On April 26, 1774, George Forster set out in a small boat together with his father Johann Reinhold Forster, Captain James Cook, and a few other travelers from Matavai Bay, Tahiti, to the neighboring bay of Pare in order to recover some waistcoats and blankets stolen from the captain. They beheld an astonishing sight: a fleet of Tahitian warships, finely crafted double canoes “from fifty to ninety feet long” that were held together by fifteen to eighteen transverse beams. George Forster counted at least 159 of these canoes and at least 144 rowers on the largest ships plus eight men to steer them. Towhah, the “admiral” of the fleet, wore a turban and had five long tails of green and yellow feathers, interspersed with red, streaming down his back. This fleet, representing one small district on the island, was assembled for a campaign against the neighboring island of Eimeo (Moorea). It was a rare moment of opportunity for capturing a Pacific island culture in writing: Cook was leading his second circumnavigation and from his previous voyage had some knowledge of Tahitian language and politics; Tahiti still showed off its full splendor, undiminished by European weapons and disease; and George Forster and his father were observers as skilled as any Europe could have sent to comment on the encounter. This was just one small incident in a journey that took the Forsters around the world. On their return the young traveler wrote an account of the voyage that memorialized its achievements and its moral ambiguities. In the annals of travel literature few books make for more satisfying reading than this richly detailed and reflective record of their experiences on this expedition, which was one of the crowning achievements of the European Enlightenment.

George Forster’s unusual upbringing suited him for the role of witness to this new world. His father, born in a small town near Danzig in 1729, received his secondary education in Frederick the Great’s Berlin, studied theology at the University of Halle, and served as a parish minister in the small town of Nassenhuben near Danzig, where his eldest son George (Johann George Adam) was born on November 27, 1754. The elder Forster was a restless intellectual. In March 1765 he left the ministry and went to Russia at the request of Catherine the Great to investigate the condition of the German peasants she had settled on the Volga River. In search of employment for his growing family he next went to England in 1766 and taught at Warrington Academy, a boys’ school and gathering place of radical Dissenters. George Forster grew up in radical Enlightenment circles, his education largely in the hands of his father, a virtuoso at everything from languages to science.

When Johann Reinhold was invited in mid-1772 to join Cook’s second voyage of discovery as its official naturalist, he accepted with the understanding that George would serve as his assistant. George was not yet eighteen when the Resolution, the flagship including the Forsters, and its companion ship the Adventure departed on July 13, 1772. An intellectual prodigy in his own right, he was imbued with Enlightenment ideas of humanity’s universal dignity and brotherhood. His intellectual powers were fully equal to the challenges of helping his father gather plant specimens and linguistic vocabularies. The emotional stress of the voyage was another matter. Johann Reinhold was a notoriously peevish man who was soon disliked by the sailors and even wore out the patience of the phlegmatic Cook, leaving George in the difficult role of onlooker and mediator. The sailors seriously shook George’s faith in human decency: their swearing, readiness to fire on natives, disrespect for his and his father’s work, and sexual excesses in places like Tahiti and New Zealand disturbed him as much as anything he observed among Pacific islanders. He was appalled to watch them insist on getting drunk on Christmas Day, 1773, while the ship was weaving its way through Antarctic ice floes, any one of which could have destroyed the ship: “As long as they had brandy left, they would persist to keep Christmas ‘like Christians,’ though the elements had conspired together for their destruction.” But he also sympathized with them as the victims of physical hardship and harsh command who for all their roughness were “brave, sincere, and true to each other.”

The expedition was supposed to sail as far as it could toward the South Pole, but Cook also had broad license to revisit known lands and seek out new ones in the South Pacific. George Forster was able to visit Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Easter Island, the Marquesas Islands, the Tongan Islands, and Vanuatu, to give only an incomplete list of the voyage stops. He argued in the introduction to his voyage account that a mere chronicle was meaningless; a narrative worthy of the name had to use its observations to test general principles. George made good on this proposition by looking for the natural goodness of man wherever he went; he was surprised again and again by the diversity of “natural” societies. The expedition visited Polynesian peoples from New Zealand to Easter Island, across a vast stretch of the Pacific, who shared a common culture and spoke related languages, yet had differing political institutions that George was particularly keen to fathom. 

Tahiti appeared at first to be an egalitarian society, a place of plentiful food and mutual respect, but on happening on an obese man of rank who was being stuffed with food by his servants and did not take the trouble to extend the usual Tahitian hospitality, George became aware that it was in fact highly hierarchical. Spinning out his philosophical reflections, he imagined a Tahitian historical cycle that went from rude simplicity and equality to aristocratic decadence ending in revolution. Marquesan Islanders, he remarked on the Resolution’s stay in mid-April 1774, could not compare with Tahitians for material possessions but kept closer to their original equality: “The great sources of Taheitian affluence and luxury, their profusion of food, and their vast variety and quantity of cloth, do not exist in the Marquesas: but the inhabitants have a competence; they are all equal among themselves; they are active, very healthy, and beautifully made; there is nothing which can make them unhappy, by debarring them the means of obeying nature’s voice.” Perhaps “nature’s voice” referred to the extravagant erotic culture of the Marquesas, but more likely the rather puritanical George had in mind a political point: his contrast of Tahitian luxury and Marquesan simplicity was a barely disguised attack on decadent aristocrats at home. To explain the differences between Tahitians and Marquesans he used materialist explanations that belittled privilege and preserved his belief in human goodness.

The voyage was a glorious success, and the Forsters did their work well, gathering materials for George’s narrative and for his father’s Observations Made During A Voyage Round the World (1778), which according to Richard Grove became an important model of natural history for scientists and colonial administrators. On their return to England in 1775, they should have been able to look forward to honor and material security. Instead Johann Reinhold quarreled with the voyage’s patron, the earl of Sandwich, until he was debarred from writing the official voyage account. The prohibition did not extend to George, however, who wrote away month after month in the hope that his account (probably written in collaboration with his father) would appear before Cook’s and rescue the family from financial ruin. A Voyage Round the World, first published in English in 1777, came to 675 pages of narrative in the complete edition of George Forster’s works. Robert L. Kahn, the volume editor, lists a German translation that appeared the next year and French, Russian, Swedish, and Spanish excerpts that appeared soon after. It turned out not to be the moneymaker that father and son counted on (for one thing it lacked pictures, whereas Cook’s rival volume had lavish, at times strange and beautiful engravings) but it did make them celebrities to educated Germans. George was awarded an academic job in Kassel in 1778, accepted a professorship in natural history at the University of Vilna in 1784, and finally took up a post as librarian to the elector of Mainz in 1788. He impressed rulers and intellectuals alike: Joseph II of Austria allowed George to dedicate a book to him; Catherine the Great of Russia offered him a professorship in St. Petersburg; the young Alexander von Humboldt made his journeyman voyage, so to speak, on a Rhineland tour with him. He broke with his tyrannical father and began an unhappy marriage to Therese Heyne, daughter of a powerful professor whose influence eased his career. 

After Forster’s return to Germany his views of non-European peoples became more detached from his travel experiences. By 1787, when he finished writing his essay on “Cook the Discoverer,” he had shifted from a warm defense of his former hosts and (as he imagined the relationship) friends on Pacific islands, whose spontaneous goodness and civility often surpassed that of Europeans, to a belief in the superiority of European ideals and institutions. Cook figures in this essay as the hero who combines courage and intelligence to bring enlightenment to the farthest reaches of the earth. Although well received at the time, it loses the tension between general principle and historical particularity of his travel narrative; instead a dogmatic application of principle prevails. A radicalization of his politics took place too, although this may have been a sudden conversion experience under the impact of revolutionary events. Forster was a respectable man of learning when the troops of the French Revolution spilled over into the Rhineland and occupied the territory of the elector of Mainz. By late 1792 he was an active revolutionary serving in France’s provisional government; on March 25, 1793, he left for Paris as a deputy of the revolutionary government. He was alone, disowned by his wife, his father, and most German intellectuals. Disheartened by the Terror, he died of a lung ailment in the French capital on January 10, 1794. 

Little remained of his reputation. While never forgotten, he represented a cosmopolitan, revolutionary Germany that was already becoming an embarrassment to his contemporaries. The rulers of the German states were horrified by the regicide and democratic revolution emanating from Paris, and after 1800 many German intellectuals, too, reacted to the revolutionary politics of their time by turning in a conservative, nationalist direction. In particular German literature and German history took shape in nineteenth-century universities as conservative disciplines that were unreceptive to a world traveler and political radical. George Forster’s revolutionary end made him appealing in the German Democratic Republic, where a critical edition of his works appeared; but only in recent years has there been a renewed appreciation of his significance as a global traveler and writer.

Further Reading:

For George Forster’s biography, Michael E. Hoare, The Tactless Philosopher: Johann Reinhold Forster (1729-98) (Melbourne, 1976) is the best starting point; it offers a vivid portrait of George Forster’s life as well as his father’s. Alfred Dove, “Georg Forster,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 7 (1877; Berlin, 1968): 172-81, is a sympathetic factual account; Ulrich Enzensberger, Georg Forster: Ein Leben in Scherben (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), contains a mosaic of sources and commentary that evoke this haunted, tragic life. For Forster’s voyage account, readers can turn to two outstanding editions. A Voyage Round the World, vol. 1 of Georg Forster, Werke, ed. Gerhard Steiner, (1777; Berlin, 1968), includes generous quotes from letters and reviews as well as a “History of the Work.” George Forster, A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, assist. Jennifer Newell, 2 vols. (Honolulu, 2002), includes commentary that sets it in the context of recent Pacific scholarship. Forster’s account can be compared with Cook’s observations in the richly informative edition, The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure, vol. 2 of The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, ed. J.C. Beaglehole, Hakluyt Society, extra series, 35 (Cambridge, 1961). Forster’s essay, “Cook der Entdecker,” is reprinted in his Werke, 5: Kleine Schriften zur Völker- und Länderkunde, ed. by Horst Fiedler, Klaus-Georg Popp, Annerose Schneider, and Christian Suckow (Berlin, 1985). For the ambivalent reception of George Forster’s work, see Helmut Peitsch, “Round-trips from the Inside to the Outside: The Changing Places of Georg Forster’s Travelogues in the German Literary Canon from 1797 to 1989,” Carleton Germanic Papers (Ottawa, Canada), 24 (1986): 17-35. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995), sets the Forsters in the wider context of European scientific and administrative analysis of overseas colonies.

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

Harry Liebersohn is the author of Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians (Cambridge, 1998). He will be a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin in 2006-07.

The Jeffersonian tradition and American philanthropy

“The earth belongs in usufruct to the living; . . . [and] the dead have neither powers nor rights over it,” proclaimed Thomas Jefferson in 1789. Jefferson’s claim is a radical one: the wealth and power of past generations should not determine present and future ones. To maintain democratic equality across generations, Jefferson argued, private fortunes must be broken up by eliminating primogeniture and entails or what we today call trusts and foundations. Otherwise a few individuals or institutions would over time amass sufficient wealth to lord it over ordinary citizens.

Warren Buffett’s recent decision to donate the bulk of his fortune, a whopping $30.7 billion, to the Gates Foundation (already the largest foundation in the world) asks us once again to consider Jefferson’s claims. The press has lauded both Gates’s and Buffett’s philanthropy. But Jefferson is spokesman for a rival American tradition that is wary of foundations’ potential to unduly influence democratic public life.

Given the combined wealth of Gates and Buffett, one can be confident that the Gates Foundation, governed by a small board of trustees, will have significant public influence. For those of us who support Gates’s current goal of alleviating global poverty and improving American education, this is good. Yet its private control should give us pause. What if the Gates Foundation’s trustees supported either ends or practices that we as a people find unethical or impolitic? Should such a powerful institution trump the public will?

Americans confronted these questions soon after the Revolution during the Dartmouth College controversy of 1816. While in monarchical England, incorporation had long been accepted as a legal privilege granted by the monarch to those who served the realm, following independence many Americans worried that corporations would enable the few to exercise monopolistic privileges not available to the many. In time, many Americans feared, corporations and trusts would become immortal private fiefdoms, the basis for a new aristocracy. Corporations, they concluded, must be made subordinate to the public will.

When New Hampshire put Jeffersonians in power, Governor William Plumer therefore sought to extend the people’s control over Dartmouth College, a corporate entity that had been controlled by rival Federalists. Jeffersonians worried that Federalists would use Dartmouth to inculcate the wrong ideals in the next generation.

As Plumer put it, a powerful institution governed with little public oversight is “against the spirit and genius of a free government.” Jefferson agreed. Protecting institutions from the government makes sense in a monarchy but “is most absurd” in a republic, he told Plumer. Wealthy institutions beyond government control would mean that “the earth belongs to the dead and not the living.”

Federalists went to court to maintain control over Dartmouth. When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Daniel Webster argued, “It will be dangerous, a most dangerous experiment to hold these institutions subject to the rise and fall of popular parties, and the fluctuations of political opinions.” If corporate charters could be altered whenever a new party rose to power, “colleges and halls will be deserted by better spirits, and become a theatre for the contention of politics.” In other words, corporations serve the common good because they are not subject to the voters’ whims. The court sided with Webster in its 1819 Dartmouth College ruling. The Constitution, the court declared, protects private institutions even when their activities are at odds with the goals of elected leaders.

Jeffersonians lost the battle against Dartmouth, but they continued the war. Many southern states repealed the long-standing Elizabethan statute for charitable uses, effectively limiting the power of trusts and charities in the South. In the 1820s New York Democrats regulated the amount of property charitable trusts could hold, placed their activities under the supervision of the state regents, limited what testators could leave to charity, and prohibited bequests to unincorporated charities. All of these measures were meant to ensure that citizens had the ultimate say over what institutions could exist in New York.

In Massachusetts, Democratic governor Marcus Morton condemned endowed institutions in 1840 as “a kind of mortmain inconsistent with the spirit of our laws and the genius of our government.” He accused businessmen of using endowments “for the purpose of holding and managing property” rather than serving the public good. Morton’s accusation was fair. Massachusetts’s business elite routinely donated money to private institutions, including Harvard College, and then invested the funds themselves, often in the service of their own commercial interests.

Even as Democrats condemned powerful private institutions in the name of equality, the most prescient nineteenth-century observer of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, applauded those institutions. Tocqueville argued in Democracy in America that private institutions preserve freedom by protecting minorities from the “tyranny of the majority.” The Democrats’ Whig opponents agreed. When Democrats criticized Harvard for failing to serve the common good, its president responded that colleges have a “duty to yield nothing to any temporary excitement, nothing to the desire of popularity, nothing to the mere hope of increasing the numbers in a seminary, nothing to any vain imagination of possessing more wisdom than the Author of the human mind.” Large endowments preserved freedom precisely because they insulated minorities from overzealous majorities.

