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.

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.

Steaming with anger, Claude-Joseph Villars Dubreuil struck out from his plantation home on the Mississippi River one early morning in June 1748, to make his complaint before the Superior Council, the seat of government for the Parish of New Orleans and the Province of Louisiana. An original founder of the town, and its most important citizen in every sense, Dubreuil had good reason to be disgruntled. Despite his wealth and power, he had been insulted by the military police officer charged with keeping order, Major Membrède. Dubreuil regarded the man’s behavior as unendurable, the beginning of what was to become a fierce confrontation over the next three years.

All along his ride, Dubreuil saw evidence of his many contributions to the building of this still modest town, since his arrival at the beginning of its construction in 1719. His slaves had reinforced the natural levee before New Orleans, a massive project that made the town safe from floods for the next three centuries. The same slave workforce had built the governor’s residence, the charity hospital, a canal, royal vessels, a sawmill, and a fort one hundred miles below at the mouth of the Mississippi that protected the town’s approach. All of this activity had taken place under Dubreuil’s authority as contractor for the Royal Public Works. Just now, he was passing the imposing new Ursulines’ Convent, another project to which he had contributed. He could field 150 of his own slave laborers in 1748, from a total personal slave force between two and three hundred, by far the largest in a community where a force one-tenth that size was substantial. As a private entrepreneur, he had overseen the development of two major plantations at Tchoupitoulas, and had recently purchased a major plantation just below the town center. He had also been involved in the African slave trade to New Orleans, the establishment of indigo cultivation, spurge wax production, and an experiment in sugar production, to say nothing of major brick-making and timbering enterprises. If New Orleans’ isolation from the Atlantic world meant that it still had a sluggish economy in 1748, it owed what vitality it possessed to Dubreuil.

Although no nobles established themselves in Louisiana, Dubreuil was almost as exalted as a duke in his community: he far outstripped other founders by his great wealth and industrious pursuits. Supported by a distinguished family in France, he had sailed to Louisiana with a group of artisans he sponsored. With his remarkable variety of economic pursuits, he upheld a high standard of ambition and industriousness for the community. That such a man was willing to remain in such an unpromising location, and that he and wife Jeanne-Catherine La Boulaye married their children to locals, gave heart to lesser landowners and promoted entrepreneurial values. Like Claude and Jeanne-Catherine, and like Anglo-American planters in neighboring colonies, most New Orleans slave owners were committed to their patrimony in the colony, rather than thinking of themselves as temporary exiles from Europe like the West Indian planters. Like Claude and Jeanne-Catherine, most locals settled close to the town center to strengthen the capital and make it look stronger and more flourishing than it was.

Carefully planned at its founding in 1718, New Orleans Parish spread along the turn of a major crescent in the Mississippi River. By 1748, the white population totaled about two thousand, including the founding generation of immigrants from western France and New France, and the young creole (or American-born) generation. The slave population of perhaps four thousand consisted of the survivors among several thousand Africans brought to New Orleans in the 1720s, plus their creole children and a handful of Indian slaves. The town center, which lay on the left bank at the precise turning point in the crescent, was a rectangular grid designed to be a neat, compact residential space. From it radiated directly the indigo and rice plantations. These were distributed as narrow long lots in compact fashion, stretching from frontage on the river, through the riverine sediments the planters farmed, to the swamp or forest running behind the plantations.

Most plantations were just out of shouting distance from one another, so socializing was common, and all were relatively close to the town center. Known today as the Vieux Carré, the center housed the colony’s civil and military officials and soldiers, the clergy, some artisans, barkeeps, and shopkeepers. But the great majority of slaves, free white people, and free blacks lived in the adjacent plantation regions. To the town center, white and black resorted frequently to enjoy the social life there, or to conduct affairs in one of the official institutions. Travel between plantation and town center was frequent because it was easy. From the most extreme upriver district, Tchoupitoulas, where the main concentration of slaves and planters now lived, one could reach the town center in less than an hour and a half on foot, less than half that by horse, or in minutes by water. Dubreuil lived only minutes away by horse.

The Parish of New Orleans, then, was more tightly knit than it looked on a map. It was centered by the Place d’Armes, today’s Jackson Square. Dubreuil now came upon the official establishments clustered around the square, imposing edifices that gave the town center some claim to dignity despite its tiny population. The plaza served as the weekend market, and the gathering place for religious or other festivals, military drilling, and judicial executions. On one side ran the levee that held back the river. Opposite the levee was St. Louis Church, the presbytery housing the town’s spiritual fathers (the Capuchins), and a brick jail, which had four “cells” for blacks on the ground floor and four “rooms” for whites. The army barracks flanked the two sides of the plaza. In Dubreuil’s day, those streets oriented horizontally to the river already had the social characteristics they have today: Chartres and Royal Streets were the most richly and respectably built, while Bourbon Street was already a vice zone for locals and sojourners: a place for drinking, gambling, dancing, gorging on the produce of the immensely rich environment, and prostitution. From this central terrain of social life radiated the upper and lower plantation coasts.

The town was situated precisely where it had to be to control access to the Mississippi Valley. The site benefited from centuries of Indian custom in that it lay athwart an old Indian portage between Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne and the river, the trail that now terminated as Rue de l’Hôpital. Rather than sailing nearly one hundred miles to the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi, a vessel with Dubreuil’s cargo could take the backdoor route through the lakes to the gulf in two days or less. In New Orleans, Dubreuil not only farmed some of the richest sediments in North America, he lived at the exact nexus of transatlantic trade for people living in the interior of the continent west of the Appalachians. The town served as a catch basin for the produce of the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri River Valleys.

