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.

 

Fig. 1. Jacques Bellin, "Carte Réduite de l’Océan Septentrional," 1766. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C.
Fig. 1. Jacques Bellin, “Carte Réduite de l’Océan Septentrional,” 1766. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C.

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.

Further Reading:

Parts two and three of this essay present condensed versions of arguments appearing in my “French Reactions to the British Search for a Northwest Passage from Hudson Bay and the Origins of the Seven Years’ War” Terrae Incognitae 33 (2001): 13-32; and “French Geographic Conceptions of the Unexplored American West and the Louisiana Cession of 1762,” in Colonial Louisiana: A Tricentennial Symposium (Baton Rouge, forthcoming). I thank the editors of both publications for allowing me to use material from my previously written articles. For its account of France and the Pacific after 1763, this essay draws from John Dunmore’s excellent Visions and Realities: France in the Pacific, 1695-1995 (Waikanae, New Zealand, 1997). The key books on France and the Pacific before 1763 are E. W. Dahlgren, Le Commerce de la mer du Sud (jusqu’à la paix d’Utrecht), vol. 1 of Les Relations commerciales et maritimes entre la France et les côtes de l’Océan pacifique (commencement du XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1909); and Carlos Daniel Malamud Rikles, Cadiz y Saint Malo en el comercio colonial peruano (1698-1725) (Cadiz, 1986). For a sampling of the many strong works on Spanish silver, see Stanley J. and Barbara Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2000); Ward Barret, “World Bullion Flows, 1450-1800,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750, edited by James D. Tracy (Cambridge, 1990); Richard Garner, “Long-Term Silver Mining Trends in Spanish America: A Comparative Analysis of Peru and Mexico,” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 898-935; and Geoffrey J. Walker, Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700-1789 (Bloomington, 1979). Accounts of French piracy in the Pacific include Peter Gerhard, Pirates of the Pacific, 1575-1742 (Lincoln, 1990), and Peter Bradley, The Lure of Peru (London, 1989). For an introduction to the Manila galleon, look to William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York, 1959). Important accounts of Britain and the Utrecht settlement can be found in Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570-1750 (New Haven, 1997); and L.G. Wickham Legg, “Torcy’s Account of Matthew Prior’s Negotiations at Fontainebleau in July 1711,” English Historical Review 29 (1914): 525-32.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 5.2 (January, 2005).

Paul Mapp is an assistant professor of history at the College of William and Mary.



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.

 

"Gifford painting a landscape of castellated rocks near Chugwater Creek." Guessing from the hat, the man standing is Ford, the mineralogist. (These are the same rocks in the Gifford oil sketch owned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth.) W. H. Jackson photo, courtesy of the USGS archives.
“Gifford painting a landscape of castellated rocks near Chugwater Creek.” Guessing from the hat, the man standing is Ford, the mineralogist. (These are the same rocks in the Gifford oil sketch owned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth.) W. H. Jackson photo, courtesy of the USGS archives.

“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?

Further Reading (and Viewing):

See all of Jackson’s photographs from his years with the Hayden Survey at the U.S. Geological Survey’s online photo archive. Go to “continue,” then use the “free form” search and enter “jwh0” in the first window—all Jackson’s photos are archived with numbers starting with that code—and use the other windows for dates, places, or any other qualifying search terms. This is the place, too, to enter names of other great survey photographers of western landscapes; try Hillers, O’Sullivan, or Russell. These photos are all part of the public domain and available free for downloading and publication.

Jackson’s diaries from his first trip west, in 1866, are included in The Diaries of William Henry Jackson, Frontier Photographer, edited by Leroy and Ann Hafen (Glendale, Calif., 1959). The two autobiographies Jackson wrote late in his life, The Pioneer Photographer (New York, 1929) and Time Exposure (New York, 1940), are less reliable. Jackson, who needed a mule-load of stuff to take a picture in 1870, lived to be ninety and to shoot color film on a 35-millimeter Leica camera. His diaries from the summer of 1870, quoted here, are still unpublished and are in the collection of the Colorado Historical Society in Denver. My discussion of Jackson’s life and aesthetics relies heavily on Peter B. Hales’ excellent William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape (Philadelphia, 1988).

Hayden was a good descriptive writer, and his reports are still useful for the insights they allow into American boosterism, science, and aesthetics after the Civil War. They were published by the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C., annually in the 1870s and may be found in good university and public libraries. His account of the 1870 expedition is in the Preliminary report of the United States Geological Survey of Wyoming and portions of contiguous territories, 1871.

The best overview of the post-war government surveys in the West may still be William Bartlett’s Great Surveys of the American West (Norman, Okla., 1962). See also William Goetzmann’s Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the West (New York, 1966). But anyone seriously interested in Hayden should balance the fading failure of a man portrayed in Donald Worster’s River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York, 2002) with James Cassidy’s more sympathetic portrayal in Ferdinand V. Hayden: Entrepreneur of Science (Lincoln, Neb., 2000).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 6.2 (January, 2006).

Tom Rea is a freelance writer in Casper, Wyoming. This piece and an article on John C. Frémont in the July 2004 Common-place are excerpted from his new book on the country around Independence Rock and Devil’s Gate in Wyoming. The Middle of Nowhere: Who Owns the Story of the West? is due in fall 2006 from the University of Oklahoma Press.



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.

 

1. “Robert Benjamin Lewis,” B.F. Nutting, lithograph by Pendleton’s, 18.3 x 15 cm. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
2. Title page from Light and Truth, from Ancient and Sacred History by Robert Benjamin Lewis (Portland, Maine, 1836). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
3. Title page from Light and Truth, Collected from The Bible and Ancient and Modern History, … by Robert Benjamin Lewis (Boston, 1844). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

 

Both the 1840s and 1850s printings of Light and Truth and the lithograph of Lewis place him in Boston during that period, either as a visitor or as a more regular participant in Boston’s vibrant community of black activists. Although I have not been able to determine its exact date of production, the lithograph of Lewis must have been produced sometime in the late 1820s or early 1830s since it was printed by Pendleton’s Lithography, an extremely important yet short-lived firm in Boston owned by brothers William S. and John B. Pendleton. The Pendleton brothers were at the forefront of lithography’s ascendency in America: their Boston studio and Anthony Imbert’s studio in New York were the first professional lithography firms established in the United States. Pendleton’s opened its doors in 1825 and transferred ownership to the firm’s bookkeeper, Thomas Moore, in 1836, the same year that Lewis published Light and Truth. Lewis’s portrait was drawn by Benjamin Franklin (B.F.) Nutting, a popular Boston artist and engraver who worked as an apprentice at Pendleton’s from 1828 until about 1834. The handsome and large lithograph was clearly produced in anticipation of and in conjunction with Lewis’s forthcoming book publication. Given Lewis’s frequent travels throughout the region and the wide regional circulation of Light and Truth, it seems likely that the portrait was produced to sell at Lewis’s lectures, as many activists of the period sold their self-portraits at such events. Although it did not appear in the 1836 edition, or in any subsequent editions, the lithograph may also have been intended for use as a frontispiece to Light and Truth. Many other portraits from the studio were used for this purpose. For example, B.F. Nutting also drew a portrait of the Methodist missionary, Reverend Samuel Osgood Wright, for Pendleton’s in the early 1830s, sometime before Wright departed for Liberia in 1833 (fig. 5). The lithograph subsequently appeared as a frontispiece engraving in Memoir of Rev. S. Osgood Wright, late missionary to Liberia, published in Boston after Wright passed away from typhoid fever in 1834, just a year into his missionary work abroad (fig. 6). In his foundational history of lithography in America, America on Stone (1931), Harry T. Peters notes that Pendleton’s specialized in portraits for magazines and books. The question remains: after going to the trouble of having his portrait engraved on limestone, printed, and reproduced, why didn’t he include the lithograph in his ethnology? Peters notes that artists working for Pendleton’s received upwards of sixty dollars for each portrait and the studio charged additional printing fees for copies (a bill from Pendleton’s, for example, lists a $50 charge for the cost of 500 copies plus paper). While Lewis benefitted from the democratization of image production in the Northeast enabled by the rise of commercial lithography during the 1830s, allowing him to have a distinguished portrait taken when it wouldn’t have been possible in previous decades, the high printing costs may have made further reproduction of the portrait unfeasible for Lewis, who cobbled together his livelihood from lecture tours, odd jobs, and various forms of craft work.

In looking at Lewis’s image for the first time, I was immediately struck by its preciousness. Scholars of early African American culture and history often spend years—and sometimes entire careers—researching figures for whom no known image exists. As a scholar of print culture, I must also admit my own bias toward print sources, a bias that, I realized in this archival moment, sometimes blinds me to other key contexts and stories. Seeing Lewis’s image I was immediately reminded of the importance of the visual—both for present-day scholars of African American life and culture and for those nineteenth-century freedom fighters who knew the visual field was a key site of struggle for representing the race. The lithograph of Lewis reminded me that his Light and Truth was not just about challenging claims of degeneracy and inferiority in antebellum race science, it was also about the politics of visibility and representation for people of color in the United States.

 

4. Title page from A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States;…, by Rev. H. Easton (Boston, 1837). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
5. “S. Osgood Wright,” B.F. Nutting, lithograph by Pendleton’s. Frontispiece from Memoir of Rev. S. Osgood Wright, Late Missionary to Liberia (Boston, 1834). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
6. “Rev. S. Osgood Wright, Missionary to Liberia,” B.F. Nutting, lithograph by Pendleton’s (Boston). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

 

African American portraiture made important interventions into discourses of race and physiology throughout the period. Crude illustrations were regularly used to delineate racial “types” by ethnologists and to establish racial inferiority through the field of the visual (see, for example, Nott and Gliddon’s famous chart of Negro physiognomies in Types of Mankind) (fig. 7). In response to the rude visual typologies of racist science, figures like Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Lewis himself turned to the detailed art of portraiture in order to establish counter-archives of black respectability, beauty, and intelligence. Indeed, my detective hunt in the AAS reading room led me to the simple yet important realization that the lithograph was likely produced so that readers would have to encounter Lewis’s proud portrait before they read his treatise or heard him speak on the noble origins of the African race. In viewing Lewis’s portrait, they were asked to confront an image of undoubtable manhood and respectability: his straight posture, regal and almost exotic garb, slightly pursed lips and that downward glance, a glance that seems to resist even as it receives the gaze of viewers. I realized at this moment that the text of Light and Truth was not Lewis’s only intervention into the dominant discourses of antebellum ethnology: with his noble visage displayed and mixed parentage—”Indian, Ethiopian, & European”—prominently announced in the caption, the portrait itself served as a powerful counter-ethnology. Although the portrait never appeared in an edition of Light and Truth, Lewis’s bodily presence on the lecture stage surely served a similar purpose: as a powerfully embodied intervention into the discourses of ethnology.

Instead of tracking down citations and checking facts, as planned, I spent most of that day staring at Lewis’s portrait. The lithograph gave me insight into key aspects of his identity that had gone undetected in my research, including the fact that he was a freemason. In the image, Nutting portrays Lewis with a seven-pointed star on his head and a striking pendant around his neck bearing the famous Eye of Providence. These two Masonic symbols would have immediately signified Lewis’s affiliation with freemasonry to nineteenth-century viewers. Lewis’s racial background seems deliberately ambiguous in the image, an ambiguity that positions him as an apt representative for all oppressed people around the globe. The caption notes he “will plead the rights of all.” Through the image and caption, Lewis is presented as a worldly, even cosmopolitan figure, combining and representing the noblest qualities of the global races of man, both East and West (“Indian, Ethiopian, & European”). Indeed, throughout Light and Truth, Lewis advocates a kind of global, cosmopolitan religion as he artfully draws together—and “amalgamates”—the origin stories and teachings of Christianity, Judaism (suggesting American Indians are the lost tribes of Israel), Islam, and Native American belief systems. The ethnology even ends with a Native American creation story of the Great Spirit, which serves as yet another challenge to the Biblical creation stories used and manipulated by the proponents of polygenesis. Like the portrait, Lewis’s closing account of the Great Spirit’s creation of “his white and his red children” is yet another counter-ethnology, another challenge to the racist origin stories perpetuated by the American school of ethnology.

This one portrait turned my myopic gaze from a genre of scientific writing in early black print culture to the whole history of Afro-Native peoples and relations in the nineteenth century, a history that is too often wholly neglected or subsumed under the rubric of African American history and literature (I had been myself guilty of doing as much in my work on Lewis). My encounter with this one singular image not only enriched my research on Lewis by foregrounding his identity as a black-Native American, but it also allowed me to “see” ethnology in a whole new light. I realized that my understanding of Lewis’s text as a black ethnology did not adequately capture the complexities and real political aims of the text. It might, I think now, be more fruitful to think of it as an Afro-Native ethnology. Indeed, in the 1844 edition of Light and Truth, the preface by the committee of colored gentlemen packages the tract as an Afro-Native ethnology by an Afro-Native man: “The author of this compilation has been some years in gathering this information. He is a descendent of the two races he so ably vindicates.” What became clear to me is that Lewis was interested in ethnology because it provided him with a powerful language with which to articulate the shared descent of African and Native peoples. The text insists on other commonalities as well, namely a shared history of subjection at the hands of the United States government. As a discourse that had been used to justify the exploitation of black labor and dispossess Indians from their land, ethnology was deeply implicated in the subjection of both African American and American Indian communities. This last realization enabled by Lewis’s portrait was perhaps the most surprising and startling to me. While I had always assumed this counter-archive of ethnology had been written to challenge the American school of ethnology’s pro-slavery arguments, I realized that black and Afro-Native ethnologists like Lewis were also likely producing these texts as responses to the U.S. government’s production of ethnological knowledge to justify Native American removal and extermination. In Light and Truth, ethnology is transformed from a science of subjugation to a science of Afro-Native alliance. In opposition to the various scientific “proofs” of black and Indian inferiority that populated dominant ethnological discourses, Lewis uses ethnology to imagine new forms of solidarity and to forge models of mixed-race identity in America.