The debate over the relationship between private institutions and popular democracy continued through the nineteenth century. When the New York State Supreme Court ruled in the late nineteenth century that state law prohibits testators from donating for undesignated purposes, overturning Governor Samuel J. Tilden’s decision to leave a large part of his estate to charity, state legislators repealed the limits imposed by their Jacksonian predecessors, paving the way for the new and much larger foundations established by Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Established at a time when some Americans were criticizing the inequalities generated by laissez-faire capitalism, Carnegie and Rockefeller’s activities raised anew concerns about the relationship between private money and public power.

These concerns came to a head following Congress’s creation of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations in August 1912. Chaired by populist Democrat Frank Walsh, the commission’s charge was to investigate the sources of often bloody industrial strife that plagued the country. Dissenting from the majority of the commissioners, the populist Walsh argued that foundations help capitalists sustain their power “through the creation of enormous privately managed funds for indefinite purposes.” John D. Rockefeller’s money derived from “the exploitation of American workers” and rightly belongs “to the American people.” Foundations, Walsh concluded, allow rich families to insulate their wealth from taxes controlled by the people’s representatives. By limiting government’s intake they effectively enhance private power at public expense.

As critics condemned the ties between Gilded Age money and philanthropy, foundations addressed social and economic problems that the political system would not or chose not to address. Foundations even funded the salaries of government officials in experimental programs. To critics, the close ties between foundations and government confirmed the dangers that Jefferson had foreseen. Even as many New Deal Democrats emerged from foundation-funded social science projects and private universities, the party worked to curb philanthropic power by prohibiting tax-exempt foundations from lobbying government.

Debates over the public influence of private foundations arose again during the McCarthy era when populist conservatives accused foundations of supporting communism. And even though Congress’s Cox Committee absolved foundations of wrongdoing, Republican representative Carroll Reece organized a new committee, warning Americans that “large foundations have a tremendous influence on the intellectual and educational life of our country.” Among the committee’s targets were Carnegie and Rockefeller funded foundations, the former for funding Gunnar Myrdal’s research on race and the latter for supporting Alfred Kinsley’s on human sexuality.

Reece’s report never attracted much attention, but in 1959, when Congress proposed liberalizing tax provisions for foundations, a minority criticized these policies for further shifting the tax burden from the rich to the middle class. Responding to such concerns, Texas congressman Wright Patman initiated a series of influential investigations on foundations.

By the time Congress took up the issue of foundations’ tax privileges as part of the Tax Reform Act of 1969, it was clear that the Democrat Patman had pulled some powerful members of his party into the anti-foundation camp. Senator Al Gore Sr., for example, proposed to limit all foundations to a forty-year lifespan. Gore’s proposal was supported in the Senate Finance Committee but defeated on the floor. Nonetheless, the Patman faction carried enough political weight to make the 1969 Tax Reform Act a serious blow to private philanthropy. The act limited tax benefits for donations to foundations, imposed a tax on foundations’ investments, and prohibited foundations from engaging in partisan political activity. The last clause reflects Americans’ ongoing Jeffersonian desire to separate private wealth from public power.

Across America today the scope and scale of private donations are growing—what Stanley N. Katz calls “the new philanthropic math.” Foundations have been responsible for much good. They encourage innovation, promote knowledge that may be unpopular, and protect minority viewpoints. But the Jeffersonian tradition reminds us that concentrated wealth often translates into political power. Nowhere is this more clear than in public universities. Jefferson considered the University of Virginia to be one of his crowning achievements because it was a public institution controlled by and serving the people. Today many public universities are becoming more reliant upon private donors and are, in turn, freeing themselves from dependence on state funds. With this financial shift has come a political shift, as these institutions are less and less beholden to state legislatures and government oversight boards. The scales seem to be tipping away from Jefferson and towards Tocqueville.

We need not question Gates’s or Buffett’s altruism to worry about the growing influence of private philanthropy in higher education and elsewhere. Instead we must constantly keep the scales balanced between Jefferson and Tocqueville in order to benefit from private philanthropy while limiting its dangers. If the new philanthropic math has enhanced foundations’ power to levels we find alarming, we can erect clearer legal parameters around their activities. But there is a better solution. Public institutions, especially in higher education, have turned to private donations to compensate for declining public spending. There is growing pressure for private money even at the K-12 level. Reasserting public control over our institutions may therefore require a renewed public commitment to supporting them. Private philanthropy relies on untaxed wealth, but we might tax more of it in order to gain control over how it is spent. By enhancing the common wealth, Americans can reinvigorate the public element of their public institutions. Doing so would ensure that citizens, not a few wealthy individuals or foundations, determine their future.

Further Reading:

For historical overviews of the development of American philanthropy see Peter Dobkin Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations (Baltimore, 1992); Judith Sealander, Private Wealth and Public Life: Foundation Philanthropy and the Reshaping of American Social Policy from the Progressive Era to the New Deal(Baltimore, 1997); and David Hammack’s essay in Kenneth Prewitt, Mattei Dogan, Steven Heydemann, and Stefan Toepler, eds., The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations: United States and European Perspectives (New York, 2006). Sealander not only documents the relationship between private money and the American government but evaluates where and how private spending made a political difference.

Discussions of the recent growth of private philanthropy and some of its benefits and dangers can be found in Joel Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World (New York, 2007); Stanley N. Katz, “The New Philanthropic Math,” The Chronicle [of Higher Education] Review53:22 (Feb. 2, 2007): B6; Leslie Lenkowsky, “The Wealth Explosion: Big Philanthropy,” The Wilson Quarterly (Winter 2007); and Kathleen McCarthy, “Anonymous Donor: A New Era of Wealthy Foundations Demands a New Era of Transparency,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (Winter 2007).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.4 (July, 2007).

Johann N. Neem is assistant professor of history at Western Washington University. He is completing his manuscript, “Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts.”

The invention of an American place 

I remember a Monticello of my childhood, though I have never been there. fields of lush green; the Rotunda, a fresh whiteness; and a mood of bucolic serenity, a feel of quietness and slow time. I don’t know where this impression came from. I had seen pictures of Monticello in books and on television, and I knew Jefferson—or rather, he was an emblem of my boyhood. But this is not enough to account for my Monticello: a place without history, almost without a past, and peopleless. The last, in particular, never seemed strange to me, though it does now. Not once did I imagine the house and the fields as anything but empty. Perhaps people would have spoiled the view and brought with them noise, bustle—the world—which was just what my Monticello locked out. Even today, this sense of the place lingers in me. It has survived its clash with real history of the place as I’ve come to know it. It is one of those vague and powerful notions that survive any contact with reality. And so as I read about the place and see the many different forms it has taken, those other Monticellos compete and meld with mine.

Most Westerners take for granted the value of historical sites, the notion they should be preserved as “heritage.” And yet we forget the idea is a recent one; its wide acceptance blinds us to its newness, its strangeness. True—even the ancient world had its travelers in search of relics, its pilgrims to the tombs of great men. But our sense of the past, which insists on protecting the things of a lost world precisely because it no longer exists, is a different thing altogether.

Not until the end of the nineteenth century did people begin to think that Monticello, as a historical place, should be preserved in something like its “original state.” After Jefferson’s death, it was sold in 1832 to James T. Barclay for seven thousand dollars. In sight of the Rotunda and its classical columns, in the fields where the author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States had taken his walks, this man planned to grow silkworms. The scheme failed. In 1836, Uriah P. Levy, an admirer of Jefferson and the first Jewish commodore in the U.S. Navy, bought the house and its two hundred and eighteen acres for $2,700.

It is easy to forget that the people who bought and sold Jefferson’s home in the 1830s were his contemporaries. The man—and the place—had not yet been hallowed by history, by distance in the past. There were people alive who had seen Jefferson in the flesh, who had shaken his hand, who knew his faults. The sage of Monticello had not yet become a god.

Nevertheless, even in these early years there were visitors to Monticello who came because Jefferson had lived there. In 1832, Philadelphia lawyer and architect John H. B. Latrobe wrote of the “utter ruin and desolation” of the house and grounds but also of the “lingering” presence of Jefferson: something he felt would lure visitors to the place as long as “the history of America…[has] an influence on the conduct of its people.”

Latrobe’s association of person with place makes his view of Monticello well ahead of its times. This is perhaps not surprising given who he was. In addition to having a personal connection to Jefferson—his father, the Philadelphia architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, worked for the Jefferson administration and assisted the former president with the design of the University of Virginia—Latrobe was also a gifted landscape painter and architect. 

In 1862, thirty years after Latrobe’s visit, the will of Uriah P. Levy did leave Monticello to the nation but not as a monument to an important man in American history. Instead, the place was to become a school for the orphan children of naval warrant officers. (It is possible Jefferson would have approved. But then, he was vain and maybe would have preferred the pristine shrine of today.) The plan never went ahead because the Confederate government sold Monticello in 1864 as “alien property.”

Alien property was a strange thing to call the home of one of Virginia’s favorite sons, even if the Richmond government, ever desperate for money, was keen to raise cash by disposing of the properties of Northerners like Levy. After Union victory, the government—again ignoring the wishes expressed in Uriah P. Levy’s will—restored the property to the Levy family, and it once more became a private home. The Monticello of the twentieth century, a place fit only for a memorial and museum, was not yet a reality in the American imagination. Instead, visitors to the place before the 1880s were more inspired by the view from the mountain, by the natural beauty of the scene. Reverend Stephen Higginson Tyng, writing in 1840, talked about the “glory” of Blue Ridge as seen from the house, a vision that spurred him to offer “homage to the great being” who could create such a sight.

Tyng was not even an admirer of Jefferson. He disapproved of his “atheism”—the reference to “the great being” was actually a dig—and was pleased to report not only that “[Jefferson’s] influence has passed away” but that his name was spoken with “little respect, and much aversion…in this very neighbourhood in which he lived and died.”

Tyng’s sense of Monticello, particularly the notion that its natural beauty offered proof of the deity’s presence, reflects the influence of Romantic conceptions of landscape. But over time, it would be another set of Romantic ideas—those about place and history and the relation between them—that would form the background to the “invention” of the modern Monticello. (Interestingly, my own image of the place, formed as a child in inner-city Sydney in the 1990s, is closer to that of Tyng and other early observers than to the later, more “historical” Monticello.)

From the 1880s, perceptions of Monticello change dramatically. While visitors continue to admire the natural beauty of the estate, it is Jefferson’s presence that really excites them. The members of the Jefferson Club of St. Louis, on a visit in 1902, were “impressed by the sublimity of the scene…the disappearing mists of the morning, across valleys of rolling farm land to other mountains.” But beneath this sentiment lay “an even deeper feeling of standing on the ground forever rendered sacred by the life and deeds, the death and dust of one who had been the greatest benefactor of mankind…[a] man who died there only to live forever in a Nation’s life…”

Certainly, the members of the Jefferson Club were far from typical. Some, perhaps most, Americans had no doubt never heard of Monticello, and of those who had, few would likely have used the grand word “sacred” to describe it. Nevertheless, the club’s choice of words is interesting: where previous visitors to Monticello talked mostly about the landscape, now it is the memory of Jefferson’s “life and deeds” and his place in the “Nation’s life” that are important. American nationalism was slowly building a new Monticello. 

In 1853, fifty years earlier, Benson Lossing had still seen in the place “only the empty offerings of laudable curiosity.” Lossing was writing for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, a popular periodical with a large readership; his view may not have been unusual. What is harder to believe for a contemporary is what Lossing did for a living: the man was a historian.

Clearly, times had changed by the turn of the century. Other motives, besides an interest in history, lay behind the St. Louis pilgrimage. The club was a Democratic group; its politics were Progressive and opposed to the administration of Republican president William McKinley. In 1897, just five years before the club’s visit, William Jennings Bryan, the great Populist and Democratic presidential candidate, had been the first public figure since the Civil War to call for Monticello to be publicly owned (this had, of course, been the wish of Uriah P. Levy from the beginning). Ironically, this call gave rise to a movement to wrest control of Monticello from Uriah P. Levy’s descendants. In the same year as the St. Louis club’s pilgrimage, former Democratic congressman A. J. Cummings wrote an article about the Levys’ ownership entitled “A National Humiliation.”

It is not surprising that Democrats, now beholden to an at times openly anti-Semitic populist movement, would object to the Levys’ ownership of what was becoming a national shrine. When it was Jewish bankers who allegedly crucified America’s agrarian heartland on Bryan’s “cross of gold,” how could the former home of America’s greatest agrarian champion remain in Jewish hands? Similar sentiments swirled around the question of Monticello’s ownership until the Levys sold the property in 1923.

In 1912, the wife of a former Democratic congressman, Maud Littleton, testified before Congress about the need for Monticello to be publicly owned. Having been invited by the Levys to inspect the estate, Littleton returned the favor by lamenting that at Monticello, she “did not get the feeling of being in the house Thomas Jefferson loved and built and made sacred…Jefferson seemed detached from Monticello…It seemed to me that the people of the United States should own Monticello…that it should be furnished as much like Mr. Jefferson had it as possible.” 

Not once in her testimony did Littleton mention the landscape—the view from the mountaintop, which had so taken nearly all the visitors who came before her. For Littleton, all the value of Monticello is in its historical associations; the place will not be whole until the Levys are turned out and the house is rebuilt to look just as it did in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.

This is a long way from Benson Lossing, writing over fifty years before and seeing only “curiosity” in Monticello itself. And yet Lossing was a professional historian, while Littleton was not. Nevertheless, hers was the more sensitive—if not necessarily the deeper—sense of history. In the period between 1853 and 1912, a historical profession, inspired by German ideas of craft and scholarship, had grown up in American universities. At the same time, there emerged a more popular interest in the past. Maud Littleton’s Monticello—a place very like the austere, World Heritage-listed monument of today—belongs firmly to this time in American history. 

Despite all the fuss, Monticello never did become publicly owned. Littleton’s campaign only drew from Congress a joint resolution declaring Monticello “the Mecca of all lovers of liberty” and noting a petition, signed by “thousands of patriotic American citizens,” which complained about the Levys barring the public from the house. 

The meaning of this failure is far from clear. Mount Vernon, Washington’s home, had been a house museum since before the Civil War (albeit under the ownership not of the public but of the fantastically named Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union). Did this mean Jefferson and Monticello did not have as important a place in the American imagination? Maybe—but there could have been other reasons why Congress failed to vote the money. Mount Vernon had been bought in 1858; by the 1900s, buying up a large estate in Virginia was far more difficult and costly. But perhaps most important, Jennings Bryan and Littleton—and, by association, Jefferson and Monticello—were closely linked with the Democrats; in the years of the campaign to buy Monticello, Congress was controlled by the Republicans. 

When the Levys finally gave in and sold the place, it was not to the federal government but to a private group called the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. According to a supporter, the foundation was “an organization of patriotic citizens who…[have] worked to see Monticello a national shrine. Its purpose is to…restore it to the condition in which Jefferson knew it.”

