The Right to Be a Freemason: Secret Societies and the Power of the Law in the Early Republic

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.

Fig. 1. "Wm. Morgan" from an original picture by A. Cooley. Frontispiece, Light on Masonry: A Collection of All the Most Important Documents on the Subject of Speculative Free Masonry…, by Elder David Bernard (Utica, 1829). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — Fig. 1. “Wm. Morgan” from an original picture by A. Cooley. Frontispiece, Light on Masonry: A Collection of All the Most Important Documents on the Subject of Speculative Free Masonry…, by Elder David Bernard (Utica, 1829). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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.

Fig. 2. Title page from The Constitutions of the Ancient and Honourable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masonry… which follows the structure and incorporates much of the content of James Anderson's Constitutions, first published in England in 1723 and in North America in 1734. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. — Fig. 2. Title page from The Constitutions of the Ancient and Honourable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masonry… which follows the structure and incorporates much of the content of James Anderson’s Constitutions, first published in England in 1723 and in North America in 1734. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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.

Undergraduates in Early American Archives: Transcribing Quaker Scribal Texts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society’s Weekly Contribution Box

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

Cover/title page of The Monthly Offering, Vol. I, No. 1 (July, 1840). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

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

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

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

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

Overcoming Nausea: The Brothers Hesselius and the American Mystery

“Who painted these paintings?”

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

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

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

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

Fig. 1. Lapowinska. Painted by Gustavus Hesselius, 1735. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia.

Fig. 2. Tishcohan. Painted by Gustavus Hesselius, 1735. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.2.Lockridge.3 — Fig. 3. Gustavus Hesselius, self-portrait, c. 1740. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When he first met them, Hesselius found Indians repulsive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig. 4. Sweden Landskap. Map by Mark Fritch, University of Montana.

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

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

Fig. 5. Husfoerhoer record, Tuna Parish, nineteenth century. Courtesy of Swedish Archives Information in Ramsele.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More fascinated than repelled, Private Martin had discovered America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig. 6. Delaware(?) war club; photograph by Tony Sandin, copyright and courtesy of the Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm, Sweden

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

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

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

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

Coda

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

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

Fig. 7. Bishop Jesper Svedberg, 1714. Gripsholm Castle. Courtesy of the Portrait Collection of the National Museum in Stockholm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources and Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silver, Science, and Routes to the West

The Pacific Ocean and eighteenth-century French imperial policy

If pressed, most early modern historians would probably identify the Pacific Ocean in the centuries between Magellan and Cook’s famous voyages as an area of marginal importance: the site of an interesting but relatively insignificant commerce between Acapulco and Manila from 1565 to 1815; of picturesque but largely inconsequential episodes such as Drake’s epic circumnavigation of the 1570s; and of idyllic but isolated archipelagoes, the existence of which long remained unknown to those who did not enjoy the good fortune of having been born there. From this perspective, the Pacific was a region tenuously connected to other parts of the globe, doing little to shape developments beyond its shores, offering little to historians seeking explanations for events in other areas. The first burden, then, for scholars interested in the early modern Pacific is to demonstrate the historical significance of the subject.

This is especially true for historians of the French Empire in the 1700s. Eighteenth-century France lacked long-established colonies in the Pacific Basin and thus one obvious connection to the South Sea; and even though French mariners such as Bougainville succeeded in the 1700s in overcoming the considerable challenges of Pacific navigation, they have often received less credit for their achievements than their more celebrated British counterparts.

Yet clusters of French merchants, officials, geographers, and savants directed their attentions or their ships to the Pacific throughout the eighteenth century, and their interest and activities helped to give the Pacific Basin’s lands and waters a more influential role in the period’s history than is widely appreciated. This essay will discuss two examples of this historical significance of the Pacific Ocean for the eighteenth-century French Empire. The first considers the manner in which French concerns about British expansion into the Pacific helped to draw France into the Seven Years’ War. The second uses an analysis of French assessments of the possibility of reaching the Pacific by means of some kind of water route through North America to help explain the French decision to cede western Louisiana to Spain at the end of the Seven Years’ War. These considerations influenced momentous French imperial decisions made half a world away from the South Sea, decisions that cannot, in fact, be fully explained without consideration of the Pacific horizons of eighteenth-century French thought.

I.

It will be useful, first, to mention the matter pertaining to the Pacific that exercised the earliest and most immediate influence on French merchants and officials. From the 1690s until 1763, the commodity drawing the attention of French merchants and officials to the Great South Sea was Spanish silver from the famous mines of Mexico and Peru. Most of this silver moved east across the Atlantic to Europe, but a significant portion went in the opposite direction, west across the Pacific to the Philippines, as part of the annual galleon trade that Spain conducted between Acapulco and Manila. American silver supported Spanish outposts in the Philippines, and vast quantities of it were exchanged there each year for East Asian products such as silk. Besides crossing the oceans in Spanish galleons, some New World silver remained, for a time at least, in the hands of the inhabitants of Spanish possessions in places such as Chile, Peru, and western Mexico. Numerous, poorly supplied with Spanish goods, and able to pay for the products of Spain’s competitors with bullion, these Spanish-American consumers on the Pacific Coast represented an irresistible market for countries such as France and Britain. Overall, Spanish America accounted for roughly 90 percent of world silver production in the eighteenth century; and because much of the remaining 10 percent occurred in Japan, to which Europeans had only the most limited access, Spanish America formed the essential source of silver for European traders and governments who wanted it.

And they did want it. The value of silver for individual Europeans was obvious and longstanding: it meant wealth. For governments, it meant not just wealth, but also power. Silver could be used to build ships, to pay soldiers, to back paper money—especially in wartime when the reliability of paper currency could easily become uncertain—and, perhaps most strikingly, silver could be used to buy the assistance of allies and the services of soldiers on the continent of Europe. Historian Fernand Braudel offered one telling example of this when he observed that the down payment on Britain’s alliance with Prussia in 1756 was thirty-four wagons of silver bouncing down the roads to Berlin. European statesmen keenly felt the importance of gaining supplies of silver for their own state, and of keeping large quantities of it out of the hands of their rivals.