 

 

Fig 7. “Illustrations of Comparative Types of Races,” from pages 458 and 459 of Types of Mankind or, Ethnological researches based upon the ancient monuments, paintings, sculptures, and crania of races… by Josiah Clark Nott and Geo. R. Gliddon (Philadelphia, 1854). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

 

My encounter with Lewis’s image was soon intensified by a second, happy shock, another archival moment deeply tied to the visual. While hunting down more clues about Lewis’s history and background, I came across an 1873 article in a Maine newspaper that contained quite a surprise: the article claims that Robert Benjamin Lewis was the father of Mary Edmonia Lewis, the Oberlin-educated Afro-Native American sculptor (fig. 8). In 1865 she traveled to Rome where she lived and worked among an international community of artists. She would go on to receive international acclaim for her sculpture. This was the second time in a day that I covered my mouth in surprise. There were reasons to believe the newspaper article, the first being that I wanted to. But there were other reasons, rooted in evidence rather than desire: Edmonia was a freeperson of African and Ojibwa heritage. In the early 1840s, Edmonia’s mother met and married a man named Lewis (R.B. Lewis from Maine?) outside of Albany, New York, where Edmonia was also born in 1844. And finally, like Robert Benjamin Lewis, little is else is known about Edmonia’s family history and early life. I spent the rest of the day tracking down citations that would confirm or deny the biological ties between Edmonia and Robert. In my unexpected search for the possible genetic relation between these two Lewises, I realized that I was now conducting genealogical research. I was struck by the irony of attempting to learn more about Robert Benjamin Lewis’s family history in the middle of a research project about Lewis’s own writings on genealogy. Apart from this single newspaper reference, I was unable to uncover any evidence that would further substantiate a biological connection between Edmonia and Robert. But I started to wonder how else we might understand their relationship to one another. I started speculating on alternative forms of kinship. Both Edmonia and Robert, for example, were interested in creating alternative images of Afro-Native America. Both were interested in the crafting of Native-black identities in the nineteenth century, she through sculpture and exhibition, he through ethnology and lecturing (another kind of public exhibition).

 

8. "Edmonia Lewis," photograph by Henry Rocher, 3 5/8 x 2 1/16 inches, albumen silver print (c. 1870). Courtesy of the Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., http://www.npg.si.edu.
8. “Edmonia Lewis,” photograph by Henry Rocher, 3 5/8 x 2 1/16 inches, albumen silver print (c. 1870). Courtesy of the Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., http://www.npg.si.edu.

 

Indeed, I had found myself engaged in a project similar to Lewis’s in Light and Truth: we were both speculating on forms of kinship in the absence of reliable records, in the face of the enormous losses and absences of the Middle Passage, and in the many gaps of the archive. These surprising archival encounters forced me to think about antebellum ethnology in entirely new ways: they forced me to see what I was blind to and keyed me into something I had missed all along: the power that speculating on kinship held—and continues to hold—for African American, American Indian, and Afro-Native peoples. Moreover, these counter-discourses of kinship did not always privilege biological kinship. Of course, Lewis was interested in the histories of reproduction between African American and American Indian communities, but he was also interested in a history of commingling and community that did not depend on blood. Indeed, Lewis’s account of shared descent does not hinge on genetics, but on a shared plight—a shared history of racial violence, removal, containment, and subjugation by the United States. Just as I was energized by the speculative connections between Edmonia and Robert, Light and Truthrevels in the bonds of speculative kinship, those forms of kinship and community that are not restricted by the norms of biological kinship and the imperatives of reproduction.

Ethnology provided Lewis with a powerful language to articulate a shared heritage—both reproductive and cultural—between African American and Native American peoples. In a fascinating way, African American and Afro-Native ethnologies from the nineteenth century anticipate the popular interest that surrounds genetic ancestry testing in our contemporary moment. Indeed, one needs only to look to the interest in direct-to-consumer ancestry testing among communities of color and to the popularity of television series about family ancestry like Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s African American Lives and Faces of America on PBS to recognize the appeal of the tools and technologies of genomics. In African American Lives, Gates and his team use the tools of history (genealogy) and science (DNA ancestry tests) to help prominent individuals like Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Don Cheadle, and Maya Angelou find out more about their ancestral heritage. Viewers of the series will likely recall that a number of people featured on the show believed they had Indian ancestry, but were subsequently informed that the genetic results did not confirm their beliefs. However, many of those featured on the show stated that they planned to continue valuing the stories and histories they had grown up with even if they weren’t confirmed by science. They would continue to favor oral and family history over the “truth” of genetics. In our immediate moment, in the midst of the genomics revolution and the ongoing production of scientific knowledge about race, we might consider how communities have begun to use DNA analysis and ancestry tools to tell their own stories and to forge counter-histories that challenge official discourses of race and genetics, much like R.B. Lewis used ethnology to imagine other ways of being and belonging in the world, imagining an Afro-Native America that existed autonomously from the United States of America. Scholars have rightly worried about the re-biologization of race through the new sciences of genomics, but these nineteenth-century counter-ethnologies remind us of the ways in which discourses of race and science have long been—and continue to be—challenged, subverted, and rewritten by the subjects of those discourses.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Paul Erickson, Catherine Kelly, Susan Schoelwer, Trudy Powers, John McCoy, and the library staff at the AAS for all of their assistance, and to Jennifer Brody and Kelli Morgan for their enthusiasm about the possible connection between Robert Benjamin and Mary Edmonia Lewis.

Further Reading

Mia Bay’s The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (New York, 2000) remains the most complete study of African American ethnologies in the nineteenth century. In his A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), Bruce Dain also writes on black ethnology and provides a comprehensive treatment of African American responses to scientific theories of race in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Ann Fabian’s recent study of Samuel George Morton and the rise of craniology, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago, 2010), is a refreshing update to Stephen Jay Gould’s still classic and important study, The Mismeasure of Man (1981; New York, 1996). On the U.S. government’s use of linguistic ethnology—philology—to inform Indian policy and removal efforts, see Sean P. Harvey, “‘Must Not Their Languages Be Savage and Barbarous Like Them?’: Philology, Indian Removal, and Race Science,” Journal of the Early Republic 30.4 (Winter 2010): 505-32. Harry T. Peters’s 1931 America on Stone (New York, 1976) and Graham Hudson’s The Design and Printing of Ephemera in Britain & America, 1720-1920 (London, 2008) offer detailed histories of the development and practice of lithography in America. On the pleasures of conducting African American genealogy, see Pauli Murray’s Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (1956; Boston, 1999); on its haunting absences, see Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York, 2008). For more on the fascinating and understudied figure Edmonia Lewis, see Kirsten Pai Buick’s Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham, N.C., 2010).

 

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

Britt Rusert is assistant professor of African American literature and culture in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is currently finishing a book titled Radical Empiricism: Fugitive Science and the Struggle for Emancipation.

 



Poems

Large Stock

To Find You III

        [O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu House, Abiquiu, NM; present day]

Bushes of mulberry, rosemary, cherry;
trees of filbert, plum, and peach. Beside
the ladder leading to the roof, blue
and yellow columbine; a head-high
stalk of hollyhock, the unblossomed
buds like pursed green stars.

In the back, the view unobstructed
is somehow less than the same view
framed by your studio window.

A bush of the sage that ranges
ragged across these basins is,
in your patio, trimmed like bonsai,
tame as a housecat. How did you see
into this once-ruin of adobe and mud,
used by villagers as a sty for their pigs,
and know—both the vision
of what it could be and that your will
could make it so? You hired local women
to daub and smooth, every surface
leveled by a woman’s hands. I stand
in the shadow of your patio door,
breathe its new coat of acrid shellac,
dust eddying up in the afternoon light.

To Find You IV (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center)

        [Santa Fe, NM; present day]

Just beyond the windows, sprinklers arc steady intervals between the trees, which are all in full leaf. It does not feel like desert. The archive’s air is cold and dry, each of its three large tables covered in brown leather, topped with two lamps. Small brown moths flutter through the room. One lands on my foot.

In low gray rows with small white labels, the drawers are glass-topped, heavy. Regulations require I ask a security guard to pull each out for me, drawer by drawer.

G1: Source Materials/Animal Bones

Teeth sprout from the jaw like desert coral, the old bone fissured to woodgrain. Vertebrae like spongiform model airplanes, most no bigger than the large moth skating across the drawer’s glass. It is so quiet I can hear the flap-tapping of its wings.

G2: Source Materials/Animal Bones

A photo of O’Keeffe in the back of a car, a fragment of pelvis held to her eye like a monocle. That section of pelvis is in the center of the drawer. A card reads, “O’Keeffe used bones to explore the combination of near and far.” Propped next to it, a tiny replica of her painting Pelvis IV—giant foregrounded pelvis framing a tiny faraway moon.

Outside, a crow plucks grubs from the trunk of a catalpa tree, its leaves broad as a man’s palm. They shake in the breeze. A thousand hallelujah hands flushed through with light.

Polaroids, mostly, taken by O’Keeffe, blurred with chemical peel and streak.

“Skull and Chair:” A cow skull hung on the wall above a straight-backed wooden chair. Written on verso, “This is at the end of the Portal—beyond the ladder. That chair I paid ninety-eight cents for 22 years ago. One thing I have that is worth its price. It isn’t antique. It is from Montgomery Ward. G”

In Box 6, photos of the same chair. She set her paintings in the dirt, propped against its seat, to photograph them for Alfred.

One year of Stieglitz/O’Keeffe original correspondence—1944—in seven ringed archival boxes. Foxed and tea-colored in their acid-free sleeves, I can feel their corners through the plastic.

But the pages of three letters are too long, folded over in their sleeves. The archivist removes them—three sheets of onion skin on the large empty table. She held these. He held these. My breath flutters their edges. I have the urge to put the corner of one in my mouth. I resist this.

Her “I” whorls like an ear, making the letters so distinctly hers she didn’t need to sign them. Two black moths stutter against the white window frame. I notice her abstract sculpture on the lawn outside—the same lopsided spiral. How can I care so much for people I have never met?

To Find You

        [Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM; present day]

In the great hall: your
navy canvas shoes, jeans, long-sleeved shirt,
polka-dotted kerchief. Your voice
from the screening room. On this knife I might

fall off on either side. But I’d walk it again.
I’d rather be doing something I really wanted.
Here is your resurrected campsite: canvas-wrapped
canteen, Sterno stove, miniature cast—

iron fry pan. Your tent roofed by a rough tarp,
walls of gray-black oilcloth. Your biography
broods the air. A tour guide mock-corrects himself,
“As Georgia, I mean, Ms. O’Keeffe always said …”

From the gift shop, two middle-aged men wear
monogrammed chambray shirts “just like the ones she
wore.” An elderly woman cries in the corner
before the swirl of White Rose. Just this morning,

I had to explain, again, to a friend, that your paintings
are more than postcards writ large; that you
both are and are greater than your biography.
I’m tired. How did you make the choice

to be alone for your art? They’ve curated
a corner of the tent up. What would I produce
from such loneliness? There is the edge
of your sleeping bag, brown and tan. How

desperately I want to crawl in, to rest for a while
in your temporary bed, breathing in what you left.

To Find You II

        [On Photography: A Questionnaire]

Georgia:
        What is it like to be photographed?
                To be dressed, posed, forced to move or be still?
        Is your pose meant to convey a message?
                If so, is it yours or one that Alfred has given you?
        In photos of you with another person, whom do you see first?
        Describe what it’s like to look at photos of yourself
                —right after they were taken.
                —years later.

Alfred:
        When you meet someone new, how long before you reach for your camera?
        Describe
                —the act of taking a picture.
                —developing it, her face swimming up through the chemical waters.
        When looking at a photo you’ve taken
                —do you recall what happened before or after?
                —can you remember past the frame of the shot?
        When shooting, how cut-off or connected do you feel to your subject?
        How does a moment change when you begin taking pictures?
                How does a person?

To Find You

In silence, grow
transparent as an old-world

photographer’s glass plate.
My edges going

hazy as the noon desert, salted
as a body beneath that zenith

sun—until I am prepared
to slot into the coal black

hold of a moonless night.
Naked in the barrens

until morning, ready
for what images

come with such
exposure.



…And Now For Something Completely Similar

Since the doleful events of September 11, one of the points made by almost everyone, from the president to television commentators to the freshmen in my survey class, has been the radical newness of the era in which we now find ourselves. “Four Days That Transformed a President, a Presidency and a Nation, for All Time,” ran one New York Times headline, by no means the most hyperbolic of the past two weeks. There is no denying that we all have been changed to some degree by what one hopes will stand for a long, long time as the deadliest single day for Americans outside of a battlefield. And few American battlefields have ever come close. Though most other nations have had their cities attacked in the twentieth century–if not destroyed, invaded, or occupied–the United States has seen nothing like this since the Civil War. If foreign attack is the standard, then the last occasion can be pushed back to the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, in which we lost exactly eight men. Perhaps most importantly, all the close rivals of September 11 in our history involved solder and sailors, who at least knew that they faced death, not office workers and airline passengers in peacetime who by rights should have been more concerned with where they were going to have lunch than whether they would survive the day.