May Sarton was not the sort of person usually associated with American nationalism. She was a lyric and confessional poet and a lesbian. Her most famous work was a novel about McCarthyism. And yet, in 1948, she wrote this about Monticello:

This legendary house, this dear enchanted tomb,
Once so supremely lived in, and for life designed,
Will none of moldy death nor give it room,
Charged with the presence of a living mind. 

The time must come when, from the people’s heart,
Government grows to meet the stature of a man,
And freedom finds its form, that great unruly art,
And the state is a house designed by Jefferson.

There are a number of motifs here. First, Sarton appeals to something like the sense of place experienced by the members of the St. Louis Jefferson Club. They too saw eternity at Monticello: for them, it was “forever rendered sacred” by Jefferson’s life; for Sarton, it will have “none of moldy death.” Like the bucolic, Romantic Monticello, this Monticello owes a great deal to the traditions of Western—and especially English—literature. Shakespeare and Shelly, in the same scheme of rhyming couplets used by Sarton, wrote about how love, verses, or monuments can survive the death of the people who made them. 

Like Littleton though, Sarton did not see in Monticello a pastoral scene. Not once does she mention the grounds or landscape. Instead, Sarton brought something new: a sense of Monticello as an architectural wonder, a beautiful house in itself. By 1948, the foundation had restored the place, and the “ruin” seen by earlier visitors was gone. Sarton could now speak of a structure “[e]legant, various, magnificent—and plain”: as good as a description yet written of the neoclassical façade.

Like Littleton and the members of the St. Louis club, Sarton admired Jefferson. But her Monticello was more complicated than theirs. (An interesting question: had Sarton actually been to Monticello, or was hers, like mine, an entirely imagined place?) The last stanza of the poem suggests the America she knew had not lived up to Jefferson’s dream: “the time” she speaks of, when “government grows to meet the stature of a man,” has not yet come.

In the year Sarton wrote these lines, President Truman referred to the United States as “the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon.” He had reason to boast: America was the richest nation in the history of the world, she had just won a World War, and her armies occupied Western Europe and Japan. Nevertheless, Sarton did not share in the sense of triumphant satisfaction. Unlike the people who made Jefferson’s home a national shrine, she saw the place as something of a reproach. Using Monticello as a metaphor for perfect construction, Sarton suggests that Jefferson’s other dream, America, has not fulfilled the design of its original architects (the poem would perhaps have been even better if Sarton had known that Monticello, far from being finished at Jefferson’s death, was very much a work-in-progress). 

Another complicated vision of Monticello is found in a kind of prose poem published in 2003. It is both a short story and a nonfiction reflective piece, with the narration going back and forth in time between a contemporary tour of Monticello and imaginary scenes from the life of the plantation’s slaves. The piece was published in Callaloo, a journal produced by Johns Hopkins University for African and African-American writers. The author was Vesper Osborne, a black woman, and for her, the beauty of Monticello was only for “Jefferson and the white family”; for the slave, “Monticello was only an invisible cage.” Nevertheless, Osborne’s conception of the meaning of Monticello is far from one sided. Despite the “reality of slavery,” the place also represents “the ideal of a free democracy,” and the “sorrow” of its history coincides with a “majestic, elegant” façade. 

Osborne’s piece reflects a movement of recent years, which, though it may not have tarnished Monticello as a national monument, has at least made its place in the American imagination more ambiguous. Certainly, Osborne is hardly a “popular” writer, and her work was probably read by only a handful of Americans. But the story of Sally Hemmings has become part of popular culture since a DNA test in 1998 proved the descendents of Hemmings had Jefferson blood in their veins. A best-selling book—Sally Hemmings: A Novel—has been made into a telemovie starring New Zealander Sam Neil as Jefferson.

In neither the novel nor Osborne’s prose poem is Jefferson portrayed as a bad man. Rather, he is seen as a flawed human being imprisoned by the assumptions of his time. Jefferson knows slavery is wrong and that by owning slaves he violates his declared principles; but he cannot bring himself to free them. In its way, this split-minded character of the potboiler and daytime television is actually more historical than the glass-museum figure admired by Maud Littleton. The irony is that it was a growing popular interest in the past that helped make Monticello a shrine in the first place; now, nearly a hundred years later, it has made it more complicated, more difficult, and more interesting.

Since the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation bought Monticello in 1923, a whole Jefferson industry has grown up around the estate and the nearby University of Virginia in Charlottesville. There is a post called the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at UVA, now occupied by Peter Onuf. The foundation itself has a Website devoted to Monticello, where the viewer can take virtual tours of the house. They also sell Monticello-themed mugs, t-shirts, and action figures and release their own newsletter, called, imaginatively, Monticello. In 2004, the trustees of the foundation announced a new initiative called “Jefferson Lives: A Campaign for Monticello in the Twenty-First Century.” The aim of this initiative—achieved—was to raise $100 million in a little under a year.

Obviously, the finances of Monticello have not suffered under private ownership. The foundation also does its best to spread a certain image of the place in the public sphere. One of its offerings, a photographic portrait done in a lush coffee-table edition, had its introduction written by David McCullough and its blurb by Ken Burns.

In 2003, something very interesting happened: the U.S. Treasury took Monticello off the reverse side of the nickel. This was not meant as an anti-Jefferson slight; his profile had been on the obverse side and a picture of Monticello on the reverse side since 1938. The new coins—which celebrated the bicentennial of the Jefferson-sponsored Lewis and Clark expedition—would be minted for only two years, after which a newly designed Jefferson/Monticello coin would be created. Nevertheless, people complained. Congressman Eric I. Cantor, with the support of the Virginia delegation in the House, proposed legislation specifying that the five-cent coin “shall bear an image of Monticello.” Cantor also released a press statement saying that keeping Monticello on the coin was necessary to ensure that “our heritage as Americans and Virginians is accurately represented.”

It is hard to say if there was any real “public outrage” behind this effort. The president of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, certain that Monticello would return to the coin in 2006, was “totally supportive” of the Treasury Department’s actions. Most likely, the majority of Americans never heard of the battle and failed to notice the new coins when, despite the protests, they came into circulation the next year. 

Nevertheless, the fight—and the agreement by all parties that Monticello would ultimately stay on the coin—says something. Jefferson’s old home remains one of America’s public places. Though different, its image is as vital as it was in 1938. Today, Monticello is back on the coin, a symbol of the hidden presence of history itself in daily life; for when millions of Americans buy and sell things each day, the house of Jefferson passes through their fingers, whether they see it or not. 

Postscript

In 1956, President Sukarno of Indonesia, a Muslim, made a trip to Monticello. According to a report in the New York Times, he described his visit as “a pilgrimage” and referred to Jefferson as his “great teacher.”

It is hard to say what all this meant. Publicly owned or not, Monticello had been established after the 1920s as one of America’s national monuments. Sukarno’s visit may have been sincere, proof of Monticello’s fame abroad, at least amongst the educated elites of certain countries. But it may also have been mere form and ceremony, a ploy to curry favor with a powerful ally. In 1956, the height of the Cold War, Sukarno’s government was dependent on the United States for money and arms. Nevertheless, the mere fact of the visit says something: the Indonesian wanted to make a statement in America, and he felt Monticello was the place to do it. 

Further Reading: 

Merrill Peterson’s Visitors to Monticello (Charlottesville, Va., 1989), an edited collection of eyewitness accounts, contains extracts from the writings of Latrobe, Tyng, Lossing, Littleton, and others. Patricia West’s Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums (Washington, D.C., 1999) explores the general topic of the growth of antiquarianism and its connections with the party politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marc Leepson’s Saving Monticello (Richmond, Va., 2003) offers a thorough and generally fair account of the efforts to make Monticello publicly owned. 

For general material on the history of Monticello—or to apply for the position open in “cultural property protection” (dead presidents need security too)—see the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation’s lushly produced Website. On the infinite, and infinitely interesting, subject of the growth of historical consciousness in America, see the musings of John Lukacs in his A New Republic (New Haven, 2004). For an introduction to the whole question of place, its meaning in history, and the evolution of the way in which humans relate to the natural and nonnatural worlds, see Simon Schama’s rambling, often frustrating, but occasionally brilliant epic, Landscape and Memory (London, 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.4 (July, 2008).

Jack Sexton is a writer and historian. He lives in Sydney.

Reading eighteenth-century novels in company with the American revolutionaries

“What would the founders have thought?”

It’s a favorite question for constitutional lawyers, legal scholars, and politicians, and it can be a crowd-pleasing parlor trick for legal historians: take a modern-day controversy, feed it into the chattering machine of late-eighteenth-century opinion, and see what comes out. Uncertain what to think about international agreements? See George Washington’s Farewell Address: “[S]teer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Frustrated by government inaction? Consider Thomas Jefferson’s injunction: “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” Feminism? Abigail Adams to John Adams: “Remember the Ladies.” Whatever the topic, the generation of Americans responsible for the Revolution, Declaration of Independence, and Constitution seems to have an answer. The situation calls to mind Adam Gopnik’s description of the place of Alexis de Tocqueville in modern political commentary: “There is no bore like a Tocqueville bore, no game quite so easy to play as the game of saying that Tocqueville saw it all before it happened.” No game quite so easy, that is, except for the game of attributing superhuman perception and wisdom to the founders.

But, as even these few examples demonstrate, there is no single answer to the question of what the founders would have thought. Washington, Jefferson, Adams (Abigail or John)—all have a clear claim on membership in the founders’ club, and yet divining a unitary opinion from their writings on law, politics, economics, or society is an impossible task. The thoughts are too disparate, the lives too long, the situations encountered during those lives too varied and messy to support firm conclusions about what even this relatively small group of individuals thought about their own time, let alone ours. Instead, we are thrown back onto specifics: how Washington’s youthful service as an officer of the British Empire colored his perception of international conflict; how Jefferson’s reactions to the French Revolution influenced his views on the partisan conflict of the early American republic; how the Adamses’ shared Puritan background helped to shape their intellectual partnership. In other words, we leave the domain of retrospective prediction and enter the realm of history.

If the outputs of the founding generation are speculative and subject to debate, perhaps the better, more concrete questions to ask concern the inputs. In order to begin to answer the lawyer’s question of what the founders thought about a given issue, we need first to answer the historian’s question of how personal stories, beliefs, and external social and political conditions combined to create those thoughts. The founders were not simply producers of theory; they were avid consumers of words and ideas. And those ideas came not only from the political tracts and works of philosophy that we typically envision Jefferson, John Adams, and their contemporaries reading but also from fiction. Along with their Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, late-eighteenth-century Americans read novels—lots of them—although few, if any, of those novels were the work of American authors.

This search for the sometimes-overlooked literary grist that helped feed the founding generation’s intellectual mill led my colleague Jake Gersen and me to attempt a pedagogical experiment in early 2007. With a dozen law students, we would read a selection of novels that members of the founding generation had read. Fortunately for us, the University of Chicago Law School offers a forum for classes that might seem unorthodox in comparison to the usual legal curriculum: Greenberg Seminars, in which pairs of faculty members lead small groups of students in a series of discussions held at the professors’ homes. Our seminar, The Founders’ Fiction, promised students an opportunity to “read the novels that the founders read with an eye toward better understanding the literary backdrop against which they crafted their legal and political analysis,” as the course description put it.

The description was largely aspirational, since Jake and I hoped the novels would yield insights into the founders’ thought but had little sense going into the seminar of what those insights would be. But that was the fun of it: the seminar would be a shared scholarly enterprise between the students and us. In contrast to the closely controlled Socratic method used in many law-school classes, in which (ideally) the professor leads students from the specific facts of a given case to general legal principles by constantly challenging the students’ efforts to articulate those principles, this seminar would ask open-ended questions. Does literature matter to politics and law? The very premise of the seminar suggested that the answer to this question is yes. But how does it matter? And, more precisely, how did literature matter to late-eighteenth-century American politics and law? We didn’t know what the answer to this question would be—an exhilarating, if ever so slightly worrisome, position for any teacher.

The first order of business was to select the novels. To guide us in the process, and to ensure that the books we chose were ones that the founders had read, we turned to a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to his prospective brother-in-law, Robert Skipwith, in August 1771. Skipwith had asked Jefferson to provide a list of books that would be the basis of his library. “I would have them suited to the capacity of a common reader who understands but little of the classicks and who has not leisure for any intricate or tedious study,” Skipwith wrote to Jefferson. “Let them be improving as well as amusing.”

In response to Skipwith’s request, Jefferson drafted a list comprising 148 titles, which he broke down into nine groups: “Fine Arts”; “Criticism on the Fine Arts”; “Politicks, Trade”; “Religion”; “Law”; “History, Antient”; “History, Modern”; “Natural Philosophy, Natural History &c.”; and “Miscellaneous.” Of these categories, the most numerous by far was “Fine Arts,” which included seventy-five titles, among them plays by dramatists such as Molière and Dryden as well as the poetry of Homer, Virgil, and Pope. Having exceeded Skipwith’s proposed budget of “about five and twenty pounds sterling, or if you think proper … thirty pounds” by some seventy pounds, the biblio-generous Jefferson excused the inclusiveness of his list by saying he “could by no means satisfy myself with any partial choice I could make” and that he had therefore “framed such a general collection as I think you would wish and might in time find convenient to procure.”

Most striking to modern eyes is the prominence of fiction on the list. More than a third of the books listed under “Fine Arts” are works of fiction. All are by European authors. They include classics that are still read today, such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Chaucer’s Canturbury Tales, as well as less familiar works more likely to be found on the syllabus of a course on eighteenth-century English literature than on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, such as Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle and Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. Along with the works of philosophy and law that one would expect to see on a founder’s reading list (Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England), Jefferson’s list made the case that a gentleman’s library ought to include literary fiction. “[T]he entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant,” Jefferson wrote to Skipwith. “[E]verything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue.”

Suppressing the temptation to assign one of the list’s more obscure novels (would the students really be able to track down copies of John Langhorne’s Solyman & Almena: An Oriental Tale?), Jake and I chose four works from among Jefferson’s recommendations: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield; and the sensational duo of 1740s literary London, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and its parody Shamela, by Henry Fielding.

The text for the first meeting of the seminar was Tristram Shandy—the longest and arguably the most influential of our selections. We began the session by distributing copies of Jefferson’s book list and the accompanying letter to Skipwith. When the students expressed surprise at how much of the list was devoted to fiction, we knew we were off to a promising start, especially given the frequency with which the phrase “I don’t read fiction” is uttered in law schools. Our theory of the seminar, we explained, was that by reading novels the founders had read, we might be able to trace some influences for the ideas everyone discusses in law school, using a different body of primary sources from those on which such discussions tend to focus. And perhaps as important would be the experience of reading the books—of sitting in a group, lawyers and soon-to-be lawyers all, reading eighteenth-century literature—and so in some way drawing closer to the “bourgeois public sphere” that the philosopher Jürgen Habermas describes as mediating, in the early modern period, between the public realm of the state and the private realm of the household. True, we were professors and students sitting in a pizza-box-strewn living room in Chicago, rather than pamphleteers and political operatives meeting in a drafty coffeehouse in Chancery Lane. But by reading some of the same books that those people read, we hoped to flesh out our picture of their world.