Silver’s importance extended beyond the realm of power politics. It was, in fact, becoming increasingly important in eighteenth-century Europe because of its essential role in Europe’s growing trade with China. One aspect of Europe’s consumer revolution in this period was a burgeoning demand for goods such as Chinese porcelain, silk, and tea. The problem for European merchants was that in the years before they began exploiting the commercial possibilities of otter furs and opium, Europe had very little that China wanted to buy. Chinese traders did want silver, however, silver serving as the official means of exchange in China and as the currency in which the Chinese government insisted that taxes be paid. Any European government hoping to profit from trade with the rapidly expanding population of China had to find a source of silver with which this commerce could be conducted.

Spanish America offered the obvious answer to European statesmen and merchants. The question was how a European empire such as that of France could obtain it. The usual method was to exchange French goods for Spanish silver in Spain. This was much better than nothing, but because Spanish ships served as the conveyors, and Spanish merchants the middlemen between Europe and Spanish America, French merchants lost out on much potential profit. A second, more violent and direct method involved sending privateers or naval squadrons to seize Spanish ships and to attack Spanish cities on the Atlantic and Pacific shores of this Americas. Such attacks could bring spectacular results: English ships, for example, succeeded in taking Pacific galleons in 1587, 1709, and 1743.

Pirates, of many national origins, provided another example of this most straightforward way of trying to acquire the wealth of the Spanish Indies. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, impelled by the efforts of the European empires to reduce piracy in the Caribbean, and attracted by the temptations of poorly protected Spanish towns and shipping, packs of buccaneers journeyed into the Pacific by crossing the Isthmus of Panama and by sailing around the tip of South America. After enduring numerous costly attacks, Spain’s Pacific colonies finally succeeded in the 1690s in driving these pirates away. Some of the buccaneers made it back to Europe, however, where they recounted fabulous tales of Spanish wealth that naturally inflamed the avarice of their countrymen in French port towns such as St. Malo. Tales of treasure in St. Malo predictably reached the ears of officials in Paris, officials perpetually beset by the challenge of financing Louis XIV’s quest for military and courtly grandeur.

The combination of the experience of these pirates and the disruptions to the Spanish government and the Spanish shipping system during and after the War of the Spanish Succession suggested to French officials and merchants a third method of acquiring Spanish American silver, one that avoided the uncertainties and dangers of outright pillage; namely, direct trade between French ports, especially St. Malo, and the inhabitants of Peru and Chile. According to the treaties, precedents, and claims established during the early decades of the Spanish Empire, the Pacific was considered to be a Spanish Lake, a mare clausum from which non-Spanish shipping was excluded; pirates and privateers aside, this principle was generally accepted. But once the War of the Spanish Succession began in 1702, Spain’s naval forces proved insufficient either to protect Spanish commerce from English and Dutch raiders or to supply Spain’s distant colonies. French merchants eagerly took advantage of these Spanish difficulties by sailing directly to Peru and Chile themselves. Historian Carlos Daniel Malamud Rikles has estimated that between 1702 and 1713, ninety-eight French ships arrived in the Pacific. The merchants of St. Malo took on the most active role in the trade, and their passage through the South Atlantic left the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands with one of their two names.

Though it is impossible to arrive at precise figures, it is certain that the quantities of bullion returned to France from this trade were enormous. The Swedish historian E. W. Dahlgren—the author, between 1905 and 1913, of the fundamental works on the French presence in the early eighteenth-century Pacific—estimated conservatively that French ships involved in the Pacific trade in the early decades of the eighteenth century brought at least two hundred million livres of silver back to France. To view this in perspective, estimates put the total value of silver coinage in France in both 1683 and 1700 at five hundred million livres. More recently, historians such as Malamud Rikles and Stanley and Barbara Stein have offered estimates ranging between fifty-five and ninety-eight million pesos. To get a sense of the magnitude of these peso figures, consider that Alexander Hamilton estimated that the total value of both specie and paper money in the thirteen colonies on the eve of the American Revolution was about thirty million pesos. In short, access to the Spanish Pacific could result in staggering profits.

Such dividends brought their own difficulties. Spanish officials complained about the economic exploitation of their empire by French interlopers. British merchants and officials noted the profits French ships were bringing back from the Pacific, and, as the founding of the South Sea Company in 1711 attested, they wanted their own share of Pacific markets. It became clear to the governments of both the French and the British Empires during the peace negotiations at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession that neither would tolerate the presence of the other in the Pacific, and that therefore the only way to secure peace between them was to resume the traditional exclusion of all non-Spanish shipping from the South Sea. Spain, France, and Britain agreed to this, and thus, in theory, the diplomatic settlement at Utrecht precluded direct British or French involvement with the Pacific. Practice would not always conform to theory, however.

II.

With one of the fundamental reasons for eighteenth-century French interest in the Pacific in view, it now becomes possible to assess the implications of this interest through consideration of two instances of French governmental conduct. The first of these concerns French reactions to two British expeditions, in 1742 and 1747, that sought a Northwest Passage from Hudson Bay.

Large parts of the western shore of Hudson Bay remained unexplored by Europeans before the 1740s, making it possible for geographic speculators and promoters to imagine a passage extending from the bay to the warmer waters of the South Sea (see figs. 1 and 2 for two mid-eighteenth-century French views of the Hudson Bay region and its possible connections to the rivers of the North American West.)

Fig. 2. Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Vérendrye, "Hudson’s Bay’s Country after La Veranderie. About 1740." Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C. — Fig. 2. Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Vérendrye, “Hudson’s Bay’s Country after La Veranderie. About 1740.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C.

One such promoter, Arthur Dobbs, a rich Ulster landowner, a member of the Irish parliament, and a future governor of North Carolina, succeeded in the 1740s in bringing about one government-supported and one privately-financed expedition to seek a Northwest Passage. French agents in London and French geographers at home reported on these British expeditions, and in the years after the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748, officials in the French government began to assess the wider significance of these British ventures.

French officials were skeptical about the existence of a useable Northwest Passage from Hudson Bay, but their ignorance of the region’s geography left them feeling uneasy. They respected the prowess of the British navy, and they feared that the British, during the long decades of the Hudson Bay Company’s trade in the region, might have found evidence concerning a Northwest Passage that remained unknown to other Europeans. Moreover, French diplomats and ministers found it difficult to believe that the British Empire would be sending costly and dangerous expeditions into the icy waters of Hudson Bay without some plausible expectation of profit or advantage. For even the most dubious French observers, the very improbability and audacity of British exploration in the forbidding subarctic environment of the bay demonstrated the lengths to which the British would go in an attempt to reach the more alluring waters of the South Sea.

