itself doesn’t suggest this. It makes more sense, in fact, to notate the opening melody this way:

Example 7. Re-notated opening of “Ça Ira.”

 

Carr’s unusual barring owes to the song’s history as a contredanse, and more specifically to a convention known as “dancing across the bar.” Opening on the weaker, second half of the bar accommodated an upward motion of the hand or foot, which was then lowered in accordance with the downbeat.

The most popular tunes of the French Revolution resisted the identity of song as a self-standing form of vocal expression: “La Marseillaise” betrayed the movement of soldiers, the music and words of “La Carmagnole” were bent to accommodate the dance, and “Ça Ira” was better suited to the rhythmic chanting of the crowd than the cultured singing of the drawing room. It is thus no surprise that Carr’s next treatment of this music took nonvocal form. The Federal Overture was a fitting culmination to Carr’s career as a publisher of French revolutionary song, for it brought “La Marseillaise,” “La Carmagnole,” and “Ça Ira” together in a single, wordless work. Though it represents a different genre, it advances the same purpose seen in his other editions—broadening the appeal of an otherwise partisan repertory.

The Federal Overture

Carr’s Federal Overture was premiered by an orchestra at Philadelphia’s Southwark Theater in September 1794 and issued in a keyboard arrangement two months later. He composed introductory, transitional, and closing material for this work, which was otherwise an arrangement of nine existing melodies, and exemplified the British genre of the medley overture. It had a uniquely American purpose, however, which was to preempt the disorder that could erupt when theatergoers didn’t hear their favorite tunes. It featured Federalist favorites like “Yankee Doodle” and “The President’s March,” along with the songs we’ve been considering.

The idea of uniting ideologically opposed pieces in a single publication was not unique to the Federal Overture, as figure 3 suggests. Nor was pairing tunes like “The President’s March” and “Ça Ira” necessarily a conciliatory gesture. As the historian Liam Riordan has argued, the Overture appealed to Republican taste while subtly validating Federalism. Its title suggests as much, but, according to Riordan, Carr also musically affirmed the status quo. His newly composed material lent a menacing quality to the French selections while foregrounding “Yankee Doodle” and “The President’s March.”

Carr’s other editions of French revolutionary song don’t underscore Federalism in this way. But they did separate music from public utterance and from social actions like marching and dancing, and these trends continued in the Federal Overture. Carr’s orchestral score for the Overture hasn’t been located, so we only have the keyboard arrangement (along with an abridged version for flute duet, shared between the fifth and sixth numbers of Carr’s Gentleman’s Amusement) to compare with his other publications. The three discussed here were issued before the Overture—”The Marseilles Hymn” and “Ça Ira” in 1793 and “La Carmagnole” by June 1794. Even in the absence of its original performing version, however, it is clear that Carr’s medley further removed this music from the functions it formerly knew. His earlier editions had made it into a parlor song (or a keyboard solo in the case of “Ça Ira”), but now it became a nonverbal orchestral symbol.

In his first edition of “La Marseillaise,” for instance, Carr reserved the eighth-note beam for cases when multiple notes were assigned to a single syllable. He abandoned this vocal consideration in the Overture, however, where the tune also appears in a fuller texture and with a new, symphonic accompaniment in the chorus. For their part, Carr reconceived the melodies of “La Carmagnole” and “Ça Ira” for a nonvocal instrument. Each ascends in the Overture to an E above the treble staff—well beyond vocal range. In addition, “Ça Ira” is realigned so as to begin with a complete bar, and the harmonic complexity of the “Carmagnole” accompaniment is curtailed, although its introductory and closing material is retained. He also added orchestral volume contrasts to each number, according to the conventions of instrumental theater music.

Carr’s editions initially distanced “La Marseillaise,” “La Carmagnole,” and “Ça Ira” from public utterance, turning them into private amusements. But his Federal Overture restored these songs to the public in a carefully managed and wordless form. His political ambition in doing so shouldn’t be exaggerated—he was selling music. But Carr’s publications did soften the radicalism of French revolutionary song, if only to make it more palatable to drawing-room and theater-going consumers alike.