Our discussion of Tristram Shandy began with the evidence: statements by eighteenth-century Americans demonstrating familiarity with the book. Sterne’s works were popular in British North America, so much so that references to them peppered contemporary letters. Writing to Abigail in 1777, John Adams described one of his fellow delegates to the Continental Congress as “as droll and funny as Tristram Shandy.” New York congressman James Duane took a slightly randier Shandyan tone in a 1778 letter to General Philip Schuyler, with an allusion to the war wound suffered by Tristram’s Uncle Toby, the subject of much speculation by that veteran’s paramour, the Widow Wadman. “General [Benedict] Arnold is mending,” Duane wrote. “His Leg resembles Uncle Toby’s Groin. I heard two Ladies of our Acquaintance in deep debate about this same wounded leg. They were as much perplexed as the Widow Wadman.” Perhaps the most famous early republican reference to Tristram Shandy is Aaron Burr’s rumination late in life upon a scene in which the same Uncle Toby releases a fly rather than killing it: “Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”

For each of the four novels, we searched for contemporary citations to open that session’s conversation. None seemed to have been as frequently mentioned in the founders’ writings as the riotous Tristram Shandy. Yet Goldsmith’s novel was certainly read in the learned Adams household, for John Quincy Adams described his mother’s family—and her clergyman father—as “furnish[ing] ample materials for another Vicar of Wakefield.”

The bulk of the seminar’s discussion centered on themes that Jake and I or the students had drawn out of the novels. Always conscious of the perils of drawing causal links between literature and politics, we urged the students to think about each theme as one among many ideas circulating in late-eighteenth-century America, rather than as an explanation for any specific political or legal development. The students threw themselves into the discussion with relish, trading favorite passages from the books and making quips about Walter Shandy’s quest to assemble a “Tristapaedia” to guide his son’s education, Pamela/Shamela’s relationship with the rakish Mr. B, and the serial woes of the well-meaning Primrose family. They were initially struck by the degree to which American literature of the founding period was part of a larger Atlantic literary culture, an insight that challenged the tale of early-American exceptionalism that continues to haunt many law-school casebooks. Other themes that recurred in our discussions included the importance and omnipresence of text—both political and literary—in early America; the question of authority, whether through the family or through the state; social hierarchies and their destabilization; the pastoral ideal of the countryside as a place of virtue; and the connection between the values of reason associated with the Enlightenment and the values of feeling associated with romanticism.

So, after four evenings of conversation and takeout food spread over the course of the winter and spring quarters, what did we learn? The novels contained no obvious answers to the question of what the founders thought. What they did offer, however, was a strong argument against domesticating the founders as tame geniuses in period dress or cozily all-knowing sages who saw it all before it happened. Reading the founders’ fiction allowed our group of twenty-first-century lawyers and proto-lawyers to encounter the essential strangeness of the eighteenth century. As the historian and philosopher Quentin Skinner puts it, “It is the very fact that the classic texts are concerned with their own quite alien problems, and not the presumption that they are somehow concerned with our own problems as well, which seems to me to give not the lie but the key to the indispensable value of studying the history of ideas.” Such classic texts “help to reveal—if we let them—not the essential sameness, but rather the essential variety of viable moral assumptions and political commitments.” In other words, it is alienness, not sameness, that makes the study of ideas valuable.

The alienness of the past, the specificity of historically contextual assumptions and commitments, the crucial importance of the particular and the individual—these are some of the lessons that fiction offers. For lawyers, these lessons are vital antidotes to the flattening out of context and specificity that sometimes accompanies the study of doctrine and the quest to develop the optimal rule for a given case. The fact that this lesson comes from the founders’ own milieu is somewhat ironic, for all too often appeals to the founders lose sight of the gulf between words, concepts, and meanings, then and now. It all seems so familiar when one reads the writings of Jefferson, Adams, and their peers; after all, we are still living in their republic. Yet, as Skinner notes, “whenever it is claimed that the point of the historical study of such questions is that we may learn directly from the answers, it will be found that what counts as an answer will usually look, in a different culture or period, so different in itself that it can hardly be in the least useful even to go on thinking of the relevant questions as being ‘the same’ in the required sense at all.”

Perhaps the principal lesson to draw from reading novels that the founders read is that many of the founders were humanists who valued literature, in addition to political scientists who delighted in building models of government. Jefferson is thus an ideal exemplar of this late-eighteenth-century blend of the humanistic interest in the particular with the scientific zeal for the general. The same Jefferson who collected mastodon bones in an effort to disprove European assertions of America’s biological inferiority also accompanied his list of recommended reading with a defense of fiction as a tool for developing what he termed “the moral feelings.” Fiction, Jefferson claimed, could serve as a tool for cultivating a virtuous citizenry. To Skipwith, Jefferson wrote, “I appeal to every reader of feeling and sentiment whether the fictitious murther of Duncan by Macbeth in Shakespeare does not excite in him as great a horror of villainy, as the real one of Henry IV by Ravaillac as related by Davila?” As literary scholar Douglas L. Wilson has noted, Jefferson’s insistence in his letter to Skipwith on fiction’s power to elicit “the sympathetic emotion of virtue” borrowed heavily from the writings of the Scottish jurist and philosopher Lord Kames, especially Kames’s Elements of Criticism. Moreover, Jefferson’s arguments find a powerful modern analogue in the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s call to conceive of “the literary imagination as a public imagination” with the power to “steer judges in their judging, legislators in their legislating, policy makers in measuring the quality of life of people near and far.”

The lessons we took from reading the founders’ fiction were pleasingly fuzzy and not explicitly law-related—no startling revelations that Sterne believed in checks and balances or that Goldsmith had strong opinions about gun rights. If what the founders thought about a given issue matters at all for modern law and politics, then so also must the sources of that thought. The lawyer’s questions, then, are incomplete without the historian’s answers.

Further Reading:

Jefferson’s remarks and booklist can be found in Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, N.J., 1950): vol. 1, 76-81. On Jefferson’s library, see Douglas L. Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson’s Library and the Skipwith List,” Harvard Literary Bulletin, n.s. 3 (1992-93): 56-72. Habermas’s discussion of the bourgeois public sphere can be found in Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, 1991). For Skinner’s remarks, see Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, N.J., 1989): 66-67. Nussbaum’s discussion of the literary imagination can be found in Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston, 1995): 3; for additional discussion, see Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York, 1990). On literature and print culture in the early republic, see David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997) and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, 2006). For Gopnik’s discussion of Tocqueville, see Adam Gopnik, “The Habit of Democracy,” New Yorker (October 15, 2001): 10. For one version of Burr’s musing about the fly, see Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 2004): 722.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

Alison L. LaCroix is assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School. She recently completed a book on the history of American federalism.

Reading early American books

In their introduction to this issue of Common-place, the editors ask why early American books have remained unread outside university English departments, even as nonfiction studies of Revolutionary and early U.S. history and biography have achieved extraordinary popular success. Scholars of early American literature sometimes gaze wistfully at best-selling biographies and award-winning miniseries and wish that some of that limelight would fall on our texts. We’d like others to share our pleasure in early American texts and to appreciate the insights they offer into American culture, or at least to know that American literature begins before The Scarlet Letter. But many early American texts are reaching audiences outside the academy—audiences of religious readers, for whom the texts remain current and spiritually compelling.

Religious presses have long been reprinting texts by early American writers, including both Puritans and Quakers. Amazon.com offers several paperback editions of Jonathan Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, along with one edition for Kindle and three editions of John Woolman’s Journal (fig. 1). On January 12, 2008, three editions of Sinners were ranked around 250,000, and three editions of Woolman’s Journal were ranked in the top 100,000 items, with one at 52,845. Amazon’s sales figures suggest that these editions are reaching readers, and at least some such texts seem to be having an impact. A recent profile of New Calvinist minister Mark Driscoll in the New York Times Magazine reported that “paperback reprints of old Puritan treatises in the corner of a local bookstore piqued [Driscoll’s] interest in Reformation theology.”

Scholars of early America have long drawn on religious publications for our work; before online digital collections, religious presses’ facsimile reprints of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts were the most affordable and available editions of the texts we study. But we’ve generally not viewed pious readers as indicators of early American literature’s popularity, in part because religious editions often encourage readers to emulate their authors and adopt their beliefs. For example, John H. Gerstner’s introduction to Thomas Shepard’s Parable of the Ten Virgins exhorts:

Reader, beware! The Puritans are never “light” reading. However, Edwards is relatively easy alongside Shepard in the Parable … This work is valuable in inverse proportion to its readability. Don’t read it! Study it; a few pages at a time; decipher it. Live with it. Die with it. It may not save you, but it will leave you in no doubt if you are saved and even less if you are not …

If that’s not worth $29.95, I don’t know what is!

Gerstner offers the book as an aid to spiritual self-knowledge and perhaps even salvation. In our classrooms, we take a very different approach. I often find myself reassuring students that I have no interest in preparing them for Christ’s coming or even in advocating Puritanism, Quakerism, or Deism. And I discourage students who want to judge whose faith is truest, explaining that although we’re interested in how various religious beliefs shaped the texts we’re reading, we aren’t taking sides.

But such claims aren’t entirely honest. While I don’t ask students to assess whether Anne Bradstreet’s or Thomas Shepard’s beliefs are closer to their own, early Americanists do often have allegiances to authors and texts. Perry Miller’s essays on covenant theology and preparationist soteriology reveal impatience bordering on affront with these encroachments on pure Calvinism, perhaps surprising in a scholar who referred to himself as a “goddam atheist.” And in a 1986 lecture that influenced my approach to Puritan texts, when Janice Knight distinguished between the “Spiritual Brethren” and the “Intellectual Fathers” of Puritanism, she called the Spiritual Brethren “my guys.”

Such allegiances enliven and shape our scholarship and our teaching. My own entanglement in Puritan texts emerged from a sense of connection with Anne Hutchinson and from frustration with accounts that seemed to trivialize Hutchinson’s concerns by treating theological issues as secondary. Scholars of Quakerism seem more comfortable acknowledging links between their faith and their scholarship. In his introduction to The Tendering Presence: Essays on John Woolman (2003), Mike Heller praises the collected essays as models of “dispassionate research” by scholars whose “lives also are touched personally and spiritually by Woolman’s writings” (xi). The collection includes a section titled “Scholars Who Became Disciples,” and biographies of several contributors refer to their membership in the Society of Friends. Of course, not all scholars who work in Quaker studies are Friends, and not all Puritanists take sides. But many readers have strong personal responses to early American texts.

Jonathan Edwards, for example, grabs hold of some readers. While most people who learn that I’m an early Americanist assume that I work on The Scarlet Letter, every so often someone says instead, “Oh, Jonathan Edwards?” and then quotes with great relish from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. My friend David even quoted Edwards at length in a lay sermon he delivered on Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath before Yom Kippur. When I asked him later why he had chosen to discuss Sinners—hardly an orthodox text in our fairly traditional synagogue—he explained that he had studied Edwards with Richard Slotkin at Wesleyan University. A former music major who now works in finance, David remembered several course texts favorably, including “Indian stuff,” sermons, Franklin’s Autobiography, and Melville. But he had returned only to Edwards’s sermon, not as the Christian reader envisioned by Protestant presses, but as an observant Jew who rejects many of Edwards’s fundamental assumptions. While David’s sermon challenged Edwards’s view of repentance, reading Sinners nevertheless made a meaningful connection for him. David found Edwards’s visceral appeal and sense of immediacy relevant to his own community; they spoke to his sense “that not everything is optional, and that the synagogue is not the time to take the academic view of God and religion. Particularly, shabbat shuvah is a good time for a ‘spider over the pit of hell’ kind of speech. I was less discussing him [than] I was adopting his view of the world.” While this explanation surprised me, I suspect that many of our students make similar connections as they wrestle with early American texts and that the texts affect readers in ways we don’t anticipate.

Susanna Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple has provoked intense responses from surprisingly diverse readers since its 1791 publication. Published in more than two hundred editions, Rowson’s novel is, in Cathy Davidson’s words, “one of America’s … all-time bestsellers” (159). Rowson specifically addresses young women (“Oh my dear girls—for to such only am I writing”), but her readers have included aggressively masculine men as well (29). One such reader was Reverend C. H. Covell, a sailor-turned-minister who placed Charlotte Temple at the center of his narrative of sea adventure and spiritual transformation. Indeed, the surprising account that appeared in the March 1906 Springfield Republican claimed that Covell “really owes his life to the book.”

In 1844, having deserted a whaling ship commanded by an abusive captain, Covell found himself stranded at Port Ottoway in Patagonia. Several of his companions starved to death and another “lost his mind,” but fortunately Charlotte Temple intervened by catalyzing the conversion of another sea captain, William A. Brown, commander of the Peruvian. Captain Brown was “one of those harsh unfeeling men that were found in such large numbers in command at that time.” But finding Charlotte Temple among the “promiscuous” reading material on board, Captain Brown was transformed by it. As he read, “The two characters of Montraville and LaRue grew more and more detestable as they revealed themselves to his awakened conscience. He began to question himself: ‘What prevents me from being just as base and as treacherous as they are pictured to be? Why, there is nothing but a pardoning Savior. I am as bad as they are. I have ill-treated my crew, and driven them to suicide; lashed them in the rigging and flogged them upon their bare backs to gratify my violent temper.’” Inspired to pray, “Capt. Brown became a changed man from that time,” reforming both self and ship:

no longer profanity and abuse to be used by his officers upon the sailors, no unnecessary labor upon the Lord’s day, not even standing of mast-heads, which is considered one of the most essential duties on board a whale ship; prayer meetings in the cabin to which all the crew were invited, but none compelled (and here I want to say that the crew numbered 30 men), not a Christian aboard when they sailed from home, but before the close of the voyage 27 of that crew were living true and honest lives. This great change was begun and wrought by one man, who was led to see his condition by reading the story of “Charlotte Temple,” which turned his attention to the book of books for salvation.

Covell credits Charlotte Temple with twenty-eight sailor-converts, along with wondrous material success. For despite Brown’s resolution to do “no unnecessary work … on Sunday, … no lowering of boats even if whales were seen, … he carried into New London the largest cargo of sperm oil ever carried in the same length of time.”