The recent events are new to us, then, if not to the people of London or Paris or Berlin or Tel Aviv or Hiroshima. The last decade has been an era when many people seemed to feel that nothing “real” had ever happened to them, nothing that tested their limits and characters. Suffused with a somewhat facile sense of the insubstantiality of modern life (and politics), middle-class people seemed to yearn for experiences more intense than what their suburban lives provided. Bourgeois anomie is an old story, but it seemed particularly virulent in the 1990s. Vast audiences sought out extreme experiences as entertainment–from slasher movies, to first-person-shooter video games, to thrill rides, to so-called “reality” television, to popular military history. Until last month, there was even a transportation disaster-themed restaurant, The Crash Café, being planned for Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. At the same time, there was a bull market not just on Wall Street, but in evangelical religion and other forms of spirituality and self-help, all promising to connect believers to a realer reality than anything we have down here.

In a bewildering variety of ways, Americans sought to find and identify with something authentic and serious in their own personal histories, from a childhood trauma to a psychological syndrome to an ethnic heritage to a record of wartime heroism and 1960s activism. Occasionally these bits of personal reality were invented or exaggerated, sometimes by historians, but even the scrupulously honest among authenticity-free Americans had the vicarious option. So baby boomers and their children embraced a burgeoning cult of their World War II era forbears, a cult that was just gearing up for another round of Greatness, related to the HBO series “Band of Brothers,” when the terrorists struck. And for political guidance, at least during this past summer when David McCullough pushed crotchety little John Adams to the top of the charts and Joseph Ellis continued to attract huge audiences for tales of the founding fraternity, we were supposed to look all the way back to the “Even Greater Generation,” the Founders.

Now something real really has happened, not to one of the great generations, but to us. And it is almost unbearable. With a political language devalued by decades of politicians declaring “wars” on every problem of the moment except those requiring military action, there is no available hyperbole that can contain our feelings in the face of such a tragedy, though most of them have been tried. But has September 11 really changed us forever? Has the nation set off down a fundamentally new and different path?

Many early indications suggest not. While President Bush’s spokesmen have mercifully eschewed the bombing-only tactics pioneered by Nixon and Kissinger (and pursued so frequently by Bush père and Clinton), their “new war” sounds suspiciously like most of the other ones since World War II: premised on vague but expansive abdications of congressional authority to the executive branch, and launched with little suggestion that the populace will be required to mobilize or sacrifice for the cause. The new war may go on for years, the administration says, and we might not be told much about it, and it will sometimes be dirty, but we can count on its not affecting us too much, since it will be conducted mostly through precision strikes, “special operations,” and commando raids. Ironically, “war” seems to be the chosen term this time around, not because war will actually be declared or a fundamentally new approach taken, but because all the older euphemisms (“police action,” “conflict,” etc.) lost their magic in previous postwar stalemates and defeats. The American people are aware of the quagmires and disappointments that this nonwar warpath has led us into before–and in the Cold War conflicts we at least had the benefit of knowing pretty clearly who and how we were to fight.

Nor is the same old “new war” plan the only depressingly familiar aspect of the present situation. The warnings that began on the very day of the attack–injunctions that Americans would have to give up some of their freedoms and forgo some democratic niceties in order to combat the threat–have an American history predating the United States itself. Faced with unruly Boston tax protesters in 1768, Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson advised his superiors that there would have to be “an abridgement of what is called English liberty” if the colonies were to remain part of the British Empire. Thirty years later, it was the prospect of war with France–and fear of revolutionists and French sympathizers at home–that had influential figures not just calling for but actually achieving such abridgements, in the form of the Alien and Sedition Acts. (The French Jacobins were the very first modern “terrorists,” of course, though they favored the state-sponsored variety. And while Robespierre probably could have given Osama bin Laden a run for his money, Vice President Thomas Jefferson was considered the likely American terrorist mastermind of that era.) Mobs did most of the wartime liberty abridging during the nineteenth century, but the early decades of the twentieth proved to be something of a golden age for the official variety in America. Faced with seemingly diabolical threats like communism, anarchism, and the Hun, the U.S. government engaged in periodic spasms of trampling on the rights of citizens and immigrants in the name of internal security, beginning with the post-World War I Red Scare that led to mass arrests and deportations and the creation of the FBI. In asking for broader powers to detain suspected terrorists without trial and to conduct electronic surveillance, John Ashcroft’s Justice Department is only returning to the original mission behind its twentieth-century expansion. (Luckily for the country, the usual southern conservative base for crackdowns on the civil liberties of radicals and immigrants seems to be crumbling in Congress this time around.)

 

Figure 1: Jefferson’s “Terrorist” Plans Exposed: The Providential Detection. Political cartoon by unknown artists, ca. 1800.

 

Though always presented as clear-eyed wisdom borne of hard experience, calls for the restriction of civil liberties and the unleashing of government police powers have tended to come almost automatically from people with profound and preexisting doubts about whether liberal democracy and widespread individual freedom can survive in a world of hatred, war, and power politics. Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and other Federalists, for example, had made their doubts about the staying power of the U.S. Constitution, as written, perfectly clear even before the French crisis of the late 1790s. On this and many later occasions, these doubts have arisen from an apparent distaste for debate, compromise, and individualism per se, with military crisis providing a golden opportunity to command greater political conformity and a more authoritarian style of governance. Over the past century, in fact, these retrenchments have been more easily accepted by the public and the political system than they were earlier in American history. The exposure of Hutchinson’s advice created a scandal that pushed the colonies toward revolution, while the Sedition Act inspired the expansion of the opposition press it was meant to suppress. But just over a century later, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who oversaw the World War I Red Scare, became a serious presidential contender for his trouble, while his protégé J. Edgar Hoover remained a popular hero for a half century afterwards. In the 1950s, government repression of radical political groups was the stuff of popular books and films like I Was a Communist for the FBI, a hit in both media.

Figure 2: Poster for I Was A Communist for the F.B.I. (1951)

 

If answering terror by repressing civil liberties promises to take us back to the future, still another sadly familiar development can be detected in the present national mood. A certain note of grim self-congratulation has crept into many of the public commentaries and remembrances, a sense that a crisis like this might actually be rather healthy, a kind of exercise regimen for the body politic that will purge it of doubts and decadence and bring us back to more authentic values. “I didn’t think this country could come together like it has. I thought we were too cynical,” said the morning DJ on my car radio the week after the attacks, echoing the ecstatic paeans to national unity that began to issue from the media within hours of the World Trade Center’s collapse. Overnight, two of the roughest media images going, those of New York City and its mayor, were transfigured to the point of sainthood, while all former political questions were declared to be petty disputes when compared to the coming struggle. A less benign side of the new era of good feelings was found by a Seattle Times reporter at a Colorado gun shop. While stocking up on ammunition in order to meet the present crisis, the regulars were debating whether Hitler or the Founding Fathers had said that “A country needs a war every 15 years to get united.” They approved the sentiment, wherever it originated.

This is only the most recent occasion when war and crisis have been welcomed as opportunities for moral regeneration. Samuel Adams hoped that the Revolution would make Boston into the “Christian Sparta” that he imagined existed in the time of his Puritan forefathers. The Revolutionary War, and most of those that followed, opened with a sometimes brief but always fierce celebration of the nation’s redemption from partisan division and weakness of character. This effect skipped the little-ballyhooed Vietnam conflict, but that omission was more than made up for by the orgy of unanimity around the previous President Bush during the highly debatable Persian Gulf War.

It remains to be seen whether the present mood will mature into a Revolutionary-style “rage militaire,” as the Bush administration initially seemed to hope, or whether the self-centered habits of the Clinton age will reassert themselves. As of this writing, my money is on the latter. The administration has shifted over to assuring people that something will be done to Osama and the Taliban someday, while encouraging the American people to do their patriotic duty the new economy way, by getting out there and consuming for the common good. Perhaps this time we’ll use shopping bags instead of carpet bombs. That might be something new after all, though probably no more effective as foreign policy.

Further Reading:

For two important works on the origins of the war-as-moral-regeneration theme in American history, see Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (Chapel Hill, 1979) and Ann Fairfax Withington, Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of American Republics (New York, 1991). For its presence even in the U.S.A.’s least successful conflict, the War of 1812, see Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Baltimore, 1987) and Roger H. Brown, The Republic in Peril: 1812 (New York, 1964).

For further evidence on the new era’s lack of newness, and other political commentary, see “Publick Occurrences Extra,” a new Weblog on the author’s personal site.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.1 (October, 2001).

 



Welcome to our 2016 Special Issue on Politics!

Just as the 2016 presidential campaign enters the final, excruciating race to the finish line, Common-place once again takes a multi-faceted look at politics past, with a phalanx of timely feature articles and columns.

 

Columbian Centinel masthead (detail), June 21, 1816. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Columbian Centinel masthead (detail), June 21, 1816. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

In “Beards, Bachelors, and Brides,” Thomas Balcerski analyzes the election of 1856 where attacks of a gendered and sexual nature figured large in the race pitting the bearded John Charles Fremont, married to the beautiful Jesse Benton Fremont, against the bachelor James Buchanan. 

Daniel Peart provides us a revealing look into the long history of lobbying, while Matthew Mason focuses on Edward Everett and his reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act to reveal the plight of political moderates in times of political polarization.

Richard D. Brown reminds us that, historically, political suffrage and citizenship in this country were not always coupled, and in “House of Cards,” Merry Ellen Scofield describes the politics of Washington’s very first social media – the calling card.

Endrina Tay provides a new interpretation of the motives behind Thomas Jefferson’s sale of his private library to Congress after the burning of the Capitol, while John Craig Hammond provides a thoughtful examination of the Constitution’s framers’ original intentions regarding slavery in the United States.

In our latest Common School column, Erik Chaput describes a student project analyzing Frederick Douglass’s changing, and diametrically opposed, views regarding the Constitution’s position on slavery. In Tales From the Vault, Whitney Martinko traces the origins and significance of a painting of Philadelphia’s Market Street that has long hung in the United States Portrait Gallery in Philadelphia. Finally, this issue’s Web Library presents a roundtable discussion about the current status of graduate training and digital history.

Even our book reviews focus on past politics, covering new books about James Madison’s journal accounts of the Constitutional Convention; Sarah Vowell’s thoughts on the Marquis de Lafayette; the egalitarian ideals of the Republican Party; and the not-so-corrupt bargain that determined the outcome of the 1824 presidential election. 

We hope you enjoy this special issue, which is the latest addition to a history of political issues launched by Common-place during pivotal Presidential election years. For even more Early American political insight, be sure to visit our Politics Issues from 2008 (Issue 9.1) and Political Histories issue from 2012 (Issue 12.3).

Of course, Common-place firmly believes it wouldn’t be a true American election cycle without some sort of October surprise – so be sure to revisit commonplace.online in a few weeks to see what other pieces of American political history might turn up! 

 

– The Editors

 

 

This article originally appeared in issue 16.4 (September, 2016).

Anna Mae Duane (Associate Professor of English and American Studies, University of Connecticut) and Walter Woodward (Associate Professor of History, University of Connecticut) are co-editors of Common-place.



“Gettysburg Wasn’t His First Address”

"Kentucky: Lincoln Heritage Trail," front of map (2008). Original design by Christina Hobbs and Mike Duck. Courtesy of the Kentucky Department of Tourism.

Kentucky’s Belated Embrace of Abraham Lincoln

Earlier this year, Skyler Hornback, a 12-year-old from Sonora, Kentucky, racked up $66,600 on a single day during Jeopardy‘s Kid’s Week competition. His feat made minor national news because his winnings amounted to the third-highest one-day total (for kids and adults) in the game show’s history. During his mid-show interview with host Alex Trebek, the affable, bespectacled Skyler professed his fascination with all things related to Abraham Lincoln. “Lincoln is a very intriguing figure because most people think they know him when they really don’t,” Hornback asserted. “There was just so much behind that beard and top hat that people just don’t realize.” He informed Trebek of his ability to recite the Emancipation Proclamation from memory. As luck would have it, the Final Jeopardy! category turned out to be “The Civil War.” Confident in his knowledge, Hornback wagered $30,000, and responded to the question: “Abraham Lincoln called this document which took effect in 1863, ‘A fit and necessary war measure,'” with the correct answer: the Emancipation Proclamation.

In some ways it does not seem surprising that a young man with a penchant for historical knowledge might know a lot about the United States’ sixteenth (and arguably most famous) president, especially when he has grown up in Larue County, Kentucky, the back yard of Lincoln’s birthplace, and graduated from Abraham Lincoln Elementary. But among white Kentuckians, such youthful ardor for Lincoln is a relatively recent phenomenon. Hornback’s generation may be the first in the history of the state to share both a widespread awareness and pride in their state’s claim to the “great Emancipator.”

For well over a century after Lincoln’s death, white Kentuckians were disdainful, hostile, or just plain disinterested in highlighting the role their state had played in the life of the iconic president. While these attitudes began to change in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and the revisionist Civil War history it spawned, in the early twenty-first century this trend coalesced into a whole-hearted celebration of the 200th anniversary of the president’s birth. Between 2008 and 2010, Kentuckians feted Lincoln with galas, ceremonies, monuments, and highway signage that highlighted his Bluegrass State heritage. In doing so, they were not simply recovering a native son, but also turning their backs on a Confederate identity they had embraced for the past 150 years. They re-cast the state’s Civil War era narrative, and finally chose to remember and raise the public consciousness of painful and complicated historical topics such as slavery and emancipation.