Despite the site’s wealth of natural resources, numerous irritants existed that locals either had to suffer, or to drown with copious quantities of Bordeaux or cheap West Indian rum. It was very hot and damp six months a year, it was one of the least-favored ports in the New World, and huge swarms of insects appeared seasonally with terrifying predictability. Rapid decay dominated the atmosphere. Most buildings were constructed of wood, and so were subject to rapid disintegration and fire. The elevation was so low that the dead would not stay buried: the ooze was likely to thrust them up into the daylight. The population grew slowly by New World standards and may have declined between the early 1730s and early 1740s. Their only near neighbors were a little colony of German immigrants just above New Orleans, and the little French settlements far up the Mississippi and Mobile Rivers. The passing of a great man like Dubreuil or the execution of the occasional slave were among the few diversions in this usually sleepy town.

Early New Orleans gave off a bucolic atmosphere in an isolated setting, but underneath the apparent calm on the surface lay a basic social cleavage and with it, a dangerous tension. The whites preserved their idea of order only by constant vigilance and their willingness to apply brute force to defeat slaves’ aspirations to be free. Two decades before Dubreuil’s ride, the slaves had shown signs of concerted rebelliousness, and they would do so again in 1783 and 1811. It was, in other words, a typical North American slave society in which whites organized all social life to keep slaves enslaved. Dubreuil and the other planters ultimately held the upper hand only because of their alliance with colonists in other parishes–and because they had help from the soldiers.

New Orleans was different from Norfolk or Savannah, in that it always had a garrison of two to three hundred soldiers maintained by the French Crown. These career military men provided defense against external attack and internal unrest. Off duty, the soldiers also provided casual labor to supplement their meager incomes, but they could be an affliction to the locals. This was never truer than at this moment, for two reasons. First, the people of lower Louisiana were on high alert against attack by their English neighbors, for the War of the Austrian Succession was in its fourth year. Locals knew that they had a seaport of immense strategic importance. Fortunately for them, in 1748 their geographic situation was still too difficult of access to be captured by one of the several imperial powers that hoped to command that particular bend in the Mississippi. But in 1748, of course, the people of New Orleans did not know how secure they were, and the soldiers were edgy from being on wartime alert for years without an opportunity to engage the enemy.

A second reason the soldiers were a problem for the townspeople was that they were being used by a tyrannical post commandant, Major (Chevalier) Membrède, in a scheme to milk the local economy for personal profit. Membrède set his soldiers on anyone who opposed his effort to gain a monopoly on the sale of low-grade rum to soldiers and slaves, a form of extortion that festered for years and would end with Membrède’s dismissal. (The major may have been in partnership with the governor, Pierre de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnial, who was notorious for soaking colonists through monopolies.) The usually placid atmosphere was poisoned by this clash between the major and leading townspeople like Dubreuil. The day before, Membrède’s soldier-police had arrested two of Dubreuil’s slaves in the night, for allegedly stealing three hundred dollars from army sergeant Marette’s quarters. As soon as he heard of the charge, Dubreuil had ordered his entire slave force to comb the town for the accused, but Membrède got to them first. The major now had the means to humiliate the planter: even if he could not force the slaves to confess to the crime, it was a personal rebuke to Dubreuil as a slave master for any of his chattels to be arrested. Everyone held their breath as the news traveled at lightning speed around a town where everybody knew everybody: Dubreuil was now going to stand up to Membrède.

The rum controversy between Membrède and civilians like Dubreuil involved a fundamental question of power: masters wanted to retain control of the distribution of rum to slaves, both by their own personal rations in the slave quarter and by civilian-controlled taverns in the sale of drams. In this contest between military and civilian authority, the civilian population had little recourse against the major’s tyranny, for they had no representative institution in which to exert their power, like the Virginia House of Burgesses. In other words, not even the richest planter like Dubreuil had a sure way to counter arbitrary military actions, except by formal appeal directly to Louis XV. On June 9, Dubreuil now tried anyway by approaching the Crown’s paid local magistrates of the Superior Council to complain.

Dubreuil probably went straight to the jail, awaited by the authorities and several of his slaves with the names Louis and Jean, the two most common male names in town, those provided by the crime’s only witness. One of the suspects named Louis was the most highly placed artisan in the colony, an eighteen-year-old Dubreuil had apprenticed in the royal hospital to become a surgeon. At the time of the crime, he was attending a woman with menstrual complications, and the nuns who served in the hospital would readily attest both to his unimpeachable character and his whereabouts. After interrogation, the procurator general (or attorney general) released him. Other slaves who had been arrested despite the fact they were named Claude and Joseph–both African-born with additional African names–also quickly passed their interrogations. They both claimed to have stayed in le camp, as locals called slave quarters. In ordinary circumstances, they might have gone to the town center in the night, but they had not that night. When interrogators finally got to suspects who knew something, they discovered that the supposed armed robbery was complicated and ambiguous.

The Louisiana-born slave Marie, twelve years old, was the only witness to the crime and may have been involved. She testified that two Dubreuil slaves she knew well–whom she now named as Joseph and Jean Gué–had broken through the window into her masters’ home, while she alone guarded the house. They took the money from an armoire, and demanded that she lie: she was to say that Bellair’s Louis and Jean had committed the crime. This was one very vulnerable child: her father was dead and her mother either belonged to or worked for another master. Marie herself was only rented by her owner Sieur Lamelle to Sergeant Nicholas Marette and his wife. The attorney general tried to get her to admit that she had stolen the money herself and given it to her mother, and then he tried to get her to say the robbers paid her for her silence. She stuck by her story.