Moreover, while sailing for home, the transformed Captain Brown experienced a recurring vision, seeing “men suffering” in the gulf of Penas “just as plainly as though they were standing before him.” After two days without food or sleep, Captain Brown described his visions to the worried first mate and confessed his fear that they would drive him “crazy.” First mate Howe proposed a detour to the bay, but Brown worried that the men would think he was “losing [his] mind, or … growing childish.” Howe nevertheless approached the crew and explained the captain’s predicament, and they responded “with one accord, … ‘Whatever the captain wants to do, do it. We are willing.’” At Port Ottoway, they found and rescued Covell’s party. Covell’s account concludes, “I have given the bare facts, without detail, of what took place in a man’s life, the beginning of which was reading of the story of ‘Charlotte Temple.’ Blessings on his memory. All names and descriptions are real, no fiction. I am one of the rescued.”

A century later, Rowson’s novel continues to move readers in surprising ways. One afternoon in 2005, a student entered my office and proclaimed dramatically, “Charlotte Temple saved me.” How, you may ask (as did I). My student replied that she had been shopping when an older man approached her. As she began to feel uneasy, the man asked for her phone number. And then, she explained, “I heard Susanna Rowson in my head saying, ‘be assured, it is now past the days of romance: no woman can be run away with contrary to her own inclination’” (29). She walked away, relieved and feeling that Rowson’s guidance remained timely and relevant two centuries after Charlotte Temple’s publication.

Charlotte Temple is also inscribed in the New York landscape, in the form of a grave marked “Charlotte Temple” in Trinity Churchyard (fig. 2). During the nineteenth century, the gravesite was the “Most Popular Spot in Trinity Churchyard,” with almost daily visitors “in good weather.” Who, if anyone, is actually buried there is unclear, as parish records were destroyed by fires in 1750 and 1776. Some accounts suggest that the stone marks the grave of Charlotte Stanley, a young woman seduced by Rowson’s cousin, who may have been the model for Charlotte Temple. According to this theory, “After Mrs. Rowson told her story and all the readers began to visit the grave, the arms of Stanley and the name were removed from the tomb and the name of Temple substituted.”

In 1897, Henry Tyler offered a more skeptical account, interpreting the empty rectangle on the stone as evidence “that a former inscription was effaced and cut out, or else that … a memorial plate of metal, [was] subsequently removed.” The fire of 1776 left Trinity Churchyard “a waste of ruins,” and gravestones were moved during the reconstruction of the church from 1839 to 1846. “Among the waifs and strays was the brownstone slab,” Tyler explained, rhetorically associating the gravestone itself with poor Charlotte. “The metal memorial tablet having been lost or stolen, … some workman, or perhaps some sentimentally inclined parishioner in charge of the work of restoration, conceived the idea of filling in the blank with the fiction-name of Charlotte Temple.” Tyler conceded that this theory was “but a conjecture,” and predicted that “‘Charlotte Temple’s grave’ [would] not cease to attract gentle footsteps along the winding path, and bid them pause for her memory’s sake.” Despite his skepticism, Tyler did not mock such pilgrims: “None need think their sympathy wasted; for alas! there were only too many Charlotte Temples in fact if there was not one who bore the name.”

When my students saw photos of the gravestone, they were fascinated and decided to visit. A New York City transit strike delayed their outing until July, when one student organized a post-graduation field trip. Without believing that this grave held poor (fictional) Charlotte’s actual remains, my students approached the grave with respect for whoever might be buried there and with a powerful sense of connection to generations of readers who have visited the site (fig. 3).

After visiting the Charlotte Temple grave, we explored the rest of the churchyard. At Alexander Hamilton’s grave, we found a woman who was taking photographs and strewing white rose petals (fig. 4). She announced that it was the anniversary of Hamilton’s 1804 duel with Aaron Burr. “Isn’t it sad?” she asked. As I had never actually grieved over the duel, I paused to consider her question. 

She became impatient. “Do you know what happened? Don’t you know who he was?” she pressed. “Yes,” I replied and then asked what she was doing. She explained that she had learned about Hamilton in high school and had found his story so compelling that she has brought flowers to Hamilton’s grave annually ever since.

After we wandered away, my students asked me, “How could she ask if you knew who he was? Didn’t she know who you are?” I was touched by their exaggerated sense of my fame. (“Who do you think I am?” I asked gently.) And when they commented on the photographer’s eccentricity, I pointed out that we were the ones visiting the fake grave of a fictional character. Of course, my students were not misled by the name carved on the gravestone; they were fascinated by the way Charlotte Temple had engaged its readers and had come to be embodied in this physical site (and others—Tyler describes “at least three places in the city where it has been ‘always’ said that Charlotte Temple lived, or died”). Hamilton’s eccentric admirer offered an opportunity to reflect on the power of early American texts (and figures) to stir unexpected fascinations. Both in her case and in ours, the impulse to visit the churchyard reflected our sense that these eighteenth-century figures (whether real or fictional) were somehow connected to us.

Students’ connections to early American texts—whether to the spiritual message of Jonathan Edwards, the character of Charlotte Temple, or the generations of readers who have read the same texts—are often powerful and thought provoking. A few years ago, a student writing her senior thesis on Abigail Adams faced both personal and technological challenges, and emailed me to request an extension. Her subject line was “I ask myself: What would Abigail Adams do?” I asked her recently about this subject line and described the questions this special issue of Common-place would raise. While she acknowledged that “early American texts aren’t traditional beach reads,” especially since many readers think of “reading anything from even before the twentieth century . . . as hard work,” she insisted on the payoff: “But once one gets through that difficult layer of establishing how the language flows” and how to interpret “all the structural stuff of period literature—I think the opinions and beliefs and experiences that can be understood from the early American texts become … some of the most unique, special, intimate content for someone like me, at my age, as an American, to be engaged with. It’s just most of us are too lazy to approach that first layer!”

My student’s use of the word “intimate” struck me as apt. The readers I’ve discussed here—Reverend Driscoll, my friend David, Captain Brown, my students, even Alexander Hamilton’s flower-strewing admirer—all experienced intimate connections with early American texts. And having connected with these texts, these readers stepped back to reflect on the implications of those connections for their lives and for their understandings of the world.

Part of me still wants to see early American literature occupying the space of David McCullough’s John Adams—the best-seller list, HBO, the Golden Globes, and the carry-on bags of American travelers. I’d like to see the books I love to read and teach more widely enjoyed, even by those to whom they have not been assigned. I want them to be read not only with pleasure but also forpleasure.

But it’s more important to me that early American texts find readers like those I’ve described. Because beyond the pleasures early American texts offer, I also believe that they offer rich and complex understandings of American culture, politics, media, and religion. I want readers to feel connected to these writers and these texts—even as I understand that their connections may be on different terms than mine. But I also hope that they will reflect on those connections, that they will be provoked to think about parallels and distinctions between early America and the present, and that they will be inspired to learn more.

In short, I’d like to receive more emails like the one sent by former student Risa Garza last fall. Risa commented on the connection she perceived between the thesis she’d submitted the previous year and the 2008 presidential election. “On a side note, Governor Palin makes my need to return to Phillis Wheatley even more urgent. Seems like Palin would break the glass ceiling while crushing women’s lib underfoot; it’s really quite an accomplishment.” I was delighted by Risa’s sense that poetry and politics, Wheatley and Palin, political frustration and scholarly work are all connected. Who needs a Golden Globe?

Further Reading:

John Gerstner’s exhortation is found in his introduction to Thomas Shepard’s The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied (1660; reprint London, 1695; reprint Boston, 1852; reprint Ligonier, Pa., 1990): 3-4. Molly Worthen describes Mark Driscoll’s reading in “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?” New York Times Magazine (January 6, 2009).

The Oxford University Press edition (1986) of Charlotte Temple (first published in 1791 as Charlotte, a Tale of Truth) includes an introduction by Cathy N. Davidson. Davidson discusses Charlotte Temple’s publication history in “The Life and Times of Charlotte Temple,” in Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America: Literature & Social History (Baltimore, 1989): 157-179. 

Reverend Covell’s story appeared under the title “Advertising ‘Charlotte Temple’: A True Story of Religious Conversion and Its Mysterious Leading,” in the Springfield Republican 3:13 (March 29, 1906): 13. Accounts of the Charlotte Temple gravestone were printed and reprinted in various magazines and newspapers. Henry Tyler’s investigation of the gravesite, for example, was published in Leslie’s Weekly, then reprinted in the Springfield Republican as “A Shrine of Unhappy Love: Charlotte Temple’s Grave in Trinity Churchyard, New York,” Springfield Republican (November 13, 1897): 3. Speculations about Charlotte Stanley appear in A. b. D., “Who Was Charlotte Temple?” St. Louis Republic 85:22898 (February 19, 1893): 26, and A. b. D., “Charlotte Temple,” Philadelphia Inquirer 128:50 (February 19, 1893): 13. Other examples available through Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers include the following: “Died for Love, and Now, Her Grave is Always Covered with Flowers,” Birmingham Age Herald 21:45 (December 30, 1894): 2, reprinted from the New York Herald, and “Charlotte Temple’s Grave: The Most Popular Spot in Trinity Churchyard, New York,” Grand Forks Daily Herald 14:28 (December 2, 1894): 4. C. J. Hughes describes a December 2008 investigation of the gravesite in “Buried in the Churchyard: A Good Story, at Least” New York Times, December 12, 2008.

Thanks to Risa Garza, Libby Gery, David Marinoff, and Rebecca Rosen for permission to quote them and to Alisa Powers and Rebecca Rosen for permission to include photographs of them.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

Lisa M. Gordis is professor of English at Barnard College, where she teaches courses in English and American literature and American studies and directs the First-Year Seminar Program. She is the author of Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (2003) and is currently working on a study of early Quaker theories of language.

Two hundred years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark completed the first federal reconnaissance of the Far West, they have become hallowed figures in historical memory. Today they are remembered in every conceivable way: on monuments, road signs, and commemorative coins, in classrooms, museums, and online exhibits. The names Lewis and Clark grace colleges, towns, parks, trails, counties, law schools, research funds, and marathons. Even the U.S. Navy (impressed by their command of dugout canoes?) honors them with their own class of ships. So many books on Lewis and Clark have come out that new works have been forced to take up increasingly arcane aspects of the expedition. Recent titles include: Venereal Disease and the Lewis and Clark Expedition; Seaman: the Newfoundland Dog Who Accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition; The Food Journal of Lewis and Clark: Recipes for an Expedition; Lewis and Clark Dance Manual and Kit; and Lewis Loved Clark?: Intriguing Hints about America’s Historic Trailblazers. For those who cannot keep track of all of this, there is Lewis and Clark for Dummies. Clearly Lewis and Clark have reached the tipping point of historical investigation, a moment when the mass of printed material carries a momentum of its own, independent of the underlying merits of the story.

What are the underlying merits of the story? The Corps of Discovery was an ambitious and ultimately successful enterprise to gather intelligence about the lands and peoples west of the Mississippi. It was not the first government-funded expedition. It was not the first contact between whites and native tribes of the Far West. Nor was it the first party of Euro-Americans to cross the continent. But it did represent something new, a U.S. expedition that bundled the study of nature together with commercial and military objectives. In this, the United States took its inspiration from Europe where state-sponsored voyages of discovery had become standard practice. In their long voyages through the Pacific, James Cook (Britain) and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (France) had become famous ambassadors of science, commerce, and empire. The success of these voyages was not lost on Thomas Jefferson, who viewed the Corps of Discovery not only as a way of understanding the tribes of western America but also as a means of impressing the societies of Western Europe. As much as the Lewis and Clark expedition had practical objectives, it had symbolic ones too: namely, to show the Atlantic powers that the United States had grown out of its imperial pubescence and was coming of age as a civilized nation.

Yet it is easy to make more of these designs than we should. Jefferson had great ambitions for Lewis and Clark, true, and their expedition succeeded by all measures. Yet these facts tell us nothing about the expedition’s significance in American culture. In truth, Lewis and Clark were not much discussed by the broader public. Their expedition was not widely reported in the popular press, nor was it talked about in scientific circles. Few Americans could marvel at the natural history of the Far West because most of the expedition’s botanical collection was destroyed in transit to the east coast. They could not read the journals of Lewis and Clark because they only appeared in print in 1814 and then in curtailed form. Despite its success in the field, then, the Lewis and Clark expedition left few tracks on the wider culture of Jeffersonian America.

It would take a century for America to fully discover these explorers, introduced to their expedition by the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905, an event that eulogized the closing of the American frontier and wove the explorers inexorably into the fabric of American history. Since then, Lewis and Clark have become pantheonic figures in the exploration of the West, linking the worlds of Euro-America and Native America and setting into motion the creation of an American empire. Not surprisingly, then, they have also become the symbolic progenitors of all forms of U.S. exploration in the last two hundred years: western surveys, coastal surveys, polar voyages, and missions to the moon.

Returning to the nineteenth century, then, we are left with this question: if Lewis and Clark were not yet the patres familias of American exploration, who was? Put differently, when nineteenth-century American explorers left home in pursuit of discovery, who did they see in their mind’s eye? Some other buckskin-clad figures roaming over the American West, perhaps? In fact, they saw someone decidedly different: the Prussian polymath Alexander von Humboldt.

From 1799 to 1804, Humboldt explored South and Central America with French naturalist Aimé Bonpland. During that time, the two men surveyed everything that they could swim through or climb over, including the Orinoco and Amazon rivers and mountains from the Atlantic island of Tenerife to the Pacific range of the Cordillera Real. In 1802, Humboldt and Bonpland set a record for the highest human ascent, on Mount Chimborazo, before turning back a few hundred feet from the summit (sick, vertiginous, and bleeding from nose and gums). Through it all, they recorded observations about weather, animals, ocean currents, magnetic fields, ancient ruins, indigenous peoples, and colonial administrations. Even celestial objects weren’t safe from their gaze. In 1802, Humboldt recorded the transit of Mercury as it moved across the surface of the sun. Before returning to Europe, Humboldt made a brief stopover in the United States to visit Jefferson where they discussed, among other things, Lewis and Clark. Back in Paris, Humboldt set to work on a series of scientific reports and a five-volume personal narrative. It would take twenty years to complete these tasks, a measure of his industry in the Americas, where he and Bonpland had spent their days and nights in a frenzy of calculation and observation.

In contrast to Lewis and Clark, Humboldt received immediate, international acclaim for his accomplishments. Even before he had returned to Europe, reports were circulating about his expedition. (Still in the field, Humboldt read about his progress in an American newspaper in 1804.) Interest in Humboldt’s journey only grew with time. By the 1810s, Humboldt’s voyage had become a common subject of books, newspapers, women’s magazines, and journals of every kind: medical, scientific, agricultural, and religious. As Humboldt published data from his voyage, it began appearing on maps, in atlases, and in geography textbooks. His Personal Narrative, first published in French then translated into English, became an international bestseller, cementing his reputation as the world’s greatest living explorer. Launched into the stratosphere of public attention in 1804, Humboldt did not descend to earth until his death in 1859.

