Often overlooked today, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery (1837) was one of the antebellum period’s steadily selling ex-slave narratives and the first to contain substantial illustrations. Roper’s Narrative, when remembered, is generally thought of in terms of the striking wood engraving of its author hung from a repurposed cotton machine as punishment for running away. By the 1830s, antislavery publications of all kinds regularly included illustrations that encouraged white readers to imagine themselves in the position of the enslaved. Such images generally worked, however, by depicting enslaved people as suffering victims—pleading to a cruel master, for sale at a market, or engaged in a futile attempt to escape—whose experiences were meant to be seen as representative of the slave system as a whole. But while the image in Roper’s Narrative shows violence against a slave, its cold, diagrammatic look coupled with the illegibility of its figures’ faces seems to do little to encourage a sympathetic response (fig. 1). In returning the image to the context in which it first appeared, we find that the details of Roper’s life, his relationship with his master, and the contraption itself cause us to meditate on the image’s particularities, not its representativeness. Its inseparability from the text alongside which it first appeared begs an interrogation of the ways abolitionist image-making could render individuals interchangeable, but also, on occasion, help make them uniquely visible.

Rudolf Cronau did many things. He wrote a multi-volume account of Christopher Columbus, which identified the explorer’s final resting place and won an award at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. He wrote a striking book on the history of advertising, another on environmental degradation in the United States, a multi-volume account of Germans’ contributions to American history, and a scathing portrait of British imperialism. As an American citizen, he took up an avidly anti-British position as World War I broke out, saw his book on British imperialism impounded by the American courts, was active along with his wife in war relief efforts for Germany, and died in 1939 thinking that Adolf Hitler might indeed restore Germany to its former glory. He is most well known in Germany, however, for the trips he took to the United States as a correspondent and artist for the German illustrated magazine Die Gartenlaube during the last two decades of the nineteenth century—especially for his 1881 trip to the Dakota territory, where he met Crow King, Gall, Hump, Rain in the Face, Sitting Bull and other famous American Indians. During that visit, he recognized an affinity with these people that had become common among Germans long before his journey, and which persists among them to this day. In that way, he channeled one of the most fundamental elements in the German love affair with American Indians.

The widespread fascination with American Indians among Germans began with a triumvirate: Cornelius Tacitus, Alexander von Humboldt, and James Fenimore Cooper. When the Roman Senator Tacitus wrote Germania during the first century CE, he portrayed Germans as a noble tribal people with an existential connection to the forests and lands of Central Europe, who suffered at the hands of an expansive, colonial civilization. Indeed, he wrote about Germans much in the same way German authors would later write about American Indians, as noble savages and formidable, violent warriors with painted faces, living in forest dwellings, whose most honorable qualities exposed the decadence and failings of the civilized world.

Like many Germans who later wrote about American Indians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Tacitus got many things wrong. Those errors, however, matter less than the fact that his work became an influential point of reference for a range of Germans seeking to better understand themselves and their place in the world. Tacitus’s portraits of tribal Germans as fearless, honest, unflinching, loyal, and physically powerful made comparisons to American Indians natural. Already in the seventeenth century, for example, German writers conflated the ancient Teutons portrayed by Tacitus with contemporary American Indians, and by the middle of the nineteenth century such comparisons circulated widely.

Indeed, between 1809 and 1900 at least seventy-two publications were devoted to the battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE, when the hero Arminius or Hermann defeated the Romans. These texts made it clear that by the mid-nineteenth century, Germans had developed a sense of pride in that history which, in turn, provided them with an easy sense of affinity toward American Indians.

At the same time, Alexander von Humboldt’s well-heralded travels in Central and South America around the turn of the nineteenth century provided the German literate classes with a model of erudition and Bildung (essentially self-edification) that inspired many to take the new world seriously. Indeed, Bildung, a common goal among such people at the outset of the nineteenth century, combined well with the prevalent sense of Germans’ destiny as a conglomerate of tribal peoples. In many cases, in fact, it was the effort at gaining Bildung that led many Germans to read Tacitus in the first place, and then encouraged them to seek out other means of exploring the German past.

Moreover, if Tacitus provided Germans with a historical link between themselves and American Indians, and Humboldt offered an example for how to engage them, it was unquestionably James Fenimore Cooper who completed this triangle of origins by inspiring Germans’ imaginations with his finely crafted tales. Cooper was easily the most translated American author in Germany, and through the countless reproductions of Cooper’s novels, the German fascination with American Indians became heightened and widespread (fig. 1).

What followed, then, during the first decades of the nineteenth century was a remarkable surge of inspiration and efforts at emulation, which spurred Germans to travel like Humboldt, to write like Cooper, and to seek out the tribal peoples of North America who had not yet succumbed to the fate of their own European ancestors. Indeed, a series of German travel writers and novelists built on the success of those stories. By writing about American Indians, they, like Cronau, became best-selling authors over the rest of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. The most prominent of these was Karl May, whose books sold over 70 million copies by the 1980s, about 20 million more than the most well-known American author of westerns, Louis L’Amour.

Such successes seem astonishing until we recognize that by the turn of the twentieth century, thinking about American Indians had become integral to German culture. Indians were not only a popular subject among novelists and other writers, they were incorporated into the production of toys, theater, circus, high and low art, and the new cinema. Across Imperial, Weimar, and later Nazi Germany, children of all ages and both genders “played Indian,” emulating the characters from Cooper and May and the people they encountered in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and German circuses.

Adults “played Indian” as well, and not simply those individuals who joined the first hobby clubs in the early twentieth century or continued this pursuit in the postwar era. Modernist artists like Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter, for example, turned to their childhood engagement with American Indians while dealing with their personal crises and the crises of modernity. Art historian Aby Warburg traveled to the Hopi and Zuni pueblos for the same reason; the artist Max Ernst, the psychiatrist Carl Jung, and ethnologists Karl von den Steinen and Paul Ehrenreich followed. Adolf Hitler remained in Germany; but he continued to read Karl May’s Winnetou for insights into crisis situations, recommending it to his General Staff during the battles of World War II.

“Indians,” in short, became deeply ingrained in German culture during the nineteenth century, their stories became ciphers for modern struggles during the twentieth century, and that long cultural history continued unabated through the postwar era, resurfacing during Cold War clashes, peace protests, environmental movements, esoteric musings, visits of postwar German tourists to American Indian reservations, and the persistent settings of backyard play and hobbyists’ camps where, in every performed conflict, the “Indians” remain “the good guys.”

Cronau’s revelations during his 1881 stay among the Lakota capture the essence of this appeal, which, by the time of his adventures, was almost overdetermined (fig. 2).

Cronau’s vision

Rudolf Cronau was born in 1855 into a civil servant’s family in Solingen, a small Rhineland town just north of Cologne. He saw little of his father, who died when Cronau was ten, and his mother left him an orphan just two years later. Shuffled from one relative’s home to the next, as each in turn passed away, Cronau was increasingly isolated: His half-brother and half-sister left him behind as each sought their fortunes in America, and his sister Anna married and departed to Barmen in 1870. Afterwards, he lived alone with their aunt until he too, at the age of fifteen, set off to attend the famous Düsseldorf Academy of Art.

He did not stay long. Chafing under his mentors’ strong Catholicism, their focus on religious themes, and their insistence that he reproduce images from classical art, he left the academy, sought adventure in the Franco-Prussian War, and returned to Solingen to work as a journalist while pursuing his passion: landscapes. He produced drawings of the Harz Mountains, the Sächsisches Schweiz, the Riesengebirge, the valleys of the Elbe and Oder Rivers, and other picturesque parts of Germany and Austria. He was talented. He became a regular contributor to Die Gartenlaube by the mid 1870s, moved to Leipzig and joined the city’s Art Association, and eventually became its chairman before gaining a commission to travel to the kinds of “wonders” that dwarfed the landscapes he had seen in Europe: the geysers in Yellowstone, the walls of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley, the vast prairies, and the modern spectacle of American cities.

When Cronau crossed the Atlantic in January 1881, he filled his notebook with details from his shipboard adventures. His notes on passengers, sea sickness, and the ship’s emergency preparations were quickly overshadowed, however, by his excited first glimpse of the lighthouse on Fire Island, the quickening sensation that came with the early morning murmurs of land, and his impressions of their arrival in New York harbor. On entering the city, however, those reports gave way to silence. It took time to comprehend the wonder of New York—many days passed before he began recording it.

When he returned to writing, he focused on the city’s aesthetic, which he discerned in the chaos and order of the city’s architecture, the rhythm of its streets, and the purposefulness of its people. He described New York’s harbor as a criss-crossing collection of ship’s masts and towers, a throng of colorful confusion. His experience of the port was a mixture of quick images, of even quicker English, smatterings of various German dialects, and above all, incessant movement. The difference between “the homeland,” he explained, “is shocking; every step, every movement into the streets, brings something new and stimulating.” “Everything is interesting,” he wrote, “even if not all is satisfying. The construction of the houses, the deep red of the bricks, the chocolate color of the brown stone palaces, the number of colorful announcement boards,” give the streets such a “special complexion” that one never tires of acting the flaneur.

While much of what he witnessed was wondrous, not everything was unfamiliar. This too is critical: America was full of Germans. Indeed, when Cronau arrived in New York City, his stepsister Mathilde Waldeck Stöcker greeted him on the docks and took him into her home. From that comfortable setting, he became acquainted with the city’s German community. After only a few days in town, he met the editors of the New-York-Staatszeitung, one of the largest German-language newspapers in the world, initiating a relationship that would continue until the last years of his life. Through them, he gained introductions to many prominent people: members of the German art community, scientific associations, politicians, and eventually Karl Schurz, a fellow Rhinelander and the United States Secretary of the Interior. It was Schurz who approved Cronau’s idea to travel to Dakota territory in order to capture the moment in which America’s most formidable warriors settled onto its last reservations. And as he traveled there, he moved across vast German-American networks.

Sublime landscapes and emotional projections

Cronau left for the American West in May 1881. Traveling by train across the upper Midwest, Cronau saw endless woodlands broken by occasional villages, by zealously cultivated farmland, and by burgeoning Midwestern cities and towns. The distances were daunting. The trees in American forests seemed to grow more densely than in Germany, “everything,” he noted, “struggling up towards the sky.” The rolling landscape had a certain appeal, and he collected images, clipped from newspapers and magazines, in his diary. What most impressed Cronau on his journey to St. Paul, Minnesota, however, was the spectacle of Niagara Falls.

Niagara brought him face to face with the natural sublime he expected to find in America, the antinomy to the cityscapes, and it evoked in him the essential longings that inspired his trip. Staring out at the falls from Prospect Point he saw a vision “like that which had filled my fantasies since my early youth.” Yet it was no fantasy, no rendering of an ideal in ink or oil. Rather it stood before him “in great incomprehensible reality,” astounding in its veracity. Contemplating the gigantic whirlpool rapids, he reflected in his diary: “so wild and majestic had I imagined the American landscape, so was the nature in which I imagined the Indians, Cooper’s characters, so was the background I pictured for [Washington] Irving’s histories.” In primeval landscapes, he thought, one might find, indeed one should find, primeval people, original inhabitants: Indians.

Cronau’s melancholy

His first encounter with American Indians, however, took place much farther west, and there was little sublime about it. It happened almost inadvertently near Fort Snelling, Minnesota, during a Sunday outing from St. Paul on May 22, 1881. It began with excitement: He recorded in his diaries the initial thrill of seeing “the tops of brown tents” stretching up above the green forest as they approached the settlement. “On the edge of a small lake,” he wrote, “the white tents, now browned from smoke, were a picturesque sight.” Looking for details, he combined his observations with acquired information, explaining that these “wigwams” were cleverly constructed to control the flow of smoke through the opening in the top, and they are quickly accessible through the door at the bottom; in other times and places, he noted, they might also be covered with animal skins or the bark from trees. He included further ethnographic information about these structures in his notes, and then he recorded similar information about their inhabitants: the Sioux (fig. 3).

Around St. Paul, he noted, people generally characterized the Sioux with references to the 1862 Dakota conflict and the massacres of German-American settlers near New Ulm. The “redskins” he encountered near Fort Snelling, however, “had been friendly minded for years” and had long since “opened the door and the gate to civilization’s influence.” That was immediately apparent, he wrote, in their clothing: most of the men “wore hats and bright shirts, pants and vests,” while the women were clad in “jackets and skirts made of cotton and wool.” Moccasins were the footwear of choice. Aside from their shoes, however, “there was no longer any sign of their national costume.”

That romantic element, and the link it documented to the natural sublime, the link he expected to find among Cooper’s characters, was gone. These people were not like Cooper’s Indians, just as Minnesota was no longer primeval forest or sublime landscape. The forces that shaped and fed the hypermodern cities of the East, he recognized, had flooded west across Minnesota, fundamentally changing the land and its inhabitants—which left him disconcerted.

Indeed, to Cronau, the Dakota he met near Fort Snelling seemed more akin to the “wilting leaves” in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem Hiawatha than to the bold characters in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Thus, he quotes Longfellow extensively for Die Gartenlaube’s readers, using Hiawatha as a means of introducing his subjects, and as a way of explaining their fate. While standing by a waterfall near Fort Snelling, he explained, his imagination escaped into a time now past, into “Longfellow’s wonderful poem,” and into his portrait of “Minnehaha, the laughing water.” “Wistfully,” he told his readers, he reflected on the fact that the people about whom the poem was written were “scattered or all but exterminated, while a foreign language, the language of their destroyer, sings of their Gods and heroes.” “That,” he lamented, “is a cruel irony of history.” For although “The Song of Hiawtha is a pearl in the crown of American poetry,” the conditions he observed in Minnesota begged him to ask: “Who spared the heroes about whom the song sings in the horrible war of extermination?” Who spared “the poor Indian?”