Over the following two weeks, the authorities released all suspects, including the accused Dubreuil slaves. Like so many criminal cases in the records, the outcome of this one is not clear. The judges of the Superior Council probably agreed with Dubreuil that the accusations were groundless, and that Marie may have been the pawn of Marette and Membrède. It came out that the supposed victim Marette had only recently borrowed money to pay his debts, so how could he have had so much money to be stolen? They all knew that Marette’s superior, Membrède, had a motive to extort cooperation from Dubreuil on the rum issue by causing him shame about his slaves–a master was responsible for all his slaves’ behavior: he was supposed to be a bon père de famille. Dubreuil stood to lose not only the labor of his slaves if they were found guilty, but his dignity as a gentleman. This was, moreover, just the latest in a long series of incidents involving soldiers and citizens. In the previous year, the town watched the executioner break on a wheel a slave who had killed a soldier in a rage–for drunkenly poaching on the slave’s starling trap. In the following summer, some of Membrède’s men would resort to mere brute force in open intimidation of Dubreuil by ambushing one of his most valuable and unoffending slaves–a blacksmith for whom he had paid ten thousand livres–and beating the man so badly he could not work for months. By then, the Crown’s highest civil servant in the colony was reporting home that “the people groan and murmur” about the garrison. Even the Capuchin priests began protesting about the disorderly soldiers. The complaints were always limited, of course, by the citizens’ sense of gratitude that the king kept up the garrison: the soldiers were their first line of defense to keep the slaves in line. As a result, only in 1754 did the groaning and murmuring convince the Crown to recall Membrède to France.

Dubreuil’s predicaments were several and take us into the heart of slave society in the eighteenth century. The fact that his workers were slaves meant they had no personal rights–the law positively forbade them to defend themselves against any white person. That made them a good target for a bully with authority to use as leverage against their owner: Dubreuil dreaded the personal shame he would feel if any of his slaves was convicted of a crime. In this sense, slave society inexorably leads to disorder because the law makes slaves vulnerable. Against that disorder, Dubreuil felt a strong need for the soldiers as a local police force to overawe the slaves, even if the soldiers were a nuisance. More to the point, he especially needed the soldiers because the Crown would not allow the planters to organize their own structure of local institutional power to control the lower orders. Colonists in French and Spanish colonies were much more at the mercy of arbitrary power than their neighbors in English colonies, for they had no institution like the House of Burgesses, in which to concert their power and take primary responsibility for their society. By contrast with Virginia, Dubreuil and the rest of the citizens of New Orleans had to cope as individuals with the ambitions of the Crown’s bureaucratic and military representatives, as well as with career French soldiers who had no local loyalties.

Dubreuil undoubtedly knew when he left the house that morning that he would get no satisfaction in the Superior Council, that military power always had a superior claim in the colony. The rewards of the planter’s labor were rich, and his reputation was wreathed in glory, but Dubreuil–even he–could not call himself free. Tragically, as a master of chattels, the vulnerability of his slaves was also his own, and a jealous and unscrupulous major could make trouble for him with impunity. The planter was a special kind of slave to the system.

Further Reading: For further reading on New Orleans, see Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Early Deep South, 1718-1819 (Knoxville, 1999); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1992); Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1803 (Chapel Hill, 1992); Samuel Wilson Jr., The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana: Collected Essays of Samuel Wilson, Jr., F. A. I. A., comp. and ed. by Jean M. Farnsworth and Ann M. Masson (Lafayette, La., 1987); and Henry P. Dart, “The Career of Dubreuil in French Louisiana,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 18 (1935): 267-331.

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

Thomas N. Ingersoll is associate professor of history at Ohio State University, Lima, and adjunct professor of American history at the Université de Montréal. Besides a book and several articles on early New Orleans, he has written a forthcoming book (2004) on Indian mixed bloods in early North America.

Dry Creek Valley

On the second

and third

wires over the wire
on which forks the zinfandel vine:
barbed knots
and spirals of old
severed vinetips:
one can flick
these wishbones of waterless
grapewood into
full rotations
on the wire:
some are not wyes,
some have the look of shrew-sized
brainstems into
the knots
of which I fail
to not
project my proprioception
and the regulation
and insistence of my breathing here
in the plutocratic hills,
while quaked reactors fail
Japan, and bombs fall
in Afghanistan
for purposes of regulation
and insistence, and
there’s a crow (in an oak with a copy of
Whitman’s beard
on every limb)
counting to five
over and over and a propane truck
filling the tanks of the vineyard opposite.

Maalaea

Saugatuck Dunes

I and the others, over the dune hill wall,
confronted the Great Lake and wandered
with paper, pens and dying in different
parents
directions, and I sat a long time on a beech log and wrote

until one of the others walked
toward the black dot
that was me
and arrived
and sat, and I felt a pulsation, acute,
a desire to
protect, and felt, too,
protected, but she
sat with me
for less than
a minute in silence, then
asked for more paper and walked off.

Could it be True I
Once, Alone Walking,
Found

A split tree trunk
with a torn off back
half of a water-
logged Paradiso
in its hollow?

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

On a chilly weekend shortly before Christmas, the Stunning Significant Other (hereafter, SSO) and I took a quick trip from snowy, abstemious New England down to New York City. With no Friday night plans in place, as Metro North whisked us toward Grand Central I asked her if there were anything in particular she’d like to do that evening. Any restaurants she’d like to visit? Perhaps we could see what the Metropolitan Opera was performing? Or maybe a Broadway show? I will confess that I was not entirely lacking in ulterior motives in asking these questions. She replied that it would be great to see a show—but what was playing? Well, I cautiously replied, there was a soon-to-close musical that I’d heard was really great. “What’s it about?” Well, I ventured, even more cautiously, it’s about antebellum politics and Manifest Destiny. “That sounds absolutely awesome,” was the response. (A word of caution: I would not try this with just any significant other. It helps if he/she is also a devotee of nineteenth-century Americana. You’ve been warned.)

The opening number offers the essence of the show’s take on Jackson’s appeal, and also its less-than-subtle link to current political events.

That’s how we found ourselves at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre on West 45^th Street later that evening, ready to see “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” This musical, originally conceived by Les Freres Corbusier, a downtown theatre troupe that is “devoted to aggressively visceral theatre combining historical revisionism, sophomoric humor, and rigorous academic research,” had its roots in the downtown theater scene, although it was first performed in Los Angeles. This production was brought to Broadway by the Public Theater in fall 2010. Apparently the audience for a loosely historical musical satire about our seventh president was not as large as the producers had hoped. The show, which cost $4.5 million to stage, closed on January 2, 2011, after only 120 performances, finishing its run substantially in the red.