At first glance, Humboldt-mania seems hard to explain. He does not seem the kind of explorer that would be the stuff of legends, especially in the United States. After all, he was not a tough, home-grown pioneer but a young Prussian aristocrat, who moved in the intellectual circles of Göttingen and Weimar. He traveled not as the leader of a national expedition like Lewis and Clark or Britain’s James Cook but as a wealthy private citizen. He did not explore the American West, the region most critical to U.S. interests, but worked in regions to the south. Moreover, Humboldt’s mission to Spanish America seems to have had modest objectives. New Spain and New Granada had already been described, mapped, and surveyed by the Spanish and Portuguese since the era of Christopher Columbus. If we take exploration to mean “the investigation of unknown regions” then Humboldt was three hundred years too late.

But discovery is a relative term. Spain and Portugal closely guarded their colonies from their rivals. As a result, the Ibero-American empires remained terra incognita for most Europeans and Anglo-Americans. So when Humboldt gained Spain’s permission to travel these regions for the purposes of study, the literate classes on both sides of the Atlantic took notice. His reports were widely read and discussed by educated men and women. What readers took away from these reports varied considerably. For some, living through one of the most violent, revolutionary periods in Western history, Humboldt offered escape. Readers took comfort in his manifold, mysterious descriptions of the Americas, a world enchanting because of its distance from war-ravaged Europe. “The ambitious and malignant passions have raged with an unparalleled intensity, throughout the civilized and Christian world, and deluged the wide field of Europe with blood,” wrote one reviewer. “It is some little relief to look away to those remote parts of the world, to which the narratives of travellers enable us to carry our imagination.”

But others seized upon Humboldt’s writings precisely because of the connections he forged between New World and Old. Humboldt did not mince words about the cruelties of colonial rule, a feature that made his works popular with social critics pushing for reform. The young Venezuelan Simon Bolivar, who would eventually lead the South American revolt against Spain, was so inspired by Humboldt that he called him “the true discoverer of South America.” When it came, the independence of the Spanish colonies only enhanced the value of Humboldt’s narratives. As the new countries opened themselves to the world, scientists, traders, and diplomats turned to Humboldt’s work to learn more. “The eyes of Europe are turned upon South America,” wrote one British journal in 1818, “and every authentic account respecting that immense continent is received with great and general interest.”

Humboldt inspired reformers outside of South America as well. Abolitionists, in particular, circled every grim passage he wrote about slavery to press for reform in the United States and Britain. In a letter to the editor of Boston’s Christian Observer, one reader reprinted Humboldt’s entire description of slavery in Venezuela because it “may tend to expose in its true colors this unprincipled and cruel traffic.” They cheered when Humboldt made these connections explicit in his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, where he praised the United States in all its aspects except—glaringly—for its toleration of slavery. Translated into English in 1811, Political Essay became a manifesto for abolitionists in the United States. Considering the extension of slavery into Missouri, the editor of Boston’s Panoplist and Missionary Herald asked how Europe’s greatest thinkers would resolve the question: “If our southern brethren object to our deciding the question, might we not appeal to the wise and philanthropic in other countries? How would a Gregoire in France, a Humboldt in Germany, a Galitzin in Russia, a Wilberforce in England, decide the controversy?”

Above all else, Humboldt became a hero to science. His omnivorous appetite for knowledge extended to all major disciplines, including natural history, archeology, ethnography, astronomy, and meteorology. The massive body of facts contained within his essays and Personal Narrative made him the definitive source on all things Spanish American. As a result, the scientific and popular presses of the United States and Europe quoted him liberally on almost every conceivable subject, from the incidence and treatment of disease, the origins of American Indians, the causes of earthquakes, to the discovery of new exotic species. All of this ensured that Humboldt would never be seen as just another itinerant naturalist, a mere cataloger of new specimens with Latin names. The Humboldt who roamed South America in the pages of American magazines in the 1820s was something new, a walking cabinet of curiosities, a collector of marvelous facts on every conceivable subject: fish-vomiting volcanoes, milk-secreting trees, diseased tonsils, and mountain-sized piles of guano.

It would be easy to go too far here, to over-inflate Humboldt’s impact on American society and to repeat, in effect, the mistakes that we have made with Lewis and Clark. So for the record, let me note that Humboldt was not the first scientist-explorer. Nor was he the first one to unleash a torrent of data on the American public. This honor belongs to James Cook, whose voyages were chronicled in American books, newspapers, and geography primers (where it was hard to miss the jagged routes of Endeavour and Resolution etched all over the Pacific Ocean). Nor was Humboldt yet celebrated as the great poet-philosopher of Nature he would later become. His work did not exactly soar in his adopted French and lost further altitude in English translation. “We have derived more instruction than we have pleasure,” wrote one reviewer of Personal Narrative, a work that did not “amuse the imagination or agitate the passions.” Another complained that Humboldt “possesses less beauty than any traveller we remember.”

For Americans sensitive to their deficiencies of culture and education, however, passion and beauty could wait. There were obvious differences between Humboldt and the ordinary American, but there were points of connection too. Like many of them, he was an ardent democrat, a lover of the republic, living all too close to a threatening wilderness. If Baron von Humboldt still had the whiff of ancien régime about him, he was not above getting his hands dirty. These qualities endeared him to his readers and made his differences palatable, perhaps even appealing. It was hard to approach Personal Narrative merely as an escape into the barbarous wild. Reading Humboldt at a time when America was eager to shake off its reputation as a republic of untutored farmers was not just a diversion, I suspect, but an act of self-improvement.

In the 1820s, the discovery narrative was still an unstable thing, not yet settled into a fixed structure of excitement and calamity, of bear attacks, mutinies, and fevers. The idea of the traveler was also in flux, a category that had come to encompass every itinerant from Joseph Banks, science officer of the Endeavour, to British lads on vacation. As the concept of traveler lost definition in the eighteenth century, “explorer” entered the vernacular to delineate it, to distinguish the serious investigator of the unknown from more quotidian voyagers, the doe-eyed ingénues of the grand tour. Humboldt arrived upon the world stage precisely at this moment, when the connotations of explorer were taking form in the English-speaking world. He was not, of course, the only investigator of the unknown. But he quickly became the best known one. In the constellation of possible roles for “explorer,” then, Humboldt figured prominently, even archetypally. He was the thinking man’s explorer, the embodiment of travel in its highest form. He offered an adventure in erudition, a voyage beyond the frontier, it was true, but one that would also take the reader up the ladder of civilization in the process.

If Humboldt became the archetypal explorer for Americans, what form did this archetype take? He routinely found praise for his “juvenile vigor” and “good constitution.” Yet these observations always prefaced more lengthy descriptions of Humboldt’s mental faculties. In the eyes of his reviewers, Humboldt’s success as an explorer did not follow from rugged physique. He triumphed because of an “understanding duly prepared by education,” and “a faculty in speaking modern tongues.” Of Humboldt’s skills on a horse or with a rifle, the record is silent. Reviewers do tell us that he was “skilled in general physicks, and particularly attached to chymistry.”

Images of Humboldt tell a similar story. Artists portrayed the explorer as the picture of manly vitality: a broad-chested figure of solid proportions, with tussled hair and high forehead framing a ruddy, youthful face. Yet none of these artists portray Humboldt as a man of action. There are no scenes of him fording rivers, scaling mountains, or battling wild animals (though he did all of these things). Rather, the painted Humboldt is one caught in the act of observation and analysis. Rafael Jimeno y Planes’s portrait, dating from around 1803, captures Humboldt sitting outside at a table on which are placed a sextant, mineral specimens, and sheets of manuscript paper (fig. 1). Humboldt regards us contentedly with hands folded, as if he has just finished a large meal (geology perhaps?).

The Humboldt of Friedrich Georg Weitsch’s 1806 portrait perches on the edge of a rock in the jungle (fig. 2). He looks poised for action, except for the oversized folio book on his knee and the pink flower clasped in his hand. No animal hunt here; we have stumbled upon the baron pressing flowers.

By 1850, the vision of Humboldt as a bookish, erudite explorer had reached its zenith. Gemalde von Eduard Ender’s Urwaldlaboratorium am Orinoco (Jungle Lab on the Orinoco) places Humboldt in what was, by now, a familiar scene: a work table in the middle of the rainforest. But the dense jungle background looks spacious compared to the foreground: a crush of objects—papers, specimens, and instruments—so cover the explorer’s table that they now spill to the floor around his feet. Bathed in light, attended by Bonpland, Humboldt seems almost magisterial in his primitive “urwaldlaboratorium.” Indeed, Humboldt’s pose bears more than a passing resemblance to Ender’s 1855 painting of Emperor Rudolph II, who sits at his own table of instruments, attended by the astronomer Tycho Brahe. Ender’s Humboldt painting remained in Europe, but engravings based on it circulated widely in literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Words and images of the explorer, then, illustrate a similar point. Humboldt was idolized as the nineteenth-century’s über-explorer because of his cerebral skills and courtly cultivation, not in spite of them.

Humboldt’s ability to inspire artists, writers, and scientists has never been a secret in Europe or South America, where scholars have scrutinized Humboldt with the same feverish intensity as we have poured over Lewis and Clark. In the last few years, a small group of scholars (including Laura Walls, Katherine Manthorne, and Susan Schulten) have taken up Humboldt as a figure who loomed large in North American culture, particularly in fields of American science, art, and letters. Most recently, Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current, has shown how a cadre of nineteenth-century American explorers took up the Humboldtian cause, particularly in his sensitive and holistic approach to native peoples and natural environments.

That Humboldt became an iconic figure in the nineteenth century, particularly in the eyes of his American audience, now seems clear. But it is Humboldt’s iconic status as an explorer that occupies us here. Why? Specifically, what do we gain by toppling Lewis and Clark off of their pedestal and installing Humboldt in their place?

We can begin to correct a view of nineteenth-century exploration that has been distorted by Lewis and Clark’s Pacific expedition. For most of the 1800s, the American West did not uniquely, even predominantly, occupy the nation’s imagination as a theater of discovery. During this time, the United States fielded dozens of expeditions to every region of the planet: Africa, South America, Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific Ocean, and the Polar Regions. These expeditions employed the broadest possible notions of the term “discovery.” For example, the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-42) pursued geographical discovery in Antarctica, while the U.S. Astronomical Expedition (1849-52) spent its nights observing planetary transits from its base in Chile. The U.S. Grinnell Expedition (1850-52) hoped to discover a specific person, Sir John Franklin, who had gone missing in the Arctic in 1845. For Lieutenant William Lynch, on the other hand, discovery was historical. Under his command, the U.S. Expedition to Jordon and the Dead Sea set out to discover, among other things, the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The American explorers who led these expeditions constituted a diverse group. Their ranks included doctors, journalists, and military officers. As public figures, however, they rarely took on the image of the western pioneer or the tough backwoodsman. More often, they displayed themselves as men of science and culture. One might argue that this reflected an appreciation for science and culture in general, rather than an appreciation of Humboldt in particular. Yet, in case after case, explorers linked themselves to Humboldt by name, dedicating their narratives to him, visiting him in Europe, and naming dozens of geographical discoveries in his honor, from Nevada’s Humboldt River (John Fremont, 1848) to Greenland’s Humboldt Glacier (Elisha Kane, 1854). Fremont showed such intellectual promise that he was eventually dubbed “the American Humboldt,” by his peers, a term of high praise also conferred upon Kane as well as explorer Bayard Taylor.

Were this just a matter of correcting the historical record, we could tuck this debate into the footnotes of Lewis and Clark: Historical Overview and Bibliography (one of eight bibliographies on Lewis and Clark published since 2000). But more is at stake. Lewis and Clark have become the symbolic touchstone for every kind of modern expedition, from NOAA to NASA. Native born, of humble origins, these two men explored lands on a critical frontier during the early years of the republic. In doing so, they established a pedigree that is almost impossible to top. In making them the fathers of national exploration, we have brought order to the weird carnival of expeditions fielded by the United States in the 1800s. When we remember to talk about them, the colorful ranks of explorers who traveled the world have become linked to Lewis and Clark in our historical memory. When seen as the inheritors of a Lewis-and-Clarkian vision of exploration, these explorers have begun to appear more similar than dissimilar, sharing the inherent curiosity, restlessness, and forward-looking attitude of the Corps of Discovery.

No wonder that policy makers and NASA administrators routinely trot out Lewis and Clark when proposing ambitious new projects. They serve not merely as the ornaments of history but as pieces of evidence in a specific argument—that expensive expeditions deserve funding because the will to explore is a part of our national character. As this line of thinking goes, exploration is something that we have to do in order to be true to our human nature. “The cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose,” stated President George W. Bush days after the destruction of space shuttle Columbia in 2003. “It is a desire written in the human heart.” Within a year, the president had followed up this address with another, a directive to begin the most ambitious multibillion dollar project in NASA’s history: the renewed exploration of the moon and the manned exploration of Mars. He began his address with Lewis and Clark.

Two centuries ago, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left St. Louis to explore the new lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. They made that journey in the spirit of discovery to learn the potential of the vast new territory and to chart the way for others to follow. America has ventured forth into space for the same reasons. We’ve undertaken space travel because the desire to explore is part of our character.

By framing exploration as “part of our character,” Bush offers an answer to a common criticism of manned space flight. Hurling living beings into space and then returning them, still breathing, to earth is expensive. Why take on such risk to life and treasure when unmanned craft can do much of the same work for a fraction of the cost? By making exploration about national character rather than science or money, proponents of manned exploration can largely ignore this question as well as the excellent work now being done by robotic orbiters, rovers, and landers.

One wonders whether Lewis and Clark, who took such pains to do their scientific work correctly, would have approved of their current roles as the poster children of American exceptionalism. And what would Humboldt have to say about his own erasure from the annals of American exploration? I expect he was too much of a gentleman to grouse publicly. Yet he would have spoken up about our current policies of exploration. Nurtured by German and French Romanticism, Humboldt saw the voyage as more than the sum of its scientific parts. It was a distinctly human event, a lesson about attaining self-knowledge as much as attaining knowledge about the world. He would have doubted, I think, the capacity of robots to appreciate the sublime, to embody the internal transformation so sought by wanderers, explorers, and pilgrims alike. And for the rest of us, would he have thought that the wonders of extraterrestrial nature could be conveyed by telemetry? Doubtful. Still, Humboldt was a humanist first, a defender of people forgotten by their rulers. The vision of humans walking upon the cold dust of Mars would have thrilled him. That Americans, his favorite people, would have to pay so much to bring this vision to life, I suspect, would have given him pause.