Further Reading

On the role of French revolutionary song in early American popular culture, see Simon Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 1997). Laura Mason’s Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787-1799 (Ithaca, 1996) and Constant Pierre’s Hymnes et chansons de la Révolution (Paris, 1904) are indispensable studies of the same music across the Atlantic. For more on Carr and musical print, see Richard Wolfe’s Early American Music Engraving and Printing: A History of Music Publishing in America from 1787 to 1825 (Urbana, 1980) and Oscar Sonneck’s Bibliography of Early Secular American Music, 18^thCentury, revised and enlarged by William Treat Upton (New York, 1964). On European and American military music of the period, see Raoul Camus, Military Music of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1976).

Liam Riordan’s “‘O Dear, What Can the Matter Be?’: The Urban Early Republic and the Politics of Popular Song in Benjamin Carr’s Federal Overture” appears in the Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Summer 2011). For more on the politics and music of the theater, see Heather Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (New York, 2003), and Susan Porter, With an Air Debonair: Musical Theatre in America, 1785-1815 (Washington, D.C., 1991).

Carr’s “Marseilles Hymn” and “President’s March and Ça Ira” are available online in the Johns Hopkins University’s Lester Levy Collection of Sheet Music. There are recordings of “La Marseillaise,” “La Carmagnole,” and “Ça Ira” on Youtube, but they don’t specifically reflect Carr’s editions. Patrick Gallois and the Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä’s 18^th-Century American Overture (Naxos, 8.559654, 2011) features an orchestral reconstruction of the Federal Overture.

 

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

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Myron Gray is a PhD candidate in music history at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation considers the relationship of Philadelphian music to Franco-American politics between 1778 and 1801.

Historians who teach the War of 1812 often end their lecture by explaining that amid the smoldering ruins of a capital that had been burned in August 1814, many Americans ignored more than two years of military disasters, and the fact that the peace agreement settled none of the issues that led to the war, by proclaiming victory. A victory made all the more plausible by an odd coincidence of news reporting: on February 4, 1815, word arrived in Washington, D.C., of Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the British at New Orleans; ten days later the Treaty of Ghent appeared, bringing the war to an end. Although the two events were unrelated, with Jackson’s triumph (January 8, 1815) occurring after the peace accord at Ghent (December 24, 1814), historians like to assert that the events were connected in the popular mind. As I have announced in many a lecture hall: one headline read “JACKSON VICTORY AT NEW ORLEANS,” and the other “PEACE SIGNED WITH THE BRITISH.”

Such fabricated headlines may be great in the classroom. But they obscure a more complicated story. The supposed victory in the war was not so clear to the people who lived in 1815. For many Americans, and not just the arch Federalists who had all along opposed fighting the British, the treaty did not speak to the war’s root causes. It failed to address free trade, America’s ability to trade unhindered by British restrictions. Nor did it protect American sailors from impressment. The problematic nature of the treaty came into bold relief in late spring and early summer in the wake of the tragedy that became known as the Dartmoor Massacre.

Dartmoor is a fogbound corner of southwest England, perhaps best known as the setting of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is just the kind of place where it is possible to believe that a large, primeval, supernatural beast could wreak havoc. When the shroud of mist lifts, Dartmoor can be starkly beautiful. More often the weather is oppressive and the countryside nearly invisible. During the Napoleonic Wars, the British selected the site for a prison to house the French sailors and soldiers they captured, locating the compound just far enough inland to keep it safe from raiders hoping to liberate their comrades, but close enough to Plymouth to make it a day’s march from the coast. The prison, constructed with a huge circular wall around it, was erected in a valley, increasing the likelihood of fog. The strategy worked. When I visited the region one early spring day in 2006, the combination of low-hanging clouds, mist, and rain, made it almost impossible to see the gate as I drove by. (The building is still used as a prison.)