“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” combines the emo-rock musical stylings that made “Spring Awakening” such a smash earlier in the decade with an irreverent, free-wheeling approach to American history and presidential politics. In this respect, it is reminiscent of the little-seen but highly entertaining “President Harding is a Rock Star,” a glam rock musical that got its start on the experimental stages of the East Village before enjoying a run in Washington, D.C., in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election. Indeed, one of the main messages of BBAJ is the importance of media appeal—and particularly sex appeal—in the marketing of presidential candidates: the posters for the show seen on bus shelters around New York showed this image (fig. 1), whose slogan “History Just Got All Sexypants” seemed to be one of the key themes (if not desires) of the show.

The interior of the Jacobs Theatre was a welter of old-timey bric-a-brac, taxidermy, velvet swagged curtains, portraits of nineteenth-century political figures, duct tape, strings of lights, piles of empty beer cans and liquor bottles: picture Peale’s Museum, trashed by the Delta Tau Chis. Suspended from the ceiling was a stuffed horse, its legs trussed together by a chain. I waited all evening for it to burst open and shower something—Confetti? Whiskey? Worthless currency from the pet banks?—over the audience, to no avail.

Much of the press that BBAJ received related to the undeniable charisma and appeal of the show’s star, Benjamin Walker (fig. 2). He swaggered onstage at the outset of the show in tight jeans and a military jacket, a holstered pistol at his side, surveyed the audience, and declared, “You guys are sexy as shit!” After some additional prefatory patter, he declared “I’m Andrew Jackson! I’m your president! Let’s go!” And the night was off to the races with the show’s opening full-cast number, “Populism, Yea, Yea!” (A song that I was singing to myself on the way over to the theater—the SSO thought I had made it up.) The opening number offers the essence of the show’s take on Jackson’s appeal, and also its less-than-subtle link to current political events, describing populism as a movement that is

For people like us,
Who don’t just think about things—
People who make things happen.
Sometimes with guns,
Sometimes with speeches too,
And also other things.

The ironic, winking connection to contemporary politics runs throughout the musical, and can at times verge into the self-satisfied (as many reviews of the show noted, this tone did not translate well from smaller downtown venues to the scale of a Broadway production). The musical offers a loose—very loose—outline of Jackson’s upbringing on the Tennessee frontier (his family is depicted as being killed by Indians, cementing young Andrew’s remorseless hatred of the people whom he would as president persecute so thoroughly), and offering an explanation of his later populist politics in his father’s rants against the urban elites of the East who don’t give a damn about the needs of citizens in the West. The show races to put Jackson in action, in the War of 1812. It is in the wake of his stunning victory at the Battle of New Orleans that Jackson the public figure—the real subject of the musical—comes to the fore, in a song titled “I’m Not That Guy.” Jackson struggles with the implications of life in the public eye, including the exposure that a career in politics would bring to his marriage to his wife, Rachel, whose lack of an official divorce from her first husband before marrying Jackson would dog him throughout his career. Walker as Jackson quickly reconciles these misgivings, however, and at the end of the song declares what the rest of the musical will show to be the primary tenet of Jackson’s political beliefs: “Who am I? I’m Andrew Fucking Jackson!”

A ninety-minute musical that is primarily being played for laughs can’t be expected to offer much in the way of historical detail, and BBAJ makes no claim to fidelity to the facts (although the show’s Website does offer a link to additional resources for those who are interested in learning more about Jackson and his era). Most of the historical context that is present in the show is offered by the Storyteller (Broadway veteran Kristine Nielsen), supposedly a retired history teacher and admitted Jackson aficionado who periodically rolls onstage in a motorized wheelchair accessorized with an American flag. The central section of the musical deals with the high points of Jackson’s career: the election of 1824, and the “corrupt bargain” that put John Quincy Adams in the White House; Jackson’s decision to run again in 1828; and his first term in office. Through this portion of the show Jackson shares the stage with the main political players in those events: John Quincy Adams, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Martin Van Buren. It is in the depiction of these figures that many readers of Common-placemight find the most to enjoy.

Darren Goldstein plays Calhoun as a slick backroom wheeler-dealer, with a voice seemingly lifted from the cartoon chicken Foghorn Leghorn. Lucas Near-Verbrugghe’s Van Buren is a fawning, two-faced petty bureaucrat, interested in nothing more than feathering his own nest. The show’s version of John Quincy Adams is a far cry from Anthony Hopkins’ incorruptible idealist in the film “Amistad.” Here, Jeff Hiller plays the sixth president as a stupefied, incompetent, adenoidal lummox; when the deal is consummated that hands Adams victory in the 1824 presidential election, he clumps offstage and yelps, “This is exciting! I never win anything!” Most notable, however, is Bryce Pinkham’s performance as Henry Clay, who speaks in a near-incomprehensible shriek, may or may not have a hunchback, has hair that appears to have been styled by a mid-80s Robert Smith, and is continually stroking some sort of rodent—too sleek for a marmot, too big for a weasel. Perhaps a mink (fig. 3).

For theatre-goers who are familiar with the historical context, all of this is very entertaining. And the key message of this central section—that the qualities that it takes to get elected president are very different from those that are required to govern effectively—is one that has obvious connections to more contemporary periods. Yet many members of the audience seemed a bit baffled. The show’s satirical humor seemed to have difficulty connecting with the audience in a venue of this size, and its music and choreography are not as polished as many visitors to New York likely expect to see on a Broadway stage (especially if they paid the full price of over $100 a ticket).