Two issues, in fact, troubled French officials evaluating 1740s British exploration in Hudson Bay. The first was a possibility with potential consequences for British naval capabilities; that is, that the British might find a new route to the Pacific that would then facilitate British trade with western America and East Asia, or British attacks on Spanish commerce and possessions. This possibility constituted a potential threat to the sale of French goods in Spanish America. The second issue was a certainty that elucidated British imperial intent. Whether or not they could find a practicable Northwest Passage, British explorers had unquestionably been looking for one. This seemed undeniable evidence that the British Empire was seeking new ways to reach the Pacific Ocean and the Spanish American markets along its shores.

Such evidence pointed to unsettling conclusions about the development of British policy since the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. If, despite venerable, generally accepted prohibitions, the British were trying to find a new route to the Pacific through Hudson Bay, French officials could reasonably conclude that the British Empire must be willing to ignore the clause of the Treaty of Utrecht that prohibited British navigation in the South Sea. British conduct elsewhere seemed to support this conclusion, for exploration in Hudson Bay was only one of a group of British actions in the 1740s and early 1750s—including a British expedition into the Pacific from 1740 to 1744 (during the Anglo-Spanish War of Jenkins’ Ear) that sacked a Peruvian city and seized the Manila galleon off the Philippines; the continued presence of British log cutters in Honduras; planned British expeditions around Cape Horn in the late 1740s; and the publication in 1749 of a French translation of a book by a prominent British admiral advocating British expansion into the South Sea—that seemed directed at the Pacific. Together, this collection of British activities involving Hudson Bay, Central America, and Cape Horn persuaded French officials of the existence of a British plan for maritime expansion into the Pacific Basin. To French ministers and diplomats, the logical targets of such Pacific expansion were Spanish imperial territories and Spanish American silver, and these British moves towards the Pacific seemed indeed to indicate the existence of a broad British effort to secure the Spanish American wealth that Spain’s European rivals had coveted for so long.

When French officials in the early and mid-1750s considered British activities in other parts of the Americas—activities more familiar to American historians involving the Ohio Valley, Acadia, and the Caribbean island of St. Lucia—they had this larger, menacing British design very much in mind. They tended to interpret British expansion in contested regions of North America as part of a larger British effort to remove the French obstacle to British domination of Spain’s American empire. Consequently, French officials reacted pugnaciously to what otherwise might have seemed trivial instances of British aggression in marginal territories such as the Ohio Valley. These bellicose reactions contributed to the sequence of vigorous French and British measures and countermeasures leading to the Seven Years’ War.

III.

As French concerns about access to the Pacific shaped French imperial policy in the years leading into the Seven Years’ War, they also affected French decisions in the latter part of the conflict. This is evident in an examination of the relation between French assessments of the potential value of the French colony of Louisiana and the surprising French decision to cede the trans-Mississippi portions of the colony to Spain in 1762.

France founded the colony of Louisiana in 1699 and began serious efforts to develop it in the decade after the War of the Spanish Succession. From the beginning, colonizing the Mississippi Valley was difficult and expensive. The valley’s Indian inhabitants resisted French rule, its climate killed French settlers, its Spanish and British neighbors feared and opposed the colony, its budget absorbed French funds, and its administration frustrated Parisian ministers. Acutely aware of these difficulties, officials in Paris had always to consider whether the current, potential, and relative value of the colony justified the efforts and expenditures required to maintain it. Among the factors they evaluated were the fertility of the region’s soils, the character of its climate, the disposition of its Indian occupants, the likelihood of finding valuable mineral deposits, and the possibility of opening a lucrative commerce with the reputedly wealthy inhabitants of the Spanish colonies to the south and west. French officials also considered a more spectacular possibility; namely, that the western parts of North America that remained unexplored by Frenchmen and to which Louisiana offered access might contain a Mediterranean-like Sea of the West extending far into the continent, or a great River of the West flowing into this Sea or into the Pacific itself (see fig. 3 for one French vision of how the Sea and River of the West might look.)

Fig. 3. "Carte Dressée par M. Guillaume Del’Isle," 1752. Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada. — Fig. 3. “Carte Dressée par M. Guillaume Del’Isle,” 1752. Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada.

The idea was that these conjectured features of western geography—lying, perhaps, just beyond a gentle plateau at the center of the continent—would offer a practicable water route to the South Sea beyond. Because, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, much of the Pacific Coast remained uncharted by Europeans, and awkward features of western geography such as the successive chains of mountains covering Idaho and western Montana remained unknown to them, the hopeful imaginations of French geographers and officials had room to roam.

Up until the middle of the eighteenth century, French officials, in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example, took the possibility that western America would offer easy access to the Pacific quite seriously, and as a result, they attached a correspondingly elevated value to the colony of Louisiana. For if North America were permeable rather than impenetrable—if one could canoe, that is, more or less from New Orleans to Monterey—then Louisiana and the territories west of it could provide in time another way to get at the Spanish silver that had enriched French merchants and sustained the French government during the War of the Spanish Succession. This made Louisiana a colony to be monitored, developed, and kept.

A change of attitude away from this French official openness to the possibility of a practicable water route through North America began to become evident in the years around 1748. Between roughly 1748 and 1763 French foreign ministry officials appear to have grown increasingly skeptical about the possibility of French discovery and exploitation of a North American river route to the Pacific. In part this was because the French explorers who had long sought a passage to the Pacific from Louisiana and Canada, like the British explorers in Hudson Bay in the 1740s, had continued to fail to find one. In the aftermath of such failures, French cartographers who had placed northwest passages and seas and rivers of the west on their maps found themselves the targets of pointed criticism from their domestic and international colleagues and from the government officials who helped to finance the production of French maps. With exploration proving disappointing, and the most optimistic and speculative French cartography proving unreliable, it seemed increasingly logical for French officials to be skeptical about the existence of a useable water route to the West. In addition, the growing tensions and then outright war between France and Britain in the years between 1748 and 1763 made it necessary for French officials to take a hard look at the relative value of their overseas possessions not just on the continent of North America, but also in the Caribbean, India, and Africa. Under this kind of pressure, French officials tended in evaluating colonial value to emphasize known qualities of colonies—such as how much sugar an island produced—and to discount the potential but uncertain value of hypothetical features of western America geography.

When, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, a series of disastrous French and Spanish losses to Britain was forcing French officials to identify territories that could be ceded as the price of a peace settlement, the importance of the growing French skepticism about the existence of a practicable water route through the West became evident. If trans-Mississippi Louisiana offered such a route to the Pacific, it constituted territory of enormous potential value, but French officials seem by 1762 to no longer have thought of the colony in those terms. They saw it as an expensive and difficult-to-defend colony of limited economic value, not as the road to the South Sea. This helped to make western Louisiana expendable. France ceded it to Spain in November 1762, thereby ending the French Empire in North America. While to the contemporary observer looking back at the event it might seem hard to imagine that French concerns about access to the Pacific could figure in a decision to give up territory in the Mississippi Valley, historical investigation reveals the extent to which a choice made in Paris regarding a colony in North America was entangled with eighteenth-century French notions about the South Sea.

IV.

The two cases discussed above give some indication of the significance of the Pacific Ocean and routes to it in roughly the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century. Historians such as John Dunmore have shown that French interest in the South Sea continued in the years after 1763, but that in many cases this interest arose for different reasons. Some discussion of those reasons will provide a more complete picture of the relation between France and the distant Pacific in the eighteenth century as a whole, and of the way in which this relation developed over time.

The kinds of economic and geopolitical concerns discussed for the pre-1763 period did not disappear after the Seven Years’ War. They remained important for the French Empire in later decades. Louis de Bougainville, for example, established a short-lived French colony of Acadians on one of the Falkland Islands in 1764, in part to give France a foothold on islands that could serve as a naval station for future voyages to the Pacific, in part to compensate France for the territories recently lost in the Seven Years’ War. After Bougainville’s later circumnavigation of the globe from 1766 to 1769, French reactions to his account of Tahiti included a consideration not only of the character of the island’s inhabitants, but also of the potential uses of the island as a port of call for French ships making the long voyage across the ocean. Louis XVI sent the French explorer La Pérousse on his ultimately fatal Pacific expedition of 1785 to 1788 in part to counter British pretensions to naval supremacy and British ambitions in the North American Pacific Northwest.

Fig. 4. From La Pérouse’s atlas, "Carte du Grand Océan ou Mer du Sud," 1788. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C. — Fig. 4. From La Pérouse’s atlas, “Carte du Grand Océan ou Mer du Sud,” 1788. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C.

Economic concerns remained vigorous as well. The instructions to La Pérousse, for example, directed him to look for opportunities for profitable commerce in the Pacific. Planners of his expedition had also given some consideration to using it as a means to initiate French fur-trading operations in the Pacific Northwest. (As a side note, the Northwest Passage, despite the disappointments of the previous four decades of exploration, was also an object of investigation for the La Pérousse expedition.)

On the whole though, the differences between the pre- and post-1763 periods are more striking than the similarities. One crucial difference was that the Spanish pretension to a monopoly of Pacific navigation broke down in the decades after 1763. The Spanish government, for example, even agreed to offer assistance to the La Pérousse expedition; and, less amicably, in the later 1790 Nootka Sound Convention, Spain conceded British access to parts of the Northwest Coast as yet unoccupied by the Spanish Empire. A second difference was that science, in the broadest sense of the term, became an increasingly salient aspect of French activity in the Pacific in the decades after 1763. This included French anthropological interest in the peoples and customs of islands such as Tahiti, famously exemplified by Diderot’s Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville and its reflection on tolerance, sexuality, and the moral worth of natural man; geographical interest in the possible existence of a vast southern continent, the search for which played an important role in the expeditions of Bougainville, Surville (1769-70), and Kerguelen (in the Indian Ocean, 1771-72, 1773-74); and competitive interest in keeping up with the scientific achievements of British figures such as Cook and Banks.

Before 1763, the Pacific had remained the presumptive preserve of Spain. Though it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the ships of other European empires out of it, the Pacific could still be considered a realm apart. Consideration of the potentially serious commercial and geopolitical consequences of France or Britain breaking into the Spanish Lake animated French assessments of issues in some way connected to the South Sea. After 1763, it was becoming clear that the traditional isolation and exclusivity of the Pacific could not and would not be maintained. France moved from acting alternately as aspiring South Sea intruder or fretting Pacific gatekeeper to becoming, along with economic competitors and sometime scientific collaborators such as Britain, Russia, Spain, and the United States, one nation among many contributing to the increasing intellectual, economic, and political integration of the Pacific Ocean into the larger global community.

Hayden’s Gaze

Science and art come to the Oregon Trail

When the photographer William Henry Jackson posed fourteen men around a table in a field, propped a deer head on a keg for display, and allowed a dog to continue lying in the shade of a wagon, he was articulating complicated relationships among people, animals, and landscape—but he didn’t think much about such stuff. He thought only of the pose. Once he had everything placed, he entered the photo himself and stood as its fifteenth human subject at the right-hand end of the group. He turned his side to the camera, raised his left hand to his hip, looked slightly downward toward the center of the composition, and instructed an assistant to make, as he would have said, the view. The assistant, the third cook or a teamster, reached around to the front of the tripodded camera, removed the lens cap for many long seconds, and then replaced it over the lens. “Red Buttes,” Jackson wrote that night at the top of his diary page. It was a well-known landmark in Wyoming Territory, near present-day Casper, where the old emigrant road left the North Platte River and struck off toward the Sweetwater. Then he added “Layover—Views of camp and of men in a.m.” Even today, it may be the great landscape photographer’s best-known photograph. And it’s full of people.

The camera was new that summer of 1870. Jackson had telegraphed to New York City for it from Omaha, where he kept his studio, and it had arrived barely in time for him to join these men as their official photographer. Other field summers had taught him the importance of traveling light. By now, he had reduced the equipment that made his “views” to only about three hundred pounds. He could pack everything for a day’s work onto a mule rather than a far more cumbersome horse-drawn wagon.

Because the negatives from the new camera were so large (five by eight inches) and because Jackson understood so well what focus, light, and various lenses could do, his pictures had always captured an enormous amount of visual information. But only in the weeks of August 1870 was Jackson becoming a great composer of images. In a single summer, he became a mature artist. Innocent as he was—un-ironic, Romantic, enthusiastic—pictures like the one at Red Buttes show he also was beginning to engage the complexities of power.