Further Reading:

Over the past few years, scholarship on Humboldt’s role in North American life has come to life. Aaron Sachs takes up Humboldt’s influence on American explorers in The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York, 2007). How Sachs’s approach connects to current debates in environmental history is the subject of Susan Schulten’s essay “Get Lost: On the Intersection of Environmental and Intellectual History,” Modern Intellectual History 5:1 (2008): 141-152. Just out, Laura Walls’s Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago, 2009) examines Humboldt’s most famous work, Cosmos, and its influences on writers and scientists. Despite my frustrations with the celebration of all things Lewis-and-Clark, there are some excellent treatments of these explorers in American life, one of which is John Spencer’s “‘We are not entirely dealing with the past’: America Remembers Lewis and Clark,” in Kris Fresonke and Mark Spence, eds., Lewis & Clark: Legacies, Memories, and New Perspectives (Berkeley, Calif., 2004). For those eager to hear the baron speak for himself, Johns Hopkins Press recently came out with a reprint edition of Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe v. 1&2. This edition also comes with fine introductory essays by Nicholas Ruupke (v.1) and Michael Dettelbach (v.2).

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

Michael Robinson is author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (2006), winner of the 2008 Book Award from the Forum for the History of Science in America. He writes Time to Eat the Dogs, a blog about science, history, and exploration. He is an assistant professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford.

The social domain invades public consciousness in moments of crisis: accidents in mines, fires in factories, outbursts of epidemics aboard ships, sanitation calamities in slums, riots, strikes, and scandals. These crises entice opinion, elicit sentiment, and often prompt new legislation, a new bureaucracy, or, in the least, a new report. Social breakdowns in the new urban centers of the nineteenth century, for instance, generated calls for new forms of knowledge and, more narrowly, for a greater number of facts. Information-gatherers of all kinds, ranging from reporters and reformers to inspectors and government commissions, consequently went into action.

The contemporary critique of knowledge has emphasized the role of science—in the guise of medicine, engineering, or the nascent and as yet unprofessionalized and undifferentiated social sciences—in mapping and controlling the social terrain. Discursive cousins such as journalism and emerging “realist” literary genres have also received considerable scholarly attention. This essay proposes a different perspective, arguing that concrete historical events were just as important as ephemeral scientific “revolutions” or instantaneous “epistemic shifts” in shaping the history of knowledge. Employing examples from American and British history, the following discussion interrogates the relationship between crisis and facts. This is not only a means for asking how crises generated social knowledge, but also for understanding how knowledge itself instigated crises. How did the discovery of social “truths” prompt dismay, outrage, an acute sense of failure, and demands for intervention?

The long history of social inquiry is especially pertinent today, as the United States and the world grapple with a severe economical failure that has taken an enormous social toll. The contemporary public sphere is suffused, even saturated, with information. Government agencies, research institutions, and the media transmit facts and figures in “real time” without the cumbersome mechanisms of lengthy investigations or mammoth reports. And yet, while we produce and consume social knowledge in unprecedented fashion, we do not share a strong sense of the social.

What was the nature of the nineteenth century’s social problem, or crisis? The Communist Manifesto (1848) poeticized about the pulverizing effects of modern capitalism. In Marx and Engels’s formulation, the “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations…are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” Their famous metaphor is implausibly violent: “Everything that is solid turns into air.” But while Marx was fascinated with the creative, revolutionary aspects of capitalism, he too condemned the new system’s destructive force. Five years later, Charles Dickens, for instance, depicted the air of Coketown, the fictional modern industrial city in Hard Times (1853), as filled with ominous smoke. It is a hellacious place, a man-made jungle populated with mechanical elephants and serpentine smokestacks billowing their toxins and poisoning the public.

Nineteenth century social and economic knowledge at once functioned as an instrument of capitalism while also serving as a tool for minimizing capitalism’s most disturbing consequences, informing measures to alleviate social pain. Even more significantly, knowledge was persistently aggregated in order to address the very uncertainty woven into the fabric of modern life. Beyond the reams of facts—of maps, interviews, statistics, tables, illustrations, graphs, reports, of quantitative and qualitative information of both the hard and soft variety—the clamor to generate taxonomies of the social, to conceptualize social life by distinguishing between its various provinces and limbs and then hypothesizing about the interrelationships between these respective parts, was fueled by the promise of explanation and even predictability.

But while the countless localized crises that inspired social inquiries and sometimes reform legislation seem to exemplify the endemic instability of the industrial order, the relationship between such small-scale emergencies and the liquidity of the capitalist condition in general is more complex . Thus, for instance, particular crises often served to deflect attention from underlying sources of social strife and focused public attention on more manageable symptoms such as sanitary conditions, malfunctioning machines, and physical dangers, symptoms that the new technologies could also ameliorate.

The emerging knowledge/crisis nexus represented other aspects of the modern experience that reached beyond the specifics of industrialization. These were the rise of the liberal state and the elaboration of its other, that is, the public sphere. On the one hand, knowledge was ostensibly mustered to organize the social field, ultimately leading to expectations that society could be depoliticized and managed by objective, expertise-driven, information-laden policies that distanced themselves from the hurly-burly of emotion-driven public opinion. On the other hand, the accumulation and distribution of knowledge did not relieve anxieties. In fact, this only fueled contentious public exchanges, including an ongoing critique of the state and its actions. In this sense, knowledge and information were themselves intrinsically and consistently unstable, unruly, and hard to control.

The phenomenology of social knowledge is inseparable from the experience of crisis and from the interlacing of fact and affect, which became a hallmark of nineteenth century social inquiry. Urgent petitions, for instance, prodded the House of Commons to begin an investigation of the employment of chimneysweepers in 1802. A select committee then verified that little children were being stolen from their parents or enticed out of workhouses and then forced by the threat of sharp pins to climb up narrow, soot-filled chimneys. Another investigation of child labor, which led to the milestone Cotton Mill Act of 1819, coincided with a fire at Atkinson’s Mill, Colne Bridge, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in which seventeen girls perished. The victims were working the night shift, locked in the mill, while their overseer was busy elsewhere. The disaster stunned the British public. In the early 1830s, an intense Ten-Hours agitation in the industrial north prompted another parliamentary investigation. This movement had the character of an evangelical crusade led by several Tory sympathizers who instructed workers to “establish committees in every manufacturing town and village, to collect information and PUBLISH FACTS.” The House of Commons’ Sadler Committee consequently interviewed factory workers whose bodies were mangled and deformed by years of hard work with heavy machinery. When the committee proposed far-reaching legislation, the Whig-led cabinet countered with its own investigation. A royal commission of inquiry was instituted which sent agents to observe first hand the damage wrought by work to the health and the morality of young factory wage earners, leading to the Factory Act of 1833. Later in the decade, Poor Law Commissioner Edwin Chadwick headed another groundbreaking panel of investigation, the Sanitary Commission, in response to an outbreak of cholera in Whitechapel, London. Other examples of social investigation propelled or accelerated by a sense of public urgency abound. Official inquiries into the social ills of industrializing Britain were sometimes launched at the explicit request of distressed laborers—such as the handloom weavers and silk knitters in the 1830s—or, conversely, at the urging of employers asking the government to investigate.

By the middle decades of the century, such social investigations had become a defining feature of British political culture as well as a driving force of energetic American reform, especially in the Northeast. Animated by notions of scientific legislation, the British government dispatched commissioners and inspectors to factories and mines. Meanwhile, Parliament, as well as reform societies, philanthropists, and journalists amassed testimonies and statistical data on the condition of the impoverished. Their findings undergirded the great public debate over the nation’s social predicament, what Thomas Carlyle called the “condition of England” question. Cycles of legislation centralized poor relief and inaugurated state regulation of new industries by such means as the restriction of child and female labor and the imposition of safety and educational measures, all to be enforced by periodic inspections.

The United States had not yet experienced industrial revolution in such magnitude as Britain. Nevertheless, Boston, Philadelphia, and, especially, New York were to be counted among the fastest-growing urban centers in the world, consequently contending with tenement squalor, prostitution, crime, and abandoned children, which all became subjects of public curiosity, alarm, and the intensifying production of social knowledge that mobilized civic associations, individual reformers, and city and state governments. Thus, for example, the Pennsylvania Senate dispatched a committee in 1838 to visit the “manufacturing districts” of the commonwealth to survey the employment of children. New York’s Assembly examined the condition of tenements in New York and Brooklyn in 1857. Officials, doctors, and clergymen produced reports on the circumstances of paupers, foreign immigrants, orphans, and prisoners. In the 1850s, governments on both sides of the Atlantic began to investigate the conditions under which immigrants crossed the ocean. A Senate committee was formed “to consider the causes and the extent of the sickness and mortality prevailing on board the emigrant ships on the voyage to this country, and whether any, and what legislation is needed for the better protection of the health and lives of passengers on board such vessels.”

Traveling from one state capital to another in both North and South, the reformer Dorothea Dix, known as the “voice for the mad,” campaigned to establish asylums and hospitals for the “feeble minded.” Dix gave public testimonies to legislatures and formulated lengthy petitions that interlaced facts about the dire state of the insane poor with proposals to establish new institutions that would address the problem. In a memorial to her home state of Massachusetts Dix declared, “I proceed, Gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of Insane Persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.” For nineteenth-century reform entrepreneurs such as Dix, social knowledge was an essential element of advocacy. Their public campaigns were permeated with a sense of urgency embedded in the matter of hard-hitting facts.

Two immensely important efforts to produce information about distressed groups in the United States targeted subjects outside urban centers and the industrializing Northeast. Repeated attempts to collect social and ethnological data concerning indigenous peoples—for instance, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s enormous project sponsored by Congress in the 1850s on the Indian Tribes of America—were conducted under the specter of a permanent crisis: the Indian’s alleged inability—or, worse, refusal—to civilize, and the collateral prophesy of his impending demise as expressed in the trope of the “vanishing Indian.” Likewise, the antebellum dispute over slavery—and, in particular, the indefatigable endeavors by abolitionists to collect and disseminate material concerning the facts of slave life—constituted an enormous project of social investigation, and a rather innovative one at that. Barred from the South, abolitionists had to develop fresh tactics in order to garner information pertaining to circumstances south of the Mason-Dixon line. The use made of ads for runaway slaves by Theodore Weld and the Grimké sisters in order to indict their masters in Slavery As It Is: Testimony of A Thousand Witnesses (1839) was arguably the most ingenious empirical study of its kind to that date. In both these cases of indigenous peoples and the “peculiar institution,” the consequences of modernity were not so much put under investigation as was the alleged failure-of either Indians or slave masters—to modernize.

Reformers and government officials fixed their gaze on the social margins, on orphans, miners, poor wage earners, and racial others. The middle class was also susceptible to various forms of scrutiny, but investigation of the propertied segments of society followed distinctly different protocols. Thus, in the wake of the American economic crisis known as the Panic of 1837, financial institutions began to more carefully assess the credibility of prospective debtors, which included reports on their character and personal circumstances. The British government studied and then intervened in the manner by which factory owners managed their workforce. Some proprietors complained bitterly that their prerogatives as proprietors were being violated, but none had the misfortune of a philanthropist knocking on the door to inspect one’s dwelling and count how many persons were sleeping in a single bed. Only in the twentieth century-in the age of Gallup polls and other massive surveys—did social investigations bring middle America into focus and make the fictional “average citizen” a subject of study and comparison.

The Panic of 1837 and later economic crises provided consistent impetus to American reform. But the Civil War and its tumultuous aftermath marked a watershed in American perceptions of the social problem. Following the war, several states, again mainly in the Northeast, established boards of charity and public health, as well as bureaus of labor statistics. The American Social Science Association was founded in 1865. And the war itself was followed by one of the most ambitious social experiments in American history, Reconstruction. The history of that project to rebuild southern society was replete with congressional hearings and investigations.

The historical episodes heretofore sketched out point to an expansive notion of both social investigation and social crisis. The latter ranged from accidents and disease to destitution, war, abject physical environments, immoral behavior, mortality, and labor relations. Different emergencies entailed different strategies for collecting data. Investigations into workplace conflicts, for instance, variously featured court-like protocols, attempts to determine the facts-of-the-matter, and even whodunit elements. Major accidents further narrowed the difference between social investigation, scientific studies, and judicial procedures. For example, antebellum authorities launched inquests into those frequent steamboat disasters that claimed so many lives . In October 1844, three boilers of the Lucy Walker exploded near Albany, Indiana, on the Ohio River, sinking the vessel and killing more than a hundred passengers. The explosion of the Sultana, a Mississippi River paddleboat, in April 1865, caused the death of an estimated 1,800 persons. Explosions prompted early protective legislation in 1838 and 1852. The history of safety regulations and reform continued to be enmeshed with spectacular accidents, culminating on the eve of the First World War with the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911) and the sinking of the Titanic (1912), two iconic calamities. In both cases, questions of technology, the value of human life, and, significantly, disparities issuing from labor and class were at issue.

Knowledge itself was in perpetual flux. Different disciplinary strategies competed for legitimacy. Discourse and facts were often contested. Governments, for instance, embraced the language of statistics, which came into vogue in the 1830s, inspiring the founding of new associations whose members collected statistical data among the poor in their spare time. For Dickens, by contrast, such statistical thinking dissolved stable, affective human ties. Vying for a fuller, more veracious representation of industrial society, his Hard Times attacked the heartless regime of aggregated facts that characterized utilitarian Britain. In his view, hard facts were at the core of hard times, not a remedy.

Confusion typified discussion over the proper way of measuring social phenomena. How, for instance, should factory workers be observed? There were few experts and little expertise for addressing the problems of large cities, factories, and mills, let alone slavery or the future of native peoples. Contests ensued among various poor-watchers, reformers, government officials, missionaries, Indian agents, prison wardens, and philanthropists, each group claiming better (that is, “disinterested”) access to knowledge. In Britain, the aggregation of facts concerning social life became a national pursuit. Nevertheless, the constant, nearly compulsive, thirst for more empirical evidence betrayed deep doubts about the usability of information and about the boundaries of what could actually be known.

Facts proved elusive and controversy-prone. The 1840 U.S. Census, for example, provoked public dispute when it purported to show that the percentage of “colored insane” increased the further north they resided (especially in Massachusetts and Maine), ostensibly proving that persons of African descent fared better under slavery than in freedom. This became yet another skirmish in the antebellum sectional debate in which slavery was increasingly being defended on scientific-racist grounds. In Britain, the publication of a royal commission of inquiry report on the employment of children in the mines in 1842 triggered a scandal, for the official document featured illustrations of half naked working boys and girls which violated basic norms of decency in public communication. At times, the investigation itself rather than the concluding report prompted opposition. Witnesses would refuse to testify, or they would engage in various other forms of resistance. The Iroquois in western New York refused to collaborate with a census conducted on their reservations in the 1840s because they suspected it would lead to their taxation. In the case of the early 1830s Factory Commission, members of the Short-Time movement followed government agents wherever they went and staged demonstrations against the inquiry which they feared would undermine their reform campaign.