Perhaps more perplexing was the show’s shift in tone in its final third, where things turned somber as the focus swung to the one historical event that most members of the audience probably associated with Jackson: the Trail of Tears. A Native American leader named “Black Fox” is depicted as being a close confidante of Jackson, aiding his policies of Indian removal by betraying numerous tribes in his role as Jackson’s chief negotiator (the character was called Black Hawk in the show’s first run at the Public Theater, but the name was changed after Native Americans who saw the show objected that the character’s negative portrayal could lead audiences to think that it referred to the real Black Hawk, the Sauk and Fox war leader of the early nineteenth century). But at the end of the show, Black Fox’s own people stand in the way of Jackson’s expansionist vision, and Black Fox is forced to take leave of Washington to lead his tribe in what he knows will be a futile war against U.S. troops. Jackson explains that the conflict between Indians and white settlers hungry for land was foreordained from the moment Europeans first set foot on the continent, and that even if he wanted to stop what he refers to as the “genocide” that is underway, he is powerless in the face of historical forces he can’t control.

The show concluded with a rousing version of “The Hunters of Kentucky,” an 1821 song that Jackson used as his campaign anthem in 1824 and 1828. Yet despite ending on this energetic note, the underlying theme of the show left one feeling somewhat uneasy. As BBAJ showed, the United States as it is presently constituted is the result of a long list of bad (if not downright immoral) decisions throughout history—decisions that modern voters might regret, but that have also made us who we are. We have been the material beneficiaries of Jackson’s power-mad, bloodthirsty streak, and even if we could right these wrongs, the musical asks us whether we would want to. BBAJ’s combination of history and satire was likely not well suited for the Broadway stage—it simply isn’t commercial enough to fill that many seats night after night. A smaller venue, and an even sharper edge, would have helped this entertaining historical mash-up enjoy a longer run.

By the time the Union army reached Bayou Boeuf—the neighborhood where Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped from upstate New York, had been enslaved for twelve years—it had become a tourist destination. The federals accompanying General Nathaniel P. Banks on the march to Port Hudson, Louisiana, who had read Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) made a point of seeking out the plantation of Edwin Epps, the last, longest, and most notoriously brutal owner of Solomon Northup before he regained his freedom (fig. 1). On May 19, 1863, 2nd Lt. William H. Root of the 75th New York Volunteers, wrote the following in his diary: “We are in the district that formed the theater of Solomon Northup’s bondage”:

Old Epp’s plantation is a few miles down the Bayou and Epps himself is on the plantation, anoted man made famous of his owning Solomon Northup. Plenty of negroes are found about here who say that they knew Platt [Northup’s name while enslaved] well and have danced to the music of his fiddle often. Some who remember when he was taken out of the lot by the “Northern gemman.” Bayou Boeuf was then the witness of quite a scene which made a lasting impression on the minds of the poor darkies who saw the affair.

The story of Northup did linger, both on the bayou and in the memories of soldiers who traveled in those parts during the war. S. E. Chandler, a sergeant with the 24th New York Cavalry, wrote to the National Tribune in 1894 about Northup and his story, noting that “the book is now out of print, cannot be procured of any regular dealer.” However, he had found a copy of Twelve Years in a secondhand bookshop in Albany. Chandler recalled meeting “a number of returned soldiers who were with Banks on his Red River expedition who told me of having read the book at the time it was published (1854[sic]) and who visited the plantation of Edwin Epps, where Northup … passed years of his life. They told of seeing and talking with his former slave comrades, whose names were Uncle Abram, Wiley, Aunt Phoebe, Patsy, Bob, Henry, and Edward.” Chandler hoped that others who had visited Bayou Boeuf during the war might also write to the National Tribune with “a brief account of what they learned” about the world and the people that Solomon Northup had left behind.

The film serves to remind us what the war accomplished: the dismantling of the institution that cost Northup twelve years of his life.

As the soldiers who went looking for Edwin Epps well understood, to remember the Civil War was also to recall its antecedents and its outcomes—that is, the South and the nation as they existed before, during, and after the bloody conflict. The recent film version of Northup’s story, appearing in the midst of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial, exemplifies this broader understanding of war memory. Like the book before it, Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave points directly to the bitter roots of the conflict. The film also serves to remind us what the war accomplished: the dismantling of the institution that cost Northup twelve years of his life.

Recently, I began researching the editorial backstory to the first modern republication of Twelve Years a Slave, in 1968, and that edition’s translation into a feature film. It soon became clear that much of the press coverage of the film—which has focused on the film’s level of historical accuracy, and on how true it is to Solomon Northup’s account—has ignored the subsequent history of the story Northup told. Northup came to believe, when looking back at his escape from the bayou, that “all things were working together for my deliverance.” Little could he imagine that his published narrative would also experience redemption more than once in subsequent years.

Northup’s account reached the big screen after traveling the same hard ground of racial conflict that the nation as a whole crossed from the 1850s to the present. The book fell out of print after the Civil War and remained so through the nadir of race relations in the South and the rise of Jim Crow. It was not republished until 1968, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, when historians had begun to reflect on the African American past in search of antecedents for the radical politics of the present. Now that the Civil War has once again become present in American popular culture due to the sesquicentennial, Twelve Years a Slave has resurfaced, this time in cinematic form.

That such a searing film would appear now seems fitting. While most contemporary textbooks discuss the role that slavery played in disunion, antebellum southern slavery is not often integrated into the popular memory of the war. Although important films about slavery and the Civil War have appeared since the 1960s—from Roots to Glory to Lincoln—none of these are so closely tied to the testimony of one person’s daily experience of slavery. It is the particularity of Northup’s story, as many historians have noted, that allowed him to so keenly reflect antebellum society at large and especially slavery’s hold over daily life in the South before the war.

The film’s attention to violence (a focus it shares with the original text) and to the plantation landscape in which such routine brutality occurred, de-sanitizes slick political justifications for the Civil War. Like Alexander Gardner’s grisly photographs of Antietam in 1862, Twelve Years shocks its intended audience with horrors that have largely been kept from the public eye.