Two cooks stand at the left-hand edge of the group, flanking a small camp stove with three black pots on it. From the stove rises a pipe with a right-angled elbow at the top, sending smoke behind the head of the right-hand cook. Next, six men stand along the rearmost plane of occupation, ending with Jackson on the right. But no two stand alike. Sanford Gifford, the painter, cocks a lanky shoulder upward and gazes toward us. Next, the geology draftsman Henry Elliott looks down toward the center of things; next to him, James Stevenson, second in command, leans forward slightly, hand outstretched toward his seated boss (of whom more shortly). Then a gap, through which we can see the grass stretch back to the base of the hills; then three more men—Schmidt, the naturalist; Carrington, the zoologist; and Bartlett, listed as “general assistant.” These men are followed by another gap through which we can make out some horses grazing; then the dashing Jackson—wearing his long hair tied back, wearing a string tie perhaps, with the near side of his hat brim flipped up; then the hind end of a mule in the background; and finally, down the right-hand edge of the photo, a slice of wagon in whose shade in the lower right-hand corner luxuriates a dog, who has just stretched snout and forelegs into the sun.

"Members of the Hayden Survey near Red Buttes, Wyoming Territory, August 1870." Hayden is seated hatless in the center at the back of the table; Jackson stands at the right, left hand on his hip. W. H. Jackson photo, courtesy of the USGS archives. — “Members of the Hayden Survey near Red Buttes, Wyoming Territory, August 1870.” Hayden is seated hatless in the center at the back of the table; Jackson stands at the right, left hand on his hip. W. H. Jackson photo, courtesy of the USGS archives.

In front of the standing men, five more men sit at a wooden table. They appear at ease; there are dishes, a pot, and a pitcher on the table as though they had just finished breakfast, and one or two are holding cups. Left to right they are Turnbull, secretary of the expedition, leaning forward with a forearm on his thigh; Beaman, meteorologist, who often assisted Jackson in the field; and at the back end of the table, Ferdinand V. Hayden, MD, geologist and leader of the expedition. At the near corner, elbows on the table, looking off to the left sits entomologist and agriculturalist Cyrus Thomas in a black frock coat. Behind him and to his right sits Raphael, an interpreter the explorers had hired fifty miles earlier at Fort Fetterman. And further right, in front of Jackson, sits Ford, mineralogist, who may be stirring up batter in a dishpan. In front of Ford’s shins, the deer head is propped with its nose on the top of a smaller keg and the back of its skull against a taller one. The image is so sharp that it’s evident the antlers are still in velvet.

Hayden, the leader, sits hatless at the back of the table. The men’s postures are casual—most are wearing work clothes—yet the effect is formal. It’s not just a group portrait of the members of the 1870 United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. It’s a picture of power, of who’s in charge. Hayden’s face is at the exact center; diagonals drawn corner to corner would intersect close to his nose. Each of the several casual postures defers to his single presence. Sun blazing off his forehead, left shoulder just slightly back, he gazes out at us from well back in the group, dominating everything.

Hayden had an uncertain and difficult childhood that he seldom talked about as an adult. He was born in Connecticut and was more or less an orphan until the age of thirteen, when he landed safely on an aunt and uncle’s farm in Rochester, Ohio. A few years later he entered Oberlin College, then a hotbed of abolitionism, but appears to have chosen the natural sciences over politics. In 1851 he entered medical school in Cleveland. There he met John Strong Newberry, a recent graduate of the same medical school and a rising geologist and paleontologist. Through Newberry, Hayden came into contact with the geologist James Hall, of Albany, New York. When Hall needed an extra assistant for a western collecting expedition he was organizing in 1853, he gave Hayden the job.

Thus it was that twenty-four-year-old Hayden got his first look at western rocks from the deck of a steamboat belonging to the American Fur Company. The trip up the Missouri was slow for a brisk young man, but it allowed for day after day of gazing at the riverbanks and bluffs and a chance to talk over the meanings of the strata with Fielding Meek, whom Hall had deputized to lead the expedition. Meek was an invertebrate paleontologist of broad knowledge and curiosity, engaged then in using the fossils of ancient shellfish and other creatures to understand which rocks were older and which younger—part of the great, worldwide ordering task of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geology. They disembarked at Fort Pierre in what is now South Dakota and headed southwest into the badlands along the White River. That bleached, gullied landscape is still one of the richest fossil localities in the world. But Indian disapproval and logistical difficulties forced Hayden and Meek to leave after just three weeks.

In that brief time Hayden learned valuable lessons. He learned chiefly that he loved geology; that no science would get done unless the details of finance, travel, and supply were attended to first; and that stable finance required stroking the patron.

In Hayden’s time, geology was a visual science. A geologist needed a good eye to follow a rock layer sometimes hundreds of miles, as it dipped and rose in and out of sight. He also needed to be able to imagine the curves turned or faults suffered before the layer had eroded away or disappeared underground. He had to know fossils, too, and their order in time, as the fossils provided vital clues about when, relative to other layers, a layer in question had folded, faulted, or washed away.

Hayden soon finished his medical degree and with its extra cachet and his own ambition advanced quickly in the natural sciences. Within a year or two he was collecting rocks and fossils for men at the highest reaches of American science, including Spencer Baird of the new Smithsonian Institution and Joseph Leidy of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Hayden generally worked alone in the field but continued to turn to Meek for advice about his finds. Together they published sixteen scientific papers, the most important of which contained the first-ever stratigraphic column of the rocks—a chart that named the layers and showed their relative order and thicknesses—on the upper Missouri. With Meek’s help, Hayden was becoming an important scientist.

After some geological work as a civilian with the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, Hayden’s scientific career was interrupted by the Civil War. He would serve as an officer, an army surgeon who started out amputating wounded limbs. Soon he moved up to running hospitals.