Cronau’s epiphany

Cronau’s melancholy, however, gave way to anger as he found what he sought in Dakota Territory. His goal in traveling there, as he later wrote in his autobiography, was to “realize a long nourished and favorite wish to become acquainted with the original inhabitants of the New World, so gloriously portrayed in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales.” And he did. At Fort Yates and the Standing Rock Reservation, at the Pipestone Quarry and the Yankton Agency, and at Fort Randall, Cronau began to channel critical elements in the German love affair with American Indians: He began to take a strong position against the encroachment of white settlers on American Indian lands, to denounce the U.S. government’s handling of Indian affairs, and to condemn widespread arguments about American Indians’ inability to change with the times. He came to regard those arguments as nothing more than a rationalization for expropriating their lands and exterminating them, and his admiration for those who had managed to resist it grew precipitously as he recognized an affinity between his ancestors and the people he came to know.

Here, too, he relied greatly on Germans. Joseph A. Stephan, who was born in Gissigheim in the south German state of Baden, was the Indian Agent at the Standing Rock reservation when Cronau arrived. He welcomed his countryman to Fort Yates, introducing him to the leading chiefs and spending considerable time educating and advising him about Lakota culture and government policies. Fort Yates’s storekeeper was a German as well. So too was the quartermaster at Fort Randall, and his assistant, Fritz Schenk, was from Bern, Switzerland. Schenk guided Cronau through his initial meetings with Sitting Bull and helped him arrange an exhibition of Cronau’s artwork for everyone at the fort, including the Lakota. He also remained a key source of information about life at Fort Randall until Sitting Bull left for Standing Rock in the spring of 1883.

Moreover, throughout his time in Dakota Territory, and afterwards while writing his essays and lectures in Milwaukee, Cronau drew on reports about Indian affairs in many German-language newspapers. They too shaped his opinions and helped him channel a distinctly German discourse.

Most importantly, however, he gleaned information from his observations and from his conversations with the kinds of men he came to find: men of exceptional characteristics; natural men who had done great deeds; men who had not yet been corrupted by the myriad forces of civilization, and who need not be. These were men who could choose to accommodate themselves to those forces, but who were only then, in the fall of 1881, at the moment of choosing.

Cronau believed these men were an integral part of the landscape they inhabited. They were part of the natural sublime, and they harbored an essential masculinity. He saw it evidenced in their raw physicality, and he began rhapsodizing about their magnificent bodies early in his trip. During his first excursion from Fort Yates to the “Hostile Camp,” located just forty-five minutes away, he met with a series of chiefs who presented him with gifts, including an eagle feather from Pretty Bear, which he accepted as a token of great significance. Initially, his notes focused on recording these introductions and detailing the character of the camp. He described the weathered tents, some with painted exteriors, many decorated with scalp locks, bison skulls, and antlers, all showing evidence of the hardships that had brought their owners to the reservation.

His notes, however, moved quickly to the excitement of a dance that seemed to begin almost spontaneously, and which overwhelmed him with stark and vivid impressions of perfect bodies in motion. Enamored with the dancers, he sketched out some of the patterns he saw painted on their faces in his notebook, and he described how they carried their weapons and wore their hair, and as the numbers of participants grew and they mixed into the light from the fires, he became enraptured, proclaiming them “indefatigable,” and writing: “here, as I saw the dancers naked, I had the opportunity to marvel at the veritable athletic and superbly-built bodies of the Indians.” “A large number,” he added, “are six feet high.”

Such men easily fulfilled Cronau’s hopes and expectations of American Indians. He regarded One Bull, whom he befriended at Fort Randall, as “the personified ideal of a Cooper’esque Indian, an Unkas, but more manly, mature, complete, and noble in his movements” (fig. 4). Although Sitting Bull was not as beautiful as the twenty-seven-year-old One Bull, Cronau described him as a “vision of pronounced manliness,” and a “far more important personality than Cooper’s Chingagook,” the father of Unkas, and the model of “authentic Indians” for Cronau’s generation of Germans. In part, that “pronounced manliness” was embodied in his stature. He was a man “of average height, . . . with a massive head, broad cheekbones, blunt nose, and narrow mouth.” When Cronau met him, his “shining black hair hung in braids wrapped with fur that were draped across his powerful chest,” and a “single Eagle feather was placed in his long scalp lock.” His entire body projected physical prowess, just as his eyes and his speech revealed his exceptional nature.

Indeed, Sitting Bull and other Sioux leaders such as Crow King, Gall, and Hump impressed Cronau through their demeanor and words as much as their powerful bodies. Cronau arrived at Standing Rock during a moment of transition. Stephan’s tenure as agent was coming to an end; Major James McLaughlin had just arrived from the Devil’s Lake Reservation to replace him, and Cronau was privy to the initial meeting between McLaughlin and his new charges. He recorded McLaughlin’s speech to them, in which the new agent characterized the Lakota as children who must learn to behave so that he, as their father, could care for their wants and needs and help educate them in the ways of white Americans. What Cronau witnessed in their responses, however, was not childlike. It was inspirational.

Cronau documented the testaments of complete, independent, capable, brave, and self-confident men who commanded supreme respect when they spoke to a room. He recorded in his notebook, for example, the striking impression made by Rain in the Face as he denounced the proceedings and the “crooked tongued” men who the “Great Father” sent them, and then he reflected on this man’s participation in the Battle of Little Big Horn and the rumors that he had cut out and eaten the heart of Thomas Custer. Such men were not easily overcome. Even more impressive, however, was Big Soldier, whom Cronau characterized as a “felicitous speaker whose words rained down like a mountain storm” and who stood directly before McLaughlin, looking him in the eye, and explaining that the “Great Father” had sent many people to them with scores of promises, but they always disappointed.

Cronau’s appreciation of American Indians changed as he witnessed these and other men, including Crow King, Fire Heart, Gall, High Bear, Hump, Running Antelope, and Two Bears face the agent and issue their complaints about the ways in which they had been misled, how whites had eliminated the wild animals, how settlers greedily pressed for more land and offered little reciprocation for what they took. He listened as the chiefs stressed that the agents had continually failed to do their jobs, failed to represent them well in Washington, failed to protect them against the encroachments of settlers. And as he listened, Cronau began to develop his own understanding of a side of American history not present in Cooper’s tales. He began to take a critical position on the history of U.S.-American Indian relations, and he gained further respect for these men.

Thus Cronau’s portraits of them, both his words and his images, not only emphasized their ferocity but also came to include their dignity, intelligence, and wisdom. As a journalist, Cronau understood the appeal of sensation, and he clearly enjoyed describing the most furious and indeed terrifying scenes he had witnessed during the dances. More poignant, however, were his descriptions of the chiefs and their people during ration day: “wrapped in colorful wool blankets or shaggy buffalo skins, with a Tomahawk on an arm,” these men, he underscored, stood before the fort’s commander “with the pride of Roman Senators.”

If Cronau’s respect for these men emerged during the meeting with McLaughlin, it was solidified and deepened through his many conversations with exceptional individuals such as Crow King at Standing Rock, Struck by the Ree at the Yankton Agency, and Sitting Bull at Fort Randall. Cronau’s relationship with Sitting Bull has received considerable attention in Germany, in part because Sitting Bull remains a celebrity there, and because Cronau was the German with the closest contact to him. He is well known for having painted Sitting Bull’s portrait, and for giving Sitting Bull a photograph of himself, which the Lakota leader allegedly kept with him until his death (fig. 6).

Cronau met repeatedly with Sitting Bull and spoke with him at length. Sitting Bull told him about his past, the drawings he had made that chronicled his biography, and which had been sent to a museum in the East, the hard times and hunger in Canada, his dissatisfaction with living on rations, and his desire to have a farm, send his children to white schools, and have them learn trades. Sitting Bull also explained why he had gone to war: He had been forced after the 1862 Dakota war in Minnesota to fight back against the troops that streamed into Dakota Territory, abusing his people. He explained that he had fought against many American Indian tribes as well, refusing to attend the famous peace meeting in 1866, and effectively pushing the Crows, for example, off their lands. He also explained why he had led raids on the gold miners who invaded the Black Hills in 1875, and how he had tried to push the whites out of Lakota lands altogether. Sitting Bull became so animated during these stories that Cronau found it difficult to finish his portrait; but he did complete it, and during their discussions he experienced his epiphany about American Indian affairs as well.

There are three places in his notebooks where Cronau compares the fate of American Indian tribes to the fate of German tribes during the age of Rome: directly after watching the meeting with McLaughlin, after recording his discussions with Sitting Bull, and after his trips in Dakota Territory when he returned to his wife in Milwaukee and spent the winter writing lectures and essays for Die Gartenlaube. Such comparisons between the fate of German and American Indian tribes persist to this day in the German discourse on American Indians.

In “The Denigrated Race,” a lecture he presented to German-American audiences in 1882 and across Germany in 1884-1887, Cronau argued that American Indian tribes, much like German tribes more than a millennium earlier, suffered a devastating invasion from a better-organized and more technically advanced civilization. The consequences for American Indians, however, were more immediate and far greater. The German tribes were armed much like the Romans, and thus they did not suffer from the same disparity of weapons. They were also less alienated than the various tribes of American Indians, and they were not spread out across such vast terrain, and were therefore able to unify much more easily in opposition to Rome. American Indians suffered all those comparative disadvantages and more: they were unable to anticipate the “formidableness or numbers” of their “overpowering opponent,” and the character of the invasion was different as well. The “whites did not come with a large army” to America, as had the Romans to Northern Europe. Rather they came in small groups, “fixed themselves on many different points,” and much like a “slow, lingering, but certain sickness,” much “like a bacteria” against which “there was no cure,” they struck from multiple points of contact. In addition, they brought lethal diseases and alcohol.

Like many other German observers, Cronau denounced U.S. Indian policy. He raged against the constant deception, fraud, and incompetence of government employees charged with maintaining treaties and reservations. He reviled the mean-spiritedness behind the ubiquitous swindles and abuses faced by American Indians who moved onto reservations, and he argued that it was the same mean-spiritedness which had permitted “frontier skirmishes” to develop into a “race war that is still not at an end today [1882].” He blamed the white settlers who lived close to reservations and who coveted American Indian lands for much of the bloodshed during the last decades, and he argued that “ninety-nine out of one-hundred times” violence erupted, it was due to “the same old story:” “broken treaties, unfulfilled promises, and almost incomprehensible injustices.” “Nowhere else,” he argued, “has the collision between white people and another group of people” been so devastating as in North America, and thus he lamented that “the history of the red race in the territory of the Union” must be regarded as “one of the saddest chapters in world history.”

While the anglophone reporters who attended his lectures in Minnesota characterized Cronau’s portraits as typically German, “smacking” of idealized images from Cooper’s tales, and wondered aloud at his audacity for being so critical of government policy while visiting their land, the Germanophone audiences greeted his condemnation with applause and reprinted his arguments in full in their papers. So too did the papers that followed his three-year tour in Germany, where Cronau provided Germans with confirmation of what they already sensed: Germans shared with American Indians a fate, a loss of self, not unlike what many believed they and their ancestors experienced beginning with the influx of Christianity and the hegemonic power of Roman civilization and continuing through the oppressive modern structures that accompanied each successive economic system and state. Those structures had pressed Germans away from nature, away from more direct links to their ancestors, from the land and other species, from a more natural spirituality, an essential masculinity, and into an increasingly material, and often atomized, world. Convinced that they too had experienced a kind of ethnocide in the past, and facing the creation of new, demanding states with almost every generation, these Germans were particularly sensitive to the mixed implications of assimilation facing American Indians during the last two centuries. Thus the affinity at the heart of Cronau’s epiphany reveals the sense of self at the center of the German love affair with American Indians.

Further reading

Cronau’s manuscripts are available in the Solingen City Archive (Stadtarchiv Solingen). Some of his papers can also be found at the German Society of Philadelphia and in the personal possession of Gerald Wunderlich. Cronau’s publications from this period are all in German, but the Gartenlaube essays are easily located in many American libraries. Readers interested in learning more about how Germans and other Europeans viewed Native Americans should consult Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop, eds., Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections (Lincoln, 2002); and Christian F. Feest, ed., Indians & Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays (Lincoln, 1999). See also Penny, “Red Power: Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and Indian Activist Networks in East and West Germany,” Central European History 41:3 (September 2008): 447-476; and Penny, “Elusive Authenticity: The Quest for the Authentic Indian in German Public Culture,”Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48:4 (October 2006): 798-818. Pamela Kort’s edited collection,I Like America: Fictions of the Wild West (New York, 2007), is also a useful introduction. Based on a museum exhibition in Frankfurt, it includes many of Cronau’s drawings as well as other illustrations from Germans during this era. Another fine introduction is Peter Bolz, “Indians and Germans: A relationship riddled with Clichés,” in Native American Art: The Collections of the Ethnological Museum Berlin, edited by Peter Bolz and Hans-Ulrich Sanner, 9:22. (Berlin, 1999). For an introduction to Alexander von Humboldt’s broad vision of natural history, see Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe Vol. 1-2 (Baltimore, 1997). Readers who wish to pursue the deep backstory will find Tacitus’ account of Germany’s ancient past inArgicola/Germania, trans. Harold Mattingly (New York, 2009). Karl May books, only recently published in English, are now readily available. The classics are Winnetou vols. 1-3 and The Treasure of the Silver Lake.

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

H. Glenn Penny is associate professor of Modern European History at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (2002) and the editor, together with Matti Bunzl, of Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (2003). This essay stems from his recently completed book,The German Love Affair with American Indians, which is forthcoming with the University of North Carolina Press.

A Historical Turn for the Better, or Worse?