The generous outpouring of affection Kentuckians showed him during the bicentennial would certainly have surprised Lincoln if he had been around to see it.

The generous outpouring of affection Kentuckians showed him during the bicentennial would certainly have surprised Lincoln if he had been around to see it. He was born in 1809 in a tiny log cabin located near Hodgenville, in the lush, rolling hills of central Kentucky. A few years later, the Lincoln family moved to a second cabin at nearby Knob Creek, and they remained there until Thomas Lincoln moved his family to Indiana in 1816 when Abraham was only seven.

 

Daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln, frontispiece ("From a Rare Daguerreotype in the Collection of Oliver R. Barrett"), Lincoln and His Wife's Home Town, William H. Townsend (1929). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln, frontispiece (“From a Rare Daguerreotype in the Collection of Oliver R. Barrett”), Lincoln and His Wife’s Home Town, William H. Townsend (1929). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
"Mary Todd Lincoln at Nineteen Years of Age," ("From a Portrait by Her Niece, Katherine Helm, Now in the Collection of the Author") between pages 68 and 69 of Lincoln and His Wife's Home Town, William H. Townsend (1929). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
“Mary Todd Lincoln at Nineteen Years of Age,” (“From a Portrait by Her Niece, Katherine Helm, Now in the Collection of the Author”) between pages 68 and 69 of Lincoln and His Wife’s Home Town, William H. Townsend (1929). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

The fact that Lincoln married a Lexingtonian, Mary Todd, and understood well the habits and views of white Kentuckians did not help his popularity in the state during his political career. In the summer of 1860, as he was running for president, he wrote to a resident of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, who had asked him to campaign there: “You suggest that a visit to the place of my nativity might be pleasant to me. Indeed it would.” Then he joked, “But would not the people lynch me?”

At the heart of white Kentuckians’ dislike of the Republican candidate was his untrustworthy position on slavery—his insistence that the Constitution bound the government to protect slavery where it existed, but that the government should prohibit the spread of the institution to all new territories and states. This did not suit most white people in a state strongly wedded to the peculiar institution. Though a plantation economy did not dominate the state, many white Kentuckians depended on slaves to assist them in their small-scale agricultural and industrial endeavors. Twenty-eight percent of all Kentucky households owned slaves in 1860, and many more relied on hired-out slave labor, so the economic and cultural attachment to slavery was very strong in the Commonwealth.

As a consequence, while Lincoln may not have been in danger of losing his life to angry Kentuckians in 1860, he was not in danger of winning their votes, either. That November, most of the state’s white men proved their allegiance to latter-day Whiggery and to Unionism by voting for Constitutional Union candidate John Bell. Lincoln captured fewer than two percent of their votes, and only two voters in Mary Todd’s hometown cast their ballots for him. In early 1861, with secession sentiment swelling throughout the South, the victorious Lincoln penned some remarks that he hoped to deliver in Kentucky on his way to take office in Washington, D.C. He got as close to the state as Cincinnati, just over the river, but he never got to deliver his message appealing to Kentuckians to remain loyal in the face of his election. “Who amongst you would not die by the proposition that your candidate, being elected, should be inaugurated soley on the conditions of the Constitution, and laws, or not at all?” he had planned to ask them. “What Kentuckian, worthy of his birthplace would not do this? Gentlemen, I too, am a Kentuckian.”

Most white Kentuckians would have been loath to acknowledge solidarity with the incoming president based on his natal origins. They did, however, cling to the Union and to Lincoln’s promise to protect slavery where it existed. Indeed, for many Kentuckians, the conviction that the Union would continue to be the best protector of slavery—as it had for over eighty years—inspired their loyalty. In turn, as the war began, Lincoln trod very lightly in his handling of his birth state. He respected the state’s early policy of neutrality and once famously explained: “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.” In the face of strategic and tactical needs on the part of both the Union and Confederate armies, neutrality became impossible to maintain. Luckily for Lincoln, the tradition of Unionism in Kentucky was a strong one, and by the war’s end the number of Kentucky white men who fought for the Union was at least twice that who had fought for the Confederacy.

Thus, from the beginning of the conflict, the loyalty of white Kentuckians to the Union was precarious and patchy. Many civilians aided Rebel forces, compelling the Union military government, which occupied the state beginning in September 1861, to crack down on disloyal activity. People suspected of Confederate sympathies could neither hold elected offices nor serve as teachers, ministers, or jurors. Federal authorities suspended freedom of the press. Despite Lincoln’s kid-gloved approach, many white Kentuckians—even loyal ones—became resentful of what they saw as federal interference in civilian affairs.

Of course, what really caused whites to turn against Lincoln as the war dragged on was his evolving position on slavery. Kentuckians were well represented in the group of border state congressmen Lincoln called to meet with him at the White House in 1862 to discuss a plan for compensated emancipation in their states. The state legislature appointed a committee to respond to the proposition and they pledged to combat the plan “by all peaceable means,” and promised that should that course of action fail, “Kentucky [would] rise up as one man and sacrifice the property, and, if need be, the lives of her children in defense of the Constitution under which alone we can ever hope to enjoy natural liberty.” When Lincoln, having given up hope of conciliation, forged ahead with his emancipation policy, they rejected him too.

 

"Mary Todd Lincoln," photograph between pages 182 and 183, Mary Todd Lincoln: An Appreciation of the Wife of Abraham Lincoln, Honoré Morrow (New York, 1928). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
“Mary Todd Lincoln,” photograph between pages 182 and 183, Mary Todd Lincoln: An Appreciation of the Wife of Abraham Lincoln, Honoré Morrow (New York, 1928). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
"After 200 Years, It's Time To Party," advertisement for the Kentucky Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial in 2008. Courtesy of the Kentucky Department of Tourism. Original design by Christina Hobbs and Mike Duck.
“After 200 Years, It’s Time To Party,” advertisement for the Kentucky Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial in 2008. Courtesy of the Kentucky Department of Tourism. Original design by Christina Hobbs and Mike Duck.

After Lincoln issued the preliminary emancipation proclamation in September 1862, Benjamin Buckner, a major in the 20th Kentucky Volunteers, described it as “an abominable infamous document, [which] falsifies all his pledges both public and private.” “The Union Kentuckians are most shamefully treated,” he exhorted, “and by reward of the presidents want of good faith, which is only equaled by his lack of sense, we find ourselves in arms to maintain doctrines, which if announced 12 months ago, would have driven us all, not withstanding our loyalty to the Constitution & the Union, into the ranks of the Southern Army.” He resigned his commission in the Union Army and went home for the duration of the war. In January 1863, John Harrington of the 22nd Kentucky wrote to his sister in dejected tones: “I enlisted to fight for the Union and the Constitution, but Lincoln puts a different construction on things and now has us Union Men fighting for his Abolition Platform and thus making us a hord of Subjugators, houseburners, Negro thieves, and devastators of private property.”

White hatred of Lincoln only increased when he began enlisting enslaved African American Kentuckians in the Union Army. One of the Commonwealth’s most venerated Union warriors, cavalry commander Frank Wolford, exclaimed in 1864 that people of Kentucky would refuse to “keep step to ‘the music of the Union’ alongside of negro soldiers.” Throughout the spring and summer of that year, Wolford made a series of long-winded speeches—one purportedly lasting for four hours—in which he denounced Abraham Lincoln as a “fool” and a “tyrant,” and his policy of enlisting African Americans as illegal and “disgraceful to the people” of Kentucky. He encouraged white Kentuckians to resist any efforts to enroll them in the Army. Wolford’s series of extended protests led to his arrest and dishonorable discharge from the Union Army, and elevation to the status of folk hero among many in his home state. One Bluegrass resident noted, “Whilst the policy of his course is doubted, even censured by some, the gallant Wolford is now the most popular man in our part of the State & the President universally condemned for his tyrannical course in dishonorably dismissing [him].”

Such anti-Lincoln sentiments were common among white Kentuckians on the homefront as well. Western Kentucky resident Ellen Wallace’s husband owned around thirty slaves at the outset of the war, but initially she remained a staunch Unionist who in April 1861 projected that any decision by Kentucky to secede would lead to the state’s “ruin.” But over the next two years, Wallace came to believe that ruin came to Kentucky anyway in the form of Abraham Lincoln (a “vile wretch” of a president) and his “infamous proclamation.”

Over the course of the war, Wallace repeatedly confided in her diary in vividly racist terms her fears of the physical harm and sexual threat that emancipation would bring to the women of Kentucky. Wallace charged Lincoln with placing “innocent women and helpless infants at the mercy of black monsters who would walk in human shape.” “Servile insurrection will be the consequence [of emancipation] unless the strong arm of the nation prevents it,” she wrote on another occasion, “and the blood of helpless women and children will flow in torrents if [Lincoln’s] wicked and fanatical policy is not over ruled.” It could be, Wallace feared, “St. Domingo all over again.” As African Americans assumed authority within the Union Army, Wallace complained that Lincoln had “made the negro master of the white man as far as his power goes putting arms in their hands … the white man has to turn his horses head and obey Lincoln’s negro troops with clenched teeth.” In the diaries and letters of many Kentucky Unionists, Lincoln was a villain, responsible for corrupting their understanding of the war’s true purpose, which was to save the Union. They directed much of their anxiety, frustration, and anger surrounding the war and its outcome at him.

Not surprisingly, Lincoln did not fare much better in the estimation of most Kentucky whites after the war. While the many locales in other victorious Unionist states rushed to commemorate the martyred president, white Kentuckians did their best to honor the dead Confederacy of which they were never a part. In the decades following the war, they built Confederate monuments, published sectional periodicals, participated in veterans’ organizations and historical societies, and produced literature that portrayed Kentucky as Confederate, while largely ignoring the Union cause and the feats of its soldiers. In the seventy years following the Civil War, for instance, Kentuckians erected over seventy Confederate monuments within the state, and fewer than ten monuments to the Union. Many white Kentuckians embraced the conservative political, social, and racial values embedded in the Lost Cause even when they had not supported the Confederacy during the war, rejecting the legacies of both the Union and its president.

Americans outside of the Commonwealth, however, began to turn their attention to the martyred president’s Kentucky heritage. In the nascent age of American tourism, several people quickly realized that Americans would want to visit Lincoln’s birthplace. In 1894, New York restaurant owner Alfred Dennett purchased the Sinking Spring Farm near Hodgenville, where Lincoln was born and lived until the age of two. He moved a dilapidated cabin found a couple of miles away from the farm, rumored to have been the Lincolns’, to the site. As he struggled to finance his Lincoln endeavor, Dennett purchased another decaying cabin in southern Kentucky purported by locals to be the residence in which Jefferson Davis was born. Capitalizing on the national mood of sectional reconciliation, Dennett disassembled both cabins and began displaying them at public expositions in Tennessee, New York, and elsewhere.

Much to the chagrin of historians, but unintentionally underscoring the extent to which Americans longed for post-Civil War reconciliation, the logs of the two structures purportedly became confused and intermingled during the constant disassembly and re-assembly. As famed muckraker and Lincoln enthusiast Ida Tarbell later wrote, “It was the money-makers who first laid hands on the Lincoln cabin. It was torn down, dragged about the country, and shown in settings so vulgar and inappropriate that it was made to seem almost a ridiculous thing.”

 

"Visit the Site of the Original Lincoln Logs," advertisement for the Kentucky Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial in 2008. Courtesy of the Kentucky Department of Tourism.
“Visit the Site of the Original Lincoln Logs,” advertisement for the Kentucky Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial in 2008. Courtesy of the Kentucky Department of Tourism.
"His First Address Wasn't Gettysburg," advertisement for the Kentucky Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial in 2008. Courtesy of the Kentucky Department of Tourism.
“His First Address Wasn’t Gettysburg,” advertisement for the Kentucky Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial in 2008. Courtesy of the Kentucky Department of Tourism.

Dennett could never raise the necessary funds for his grandiose scheme (which included a spa and hunting lodge), and in 1905 he sold the Sinking Springs site to Robert Collier, the editor and publisher of Collier’s Weekly, for $3,600. Collier had founded the Lincoln Farm Association the year before with the purpose of making Lincoln’s homestead a national shrine, to “perpetuate it as a birthplace of patriotism,” and to attract visitors from all over the country. The New York-based association purchased the Lincoln (/Davis) cabin for $1,000, shipped it back to the Lincoln farm in Kentucky and commissioned architect John Russell Pope to design a marble building to house and protect it. The monument plans included fifty-six steps, one for each year of the president’s life, which led up to the columned portico and heavy bronze doors of the marble structure.

Collier hoped to dedicate the project in time to mark the centenary of Lincoln’s birth in 1909. Rather than a political beacon of Unionist victory, however, the association intended the homestead to represent national reconciliation. They hoped that since it laid upon “almost the centre of our population,” it would become “the most accessible national shrine … the Nation’s Commons, the meeting-place of North and South, of East and West, a great national school of peace and unity, where all sectional animosity will forever be buried.”

Accordingly, the effort to mark Lincoln’s birthplace began and ended largely as a national effort, rather than a local project. Of the $100,000 the Lincoln Farm Association had raised in 1908, only $4,000 came from the Kentucky legislature (in contrast, Kentucky lawmakers appropriated $15,000 for the state’s Jefferson Davis monument, which was dedicated in 1924). Eventually, over 80,000 Americans joined the LFA. The association intended that the monument for the people should be a truly populist undertaking and asked that individuals contribute no more than twenty-five dollars, suggesting an ideal subscription rate of twenty-five cents. In the end, an estimated two-thirds of the funding needed for the project came in quarters.