After the war Hayden accepted a professorship in geology and mineralogy at the University of Pennsylvania. But it paid little, and he kept collecting to supplement his income and satisfy his curiosity. In the spring of 1867, his friend Spencer Baird in Washington learned that Congress had approved a survey of the southeastern counties of the brand-new state of Nebraska. Hayden got the job, along with a similar one the following year along the new Union Pacific line to its temporary terminus at Fort Bridger in southwestern Wyoming Territory. Though these surveys were under the auspices of the General Land Office, the agency overseeing the sale of federal land, they were not square-mile-by-square-mile land surveys. They were on-the-ground inquiries into just what was out there; they were systematic, yet designed to cover lots of country, primarily to find where minerals might lie and where crops might grow best.

The grid of federal land surveys had been stepping westward from Ohio since shortly after the Revolutionary War, but for generations, farmers, prospectors, and cattlemen had kept ahead of it, claiming squatters’ rights—”preemption rights” they were called as they moved from custom into law—to the choicest lands. To control the resulting legal and financial mess, Congress had finally decided to finance organized teams of explorers and surveyors as a first step toward a more controlled exploitation of the resources of the West.

Hayden’s survey was one of four financed by 1870, and it is probably best known for its exploration of the Yellowstone country. Competition for funds would grow steadily through the 1870s, until consolidation was in order. In the final maneuvering, Hayden would lose out. Partly because of his own weaknesses, partly because his competitors outlived him and controlled the accounts that were written, he has come down in history as a failure. In 1879, another of the four survey chiefs, Clarence King, was named the first director of the United States Geological Survey. He was soon succeeded by the most famous of all these explorers, John Wesley Powell.

Jackson, the photographer, had grown up in upstate New York and Vermont, but his family had moved often, following Jackson’s father to rural Georgia and elsewhere. As a child he had shown skill with a pencil, and his mother bought him drawing books. At fifteen he put away higher artistic aspirations and went to work in a photographer’s studio in Rutland, Vermont, coloring and retouching photographs—painstaking and repetitive work.

During the Civil War, he spent a year as a soldier and filled idle hours sketching landscapes and encampments, before returning to Vermont. Then in 1866 a sweetheart jilted him, and he lit out for the western territories.

Jackson and two friends picked up jobs in St. Louis with an ox train of freight wagons, which took them to Salt Lake City. There—broke, his clothes in rags, and his boots worn through—he hit bottom, wrote home for money, and lived for a month with a charitable Mormon family. He eventually bought passage on a wagon train bound for Los Angeles. By the spring of 1867, he was headed east again, this time working with a crew herding hundreds of wild horses back over the same route he had so recently traveled.

In Omaha he landed a job in a photography studio, at wages as good as he had ever made back East. Working steadily, with a room of his own to return to, Jackson finally seems to have found a little stability in his life.

While learning how to make a living in the West, Jackson gave himself a visual education. Sketches like the one he made of Chimney Rock left no little human figures in its foreground, no houses, no soldiers’ huts, villages, streams, or farmsteads—no sign at all of human habitation or movement. Everything seemed blasted by a new, blank enormity. The world was too big to be beautiful; whether it was picturesque or sublime would have to remain unanswered for a while, as the budding artist grappled with rocks, distance, and sky.

Jackson worked in the photography studio for most of a year before his brothers joined him in 1868. With financial help from their father, the brothers bought the studio where Jackson had been working. It proved a smart investment. Omaha was booming.

The town was the eastern terminus of the growing Union Pacific, and it thronged with workers. They wanted pictures of themselves to send home. And tourists, too, wanted pictures—not of themselves but of the western landscape they had come to see. Mountain views they wanted, scenery, splendor, and if in stereopticon slides, even better. They also wanted pictures of Indians. Jackson began making regular visits to the Otoes, Omahas, and Pawnees who lived on reservations near Omaha. To a growing and lucrative selection of negatives he added views of the large Pawnee villages, of mud houses, and of individuals posed alone in slanting sunlight.

In 1869, Jackson and an assistant spent the summer taking photographs along the route of the Union Pacific. It was the year the transcontinental railroad was completed.

The summer’s work proved immensely profitable for Jackson. As he traveled along the Union Pacific line, he found a ready market for his images of the newly crossed West. In Cheyenne he and his assistant cleared sixty dollars in three days—not bad in light of the twenty-five dollars per month Jackson had lived on during his best-paid days as a retoucher. Late in the summer, still traveling, Jackson got word from his brother Ed in Omaha that a New York photographic publisher wanted ten thousand prints of pictures from the Union Pacific line. The railroad had split the West like a ripe fruit, and the terrain seemed to be spilling its lucre into Jackson’s pocket.

Jackson first saw Hayden the same summer, while delivering a batch of prints at Madame Cleveland’s, a Cheyenne brothel. Jackson watched Hayden and some soldier friends walk in. The scientist, Jackson wrote in his diary, “acted like a cat in a strange garret,” but if the two men spoke, Jackson did not record the conversation. (This encounter is interesting in light of Hayden’s long decline through the 1880s to his death in 1887 when he was just fifty-eight. He died of locomotor ataxia, a paralysis resulting from syphilis.)

Their first real meeting came a year later, when Hayden walked into Jackson’s studio in Omaha. By then, the young photographer already had a national reputation for his images of the West. But what most drew Hayden to Jackson’s work was not its rendering of the western landscape and its people, but Jackson’s unique respect for rocks.

"A rock near Green River Station, Wyoming, 1869." Note the man at the bottom. Hayden the geologist was drawn to Jackson's unique respect for rocks. W. H. Jackson photo, courtesy of the USGS archives. — “A rock near Green River Station, Wyoming, 1869.” Note the man at the bottom. Hayden the geologist was drawn to Jackson’s unique respect for rocks. W. H. Jackson photo, courtesy of the USGS archives.

There they were, in picture after picture, massively layered, detailed, and identifiable, sometimes accompanied by—but never subordinate to—people, trees, or railroad tracks. Hayden offered to cover Jackson’s expenses for the summer if he agreed to serve as official photographer for the 1870 survey. Jackson would be expected to make prints for the survey for free, but he would be allowed to keep the negatives. His new wife, Mollie Greer Jackson, could run the business expertly while he was gone—she was much better at it than his brothers. Jackson accepted. On the first of August, he caught up with the expedition at Camp Carlin, an Army supply depot outside Cheyenne.