Scholars of early America have a complicated relationship with historical movies and television shows. While popular dramas with mass audiences have the potential to kindle wide interest in a historical period, Hollywood history productions are often glaringly inaccurate, presenting a glamorized and heavily distorted version of crucial periods such as the Civil War and the American Revolution.

Of course, not all historical dramas are created equal. At one end of the spectrum are unabashed historical fantasies like Sleepy Hollow and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter; productions with no expectation of being taken as serious history by anyone. At the opposite end are conscientiously produced “docudramas” like HBO’s John Adams that stay palpably close to the historical record.

Most historical dramas fall somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, including AMC’s recent television series Turn: Washington’s Spies.

Historical fiction, for better or worse, can play a huge role in shaping popular historical memory.

Turn, which revolves around British and colonial spycraft during the Revolutionary War, was aggressively promoted as a meticulously researched show before its premiere in April 2014. Advertisements described it as “the true story of America’s first spy ring.” But as Season 1 unfolded, viewers discovered that Turn placed as low a priority on staying true to documented facts as most other historical dramas. It quickly became a prime target in the perennial debate over the importance of accuracy in historical film.

Last February, before the debut of Turn‘s second season, a group of the show’s writers, producers, and cast members assembled before a large crowd at the College of William and Mary for a discussion (viewable in its entirety here) of the differences between academic history and historical drama. There, they argued that the altered history portrayed in Turn represented an “authenticity” and even a form of “truth” that transcended factual accuracy.

Do the virtues of inaccurate historical films outweigh their vices? How much weight should accuracy have in our evaluation of historical film? Most importantly, are there historical narrative truths that supersede factual accuracy?

Historical fiction, for better or worse, can play a huge role in shaping popular historical memory, and early American scholars ought to help frame the discussions surrounding shows like Turn. In this double review, historian Cole Jones and social studies education professor Jeremy Stoddard weigh in on this new turn in historical interpretation.

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

Rachel L. Smith, founder of the Turn to a Historian blog, works for the Office of the Connecticut State Historian at the University of Connecticut; as a historical consultant; and as an administrative editor for Commonplace.

The almanac gets no respect. It’s the whipping boy of early American literature. Few Americans today would guess that an almanac was actually the second publication to come off the first American printing press. In 1639! Every year after that up through the American Revolution, the almanac enjoyed a readership unmatched but for the Bible. It was, year in and year out, a guaranteed bestseller. We can thank Moses Coit Tyler, the nineteenth-century critic who characterized the almanac as “the very quack, clown, pack-horse, and pariah of modern literature,” for sealing its demise. Nothing much has happened since to restore the almanac’s reputation despite the perennial appearance of a modern-day descendent.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac, introduced by Robert B. Thomas in 1792, gets credit for one of the longest publishing runs in American history, but its enduring popularity has more to do with nostalgia and its quirky weather predictions than real respect. Perusing the Table of Contents of the latest edition for 2010 may confuse more than enlighten those interested in understanding the almanac’s status in early America. Among the offerings are “Maddening Mind-Manglers,” “Anecdotes and Pleasantries,” “Great Moments in the History of Laughter,” and a “Special Report” entitled “The Old (and New) Farmer’s Essential Manure Manual.” Such lowbrow, if harmless, “amusements” have little to do with the almanac’s raison d’être.Today’s audience does not know what to make of the colonial almanac because most people, historians included, have never really known how to talk about it. Was it a calendar? A collection of essays? A rudimentary calculator? A political commentator? A timepiece? A local directory? A diary? Uh-huh. It was all that and more. It could be different things to different people. The problem with Tyler’s assessment, and those of many scholars thereafter, was that he categorized the almanac as literature. That placed the almanac at a real disadvantage. It simply does not belong in the same category as Moby Dick. As literature, the humble annual could never measure up. A friend recently hit on a much more appropriate analogy when he likened the almanac to an iPhone. I know, it sounds ludicrous and seriously farfetched. But give me a chance to prove just how apt a comparison it is.

Like an iPhone, the almanac was portable. The size of a long billfold at about 4-by-7 inches and typically containing 24 to 36 pages, it was slim enough to slip into a pocket or lady’s reticule. Although some almanacs held an honored position hanging by the hearth to allow every family member easy access to it, publishers intended the almanac to be carried along as a customer went about his or her day. Avid users pulled them out again and again, accidentally tearing pages or wearing down the ink, all the while praying that the almanac would last until the next year’s edition. Another risk was losing the almanac during one’s travels, perhaps left behind on a shop counter or on a bench at a local tavern. So devastated from the loss of his almanac (not to mention his paper money), a subscriber to the Virginia Gazette placed an advertisement in the December 12, 1777, issue offering a $10 reward to anyone who found his “small red pocket book containing a blank almanack, and the following bills, viz. One twelve pounds of the James river bank, one eight, one six and one five dollar bill, a four and one shilling bill with two parcels of needles.” It’s amazing that some of those almanacs survived, tucked reverently away in today’s archives, many with nail holes or loops of string still intact.

Even though its features were characteristically low-tech, the almanac had many applications. More ready reference than literary repository, many almanacs contained few words at all, or at least few words that when strung together comprised anything resembling prose. Almanacs were more about tables, lists, and, most critically, a calendar. Take, for instance, the 1792 edition of The Universal Calendar, and the North American Almanack. Consisting of only 12 pages front to back, the first half of the pamphlet was devoted entirely to a monthly calendar. Aside from offering a breakdown of the days of the month and week, the calendar was chockfull of useful information if one knew how to read it. Compiler Samuel Stearns supplied customers with a key that explained the data organized into eight columns. The first and second columns listed the day of the month and week. The third column was the widest and offered occasional weather predictions, religious observances such as Advent or Saints days, and historical trivia mostly tied to the country’s recent Revolution. The remaining columns would be the most foreign to today’s readers, all grounded in astronomical calculations performed by Stearns, including the moon’s phases, the times of the moon’s and sun’s rising and setting, and a column obliquely referred to as the “clock Equations.” I’ll explain just what customers did with all this information in a moment.

Aside from the calendar, Stearns included a tide table for Boston; a list of the annual meetings of Friends (or Quakers) in New England; a list of court days in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Vermont; and two-and-half pages devoted to a list of popular roads from Boston to various towns as far distant as New York “With the Names of those who keep Houses of Entertainment.” On the back page, strategically placed for easy reference, was a “Table of Simple Interest, at Six per Cent per Annum.” The only feature in Stearns’s almanac that might be considered prose was a recipe containing an egg yolk mixed with “clear water” to relieve cramping in the joints. Once the concoction was beaten, Dr. Fordyce, the author, recommended: “Rub with a finger, every night going to bed, the moisture under the toes.”

Although it could hardly match the number of offerings in an iPhone app store, The Universal Calendar and North American Almanac was pretty versatile. It helped calculate interest on an outstanding loan. It predicted the weather and, by extension, told farmers the best time to plant their crops. It told users when, and in the case of the Quakers where, to go to church. A virtual map, it directed travelers to and from Boston via the best roads and taverns. It performed a civic duty, for defendants and spectators alike, by publishing the days county courts met in all of New England. It indicated the best time for captains to set sail from the port of Boston. It even cured toe cramps. And, last but not least, it told the time.

Returning to that cryptic column of “clock Equations” listed in the calendar, the data enabled any Bostonian to calculate the local time. All one had to do was add or subtract, depending on the time of year, the number of minutes listed in the column from the natural time as told on a sundial. For instance, if a reader wanted to know the local time on Sunday, September 23, 1792, she could consult her sundial at noon and subtract “7” minutes, as listed in her almanac, to determine the local time of 11:53. For this reason, and because the era’s clocks were so temperamental, many admirers boasted that the pamphlet made for a more accurate timepiece than its mechanical cousin. One could even perform such calculations at night, according to almanac-maker Nathanael Low. Low famously claimed that “Twenty gentlemen in company will hardly be able, by the help of their thirty-guinea watches, to guess within two hours of the true time of night. One says it is nine o’clock, another half after eight—a third, half after ten; whilst the poor peasant, who never saw a watch, will tell the time to a fraction, by the rising and setting of the moon, and some particular stars, which he learns from his almanack.”

With so many uses, the almanac, like an iPhone, was truly interactive. The proof is in the margins where owners left crosses and dashes alongside the calendar to signal important dates or scribbled notes about matters both trivial and momentous. In 1764, William Stickney penned a note in the margin of his calendar marking the day “Elizabeth and Abigail went to Scool [sic] town Hall.” Country doctor Aaron Wight drew a tiny coffin beside December 12 in the calendar of his 1770 almanac and wrote “Uncle John Wight Died.” More often owners left only a word or phrase such as “ten wood bery” or “ox back” making the meaning more difficult to decode. But one does not have to know exactly what the writer meant to appreciate how such notes played off the calendar’s temporal features. By adding one’s own data, the generic calendar turned into a personal datebook setting the events of one’s life in time.

Just as its calendar encouraged users to convert the almanac into a personal timepiece, its financial features prompted them to think of it as an ad hoc account book. In addition to interest tables, almanacs served up tables and charts to assist customers in knowing how much money they had in their pockets. That could be an especially complicated proposition in the decades following the American Revolution when paper money, both as U.S. dollars and English pounds, mixed with gold and silver coins as legal tender. Almanac compiler Andrew Beers responded accordingly offering his customers in his 1799 Beers’s Almanac, no fewer than four tables, with copious footnotes, to assist in those conversions. Among them was a table “Shewing the value of any number of Cents in Lawful Money, from 1 to 100” and another “Shewing the value of any number of Pence from 1 Penny to 6 Shillings, in Cents and Mills.” On the next page, Beers reserved the bottom half for two more tables, one displaying the value of Portuguese and English gold in dollars and cents and the other the same conversion for French and Spanish gold. These financial tools help explain the other most common type of personal graffiti sprayed across title pages and squeezed into margins: numbers. Often no more sophisticated than simple addition or subtraction, such equations tell us that an almanac was a critical accessory in matters of money, as notepad as well as calculator.

Inspired by the almanac’s approach to organizing such financial data, customers occasionally added their own tables. Tailor David Brown tracked the days he worked “at Mr. Lord’s” in his 1791 edition of Bickerstaff’s Massachusetts Almanack, assembling all of the information into his own “table” with columns marking the days worked and the sums he paid for meals, washing, and lodging (fig. 1). In a more rudimentary table, parson Thomas Balch made a list on a blank page inserted in his 1759 Ames Almanac recording the “cords” of wood he had received from each member of his congregation that year (fig. 2), a form of “payment” familiar to any eighteenth-century minister.

Though I may be in danger here of taking the iPhone analogy too far, there is one colorful customer who even liked to “talk” to his almanac. One such virtual conversation began when Jeremy Belknap, then a Harvard theology student who years later went on to found the Massachusetts Historical Society, perused the preface of Nathaniel Ames’s 1761 almanac in which the almanac-maker announced his intention to “decorate” his pamphlet with “poetry of my own composing.” Apparently, Belknap considered Ames a better almanac-compiler than a poet, for Belknap took an entire page to offer his response to Ames’s proposition:

Fie, Doctor, I’m ashamed of you to print such a Sentence as this in your almanack,—Decorate the almanack, Doctor, This beats all Nature, Decorate the almanack with Poetry of your own composing, It seems you have a great opinion of your self to think that Poetry of your composing can decorate an almanack, I’ll assure you your opinion is wrong, Doctor, for all of Poetry that you ever made, if it be like this, can never decorate but disgrace your Almanacks.

The exchange between Belknap and Ames continued as Belknap replied to Ames’s poems printed atop each calendar page. In January, Belknap accused Ames of “false grammar.” In March, Belknap summed up Ames’s verse as “very poor sense & worse poetry.” By November, Belknap’s patience was wearing thin. Belknap appeared to cut off Ames in midstride after reading his opening lines: “When SOL descends a down the Midnight Way/The Atmosphere holds up the falling Day.” “Where’s the midnight way, Doctor Nonsense,” Belknap demanded.

Like a customer who takes his coffee black, Belknap preferred an almanac that stuck to essentials.

Dozens of patrons in early America, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, took such interactivity to its next logical step and turned their almanacs into daily diaries. The practice was so commonplace that publishers often advertised that an almanac could be “interleaved” with blank pages for an extra sum. In 1758, bookseller Hugh Gaine of New York advised his clientele to order their almanacs early, for “Many Gentlemen were disappointed of the Use of this Almanack, for the Year 1757, by their not sending for the same in Time: ‘Tis therefore requested that they wou’d be less dilatory this Year. It is properly interleaved with fine Paper, on which Memorandums may be made for every Day in the Year.”

Even though they did not have to confine their notes to the margins, customers who chose to insert blank pages inside their almanacs remained cramped for space. It was standard for a diarist to have a single sheet, inserted opposite a monthly calendar page, for an entire month’s worth of memos. For that reason, and because such daily notes followed strict conventions, one almanac-diary looked much like another. Even those of George Washington. Not surprisingly, Washington turned to the annual edition of The Virginia Almanac for his diary. Aside from assigning a heading for his memoranda pages that read “Where & How my time is Spent,” Washington’s entries resembled those of most of his contemporaries, especially in the days before the Revolution when he was preoccupied with managing his large Virginia estate. In a typical glimpse, Washington recorded the first few days of July 1771 as follows:

July 1. Rid into the Neck to my Harvest People, & back to Dinner. Mr. Robt. Rutherford came in the Afternoon & went away again.
2. Rid to Harvest Field in the Neck & back to Dinner.
3. Rid to the Harvest Field in the Neck by the Ferry & Muddy hole Plantations. In the Afternoon Mr. Jno. Smith of Westmoreland came here.
4. At home all day with Mr. Smith. In the Afternoon Jno. Custis came.

Do not be fooled by the brevity or dullness of the entries, for when added up over months, years, and often decades, they assumed more weight and significance than one might suppose. More than a portable memory aide, the almanac-diary helped users feel they were in control by imposing order on their daily experiences.

By now, I hope you’ll forgive the ahistorical slip that led me to enlist the iPhone as a way of imagining just how resourceful an early almanac could be. It was so much more than a book. Comparing it to the iPhone helps expand our vision about how an almanac worked and what it could do for its buyers. It wasn’t simply a compendium of reading material. Just as an iPhone connects users to an outside world and provides a feast of tools designed to make our lives easier, the almanac held the same promise. More than that, it was central to early American life and culture because it had so little competition. There was nothing at the local book shop that could do all the things the almanac did.

I don’t mean to suggest that almanacs did not contain anything worth reading. After all, Benjamin Franklin’s most famous parable linking time and money first appeared in the 1758 edition of his Poor Richard’s Almanac. And even if Jeremy Belknap did not consider Dr. Ames’s poetry any good, almanac-makers routinely borrowed material from the great English poets to “decorate” their almanacs. Others, including Ames and Franklin, sprinkled the calendar pages with proverbs and aphorisms.

When circumstances warranted, publishers did not shy away from weightier subjects including science and politics. Copernicus’s sun-centered universe was especially popular and encouraged Ames to reprint an engraving of the “The Solar System” on the title page of his 1759 almanac accompanied by a two-page essay explaining its workings (fig. 3). Ames advised his readers to rely not on their senses but on science: “To the naked Eye, the Aether, appears like a solid Arch, the Stars like the Heads of brass Nails, the Sun flat and about as big as a Chease, but our reason informs us better.” In 1765, the passage of the Stamp Act drove many almanac-makers into politics as they found ways both subtle and radical to protest the tax. Poor Richard urged colonists to find native substitutes for molasses, sugar, wine, and rum, even going so far as to offer tongue-in-cheek instructions for doing so. Once the act was repealed, Benjamin West in The New England Almanack …for 1767 rejoiced in America’s escape from “an Act, in its nature detestable; plotted and contrived by a set of wicked designing men.” Enlisting a bit more humor and inventiveness, almanacs played a critical role alongside colonial pamphlets and newspapers in moving public opinion towards rebellion in the decade leading to the American Revolution.

If the almanac was indeed such a central player in early America in politics and the obligations of every day, how then could it sink as low as it did when Moses Coit Tyler in 1878 compared it to a “clown”? Part of the answer can be attributed to the printing and communication revolution of the early nineteenth century. Almanacs were no longer the only game in town. There were plenty of products that could now perform the functions of an almanac. Newspapers printed currency and interest tables and weather reports, updated on a weekly rather than an annual basis. Pocket diaries, stripped of much of the almanac’s literary clutter, replaced the almanac as portable calendar and account book. Farming periodicals delivered advice and recipes once exclusive to the popular annual.

But what may have doomed the almanac to the dungheap of American culture more than such competition was its exploitation by the patent medicine man. Advertisers found the almanac by the mid-nineteenth century the perfect vehicle for peddling their cures to the American public. Among the first was Bristol’s Free Almanac: for 1844 touting the health benefits of sarsaparilla. By the 1860s, nearly half the advertising budget of David Hostetter’s empire, about $100,000 a year, went to producing Hostetter’s United States Almanac for the Use of Merchants, Mechanics, Farmers and Planters, and All Families, a shameless pamphlet promoting Hostetter’s Bitters. James C. Ayer, inventor of Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral, even surpassed Hostetter’s ambitions by constructing a printing plant that by 1889 could produce 100,000 almanacs a day in 21 languages that were shipped around the world.

Just before Christmas every year, local druggists all over the nation received a shipment of patent-medicine almanacs and strategically placed them on counters or beside cash registers as free giveaways. In characteristic one-upsmanship, advertisers struggled mightily to set their annuals apart by offering what the competition could not: a pamphlet the size of a postage stamp, an almanac dedicated to the works of Shakespeare, or an issue composed by a leading humorist. Full of such marketing pitches that homed in on the elimination of “Humiliating Eruptions” or foul breath, almanacs never recovered their previous status in American culture.

If only Ayer and his ilk had not sullied its image, perhaps today’s audience might be able to appreciate, without too much imagination, the real power of the early American almanac. Equipped with the latest issue, you always knew what day and time it was, how much money you had, where you were going and how to get there. As a bonus, you also could rely on your almanac for something to read along the way. Who could ask for anything more?

Further Reading: Moses Coit Tyler’s quote appeared in A History of American Literature, 1607-1765 (reprinted Ithaca, New York, 1966); Nathanael Low’s in Milton Drake, Almanacs of the United States (New York, 1962); and Hugh Gaine’s in Paul Leicester Ford, The Journals of Hugh Gaine, Printer (New York, 1902). On the almanac’s role as revolutionary propaganda, see Allan R. Raymond, “To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760-1777,” in The New England Quarterly (September 1978). For more on the almanacs of the patent medicine era, see James Harvey Young, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (Princeton, 1961). Marion Barber Stowell’s study of the genre remains the classic: Early American almanacs; the colonial weekday Bible (New York, 1978).

This article originally appeared in issue 11.1 (October, 2010).

It is almost a cliché to say the Civil War is still being fought—de rigueur to quote William Faulkner on the past (not dead, not even past) before considering some feature of the twenty-first-century U.S., from the merely quirky to the deadly serious. The whimsies of battle reenactments, light shows on Stone Mountain, and strange breeds of historical fiction may merely raise eyebrows. More serious extension of earlier battles, such as protests over the enduring iconography of the Confederacy, bring down flags in South Carolina and statues in Austin. They break stained-glass windows at Yale. Other echoes of the 1860s might make us wonder if the Civil War is still being fought strenuously enough. States contest federal authority over matters ranging from public restrooms to voting rights. The Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection appears more elusive with every video of an African American shot in the name of the law.

The truism about the continuing war usually frames a narrative of incompleteness. The Civil War is still being fought because its conflicts are as yet unresolved (and they are indeed). But Cody Marrs’s new book, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, gives us another way—fuller, vaster, and more complex—of understanding the Civil War outside its time. In the imaginations of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, Marrs shows us, the Civil War has always been being fought.

The “Long Civil War” is very long indeed, and not only because what it started hasn’t finished. Like a volcano bringing before our eyes the molten interior that lies, usually hidden, beneath our feet everywhere, the Civil War was one great eruption of something immanent in human civilization: an ineradicable cycle of violence, a timeless struggle for democracy and freedom. From the angles of vision Marrs’s four authors charted during their later careers, the tragedy of the Civil War was not (as southern-sympathizing historians held for decades) that it wasn’t avoided, nor (as anyone might reasonably wish) that no less bloody end to American slavery could be achieved. It was simply that Americans alive in the 1860s were the ones who had to endure so devastating a phase of historical processes almost cosmic in scale. The war belonged to a “longer conflict between freedom and unfreedom,” an “almost endlessly repeating transnational and transhistorical cycle,” and a “vast destruction that is unmoored from chronology itself,” in Marrs’s words about Douglass, Melville, and Dickinson, respectively.

Having lived through such a startling episode in these larger dramas understandably transformed these authors, and the war became central to their work. But their engagement with the conflict was quite different from the backward glance of that juggernaut of post-war publishing, the veteran’s memoir. Rather than holding on to a discrete past, Whitman, Douglass, Melville, and Dickinson wrestled with the very structure of temporality as they tried to “track the war’s almost untrackable history.” It is no coincidence that these writers, whose late works themselves often dwell out of time in our literary histories—all tend to be regarded as “antebellum” authors despite their abundant literary output during almost three post-war decades—would have taken a long view. All were relatively advanced in age when the Civil War erupted (the three men were over 40 in 1860, and Dickinson was over 30). In their maturity, they did not see the war the way many interpreters born afterward would, as an origin story for American modernity. Instead, they saw in those four years of conflict a briefly widened aperture on the deep workings of history itself.

Historians have been keenly attentive to frustrating continuities across supposed watersheds—like the persistence of slavery in sharecropping and convict labor, and the slowness of movements toward justice. Ira Berlin recently dubbed such unwieldy legacies The Long Emancipation. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has written of “The Long Civil Rights Movement.” Historical studies of simmering processes give us a fuller understanding of the dramatic moments, the speeches and clashes, that make up schoolbook and popular accounts. We do well to consider what else is “long.” Is there a Long Jacksonian Democracy? A Long Mexican War? (There sure seems to be a pretty long War on Terror.)

It takes a literary study to explore the ways of being, the habits of mind, that history’s slow simmers call forth. For the authors Marrs studies, the work of the Civil War is not just “uncompleted” but “perhaps uncompletable.” This is an almost terrifying thought—a Civil War without end—but it is urgent that we reckon with it, just as Marrs’s writers reckoned with it throughout the final years of their lives: Douglass revising his life story, for instance, in the same iterative fashion in which he understood constitutional freedom to be evolving across time, and Whitman integrating his Civil War poems into the new temporal frame of an expanded Leaves of Grass. The way Marrs unfolds the long narratives and deep patterns of authorial careers should inspire manifold revisions of literary history, as some of the contributors to this roundtable invite us to consider. It also should prompt us to reflect on how we make sense of the Long Civil War in our own century.

The unfinished Civil War may not be a struggle yet to be won, falling to us to carry toward victory. It may be that some struggles are timeless, and it falls to us—as it did to many Americans in the early 1860s—to persevere with no assurance of victory. It was before the Civil War broke out that Abraham Lincoln said the ideals of the republic should be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.” It was almost 160 years later that Barack Obama said, “America is a constant work in progress”—said, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, “the march is not yet over.” The tragedy of the Civil War may be that, although it will never be entirely won, it can still be lost.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

Christopher Hager is associate professor of English at Trinity College in Connecticut. His first book, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, was awarded the Frederick Douglass Prize in 2014. He and Cody Marrs co-authored the essay “Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth Century,” which appeared in J19.

Picture the following scene from a theater fan’s notes: it is 2005 and I am standing outside a theater in New York City with a poster and a marker after seeing David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, a personal favorite. I have read this play at least a dozen times and seen the movie version with Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino perhaps as often, even though I find it inferior to the play. I am not ordinarily a person who stands outside theaters with a poster and a marker. I am, in my own mind, a connoisseur of the theater who takes great performances in stride. All this changes, of course, when Liev Schreiber, to my mind the finest actor of his (which is to say my) generation walks out the door and into a small knot of fans. Schreiber has been playing the part Al Pacino plays in the film, Richard Roma. He walks through the crowd and signs my poster. In my mind I have practiced calmly shaking his hand and saying, “Excellent work, sir. You are the best actor of our generation.” Instead, I eagerly (and rather loudly) blurt out, “Thank you so much! I will never hear Al Pacino in my head again when I’m teaching this play!” The Actor looks at the Fan, slightly astonished; then the Actor smiles, says “Thank you,” and quickly gets as far away from the obviously crazed Fan as possible.

Afterwards, pondering my total loss of cool as I rode the subway, I tried to get some distance from my gaffe by thinking about this episode in light of the early American theater, my main line of inquiry as a scholar. I found myself wondering what a similar experience would have been like in eighteenth-century New York for an actor or for a youngish man with intellectual and literary pretensions—the sort of theater fan I had (somewhat self-referentially) envisioned occupying the theaters of early America. Colonial New York may not seem like a must-see stop for arts tourism, but visitors to Manhattan have been going to the city’s theaters for well over two centuries. Royall Tyler, the young Boston attorney who wrote The Contrast, the first play by an American author successfully produced in the independent United States, was once such a visitor. Eighteenth-century actors and fans, however, related quite differently to one another than they do today. Liev Schreiber is a classically trained stage actor, but I first became familiar with him through the globally dominant American film industry. I had seen his widely circulated image many times before I saw him in the flesh; I could have recognized him on the street before the show. Before buying tickets to the show I read reviews of his performance in all the “right” sources (The New York Times, The New Yorker, and even Variety) sold to discerning theater fans by the publishing industry. The details of my trip to the theater to see him perform conformed to a twenty-first century tourist experience of Broadway: online advance purchase tickets, an Amtrak trip from Baltimore for a New York vacation, ads for Times Square restaurants in the free copy of Playbill magazine left at my seat. In other words, I encountered Schreiber through a culture industry looking to sell me tickets, whether for ten dollars in a multiplex cinema or a great deal more on Broadway. Nothing like our little interlude would have happened in the eighteenth century. Or would it?

Some of the elements of modern celebrity and fandom were already visible in the early American theater. Certainly the intensity of the fans was there, despite the fact that acting was hardly a profession toward which most Americans aspired in the eighteenth century. Admirers of up-and-coming actresses wrote poems praising their performances. Critics promoting rival actresses sniped back and forth in newspaper columns. Aspiring young men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson attended performances whenever they could. Even young John Adams, locked away in Massachusetts, where there were no licensed theaters until after the Revolution, was a fan: he participated in amateur readings at Harvard before picking up the theater-going habit during his diplomatic and political career. Reading and attending plays, as well as performing amateur theatricals, were engrained in the culture of a certain segment of early American society.

The world of early American actors looks, if anything, even more familiar to us. A celebrity culture began to take shape over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and there were a variety of theatrical paths to fame. Playwrights sometimes wrote plays with particular actors in mind. Sometimes performers wrote or commissioned starring vehicles for their own advancement. Many other strategies were open to ambitious actors, who could pursue fame by specializing in certain popular “lines” of performance, by associating themselves with dominant forms of gender behavior, or by stressing their national identity, whether European or American. Moreover, as the eighteenth century progressed into the nineteenth, media technologies advanced, decreasing the perceived distance between actor and fan. As a result actors, not plays, came to dominate the American theater. The actress Olive Logan recalled in the late nineteenth century that “With all their love for theatrical amusements, I have no hesitation in saying that the Americans care much more for actors than for the merits of the play itself.”

Logan’s comment sums up an attitude in the nineteenth-century American theater that sounds much like our own culture of celebrity. Both Logan’s world and our own differ from the world of early American theater-goers and performers, however, when it comes to the ubiquity of the celebrity’s image that we associate with contemporary fame. Fame in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at least in Britain, was intensely visual. Indeed, it changed qualitatively during this period due to technological innovations like mezzotint that rendered images much less expensive to produce and market. In the late eighteenth century, however, the circulation of performers’ images was far more difficult in North America than it was in Great Britain. Critic Trish Loughran observes that even during the end of the colonial era in North America, the only person famous enough to have instantly recognizable features was King George III until George Washington and Benjamin Franklin joined him in that category. As Wendy Wick Reaves of the National Portrait Gallery has pointed out, even Washington’s image took time to gain common currency: she documents an engraving of the British poet John Dryden from a 1773 New England almanac that is recycled as an image of Sam Adams in a children’s primer in 1777, then again as an image of Washington in another primer in 1799. Instant and universal visual recognition, it seems, was not an absolute condition of celebrity in the early republican era, even for those whose images circulated most widely.

This absence of instant visual recognition for even the most famous Americans in the late eighteenth century necessarily created conditions in the theater trade far different from what today’s star performers know. Given the relatively poor circulation of images, celebrity actors were far less common in the colonial and early republican periods than they were in Olive Logan’s day, to say nothing of our own. Moreover, as we shall see, these earlier theaters tended to work under ensemble conditions where the marketing of individual star actors was much less common than it would become in the nineteenth century. As the theater industry began to consolidate in the nineteenth century and the technology for reproducing images became ever more widely available, an apparatus for developing and marketing celebrity performers akin to the Hollywood star factory began to emerge, but in the pioneer phase of the American theater, celebrity was a far rarer and more speculative commodity. The actors who clawed their way to fame in the early decades of the American theater labored in an entrepreneurial industry that was far more reminiscent of prospecting for gold or financing merchant ships than it was of modern industrial production.

The beginnings of professional theater in the British North American colonies are somewhat obscure. The most likely first commercial performances occurred in 1749 and 1750 by a group led by two men named Murray and Kean, and scattered records exist of other performances around this time. In 1752, the London Company of Comedians, led by Lewis Hallam Sr., landed in Williamsburg and gave the inaugural performance of what proved to be the most successful pre-revolutionary theater company in British North America. The actors, all fresh from Great Britain, were entering largely uncharted territory. The market for theatrical entertainments in the colonies was untested and no metropolitan area could sustain a permanent theater company, which meant that the actors had to travel. Unlike other “British” goods—tea or textiles—consumed by North American provincials, theatrical performances faced religious opposition. New York’s Presbyterian community and Philadelphia’s Presbyterian and Quaker communities had deep reservations about the theater; in puritan New England, professional theater would not establish firm roots until after the Revolution. Moreover, since the actors typically charged specie (hard currency) for admission but operated as traveling companies who played for a period of weeks or months at a given location before moving on, local merchants periodically opposed the licensing of theatrical seasons. They feared the actors would drain a large share of the local money supply and then skip town—not to mention exerting a bad influence on young apprentices who would be drawn to spend all their free time and money at the theater.

The life of an actor in the London Company—which was later taken over by David Douglass when Hallam died and renamed “The American Company”—or one of its colonial competitors was, then, often quite difficult. Actors were nomads working their way from town to town by cart or on foot, and occasionally by ship, along the Atlantic Coast, with occasional forays to the West Indies in times of war. (Eventually, however, these troupes established a strong chain of theatrical venues that ran roughly from New York in the north to Charleston in the south.) An eighteenth-century theater company typically worked, moreover, according to a “share” system where performers received not wages but a certain portion of the profits, assuming there were any. Established members also got a “benefit night” where they took the house’s net profits, but this income was likewise undependable. Parts were assigned according to a system of “lines of business” (such as tragic leading man or “low” comedian) that tended to be rigidly hierarchical. Actors jealously guarded their parts in popular plays, which were generally treated as a form of property within the company. Complicating matters further, the repertory system meant that a traveling troupe like the American Company performed a different play almost every night.

Given the difficulties of establishing a theater industry in British North America, it is no surprise that individual actors did not achieve much fame. David Douglass, a master of marketing, concentrated his energies on “selling” his company to the most respectable men in any new city, often using his connections as a Freemason. Prosperous men eager to be able to see themselves as on par with metropolitan Britons—and colonial audiences were almost entirely male, respectable women needing an escort to attend—were a key constituency both for gaining legal approval to act and for selling profitable box seats during theatrical seasons. (Plenty of working-class men, as well as prostitutes, also attended the theater, although they were generally relegated to the upper “gallery” seats, which were sometimes separated from the lower seating levels by a spiked fence.) The very same class of prosperous men upon whom Douglass depended for patronage, unfortunately, banished his players in 1775 when the Continental Congress banned theatrical performances. The actors were forced to decamp once again for the Caribbean.

The professional theater’s exile lasted nearly a decade. In 1783, a troupe led by Thomas Wall in Baltimore acted a few plays. In 1784, Lewis Hallam Jr. brought some of the American Company back north. They eventually joined forces with a group led by another American Company veteran, John Henry. Harkening back to their own pioneering days before the war, this group labeled themselves as the Old American Company although, once again, the actors were almost entirely British by birth. The individual egos of the performers and the growing market for theatrical performances (which also led to actors being paid on salary), however, soon led to schisms. In turn, the rapid fragmentation of theater companies in the early republic helped to initiate an arrangement known as “the star system” and contributed to a much more recognizable form of celebrity culture. In 1792, Hallam and Henry recruited John Hodgkinson, who had played opposite Sarah Siddons in Britain; Hodgkinson quickly began lobbying for more parts, and by 1794 had become a joint manager and continued to collect more plum roles. In 1794 the popular low comedian Thomas Wignell, who had been recruited from Britain just before the congressional ban on the theater, left the Old American Company with several other veteran performers to create a company in Philadelphia, while other rival theaters soon emerged in New England and the South.

Wignell’s subsequent recruiting missions to Britain brought in performers such as the former adolescent prodigy Anne Brunton Merry; the rusticated university man James Fennell, who had been disowned by his family when he went on the stage; and Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, who had been raised as a foster son by the radical philosopher and novelist William Godwin. (A touch of romance in one’s biography didn’t hurt in the early American theater.) Cooper, recruited by Wignell in 1796, had by 1798 (with considerable legal difficulty) contracted with Hodgkinson and his new partner, William Dunlap, to play in New York. Under this “star” contract Cooper worked at a higher rate of salary than the typical member of a “stock” company would receive, and he was bound not to the company but directly to the managers, leaving him free to negotiate to play elsewhere. For the rest of his career, Cooper would be an itinerant star, moving between different theaters and playing set leading roles alongside local stock companies before moving on to his next engagement. The American evolution toward the modern celebrity system had truly begun.

Meanwhile, professional theater began to spread, both geographically and socioeconomically. Theaters opened in Boston and Providence, and as the country spread westward, new theaters could be found in such places as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and New Orleans. Women, including working class women, appeared at the theater in greater numbers. New characters, such as the stage Yankee, the stage Irishman, and the stage Indian, emerged in response to shifts in the demands of the public for “American” shows, and a number of actors specializing in those roles emerged as stars. The working class audience of laborers, apprentices, sailors, and others (still including prostitutes) that filled the galleries, moreover, became increasingly boisterous during the post-revolutionary decades. Higher up the social ladder, some of the fashionable young gentlemen who began to attend the theater, such as Washington Irving, became increasingly discerning in their evaluation of the spectacles before them and began to evolve into drama critics. As a young man, Irving penned a number of essays on the theater under the nom de plume Jonathan Oldstyle for Salamagundi, the literary journal he co-founded with his brother William and their friend James Kirk Paulding.

As the theater matured and spread further across the continent and the social divides of the early republic, more and more talented performers left their stock companies and took to the road as traveling stars in search of fame and fortune. This trend culminated in the career of Edwin Forrest, the first American theatrical celebrity in the contemporary sense of the word, the first great native-born star of the American theater, and the first star to commission plays for his own repertoire. Forrest, who made his debut in 1820 and continued performing until his death in 1872, became an idol to working-class male audiences especially, a sort of surrogate Andrew Jackson. Forrest worked his way up from relative obscurity and poverty in Philadelphia by playing both Shakespearean leads and new, democratic heroes such as the medieval peasant Jack Cade and Spartacus, leader of a Roman slave revolt. Forrest, especially in his prime, was everywhere. Drawings, prints, and photographs of him, including caricatures of his rather prodigious head, circulated widely. Theater managers were forced to bargain with him and take his terms for salary and casting. Possessed of a collection of proprietary star roles and a fan base that saw in him the embodiment of what they believed it meant to be a patriotic American and a man, Forrest achieved an unprecedented degree of independence for a performer. His power to dictate his own terms in the theatrical labor market far exceeded what his predecessor Cooper or any other earlier star had achieved.

Forrest cuts a romantic figure of the star performer as a being liberated from the quotidian cares of employment in the theater industry. For other performers, the theater was not so liberating. Olive Logan was raised in Cincinnati, the daughter of an actor-manager who specialized in “Yankee” roles. As a young girl she debuted in children’s roles alongside touring stars like Forrest and Junius Brutus Booth. After retiring from the stage at sixteen to study in England and travel on the continent, she returned to the stage at the age of twenty-three in 1864 in a melodrama, Eveleen, which she had written as a star vehicle for herself. Never fond of a profession that she freely admitted she pursued solely as one of the few professions open to women in need of income, she retired in 1868 after a brief tenure as a star to pursue other interests as a journalist, lecturer, and advocate for women’s rights. In retrospect, her commentary on American audiences’ preference for players over plays suggests both the appreciative memories of a popular actress and the aesthetic displeasure of an incisive theater critic.

American audiences, however, did not always privilege players over the content of plays, especially in the early republican period, as illustrated by the theatrical career of Susanna Rowson. Better known as the author of popular sentimental novels such as Charlotte Temple, Rowson was raised partly in Massachusetts by her father, a British naval officer who was eventually seized by the Continentals, deported, and repatriated in a prisoner exchange. She returned to the United States along with her husband, moved more by economic need than artistic ambition. While performing with Wignell’s company in Philadelphia in 1794, at which point Charlotte was already available from Philadelphia booksellers, Rowson wrote Slaves in Algiers, a heroic play about Americans held captive by Barbary pirates. The controversy that attended this production illustrates the inherent difficulty of reintroducing British actors to the American stage and the specific difficulties that faced women onstage in the early republic. While Rowson’s overwhelming emphasis in the play is on the generically American ideal of “liberty,” one of her characters, an Algerian girl named Fetnah who has been sold by her father into the Dey of Algiers’s harem, expresses the desire that women should be as free as men. Meanwhile, Rowson delivered the play’s epilogue not in her starring role of Olivia, a captive of mixed English and American parentage, but as the author of the play. “Disguised” as herself, she comically turned the tables on eighteenth-century gender relations by informing the audience that “Women were born for universal sway, / Men to adore, be silent, and obey.” Rowson awakened the wrath of the arch-conservative (and fellow immigrant) newspaper editor William Cobbett, who in a pamphlet painted her as an aspiring petticoat tyrant and ally of French radicals while also questioning the sincerity of her conversion to the cause of American patriotism since her emigration from Britain. The controversy was brief, and Rowson went on to enjoy a successful, if short, theatrical career before retiring in 1797 to focus on writing books and opening a school for young women in Boston. Cobbett’s intemperate critique of her play, however, illustrates the difficulties in the life of a performer, especially an actress, in the tempestuous cultural climate of the early republic.

Logan, Forrest, and Rowson seem to have had very different experiences of fame. All of their careers, however, were wrapped up in contemporary discussions of national identity and gender that influenced the public perceptions of actors and their audience’s ability to relate to them. Their careers also coincided with a long period of expansion in American print culture, particularly the growth in the market for theatrical material in American newspapers and magazines, as well as the growth in the demand for printed plays. This profusion of print fueled the development of celebrity in the American theater by facilitating the development of professional and amateur theater critics, opinionated readers and viewers who found their own “voices” in print by championing actors and plays that met with their approval and pummeling those that did not measure up. Beginning in the 1780’s, enthusiastic fans of the theater found new outlets in print, whether in reviews and letters to the editor in papers such as The New York Daily Advertiser or, eventually, in magazines devoted to the theater. Such journals were, sadly, usually short-lived. The Dramatic Censor, a magazine that critiqued the dramatic offerings of the various theaters in Philadelphia, lasted just four issues between December 1805 and March 1806. The Polyanthos, a journal in Boston that published on a broader selection of artistic and intellectual topics and also sometimes printed engraved portraits of famous actors, fared somewhat better: it ran from December 1805 to September 1807, and was then resurrected from February 1812 to April 1814. Meanwhile, as Julie Stone Peters observes in her excellent history of play publishing, Theatre of the Book, printed plays of the eighteenth century increasingly featured prints of stage scenes or of leading actors. American printers and booksellers apparently took notice of these new features in plays imported from London and began to follow suit in their own editions.

Celebrity prior to the nineteenth-century triumph of the star system was, however, a far more localized phenomenon than our own version, and one much less dependent on visual images. Images of performers rarely circulated as separate prints, rather than as portraits in a journal or an edition of a play. The American Antiquarian Society’s Catalogue of American Engravings lists only six prints of performers prior to 1820, for instance, and almost no graphic representations exist of the colonial stage or its performers. The most famous image of the colonial theater, however, illustrates how perceptions of both gender and nationality influenced early American theater.

In August and September of 1770, the American Company was playing at Annapolis. The noted painter Charles Willson Peale painted a portrait in oil of Miss Nancy Hallam, the niece of the original leading lady of the company, Mrs. Douglass. Peale painted Miss Hallam as Fidele in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Fidele is actually the disguised Imogen, one of Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroines. This role evolved into a classic eighteenth-century breeches role that emphasizes the charismatic force of performers who borrow traits from the opposite gender, as well as offering the chance to show off the legs of eighteenth-century actresses. The orientalist fantasia of Hallam’s costume shows off precious little of her legs and the figure’s posture is a bit awkward, but the performance, as captured in Peale’s afterimage, caught the attention of the local theater critics of Annapolis. Specifically, Nancy Hallam charmed two important young metropolitan émigrés: a colonial official named William Eddis and the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, Rector of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, which was located very near the American Company’s theater on West Street. Eddis wrote an adulatory review of the show, singling out Miss Hallam, and Boucher composed verses praising both the actress and her portrait; these appraisals were printed in the local weekly paper, The Maryland Gazette.

Perhaps nowhere in the records of colonial theater is the importance of this medium to the establishment and preservation of a “British” cultural identity in North America clearer than in Eddis’s heady review or Boucher’s rhymes. Eddis hears in the metropolitan-born Miss Hallam an echo of Mrs. Cibber, for twenty years David Garrick’s leading lady at Drury Lane. He praises the American Company as equal to any of the provincial troupes in Great Britain. Yet his praise of Miss Hallam is vague, suggesting that she has achieved only a very limited sort of celebrity: “Such delicacy of manner! Such classical strictness of expression!” Miss Hallam is being appraised as if Eddis were tasting a cup of tea. Likewise, Boucher’s poem in praise of her has little to offer about the actress herself, aside from noting her ability to catch Shakespeare’s “glowing ray” and making neoclassical comparisons to Cytherea and Diana. (Indeed, the poem, while ostensibly dedicated to her portrait, praises Peale for capturing her likeness, but says precious little about the actress’s appearance.) Though these praises lack in the sort of specificity about performance or appearance that we might hope to get from starstruck young men of good erudition, Eddis and Boucher are part of a smart set of young gentlemen in Annapolis, and they are fashioning, albeit in the chastest manner possible, their own celebrity fetish. Eddis and Boucher find their Britishness and their connoisseurship reflected back to them in a well-trained performing body, not to mention the transgressive thrill of seeing that nubile body cross-dressed as a man’s. Their printed reflections on this spectacle do little to capture the performance for their readers, however. Peale, for his part, captured Miss Hallam’s graces in a more detailed but less reproducible medium than print: a canvas that provided a graphic representation of her performance and imputed to her a much greater degree of social standing than a colonial actor had any reason to expect. The oil portrait was, after all, the same medium for self-representation that the merchants and landowners of Annapolis chose to establish their own bona fides as prosperous Britons.

Ironically, Peale took this painting with him when he moved to Philadelphia in 1775, the year the revolution broke out and the year after Congress closed all theaters in the thirteen colonies. By the end of the revolution, Miss Hallam’s fame and that of the American Company as a whole must have faded markedly. The returning actors in Hallam and Henry’s troupes depended on rekindling the public’s pre-war memories in order to justify their suddenly alien presence. Whereas the first touring actors in the colonies had stressed the novelty of the pleasures of metropolitan culture for colonial audiences, Hallam and Henry stressed their familiarity with their audiences and a vague association with the Revolution in marketing the remnants of the American Company against the rival troupes that began springing up in the early 1780s. An essay in The New-York Packeton September 15, 1785, probably a plant by Henry, argues in favor of giving permission to play in the city to “an old company of players … who have a claim to remembrance for having lived amongst us,” rather than another group “who all but one or two excepted are British strangers.” (Virtually all of the American Company’s colonial and post-revolutionary performers were, of course, metropolitan Britons by birth.) Henry also stressed in a 1786 public address to a New York audience that the American Company had left North America for Jamaica only at the behest of Congress. “Ten years we languished in absence from this our wished for, our desirable home,” he explains, and though often solicited to return “we … refused, supposing it incompatible with our duty to the United States.” Pre-revolutionary fame and a sort of theatrical patriotism, then, become Henry’s arguments for readmission; Henry effectively “naturalizes” his company as good patriotic Americans. This sort of memorial association with major political events becomes contagious in the public memory of well-known performers of the period. As theater historian Odai Johnson has observed, one nineteenth-century theater manager, recalling an inaccurate anecdote about the death of Mrs. Douglass, the American Company’s first leading lady, places her 1773 death in a Philadelphia house near the theater. The house later became a tavern known as “The Convention of 1787,” featuring an image of Franklin and a couplet dedicated to the Founders on its sign. The manager’s faulty memory is not quite an act of historical revision on the scale of the villagers in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” painting over their tavern’s sign of King George with the image of General Washington, but it’s not bad.

Mrs. Douglass, who was widowed and remarried in Jamaica in the 1750s while the London Company waited out the French and Indian War, probably would have approved of this revision of her obituary. She too was adept at image manipulation: shortly after her remarried return to North America, she played the tragic mother Lady Randolph in the Reverend John Home’s medieval Scottish tragedy of Douglas, presumably working the audience extra hard during the doomed lady’s epilogue: “This night a Douglas your protection claims, / a Wife, a Mother, Pity’s softest names!” This sort of appeal to a purported feminine need for protection by an actress, particularly if said actress was an import, was often used in promoting their rise to stardom. Consider the case of Mrs. Kenna, brought over by Hallam and Henry’s American Company from the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, along with her less-talented family, in 1786. By 1787 not only the company but also New York’s self-appointed theater critics had divided over the relative merits of Mrs. Kenna and the company’s other leading actresses, Mrs. Morris and Mrs. Harper. While Mrs. Kenna’s fans praised her power to excite the passions of spectators in great detail, her detractors pointed to a haughty streak that led to her being hissed after taking a comic part from the more senior and comically gifted Mrs. Morris. Mrs. Kenna’s champions, rallying to their tragic heroine, ran a printed appeal on her behalf that effectively repositions her in a melodrama of the audience’s making: “As a number of Gentlemen, and some ladies, cruelly combined to ruin Mrs. Kenna’s theatrical fame, and deprive her of bread in a strange country where she has not a friend or relation, and was totally unacquainted with the genius, customs, and manners of the country … we expect [they] will expiate their offence and mitigate the wounded spirit of a blameless woman by their attendance” at her benefit night performance. This sort of manipulation of national and gender identities in print, by both critics and performers, becomes an increasingly typical part of early republican fame.

Questions of nationality and gender also surround the better-known men of the early republican theater. Among the many hotly contested questions of the first decade of the post-revolutionary theater, for instance, were whether the character of Bagatelle, a randy, foppish French hairdresser in John O’Keefe’s popular ballad opera The Poor Soldier qualified as a gentleman or not, and whether his character was an insult to the manhood of America’s French allies. Likewise, the appearance of Mrs. Harper on the New York stage in the Augustan British comedy The Recruiting Officer, which included her cross-dressed heroine performing the army’s manual exercise for small arms, set off a tempest in a teapot in New York in 1787. The Amazonian performance did elicit an ironic offer from one critic of a commission in the state militia since, they suggested, the state too often handed out commissions to “beardless petites maîtres” with political connections, whereas Mrs. Harper’s shocking performance had, at least, been technically proficient. Having been busy reinventing themselves as classical republican patriarchs, some of the theater-going men of the early republic apparently found that the public display of masculinity, especially onstage, is a surprisingly fragile thing. American republican manhood, it seems, is always already under attack.

Such defensiveness seems ironic if we consider the gender associations of Thomas Wignell, the greatest self-promoting actor in the American theater before the advent of Cooper and the star system. Wignell is famously celebrated as the “Atlas of the American theatre” in one contemporary performance review, but he was a low comedian, not a tragic hero. If one examines the list of his post-revolutionary parts before his secession from the American Company, he plays mostly small supporting roles in tragedy. His biggest leading role is the madcap man-child Tony Lumpkin in Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy She Stoops To Conquer, a role requiring great reserves of energy and a natural talent for clowning that borders on the juvenile. His fame, moreover, rests on two parts that suggest anything but a reassuring vision of masculinity.

Wignell is most famous for his performance as the cowardly Irishman Darby from O’Keefe’s ballad operas The Poor Soldier and Love in A Camp. Darby, first in his home village and then in a Prussian military camp, distinguishes himself through sheer cowardice and incompetence in military affairs. He is terrified of combat and in Love in A Camp falls asleep at his duty post and is beaten, all the while loudly lamenting that he ever sold his farm to purchase a military commission. Wignell’s second famous role is that of Jonathan, the original stage Yankee, from Royall Tyler’s The Contrast. The American Company staged this play at New York in 1787, during a period when Tyler was in the city on business as an envoy for Massachusetts attempting to track down fugitives from Shays Rebellion. In this romantic comedy of manners that clearly owes a debt to the plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Tyler sets loose upon an anglophilic New York full of fops and belles his two homespun New England patriots, the heroic republican Colonel Henry Manly and Manly’s excitable farmboy manservant, Jonathan. Jonathan, however, for all his patriotic fervor, was left at home by his father and brothers to tend the farm and take care of his mother during the war. His poor education, moreover, makes him more a parody than a reflection of his cultured employer, a philosophy-prone combat veteran who duels, literally and figuratively, throughout the play with Tyler’s foppish New Yorker villain, Billy Dimple.

Jonathan begat the stage Yankee, a line of business that would sustain itself on the American stage until well into the nineteenth century. The popularity of the character, however, seems to have been the result of a felicitous interaction between the role and the performer. A short, stocky man with red hair, Wignell clearly stood out on the stage, and he took advantage of the singularities of his appearance in marketing himself. Indeed, Wignell’s stage presence and his looks even invaded Tyler’s script, attributing an aura to the actor even on the page. The Contrast‘s most famous scene is a lengthy meta-theatrical joke where Jonathan decides to do a bit of sightseeing in his spare time; he unintentionally goes to the playhouse, which he, like so many other newbies in the history of meta-theatrical humor, does not realize is a world of illusion. While there, Jonathan, played by Wignell, encounters that other famous Wignell character “Darby Wag-All,” a “cute, round-faced little fellow with red hair, like me.” Wignell thus simultaneously embodies the salt-of-the-earth republican patriot, the Yankee’s cowardly Irish mirror image, and the metropolitan-born performer capable of hoodwinking Jonathan through theatrical illusion. Wignell’s famous performances and his odd looks hold a funhouse mirror up to the ideal self-image of early republican manhood, but his audiences seem to like what they see in both his features and his comic capers.

Wignell, to whom Tyler gave the copyright for his play, took advantage of both the role of Jonathan and his own features when he published The Contrast in Philadelphia in 1790, a year before he quit the American Company and began his own theater there. This self-promotion is evident in the edition’s frontispiece engraving, based on a drawing by William Dunlap (who also wrote a short ballad opera, Darby’s Return, for Wignell). Dunlap takes as his subject the climactic scene of the fifth act. Colonel Manly has rescued his citified sister, Charlotte, from being sexually assaulted by Billy Dimple, and the two men are on the verge of dueling. Jonathan has rushed in to “save” Colonel Manly. Jonathan, who hardly speaks in the scene, is clearly center stage, and the print is framed with his lines, “Do you want to kill the Colonel? I feel chock full of fight!” Although he has failed as both a lover and a fighter in the play up to this point, Jonathan’s masculinity seems to be redeemed here, even though his presence is utterly superfluous to the action of the scene and Manly quickly calls him off. Wignell, with a material interest in a play which, although he made it famous, was only performed about half a dozen times before it faded out of repertory, seems to be marketing himself as much as Tyler’s play with the inclusion of this scene engraving, a feature that as I noted earlier was increasingly common for playbooks in the eighteenth century. A British-born comedian who was according to legend fresh off the boat and sitting in a barber’s chair when he learned that Congress had banned theater in the colonies, Wignell markets himself in print to his new country as the All-American Boy.

The evolution of celebrity in the early American theater was a complex process with its roots in the immigration of white Europeans to North America and its top branches in the exportation of the images of famous American performers back out again to the rest of our global village. While the star system that evolved in the early republican period lacked the ubiquity and superabundance of celebrity that the current structure of the entertainment industry provides to the consumer, the connections for both performer and audience are nonetheless evident in the historical record. Big-budget theatrical and film production in our world share their inherent risk and unpredictability with a colonial theater that began with a few adventurous artists crossing the Atlantic. Perhaps most importantly, whether for an eighteenth-century or a twenty-first century playgoer, the intersection of audience and performer constructs a sense of communal belonging, even if it is only belonging to a community of two people consisting of the star and the starstruck.

Further reading

Odai Johnson, Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre: Fiorelli’s Plaster (New York, 2006); Olive Logan, The Mimic World and Public Exhibitions: Their History, Their Morals, and Effects (Philadelphia, 1871); Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture and the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York, 2007); Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, 1480-1880 (Oxford, 200); Wendy Wick Reaves, George Washington, an American Icon: The Eighteenth-century Graphic Portraits (Washington, DC, 1982); Susanna Haswell Rowson, Slaves in Algiers (Philadelphia, 1794); Jason Shaffer, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theatre (Philadelphia, 2007); Royall Tyler, The Contrast: A Comedy in Five Acts (Philadelphia, 1790).

For more on the history of celebrity, see Daniel Boorstin, The Image; Or, What Happened to the American Dream (New York, 1962); Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York, 1986); Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1972); Joseph Roach, IT (Ann Arbor, 2007); Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London, 2001).