In 1908, the state of Kentucky did form a Lincoln Centenary Committee, headed by prominent Louisville Union Army veteran Andrew Cowan. In the spirit of sectional reconciliation, the committee included some of Kentucky’s most esteemed citizens, both former Unionists and Confederates. In a rare occasion of cooperative interracial memorialization, Kentucky African Americans also took part in the centennial remembrance. Governor Augustus Willson, only the second Republican governor in the state’s history, appointed a “Negro People’s Centenary Committee,” after deeming that “the negro people should have honored representatives present to bear witness to their love for Abraham Lincoln and their faithfulness to his memory and to be a part of the great scene just as they are a part of the great life of our country.”

By including African Americans in the memorial effort, Governor Willson recognized the important place Abraham Lincoln occupied in black historical memory, and sought to emphasize “the ideal of blessed humanity which freed a race, and which is such a noble part of [his] life.” But inclusion did not mean equity. White organizers considered the black committee a separate entity and did not list its members on the state committee’s letterhead, or even in the official Lincoln Centenary Program, thereby relegating African Americans to the status of silent partners within Kentucky’s efforts to remember the Civil War.

The cornerstone laying ceremony featured a “Confederate Escort Committee,” which stood alongside Union veterans in the ceremony. John Leathers, one of the Confederate veterans involved, considered the event a success and wrote Andrew Cowan afterwards that, “all passion and prejudice [had] gone with the flight of the years and we are now one reunited people with one flag and one country and common destiny and I think I can safely say that none among the great crowd present at the Lincoln Farm on the 12th were more sincere and honest in rendering tribute to the name and fame of the immortal Lincoln than the Ex-Confederates who were gathered there.”

Amidst the reconciliationist overtones of the endeavor, it was President Theodore Roosevelt who articulated the most radical form of Unionism. In the keynote address he delivered at the ceremony, he lauded Lincoln, the “homely backwoods idealist,” for saving the nation when he freed the slaves. Roosevelt praised the native Kentuckian’s “love for the Union,” as well as his “abhorrence of slavery,” calling him an “apostle of social revolution.” Roosevelt brought up a Civil War legacy rarely acknowledged in Kentucky, where what little white public memory of Union victory that existed concentrated on its military victory rather than the social and racial revolution it brought. Roosevelt’s mention of the “radical revolution,” let alone his celebration of it, was an anomaly in white memory in the state.

In 1961, acclaimed Kentucky-born author Robert Penn Warren provided a much more representative description of the way many white Kentuckians remembered Lincoln. Reflecting on his early twentieth-century childhood growing up in Guthrie, Kentucky, during which he absorbed the “ever-present history” of the Civil War, he reminisced: “I had picked up a vaguely soaked-in popular notion of the Civil War, the wickedness of Yankees, the justice of the Southern cause (whatever it was; I didn’t know), the slave question, with Lincoln somehow a great man but misguided … I got [my impression] from the air around me (with the ambiguous Lincoln bit probably from a schoolroom).”

Warren’s recollection reflected the power that pro-Confederate groups, especially the United Daughters of the Confederacy, had over the interpretation of the Civil War in Kentucky. Not only did the UDC shape the state’s cultural landscape with their memorial days and monument campaigns, but their production of state textbooks and the supplemental pro-Confederate texts ensured that no child in Kentucky public schools could have anything but an “impartial” view of the conflict between the states.

In 1901, the Lexington chapter installed pictures of Robert E. Lee in every public school in the city. Later that year, the UDC held a public ceremony in which the members presented the same schools with portraits of Jefferson Davis on the same day as the Grand Army of the Republic unveiled its portraits of Lincoln. Newspaper accounts reflected the disparity in the esteem in which the city’s white masses held the two men. Even the Republican Lexington Leader covered the stories in two separate columns, devoting to the UDC twice as much space as the GAR. The paper called the UDC ceremony “unique,” “an impressive program,” and “an important patriotic event.” The GAR donation, by contrast, was relegated to the “social and personal” section of the paper, where it was deemed “very acceptable and much appreciated.”

Although the Lost Cause held sway in Kentucky’s schools, monuments to Lincoln slowly began to appear in town squares and other civic spaces. The state constructed a large statue of Lincoln in the Hodgenville town square in 1909. Two years later, Governor Willson persuaded Louisville businessman James Breckenridge Speed (whose uncles Joshua Fry Speed and James Speed were Lincoln’s close friends and political allies) to donate $40,000 to pay for a Lincoln statue for the state Capitol rotunda. President William Howard Taft came to Frankfort to unveil it.

Local Kentuckians took note of the economic boon afforded by Lincoln’s birthplace, which became the Lincoln National Historical Park in 1916. When Ida Tarbell traveled through the area in the 1920s to research her book, In the Footsteps of the Lincolns (1924), she found that “Like Homer in Greece, Lincoln in Kentucky was claimed by, if not seven, at least several different places.” At the aptly named Poortown, where the log cabin of Abraham’s uncle Mordecai Lincoln once stood, the locals, who knew “the value of a Lincoln connection,” were happy to show Tarbell around. “They tell you there, with every proof of conviction, that here Abraham Lincoln was born; and that all Poortown feels naturally enough that it is wrong indeed that the noble marble monument that stands in Hardin County, near Hodgenville should not be theirs, that they should not have enjoyed the increase in land values that Hodgenville has had, and that they should not have the roads that the Lincoln Memorial has brought to Hardin County.”

In an extension of Kentucky’s wartime antipathy toward Lincoln, however, public memorialization of the president was largely limited to African American Kentuckians who celebrated him as part of Emancipation Day events, and by hanging his image inside their houses. Their most visible means of acknowledgment were the several segregated Common Colored Schools they named after him around the state. Even these tributes became obsolete after schools desegregated in the 1960s and many African American schools closed. According to historian David Rapaport, as of 2002, of the 1,353 public schools in Kentucky, Lincoln’s name appeared on only eight, which makes him the namesake of a mere six-hundredths of one percent of the schools in the state of his birth.

While white resistance to the demise of Jim Crow in the 1960s and 1970s seldom appeared as violent or extensive as it did in states farther south, public acknowledgment of Kentucky’s historical status as a slave state was slow. Famously, the Kentucky state legislature did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1976. But slowly, the idea that slavery was a cruel institution began to trickle down to mainstream public history in Kentucky as it did in other places in the United States. This was due to the fact that the Civil Rights Movement had connected the contemporary struggles of African Americans with the oppression they had faced during slavery, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. Gradually, public sites and educational institutions around the state began to portray emancipation as a redemptive triumph and thus, the Great Emancipator became a more palatable figure in the South. It was in this interpretive environment that white Kentuckians finally began to lay claim to Abraham Lincoln and integrate him into a usable past for their state.

 

"Kentucky: Lincoln Heritage Trail," front of map (2008). Original design by Christina Hobbs and Mike Duck. Courtesy of the Kentucky Department of Tourism.
“Kentucky: Lincoln Heritage Trail,” front of map (2008). Original design by Christina Hobbs and Mike Duck. Courtesy of the Kentucky Department of Tourism.

By 1975, Hodgenville established the Lincoln Days Celebration, “for the purpose of celebrating the birth of Abraham Lincoln in an appropriate manner, to create an awareness of his values and influences upon this nation, and further the cultural, economic and civic interests of LaRue County.” In 1977, Kentucky preservationists completed the restoration of Mary Todd Lincoln’s girlhood home in Lexington.

But Kentuckians did not appear to truly embrace Lincoln as their own until the early twenty-first century as the state began plans for celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth. Along with historical organizations around the nation, various entities around the Bluegrass State developed plans for a two-year-long tribute to the revered president to take place between 2008 and February 2010. In 2004, the state created the Kentucky Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (KALBC) with the following goals: to “establish Kentucky as part of the Lincoln story on both a state and a national level by relating the critical role that Kentucky and Kentuckians played in his life and career.” And, of course, with financial interests in mind, the commission also wanted to use the bicentennial as an occasion to “enhance Kentucky’s heritage-tourism industry.”

Accordingly, schools, colleges, historical societies, public libraries, tourist sites, and other civic groups developed dozens of programs, events, and exhibits to mark Kentucky’s connection to Lincoln. The Kentucky General Assembly and the Transportation Cabinet created two new Lincoln road designations. US 31E became the “Lincoln Heritage Highway,” while the stretch of I-65 from Louisville to the Tennessee border was christened the “Lincoln Memorial Expressway.” They also commissioned signs declaring Kentucky the “Birthplace of Lincoln” at major border crossings into the state.

The state also developed the Kentucky Lincoln Heritage Trail, which included nearly twenty sites around Kentucky linked (some more closely than others) to Lincoln’s life and his Civil War legacy. Aside from obvious sites such as the Mary Todd Lincoln House and Lincoln’s Boyhood Home, these include locations such as the “Lincoln Marriage Temple,” which shelters the log cabin in which historians believe Nancy Hanks and Thomas Lincoln married, the home of Lincoln’s uncle Mordecai, and a replica of a cabin similar to the one once inhabited by his step-mother, Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln.

It seemed that although—and perhaps because—Lincoln resided for such a brief period of his young life in Kentucky, no connection to the president was too minor to include. A number of other sites earned their way onto the trail by their connection to the Civil War: the Camp Nelson Civil War Heritage Park, which marks the third largest African American recruitment camp in the nation, and the Perryville Battlefield Historical Site. Even Jefferson Davis’s monument and birthplace won a spot on the map.

In both style and substance, these events and places stressed Lincoln’s humble roots, his unlikely rise to the highest office in the land, and his lasting legacy in keeping the Union intact during the Civil War. Not surprisingly, the bicentennial effort highlighted his role in emancipating enslaved African Americans, the very act that made him so unpopular in his home state almost a century and a half before. In the post-Civil Rights era, white Kentuckians seemed ready to embrace Lincoln for the same reasons they had once maligned him.

The KALBC also outlined plans to “incorporate the relevance of the Lincoln story into educational programming across Kentucky.” The Kentucky Department of Education, Georgetown College, and the Kentucky Historical Society (KHS) worked together to develop lesson plans centering on Lincoln for elementary, middle, and high school students. The lessons tied Lincoln’s life and work to Kentucky’s teaching standards and brought Lincoln into the classroom in a number of different subject areas. The KHS also mounted an exhibit inside of a tractor-trailer that traveled to schools and public events all over the state.

In stark contrast to Kentucky’s effort to observe the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth a century earlier, the connections between Lincoln, slavery, and emancipation were front and center between 2008 and 2010. The KALBC funded numerous projects that focused on African American experiences of the Civil War era, including the Underground Railroad, USCT recruitment and enlistment in Kentucky, and the experiences of black families in the state’s contraband camps. The commission also funded a workshop for museum docents and local historians entitled “Interpreting Slavery at Kentucky Historical Sites,” designed to advise “employees how to talk about slavery with the public.”

The Commission and Advisory Council members were a diverse group of Kentucky scholars and citizens, and included organizations such as the Kentucky African American Heritage Commission. Famed African American artist Ed Hamilton sculpted a new statue of Lincoln, which stands in Louisville’s Lincoln Park along the city’s waterfront. In the early twenty-first century, Kentucky African Americans played a large role in shaping the state’s memory of Lincoln, both figuratively and literally.

Meanwhile, in an interesting turn, Kentuckians mounted a much more limited celebration for Jefferson Davis, who had also been born in Kentucky in 1809. Vestiges of Confederate partisanship remained, however. In 2007, the State Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans protested that the Kentucky Lincoln Bicentennial Commission had circumvented proper procedures in order to have the Transportation Cabinet approve a Lincoln bicentennial license plate bearing the official Kentucky Lincoln Bicentennial emblem. While Kentucky SCV members, who were also seeking approval for their own specialty plate, denied that the tag’s honoree had anything to do with their outrage, they used the opportunity to call for the resignation of the co-chairs of the bicentennial celebration and the executive director of the Kentucky Historical Society.

As a result of the state’s bicentennial commemoration, citizens of Kentucky—young, old, black, or white—could not miss the state’s connection with the sixteenth president as well as the heroic light in which it cast his historical achievements. Certainly, it was not lost on Skyler Hornback, who, five years before he would go on to Jeopardy fame, was selected by officials at Abraham Lincoln Elementary to introduce First Lady Laura Bush when she visited Hodgenville as part of the bicentennial festivities in November 2008. “Here,” Bush told the crowd, “we remember that the man who became our beloved president was once just a young boy.”

The recent embrace of Lincoln is a part of the process by which Kentucky is slowly shedding its constructed Confederate identity in favor of one that acknowledges historical divisions among the state’s whites, as well as between whites and African Americans. Within this pluralistic history, Abraham Lincoln has finally become useful and duly celebrated in his native state.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the Delta Women Writers for reading and offering insightful criticism on an earlier draft of this essay.

Further Reading

Readers can find further information about Abraham Lincoln’s portrayal in American history in Merrill Peterson’s Lincoln in American Memory (New York, 1995).

For more information on the tradition of anti-Lincoln sentiment in the U.S., see Don E. Fehrenbacher, “Anti-Lincoln Tradition,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 4:1 (1982) and John Barr, Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present (Louisiana State University Press, forthcoming, 2014).