Hayden writes in his report for the summer of 1870 that it was the rocks that drew him north from Cheyenne. But he almost certainly wanted to make historical connections as well. He wanted to hunt up the locations of the past—places with nostalgic names that congressmen would recognize. On leaving the railroad, the survey traveled north past the foothills of the Laramie Range, then linked up with the old emigrant road—the Oregon-California Trail—and turned west up the North Platte valley. They traveled with four heavy wagons and two light ambulances. The teamsters and cooks kept these near the roads, while the artists and scientists ranged and roamed alone or in small parties on horseback.

Jackson kept his bulkier gear in one of the ambulances and had a lighter outfit that he could pack for a day’s work on the back of Hypo, his fat, cropped-eared mule, named for hyposulfite of soda, a darkroom chemical.

"Sanford Robinson Gifford on horseback." He often painted looking directly into the light, like Turner, but without the turmoil. W. H. Jackson photo, courtesy of the USGS archives. — “Sanford Robinson Gifford on horseback.” He often painted looking directly into the light, like Turner, but without the turmoil. W. H. Jackson photo, courtesy of the USGS archives.

The country along the emigrant road was recovering from the devastation caused by decades of traveling emigrants and, especially, their voracious livestock. The latter had devastated the countryside, devouring the plants that had sustained much of the regions’ game. But by the time of his visit, Jackson could report plenty of antelope in his diary. The morning after they had left Red Buttes, Jackson, Gifford the painter, and Beaman the meteorologist started out from their camp at a place called Willow Springs. “Distant sight of lone Buffalo,” Jackson recorded that night. “Cautious approach—commencement of hostilities—the Chase—Excitement!—Much firing but not effective.” They quit, for a time. Later they spotted a herd of nine—in a later autobiography Jackson numbers it at “thirty or forty”—but these buffalo, too, got wind of them and galloped off through the thick sagebrush. Still later, Jackson, Gifford, and probably Beaman made a long detour downwind of three more buffalo and finally, with help from others in the party, managed to kill all three. Though both Hayden and Jackson had passed this way before, neither noted any improvement in the look of the country. Still, thirteen buffalo in the twenty miles between Willow Springs and Horse Creek was a great many more than people were seeing five and ten years earlier. With the nation’s east-west artery now moved elsewhere and the Indians pushed north of the North Platte, the country was largely empty of humans other than themselves. It was almost as rich in game as it had been in the early 1840s, before serious emigration began.

Fifty miles southwest of Red Buttes, the party camped two nights at Independence Rock. Hayden was stirred by the geology and understood its main parameters perfectly well—that Tertiary sediments there lap up against granite outcrops that are far older—”jut close up against their base” was how he put it. He understood correctly that Independence Rock and the granite ridges around it are made from the same material. He also saw that its dome shows erosion by exfoliation, or a peeling off of the outside layers as it continues to expand from within. In his excitement, he climbed the granite ridges just south of Independence Rock, and from there he could look and look to his heart’s content.

“From the summit as far as the eye could reach in every direction granite ranges could be seen, of varying lengths, from one hundred to fifteen hundred feet above the surrounding plains . . . In some of the broad intervals are the most beautiful terraces or benches, sloping gently down from the base of the mountains to the valley. Not a sign of water could be seen in any of these mountains at the present time. A few cottonwoods and groups of quaking asps, in some of the ravines on the sides, gave evidence that water issues from them at certain seasons of the year. A few stunted pines struggled for existence among the crevices, and some rare shrubs and ferns were all the vegetable life observed.”

He continued, “It seems as though the Sweetwater flowed through this valley for fifty miles or more with scarcely a tributary to add to its volume.” That observation is not true, though it appears that way from the top of those rocks.

The first day at the rock, Jackson made some pictures, but it was cold and windy. The following day was clear and still. Jackson, Elliott the draftsman, and perhaps Gifford led Hypo up the rock to try again. He faced his camera downriver, east toward the North Platte and a pair of peaks beyond it. In the photo that resulted, Elliott lounges with his sketchbook in the right foreground, but the rocks are quickly sloping away, and in the right middle ground, just beyond the river, the viewer’s eye quickly finds five tents and four wagons. Two horses graze to the left of the tents, near the river, and the broad channel of the river itself flows briefly up the middle of the picture before bending off to the left. The big rocks that Hayden climbed for a better view of everything slope into the picture from the right.

"Looking east down the Sweetwater from the top of Independence Rock." One knows without thinking that the rock is rough to the touch and warm from the sun. W. H. Jackson photo, courtesy of the USGS archives. — “Looking east down the Sweetwater from the top of Independence Rock.” One knows without thinking that the rock is rough to the touch and warm from the sun. W. H. Jackson photo, courtesy of the USGS archives.

Despite foreground, middle ground, background, and sky, this is no conventional composition. Granite takes up a full third of the picture. The rock appears in such close detail one knows without thinking that the rock is rough to the touch and warm from the sun, with a breeze cutting around its edges. Still the viewer’s eye rests finally not on the granite but, again, on the receding river at the middle of the picture—out there in space and emptiness, flowing away, and leaving behind a stillness, from which it is very difficult to look away.

That same day they left the rock, packed up, and headed toward Devil’s Gate, the dramatic, 360-foot-deep granite gunsight through which the Sweetwater makes an odd and sudden detour. They did not camp, but Jackson, Gifford, and Elliott climbed to the top with the camera and looked out again over a receding sweep of country—upstream now, to the west. The result is another stunning image. More sky this time. Again in the foreground, diagonals of granite, though now the immediate rocks make a shallow vee. In the middle distance on a flat by the river, is just a single wagon, one of the ambulances, and a tiny man is standing halfway between wagon and riverbank. Gifford and Elliott crouch on the right-hand side of the vee, looking away and outward. Again, the eye follows up the middle of the image, over the wagon, to the river as it meanders, loops, and finally disappears toward the hazy mountains and the sky.

"Looking up the Sweetwater from the top of Devil's Gate." There are people here in the middle of nowhere, says the picture. W. H. Jackson photo, courtesy of the USGS archives. — “Looking up the Sweetwater from the top of Devil’s Gate.” There are people here in the middle of nowhere, says the picture. W. H. Jackson photo, courtesy of the USGS archives.

In a single image, Jackson hands us depth, space, hints of future human occupation, and an appearance of documentary verisimilitude that, in fact, is packed with emotion. Here the geological forms sweep the eye down and then, with a big whoosh, out—to infinity. With these qualities he also hands us, right at the center, the same qualities that were in the center of the photo at Red Buttes: Hayden’s power and Hayden’s ambiguity.