During the War of 1812, Dartmoor gradually became a prison for Americans. Initially, the British lodged Americans captured on the high seas at Dartmoor with the French. As conflict with France wound down, French prisoners were sent home across the channel. And, as the British captured an increasing number of American ships, more and more Americans were concentrated in the compound. The British even sent men who had been serving in the royal navy, and who claimed American citizenship, to Dartmoor. Many of these sailors had been impressed and resented the way they were being treated now that His Majesty’s Navy no longer needed them to fight Bonaparte’s navy. By the end of 1814, there were 6,000 Americans in Dartmoor, about one fourth of whom had been released to the prison from the British navy, while the rest had been captured at sea.

 

Between the signing of the Treaty of Ghent and April 6, 1815, the day of the incident the Americans called the Dartmoor Massacre, the prison on the desolate moor was fraught with tension. As soon as the American prisoners heard of the treaty in December, they ran up a banner announcing “free trade and sailors’ rights,” using the slogan that had been ubiquitous in the United States and was an accepted shorthand for the causes of the war. The prison commandant found the slogan so offensive that he insisted that the banner be taken down. After tense negotiations, the prisoners agreed to remove their standard for the time being, and the commandant promised to fly both the British and the American flags atop the prison. In the weeks and months that followed, the prisoners tested their British guards at every opportunity. They tried American agent Reuben Beasley in effigy for not alleviating their harsh conditions. Finding him guilty, the prisoners then hanged his effigy. Later they rioted over the type of bread served.

 

As a bleak and miserable winter gave way to a bleak and miserable spring, the prisoners began to wonder why, if there really was a peace, they had not been exchanged. They had reason to be concerned. The Treaty of Ghent had stipulated that “All Prisoners of war taken on either side as well by land as by sea shall be restored as soon as practicable after the Ratifications of this Treaty.” The difficulty was what was “practicable.” It was easy enough for the Americans to return British prisoners to Canada or some other nearby British possession, but the expense of sending the prisoners in England across the Atlantic proved to be a stumbling block. As the British and Americans dithered over who was to pay this extra cost, the sailors in Dartmoor watched one cold and bleak day blur into the next. With many of the prisoners sick and malnourished, discontent soared. Then in March, smallpox broke out in Dartmoor, leading to additional deaths and further delays.

 

This was the background for the massacre. The sixth of April was one of the first nice days that spring, and the prisoners amused themselves playing ball or lolling about in the unusual sunshine. Toward the end of the day, some of the Americans repeatedly tossed a ball over the wall and called upon a guard to retrieve it. When the British soldier tired of what was turning into a game of fetch, he told the prisoners to go get the ball themselves if it went over the wall again. Soon enough, the ball was over the wall, and heeding the soldier’s advice, the sailors began to break a hole through the wall. This small confrontation soon escalated and the British guard rang the warning bell for the sailors to return to their prison buildings. When the Americans rushed the gate instead, the situation turned serious. The commandant ordered the prisoners back at the point of bayonets. The sailors tossed dirt and rocks at the soldiers. A shot rang out from the British ranks, followed by other shots from soldiers on the wall. The Americans ran back to their buildings amid a hail of bullets. The shooting continued for twenty minutes and left six dead and over sixty wounded.

Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign minister, recognized that the events at Dartmoor jeopardized relations with the United States. A quick military inquest at Dartmoor exonerated the British commandant and blamed the violence on the prisoners. This report, Castlereagh knew, only made matters worse. What was needed was a more neutral investigation with American involvement. He turned to Henry Clay and Albert Gallatin, who had arrived in London after completing the Ghent negotiations to discuss a commercial agreement, and asked them to travel to Dartmoor with one of the British representatives who had been at Ghent to investigate the affair and draw up a report. These two Republican politicians refused to go anywhere near the inquest, no doubt believing that a report that did not condemn the British would be political suicide in the United States. They recommended sending Reuben Beasley, lately tried in effigy, who claimed he was too busy arranging transport for the prisoners to leave London. Ultimately, Clay and Gallatin convinced Richard King, who happened to be in London on personal business and was the son of Federalist leader Rufus King, to travel to Dartmoor. Joined by an English lawyer named Francis Seymour Larpent, King interviewed all sides at Dartmoor and wrote a balanced report blaming both the sailor prisoners and the British soldiers, but not the commandant.