Despite being nearly 90 years old, Ida Tarbell’s In the Footsteps of the Lincolns (New York, 1924) offers a fascinating look at early Lincoln tourism in Kentucky. For a more modern take, see Andrew Ferguson, Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America (New York, 2008).

For more on the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site, see the National Park Service Website. A detailed report on Kentucky’s Bicentennial Commission is also available.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 14.2 (Winter, 2014).

Anne Marshall is associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. She is the author of Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (2010).



The Regularly Irregular War

"William Clarke Quantrill: The Guerrilla Chief," photograph taken from a tin-type made at the beginning of the war, frontispiece, Quantrill and The Border Wars, William Elsey Connelley, Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1910).

Domestic Violation, Women, and Remembrance in Missouri’s Guerrilla Theater

The sound of gunfire cracked the morning silence. News that another Confederate partisan had been bushwhacked in a barnyard soon broke upon a funeral procession of women decked out in black. If not tended to quickly, the victim, dead or alive, would “be devoured by the hogs.” So the women, as Mrs. William H. Gregg recalled, abandoned the burial of one southerner “ruthlessly murdered by Federal soldiers” and set off to forestall another funeral. They kept vigil over the wounded man all night but he died the next day (27-28).

Even as early as 1861 (the year of the incident described by Mrs. Gregg), this sort of encounter with guerrilla violence on the homefront was becoming common in western Missouri. The banks of the Missouri River here were a stronghold for slaveholders, though they were a minority of the state’s population overall and were never quite able to maneuver Missouri out of the Union. In fact, a clear majority of Missourians who enlisted in the regular armies remained loyal to the Union when hostilities broke out. Within this bitterly divided environment, the unnamed victim in the barnyard could stand for any number of bushwhacked men from all across a state teeming with irregular combatants. Historians generally categorize irregular combatants by their connection to the official war efforts of the Union or the Confederacy. Along this continuum, “cavalry raiders” such John Hunt Morgan or Joseph O. Shelby and “partisan rangers” such as John Singleton Mosby are distinguished from other, less-formal groups of men known as “guerrillas.” Rather than enlisting in the Union or Confederate armies, these guerrillas operated largely outside the formal chain of command. They took to the bush and formed bands to fight the war on their own terms and turf. Guerrillas, irregulars, partisans, bushwhackers, and Jayhawkers (a moniker specifically designated for pro-Union guerrillas from Kansas who occasionally spilled over into Missouri) plied their trade most effectively in isolated settings and domestic locales; in choosing the targets of their violence they typically made few allowances for age, noncombatant status, or culpability. As a result, arson, theft, torture, rape, murder, and massacre became hallmarks of Missouri’s wartime experience.

Violence in Missouri’s guerrilla theater was local and personal. Neighbor turned upon neighbor to settle scores long simmering, and children and the elderly found themselves in the line of fire. Terror dismantled entire communities, uprooted families, and put hundreds of refugees on the road, hunting for safer ground in Arkansas and Texas. Such violence came with long-lasting social and emotional consequences, producing a unique texture of trauma in the region.

Historians have debated endlessly whether the Civil War was the first modern war or the last Napoleonic-style conflict, but they have rarely situated it within a larger history of irregular warfare.

Sixty years after her wartime ordeal, Mrs. Gregg and fellow members of the Missouri Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy researched, compiled, and published Reminiscences of the Women of Missouri During the Sixties. They did so because—despite the success of the UDC in fundraising, policing school curriculums, and constructing monuments—they felt that the wartime experiences of Missouri women were being overlooked. Following the war, as the editors of Reminiscences explained it, they had spent years helping to transform a cause lost, by way of much ink and marble, into the Lost Cause. But that movement, as typically conceived, was not (then as now) designed to accommodate and commemorate the experiences of women like Mrs. Gregg. Instead, the Lost Cause slanted strongly toward a male pantheon of Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Jefferson Davis. It honored the valor and sacrifice of enlisted men who went to war not for the institution of slavery but to defend states’ rights against northern aggressors. And it proudly lamented that the Confederacy succumbed only to overwhelming manpower and material resources on well-known eastern battlefields. These narratives left little room for burning homes, for women and children fighting and dying as irregular combatants while their men hid in the bush. The mainstream Lost Cause had little use for Missouri’s guerrilla experience and, as a result, the record of the Missouri Daughters’ own participation in it had been ignored.

Thus, post-war patterns of remembrance and commemoration in Missouri would not—indeed, could not—adhere to those prescribed by the rest of the South. Domestic violation was the cornerstone of guerrilla violence, and it constituted the “regular war” as many Missourians knew and understood it. Unlike the homes of southerners caught in the crossfire in the Eastern Theater, Missouri dwellings were the command centers, communication hubs, and supply depots in this conflict—and so they also became battlefields. Women were in charge at home while their husbands, fathers, and brothers were off fighting; their households were targeted and destroyed while still occupied, the ruins of irregular fortresses. Children, like their mothers, morphed into soldiers, messengers, and spies as their homes militarized around them. In publishing Reminiscences, the Daughters were attempting to catalog a new set of memorial tropes that could better convey the themes of domestic violation they had experienced in Missouri in the 1860s.

 

"William Clarke Quantrill: The Guerrilla Chief," photograph taken from a tin-type made at the beginning of the war, frontispiece, Quantrill and The Border Wars, William Elsey Connelley, Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1910).
“William Clarke Quantrill: The Guerrilla Chief,” photograph taken from a tin-type made at the beginning of the war, frontispiece, Quantrill and The Border Wars, William Elsey Connelley, Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1910).

Domestic Violation Hits Home

Historians have debated endlessly whether the Civil War was the first modern war or the last Napoleonic-style conflict, but they have rarely situated it within a larger history of irregular warfare. Such a focus reveals the degree to which homes themselves were the constitutive element of the conflict. In any war in which soldiers’ mobility is their primary asset, adversaries will often attack immobile targets: civic and industrial buildings, and homes. For Missouri’s women, the Civil War came to their doorsteps with full force, and it was this experience they hoped to highlight in Civil War memory and memorialization.

In the wake of a Jayhawker raid on Osceola, Missouri, Mrs. M. E. Lewis remembered how many individual homes were destroyed, though her family was considerably luckier than most. “We were very much afraid,” she wrote, “that our house would be burned or catch fire from flying shingles which were on fire from other houses, but it was saved” (55). Others weren’t so fortunate. One Missouri woman recalled how a group of “lawless men” committed thefts and murders in her neighborhood under the “guise” of the Home Guard. “Before committing depredations,” she wrote, “drinking was always resorted to.” Men would be called to their doors at night and shot down without warning: “on Sunday afternoon, these fiends started out and by Monday morning had murdered three innocent men in their homes surrounded by their families” (19). Similarly, Julia Kern recounted multiple deaths occurring around her household. Her uncle, who was blind in one eye, was snatched by Union soldiers. According to Kern, they gouged out his good eye and shot him dead; later, a different man was “found secreted in his mother’s house,” dragged out into her yard, and hanged in front of her (248-249). Still another woman remembered how throughout Missouri, “hostile bands” had set out “burning homes” of all who dared to “side with the South.” These men, she added, were not of the “regular” Union army, but “their deeds were winked at by those in authority” (124).

Guerrillas not only targeted individuals; they also destroyed or confiscated property and the materials of war. For instance, Martha Horne recalled when, in February 1862, “the Jayhawkers came, and hitching up our wagons with the few remaining horses that had not been taken by the Redlegs or the Federal militia, loaded in supplies that we had hauled out from Kansas City for our winter’s use, and took negroes, provision stores and all out to Lawrence.” Horne even alleged that the Kansas guerrillas “dug up young orchards close to the line and reset them in Kansas” and that they “mounted houses on wheels and hauled them over into Kansas” (42). Another Daughter remembered that “families suspected of having money on the premises or valuables concealed were in peculiar danger of being raided upon” during the war (126). But the memories of a different contributor revealed that a well-stocked household could very easily find itself under siege by guerrillas from both sides—regardless of reputation or allegiance. She recounted how her family’s “hospitality, sympathy, and larder as well, were taxed beyond their limit by first one side and then the other.” One night, a group of guerrillas under the command of William Quantrill arrived and ordered dinner. The men “laid their side arms upon the piano and proceeded to get busy.” Less than an hour after the Confederates left, another group of guerrillas, this time Unionists, showed up. “So they, too, laid their arms on the piano,” and ate everything left in the already depleted pantry (236-37).

The physical destruction of houses, provisions, and farms also broke families apart by separating members from the homes, spaces, and objects that bound them to one another. According to Mrs. J. A. Adcock, after guerrillas targeted her family’s home, her family was forced to sleep outside in the brush; once it became too cold, however, they had to abandon their homestead until the end of the war. When they returned, she reported, the entire area was “a desolate waste,” with only “now and then a lone chimney to tell the story of a fire.” She considered her family lucky that the walls of their two-room brick house still stood and provided some semblance of shelter. “The saddest feature of all this war,” Adcock concluded in her essay, “was the breaking up of families” because “not all members of families ever returned” (91-92). Another Missouri woman and her family “were forced by threats, almost daily house searchings, robbed of stock, food, clothing, jewelry, silver—in fact, anything in sight, to give up our dear old home, three miles out from Kansas City.” Even after they moved, the harassment from guerrillas continued. Eventually, the death of the woman’s brother shattered the family: “Our home was broken up, and we, as refugees, were scattered here and there over the state” (236). Domestic violation left permanent scars on the homes and families of women in Missouri’s guerrilla theater; these scars served as an equally permanent reminder of the wartime experience the Daughters sought to commemorate in Reminiscences.

 

"Bill Anderson," wood engraving, p. 316 in Quantrill and The Border Wars, William Elsey Connelley, Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1910).
“Bill Anderson,” wood engraving, p. 316 in Quantrill and The Border Wars, William Elsey Connelley, Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1910).

Women Gone Guerrilla

The ruination of individual homes and family units was simultaneously a cause and effect of the guerrilla activities of women themselves. In many cases, by refusing to stand by as victims or non-combatants, they brought further destruction down upon their families. Like women in Virginia or Georgia or Tennessee, those in Missouri watched over homes and farms both large and small while their men were away. They fed and clothed themselves and their children and occasionally managed slaves. But the wartime service of Missouri women was also different. Guerrilla warfare prompted these women to stand in for men in ways they hardly could have imagined before the war, and in ways they refused to forget when it was over.

In the guerrilla theater women were not just mothers, wives, or heads of households—they became commanders of family units, real-time diplomats, and even hostage negotiators. Rich Hill resident Mrs. N. M. Harris remembered a pro-Confederate Kansas City banker (whose name is redacted throughout her story) who abandoned his home in 1861 under pressure from local Unionists. The following autumn, the rest of the banker’s family was asleep when a “squad of noisy soldiers” burst through the door of their home. Now in charge of the household and its occupants, the banker’s wife was responsible for communicating with the soldiers and negotiating a resolution that would preserve her life, the lives of her children, and enough of the material goods they required to survive (214-16). Mrs. J. A. Adcock, just a child during the war, similarly recalled how her father’s association with Confederate guerrillas forced him to live in the woods. The move left her mother alone to deal with the angry Federal authorities and prowling Unionist guerrillas that had driven him away (91-92). The consequences of encounters gone awry or failed negotiations with guerrillas were deadly serious; Harris also wrote of a woman “whom Jennison shot for attempting to shield her husband, helpless from illness.” The unfortunate woman was reportedly “crippled for life” and never able to walk again without crutches (216).

When a male relative left home to join the irregular ranks, the guerrilla conflict inevitably found its way back to mothers, wives, and daughters, who functioned as his commissary while he was out fighting in the bush. Mrs. Tyler Floyd, for example, recollected a special mission she undertook to procure cloth, quinine, and morphine for Confederate irregulars. After driving into town—which was itself a dangerous affair—she hid the medicine and strips of fabric in her dress. When stopped by Federal troops, she successfully lied her way through their checkpoint and returned with her payload (105-107). According to the reminiscence of Mrs. S. E. Ulstick, Union authorities often commanded women “not to give food to southern soldiers or Bushwhackers under penalty of death.” Though a widow (her husband had actually died before the war), Ulstick recalled that her house was searched on seven occasions by “drunken Jayhawkers.” The invaders, she alleged, “frequently ran their bayonets through all the clothing in the wardrobe” and with “pistols cocked they asked questions, blowing their drunken breath in my face, cursing the most bitter oaths until I was so frightened I could not tell my name” (35-36). Ulstick and other women took on “the responsibility of getting supplies for their families,” a function that undoubtedly allowed their men and boys to survive in the bush (142). Thus the Jayhawkers were, in some sense, applying military pressure where they knew it would be most effective. They were Sherman’s troops before Sherman’s troops ever lit a match or marched to the sea, waging a war against political will by making households howl.

In addition to serving a crucial military function by acquiring supplies, women also acted as emergency medical crews, pallbearers, and undertakers. After guerrilla engagements women picked up the debris of the battlefield: supplies, weapons, and bodies. Mrs. S. E. Lewis remembered the September 1861 sack of Osceola, Missouri, in which Senator James H. Lane and a brigade of Jayhawkers swept through and burned much of the town in an attempt to flush out Confederate sympathizers. “They [Lane’s men] passed our house on horseback,” she wrote, “their guns glistening in the moonlight.” Rather suddenly, a skirmish broke out; the town’s guerrilla defenders let loose a “tremendous volley of musketry.” Both sides suffered casualties. But when the fighting had ceased and the guerrillas melted back into the brush, they left the wounded and the dead not in the care of a medical corps but in the hands of local women (54-55).