There are not yet corrals by the river, where later the vast Sun Ranch will headquarter its empire. There is no sign of the trading cabins where the French-Shoshone families prospered for a few years in the 1850s, nor any abandoned handcarts left by the starving, freezing Mormons who stopped here for a week in 1856. There is very little brush by the river compared to now, and the space between the two nearest bends looks sandy, still perhaps badly damaged by decades of emigrant cattle. It is hard to say, however. Mostly it looks appealingly empty. But not quite. There are people here in the middle of nowhere, says the picture. Who are they? What will they do? What stories will they tell?

Types of Mankind: Visualizing Kinship in Afro-Native America

This is a tale about my return to the vault. It’s about those moments when something in the archive catches you completely off-guard—and nearly knocks you off your feet. It’s a story about how a scholar of literature was taught to sharpen her vision and see beyond the printed page.

I originally intended to write about the dynamic and neglected history of African American engagements with natural science in early black print culture (I still intend to do this, but in a different and perhaps unconventional way). More specifically, I was interested in discussing my experiences at the American Antiquarian Society with a set of little-known ethnological tracts written by African Americans in the 1830s and 1840s, including James W.C. Pennington’s 1841 Text Book of the Origin and History of the Colored People, Hosea Easton’s 1837 Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States, and what is generally regarded as the first ethnology written by an African American, Robert Benjamin Lewis’s 1836 Light and Truth, From Ancient and Sacred History. Pennington, Easton, and Lewis all wrote ethnologies that challenged the ascendency of the so-called American school of ethnology in the 1830s. Its practitioners—most famously Samuel George Morton, Louis Agassiz, George Gliddon, and Josiah Nott—used the tools of comparative anatomy to attempt to prove the innate mental and physical superiority of the Caucasian race. These comparative studies of human anatomy and physiognomy sought to demonstrate the biological and evolutionary degeneracy of African and African-descended peoples. They were also invested in upholding the thesis of polygenesis: that non-white races were not only biologically inferior to the Caucasian race, they also originated in separate creation events by God (they were both inferior and separate “types” of people). In response, black writers and intellectuals waged a war on the American school of ethnology through the creation of a counter-archive of ethnological writing, which told a different story about the origin and descent of the races. Black ethnologies often affirmed the monogenetic hypothesis—the idea that all races were descended from a single stock, rather than through individual creation acts by God, but they also moved beyond monogenesis to make even bolder claims about the descent of man: all races were indeed “of one blood,” they argued, but the white race was actually descended from the black race since the Ethiopians were the first men created by God. These ethnologies boldly proclaimed that the Garden of Eden was in Ethiopia, and hence, Adam and Eve were black. In addition to placing themselves at the center of Biblical history, black ethnologies insisted on the deep influences of Ethiopia on the development of so-called Western civilization in ancient Egypt and across the Mediterranean world: they often, for example, included lengthy lists of Greek and Roman historians, poets, statesmen and philosophers who were of African descent, including Plato, Ptolemy, Alexander the Great, Cicero, Nero, Julius Caesar, and Augustine. In short, these ethnologies offered a rich and expansive view of a glorious black past: African American ethnology challenged the American school of ethnology’s view of the black race as an evolutionarily degenerate group, but it also refused attempts to disinherit African Americans from their illustrious roots and place in history, secular and sacred.

At least those were my plans. And then I stumbled upon an image, an image that completely transformed the direction of my research by throwing into question many of the major assumptions I carried into my study of African American ethnology. I had returned to the AAS for a two-day trip in which I planned to check a few facts and confirm a couple of citations for a project I had already spent a month researching at the library. That morning, I noticed a citation in the catalog on Robert Benjamin Lewis that I hadn’t seen before. I thought I should give it a glance, but didn’t expect it to be relevant to my project. I put in the request so quickly that I didn’t realize I had requested a graphic item. I expected to receive a text. Instead, I opened the folder to a beautiful, dazzling lithograph of Robert Benjamin Lewis himself (fig. 1). I stepped back a few steps and covered my mouth. It was an incredible discovery: in all of my work on Lewis and his ethnology Light and Truth I had never come across an image of him. By pouring over pages and pages of text—of newspapers, books, pamphlets, and other print sources—I expected to learn more about Lewis’s life and his writings, but I never expected to encounter his actual image.

Born in 1802, Robert Benjamin Lewis was a freeman of African and Native American descent. He was born in Maine, where he also lived, worked, and raised a family. Some sources suggest that he passed away in Bath, Maine, in the late 1850s, while others claim he took sick and died in Haiti while scouting out a place to emigrate with his family. In her history of black thought on the white race in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, The White Image in the Black Mind (2000), Mia Bay refers to Lewis as a “jack-of-all-trades” who “made his living painting, papering, and whitewashing houses, cleaning carpets, crafting baskets, caning chairs, and fixing parasols and umbrellas” (44). Little else is known about his life except for the publication of his ethnological tract in the mid-1830s. Before it was published as a bound volume, Lewis circulated and sold pamphlets of his Light and Truth during a lecturing tour of New England. It was first published as a book (fig. 2) in 1836 by the Portland, Maine, printer and poet Daniel Clement Colesworthy. That same year, Lewis set out on another book tour of New England to sell and promote his newly published book. The many re-printings of Light and Truth in the 1840s and 1850s suggest that Lewis’s ethnology circulated widely in the region: in 1843, a newly revised and expanded edition was published as a four-volume serial in Augusta, Maine, and in 1844, a self-named “committee of colored gentlemen” in Boston published the expanded serial edition as one large volume. The 1844 edition (fig. 3) was printed by the shoemaker turned radical printer, lecturer, and activist, Benjamin F. Roberts, who also sat on the aforementioned committee. In addition to publishing Lewis’s Light and Truth, Roberts had other connections to the foundations of black ethnology: his nephew was none other than Hosea Easton, who published his own ethnology in Boston in 1837 (fig. 4). The 1844 edition of Light and Truth was reprinted by Roberts in 1849 and again in 1851. Lewis’s regular book tours and lectures must have expanded his readership and audience even further. Bay suggests that Lewis’s annual book tours may have made Light and Truth the most widely circulated black ethnology in the nineteenth century.