If Clay and Gallatin refused to go to Dartmoor for political reasons, they were right. News of the so-called massacre created a firestorm in the United States. Information traveled slowly across the Atlantic, but by late May word of the incident drifted into American ports. Vague and unsubstantiated, these first reports merely indicated that there had been some sort of riot at Dartmoor and reflected what had appeared in British newspapers. However, after months of delay, both the British and the Americans wanted to empty Dartmoor as quickly as possible after the massacre, and the American prisoners of war soon began to arrive from England. Outraged by their treatment as prisoners, these sailors viewed the events of the sixth of April as a preconcerted atrocity exacted as vengeance for Jackson’s victory at New Orleans and the American “triumph” in the war. Republican editors rushed the prisoners’ stories into print, filling their columns with first-person accounts, and publishing memoirs and even selling prints depicting the prison and its massacre. The sailors dismissed the King-Larpent report as a whitewash and issued their own report that declared that the commandant had ordered his men to fire. When the official report became public in the United States in mid July, Republican editors joined in the chorus attacking King and Larpent. As one editor noted: The inquiry was “of too high import to be settled between young Mr. King, and an unknown British lawyer; for if sailors’ rights are worthy of the consideration of government, sailors’ blood is a subject of equal magnitude.”

Federalists at first reacted cautiously to the news of Dartmoor, asking the public to hold off on its judgment until all the facts were known. For them, the King-Larpent report confirmed their faith in the British who had been willing to compromise. In response to the Republican attacks on Richard King, a few Federalists wondered out loud why such talented men as Clay, one of the most gifted lawyers in the land, and Gallatin, an experienced diplomat, had refused to go to Dartmoor and left such a delicate task to an inexperienced private citizen who then became their “scapegoat.”

Whatever the fulminations of Republican editors and the exclamations of perfidy by so many returning sailors, the Madison administration did not want the Dartmoor Massacre to lead to a break in relations with the British. Certainly, there was no way the nation would return to war. Clay and Gallatin, and then joined by John Quincy Adams, had completed their commercial negotiations with the Convention of 1815. This landmark agreement provided for the reciprocal trade that had been the goal of American diplomacy since 1776. Hereafter, the British and Americans would treat each other’s merchants, in terms of imposts and shipping duties, the same as they treated their own merchants. Neither nation wanted a few dead and wounded sailors to get in the way of the promise of free trade and open commercial relations.

Common folk saw things differently. Dartmoor became etched in popular memory, reflecting the image of a nefarious, inimical, and perfidious enemy—the detested British. In short, a war that had been painted in such triumphant colors early in 1815 had by the same summer come to include a dark streak—a deep scar on the popular consciousness. American historians often overlook that scar. Examining the end of the war within its international context and viewing events on both sides of the Atlantic allows a more balanced assessment. Sailors’ rights remained violated by both the treaty of peace and the Dartmoor Massacre. For many Americans, whatever the assertions of the Madison administration, the so-called victory was tainted and incomplete.

Further reading:

In addition to Paul Gilje’s forthcoming Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812, you can read more about Dartmoor in his Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia, 2004) and in Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). For a standard account of the diplomacy at the end of the war see Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812-1823 (Berkeley, Calif., 1964).

 

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

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Paul A. Gilje, the George Lynn Cross Research Professor in History at the University of Oklahoma, writes on the American Revolution and the early republic. Material from this essay was drawn from his new book, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812, which will be published by Cambridge University Press this fall.

 

Stepfamilies before Blending

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

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

“No,” I says, “it don’t.”

“Why don’t it, Huck?”

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

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

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

“Is dat so?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

Until Perry intervened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Further Reading:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A safer place to fight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The questionable outcome of Haas v. Montgomery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

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

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

 

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

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