As a work of both memory and memorialization, the film version of Twelve Years a Slave is perhaps the most powerful answer yet to the movie that became the archetype of the Civil War epic from its debut in 1939, David O. Selznick’s production of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The inverse of that unforgettable monument to a fictional yet fiercely remembered “Old South,”Twelve Years a Slave reminds us of what the Civil War really swept from American society.

The resulting film is clear-eyed and painful to watch, closely following the experience of its protagonist and taking relatively few liberties with the original text. Countless critics, writers, and historians have hailed it as cinema’s first honest look at the South’s “peculiar institution.” Writing in the New Yorker, David Denby declared it “easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery.” Were it not for the collaboration of two historians in Louisiana, however, McQueen’s film could not have become such a testament to what enslaved people endured before the Civil War.

In the spring of 1966, Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon contracted with Louisiana State University Press to republish what seemed to be an improbable story. Solomon Northup was a free black man living in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1841 when he was lured to Washington, D.C., by two men posing as performers in need of Northup’s skill as a violinist. Awakening to find himself chained in a slave pen, Northup was quickly sent south to the New Orleans slave market, sold under the name of “Platt” to a man named William Ford, and carried to the Bayou Boeuf region of central Louisiana. There he remained in bondage for twelve years, much of that time to a cruel master named Edwin Epps, before he was able to reclaim his freedom.

On his return to New York, Northup arranged to tell his story to a lawyer named David O. Wilson. Like most slave narratives of this period, Twelve Years a Slave was both a condemnation of slavery and a much-needed source of income for its ex-slave narrator. Wilson does not seem to have had serious abolitionist leanings, but he was an aspiring writer and recognized a good publishing prospect in Northup’s story. Harriet Beecher Stowe had published her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin the year previous, and it met with unprecedented success. The original 1853 edition of Twelve Years a Slave was dedicated to Stowe, who had been pleased to see Northup’s experience come to light. She noted the similarities between Northup’s ordeal and Uncle Tom’s, particularly the fact that Northup had been enslaved to a sadistic master (Epps) in central Louisiana, very near to where Tom suffered the abuses of Simon Legree.

Although Eakin and Logsdon became interested in the narrative independent of one another, Eakin saw it first. She recalled that she was about twelve years old when she first read Twelve Years a Slave. She had accompanied her father to Oak Hall Plantation (near Alexandria, Louisiana), where he had some business with its owner, Dr. W. D. Haas. Haas was the grandson of Douglass Marshall, mentioned in Northup’s account, who owned fifty slaves at Oak Hall in 1860. To keep the young girl occupied, Haas gave her the family’s copy of Northup’s story. She recalled being struck by the familiar names and places in the narrative.

Despite her avid interest in Twelve Years a Slave, Eakin had a difficult time obtaining a copy of her own. The book had long been out of print, as a clipping in the New Orleans Item from 1922 attests. Someone from Eakin’s hometown of Bunkie with the initials “L.C.E.” placed an advertisement in search of a copy of the book and was told none could be had, even in local libraries (fig. 2). Eakin eventually found a copy in a secondhand bookshop in Baton Rouge. As a college student at LSU in the 1940s, she began tracing the life of Northup and apparently never stopped.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Sue Eakin’s is not the face most associated with the recent film adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave (fig. 3). In fact, most people would be hard pressed to consider the woman in her author’s photo (white, grandmotherly, with her hair set and a chain on her eye glasses) on the cutting edge of anything, much less that of African American history. Although it was clearly Eakin who did most of the sleuthing, with Logsdon’s help she brought the remarkable narrative of freeborn Solomon Northup’s ordeal in slavery back into print.

Just as Lt. Root penned his letter from a South soon to be free of slavery, Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon revived Northup’s narrative during another upheaval in American race relations. The political movements of the late 1960s brought with them a rising interest in African American history. At that critical point in a long racial struggle, in an age before digital archives put original nineteenth-century books at readers’ fingertips, Eakin and Logsdon made Twelve Years a Slave accessible to two generations of scholars and their students.

In doing so they became part of a long history of slave narrative publication and re-publication in American letters. With the rise of anti-slavery activism in the 1830s, the publication of slave narratives burgeoned. White abolitionists typically penned an introduction to the former slave’s account; many ex-slaves also relied on amanuenses (who often had heavy-handed editorial intent) to transcribe their stories. Some literary critics have seen this as an unequal relationship, and others see this same inequality in modern editions: the words of a former slave, so this critique goes, are never allowed to stand on their own, without the support of an editor to authenticate them.

In the case of Northup’s story, however, the process of authentication was always something of a communal one, and it began almost from the moment of Northup’s liberation. Given the illegal nature of Solomon Northup’s enslavement, the effort to retrieve evidence of his sale and to retrace his steps commenced once he was redeemed. After a failed attempt to send a letter to New York and a near lynching (fig. 4), Northup found an ally in Samuel Bass, an itinerant carpenter with antislavery sympathies who got word to those in New York who could vouch for Northup’s status as a free man. A descendent of his father’s owner, Henry B. Northup, traveled to Louisiana to retrieve him, with endorsements and aid from Louisiana Senator Pierre Soulé and the governor of New York.

Both Northups then traveled to New Orleans, where they visited the slave pen where he had been held and the room in which William Ford had purchased him. According to the New York Daily Times, they also visited the office of a notary to “trace the titles of the colored man from Tibaut [Tibeats] to Eppes [sic], from Ford to Tibaut, and from Freedman [the New Orleans trader] to Ford—all the titles being recorded in the proper books kept for that purpose.” The elaborate system of notarial record keeping in New Orleans, which today fills an archive like no other in the country, helped Northup corroborate his own memory of events.

In later years, the accounts of Lt. Root and Sgt. Chandler, too, served to authenticate Northup’s story. And Chandler’s list of people who remembered Northup and his sudden liberation suggests that those who were enslaved with him also were willing to affirm both his story and its strangeness. The inclusion of a woman named “Patsy” on that list is significant since in Northup’s telling she had been the main object of abuse in the Epps household, caught between the sexual coercion of Edwin Epps and the violent jealousies of his wife. That Patsy may have been there still, with Epps, means the war could not have come soon enough.