The causal relationship between crisis and knowledge thus moved in both directions. Social surveys did not merely respond to alarm bells. Their purpose was often to bring social phenomena otherwise deemed latent or hidden to the surface of public consciousness. The social realm was conceived to be a subterranean stratum in need of exploration and the kind of shock and awe associated with acts of discovery. Crisis resided in the interface between social reality and public rhetoric and sentiment. Shaped by language, imagery, moral discourse, and politics, crisis was a discursively and affectively constructed cultural phenomenon as much as it was a reflection of concrete social events.

In the period prior to the advent of modern expert culture which developed late in the nineteenth century, citizens were expected to read and opine on social and other policy matters of the day. Several investigatory reports thus received a wide circulation and became popular reading material. The factual texture of public discourse also rested on a humanitarian sensibility and the responses it elicited to detailed descriptions of human suffering. Conversely, social (or racial) curiosity increased the public’s appetite for titillating, sometimes sexualized, narratives of destitution and transgression. The popularity of investigation, that is, also fed off the voyeuristic possibilities contained in the exposure of concealed and potentially dangerous worlds.

Facts did not always provoke such intense reactions. The opposite was also true. Numerous studies and surveys went largely unnoticed. Nevertheless, social knowledge as a whole was oriented toward public consumption. Reform culture in both countries created arenas specifically for the exchange of information and the consequent debates. These specialized spheres—or sometimes counter-publics, such as the abolitionist movement or labor unions—supported large systems for dispensing printed matter. Thus, for example, numerous battles over the competing prison systems in New York and Pennsylvania—the “separate” versus “silent” experimental methods of incarceration were carried out in the pages of annual reports published by penal reform associations such as the Boston Prison Discipline Society. America penal reform drew international attention and numerous foreign visitors, including Dickens. Neither experiment seems remotely acceptable today. The fierce debate was carried in the language of republican citizenship, the reforms being designed to rehabilitate wayward individuals and transform them into autonomous, self-disciplined subjects. But this exchange was far from inclusive. It rarely paid any attention to the inmates’ point of view, for instance. Indeed, the central place of factual matter in such debates privileged groups and institutions that could assume empirical authority over other participants. At the same time, facticity also made novel forms of contestation addressing the veracity and challenging the interpretations of fact collectors possible in the first place. The rules of public exchange rendered such discourse open to anyone with access to information, thus giving new participants an opportunity to enter the public stage. This was evident in the Short-Time Movement’s own efforts to collect facts. Similarly, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels employed the prolific fruits of British social research for purposes inimical to those of the institutions and individuals who had generated them, the British state and bourgeois reformers. The accumulation of social knowledge, in other words, while enhancing and reifying social distinctions, also contributed to the struggle to subvert the emerging class system.

While social knowledge is often studied through the optic of science (sociology, anthropology, and economics) or the contributions of famous social cartographers (Henry Mayhew, Jacob Riis, and Charles Booth), the nineteenth-century knowledge apparatus consisted of a mammoth record of increasingly bureaucratized information in which the state figured prominently. Together with special investigations responding to occasional exigencies, governments established permanent tools for measuring society. These included the ever-more detailed national census, statistical bureaus, or the annual reports submitted by governmental departments. Reform organizations also unleashed an immense volume of periodic literature to the reading public.

Like crises themselves, these studies and the publication of their findings constituted historical events. What’s more, they were highly cognizant of their own temporal nature. Social knowledge, therefore, comprised an archive already arranged as history—the history of economic crisis, for instance, or the history of reform legislation—or it was produced on a strict calendrical basis, issued in regular intervals and featuring the periodic findings of bureaucratic agencies and reform associations that also had a regular, cumulative effect. Large-scale social reports were often framed as mini-historiographies. These self-referential accounts alluded to prior strings of investigations, often couching the particular crisis under examination as a case history.

This archive could be mined to produce stories of progress that led, in the British Whiggish tradition, from one reform victory to another. At the same time, social knowledge as history alerted its readers to the recurrence of crises and the cycles of boom and bust characteristic of the modern marketplace. In the American historical imagination, the narrative is also often circular or looped, as reform is perceived as restoring fundamental American values. Moreover, the history of government growth and social legislation in the United States cannot easily conform to a linear plot.

In addition, records of social knowledge form the backbone of the history (and, arguably, the identity) of the state. Regardless of this or that specific policy, amassing evidence on the condition of the nation typifies the modern governing process. Crises allowed governments to interject themselves into the social scene. These moments cemented the bonding, or the mutual constitution, of state and society. Beyond the (sometimes doubtful) utility of specific studies, social reportage in general fulfilled other tasks, managing a public exchange in which government was only one actor, (and not always the most powerful), allowing weaker, disenfranchised populations some form of representation, and responding to the pressures of popular social movements. Social investigations opened for the British state a space of negotiations between itself and different segments of society. When Samuel H. G. Kydd (under the pseudonym Alfred) wrote The History of the Factory Movement in 1857 he largely focused on the interactions between the movement and investigatory proceedings and legislation, using parliamentary papers (“blue books”) as a primary source.

While society and knowledge were in perennial crisis, the public procedures devised to address emergencies remained relatively stable. Governments often responded to periods of endemic crises by engaging in a vigorous exploration of the nation, especially of vulnerable social groups. This was evident in nineteenth century Britain as well as in depression-stricken America of the 1930s. Indeed, the New Deal was a watershed in reinforcing the affinity between the federal government and ordinary citizens. The rituals of social investigations may thus help us understand the process through which the modern state became a receptacle for ordinary people’s expectations of social remedy. This development cannot be taken for granted since governments typically served the interests of commerce and industrial capital. But beyond this or that policy or piece of legislation, the practices of social inquiry and the circulation of information allowed the Victorian state to develop the means to communicate with its subjects and to acknowledge them as citizens.

The archive of social knowledge also testifies to the long, somewhat convoluted history of liberalism. The formative inquiry carried out in Britain in the 1830s—the Royal Commission of Inquiry on the Poor Laws—epitomized the ascent of classical liberal thought to power. The New Poor Law that followed the Inquiry in 1834 replaced an older, more generous public relief system with parsimonious arrangements based on Jeremy Bentham’s principle of “less eligibility,” employing the workhouse as a whip to funnel paupers into the workforce. Nevertheless, the administration of the Victorian poor laws was taken away from local parishes and centralized under state supervision. Half a century and numerous reforms later, a shift became apparent in Britain and the United States (and elsewhere too) from orthodox laissez-faire to “new liberalism” or “social liberalism.” Emergent ideas about the interventionist role of government in society and the economy gave birth to increasingly professionalized and scientific forms of social investigation. By the middle of the twentieth century, with Labour’s “democratic socialism” in the United Kingdom and a “modern liberal” Fair Deal consensus in the United States, both countries were busy building welfare states.

What, then, is the status of the crisis/knowledge nexus today, especially in light of an ascendant neo-liberalism that criticizes the earlier notions of social justice and obligation? Crisis continues to be capitalism’s mode of operation. According to Naomi Klein’s recent “disaster capitalism” argument, emergencies around the globe, including natural catastrophes, are now used to impose radical free-market policies. As for knowledge, government- and business-produced information is omnipresent and effortlessly accessible. Expert culture is thriving. The popular media pepper this flow of official data with “human interest” accounts of individual plight or of difficulties suffered by entire communities. This blend of hard and soft “news” is certainly reminiscent of an older culture of the social fact. But it is to be distinguished from those precedents by the absence of a public sphere willing to address the social, a strong public wishing to discover society, and social movements speaking for the disaffected. The only grass root organization to emerge so far from the current crisis reenacts a different moment in the American past, the Boston Tea Party, and partakes in the grand old effort to ignore society and downgrade the state.

Admittedly, the social has also been subject to attacks from the Left, especially its academic wing, cast as a domain of modern technologies of power deployed by the state and the middle class to mold populations in their own image, or to simply discipline the masses. The nineteenth century preoccupation with knowing society was indeed motivated, at least in part, by the ambition to domesticate the lower classes and alien populations. Nevertheless, the public rituals of social investigation and the reading materials they generated also buttressed notions of social affinity, solidarity, and collective responsibility-all rather diminished today.

Further reading

For a classical analysis of the modern state and its relationship to capitalism and society, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York, 1944). On nineteenth century statistical imagination, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998), chap. 7; Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton, 1986); Ian Hacking,The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990). On new liberalism and social investigation, see The State and Social Investigation, ed. Michael J. Lacey and Mary O. Furner (Washington, D.C., 1993). For an account of the rise of sociology to replace disrupted social ties, see Bruce Mazlish, A New Science: The Breakdown of Connections and the Birth of Sociology (New York, 1989). Also see Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in Britain, 1840-1914 ed. David Englander and Rosemary O’Day (London, 1995); Robert C. Davis, “Social Research in America Before the Civil War,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Science, 8 (1972). James Vernon’s Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, 2007) follows the changing relationship between the British state and its subjects through the process that redefined malnutrition and the combat to eliminate it. On the establishment of boards of charities, public health, and labor statistics in American states after the Civil War, see William R. Brock, Investigation and Responsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865-1990 (Cambridge, 1984). On the U.S. Census, see Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven, 1988). For neo-liberalism and crisis, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York, 2007). On descriptions of bodies in pain and the humanitarian sensibility, see Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), 176-204. For Dorothea Dix’s reform crusades, see David L. Gollaher, Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix (New York, 1995).

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

Oz Frankel is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Committee on Historical Studies, New School for Social Research. He is the author of States of Inquiry: Social Investigation and Print Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain and the United States (2006).

I want to begin by thanking Common-place and the organizers of “The American Revolution Reborn.” I thank them for giving me not just this opportunity to share my work with you—to run with the big dogs—but also for giving me their validation that environmental history can help us understand the American Revolution. My paper for the conference looked at the science behind making saltpeter and forms part of a larger book project that brings together environmental history and the War of Independence. The project has been progressing at a glacially slow pace, but the conference has already sparked lots of ideas that will get things moving along. I’d like to mention a few of them here, and I’d like to dwell on one of them in particular.

The first session of the conference focused on global perspectives, and one member of the audience asked about connecting the Revolution to places other than the Americas and the Atlantic. Environmental history can help here. My paper examines how Americans made saltpeter for gunpowder, which naturally leads to the question, how did the British get their saltpeter? Well, almost all of it came from northeastern India, so what effects did wartime demand have on that environment? Deforestation for sure, and many others that I am starting to investigate. Similarly, what happened to the forests of northern Europe and western Russia, which supplied fir trees through the port of Riga? The Royal Navy used these huge trees as masts for ships of the line.

The second session of the conference brought to our attention the disaffected. One paper suggested that a person’s position was shaped, in part, by pre-existing conflicts. It also noted how some of the disaffected could tack back and forth from one side to the other, or how they could keep their heads down and stay out of trouble. Environmental history offers additional ways to think about these issues. For example, particular natural features of the land may have been the basis for some of those pre-existing conflicts. Control over a valuable resource may have given a person the power to approach first one side, and then the other. Alternatively, a livelihood involving work such as off-shore fishing or whaling may have enabled some to escape the conflict altogether.

The interactions between Loyalists, the disaffected, and rebels also prompted me to think about an environmental analogy on which I want to focus for the rest of this brief essay. Landscape ecologists study, among other things, the edges between two types of habitats. Think of a clearing in a forest, or a field next to a forest. At the edges of these habitats, you will find a transition zone where sunlight, wind speed, temperature, moisture, and other variables differ from what you find in the heart of either the forest or the field.

Now, what if we thought of communities of Loyalists, the disaffected, and rebels as separate habitats? One paper talked about how rebel communities put pressure on their inhabitants—to take this oath or join that militia. What happens if a Loyalist community, no matter what the size, appears and creates an edge? Can we come up with analogies to the natural variations in sunlight, wind speed, and moisture? Perhaps we see new variables at work, such as economic opportunities, cultural appeals, and social ties. Does this then change the rebel community’s pressure?

The edge between a forest and a field, with its mixture of habitats, can also host a rich diversity of species. Some are drawn to and thrive on the edge—generalists such as raccoons and coyotes—while other species cannot survive in or even enter the edge. Can the same be said for certain Loyalists, disaffected, and rebels? What would a generalist disaffected person look like, someone who can tack back and forth from one side to the other? What kind of rebel would not be able to come into contact with Loyalists? Furthermore, surprising relationships can develop in the edge. In north-central Florida, certain forest-dwelling birds will not go into the edge unless they see the tufted titmouse there; that bird’s presence may signal that the area is safe. The reliance of one species on another might get us to think in different ways about what another paper told us about Newport, Rhode Island. Did the “intimate connections” identified there facilitate the movement and survival of others in that edge environment?

I bring up edges because they make a particularly apt analogy for “The American Revolution Reborn.” Think of the meeting place of the conference, Franklin Hall at the American Philosophical Society, as an edge zone. The academic “forests” of Penn and Drexel were located just to the west of us; the public history “meadow” of Independence National Historical Park sat right next door; and we were drawn to this edge zone, joined by school teachers, retirees, lawyers, independent scholars, librarians, tour guides, consultants, docents, and many others. We all had specific knowledge of particular places and times, and by sharing that knowledge we made that edge zone especially rich during the days of the conference. Might Common-place be another such forum, another edge zone, where diverse students of the Revolution enrich one another’s experience and thinking?

There is one more feature of edges that may be appropriate here. Once an edge develops, certain conditions lead to the creation of more edge. Once some fallen trees create a clearing in a forest, other trees are now exposed to higher wind speeds, which can produce more blow-downs and more edge. This could be useful for thinking about how people interacted during the Revolution, but for now I want to keep the focus on us. Now that “The American Revolution Reborn” and Common-place have created this edge zone, I think the conditions are ripe for us to go out and create more edge in our home habitats. May this vibrant diversity of participants and ideas spread and flourish.

Further reading:

J.R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (Cambridge, U.K., 2010), an exemplary work of environmental history, contains one chapter that examines malaria in the southern campaigns of the War of Independence. Accessible general works on edge habitats include Jodi A. Hilty, William Z. Lidicker Jr., and Adina M. Merenlender, Corridor Ecology: The Science and Practice of Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation (Washington, D.C., 2006) and Mark A. Bush, Ecology of a Changing Planet (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1997). Two articles that go into greater detail are Leslie R. Ries, Robert J. Fletcher Jr., James Battin, and Thomas D. Sisk, “Ecological Responses to Habitat Edges: Mechanisms, Models, and Variability Explained,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 35 (2004): 491-522, and Kathryn E. Sieving, Thomas A. Contreras and Kimberly L. Maute, “Heterospecific Facilitation of Forest-Boundary Crossing by Mobbing Understory Birds in North-Central Florida,” Auk, 121:3 (July 2004): 738-751.

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

David C. Hsiung is the Charles and Shirley Knox Professor of History at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.