 

"Jesse James," wood engraving, p. 318 in Quantrill and The Border Wars, William Elsey Connelley, Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1910).
“Jesse James,” wood engraving, p. 318 in Quantrill and The Border Wars, William Elsey Connelley, Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1910).

Where virtually no boundary existed between domestic and military realms, the absence of men from the household created uniquely difficult and traumatic scenarios for women. They, along with their families, watched as men were hunted, shot down, and hanged in front doorways and yards. But whenever possible, they fought back. This resistance was not limited to supplying, caring for the wounded and dead, lying, smuggling, or even spying. From broom to ax to gun to shovel, from charm to venom, women wielded whatever weapons were available to them to defend their families and their homes. Mary Harrison Clagett, for example, described the ordeal of a woman in Callaway County, Missouri, who “stood with ax in hand ready to fell the first one that entered” when a detachment of Union soldiers “swooped down” on her home. The invaders treaded lightly because the woman “was ready for battle inside, armed not with a broom but a dangerous ax” (125-127). Furthermore, Martha F. Horne recalled the trouble that arose after her husband, home from the service, stored a large load of fresh corn in their crib. She saw Union militiamen “helping themselves to our corn without so much as saying ‘by your leave.'” Enraged, she “grabbed a hand ax and a few nails and rushed down, arriving after the men had made off, each with an armful of corn.” By the time a second gang arrived to plunder the corn, Horne had nailed the crib door shut. An officer informed her that he must break down the locked door. According to Horne, she “took a step toward him, drew back the ax over my shoulder and told him if he struck that lock I would brain him.” At that, the startled foragers took their leave and Horne went home sobbing (43-44). Far from helpless, women like these met irregular violence with irregular violence, and they recounted these acts quite proudly in their Reminiscences.

A Hard-Knock Life in Missouri

With their parents and homes so directly entrenched in Missouri’s guerrilla war, the conflict left very little room for children to do the things that children normally do. Homes were not safe places to play; they were not even a refuge to shield children from the traumas of the war. But these children did more than just witness hardships and tragedies. They were rousted from warm beds on snowy evenings and threatened with all forms of violence, from intimidation and theft to rape and decapitation. Thus, like their mothers and other grown relatives, youths in guerrilla-torn sectors of Missouri participated directly in the war in this region.

Age was clearly no guarantee of insulation from guerrilla warfare in Missouri. Children witnessed a breakdown of social and political order in which their mothers, fathers, grandparents, and neighbors were often assaulted and killed. Maggie Stonestreet English wrote that her “bitter memories will be cherished so long as one remains whose tender sensibilities were so grossly violated when all should have been gay and joyous to the free and careless heart of a child.” She then recounted that her “most painful childish memories were of officers searching the house for my father, who was secreted there.” Once her father had been driven into exile, the raids did not stop. Her family was robbed—even of a locket containing a dead child’s hair—and “the house was burned and the plantation devastated” (125). Another woman remembered a young girl awakened by guerrillas in the middle of the night. When she began to cry, one of the guerrillas went to the girl and “holding a saber against her face, told her if she uttered another sound he would cut her head off.” Other girls sleeping in the same home ran downstairs to investigate. “The outlaws,” the woman continued, “turned their attention to the girls” and “using insulting terms” searched them for valuables, “all the while singing ribald songs or telling obscene jokes.” Before leaving, the raiders forced “three of the girls into the yard and marched back and forth in the moonlight, making most vicious threats and insinuations” (214-15). Mrs. J. M. Thatcher was equally terrified one evening when raiders stormed into her house and even threw “their loaded guns across [her] baby’s cradle.” “A young lady,” she recalled, “dared not refuse to take a ride with officers, and one [such] young girl died three days afterwards with a dread secret untold” (250).

But children weren’t always just the victims of guerrilla war—they, too, frequently answered the call of irregular service. In these cases, children were trusted with vital intelligence about family members, put to work in home-fortresses, and when necessary, expected to bear arms when their houses came under siege. Ann C. Everett summoned memories of an afternoon on which she and her two small children had gone to spend time with a nearby neighbor. After visiting only a short while, they “heard the firing of guns and the whooping and yelling of men.” Looking toward her home, Everett “soon saw that it was surrounded by a company of Federal soldiers.” She ran to the house with her children and discovered that a trio of Confederates had been shot there and the Union officer in charge planned to leave them unburied as good “food for the hogs.” Everett and children, ages five and seven, endured a nightlong vigil over the corpses before burying them in the morning (132-35). Another contributor to Reminiscences, Kate S. Doneghy, told the tale of the night she was home alone with her six little boys, the oldest of whom was just eleven. “All at once,” she wrote, “there was a dash and crash” from the outside of the small house. Soon she found her home surrounded by Federal soldiers with “guns and bayonets at every window.” Doneghy answered the door with a baby on her hip and the men rushed inside with revolvers drawn. According to Doneghy, in front of six children, the Federal soldiers told her to get whatever she could out of the house before they torched it. Only the scene of a six-year-old boy trying to save the family Bible shamed them into stopping (186-87). Mary Harrison Clagett recalled guerrillas trying to burn down her house in the middle of the night. When their attempts failed, she prayed inside as they dragged her son, Irvin, out in only his nightclothes and abused him in the yard. Even less lucky was another boy memorialized in the collection who, already in poor health, was “driven from home by threats upon his life” and soon after died apart from his family (126-27). Perhaps more than other memories published in Reminiscences, the recollection of the violated innocence of children underscored how the guerrilla front produced a unique strain of remembrance.

Remembering the Unimaginable

Throughout the pages of Reminiscences, the Missouri Daughters painted the portrait of a war largely unrecognizable to their eastern counterparts. They described a conflict in which homefront violence involving women and children as primary combatants and casualties was commonplace. Missourians’ households were epicenters of traumas that most families had never before experienced or imagined. Residents of Missouri’s guerrilla theater lived and fought through a different kind of war—one that set them apart from other Southerners. By publishing their accounts, the Missouri Daughters were not simply trying to insert their own personal remembrances of the Civil War into the Lost Cause; rather, they produced new kinds of memorial narratives that sorted, categorized, and laid bare their unique wartime experiences. And when critics questioned their intentions, contributor Mrs. N. M. Harris responded with a simple question of her own: “Why? Isn’t this part of the history of the Civil War?” (214)

 

"Map of Lawrence at the Time of the Massacre," pp. 335-336, Quantrill and The Border Wars, William Elsey Connelley, Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1910). Click image to enlarge in new window.
“Map of Lawrence at the Time of the Massacre,” pp. 335-336, Quantrill and The Border Wars, William Elsey Connelley, Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1910). Click image to enlarge in new window.

Despite their compelling case, the sort of memorial shift that the Daughters envisioned inReminiscences—one that might balance their own experiences with the Lost Cause in a way that could provide some sort of commemorative closure—never really materialized in the South. Indeed, it never materialized even in Missouri. The idea of a war fought without heroic generals and major pitched battles, involving women and children and the unpleasant realities of bushwhacking, never gained institutional traction. To be sure, in the 1920s (and beyond), members of the Missouri Division of the UDC remained prominent as local historians and brokers of Confederate tradition. They helped manage the Confederate Veterans’ Home at Higginsville, Missouri; spearheaded educational programs for children; maintained Confederate graves; and even sent birthday cards to elderly former Rebels. But they were never able to successfully integrate their own experiences into the Lost Cause narratives they helped administrate and disseminate because, in those accounts, women are not damsels in distress or stoic army wives. Instead, they are full-fledged partisans of the guerrilla theater. These women, along with the trauma they endured and the “other” war they represented, were commemorative competitors with Confederate veterans. Thus, Reminiscences threatened the mainstream versions of the war that best suited rank-and-file Confederates everywhere.

Today the most familiar of Missouri’s guerrilla-based memory narratives revolve around large-scale massacres at Osceola (September 1861), Lawrence (August 1863), and Centralia (September 1864). These wartime atrocities involved larger-than-life guerrilla chiefs, massive casualty counts, and a bevy of witnesses who spread fantastic (and often erroneous) descriptions of the violence. Popular narratives also focused attention on Union general Thomas Ewing’s General Order No. 11, which forcibly evicted civilian residents of Jackson, Cass, Bates, and Vernon counties in an effort to stamp out support for Confederate guerrillas in August 1863. The massacres and Order No. 11 are the best-remembered scenes from Missouri’s guerrilla theater because they offer a quick, easily processed glimpse of irregular warfare. Through them, we see the major figures and functions of bushwhacking, but in a form that conveys many of the traits that make the public comfortable with the Civil War: political orders, larger battles, and famous (or infamous) commanders.

Not unlike other collective remembrances of the Civil War framed around Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Ulysses S. Grant, conventional accounts of Missouri’s Civil War history are male-dominated. The usual suspects include William C. Quantrill, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, Senator James Lane, Charles “Doc” Jennison, the Younger brothers, and the James boys, among others. These men are the state’s most prominent Civil War exports, and most Missourians have latched onto them and the narrative they represent. Even in the few cases where women of the Civil War generation have received memorial attention in the form of specified, permanent monuments, such recognition has typically come up well short of commemorating the roles played by women in guerrilla warfare. Consider a monument erected in 2009 in Cass County, Missouri, remembering the “Burnt District” created by Ewing’s General Order No. 11. The structure—a lone, stone chimney—and corresponding placards hint at the domestic nature of irregular warfare in Missouri. But the memorial commemorates the order itself and does not highlight women as actual combatants.

This commemorative “comfort zone” was recently exemplified by a digital reenactment, staged via Twitter, of the Lawrence (Kansas) Massacre on its sesquicentennial anniversary. Under the hashtag QR1863, enthusiasts spent hours on August 21, 2013, producing a minute-by-minute stream of messages designed to recreate William Quantrill’s raid on the city in real time. But while the “tweet-enactment” did include women in its reportage of the massacre (and scenarios in which they faced mortal danger from guerrillas), it failed to provide the context or back story through which women of the guerrilla theater were directly involved in both the staging and waging of irregular warfare. Nor did the reenactment underscore how fervently many women desired to be remembered as something other than the victims of a caricatured, intoxicated “Bloody Bill” Anderson prowling the streets of Lawrence for scalps, loot, and vengeance. Instead, they wanted to be remembered as primary actors—not extras—in the broader conflict to which the Lawrence Massacre belonged.

As we now know, such emphasis on massacres, orders, and leaders actually misrepresents much of the guerrilla war in Missouri. Quantrill, Anderson, and company were all very active players on the guerrilla front, no doubt, but isolating the flashiest exploits of a handful of notorious men tells us very little about guerrilla warfare, or about the daily traumas Missouri’s women and children experienced. Many contemporary Missourians with an interest in the Civil War legacy of their state do have a basic understanding of guerrilla warfare as a “different” type of wartime experience. The same can generally be said of Civil War buffs outside of Missouri. More often than not, however, even a cursory conception of just how hard the guerrilla experience hit the individual homes remains buried in the state’s postwar commemorative strata.

As a result, most Missourians—and Americans, it seems fair to say—are curiously content to recognize the irregular features of the guerrilla war and then to continue to approach its memory and commemoration from a conventional (Eastern, male) perspective. This is a serious problem. Because whether we agree with their original cause or not, the stories of these women and their memories of a war waged from, on, and upon their homes must be integrated into the wider narrative of Civil War memory and commemoration. Otherwise, we will fail to comprehend how regular such irregularities really were in Missouri, and why these women refused so doggedly to forget them.

Further Reading

On the wartime function and impact of guerrilla warfare in Missouri see Joseph M. Beilein, “Household War: Guerrilla-Men, Rebel Women, and Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri,” dissertation, University of Missouri, Columbia (May 2012); Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War (New York, 1989); Daniel Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003); Don R. Bowen, “Guerrilla War in Western Missouri: Historical Extensions of the Relative Deprivation Hypothesis,” Comparative Studies in History and Society 19:1 (January 1979): 30-51; Richard Brownlee, Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy: Guerrilla Warfare in the West, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge, La., 1958); Robert R. Mackey, The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861-1865 (Norman, Okla., 2005).

For specific treatments of women in Missouri’s guerrilla theater see Joseph M. Beilein, “The Guerrilla Shirt: A Labor of Love and the Style of Rebellion in Civil War Missouri,” Civil War History 58:2 (2012): 151-179; LeeAnn Whites, “Forty Shirts and a Wagonload of Wheat: Women, the Domestic Supply Line, and the Civil War on the Western Border,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1:1 (March 2011): 56-78.

On women and the Civil War experience more generally, see LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long, eds., Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009); Catherine Clinton, Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York, 1992); George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Champaign, Ill., 1991); Joan E. Cashin, The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War (Princeton, N.J., 2002).

For examinations of memory and the legacies of Missouri women and guerrillas see Matthew C. Hulbert, “Constructing Guerrilla Memory: John Newman Edwards and Missouri’s Irregular Lost Cause,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2:1 (March 2012): 58-81; Matthew C. Hulbert, “How to Remember ‘This Damnable Guerrilla Warfare’: Four Vignettes from Civil War Missouri,” Civil War History 59:2 (June 2013): 142-167; LeeAnn Whites, “The Tale of Three Kates: Outlaw Women, Loyalty, and Missouri’s Long Civil War” in Berry, ed., Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges (Athens, Ga., 2011): 73-94.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 14.2 (Winter, 2014).

Matthew C. Hulbert is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Georgia. His essays on the intersection of guerrilla warfare and social memory have appeared in Civil War History, Journal of the Civil War Era, and Journal of the West.



The American Revolution, the West Indies, and the Future of Plantation British America

Small Stock

The American Revolution was disruptive and challenging for plantation societies. Its most significant long-term effect was an artificial separation of the British Empire. The aftermath of the American Revolution saw the northern and southern sections of the pre-revolutionary British Empire separated, with the new United States of America intruding itself between Canada and the West Indian islands. The more significant shift was in plantation America. The natural links between slave societies in British America were broken, reducing the long-term ability of slave societies to unite against outside forces. Certainly, if the artificial split of the plantation colonies that occurred in 1776 had not happened, Union victory over the Confederate South in 1865 would conceivably have been much harder.

 

One lesson that British imperialists refused to learn from the American Revolution was that the prejudices of settler elites needed to be respected. That was not a policy that Britain adopted. The British Empire from the 1780s onward became more, not less, authoritarian and became ever more dependent upon metropolitan direction exercised tightly among a close group of initiates experienced in plantation affairs. Governors were unwilling to put up with any opposition from settlers who upheld the principles of local autonomy that led the residents of the Thirteen Colonies into revolt. Such imperial obstinacy proved especially problematic for West Indian planters. Britain acted less consultatively and less in the interests of West Indians after the American Revolution than before. In 1784, for example, against strong West Indian protests, they severed the West Indies economically from North America by insisting on recognizing the United States of America as a foreign nation whose ships should be banned from British ports. For the first time in the eighteenth century, and increasingly thereafter, West Indian lobbyists in London found themselves unable to get their way in West Indian policy matters. This diminished political influence, moreover, was combined with a British tendency to see West Indian planters less as gauche nouveau riches who brought material benefits to the Empire than as crude, cruel, sexually lascivious deviants. Metropolitan opinion saw West Indian planters as given to “mongrelisation” in their relations with black women. As a consequence, they were thought to be intellectually and morally bankrupt.

The representational image of the planter may have been based on that of the oriental pasha, but depictions of actual planters tended toward the pathetic rather than the tyrannical.

It was not economics but politics that was the real problem facing the West Indies after the American Revolution. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, Jamaican planters came under scrutiny (mostly unfavorable) as never before. Britons accepted the new principles of an imperialism that was beginning to bestride the globe but felt distinctly queasy about particular aspects of its commerce and governance. White West Indians were the first in a long line of Loyalists abandoned by Britain (the Northern Irish may have been the last). Beginning from 1783, British imperial officials showed repeated readiness to sacrifice colonial aspirations if such aspirations did not suit imperial aims. In short, Britain showed little respect for Loyalists after the American Revolution had finished and when Loyalists had become more of a problem than a resource.

The West Indian planter cut a sad figure from the late 1780s onward. The representational image of the planter may have been based on that of the oriental pasha, but depictions of actual planters tended toward the pathetic rather than the tyrannical. Planters were not seen as they saw themselves: British gentlemen, of upright character, firm morals, capable of moderation, self-restraint, and refined gentility. Rather, planters were seen through an Orientalist lens, a discourse predicated on a humoralist understanding of the malign effects that exchanging a temperate climate and lifestyle for a tropical way of life meant for Europeans. Planters were wealthy, but depictions of their wealth were undercut by representations of decadence and corruption coded as luxury, effeminacy, gluttony, racial degeneracy, or sexual hybridity.

Seeing the American Revolution in an Atlantic rather than an American perspective allows us to take the perspective that Samuel Johnson did on planter pretensions in 1775 when he expostulated on the irony of hearing yelps of liberty from the drivers of slaves. The American Revolution was a war fought by planters in part to protect, defend, and expand slavery. One of the fundamental rights that British American planters insisted upon was their right not only to own slaves; they also wanted to be able to determine within their own legislatures the laws under which their investment in slave property would be protected. The planters of the American South after 1787 largely succeeded in ring-fencing slavery from interference from outside forces, whether these forces were British imperial rulers or northern abolitionists. Some of the most important people in America were deeply invested in slavery and its continuation.

Not all of those people were slaveholders, but those who were insisted on protections for slavery, especially the right of slaveholders to police their slaves and the right to have runaway slaves returned to them from any part of the United States. As events turned out, slaveholders in the American South made the correct decision to rebel against Britain in order to protect their investment in slave property. William Lloyd Garrison was correct to see the new United States government as being founded on a pro-slavery constitution. The small gains that abolitionists made in the American North were surpassed by the gains slaveholders achieved in limiting the ability of a powerful centralized government to insist on the amelioration of slavery. France and Britain both insisted on the amelioration of slavery in the late 1780s. They then ended slavery by imperial decree—France in 1794 and Britain in 1833. Southern slaveholders were able to control the discourse over slavery, and were able to stop a powerful centralized state from interfering in their affairs. That strategy worked until southern planters decided to destroy themselves by seceding from the United States of America in 1861.

The greatest threat to slavery thus proved to be an assertive, self-confident imperial state with centralizing tendencies. Britain became such a state after 1788. It tried aggressively to reshape its empire in its own image, confident that Britain was the ideal model for any imperial society. West Indian planters found out to their cost how willing Britain was to interfere in matters that colonial people thought were their own business. The most important matter colonials believed they should control was how their slaves should be treated. Britons increasingly disagreed. Thus, West Indians were caught in a bind not of their own making. The republican tendencies of America appalled them. Their loyalty to the king remained a paramount political value. They could not join in the American republican experiment. But they became increasingly aware of how the American Revolution had encouraged Britons to traduce planters’ character in ways that diminished planters’ importance, whether the planters in question lived in America or in the West Indies. And they realized that many Britons wanted to end the institution of slavery, the institution that sustained West Indian prosperity.

West Indian planters also lamented how little influence they had in a radically reformed British Empire in which everyone was a subject and in which most subjects were not white. William Wilberforce and other abolitionists seemed to them madmen. West Indians thought abolition a mindless policy designed to destroy British prosperity, especially in the islands. But West Indians were in a dramatically weaker position after 1783 in an empire with relatively few slaveholders. Moreover, the increasing number of Britons who thought slavery wrong left West Indian planters unable to stop British “madness.” That madness, as they saw it, was to wreck a great economic system in which the sufferings of Africans no one needed to care about brought about an advance in the standard of living of white people everywhere. Thus, the American Revolution had important political consequences for the part of British America that did not join the rebellion in 1776. West Indians lost control of slavery, which was critically important to them. Meanwhile, their northern cousins—previously less powerful than the West Indians had been in imperial circles—increased their power over slavery, at least in the areas of the Americas where slavery was most important.

Further Reading

For treatments of the American Revolution in plantation societies, see David Brion Davis, “American Slavery and the American Revolution,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Urbana, Ill., 1983): 283-301 and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000). The British context is summarized in Stephen A. Conway, The British Isles and the War for American Independence (Oxford, 2000) and Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011). The declining public reputation of West Indian planters after the war is covered in Trevor Burnard, “Powerless Masters: The Curious Decline of Jamaican Sugar Planters in the Foundational Period of British Abolitionism,”Slavery & Abolition 32 (2011): 185-98 and Christer Petley, “Gluttony, excess, and the fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean,” Atlantic Studies 9 (2012): 85-106.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Trevor Burnard is professor and head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. With Gad Heuman, he co-edited the four-volume series Slavery: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies (Routledge, 2014).



Returning to the Puritans

As a professor in a law school, I should begin by stating that I am on record testifying that Professor Sacvan Bercovitch changed the course of my career. Here’s how. I met him in 1987, at the School for Criticism and Theory, then housed at Dartmouth College. I was in his class, centered on the American Jeremiad, and I found the experience a revelation, absolutely eye-opening. I’d been a trial lawyer for five years at that point, and a law professor for another seven. I was lonely and miserable in my chosen profession. I was at loose ends, a woman unbound, lost in the world-before-binders for my kind.

At the time there were very, very few women and virtually no women of color in legal academia. When I began teaching, I was one of six women of color teaching in law schools in the entire United States: four African Americans, one Latina, and one Asian American. Things were to change rapidly after that, but they hadn’t at that point.

Given all this, I had decided to go back to school and get a PhD in English in order to wipe the slate clean, start all over again, try something that wasn’t so seemingly completely and insurmountably an exclusive gentlemen’s network within an exclusively male preserve.

When this roundtable was originally organized, we were asked to consider whether there is still a place for synthetic, totalizing interpretations of what Bercovitch called “the meaning of America.” I don’t know.

Anyway, I loved Professor Bercovitch’s class, and not only because he was such a fabulous teacher. There was also the context of that moment in my own life, for I grew up in Boston, literally atop the bones of the Puritans and their dour inheritance. Boston, where in high school we had to read John Winthrop and John Cotton and Samuel Danforth. Now, if there’s anything that can make adolescence even more miserable than it is as a constitutional matter, it’s growing up in a world where, just beyond one’s window, the rest of the world was popping with joyous color, with Peter Max posters and rainbow coalitions, and music thrumming openheartedly to the strains of Miles Davis and the Rolling Stones and Nina Simone, and cultural fireworks like Haight Ashbury and the Freedom rides and women’s liberation, while you are stuck indoors with the Puritan divines.

So there I was, an earnest nerdy grind whose only popular recognition in tenth grade was being elected “most ladylike”— for that is the kind of reward one gets for being perpetually locked away in one’s room slogging through “Errand into the Wilderness.”

That’s how I came to be in Professor Bercovitch’s class, bitter and cheerless and, like Miranda in The Tempest, bracing myself both for, as well as against, this brave new world that had such literary people in’t. Yet, despite that dreary weight of expectation, I was electrified. To visit these Puritan texts anew, through adult eyes and under Professor Bercovitch’s tutelage, was a revelation. As a lawyer, I had never remarked on the jeremiads’ indelible shaping of legal argumentation. As an activist, I had never remarked on the jeremiads’ indelible shaping of the form of those most powerful speeches during the civil rights movement—and I mean, even the straightforward knock-you-over-the head stuff like Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It must seem obvious in retrospect, perhaps, but at the time it was all new.

When this roundtable was originally organized, we were asked to consider whether there is still a place for synthetic, totalizing interpretations of what Bercovitch called “the meaning of America.” I don’t know. But it’s not just his exposition of Americans’ Puritan rhetoric but also his critique of it that has given me the equipment to play with and against that singular American vocality, which extends most especially to legal discourse.

Without Professor Bercovitch’s transformative lens, I wonder if I’d have appreciated the peculiar covenantal appeal of Barack Obama’s clever play with the conventions of the immigrant narrative, back during the 2008 election. If you recall, Obama spoke of his immigrant father—not of a white European immigrant father who came to these shores in search of the American dream, but a Kenyan father, a black immigrant, who came to these shores in search of heaven on earth. And his “single mother” wasn’t the instant present-day consensus of must-be-a-black-woman, but an unexpected white single mother, more in the older tradition of Horatio Alger’s now-miscegenous legacy.

This calculated unsettling reorganization of racial tropes played havoc with political and media expectations, and—for at least a little while—there was a grace period of suspended stereotypification as Obama inscribed himself within a very mainstream narrative trajectory of political candidacy. People just didn’t know what to make of him—the finest example of such hand-wringing being then-Senator Joe Biden’s amazement that Obama was just so “clean and articulate.” It’s hard to remember that tremulous moment of suspended judgment for what it was, because it so quickly evaporated; and, ultimately, Obama was not just exoticized but rendered so familiarly alien that even his birth certificate hasn’t yet completely resolved the issue.

By the same token, cases like Citizens United have so vexed the notion of personhood that we find ourselves quivering in a world where expenditure of money is speech, and speech is the incarnation of puritan economy, and the very recognition of monetized speech becomes the equivalent of personhood incarnate. Without having had the benefit of Professor Bercovitch’s insights, I wonder if we’d fully appreciate the deep-rooted appeal of the Tea Party’s pandering, panicked eschatology of despair.

But there’s a more idiosyncratic dimension to my debt to Professor Bercovitch as well. Halfway through that summer of 1987, he gave us a homework assignment, to write an essay. For the life of me I can’t remember the topic of that assignment, but whatever it was, I was so inspired by it that I sat down and wrote an essay that changed the course of my career. My essay had nothing to do with Puritanism or jeremiads per se, so I think the assignment must have been more open-ended, something about persuasion or rhetorical form, or constructing a polemic in some broader sense. That piece of mine was entitled “On Being The Object of Property,” and it was a lamentation about chattel slavery and personhood. I wrote it quickly, in a single evening—it just came pouring out sparked by that homework assignment, a detailed answer to that question from Professor Bercovitch that now I cannot remember. It was an immensely satisfying project, and to this day I’m really proud of it; I still believe it’s far and away the best thing I’ve ever written.

To make a long story short, Professor Bercovitch liked that piece too, and sent it over to Harvard University Press, which asked me to render it into a book, which then became The Alchemy of Race and Rights, a publication that opened all kinds of other doors for me. So, weirdly enough, the book that I wrote as an escape hatch from the legal profession ended up drawing me back into it, as I became both hailed and assailed for being genre-busting, and quirky.

I’ve been wandering about academia ever since, always in search of that original inspiration—Sacvan Bercovitch’s inspiration. I have the answer, I keep telling myself. I just cannot quite remember the question ….

 

This article originally appeared in issue 14.4 (Summer, 2014).

Patricia Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School in New York.