White members of the Bayou Boeuf community—contemporaries and immediate descendants of those Northup had encountered—also chimed in regarding the accuracy of Northup’s memories. There is evidence that white planter families from the Bayou Boeuf community kept copies of the 1853 edition of Twelve Years a Slave in their libraries. According to Eakin, a family named Townsend “undoubtedly was one of those who owned one of the original editions of which there were a number still preserved.” Apparently the people of Bayou Boeuf were eager to see their community recognized in print, even if it appeared in the context of a truthful account of the brutality of slavery and the slave trade.

In the footnotes to the 1968 edition, Eakin reprinted parts of an annotation Dr. Haas had written on the flyleaf of the book in 1930, around the time Eakin first read the narrative. Dr. Haas’s inscription reflected the grudging admission of residents of the area that Northup’s narrative was accurate in its recounting of people and places in Bayou Boeuf: “This story is remarkable in many respects [—] that an uneducated negro after twelve years spent in slavery under a drunken overbearing Master could give so correct a narrative of his experiences is remarkable.”

By 1966, Eakin had completed years of research on Northup’s narrative, but convincing the editors at LSU Press that she was the right person for the editing job was not easy and, ultimately, not entirely successful. When she first approached the press about publishing Twelve Years a Slave, she was a married woman with children, a master’s degree, and an instructor’s position at a small regional state university. Eakin did not receive a PhD until 1978. “(Mrs.) Sue L. Eakin,” as she signed her letters, was not the highly credentialed male historian university presses preferred.

In one telling, Eakin approached the press and was rejected. When she tried again, the editors expressed mild interest. Unbeknownst to her, however, a young scholar at LSU-New Orleans (later, the University of New Orleans) with a BA and MA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, had discovered his own copy of Twelve Years a Slave, and had decided that it should be reprinted.

Joseph Logsdon first read Northup’s narrative when one of his students brought the book to class (fig. 5). The woman was a friend of the McCoy family, some of whom were mentioned in Northup’s account, and it was their copy she had brought for Logsdon to see. According to Northup, the young plantation mistress Mary McCoy was “the beauty and the glory of Bayou Boeuf” and a benevolent slave owner who held “about a hundred working hands, besides a great many house servants, yard boys, and young children” (fig. 6). In his first letter to her, Logsdon told Eakin: “The work came to my attention last fall when one of my students … brought me the family’s treasured (and humorously edited) copy of the narrative. After reading the fascinating book, I realized that it should be edited and republished.”

Both historians had gone to the press, within weeks of one another—Eakin with years of research in hand, and Logsdon with an interest in the subject matter and well-placed contacts in the field. After meeting Eakin and discussing a possible collaboration, Logsdon wrote to the director of LSU Press: “Her knowledge of the Bayou Boef [sic] region is truly impressive. There is no question in my mind that, working together, we shall write a much better book.” For Eakin, however, the decision to collaborate with Logsdon was not much of a decision at all, since she had little choice if she wanted to be an editor on the project.

They divided the work between them: Logsdon worked on the New York parts of the account as well as the introduction, and Eakin continued to research and write footnotes to the Louisiana portion. Together, they verified nearly every name, date, and landmark Northup mentioned in his narrative. John Ridley, who wrote the script of the film, told the New York Times that he relied upon the extensive notes in the Eakin and Logsdon edition to write the screenplay.

Logsdon’s most significant contribution, however, may have been his efforts to put Northup’s narrative in a larger context. Logsdon was aware that African American history was of increasing interest to publishers and within the academy. In his “Northup” file, he saved a clipping from theNational Observer dated March 21, 1966 (fig. 7), with the headline “A New Boom as Negroes Seek a Place in History.” The writer noted “the depth and diversity of the current Negro information explosion, a phenomenon that is inundating libraries and schools, spawning new businesses, and creating a sense of pride in heritage among thousands of American Negroes.” The Civil Rights movement and its fight for school integration, as well as “the emergence of Africa” in the popular consciousness, had created an “insatiable public appetite for information on Negro Life.”

In the same article, John Hope Franklin, then teaching at the University of Chicago, argued that “the Negroes’ contributions to the nation have been obscured by history, and deliberately so. The traditional view of the Negro that depicts him as irresponsible and shiftless was part of the apparatus used to uphold his degraded status, and justify the institution of slavery.” A “reexamination” of that view was underway, but not all of this new work was genuine. Pointing to the efforts of publishers and writers to turn a profit by quickly filling the void in black history, Franklin said: “There are people slapping anything at all to do with Negroes between two covers and making a profit on it.”

Logsdon must have seen the Northup project as one that would address Franklin’s concerns. The experience of enslavement narrated by one of the enslaved, a dramatic story filled with detail that could be verified and used by scholars and teachers, was the antithesis of the slapdash productions to which Franklin alluded. In light of Northup’s obvious intelligence, remarkable survival, and industrious frame of mind even under slavery (in addition to playing the violin at plantation parties, he saved his first master, William Ford, both time and money by devising a means for transporting timber down the bayou instead of over land), Twelve Years a Slave would contribute meaningfully to a rebirth of research and writing in African American history.

Logsdon also worked to promote the new edition among prominent historians. He enlisted the help of Kenneth Stampp, eminent historian of American slavery at the University of California-Berkeley, who agreed to write a blurb for the book (though it does not seem to have ever been used). Stampp called the narrative a “priceless document,” asserting that while Frederick Douglass’s narrative was the “superior” of the two, “in some respects Northup’s narrative is more valuable to the historian.” Because he had been born a free man, Northup (perhaps more so than Douglass) “tasted the bitterness of slavery.”