For a general history of early American theater, see Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, eds., The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume I (New York, 1998). For more on Thomas Wignell and the role of Darby, see Jeffrey H. Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (Cambridge, 2005). For more on Edwin Forrest, see Richard Moody, Edwin Forrest: First Star of the American Stage (1960, New York). For more on Olive Logan and on the working conditions and public image of American actresses in the nineteenth century, see Claudia D. Johnson, American Actress (Chicago, 1984).

This article originally appeared in issue 10.2 (January, 2010).

Jason Shaffer is Associate Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. His book, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (University of Pennsylvania, 2007) was the Honorable Mention for the Barnard Hewitt Award in Theatre Studies from the American Society for Theatre Research and a CHOICE Magazine Outstanding Academic Title. He is currently working on a history of celebrity in the theater of the early republic.

Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Bestsellers are a characteristic feature of modern American publishing. The works on the weekly bestseller list published in the New York Times Book Review are displayed prominently and are regularly discounted in bookstores, and there is surely no author who has not, at least once, looked online to discover his or her book’s Amazon.com sales rank.

Book historians agree that the term “bestseller” is probably of American origin, and they usually associate the beginning of the bestseller phenomenon with the publication of the list of the six “New Books, in the order of demand” that appeared in the inaugural issue of a New York periodical, The Bookman, in February 1895. The term’s American origin is confirmed by the Oxford English Dictionary, which gives the definition “one of the books having the largest sale of the year or the season” and finds the earliest citation in a report in the Kansas Times & Star of April 25, 1889. “Kansas City’s literary tone is improving. The six best sellers here last week were Fools of Nature [etc.],” claimed this report, referring to a little-remembered work by Alice Brown, published in 1887. The next citation, a reference to a “best selling new book,” appeared in the July 1895 issue of the Bookman. What the editors of the OED and book historians seem to have overlooked, however, is that the American Bookman was an imitation of a London periodical, also called the Bookman, which had, from its beginning in October 1891, included a list of the “best selling books” from a leading West End bookseller.

Wherever and whenever the term “bestseller” originated, the phenomenon of bestselling books antedates these lists. Even discounting the substantial sales of non-trade books—almanacs, Bibles and other religious works, text books and handbooks—a few earlier literary works also qualify as bestsellers. Their stories make up what might be termed the prehistory of “bestsellerdom.”

Susanna Haswell Rowson, the author of Charlotte Temple, was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1762, the daughter of an officer of the Royal Navy who was assigned as collector of customs in Nantasket, just south of Boston, soon after her birth. Susanna, whose mother had died giving birth to her only child, remained in England until 1767, when her father, now remarried and established in the colonies, brought her to America to join him. These were turbulent years, however, and in 1778, after the American colonies had declared their independence, Lieutenant Haswell removed his family first to Halifax and then to England. There Susanna grew into womanhood: she first became the governess for the Duchess of Devonshire and then married William Rowson, a hardware merchant and trumpeter in the Royal Horse Guards. Soon afterward she became associated with the London theater world, and in 1786 published in London at her own expense a novel, Victoria —thus beginning her career as an author, a career that would last until her death in 1824.

In 1791, Susanna Rowson published Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (better remembered today by its later title, Charlotte Temple), the first of three of her novels that would appear over the imprint of William Lane, proprietor of the Minerva Press and its associated network of circulating libraries. Lane’s empire, which might be considered an early equivalent of a combination of the modern Barnes and Noble, Blockbuster, and Netflix, was built around the publication of light-weight popular fiction, not dissimilar from today’s romance novels. In this company, Rowson’s works did not stand out—indeed, they were simply three of the many sentimental Minerva novels published and quickly forgotten.

In late 1793, however, Rowson returned to America with her husband as part of a touring theater troupe that had been recruited by Thomas Wignell to perform at his Philadelphia “New Theatre,” and her Charlotte Temple fared much better when it was published by Mathew Carey in that city the following spring. It went on to become a steady seller in America over the next century. A second edition by Carey also appeared in 1794, and further Carey editions in 1797, 1801, 1802, 1808, 1809, and 1812, as well as a possible “sixth edition,” unlocated, sometime between 1802 and 1808. In 1801 new editions were also published in Hartford, New Haven, and Philadelphia (this last by Peter Stewart), and from that point forward, Carey was no longer the primary American publisher of Charlotte Temple. Our best record of the work’s publication history lists 152 American printings or editions of the work before 1905, some of which were issued together with its sequel Lucy Temple—first published posthumously in 1828—usually with the omnibus title Love and Romance. In 1825 Silas Andrus of Hartford published the first edition printed from stereotype plates, which were subsequently used for many more printings, and at least fifteen sets of stereotyped plates were used over the next eighty years. These figures are almost surely an understatement of the true number, but in any case, they have been widely taken to qualify Charlotte Temple as an early American bestseller.

What accounts for the novel’s remarkable success in America? Certainly its content played a role: as a tale of seduction and innocence lost, yet in the end somehow forgiven and redeemed, it struck a chord with American readers, especially during a period that saw the new nation attempt to establish itself culturally in a Eurocentric world that viewed America as innocent of artistic and moral tradition. But the question of Charlotte Temple‘s “Americanness” is a vexed one.

It is certainly true that the second volume of Charlotte Temple (which includes the denouement) takes place in America; that Rowson herself was born in America and spent the greatest part of her life here (though her identification on the title page of the first American edition as “of the New Theatre, Philadelphia” seems rather to point to the work’s racy nature, written by an actress, than to the author’s American residence); and that the novel achieved its great success in America. But, Charlotte Temple was in many ways an English novel, first published in London by a British citizen as part of the popular Minerva Library. This is certainly how the American book trade viewed the work, for if it had been an original American work in 1794, Carey could have protected his interest in the work by copyrighting it, a privilege that at the time was restricted to works written by Americans. There can be little doubt that Charlotte Temple‘s great success in America depended on the fact that, as a work in the public domain, it was freely available for reprinting by any and all American printers and publishers who cared to offer an edition—and many did throughout the nineteenth century.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is widely recognized as the great American bestseller of the nineteenth century—the “greatest book of its kind” as its original publisher styled it. Written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter of the leading American evangelical of the time and wife of one of our first biblical scholars, the novel was her impassioned response to the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which implicated all Americans, both northern and southern, in support of the moral outrage of chattel slavery. Stowe, who had been supplementing her family income by publishing stories and sketches since the 1830s, was regularly contributing material to the moderate antislavery National Era in March 1851, when she wrote to its editor, Gamaliel Bailey, announcing that she was at work on a story that addressed the evils of slavery. Initially she expected that it would extend to only three or four installments, but eventually the text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin expanded to make up many more, which were published weekly from June 6, 1851, to April 1, 1852. The work attracted a considerable following as a serial, but not until its publication in book form would it truly become a bestseller.

As early as summer 1851, discussions were underway for the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in book form, but Boston’s Phillips, Sampson, and Company, the firm originally approached, declined to take it on, fearing that its antislavery content would alienate the southern market. In September, Bailey announced in the National Era that he had learned from a private source that Stowe had completed arrangements with another Boston firm, John P. Jewett and Company. In fact, the contract with Jewett was not signed until March 13, 1852, a week before the book finally appeared and twelve days before the text was completed in the National Era. The first edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published March 20, 1852, in two volumes priced $1.00, $1.50, or $2.00, depending on the binding.

From the start, the book was a hit. The first printing of five thousand copies was exhausted in a few days, and by April 1, a second run of five thousand had been produced. In mid-April, Jewett announced that ten thousand copies had been sold and that “three paper mills are constantly at work, manufacturing the paper, and three power presses are working twenty-four hours per day, in printing it, and more than one hundred book-binders are incessantly plying their trade to bind them, and still it has been impossible, as yet, to supply the demand.” By mid-May fifty thousand copies had been sold, seventy-five thousand copies by mid-September, and in mid-October one hundred and twenty-five thousand were claimed. For the 1852 holiday season, Jewett produced two further editions: three thousand copies of an expensive one-volume gift edition with over one hundred vignette illustrations, costing $2.50 to $5.00 depending on the binding, and an inexpensive “edition for the millions,” selling for only thirty-seven and a half cents, of which fifty thousand had been produced by year’s end.

All this made Stowe wealthy—Jewett paid her over twenty thousand dollars in royalties by the end of 1852—and world renowned. The first London edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in late April or early May, and the work was reported to have sold over one million copies in various British editions before year’s end. It was soon also reprinted, in both English and translation, on the European continent and around the world. But the Uncle Tom phenomenon extended beyond the novel to offshoots—children’s versions, sheet music, figurines, games, muslin handkerchiefs, among others—not to mention a multitude of responses, known as “Anti-Uncle Tom” novels, which attempted to counter the work’s antislavery sentiments. In the United States, dramatizations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a staple of American melodrama well into the twentieth century.

A bestseller? Certainly. Less widely recognized is that the market for the original text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin soon dried up in the United States. Jewett produced something like three hundred and ten thousand copies of the work during its first year of publication, but subsequent demand remained small for many years. Forced to suspend payment of his debts during the panic of 1857, Jewett produced another small printing in late 1859, shortly before he finally left the publishing business entirely in August 1860. The rights to Uncle Tom’s Cabin were then acquired by another Boston publisher, Ticknor and Fields, which first published a small printing of only two hundred seventy copies in November 1862. During the 1860s, that firm and its successors produced just under eight thousand copies. But sales were increasing: during the 1870s, nearly twenty thousand copies were produced, and during the five-year period from 1886 to 1890 just under one hundred and ten thousand copies. By the time that Uncle Tom’s Cabin entered the public domain in 1893, the work had, like Charlotte Temple, become a steady seller. Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, the firm that had inherited the rights to the work from Ticknor and Fields, made a determined attempt to maintain its control of the market for the work by issuing a variety of editions, from cheap to expensive, but by the turn of the century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was being published by a veritable array of American publishers of inexpensive books: Altemus, Burt, Caldwell, Coates, Crowell, Dominion, Donohue, Fenno, Hill, Hurst, Lupton, McKay, Mershon, Neeley, Page, People, Rand, Routledge, Warne, and Ziegler.

The initial success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was no doubt due, in part, to its topicality: the Fugitive Slave Act meant that no American could ignore the implications of slavery any longer. Stowe’s depiction of that “peculiar institution” stressed not only its cruelty but also the ways in which it compromised the values of Christianity and domesticity that were so much a part of the dominant culture of Victorian middle-class America. The promotional activities of its publisher J. P. Jewett also played a role. Jewett was recognized by his contemporaries as an innovative book promoter at a time when a truly national market for books was first established in the United States. His successes included not only Uncle Tom’s Cabin but also the second great bestselling domestic novel of the decade— The Lamplighter(1855) by Susanna Cummins. In promoting Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jewett spent thousands of dollars for advertising before the work was published, and upon its publication he traveled to Washington to push the book to all leading senators, both northern and southern, a tactic that surely served to draw attention to it. Front matter added to the new 1878 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin made sure to stress that this was a work that championed the downtrodden, now generalized over ten years after the emancipation of the African American slaves, but also the work’s status as an American classic that had been recognized worldwide. It was promoted as a book that deserved to be read.

The initial success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was no doubt due, in part, to its topicality: the Fugitive Slave Act meant that no American could ignore the implications of slavery any longer. Stowe’s depiction of that “peculiar institution” stressed not only its cruelty but also the ways in which it compromised the values of Christianity and domesticity that were so much a part of the dominant culture of Victorian middle-class America. The promotional activities of its publisher J. P. Jewett also played a role. Jewett was recognized by his contemporaries as an innovative book promoter at a time when a truly national market for books was first established in the United States. His successes included not only Uncle Tom’s Cabin but also the second great bestselling domestic novel of the decade— The Lamplighter (1855) by Susanna Cummins. In promoting Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jewett spent thousands of dollars for advertising before the work was published, and upon its publication he traveled to Washington to push the book to all leading senators, both northern and southern, a tactic that surely served to draw attention to it. Front matter added to the new 1878 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin made sure to stress that this was a work that championed the downtrodden, now generalized over ten years after the emancipation of the African American slaves, but also the work’s status as an American classic that had been recognized worldwide. It was promoted as a book that deserved to be read.

What conclusions can be drawn from this examination of the publishing history of these two early American bestsellers? Both achieved substantial sales, but the sales patterns differed. The success of any bestseller depends on market conditions as much as upon content and promotion. Some topics—”Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog,” as George Stevens quipped in the title of his short book on bestsellers published in 1939—resonate more than others. Just as important is the political economy of the book trade, the legal, economic, and manufacturing “technologies” that make substantial sales possible in the first place.

Copyright certainly played a role in the success of the two novels that I am considering here. Charlotte Temple was slow to find its audience, which was largely in America rather than Britain, where it was first published. The record also does not show that Rowson’s work achieved remarkable sales in any one year; rather, it was what is often termed a “steady seller” over many years. It is impossible to imagine the continued success of Charlotte Templehad it not been in the public domain in the United States, leaving any publisher free to reprint it. In contrast, Uncle Tom’s Cabin achieved a remarkable sale immediately upon publication in book form, something that struck contemporaries as extraordinary. But its sale ceased almost completely after a year, for production came to a halt, and only after several decades did Stowe’s work begin to find an audience that brought it steady sales like Rowson’s. Perhaps the very fact that the work was controlled under copyright encouraged J. P. Jewett to make such promotional efforts when the book was first published to ensure its exceptional success. Nevertheless, it is also worth noting that Uncle Tom’s Cabin achieved remarkable sales in Britain, where it was not protected by copyright, and in the United States, especially after 1893, when it had entered the public domain.

The prehistory of American bestsellers takes us beyond questions about the content and literary value of bestselling texts and invites us instead to explore just what makes such a phenomenon possible. Markets are complex things, and the market for books more so than most. If copyright can be viewed as restricting the free flow of books and the information that they contain, as is often claimed, then perhaps we need to explore just how copyright also fosters that flow by controlling the markets that enable it. Surely it is no coincidence that bestseller lists emerged in the United States only after the nation passed an international copyright law in 1891. In what ways has copyright influenced the market for books, bestsellers and others? And how does the political economy of publishing influence how we choose the books that we continue to read and treasure? This examination of the publishing history of two early American novels offers a first answer to these questions.

Further Reading:

The early history of American bestsellers is recorded in Frank Luther Mott’s Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York, 1947), James D. Hart’s The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (New York, 1950), and the series of compilations by Alice Payne Hackett beginning with Fifty Years of Best Sellers, 1895-1945 (New York, 1945). The best source for information on the life and works of Rowson is R. W. G. Vail, “Susanna Haswell Rowson, The Author of Charlotte Temple: A Bibliographical Study,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, n.s. 42 (1932): 47-160. A helpful guide to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its many spin-offs is Stephen Railton’s Website, Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive. The phrase “political economy” is borrowed from William St Clair’s influential 2005 lecture, “The Political Economy of Reading,” in which he argues to the contrary that copyright and its restriction of intellectual property have severely limited the availability of books in editions at a price that allows them to reach substantial audiences.

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

Michael Winship, Iris Howard Regents Professor of English II at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1995) and a member of the editorial board of and contributor to multiple volumes of A History of the Book in America series, now published by the University of North Carolina Press. An earlier version of this essay was presented as a keynote address at “Birth of the Bestseller: The 19th-Century Book in Britain, France, and Beyond,” organized by the Bibliographical Society of America in New York in March 2007.

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

In August of 1889, eighteen-year-old Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train that would take her the hundred miles or so from her home in the small Wisconsin town of Columbia City to Chicago. Her plan was to live at least for a while in the modest flat of her married sister Minnie Hanson and find a job. Minnie had proposed this arrangement not because she missed her sister, but because Carrie was “dissatisfied” at home, and the frugal Hansons could use the money Carrie would pay for her board. The expectation was that Carrie “would do well enough until–well, until something happened . . . Things would go on, though, in a dim kind of way until the better thing would eventuate and Carrie would be rewarded for coming and toiling in the city.”

This particular journey never actually took place, except in the opening pages of Theodore Dreiser’s first and best novel, Sister Carrie. Still, it happened for real hundreds of thousands of times, and Carrie Meeber’s short but momentous trip captures the essence of life during Chicago’s formative years. The salient fact about Chicago’s early history is the city’s explosive growth, thanks to its location at the western edge of the Great Lakes when the full force of unrestricted industrial capitalism took hold in America. No other city in the nation grew so much and so fast. Chicago was a metropolis created out of nowhere and everywhere in a historical instant. While the region where Chicago is located was explored by Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette in the 1670s, as late as 1830 it was still an isolated outpost with a smattering of settlers. But between Chicago’s incorporation in 1837 and Sister Carrie’s publication in 1900–barely two generations–the population rose from 4,170 people gathered near a weedy portage site to just under 1,700,000. According to the census of 1890, conducted the year after Carrie’s fictive arrival, over 41 percent of Chicagoans had been born abroad, with more than half of these immigrants from Germany or Ireland. A third of the native-born residents were, like Carrie, from a state other than Illinois, an even larger portion from outside Chicago itself. Near the beginning of The Cliff-Dwellers, the novel published in the early 1890s by Henry Blake Fuller (who was, against the odds, actually from Chicago), a recent arrival from Boston asks, “Is there anybody in this town who hasn’t come from somewhere else, or who has been here more than a year or two?” Virtually all of the newcomers, and the equally staggering number of people just passing through, came into Chicago on the train

Chicago was originally a river, lake, and canal town, but since the Civil War it had been what transportation historian George Rogers Taylor calls “the greatest railroad city in the world.” The level landscape that surrounded it for miles may have lacked stunning beauty, but it helped make Chicago the ultimate railroad nexus, the place, as Carl Sandburg put it, “where all the trains ran.” These trains carried not only people, but also massive amounts of grain, meat, lumber, and other commodities, as well as a rapidly expanding volume of manufactured goods, establishing Chicago as the country’s great inland mercantile and industrial metropolis. By 1890 only New York was larger. In a city increasingly characterized by class and ethnic distinctions, the trip in by train was arguably the one significant personal experience that more Chicagoans had in common than any other. It is no surprise, then, that descriptions of the entry into Chicago on the train appear repeatedly in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fiction and memoirs of life in the city, not to mention many visitors’ accounts. Master financier Frank Cowperwood, the protagonist of Dreiser’s The Titan, intuitively follows the money from the East Coast to Chicago along the tracks that also carry the unskilled laborer Jurgis Rudkus and his family on the last leg of their long trip from Lithuania to the hell-on-earth that is the stockyards in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Architect Louis Sullivan and Haymarket anarchist Albert Parsons, both persuaded by the panic of 1873 to pick up stakes in Philadelphia and try their luck amidst the prospects of Chicago, arrived at virtually the identical time to begin their very different careers. Frank Lloyd Wright was scarcely a year older than Sister Carrie when in 1887 he took the same journey she did from Wisconsin to Chicago.

Each of these immigrants and virtually all of their fellow passengers left home with the same expectation that Carrie had, that Chicago offered richer opportunities than where they had been. Most did not come for religious freedom, to establish a colony, or for education and refinement, but to try their skill and luck as free agents, or so at least they thought, in the irresistibly powerful laissez-faire economy of which Chicago, for better and for worse, was the leading edge. “This town of ours labors under one peculiar disadvantage,” a reflective Chicagoan observes with resignation in another Fuller novel, With the Procession–,“it is the only great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the one common, avowed object of making money.” This remark doesn’t quite have it right. True, virtually all of Chicago’s newcomers were, like Carrie, seeking a better life where “better” was defined substantially in material terms, but what attracted them perhaps as much as money was the idea of constant change that Chicago represented. Chicago could integrate even a disastrous fire into its all-consuming booster faith because it was already accustomed to being continuously remade. Chicago is “always a novelty,” Mark Twain commented with admiration, “for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.” It was the place to go–a “magnet attracting,” in Dreiser’s words–because it was the preeminent locus of what Saul Bellow has called “the transforming power of the modern,” a power whose creative and destructive tendencies, as Marx pointed out, are inseparable from one another. Chicago was, on one hand, the birthplace of modern commercial architecture, the possessor of a vibrant cultural life that drew all kind of artistic spirits (including Dreiser) and of a well-heeled civic pride that erected museums, concert halls, and universities and mounted the World’s Columbian Exposition. On the other, it was the site of the Haymarket bombing, the most sensational and divisive act of urban violence in an era of terrible social tensions, and of the Pullman Strike, the most famous and far-reaching labor conflict of its time.

Whatever the motives that put all these people on the railroad to Chicago, it is the qualitative feel of the entrance on the train that embodies the essence of life in the city during the late nineteenth century. In account after account, the journey in seems to recapitulate before the traveler’s eyes the nation’s rapid transition from rural to urban. “The complex quality of this wonderful city,” University of Chicago professor (and recent exile from Harvard and Cambridge) Robert Herrick wrote with considerable irony in 1898, “is best seen as the stranger shoots across the prairie in a railroad train, penetrating layer after layer of the folds.” As the train approached Chicago, its riders witnessed farmland giving way to houses and to what Dreiser called, in his autobiographical account of his own trip from his native Indiana a few years before Carrie’s, the “sudden smudge” of factories amidst the “great green plains.” Next came the increasingly tight network of railroad tracks and telegraph wires through which one finally penetrated the entirely manmade landscape that was the city’s heart. That this history of American urbanization is displayed to the passenger both by and from the train–the literal engine of nineteenth-century mechanization–makes it all the more vivid and intense. In a city that seemed itself to be always on the move, how better to view this place than while in motion, conveyed into its center by the essential agent of change? Like the direction and velocity of life in Chicago, however, the train was outside the control of the individual rider, who was pulled by the anonymous locomotive up ahead. Perched in a passenger car entering Chicago, one was somehow of the city that the train had created but separated from it, coursing through all the activity while sitting still, driving yet driven. The responses this entry engendered anticipated the paradoxical state of mind and body, once one was settled in the city, of feeling empowered at being part of the Chicago colossus while being powerless to shape experience within it. Although the descriptions of Chicago as one enters on the train are remarkably similar in the details they note, the reactions of the travelers greatly diverge. For some, the first arrival was nothing short of inspirational. Sullivan, who was drawn to Chicago by the promise of new architectural work demanded by the fire, recalled decades later that he “tramped the platform, stopped, looked toward the city, ruins around him; looked at the sky; and as one alone, stamped his foot, raised his hand, and cried in full voice: THIS IS THE PLACE FOR ME.” Writing in his autobiography, Dreiser similarly remembered that stepping out of the train as a teenager into “the hurly-burly” of Chicago made him feel “as though I were ready to conquer the world.” Herrick, in contrast, called the “huge spider’s web” of railroad lines “a stupendous blasphemy against nature.” Once within the city, Herrick advised, “the heart must forget that the earth is beautiful.”

No one captured the new arrival’s entrance by train as well as Dreiser did in Sister Carrie. His heroine is “bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth,” an apt representative for so many other newcomers. Her most important assets are not the contents of her cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel nor the four dollars in her yellow leather snap purse (a whole week’s pay, she soon discovers to her dismay, for an untrained factory worker), but her youth and good looks, her ambition and energy, and her desire to escape the limited round of life in Columbia City and embrace the open-ended possibilities of Chicago. There’s a gush of tears as she kisses her mother goodbye, a touch in her throat when she takes a parting look at the flour mill where her father works, and then a “pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review.” These personal ties have little power compared to the draw of Chicago, however. “Since infancy,” Dreiser explains, “her ears had been full of its fame.” As the train pulls away from Columbia City, we’re told, “the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.” We know that this is an irreversible one-way journey of both Carrie and the nation into the American urban future. Indeed, almost immediately Carrie’s thoughts turn to “vague conjectures of what Chicago might be.” Carrie is eager for pleasure and comfort, and Chicago, like her still only partially formed, is in her mind the correlative of all her hopes. “A half-equipped little knight she was,” Dreiser writes, “venturing to reconnoiter the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague-far-off supremacy which should make it prey and subject, the proper penitent, groveling at a woman’s slipper.” As she daydreams out the window at the passing landscape, Carrie hears “a voice in her ear.” The voice belongs to Charles Drouet, the charming masher who will seduce her not long after her move to Chicago but whom Carrie will soon outgrow as her own personality develops through her contact with the dynamism of the city.

Their meeting in the cars is entirely fitting because Drouet is a creation of the city and the train, a traveling drummer for a leading Chicago dry-goods house. His tight-fitting and perfectly coordinated clothes, his smooth conversation, his ease of manner, and his mastery of the situation constitute Carrie’s initiation into urban style. Drouet’s “shiny tan shoes, the smart new suit and the air with which he did things built up for her a dim world of fortune around him of which he was the centre,” Dreiser notes. “It disposed her pleasantly toward all he might do.” In a matter of minutes he has assumed the seat beside her, and they are exchanging familiarities in a way that could never happen in Carrie’s safe and boring home town. All this seems completely natural on the train to Chicago, which is an extension of the city as an accidental place full of uprooted and unattached strangers whose lives become unexpectedly intertwined. Drouet’s friendly assurance and flattering attentions put Carrie at her ease, even though she is at first as anxious as pleased at his interest in her. Soon she has surrendered to him the address of her sister, and they have agreed to see each other the following Monday evening. Dreiser then switches attention back to the view through the car window as the train nears Chicago. They pass “lines of telegraph poles stalking across the fields,” “smoke stacks towering high in the air,” and “two-story frame houses standing out in the open fields, without fence or trees, outposts of the approaching army of homes.” Drouet, Carrie’s self-appointed guide to the city he personifies for her, points out landmarks and informs Carrie that Chicago is nothing short of “a wonder.” But she barely hears him, since now her heart is “troubled by a kind of terror.” It is the terror that so many others must have felt when, like Carrie, they suddenly realized that they were “alone, away from home, rushing into a great sea of life and endeavor” in Chicago on the train. Her pulse beats rapidly, she is choked for breath, she feels ill. Once they are in the station, Carrie has recovered sufficiently to decline Drouet’s offer to carry her luggage, since she does not want her sister Minnie, who is meeting her, to see him. Having watched longingly as Drouet disappeared into the crowd and now walking alongside Minnie into her new life, Carrie feels “much alone, a lone figure in a tossing, thoughtless sea.” She has been exhausted and disoriented not by her short afternoon’s trip in time and distance on the train to Chicago, but by the much longer, more arduous, and wholly unanticipated psychic journey she has made through extremes of powerful inarticulate feeling. This lonely, tossing, thoughtless sea in which Carrie is swimming as she concludes her entrance into Chicago is Dreiser’s metaphor for what the German sociologist Georg Simmel identified shortly after the publication of Sister Carrie as “the mental life of the metropolis,” which, Simmel contended, derives from “the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.” Simmel might have been describing the state in which Carrie repeatedly finds herself through the rest of her urban career, during the course of which her mood shifts again and again between exhilaration and ennui, expectation and disappointment, hope and fear, confidence and confusion. The overture to that career, full of the swift and continuous shift of external stimuli so familiar to her and other Chicagoans, is her journey into the city on the train.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4

Carl Smith is Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English and American Studies and professor of history at Northwestern University. He is author of several articles and books on nineteenth-century Chicago and curator of the online exhibitions The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory and The Dramas of Haymarket.