When the 1968 edition appeared—doubling the accepted canon of nineteenth-century slave narratives to two—it was as if Northup had offered up his story again, in another tumultuous era for race relations in America. A review for the Florida Historical Quarterly (whose blurb, strangely, still appears on the cover of the 2010 LSU Press edition) insisted that the book “should be must reading for every young Southerner. Only in accounts such as this can they understand the true nature of the curse which, more than a hundred years later, still hangs like a millstone around the neck of the South, hampering final emancipation for white and black alike.” Such a directive reflects the time and place in which Eakin and Logsdon reintroduced Northup’s remarkable story, delivering his account to an eager new generation.

If Logsdon provided the larger framework for Northup’s narrative, it was Eakin who reconstructed “the world of Solomon Northup,” to quote Logsdon himself. But in truth, Eakin’s relationship to her subject was not entirely academic—nor was it always objective. She seems to have been drawn to Twelve Years a Slave in large part because while it narrated Northup’s trials, the text also recorded a detailed history of her beloved Bayou Boeuf. In the early 1970s, for instance, she secured funding for a brochure called Backtracking: Twelve Years a Slave, which numbers the various sites of Northup’s enslavement and provides brief commentary on the people and places he encountered (fig. 8). This text serves as a (now mostly outdated) travel guide through the community where Northup was enslaved for so long.

Perhaps nothing so well illustrates Eakin’s familiarity with the world in which Northup found himself, however, than the map of “The Bayou Boeuf Country” she created with the help of a local cartographer named Rufus Smith (fig. 9). The names and property lines of plantation owners cluster on either side of the bayou, and the cleared land is ringed by swamps and mostly impassable forests. Like Northup’s narrative, the map is full of names and places, topographic notations, and marked routes between plantations. Eakin did her best to highlight Bayou Boeuf, its landmarks, and Northup’s journeys through it. But she was unable to render that same landscape from Northup’s perspective, that is, from the perspective of a free man who suddenly found himself enslaved in plantation country, far from a port or a coastline that might have afforded him swift passage home.

Sue Eakin’s mapping of Solomon Northup’s “world” and his journeys through it has been translated into three dimensions in Steve McQueen’s film. With the camera, he tracks Northup through what historian Walter Johnson describes as the “carceral landscape” of the mid-nineteenth century Lower Mississippi Valley, a vast territory of cotton and cane with few opportunities for escape. In Northup’s recollection, it was as though even the sun was beyond the reach of the bayou’s inmates: “In the edge of the swamp, not a half mile from Epps’ house was a large space, thousands of acres in extent, thickly covered with palmetto. Tall trees, whose long arms interlocked each other, formed a canopy above them, so dense as to exclude the beams of the sun. It was like twilight always, even in the middle of the brightest day.”

In McQueen’s film, elements of the landscape become characters in the story. He filmed oak trees, for instance, in long, watery shots of gnarled branches draped with Spanish moss and, at two points in the story, with the bodies of black men. In one scene, when Northup considers escape, the sweating indecision he suffers in the maze of scrub brush is frightening. When he then stumbles on a lynching—through which McQueen also evokes a more recent reign of terror in the South—the impassability of that space for a black man in the 1840s becomes plain.

Given how closely McQueen’s film hews to Northup’s account, Eakin would probably have been pleased with the film. But there is one important point on which Sue Eakin would have taken issue with McQueen’s version. It concerns the house where Epps lived—the very house where Lt. Root made a stop on his way to Port Hudson. Eakin exerted much effort to help preserve the Edwin Epps house, built with the help of Northup in 1852 (figs. 10 and 11). Since 1976, the structure has been moved twice and now sits, restored, on the campus of LSU-Alexandria. Eakin had found the house herself, after considerable searching: “I had a time documenting the house,” she wrote, “because I had mistaken it for another of the hundreds of thousands of old slave cabins which had once lined the Bayou Boeuf.” Eakin rightly pointed out that the house, a modest one, was “far more typical of plantation houses as known within the miles of plantations in the lower Red River Valley than the columned mansions ‘restored’ mostly with oil money after World War II.”

Much of the movie, in fact, was filmed on the grounds of the sorts of “columned mansions” to which Eakin alluded. The Felicity Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana, plays the part of the Epps house in Steve McQueen’s movie and such a house, Eakin might have argued, would have been entirely too extravagant for a man who began his career as an overseer. In her Backtracking guide, she included a photograph of the P.L. Shaw House, a neighboring plantation to the Epps place with a nearly identical structure. The Shaw house was still in good repair at the time the photo was taken and probably offers something close to what Lt. Root and his companions found on Epps’s property in 1863 (fig. 12).

Eakin would have also appreciated the film’s high-profile release during the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. But she would have continued to point to our garbled understanding of the slave South and our even more confused attempts to remember the society that the Civil War upended. “It was here,” she seemed to say, “and here, and here.” The peeling houses and the bloodlines that persisted in Bayou Boeuf were also remains of the war and the last physical evidence of the antebellum society it (rightly) destroyed.

Further Reading

Two editions of Northup’s narrative have been published in advance of the film: Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York, 2013); Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, Enhanced Edition, ed. Sue Eakin (Longboat Key, Fla., 2013). The 1968 edition is Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon, eds. (Baton Rouge, La., 1968).

On the history of slave narratives, see Marion Wilson Starling’s The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History (New Haven, Conn., 1981).

For critiques of Twelve Years a Slave as a book and a film, see David Denby, “Fighting to Survive:Twelve Years a Slave and All is Lost,” The New Yorker (October 21, 2013); Noah Berlotsky, “How Twelve Years a Slave Gets History Right: By Getting It Wrong,” The Atlantic.com (October 28, 2013); Jimmy So, “The ‘12 Years a Slave‘ Book Shows Slavery As Even More Appalling Than In the Film,” The Daily Beast.com (October 18, 2013); and Forrest Wickman, “How Accurate is Twelve Years a Slave?” Slate.com Culture Blog (October 17, 2013).

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

Mary Niall Mitchell is Joseph Tregle Professor in Early American History and Ethel & Herman Midlo Chair in New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans.