It’s rare for a single work of scholarship to fundamentally change the way I teach a topic in U.S. history, but historian James Oakes’ latest work has done just that. Oakes has thoroughly persuaded me that the Republicans came into the Civil War ready to carry out much of the abolitionist agenda, meaning that they were willing from the beginning to destroy what Francis Lieber called the “poisonous root” of slavery. In his Lincoln Prize-winning book, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (2012), Oakes argues that as early as 1861, congressional Republicans, along with the president and his cabinet, and generals in the field, “insisted that slavery was the cause of the rebellion and emancipation an appropriate and ultimately indispensable means of suppressing it.” The Republicans were moving in lock-step with the abolitionists. As one widely circulated 1861 antislavery petition declared, Congress needed to utilize its “war-power” to destroy the “system of chattel slavery,” which the author of the petition labeled as the “root and nourishment” of the Confederacy.

Until recently, I have followed the trajectory of most textbooks and covered the abolitionist movement from the publication of David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829 to John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry thirty years later. Over the course of several weeks, we examine a selection of broadsides, pamphlets, images, and letters that have been scanned by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Library of Congress, the National Humanities Center and the Boston Public Library. We also discuss how these documents fit in with the PBS documentaries (Africans in America and The Abolitionists) that students watched and responded to online the night before.

After covering the attack on Fort Sumter, I left the abolitionists behind and focused on the Republican Party. The narrative I presented painted the Republicans as reluctant emancipators, a party that had neither the support nor the encouragement of most abolitionists. The trajectory of the war shifted only over the course of several years from a struggle for the restoration of the Union to a no-holds-barred war against human bondage.

I often ask my students whether they think the Confiscation Act would have been issued if hundreds of refugees had not shown up at Fortress Monroe weeks before. They often conclude that the slaves themselves were partly responsible for pushing the legislative agenda in Washington.

Oakes’ scholarship, however, has forced me to ask an obvious but important question: How did the abolitionists succeed in achieving their ultimate goal? In this, Oakes challenges historian Manisha Sinha’s argument that abolitionist precepts were not represented within the ranks of mainstream congressional Republicans and that President Abraham Lincoln “gave short shrift to the abolitionist agenda” in the early years of the war. Though Frederick Douglass was often frustrated with the Republican Party, Oakes argues that Lincoln and the Republicans were committed to achieving what Douglass called for in May 1861: put “an end to the savage and desolating war” being “waged by the slaveholders” by striking “down slavery itself.”

My students have responded enthusiastically to a multi-day lesson utilizing the Visualizing Emancipation Website. This ground-breaking digital history project allows students to map emancipation over the course of the war. Students view the unfolding of emancipation by tracking the movement of slaves toward the Union Army’s lines and the actions of soldiers and generals in the field. The Website can be used alongside the Freedmen and Southern Society Project and the Valley of the Shadow Project.

In the classroom, I use the students’ blog posts as a way to start a discussion. During their exploration of Visualizing Emancipation, many students picked up on the number of slaves that flooded Union lines in coastal Virginia not long after the firing on Fort Sumter. During the discussion we focused heavily on the role of General Benjamin Butler. On May 27, 1861, Butler, a conservative Democrat who opposed Stephen Douglas at the party’s 1860 convention, wrote to the Commander of the U.S. Armed Services General Winfield Scott asking him what he should do with the fugitives entering his lines at Fortress Monroe. “As a military question it would seem to be a measure of necessity to deprive their masters of their services … As a political question and a question of humanity can I receive the services of a Father and a Mother and not take the children?” asked Butler. “Of the humanitarian aspect I have no doubt.” What Butler needed was clarification on the political side of the equation. He decided to label the escaping bondmen “contrabands” under the rules of war and refused to turn them over. On May 30, Secretary of War Simon Cameron approved Butler’s decision not to return the “contrabands.” As Adam Goodheart has noted, slavery’s “iron curtain began falling all across the South.”

On August 8, 1861, two days after Lincoln signed the First Confiscation Act, which stated that Confederates who used slave labor to engage in rebellious acts would “forfeit” their claim to such “labor,” Secretary of War Simon Cameron issued instructions for slaves to be “discharged.” With his use of the word “discharged,” Cameron restored language used by Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull in an earlier version of Section 4 of the First Confiscation Act. Whereas Article 4, Section 2 of the 1787 Constitution prevented a “person held to labor or service” from being “discharged” if they escaped to a free state or territory, Trumbull’s amendment called for the military to emancipate or “discharge” enslaved people who reached Union lines. By treating the “contrabands” not as property, but as persons “held to labor,” the confiscation bill lined up with the long-standing view of antislavery Republicans. Cameron’s instructions also answered a question posed by Butler in a letter dated July 30, 1861: “Are these men, women, and children, slaves? Are they free?”

Lincoln never said a word in opposition to Cameron’s far-reaching order, which settled the status of those caught up under the terms of the First Confiscation Act on the side of freedom. There would be no further legal proceedings to debate the question. “Strictly speaking,” the act “freed only slaves used to support the rebellion,” writes Oakes. But “under the War Department’s instruction, all slaves voluntarily coming to Union lines from disloyal states were emancipated.” Indeed, in his December 1861 message to Congress, Lincoln used the word “liberated” when referring to slaves caught up under the provisions of the bill. I often ask my students whether they think the Confiscation Act would have been issued if hundreds of refugees had not shown up at Fortress Monroe weeks before. They often conclude that the slaves themselves were partly responsible for pushing the legislative agenda in Washington. As Steven Hahn has argued, black flight “began to reshape Union policy.”

Oakes tackles the long-standing assumption that the “purpose of the war shifted” from one designed to protect the Union to one that promoted emancipation. This is the conventional narrative found in numerous textbooks or classics like Allan Nevins’ multi-volume Ordeal for the Union (1947-1970). Take, for example, the traditional rendering of Lincoln’s battle with General John Frémont in the summer of 1861 and General David Hunter in the spring of 1862. Historians have typically used the clash with Frémont and Hunter to demonstrate Lincoln’s reluctance to embrace emancipation. As Oakes noted in his 2007 book on Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, Lincoln merely ordered Frémont and Hunter to conform to the wording of Section 4 of the First Confiscation Act, which empowered officers to confiscate slaves that were being used against the Army or Navy, along with the subsequent War Department orders. Frémont had gone a step too far in his proclamation, emancipating slaves of all rebels in Missouri; Hunter declared the abolition of slavery in three entire states (South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida) not yet under Union control. Allan Nevins actually called Frémont’s order the first act for emancipation, ignoring the role of General Butler and Secretary of War Cameron.

Frémont and Hunter, in Lincoln’s analysis, had turned themselves into dictators. Lincoln told his friend Orville Browning on September 22, 1861, that he could not allow “this reckless position” to stand. Lincoln did not disagree with the agenda of freeing slaves; he simply wanted it done in a manner that followed what Congress had prescribed. In his order revoking Hunter’s emancipation edict, Lincoln reminded the public that he was still holding out hope that rebellious states would adopt a “gradual” emancipation plan. As Oakes noted in his book on Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the president wanted to make clear that he was being pushed by the actions of slaveholders; they were the ones who “lit the fuse.” The bomb exploded in 1862.

Virginia slaves continued to escape to freedom as the Army of the Potomac moved south in the spring of 1862. In mid-March, General Ambrose Burnside captured New Bern, North Carolina. Nearly 7,500 blacks from the eastern portions of the state quickly made their way to the city. As one slaveholder declared at the time, the idea of “the ‘faithful slave’ is about played out.” Burnside carried on the same policies Butler had enacted. According to Oakes, a “tacit alliance between escaping slaves and the Union army” was “created with the approval of officials in Washington.” In July 1862, Congress authorized the president to enlist black men. The Second Confiscation Act empowered the president to “employ … persons of African descent … for the suppression of the rebellion.” In November 1862, the prominent abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson took command of the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment composed of freed slaves. “No officer in this regiment now doubts that the key to the successful prosecution of this war lies in the unlimited employment of black troops,” wrote Higginson. “Instead of leaving their homes and families to fight, they are fighting for their homes and families, and they show the resolution and sagacity which a personal purpose gives.” One month later, Attorney General Edward Bates demolished Chief Justice Roger Taney’s racist ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) and declared in an official opinion that African Americans were full citizens of the United States.

In addition to the Visualizing Emancipation Website, another exercise that allows students to explore the ideas James Oakes raises in Freedom Nationalis to search the text of the Congressional Globe. I found it useful this past term to have my students access the Globeonline, particularly the debate over the First Confiscation Act, via the Library of Congress’ Website. Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson declared: “Our purpose is to save this Government and to save this country … and if traitors use bondmen to destroy this country, the Government should at once convert those bondmen into men” so they could not “be used to destroy our country.” For Wilson, along with many of his colleagues, especially Senator Trumbull, freedom and the war effort went hand in hand.

By focusing on political history, Oakes reminds us of the astounding legislative record of the 37th Congress. Congressional leaders pushed through bills strengthening efforts to prohibit the international slave trade, granted diplomatic recognition to Haiti, and abolished slavery in Washington, D.C. On the military front, thousands of slaves sought refuge behind Union lines after the U.S. Army and Navy took control of the coastal regions of the Carolinas and portions of the Tennessee Valley.

As “emancipation events,” to borrow a phrase from the editors of Visualizing Emancipation, became more prevalent, discussion of colonization also intensified. In the Second Confiscation Act, Congress attached an appropriation for voluntary emigration and authorized the president to implement it. Section 12 of the act reads: “The President of the United States is hereby authorized to make provision for the transportation, colonization, and settlement, in some tropical country beyond the limits of the United States.” In his second annual message to Congress in December 1862, Lincoln went so far as to call for a constitutional amendment authorizing funding for voluntary emigration.

For a long time, Lincoln held fast to the idea of voluntarily removing blacks, though there was only one tiny, privately organized experiment in voluntary exile. The businessman Bernard Kock asked Lincoln to help subsidize a project to send blacks to Île à Vache, a Caribbean island off of the coast of Haiti. Lincoln granted funding, signing off on the ill-conceived scheme on December 31, 1862. At this very moment Lincoln was also putting the finishing touches on the Emancipation Proclamation—something that my students often find shocking. Lincoln personally shut down the disastrous Île à Vache project within a year.

Michael Vorenberg’s research on colonization schemes during the Civil War has helped my students understand Lincoln’s writings concerning the removal of African Americans from the United States. I often use the September 1862 edition of Douglass’ Monthly to demonstrate the profound opposition to colonization within the black community. Douglass was responding to Lincoln’s August 14, 1862 disastrous meeting with a black delegation in Washington, D.C. The president urged the leaders to think about the possibility of mass emigration. “Taking advantage of his position and of the prevailing prejudice against them [African Americans] he affirms that their presence in the country is the real first cause of the war, and logically enough, if the premises were sound, assumes the necessity of their removal,” declared Douglass in response. However, as historian Kate Masur reminds us in a recent article, we need also to keep in mind that since so many “white Americans rejected the idea of a multiracial nation … many black Americans, recognizing the implications of that rejection, took steps to build their lives elsewhere.”

Another question history classes should explore is how mainstream abolitionists fit into this new narrative about the destruction of slavery that focuses heavily on the Republicans, a party of which many abolitionists were leery of trusting. I have found it useful to present my students with copies of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator from July 12, 1861 (accessed via the Early American Newspaper Project) in order to demonstrate the parallel tracks of Republican Party policy and abolitionist doctrine.

That edition recounts that on a warm and sunny July 4th afternoon in 1861 at Framingham, Massachusetts, a large town just west of Boston, more than 2,000 people gathered to listen to abolitionists lecture about the meaning of the war. In his inaugural address as the new president of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Edmund Quincy declared that there was never such an occasion as the one upon them to be “thankful.” The war had created a situation in which slavery could be destroyed. Quincy was greeted with laughter and applause when he told the crowd in Framingham: “The American Anti-Slavery Society has for its Office Agent—who? Abraham Lincoln … and it has for its General Agent in the field—General [Winfield] Scott.” Secretary of Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair had “not the heart nor the wish to put back into the hell of Virginia slavery one single contraband article in Fortress Monroe.”

During his turn at the podium, Garrison reminded the crowd that Lincoln’s cause was their cause. Both he and Lincoln would be given “a coat of tar and feathers” by the white South, proclaimed Garrison. The Boston editor went on to talk about how the war powers could be used to destroy slavery. The abolitionist editor had long given up on the notion that “moral suasion” could bring an end to the Slave Power. In 1837, he admitted to the British abolitionist Elizabeth Pease that American antislavery advocates were not making nor were they going to make an “impression” upon slaveholders. “I have relinquished the expectation that they [slaveholders] will ever, by mere moral suasion, consent to emancipate their victims. I believe that nothing but the exterminating judgment of heaven can shatter the chains of the slave.” That judgment arrived in 1861 in the form of Lincoln and congressional Republicans.

However, not everyone in the all-star line-up of speakers at Framingham had confidence in the Lincoln administration. Stephen Foster, for example, did not want abolitionists to commit to supporting Lincoln until an emancipation edict had been issued. In Foster’s analysis, the president was not up to the task. Foster declared that the administration was “undeniably the most thoroughly subservient to slavery of any which has disgraced the country.” In the eyes of Sallie Holley, a close friend of Foster’s wife, Abby, Lincoln was a “sinner at the head of a nation of sinners.”

The Fosters, along with the New Hampshire radical abolitionist Parker Pillsbury, quickly found themselves in the minority. For the Garrisonians, the war was going to bring revolutionary changes in the political system that could not be accomplished through moral suasion. Beginning in the summer of 1861, David Lee Child wrote a series of wide-ranging articles in The Liberator on the war powers. The “slave, once freed by the war power, would be free for ever,” declared Child, who drew heavily from an 1836 speech by the venerable John Quincy Adams.

A “defeat, bloody and cruel” was needed in order to “anger” the North into “emancipation,” said Wendell Phillips during his remarks at the Framingham rally. The prominent antislavery attorney and orator got his wish a few weeks later. On July 29, Child wrote to Garrison offering his view on the Battle of Bull Run. According to Child, the massive Union defeat had “done more than a dozen victories” in terms of convincing politicians that using the war powers was absolutely necessary. Former Rhode Island Congressman Elisha Potter Jr. agreed: “We may commence the war without meaning to interfere with slavery; but let us have one or two battles, and get our blood excited, and we shall not only not restore any more slaves, but shall proclaim freedom wherever we go.”

In early August 1861, Congress responded by passing the First Confiscation Act. A month later, Garrison, Phillips, and other Bay State abolitionists organized the Emancipation League, with the purpose being to educate the North on how central the issue of slavery was to the successful prosecution of the war. As historian Stacey Robertson has argued, the League “tried to stimulate abolitionist sentiment by insisting that emancipation would help the North to win the war.”

In January 1862, Garrison gave a number of addresses to huge crowds in Philadelphia and New York. Speaking about the origins of the bitter and bloody conflict the nation found itself embroiled in, Garrison proclaimed:

There is war because there was a Republican Party. There was a Republican Party because there was an Abolition Party. There was an Abolition Party because there was Slavery. Now, to charge the war upon Republicanism is merely to blame the lamb that stood in the brook. To charge it upon Abolitionism is merely to blame the sheep for being the lamb’s mother. But to charge it upon Slavery is to lay the crime flat at the door of the wolf, where it belongs. To end the trouble, kill the wolf. I belong to the party of wolf-killers.

Garrison, who was undoubtedly reveling in the applause from the crowds that came to hear him speak, crowds that would have likely pelted him with rotten apples (or worse) only a year before, also spoke about the war powers: “What the people have provided” to “save their Government, is not despotism.” It “is as much a Constitutional act, therefore, for the President of the United States, Gen. McClellan, or Congress, to declare Slavery at an end in our country.”

Lincoln made this a reality on January 1, 1863, when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Too often, teachers criticize the Proclamation because it is couched in legalistic, military language, lacking the moral force of a radical antislavery address. However, as Oakes rightly observes, “most Americans at the time associated military emancipation with antislavery radicalism.” Lincoln was moving in lockstep with antislavery constitutionalism. Even Stephen Foster, who never hid his hatred for Lincoln, argued that “emancipation proclaimed by the national government and enforced by the Army” would “effectively destroy the slave power.” Critics might speculate as to Lincoln’s motives, but one important fact remains: no slave was ever returned to bondage. The Emancipation Proclamation also encouraged the enlistment of black freemen. As historian Douglas Egerton has recently argued, black abolitionists “were as anxious to destroy slavery” as “they were to establish a bid for citizenship.”

Shortly after Lincoln was re-nominated at the 1864 Republican Party convention in Baltimore, Garrison traveled to Washington. “There is no mistake about it in regard to Mr. Lincoln’s desire” to “uproot slavery, and give fair play to the emancipated,” wrote Garrison to his wife, Helen. What helped to draw the prominent abolitionist editor even closer to Lincoln in 1864 was the administration’s abandonment of colonization. Abolitionists, according to Sallie Holley, had to work to “explode utterly all ideas of colonization as not only a cruel insult to the colored people, but a miserable national policy.” In this they succeeded. Lincoln made no mention of colonization in the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

In 1864, Garrison risked losing many of his devoted followers when he entered into a battle with his long-time friend Wendell Phillips, who was incensed over Lincoln’s announced reconstruction policy. As historian W. Caleb McDaniel argues in his engaging new book on democratic theory and slavery, Garrison—though unhappy about Lincoln’s unwillingness to commit to political rights for black Americans—still believed that the president deserved another term. In a September 1864 letter to Samuel May, in which he discussed the dangers of voting for John Frémont, the candidate of the Radical Democracy Party, Garrison declared that the “best thing” that the abolitionists could do is “join the mass of loyal men in sustaining Mr. Lincoln and thus save the country from the shame and calamity of a copperhead [Democratic] triumph.” Garrison was pleased with the Republican platform and its call for a constitutional amendment ending slavery. After the votes were tallied, Garrison, the man who had openly despised the American political system for decades, declared that Lincoln’s “re-election” was the “death-warrant of the whole slave system” and indicated that the country was “very near the day of jubilee.” In the final analysis, Republicans and abolitionists surely had their differences when it came to how slavery should be destroyed, but the historic significance lies not in what was different. What mattered most is what Republicans and abolitionists agreed on from the outset.

The author dedicates this article to Lawrenceville History Master Kristina Schulte.

Further Reading

Everyone interested in the destruction of American slavery should begin with Ira Berlin, Barbara Fields, Steven Miller, Joseph Reidy, Leslie Rowland, eds., Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York, 1993). The best overview of the abolitionist movement remains James Brewer Stewart’s Holy Warriors (New York, rev. 1996). Students of the 19th century have been waiting anxiously for Manisha Sinha’s forthcoming, The Slave’s Cause: Abolition and the Origins of America’s Interracial Democracy. In addition to Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (New York, 2013), see also Oakes’ The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York, 2007). Henry Mayer’s All on Fire (New York, 1998) remains the best biography of William Lloyd Garrison. No student of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War can be without a copy of Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010). Silvana R. Siddali’s From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861-1862 (Baton Rouge, 2005) is a detailed treatment of these landmark pieces of legislation.Michael Vorenberg’s Final Freedom (New York, 2001) is the definitive account of the Thirteenth Amendment. Kate Masur’s An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill, 2010) details how the nation’s capital became a laboratory for Republican racial policy during and after the Civil War. Janette Thomas Greenwood’s First Fruits of Freedom (Chapel Hill, 2009) chronicles the creation of a network between Massachusetts and the eastern shore of North Carolina after Union troops from Worcester County took control of the area in 1862. For more on Garrison and Phillips in 1864 see W. Caleb McDaniel’s The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery (Baton Rouge, 2013). Douglas R. Egerton’s The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York, 2014) brilliantly chronicles what Frederick Douglass meant when he argued in December 1863 that “the old Union, whose canonized bones we so quietly inurned under the shattered walls of [Fort] Sumter, can never come to life again … We are fighting for something incomparably better than the old Union.”

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (September, 2013).

Erik J. Chaput is a History Master at the Lawrenceville School, a college preparatory boarding school in New Jersey. He is the author of The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (2013) and the co-editor with Russell J. DeSimone of the Letters of Thomas Wilson Dorr and the Letters of John Brown Francis (forthcoming summer 2014), which can be found on the Dorr Rebellion Project Site hosted by Providence College.

Hello, I’m Chef Kevin Mitchell of the Culinary Institute of Charleston. I am spokesman for the team of chefs who prepared tonight’s banquet for you, and I’m also appointed to stand as representative of our culinary forefather Nat Fuller. As you know, all of the dishes you will taste tonight come from his menus and are served in the style true to his banquets 150 years ago.

I’ve wondered what Nat Fuller would have said to the company assembled at the Bachelor’s Retreat at the end of the Civil War. I think he may have said something like this:

“All things are ready, come to the feast!
Come, for the table now is spread;
Ye famishing, ye weary, come
And thou shalt be richly fed.”

Welcome, friends and guests. I am sure many of you are looking around this table and seeing new and unexpected faces. But I remember that the Lord says that many who sit down at the banquet table in heaven will be the Father’s unexpected guests. We can do no better than to follow his example when it comes to hospitality.

These have not been hospitable times. Strife and sorrow have held the upper hand. For a long season, people have expressed themselves through violence.

War has never been my work.

My study has always been how to make people enjoy the times they share together. It is ancient custom that once people at the same table share bread and salt, they shall do no harm to one another. It is a matter of some pride to me that my work has always been to supply the bread and salt that makes peace break out.

I do more than that. I prepare dishes whose deliciousness makes pleasure go around the table. Tonight there is a particular pleasure, a particular taste that’s featured—the taste of liberty. I suspect that some here at this table have not tasted in their lives a food that was not produced by people in bondage. Everything here, however, was produced by free persons who received just compensation for their toils. I don’t know about you—for me, it just makes the food taste somehow better.

Friends, I’m not here to give a lecture or to teach you how to talk with one another. We have had lessons. Now is the time to talk with your neighbor, make a new friend, or hear someone tell his or her story. Of course at the end of the evening, when we bring dessert there will be toasts. Anyone then is free to stand and speak a sentence from the heart.

My mentor, my teacher Eliza Seymour Lee could not be present. But her great-great-granddaughter Robin Lee Griffith is here. Would you come and receive my hand in gratitude?

Tonight you shall taste the most celebrated dishes from my repertoire. I could not have offered them to you without the support of my colleagues, Chef Sean Brock, Chef B. J. Dennis, Chef Michael Carmel, and Chef Forrest Parker, and the faculty and students of the Culinary Institute of Charleston.

I have pressing work in the kitchen. I will return when it is time to issue the toasts. Until that time let me speak a benediction.

Dear Father, bless the people in this room, both guests and servers. Give the diners here health and pleasure from the food we serve. Give them appreciation of the peace of this time and place.

Keep the pains and evils of the world distant from us here.

Give us kindness, hope, and wisdom.

May peace, grace, and love be your portion until we enjoy your hospitality in heaven.

Amen.

Bon appetit.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Kevin E. Mitchell, CEC, CFSE, ACE chef instructor, Culinary Institute of Charleston studies the history of African American chefs and southern foodways. He oversaw the recreation of the famed African American chef Nat Fuller’s reconciliation dinner held in Charleston in 1865.

To look at the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters on a computer screen is to see all 2,600 miles of the Mississippi River at once (fig. 1). It begins as a barely perceptible stream in the upper left of the image, eventually taking shape as a hand-colored blue line winding its way through ten different states (the boundaries of which are indicated by block letters that parallel the river on either side). Seeing the river in this way conveys the fluctuating nature of the river’s course, from the bulbous expansion of Lake Pepin between Minnesota and Wisconsin to the looping cutoffs below Natchez, Mississippi, and offers a visual contrast between the sparsely populated upper river and the more densely settled lower portion. The user can zoom in at any point to read the names of towns, landings, and tributaries in amazing clarity, and then toggle back to the comprehensive view, controlling his or her own experience of the map.

In this image the map has been segmented into eight pieces, but the actual Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters is one continuous strip that measures nearly eleven feet long and a little over two inches wide. When encountering it in person, the river only gradually comes into view over time, making the experience of using the map more like traveling on the river itself. The digital image serves as a solution to a representational problem: namely, how a map of such an unusual size and shape can be made to conform to a rectangular screen. This twenty-first century challenge seems remote from the context of the post-Civil War era to which this map dates, but it mirrors difficulties that nineteenth-century Americans faced in translating their ideas and experiences of the river into visual representations. Published in 1866 by St. Louis-based entrepreneurs Myron Coloney and Sidney B. Fairchild, the ribbon map’s singular focus on the river and its exaggerated dimensions assert the enduring relevance of the Mississippi River after the Civil War, both to the nation’s identity and to its commercial future.

The map is a hand-colored lithograph that was initially printed on one sheet of paper (fig. 2). One version of it appeared in the 1866 edition of Edwards’ Descriptive Gazetteer and Commercial Directory of the Mississippi River, where the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters can be found between an advertisement for Barnum’s Hotel in St. Louis and an account of the Mississippi’s “discovery” by Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this context, the map helps to fold the river into popular contemporary narratives of U.S. history while also signaling that it was intended for use by travelers.

As a single, foldout sheet, the map was similar to maps and guides produced for a growing tourist and transportation industry. By the mid-1830s, examples such as J. Duff’s Traveller’s Guide were available for sale on western steamboats (fig. 3). They typically indicated the general shape of the river channel, gave the location of towns and cities, listed distances between landings, and sometimes included a range of steamboat fares. As might be expected, they almost always focused on the portion of the river system that was actually navigable by steamers. If one were to depart from the main stem of the river to embark on an overland journey, a river map would have been useless because it usually did not give information about the broader region or network of transportation options. By 1866, however, it was imperative to represent the host of railroad tracks increasingly extending from large and small cities alike. Bold black lines extend from various points along the Mississippi and testify to the centrality of the river’s location between western and eastern markets.

Coloney and Fairchild’s patented apparatus required that the single sheet be cut into strips, attached end-to-end, mounted on linen, and then rolled inside a wooden, metal, or paper spool (fig. 4). The resulting portability of the map was crucial because, as advertisements indicated, it was intended for business travelers, steamboat navigators, and tourists. Of this form, the Newberry Library and the Minnesota Historical Society Library hold what seems to be a first edition, while nearly a dozen archives around the U.S. hold an updated second version. With the addition of hundreds of towns, mile markers, islands, landings, landowner and plantation names, and significant Civil War locations, the Lower Mississippi appears to be a settled and thriving commercial space.

In the scroll form, the map’s user pulls the bottom tab to travel upriver from the Head of Passes, where the river empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The seamless and gradual way one would have encountered the river led the New York Sun to christen the Coloney and Fairchild map “[t]he latest style of panorama,” recalling the moving panorama craze of the late 1840s and early 1850s (fig. 5). These gigantic scrolling paintings were presented to seated audiences in darkened rooms and accompanied by narration and music. Moving panoramas presented the river as a comprehensible succession of picturesque landmarks, burgeoning towns, western metropolises, and notable historical sites, simulating an imaginary steamboat journey. Scholars have asserted the central role that these popular spectacles had in supporting the ideology of Manifest Destiny, as the imagery naturalized a continuous and conflict-free progression through the American continent. The Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters capitalizes on this well-known visual form but allows users to enact their own imaginative travel up the length of the Mississippi. At the same time, since the ribbon map lacks a second spool around which to wrap the already viewed portion, the object had the potential to be as unruly and excessive as the river itself was during periods of high water (fig. 6).

Certain locales would have had particular resonance to the map’s postbellum viewers (fig. 7). The portion of the Mississippi that had been Confederate territory was the focus of a number of strip maps during the war. In January and May of 1862, Harper’s Weekly published depictions of the river between Cairo and New Orleans to orient readers in anticipation of military action in the region. The same year, advertisements for J.T. Lloyd’s Map of the Lower Mississippi from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico asserted that Union commanders requested his version for use in the field.

Just one year after the end of the Civil War, Coloney and Fairchild incorporated significant battle sites on and along the river into their ribbon map. The location of batteries, Jefferson Davis’s plantation, and even “Grant’s Cutoff”—an attempt to bypass the Confederate-controlled section of the river at Vicksburg that was ultimately abandoned—are all included. These new landmarks form elements of a newly unified river’s historical landscape and reinforce the notion that the Mississippi was national terrain.

Part of the reunification effort, as far as St. Louis businessmen like Coloney and Edwards were concerned, was the reestablishment of St. Louis as the preeminent commercial center of the West (fig. 8). Momentum had shifted away from St. Louis and the Lower Mississippi to Chicago and its rail networks by the end of the 1850s. Yet even in 1866, St. Louis boosters did not view Chicago’s permanent ascendance as inevitable. They put their stock in their city’s geographic position near the confluence of both the Missouri and the Ohio rivers. They continued to push for navigation improvements and strengthened their connection to the port at New Orleans. Additionally, in his position as commercial editor of the Missouri Democrat, Coloney was a vocal advocate for updating the city’s waterfront by adding grain elevators and using barges to transport grain in bulk. Although some railroad maps tried to shear St. Louis from the region, the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters pictures St. Louis as the natural repository for the agricultural bounty of the Upper Mississippi.

In the uppermost 470 miles of the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters—from St. Anthony Falls to the river’s headwaters—the Mississippi flows mostly west to east, though that is not made evident by the consistent linearity of the map (fig. 9). Despite the fact that others had shown this to be quite a watery area, only a few patches and lines of blue disrupt the relatively vacant space of the map. The two named lakes inscribe the river with national significance as the monikers refer to expeditions by territorial governor Lewis Cass and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft to locate the source of the great river in 1820 and 1832, respectively. To reinforce the authenticity of his findings, Schoolcraft renamed what had been known as Elk Lake or Lac La Biche to the indigenous and French inhabitants of the area as “Itasca,” the composite of parts of two Latin words: veritas (true) and caput (head).

This uppermost portion—nearly one-sixth of the map’s total length—would have been unnecessary information for a steamboat traveler in 1866, as it is far beyond the head of navigation and there was no touristic infrastructure in the area. Its presence serves other ideological purposes, naturalizing the boundaries of the nation and emphasizing the connectivity provided by a unified river.

The completely unfurled map extends beyond the limits of the user’s reach, wondrously embodying the scope of the river in the time it took to unroll it and in the eleven feet of space it now occupies. At the same time, the care required to wind the strip back into Coloney and Fairchild’s patented spool apparatus reiterates the precariousness of human control—either representational or environmental—over the mercurial Mississippi. While digitization has immense value for the preservation of historical objects and for making archival collections more accessible, in this case, the opportunity to experience the map on its own material terms opens up layers of meaning that a digital interface obscures.

Further Reading

For a multifaceted discussion of the history of maps, see James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr., eds., Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (Chicago, 2007). Martin Brückner has written about maps as mobile objects in “The Ambulatory Map: Commodity, Mobility, and Visualcy in Eighteenth-Century Colonial America,” Winterthur Portfolio (2011): 141-160. Recent attempts to relate the experience of nineteenth-century travel to its representation are Anne Baker, Heartless Immensity: Literature, Culture, and Geography in Antebellum America (Ann Arbor, 2006) and Alison Byerly, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor, 2013). Louis C. Hunter’s Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History (Cambridge, Mass., 1949) is a classic introduction to the steamboat age. On the Vicksburg campaign and the battle for the Mississippi River during the Civil War, see Lisa M. Brady, War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (Athens, Ga., 2012) and William L. Shea and Terrence J. Winschel, Vicksburg Is the Key: The Struggle for the Mississippi River (Lincoln, Neb., 2003). William Cronon tells the story of Chicago’s rise to prominence over St. Louis in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), while Adam Arenson details the perspective of St. Louisans in The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 2011). On the ways that the search for the river’s “true source” is related to claims about knowledge and authority, see Rich Heyman, “Locating the Mississippi: Landscape, Nature, and National Territoriality at the Mississippi Headwaters,” American Quarterly 62:2 (June 2010): 303-333.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Nenette Luarca-Shoaf was the 2014-15 Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota. She is working on a book about the role of nineteenth-century visual culture in shaping the identity of the Mississippi River.

Or, building a better world with iron

Several years ago, while teaching one of those history surveys that gallops across great events as if they were pebbles at Belmont, I asked my students to name a revolutionary. I had in mind Tom Paine—whose Common Sense we had just read—or perhaps Marx. I should not have been surprised by the answer I got: Bill Gates.

A revolutionary? Yes, my students told me. After all, Gates had changed everything. And he did not do this by accident. He even wrote a book, The Road Ahead (New York, 1996), whose first chapter bears the very Trotskyite title “A Revolution Begins.” In that chapter, Gates reflected upon his achievements, the revolutionary looking back on the revolution. What did they know, he and Paul Allen, a couple of school kids tinkering with some funky machine at little old Lakeside School? Well, “We caused a kind of revolution—peaceful, mainly—and now the computer has taken up residence in our offices and in our homes.” 

My students agreed. The PC had changed the world. For them, it was clear: things made history. It was a curious, if partly semantic, problem. Would this make Eli Whitney and James Watt more radical than Thomas Jefferson or John Brown? 

I had not given the problem much thought until I recently started doing some research on Tom Paine. What drew me to Paine was his peripatetic life. I had finished a project about a traveler who was a contemporary of Paine’s and who led a similarly transatlantic existence. This phenomenon was something I wanted to explore further and Paine seemed the ultimate exemplar of the mobile eighteenth century. 

As I started reading Paine, I found myself drawn in an unexpected direction, albeit one that in a weird way validated what those undergrads were telling me some years ago. Paine spent most of the final twenty years of his life pursuing answers to an extraordinary technological problem. The problem was simply this: how do you create a reliable, sturdy, weather-resistant bridge that can span rivers without impeding water traffic? What a mundane problem to occupy the author of The Rights of Man. 

And yet the problem was anything but mundane. Paine’s world was a water world. Everything traveled more quickly and more cheaply by water. Where there were no rivers or seas there was little of anything else. What farmers and trappers and miners and other producers could bring to market depended on ready access to water transport. We do not generally think of the Connecticut River or the Schuylkill River or the James River as hugely important commercial arteries. But in the eighteenth century they were. If you stood on their banks in the right season, you would see logs bound together as huge rafts, fifty and sixty foot dugout canoes loaded with deerskins or dried fish, and small sailing craft carrying grain, livestock, or tobacco. 

If you lived, say, in the far northwestern corner of Connecticut—hardly a remote place—you may as well have lived in Siberia. (Actually, you might have been better off in Siberia. The Russians had developed an enormous and well-traveled network of post roads—maintained by state-owned serfs—stretching from Lake Baikal in Siberia to St. Petersburg. Interestingly, these were more efficient arteries during the long winters when horse pulled sledges could glide across what would otherwise be wet, boggy terrain.). Getting anything to market—you would probably head to the river town of Hartford—would have involved a treacherous journey across barely maintained trails, usually unable to accommodate any kind of cart or carriage and all but impassible in the winter months. If, heaven forbid, you should stumble upon the swollen Housatonic or Farmington Rivers, you would hope to find a ferryman nearby and you would hope he knew and liked you and was happy to take a few pounds of grain or a few deer skins for his services. You would also hope the weather cooperated. Storms and spring ice made river crossings a deadly business.

Imagine a world without these problems. Imagine simply being able to carry your goods across a bridge. Sure, you might have to pay a toll, but you could travel when you wished, unimpeded by the comings and goings of ferrymen and foul weather. And you could expect, with a nice bridge across the Housatonic for instance, that others would be following you to market, perhaps now carrying large loads of corn and rye. And with those others now happily farming in northwest Connecticut, more people would be more dependent on roads and thus more inclined to band together to maintain them. Above all, if you could make rivers easy to cross you could open once remote tracts to European-style farming and if you could do that you could, in theory anyway, make more land available to more people. You could, to put it simply, help the cause of liberty.

This would all have been very agreeable to Tom Paine. He believed in property and he believed in the “projecting spirit,” that spirit of invention that seemed to inhere in the breasts of all men (this was, as far as I know, understood to be a distinctly masculine quality). He thus advocated the creation of a national system of copyright so that authors could, in effect, claim proprietary interests in their work. Not only would this afford fair remuneration, it would also—so Paine believed—spur creativity. Why create if you cannot serve yourself in the process?

Bridge technology was obviously not a new thing in Tom Paine’s America. The Romans had created great stone ones and Europeans continued to build stone bridges using what was basically a modified Roman design. In the new United States, small wooden bridges were most common. They required little specialized knowledge and far less labor than stone bridges. But above all, wood was far more abundant in North America than in Europe. 

Wooden bridges had a number of problems though. One was simply that they decayed. Moisture softens all but the rarest hardwoods, exposing load-bearing timbers to wood-boring organisms that can, in a matter of months, turn them into sawdust. The problem is especially acute on the flat road surface where pounding wagon wheels and horse hooves combine with accumulated rainwater, snow, or ice to speed decay. By the early nineteenth century, American bridge builders had devised a solution to this problem in the form of the covered bridge, but other problems with wood remained.

One was that building a wooden bridge long enough to span more than ten or fifteen feet was extremely difficult. With a growing scarcity of long, hard timbers, bridge builders had to rely on supporting piers. Aside from inhibiting river traffic, these were extremely difficult to build. They usually required temporary parapets, built midriver, within which stone foundations could be constructed. But even the most robust piers were vulnerable to forceful flood waters and spring ice.

Paine was among a small group of tinkerers who recognized that the solution to these problems lay in an old material put to a new use. That material was, of course, iron. In the short term, iron lost no strength when wet, and it could be easily fashioned into light, readily transported arches, western architecture’s strongest element. The strength of the arch allowed bridge builders to span waterways without costly piers that inhibited river traffic. But above all, Paine and his fellow inventors saw few limits to the potential span of iron bridges. As long as the basic design was sound, the scale was limited only by the ironworkers’ capacity to fashion the arches. 

The material’s first real trial came in 1779 when an ironmaster named Abraham Darby III completed the world’s first iron bridge over the Severn River Gorge near the town of Coalbrookdale in England. It was a spectacular achievement. The one hundred-foot arch eased the movement of labor, manufactured goods, and raw materials fueling the region’s booming industrial economy. 

Great though the Coalbrookdale Bridge was, Paine recognized several drawbacks. The first was that it was made from a vast, semicircular arch, whose height made the design feasible only for rivers running through deep gorges—or for bridges with costly embankment towers. And second, it remained largely the work of a single, creative mind. There were no plans or instructions on how similar structures might be erected elsewhere. If more such bridges were to be built, they would have to be built by Darby. This is one reason it took a decade and a half for Britain’s next full-scale iron bridge to appear.

Paine’s ambition was to solve both of these problems. He believed the same basic design principles could be applied to a much shallower arch, fashioned from a “small segment of a large circle.” Such a shallow arch could span more than a hundred feet and required no more than five feet of vertical clearance. An arch was an arch. The same principles that applied to large segments of smaller circles applied to smaller segments of giant circles.

But perhaps even more innovative was Paine’s approach to the design and construction process. Instead of crafting a bridge in the way a joiner might a house or a wheelwright a wagon wheel—relying on experience and individual knowledge passed from one craftsperson to the next—he would begin with a design. And that design would be carefully tested, codified, and disseminated. Though he was a great advocate of individual patents, he would not seek one for his iron bridge. It was to become part of the public domain, accessible to all much like the uncannily crisp prose of his most famous pamphlet, Common Sense.

It was all very democratic and very much contrary to the closed and carefully guarded practices of the artisans and trade guilds in which Paine had once found his most loyal political constituency.

This story, like much else in Paine’s life, ends in failure. Paine’s design never made it beyond a prototype exhibited near London. Paine eventually tried to persuade the American Congress to invest in an ambitious version, but to no avail. Nobody in the new American polity—an increasingly Christian polity—wanted to pay the price of associating with such an unapologetic skeptic. It would not be for another thirty years, long after Paine’s passing, that an actual iron bridge would be built in the United States. 

Paine blamed the initial collapse of the project on the French Revolution. It was that event that prompted his former friend, Edmund Burke, to publish a popular defense of hereditary rule. The greatest political pamphleteer of the time could not sit idly by. He abandoned the iron bridge project to compose The Rights of Man, a searing rejoinder to Burke. “The publication of this work of Mr. Burke,” he later wrote, “drew me from my bridge operations, and my time became employed in defending a system [of representative government] then established and operating in America and which I wished to see peaceably adopted in Europe.” 

We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be. Paine saw in bridge design a handmaiden of social and political change. In encouraging freedom of movement, bridges could free individuals to better themselves. They could free farmers and merchants and craftspeople to move freely through the countryside, and in doing this, they could free them to prosper and become true citizens with a vested interest in the political nation. 

Further Reading:

Paine discussed his iron bridge activities in several letters but he said most about the project in his 1803 petition to Congress, reprinted in Eric Foner, ed., Paine: Collected Writings (New York, 1995). Paine’s remarks on copyright appear in a 1782 letter to the Abbé Raynal, reprinted in volume 2 of Philip S. Foner, ed. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York, 1945). The most recent and most complete treatment of Paine and his iron bridge appears in chapter 9 of John Keane’s Tom Paine: A Political Life (New York, 1995).

This article originally appeared in issue 5.4 (July, 2005).

Edward Gray is the Editor of Common-place and associate professor of history at Florida State University.

He delivered Daniel from de lion’s den,
Jonah from de belly ob de whale
And de Hebrew children from de fiery furnace,
And why not every man?

Frederick Douglass claimed that African American spirituals like “Oh Canaan, sweet Canaan. / I am bound for the land of Canaan,” symbolized something more than the hope of reaching heaven. To Douglass, these spirituals carried a powerful message about the North and potential freedom. And scholars agree that there was a latent and symbolic element of protest in the slave’s religious songs, which frequently became overt and explicit. Even Harriet Tubman, “the Moses of Her People,” sang “Sweet Low, Sweet Chariot,” to signal her presence and willingness to lead men, women, and children escaping along the Underground Railroad.

Analyzing slave spirituals is an integral part of the study of the pre-Civil War era in my Advanced Placement United States History classes at Half Hollow Hills High School East in Dix Hills, New York. As part of an overall discussion on how slavery affected African Americans, my students closely read these spirituals for both their religious and secular meanings.

Half Hollow Hills High School East, while situated in a mainly middle-class community, is ethnically and economically diverse and is part of a high achieving district on suburban Long Island. The Advanced Placement U.S. History classes include enthusiastic juniors and seniors who reason at different levels, but are looking for the challenge of a college-level course in the high-school environment. Tasks like the analysis of slave spirituals give them an opportunity to hone their critical thinking skills.

One way I introduce the analysis of slave spirituals is through John Lovell Jr.’s book Black Song, the Forge and the Flame (New York, 1972). Lovell suggests that spirituals reflected the values and concerns of blacks in the antebellum South in the five ways: by providing the community with a true, valid, and useful song; by keeping the community invigorated; by enabling the group to face its problems; by helping to stir each member to personal solutions and to a sense of belonging in the midst of a terrifying world; and by providing a code language for emergency use.

The five meanings suggested by Lovell guide my class’s close reading of spirituals like “Joshua, Fit de Battle of Jericho”; “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel”; and “Steal Away.” We listen to recordings and read lyrics, and I ask my students to use these songs to assess the validity of Stanley Elkins’s view of slavery as a “closed system of dehumanization,” destructive of community.

Initially, the students tend to dwell on the explicit message of the spirituals. They assert that the spirituals focus on another world and encourage slaves to passively accept their fate. They perceive slave spirituals as a coping method: “They are talking about heaven,” students are likely to say. Or, “They are using God in a passive way,” or, “They are using the song to connect them to the master and his religion, thereby isolating them from one another.”

Gradually, the classroom dialogue shifts to the implicit messages. One student indicates that the language of flight is predominant: there is mention of transportation, places to go, and signals to decipher. Other students begin to see expressions of joy in the activities that are shared. Some students skilled in music often hear the rhythms and begin to explain work movements. The music is seen as proof of slaves saving themselves from dehumanization. Working together creates community, offers one student. “Go Down, Moses,” believes another, has references to Canaan, the wilderness, and means of travel. These all become signals of flight.

By the end of our discussion, many students have become suspicious of Elkins’s theory; others still support it. “You are reading too much into it. Look at what it says: ‘This world’s a wilderness of woe, O’let my people go.'” After analyzing the implicit and explicit messages of the slave spirituals, I direct my students to visual sources like the painting of a slave scene, The Old Plantation. The Old Plantation shows slaves gathered together celebrating with music. The musical instruments include hollowed-out gourds and reveal the continuity of African heritage. The colored kerchiefs of the women are in the style of the Yoruba of Nigeria.

Students employ the details of The Old Plantation to draw conclusions about the nature of community, the retaining of the African culture, and religious ceremonies. Which details help to explain community? Religious ceremony? What evidence does the painting provide to assess Elkins’s thesis?

I also occasionally use other paintings that can be read for suggestions about African heritage and religious ceremony including John Antrobus’s A Plantation Burial (1830) in the Historic New Orleans Collection; Henry Latrobe’s Enslaved Women Cultivate Tobacco on a Virginia Plantation (1798); George Washington and His Family (1800-01) in the National Gallery of Art; and J. S. Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778) in the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

To conclude our discussion of slavery, I distribute excerpts from Stanley Elkins’s book Slavery (Chicago, 1959) in which he connects the institution to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Students are asked to note the similarities and differences between antebellum American slavery and Nazi camps and to evaluate Elkins’s thesis. They draw upon the evidence from the slave spirituals, paintings, stories, slave narratives, and the textbook discussion of slavery. Observations about the heroism of surviving slavery, the nature of community, a symbiotic religious culture that emerges, and the meaning of open and closed institutions are generated in this concluding dialogue.

Viewing the array of evidence, students tend to argue that while the concentration camp was what Elkins calls a “total closed system” focused on extermination, the slave system was not closed since it afforded access to other places and often used spirituals to provide signals. As one student noted during our recent classroom discussion, “The goal of the system is not death but production and prosperity. It benefits the owner to create warmth and community. Washington included a slave in his family painting.”

The study of American slavery is a valuable opportunity to expand the traditional collection of text-based primary documents to incorporate music and art–important windows into the impact of America’s “peculiar institution.”

Selected spirituals’ lyrics

“Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho”

Refrain:
Joshua fit de battle of Jericho
Jericho, Jericho,
Joshua fit de battle of Jericho,
And de walls come tumblin’ down.

Stanzas:
You may talk about yo’ king ob Gideon;
You may talk about yo’ man ob Saul;
Dere’s none like good ole Joshua
At de battle of Jericho.

Up to de walls ob Jericho
He marched with sper in han’.
“Go blow dem ram horns,” Joshua cried,
“Kase de battle am in my han’.”

Den de ram sheep horns being to blow:
Trupets begin to sound.
Joshua commanded de chillen to shout,
An’ the walls come tumblin’ down.

“Steal Away”

Refrain:
Steal away, steal away,
Steal away to Jesus!
Steal away, steal away home,
I ain’t got long to stay here.

Stanza:
My Lord calls me,
He calls me by the thunder;
The trumpet sounds within my soul,
I ain’t got long to stay here.

“Git on Board, Little Chillen'”

Refrain:
Git on board, little chillen,
Git on board, little chillen,
Git on board, little chillen,
Dere’s room for many a mo’.

Stanza:
De gospel train’s a-comin’,
I hear it jus’ at han’;
I hear de car wheels movin’
An’ rumblin’ thro do lan’.

“Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel”

Refrain:
Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel,
Deliver Daniel, deliver Daniel,
Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel,
An’ why not every man?

Stanza:
He delivered Daniel f’om de lion’s den,
Jonah f’om de belly of de wale,
An’ de Hebrew chillen f’om de fiery furnace,
An’ why not every man?

“Deep River”

Refrain:
Deep river,
My home is over Jordan,
Deep river, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground.

Excerpt from Stanley Elkins, Slavery
(Elkins’s footnotes have been omitted.)

Historians have debated the evils of slavery for generations. James Ford Rhodes (1893) described it as a curse to both masters and slave. Ulrich B. Phillips (1918) countered that the evils of slavery were wildly exaggerated. He emphasized the humane friendship between kind-hearted master and contented, faithful, and childlike slaves. Kenneth Stampp (1956) reasserted the traditional view, showing the harshness and cruelty of the system. My interpretation makes a fresh examination of slavery through the lens of social psychology to provide a new perspective to the old debate on the evils of slavery, and it provides insights into the behavior of slaves and masters.

Basically, slavery in the United States was much worse than slavery in other countries and had a much more severe effect on the slaves. American slavery was comparable in many ways to a concentration camp. It took away personal initiative from slaves and destroyed their personalities.

Unlike slavery elsewhere, slavery in the United States had no institutions, such as the church or government, to either oppose the slave owners, or to control slavery for the benefit of the slaves. Slave owners had complete dominance over their slaves. In contrast to relatively “open” systems of slavery in other countries, slavery in the United States was a “closed” system. This contrast can be illustrated by comparing the slave systems in Latin America and the United States.

In Latin America slavery was a relatively “open” system. Slaves there had certain rights and some possibilities to develop themselves personally. The Catholic Church and the mercantile governments of the European Powers ruling the Latin American countries intervened frequently in the slave system. The slave owner had to be conscious of the clergy and government officials in his dealings with his slaves. As a result, the harshness of slavery was softened considerably.

Slaves in Latin America were not automatically slaves forever; they could purchase their own freedom. Slaves were thought to have immortal souls and, as such, were to be legally married and received the sacraments. Masters’ disciplinary power over slaves was limited by the laws of the government. Masters were liable for the murder of their slaves. Although the law was violated, and owners were sometimes cruel to their slaves, the laws were not as widely violated as they were under the English or in the United States. Government officials and priests regularly checked to see if slaves had been mistreated. Slaves could also own property. Lastly, slaves in Latin America regularly had contact with the rest of society. One of the results of this was a much higher rate of intermarriage than in the United States.

By contrast, slavery in the United States was a “closed” system. Slaves had almost no rights and were totally dependent upon their master for nearly everything. The term of servitude in the United States was for life; slaves couldn’t buy their freedom. There was no recognition of marriage or the family. Slaves were to be sold to the highest bidder even if it meant breaking up the family. Conversion to Christianity meant no difference in status or treatment as slaves. Slaves as property took precedence over slaves as human beings. They had no civil rights, right to own property, or any other rights. Slaves were limited to the plantation–they had little contact with the rest of society. They were isolated on the plantation under the absolute control of their owners, to whom they were to give complete obedience. The masters exercised such extensive power because there were no governmental restrictions on them.

The result of the closed system of slavery in the United States was to destroy the personality of the slave; that is, to reduce his behavior to that of a child. Historians have long noticed the passive personality among slaves. Many slaves were docile, irresponsible people, perpetual children incapable of mature behavior. Slaves passively did whatever they were told. They had no initiative, and offered no resistance to slavery. Some people have contended that this is just another white stereotype of blacks, yet abundant evidence proves that the passive personality type did exist in the United States.

Since there is no evidence of the passive personality in slavery in Latin America, one is left with the conclusion that the passive personality must be the result of the authoritarian nature of American slavery. The absolute power of the slave owners over their slaves, but not necessarily the cruelty of the masters, was enough to produce passive slaves.

Many of the blacks brought from Africa to the United States as slaves had been warriors or had held high position in their advanced civilizations. They were transformed into passive people as a result of their enslavement. There was the shock of being caught and enslaved, and the several-week march to the coast. The next shock was their sale to the Europeans. They were put into pens and branded. Blacks rejected as slaves were left to starve. The cruelest step was the middle passage on slave ships across the Atlantic Ocean. Slaves were packed in and chained down in the hold of the ships for two months, where they remained amidst their own vomit and excrement. If they survived this ordeal they were introduced to severe masters and conditions in the West Indies. Then they were transported and sold to owners in the United States. By this time two-thirds of the slaves had died.

After all these shocks to their personalities, slaves could not be expected to exhibit aggressive behavior. They had to look for new cues for the type of behavior expected of them in America. Since the master had complete control and authority, the only person the slave could look to was the master. The master became like a father. The result was the child-like personality dependent upon the master.

With this dependent personality of slaves in full-scale wars, there were very few in the United States. Moreover, the few revolts in the United States were led by non-slaves. This phenomenon supports the view that slaves in Latin America retained much of their personalities, including their will to resist.

The striking aspect of slavery in the United States, and especially the passive personality, is its similarity to personality changes in concentration camps under Hitler’s Germany. Like the slave owners, the guards (called SS) had absolute power over the inmates. Even though they were brutal, the SS became father figures to the prisoners, since they were the only figures of authority. Inmates accepted the values of the SS, and most inmates did not hate the SS when they were released–they showed no emotion.

Brutalities were so great in concentration camps that inmates soon felt that the brutalities were not happening to them. They testified years later that they had felt separate from their bodies. The tortures were happening to their bodies, but not to them. It was like watching someone else being tortured. The unreal self became the real self. There were few cases of resistance to the guards or revolts in concentration camps, even when they were being herded into gas chambers! There were few cases of suicide–the inmates had completely passive personalities.

It is obvious that there are striking parallels between personality traits exhibited in concentration camps and in slavery in the United States. The effects of slavery in the United States on blacks were profound. Their personalities were destroyed, and, as such, their ability to form meaningful relationships and families was destroyed. Since these awful consequences did not exist in slavery elsewhere, the conclusion is inescapable that it was the unchecked and complete power of the slave owners, the closed nature of the system in the United States, which led to the childlike

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

Gloria Sesso teaches American history at Half Hollow Hills High School East in Dix Hills, New York

Upon her return to Boston, Madam Sarah Kemble Knight wrote in her 1704 journal that her “Kind relations and friends flock[ed] in to welcome mee and hear the story of my transactions and travails.”  Knight’s account merits such “flocking”—her journal chronicling her departure and return from Boston to New York along post roads is one of the first written accounts of such travel by a woman. However, her “travails” are not only noteworthy because of the physical exertion such a journey required. Rather, Knight’s use of poetry to contain and resolve potential threats along her travels demonstrates the integral role her mental trials assume in navigating such encounters.

Knight turns to original verse at five moments in her journal, moments marked by fear and discomfort. During her nighttime travels in the woods, she addresses the moon as her guide in one poem and then turns to considering the imposing trees in another, refiguring them as steeples and castles.  After arriving at an inn, she cannot sleep because of loud patrons, leading to a plea that they rest. As a result, she crafts verses warning future travelers of the lodgings. Lastly, upon witnessing an impoverished family, Knight reflects on her own, more comfortable condition.

By positing these moments of verse narration alongside a summary of each day, Knight presents an alternative mental framework to each physical moment. Fittingly, she describes these moments as “divirting thot’s,” entities that structurally divert from the prose narration and redirect her daily account. In the first instance, after fording a river and entering woods, “Yet swelling fears surprise; all dark appears— / Nothing but Light can disipate those fears.” After addressing the moon, though, “The Boistero’s Trees now Lend a Passage Free, / And pleasant prospects thou giv’st light to see.”  While her poems may merely be a space for thoughts, by presenting such musings in verse, Knight privileges their capabilities. Only in this space can she properly address the moon, which in turn opens safe passage. Imagining a response from the moon enacts its calm, allowing Knight to write herself and her surroundings into resolution. By liberating her thoughts from the space of prose and her account from the limitations of physicality, Knight can transform the landscape through her narration, using poetry to “divert” and contain the threat of the unfamiliar.

The poems’ structures mirror this conceptual goal: throughout the five interludes, Knight writes in iambic pentameter or tetrameter, organizing her verse in combinations of triplets and couplets. In contrast to the free form of her prose, in which the episodes of each day shape her narrative, these poems instead organize each moment into a dictated form, literally aligning each incident into order.

Consequently, Knight’s strategy of containment expands outside the wilderness. In each poetic instance, she not only presents an alternative approach to the present (recasting trees as steeples and castles, for instance) but also indicates the arrival of a desired future. During her stay at the inn, Knight, frustrated by the clamor of her fellow guests, implores, “I ask thy Aid, O Potent Rum! / To Charm these wrangling Topers Dum /…/ Intoxicate them with thy fumes: / O still their Tongues till morning comes!” In one of the many comedic moments of the text, Knight uses an apostrophe to inhabit the imperative voice, demanding quiet. Miraculously, the commotion soon ends, Knight explaining, “I know not but my wishes took effect.” Pointing to her “wishes,” Knight implies that the act of composing the poem resulted in this effect; the imperative becomes the declarative. By harkening to rum, Knight takes on its power, eliminating the threat, or at the very least the nuisance, of the drunken men she could not physically confront. While structurally Knight’s thoughts remain isolated from an account of the previous day, the resolution that verse’s imagination activates expands into the physical world of her prose. Through accounting what she hopes will occur, Knight actually narrates its occurrence, using verse to write such diversions into her journal’s reality.

In a work by the rare woman traveling these roads, poetry enacts resolution for Knight. The prose of Knight’s journal recounts her daily progress, communicating her past to her reader. In contrast, her verse gestures to a future that can only be conceived outside of physical endeavors. Knight’s mental travails ensure her physical progress, crafting and structuring both her narrative and her journey.

Further Reading

Sarah Kemble Knight, The private journal of a journey from Boston to New York in the year 1704, edited by William Law Learned (Albany, N.Y., 1865).

Susan Clair Imbarrato, Traveling Women (Athens, Ohio, 2006).

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3 (Spring, 2017).

Kimberly Takahata is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she studies the intersection of narrative, temporality, and ontology.

Currier and Ives’s Civil War

The April 2007 issue of Common-place was devoted to graphics in nineteenth-century America. It was titled, “Revolution in Print.” As the authors of that issue’s introduction wrote, “Technological innovations—from the invention of photography to the development of a variety of mechanized processes for reproducing images on a scale never before imagined—coupled with expanding transportation and communications networks, engendered a veritable avalanche of pictorial publications and products.” No one contributed more to that “revolution in print” than Nathaniel Currier and James Ives. In this article, I will focus on Currier and Ives’s Civil War. But first, let me provide a brief introduction to Currier and Ives and why an article on them is an appropriate addition to those essays published two years ago.

Printmakers to the American People

Those with only a passing knowledge of Currier and Ives usually identify them as the creators of “things Americana.” That was certainly true, but they did much more. Currier and Ives called themselves “Printmakers to the American People” and their company “the Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints.” They advertised their company as “the best, cheapest, and most popular firm in a democratic country,” and they lived up to that billing. Over the course of a half century, Currier and Ives produced more than seven thousand prints that sold in the millions of copies, at one point accounting for 95 percent of all lithographs in circulation in the United States.

When Nathaniel Currier started his business in the 1830s, lithography was still a relatively new technology—less than forty years old. The Bavarian, Alois Senefelder, invented lithography while searching for an inexpensive way of printing his plays in multiple copies. Literally translated as “writing on stone,” the process involved using a grease crayon to create an image on stone. Ink was then applied to the surface and a mirror image of the drawing produced by pressing paper to it. The chief advantages of lithography over engraving and etching were its lower-cost materials and much speedier production. Within a few years European printers began issuing lithographic prints by local artists, but that idea was slow to catch on in the United States.

In 1834, after serving six years as an apprentice with lithographers William and John Pendleton in Boston, Nathaniel Currier started his own company in New York City, which would become the center of lithography in nineteenth-century America. Like those from whom he learned the trade, Currier began work as a job printer. He used lithography to duplicate whatever a customer needed—labels, letterheads, handbills, and architectural plans—in as many copies as requested at only pennies a copy. 

In 1840 Currier produced the first of his famous “disaster prints,” picturing the sinking of the steamboat Lexington in Long Island Sound, which took the lives of over one hundred people. When the print was reproduced in the New York Sun, Nathaniel Currier became known nationally, and disaster prints and others depicting the news events of the day became his staples. In the 1850s, James Merritt Ives, who married into the Currier extended family and whom Currier hired as a “bookkeeper,” came up with the idea of marketing prints that “presented the plain daily experiences and pleasures of American life”—those prints with which Currier and Ives are most closely associated today.

Currier and Ives never intended to produce prints of great value. They sold their products for as little as fifteen cents and no more than three dollars. Rather than aspiring to have their work exhibited in the nation’s fine-art museums and galleries, they sought to have it hung on the walls of America’s homes, stores, barbershops, firehouses, barrooms, and barns.

Currier and Ives’s Civil War

The pictorial record of the Civil War was far greater than that of any previous war. The new art of photography, however, even in the hands of Mathew Brady, was still comparatively rudimentary. The shutter’s slow speed, for example, limited the photographer’s subject matter to that which stood still. As a result, the artist’s sketchpad continued to dominate the market. As one critic put it, “for the picture industry, the war was a blessing,” and Currier and Ives made the most of it.

Currier and Ives produced more than two hundred prints of the American Civil War—the vast majority of which purported to illustrate the great battles of the war. Insofar as the proprietors had any direct experience with the war, it was quite limited. Ives served during the war as a captain in the New York State National Guard, but he saw action only briefly when Lee invaded Pennsylvania. Otherwise, he worked to promote Union enlistments in the New York City area. Neither Currier nor anyone else highly placed in the company—as far as I could find—participated in, or even witnessed, a battle. Further, their exact position on the war is difficult to gauge for lack of any significant personal correspondence or other documentation. What is clear is that the printers freely exploited the conflict for commercial gain. And that meant, above all, tracking the attitudes of Northern middle-class consumers. One finds little moral ambiguity in the prints from this period; on the whole, the Civil War prints of Currier and Ives plainly reflect the ideals of the North, the Republican Party, and its leader, Abraham Lincoln.

The War

In stark contrast to the reality that appeared through the lens of photographers like Mathew Brady and in the pages of illustrated weeklies like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly, Currier and Ives produced a long list of patriotic prints that portrayed the sacrifices made by Union soldiers and their families—like The Union Volunteer (1861), The Flag of Our Union (1861), The Spirit of 61/God, Our Country and Liberty (1861), The Soldier’s Dream of Home (1862) and The Brave Wife (undated). To these they added a steady flow of romanticized battle scenes beginning with Bombardment of Fort Sumter (1861), which shows the Union installation under attack and the American flag flying high above the fray and smoke—reminiscent of the scene at Fort McHenry in 1814 recalled in “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Northern news weeklies’ loyalty to the Union complemented their hatred of the South. Continually assailing slaveholders and Confederate political and military leaders as treasonous in politics and barbarous in war, they freely blamed the seceding states for all the nation’s troubles. Lest their images disrupt the peaceable sanctuary of the middle-class parlor, Currier and Ives tended to emphasize Northern righteousness rather than Southern depravation. 

In the first few months of the war, Currier and Ives produced The Hercules of the Union, Slaying the Great Dragon of Secession (1861). It shows Union General Winfield Scott wielding a club labeled “Liberty and Union” in the face of a Confederate serpent with seven heads—one for each of the seven original seceding Southern states. As the title suggests, Scott acts with some dispatch.

This is not to say that Currier and Ives prints were incapable of nuance or dissent. Breaking That Backbone (1862) (fig. 1), for example, pictured the various Union plans to subdue the South, none of which has succeeded in breaking the back of the “Great southern Gyascutis.” Generals Halleck and McClellan wield sledgehammers labeled “Skill” and “Strategy.” Secretary of War Stanton holds a hammer labeled “Draft,” while Lincoln holds an axe labeled “Emancipation Proclamation.” In the background sits a man, head in hand, despondently holding a small hammer labeled “Compromise.”

Two years later the even more critical Running the Machine (1864) (fig. 2) appeared, wherein various members of the Lincoln administration are attacked for corruption and failed policies. Secretary of the Treasury Fessenden is shown directing the manufacture of a flood of greenbacks, complaining of the greed of his fellow Union leaders, while contractors demand more funds. Seward is shown suspending habeas corpus and planning arbitrary arrests, and Lincoln—known, but not always appreciated, for his sense of humor—leans back and exclaims that all of this reminded him of a “capital joke.”

During the early months of the election year of 1864, compromise still was an issue. Things were not going well for the North, and the Democratic candidate George McClellan posed a serious challenge for the incumbent. Although Currier and Ives had been critical of McClellan early in the war for his failed military efforts, they nevertheless gave him equal time as an alternative to Lincoln. One plank in the Democratic Party platform of that year read, “after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war,” immediate efforts should be taken to reach a “cessation of hostilities” through negotiation.

Currier and Ives made reference to the “Chicago platform” in The True Peace Commission (1864), which appeared in 1864. It shows Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, back to back, surrounded by Union Generals Philip Sheridan, Ulysses Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman and Admiral David Farragut. They demand unconditional Confederate surrender, but Sherman adds the conciliatory, “We don’t want your Negroes or anything you have; but we do want and will have a just obedience to the laws of the United States.” Lee responds to the demand of unconditional surrender by proclaiming that he will not surrender but that he is willing to consider an armistice and suspension of hostilities “through the Chicago platform.”

In The True Issue or That’s What’s the Matter (1864), Currier and Ives picture Lincoln and Jefferson Davis having a tug-of-war over a map of the United States. Lincoln proclaims, “No peace without abolition.” Davis responds with, “No peace without separation,” while McClellen stands between them, holding each by the lapel and preventing their further tearing the map. McClellan proclaims, “The Union must be preserved at all hazards.”

By the end of 1864, however, the Union victory at Gettysburg and the siege of Petersburg, as well as Sherman’s March through the South, turned the tide of popular opinion in Lincoln’s favor, and Currier and Ives returned once again to largely pro-Lincoln cartoons. In Desperate Peace Man (1864), Peace Democrat George Pendleton offers Lady Liberty and a slave to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, if only Davis would give him peace in return. McClellan watches approvingly from a distance; a devil-like figure stands behind Davis urging him not to accept the offer but rather to fight on to victory.

Emancipation remained a divisive issue for the duration of the war, especially in Currier and Ives’s New York City, where news of the proclamation and the draft ignited riots during the summer of 1863. That it remained a campaign issue the next year is seen in Currier and Ives’s Abraham’s Dream: “Coming Events Cast Their Shadows Before” (1864) (fig. 3). In what might be better titled, “Lincoln’s nightmare,” the president is shown sleeping on a bare mattress under a starred sheet, dreaming that he has been defeated in the 1864 election. The figure of Columbia, goddess of liberty and symbol of the nation, stands in the doorway of the White House, brandishing the severed head of a black man, kicking Lincoln out. The disguised Lincoln carries a suitcase and the Emancipation Proclamation and exclaims, “This don’t remind me of any joke,” another reference to Lincoln’s tendency to make untimely jokes. George McClellan, suitcase in hand, climbs the steps to the White House.

But gradually, especially after Lincoln’s victory in 1864, the successful conclusion to the war a year later, and, of course, his assassination soon thereafter, Currier and Ives pictured the Emancipation Proclamation in a more positive light. Representative are President Lincoln and Secretary Seward Signing the Proclamation of Freedom: January 1st, 1863 (1865) and Freedom to the Slaves (undated) (fig. 4). The latter print is undated. It may have been done as early as 1863, but more likely it appeared after Lincoln’s assassination two years later—or both, as Currier and Ives commonly reissued their more successful prints. Pictured is a slave made free by Lincoln’s proclamation. Hat in hand, he kneels before the Great Emancipator kissing his hand, shackles broken and lying at their feet, while the president gestures for him to rise—perhaps signaling that emancipation was God’s will. The freedman’s wife stands nearby with their two children, one still a babe in arms. The print reads, “Freedom to the Slaves. Proclaimed January 1st, 1863, by Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States. ‘Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants therefore.’ Lev. xxv. 10.”

Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, prompted yet another surge of Union pride. A few prints, The Last Ditch of the Chivalry, or a President in Petticoats , for example, ridiculed Confederate President Jefferson Davis for trying to escape capture dressed in women’s clothing. But once again, Currier and Ives chose not to subject the South to the criticism and demeaning coverage seen in the penny press. Instead, they focused on Lincoln’s assassination and subsequent apotheosis, commonly picturing him coupled with George Washington—one as founder of the nation, the other as its savior.

The portrait Abraham Lincoln: The Nation’s Martyr (1865) was so successful that it was reissued nine times. But nearly as popular were The Assassination of President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre (1865) and The Death Bed of the Martyr President Abraham Lincoln (1865), wherein family, friends, and figures of note gather at the slain president’s bedside.

The Aftermath

After the Civil War, Currier and Ives followed the mood of the nation once again, gradually distancing themselves from emancipation and the Radical Republican plan to “reconstruct” the South. In the years immediately following the war, the company issued prints critical of Southern resistance. By way of example, in Reconstruction, or A White Man’s Government (1868), a white Southerner being swept along in a river toward a waterfall refuses the rescuing hand of a black freedman, saying, “Do you think I’ll let an infernal nigger take me by the hand? No sirree, this is a white man’s government.”

But even at that point, Currier and Ives were increasingly criticizing the Republicans for their Southern policy. In an undated print, likely done in 1868, Fate of the Radical Party, a train powered by a caricatured African American and engineered by Republican leaders Ulysses Grant and Thaddeus Stevens speeds down a track toward a ditch, while President Andrew Johnson frantically tries to fill the hole. The company even began to issue, as it had before the war, idyllic plantation scenes like A Home on the Mississippi (1871) and The Old Plantation Home (1872) (fig. 5). The first shows contented, even carefree, blacks still working the cotton fields. The second pictures them outside their picturesque plantation cabin, cavorting and dancing to the songs played on the banjo. But perhaps the most glaring “change of heart” occurred in 1872, when the company issued The Lost Cause (1872) (fig. 6), an unsigned print wherein a Confederate soldier is shown weeping at a gravesite, a dilapidated cottage standing in the background.

Once again, echoing Northern sentiment, Currier and Ives seemed to forget just why the Civil War was fought and followed the nation toward the era of Jim Crow. From the mid-1870s into the 1890s, the company issued what might well have been its most successful series of prints ever—its Darktown series—which constituted some of the most vicious “race prints” of that or any day. Employing much of the language used at the time, this series consisted of over one hundred individual “comics,” which the company insisted were intended as humor. In these comics, Currier and Ives, as historian William Fletcher Thompson later wrote, “reinforced the widely accepted stereotype that pictured the African American as a kinky-haired, thick-lipped, wide-eyed, simian creature and satirized his or her every attempt to act in a civilized manner.”

Postscript

Currier and Ives succumbed to advances in the technology of reproduction, as well as to changes in American taste, and closed its doors in 1907. Its last prints were issued in 1898 offering scenes from the Spanish American War. The company’s works were soon forgotten—discarded like yesterday’s newspaper, one person put it—only to be rediscovered some thirty years later and valued for very different reasons than those for which they were produced.

Further Reading:

Much of what has been included in this article has been drawn from research done for my book Currier and Ives: America Imagined (Washington, D.C., 2001). The most complete collection of information on Currier and Ives prints is Bernard F. Reilly Jr.’s Currier and Ives: A Catalogue Raisonne (Detroit, 1984). Other useful publications include: Russell Crouse, Mr. Currier and Mr. Ives (Garden City, N.Y., 1936); Harry Peters, Currier & Ives: Printmakers to the American People (Garden City, N.Y., 1929-31); Walton Rawls, The Great Book of Currier & Ives’ America (New York, 1979); and Colin Simkin, Currier and Ives’ America (New York 1952).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.2 (January, 2009).

Bryan F. Le Beau, vice president for academic affairs at the University of Saint Mary, is the author of Currier and Ives: America Imagined, published by Smithsonian Institution Press in 2001.

Traversing the electronic textbook frontier isn’t easy, but it’s probably logistically—and pedagogically—necessary

It’s taken about a year, but I’ve finally concluded that it’s time for me—and, fellow teachers of U.S. history surveys, probably time for you—to do something that doesn’t come naturally: give up on printed and bound textbooks. While teachers are not unique in our attachment to hard-copy publishing and cannot singlehandedly be the solution to the problems that plague the textbook industry, we are situated at a critical nexus in the chain, and it strikes me that, as a matter of social and educational responsibility, we ought to face the question of textbooks’ future directly. Electronic books (a.k.a., e-books) are no panacea and have some clear drawbacks in terms of their readability (which I’ll get to presently). However, we’ve reached a point where they merit a closer look.

This unintended conclusion is the result of an intended act, which began last summer when I revisited the question of what U.S. survey textbook all teachers of the course in my department should use. In the eight years I’ve been at the school, we’ve been using America: Past and Present, by Robert Divine et al. (one of a number of texts published by Pearson Longman, a large international conglomerate). In the last couple of years, we’ve been working with the two-volume brief edition, which is lighter, cheaper (at least when students buy single volumes rather than the set, which costs more than the traditional textbook), and helpfully segments American history into thirty-three chapters of about fifteen pages rather than the customary thirty pages. There’s a consensus among my colleagues that there’s nothing really wrong with “Divine”—the custom in the textbook industry is to identify titles by the lead author—but nothing particularly compelling about it either. It does not, for example, stake any particular thematic ground, the way John Faragher et al. give their text, Out of Many: A History of the American People, a multicultural focus. So I requested desk copies of a bunch of these other titles, which arrived in short order.

There’s a lot to say about the contents of these books—that, in fact, was the original intention of the column you’re now reading—but the dominant, even overpowering, impression I got from having a heap of them in my office was their sheer size. Many of them are massive. Considered solely as a matter of commerce, the textbook trade strikes me as colossally wasteful at best and a futile treadmill at worst. Because they take so long and are so expensive to produce—textbooks are not “written,” but rather “developed” by whole teams of specialists, of whom writers are only the tip of a publishing iceberg—their prices are high. They now routinely cost in excess of one hundred dollars, making them three to four times as expensive as a hardcover trade book one would buy at a retail bookstore. Because even the avowedly “brief” editions are so large, academically ephemeral, and sold to captive audiences with little emotional attachment to them, there is a huge and growing used-textbook market serving students who understandably want to spend as little as possible. This means that publishers are effectively competing against themselves, and to do so, they are not only regularly releasing new editions but stuffing them with extras—Websites, downloads, CD-ROMs, and other ancillary materials—to make their new wares more attractive, if not indispensable. This in turn drives prices up still more, intensifying the problem.

Since the people in this business are not idiots, I imagine this is all still worth their while—and with public school systems, some on a statewide level, creating huge captive markets, the profits must be sizable enough to keep the big companies in the game. Still, you don’t need to be a marketing genius to start thinking about the sheer cost savings of an online business model: the huge reduction in production costs! The elimination of warehousing expenses! The ease of updates! The relative reliability of a subscription-based retail model! And, in fact, virtually every major textbook publisher now offers an e-book as part of their product line, both bundled with the text and as a stand-alone.

In theory at least, the appeal of this model extends beyond the publishers. One can readily understand the ongoing resistance to e-book readers like the Kindle or Sony’s electronic reading device. Printed books are not only a marvelous technology in their own right but are rich with lifelong emotional and sensory associations as well. But here we’re talking about trade books. Textbooks are another story. Even in printed—and narrative—form, they’re rarely regarded as anything other than databases. To be sure, they have a certain reader-friendliness; indeed many are positively lush with illustrations and arresting typography. But if nothing else, the cost-efficiency of e-books alone should be enough of an incentive to get purchasers to happily make the switch.

And yet this hasn’t happened. No one I talked with at the book exhibits at last spring’s Organization of American Historians conference in Seattle could (or would) give me hard figures, but it’s clear that the e-book market is miniscule. It is increasing; two different publishing representatives cited a move from 1 percent to 5 percent of the overall market in the last year. Relatively speaking, that’s a big jump. But it’s surprising, even shocking, that there hasn’t been more of a transition on this front.

Actually, I think publishers themselves are partly to blame for this. Given the enormous cost-savings, the prices of these books still seem too high; the going rate in the business is roughly half the price of a printed/e-book package. No doubt an economy of scale would help lower the price point. But it’s hard to see why electronic versions of books should cost as much as fifty dollars; they should be a fraction of that.

Still, if publishers are the egg in this equation, teachers are the chicken. Educators are to the publishing industry what doctors are to pharmaceuticals: both are positioned at the nexus between producers and consumers. They (or their administrative superiors) are the ones who make adoption decisions, and generationally speaking, they are, as a group, digitally conservative. They’re also procedurally conservative; as with many things in life, it often just seems easier to stick with what you know, whether that knowledge is understood in terms of form or content. If enough of us decided to make the switch, prices would probably come down.

We would also get better value for the money. E-books have some bona fide advantages over bound books. A good example is Norton’s electronic version of Eric Foner’s Give Me Liberty! (Because my curriculum has long been thematically framed around the concept of freedom, thanks to Foner’s 1998 book The Story of American Freedom, this is the one that will be getting my vote this fall. Froner’s is a rare case of a single-author textbook by a true master.) In addition to all the features of the book, the electronic version features brief podcasts and mini-lectures by Foner, along with other tools that books can’t match. While such bells and whistles often amount to sensory overload, at least some of these features, like map exercises, could actually work rather well on a Smart Board in a classroom setting, which would serve to actually integrate the textbook directly into the curriculum.

Such considerations are clearly on the minds of developers at Bedford/St. Martin’s, which this summer will launch HistoryClass, what it calls “an online course space.” “HistoryClass,” which is built around a number of the company’s textbooks, is based on the “Angel” course-management system widely used in many school districts and universities around the country. It includes grading software and other course-management tools. Though technically not a subscription-based model because the product is not continuously updated, “HistoryClass” users will pay a fee for access for a set period of time. Products like these pose a significant challenge for textbook retailers, whether of the virtual or brick-and-mortar variety. Simply put, such retailers are in danger of becoming obsolete.

The potential buyers of these products, however, will focus on other objections, objections which students themselves are as likely to cite as their less tech-savvy teachers. Many students with whom I’ve chatted in recent months make clear that they find electronic texts extremely flexible: they can carry multiple e-books for different courses on the same laptop or hand-held device; they can highlight, take notes, and organize material easily; they don’t have to worry as much about whether they have what they need at home or school. Yet for every student who makes these arguments, there are at least as many who note that online texts are harder to read, that they feel forced to print out lots of documents and segments, that books are much more user-friendly when it comes to writing an essay at home or trying to do homework on a bus or in a car. Clearly, the costs of using e-books are not solely financial.

But sooner or later, any debate between formats will likely come down to price. I have little doubt that what many of these students or their school districts would do if they had a choice between a hundred-dollar textbook and a twenty-five-dollar e-book (indeed, some districts appear to be moving in this direction already). Of course, those who actually pay for books themselves should have a choice. But my guess is that the logic of the marketplace or the school district will exert itself eventually. Printed textbooks will probably become a luxury, no matter what happens. Indeed, many college and independent-school students admit, though not directly to their teachers, that textbooks are already a luxury that they don’t actually purchase.

And this brings us to what I regard as the heart of the issue: U.S. history textbooks are, at best, a crutch anyway. Truly effective teaching should draw at least as much on primary sources as a text, and this is one area in which e-books—which bundle primary sources without bulk—have a decisive advantage. Of course, one could argue that many historical sources are widely available in the public domain. But you could still make a case—again, if the cost was low enough—that a well-edited, consistently packaged collection via e-book or online subscription would be worth paying for, particularly for teachers who lack the time or autonomy to assemble their own curriculum.

It might be objected that textbooks are at least as important for teachers as students, as they create a curricular foundation for new teachers or ones pressed into service on unfamiliar terrain. One product worth mentioning—not, in fact, a textbook—is the online database CICERO, which carries the tagline “History Beyond the Textbook.” It is published by the American Institute for History Education, a moniker which makes a thoroughly commercial operation sound higher-minded than it probably is, though its promoters shrewdly tap the well of the highly regarded U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History program for much of its content. Though the actual pricing depends on a series of variables like the size and length of a subscription, it appears that CICERO is one of the more cost-effective options available in the marketplace. While it lacks the narrative account that’s typically the centerpiece of an e-book, CICERO is chock full of the usual resources you can find in an e-book, including lesson plans, along with unique features like short videos of historical reenactors who bring the past alive for younger students.

The increasing use of video in education generally and in these educational tools in particular points to an uncomfortable truth: history, at least at the primary and secondary level, is less and less about reading. Actually, this reality confronted me at the start of this inquiry when I began sifting through print textbooks, all of which bear the unmistakable marks of a post-MTV generation. They’re all just so damn busy—open up to a random page, and you’ll see a map here, an illustration there, information in the margins, headers, subheads, captions, tables. The tables of contents alone, in long and short versions, go on page after page after page. Students tell me such features are appealing to them. Having lots of illustrations in particular makes the individual pages, often flowing in two columns of text, seem less dismaying. I get that. But as someone who likes and is serious about reading, I find all this activity distracting and am always surprised at just how hard it is for me to stay focused on those occasions where I decide I’m really going to read the textbook. My mind wanders, I doze off, I get bored. Nothing terribly unusual there; this happens to me, and my students, all the time. But the tendency is particularly pronounced any time I get near a survey textbook. The problem is even worse when I try to read a traditional textbook in e-book form, since most e-books simply mimetically reproduce the print book without making much effort to present the material in a computer-screen friendly manner. That, I think, has to change.

We can decry these realities; we can fight these realities; and we probably should do both. But if in fact we want students to be serious about reading, we probably shouldn’t be using a textbook in the first place. Our job should be organizing and presenting a series of carefully chosen and compelling stories about our shared past—and then asking our students to reflect, analyze, question, and interpret those stories as a prelude to making a case for the joy of reading. In an age of information, our role is one of promoting productive conversation, in the broadest sense of that term. You can’t do that very well if you’re buried in a textbook, electronic or otherwise.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.4 (July, 2009).

Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. His most recent book is Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write and Think about History (2009). He blogs at American History Now.

Why are Hollywood movies about the American Revolution consistently terrible? Why has this signal event, the formative moment in United States history, yielded no great works of the cinema? Around the globe, wars and revolutions have been the subject of many of our most remarkable films; think of silent classics such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Abel Gance’s Napoleon, or think of Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers from the sound era. Momentous events or transformative periods in American history—the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War—have generated profound and influential films, from Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind to Modern Times and Dr. Strangelove. And this is not to mention an entire genre, the “Western,” a mainstay of the cinema for decades, with many terrible but some terrific films (Stagecoach, High Noon, Rio Bravo, Shane, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Little Big Man, Unforgiven, and I could go on) constructed around our collective fantasies of an American historical era.

By contrast, just try to conjure up a successful movie, or even a pretty good movie, about the American Revolution.

I’ll give you a minute …

… thought of any yet?

Admittedly, the pickings are slim. Some of the choices include Mel Gibson as that rare South Carolina plantation owner for whom free blacks labor voluntarily, in the pornographically violent The Patriot (2000); Al Pacino as an upstate New York boatman and fur trapper, sounding oddly like a mafia don from the Lower East Side, fighting redcoats along the cliffs (?!) of Yorktown in Revolution (1985); the singing John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin writing the Declaration of Independence in 1776 (1972); and Cary Grant as a deerskin-clad backwoods buddy of Tom Jefferson, yearning for the wilds of Kentucky in The Howards of Virginia (1940). Perhaps it needn’t be said that Oscars failed to rain down on these rhinestones in the rough. None of them has made anybody’s “Best Of” or “Top Ten” lists.

In the most recent edition of my American Revolution lecture course, I took a swipe at this question by hosting an evening’s screening of excerpts from a series of these movies, and I invited my students to join me in thinking about this puzzle. To prepare myself, I watched all four of the movies listed above in advance, plus two additional titles: The Devil’s Disciple (1959), starring Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and Laurence Olivier (as General John Burgoyne), as well as the recent HBO television series, John Adams (2008), based on the best-selling biography by David McCulloch and starring Paul Giamatti in the title role. From these six cinematic versions of the American Revolution, I selected comparable scenes for my students to watch. Here are some of the tentative conclusions we reached from this “reading” of our cinematic culture.

First, it seems as though the difficulty of making a good American Revolution movie has something to do with the challenge of finding a plot for the Revolution that can be arranged in the form of a family drama. Hollywood’s historical dramas tend to reduce complex processes to a small number of characters who can coherently depict the course of events, often through the intertwined lives of a family or two. The Civil War, of course, is perfect for this—”brother against brother” in a fratricidal family drama. But other historical eras have been readily adapted to this format as well; the collective sufferings of Americans in the Dust Bowl and the Depression were conveyed through the tribulations of the Joad family in John Ford’s version of The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and even the twisted psychic carnage of the Cold War is grounded in a family drama in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

The problem for this device in depicting the American Revolution lies in American’s squeamishness in accepting that the American Revolution was a form of patricide—a revolt against paternalistic government symbolized in the fatherly figure of the king. Other genres of war film (WW II for instance) don’t share this problem, for in these cases, the enemy is external to the American family, and whatever tensions families endure as a result of war—as in, for instance, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)—are not what the war itself is about, not what caused the war. Hollywood dramas are a very conservative genre, and this is part of what plagues movies about the Revolution. It seems impossible to depict a family drama in which patricide goes unpunished, or indeed, is glorified and rewarded in the founding of a prosperous new nation.

This difficulty, in fact, is not unique to Hollywood or to film as a medium. It goes back to one of the earliest fictional representations of the American Revolution, a quasi-novel called The Foresters, written in 1792 by Jeremy Belknap, a Boston clergyman and founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In this clumsy allegory, Belknap sets up the plot as a conflict within the household of John Bull, a family that includes Bull’s wife (Parliament) and mother (the Church of England). But the causes of trouble, the colonies, are not depicted as the children of John Bull but rather as servants in his household, with names like Walter Pipeweed (Virginia, of course) and John Codline (Massachusetts). Therefore, when the servants revolt against John Bull and set up their own independent household, nothing more than a contractual relationship has been destroyed, not blood or family ties—no patricide here. And not much drama either. I don’t recommend adding The Foresters to your syllabi. It remains un-optioned for the movies.

After this bad start, American fiction about the Revolution has not improved a great deal. Few of America’s canonical authors have taken up the subject or the period as a setting for their work—James Fenimore Cooper’s early novel, The Spy (1821), is among the few exceptions. Some of the best, and best-loved, fiction about the American Revolution is aimed at children, such as Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremain (1943), which (like much of children’s literature) largely avoids the patricide problem by making its protagonist an orphan. In Forbes’s plot, Johnny Tremain can be slowly drawn into Boston’s rebel cause, defying the Tory family of his maternal uncle but not, of course, his father, a French Huguenot émigré long since dead.

Like most American Revolution fiction, movies about the subject tend to skirt the patricide issue. The only one of the six films I screened that addresses the problem directly, even in a symbolic way, is Al Pacino’s Revolution, which was (perhaps no accident) made in England. Revolution depicts an actual event from the Revolution in its opening scene, the violent destruction of the equestrian statue of George III in New York’s Hanover Square. The New York crowd that symbolically murders the monarch seems to be unanimous in its carnivalistic fury, but the scene is utterly bewildering to Pacino’s character, Tom Dobb. Dobb is an American Everyman figure, who arrives in his boat at the New York dockside, having sailed down the Hudson with his furs, just in time to see the bronze head of George III tossed into the water and for the crowd to commandeer his boat for the coming conflict. Tom Dobb has nothing against the king, though, or against anybody else for that matter. He just wants to go about his business, raise his son, and stay out of harm’s way. He repeatedly insists, “It’s not my fight!”

What finally turns the Revolution into Tom Dobb’s fight is when authority figures in the British Army start acting like bad fathers. Dandified British officers humiliate Dobb, using him as a kind of human fox-hunt prey. After a series of confusing reversals, Tom Dobb’s own son is pressed into the British Army as a drummer boy, where he encounters a villainous sergeant played by Donald Sutherland. Sutherland has a son of his own in the drummer corps, of whom he is quite protective, but he and a senior officer brutalize Tom Dobb’s son, and Dobb is forced to rescue his boy. Now the Revolutionary War is Tom Dobb’s fight as well. His own son has been threatened and abused, so the war becomes, for Dobb, an exercise in vengeance, aimed at the sergeant who now stands for the twisted and misguided paternal authority that is British military government. When Dobb’s personal vengeance is finally won at Yorktown, the war ends as well, and Dobb and son can get on with their free and independent lives.

I’m leaving out a great deal of subplot in this summary, including a series of remarkably lucky encounters between Pacino and Nastassia Kinski (who plays the fiery rebel daughter of New York Irish loyalists) and an extended quasi-mystical healing sequence among Huron Indians. But as confusing a movie as Pacino’s Revolution can be, it somehow hits upon the formula that most of these other Revolution movies discover as well, a way to make patricide acceptable in a family drama.

The key is this—an actual father must have his authority challenged and his children harmed by a symbolic authoritarian father figure in the British military or government. The brutal mistreatment of the true son by the false (British) father then allows the real (American) father to demonstrate what true “patriotism” is by fighting against the false fathers to reinstate a rightful form of paternal authority. Through this convoluted plot mechanism, Revolution can embrace a form of patricide as a righteous cause without undermining the ultimate validity and sanctity of a father’s authority over and duty to his family. Revolutionary and conservative, all at the same time.

Convoluted as it is, some version of this basic plot structure lies at the heart of most other movies that present the Revolution as a family drama. It’s pretty obvious in The Patriot, where Mel Gibson plays Benjamin Martin, a gussied up version of Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox” of South Carolina’s revolutionary history. Gibson’s Martin is a patriarch of nearly biblical proportions; a widower with an unaccountably large brood of children, from grown sons to toddlers underfoot, he also presides over a plantation full of devoted African servants—free men and women, of course, not slaves—who are clearly part of Martin’s expansive family. As a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, Gibson’s character has committed too much violence for one lifetime and has sworn off it. As South Carolina prepares for another war, this time against Britain, Benjamin Martin follows Tom Dobb’s lead—”it’s not my fight”—or rather, “fighting’s not right.”

But this is a Mel Gibson movie, so the pacifism lasts only for the blink of an eye. The war becomes Benjamin Martin’s fight in exactly the same way it did for Tom Dobb, only quicker. His rambunctious grown son Gabriel (Heath Ledger) joins the South Carolina rebels. When the British Army comes past the Martin plantation, Gabriel is captured. He gives himself up honorably, but when another of Martin’s sons (Thomas) tries to rescue the brother, Thomas is brutally murdered by—yes, you guessed it—a sadistic British officer. Utter mayhem ensues, in the form of Mel Gibson’s revenge. The film can’t end, despite buckets of blood and gore, until Benjamin Martin takes personal vengeance on the sadistic officer, whose reign of terror engulfs not just Martin’s son but a whole village at prayer in church, in a scene borrowed from a historic Nazi atrocity in France—actual British atrocities in the Revolutionary War being nowhere near flamboyant enough for today’s demanding movie-goer.

Like Revolution, The Patriot has other weirdnesses too numerous to mention, including a “native” idyll to match the Huron scenes in Revolution, namely, a happy coastal Gullah community where Gibson and family rest and recuperate from all the stress of wartime, only a short distance from their backcountry plantation—think “Club Med with knee breeches.” There is also a subtle but persistent representation of Gibson’s well-known if eccentric Roman Catholic faith. Benjamin Martin and his fellow rebels frequently hide out in a place they call “the old Spanish mission” (in eighteenth-century South Carolina?), which explains why their rosy back-lit swamp gatherings often feature a cross standing mistily nearby. But most of these strange features are carried along and justified by the much deeper oddity at the core of this and other American Revolution films, that the war was fought against bad fathers—tyrants—in order to make good fathers free to be true patriarchs.

A more complex and fully developed version of the family story of the Revolution can be found in The Howards of Virginia (1940), directed by Frank Lloyd and starring Cary Grant as Matt Howard. Like Gibson’s character in The Patriot, Matt Howard’s experience of the Revolution was shaped by the Seven Years’ War. His father was killed, leaving Matt an orphan, so that the problem of patricide is never directly part of the plot when Revolutionary politics come to Virginia. However, the frontier-loving Howard (here’s where you have to imagine Cary Grant in a coonskin cap, relishing the back-slapping company of moonshine-swigging toothless trappers) marries Jane Peyton. Jane’s elite and effete tidewater family obviously disapproves of Howard’s uncouth manners and backcountry aspirations. (Jane’s not too sure about it herself, but who can resist Cary Grant?)

The patricidal aspect of the plot is muted, as the patriarch of the Peyton family, whom Howard must defy, is not the father of Jane Peyton but her older brother Fleetwood (played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, the distinguished British actor). From their elitist attitudes and snobbish behavior, one expects the Peyton family to be Tories, but they’re not. Turns out that everyone in Virginia is in favor of independence, it’s just that some are less radical and leveling about it than others. Given that the film was made in 1940, I suspect that the international politics made Hollywood squeamish about depicting Britons as out-and-out villains. No one would sign a Lend-Lease Pact with the Nazified British martinets of The Patriot. But in this film, we never actually meet any British soldiers or fighting Tories.

To accommodate these constraints, the family plot of The Howards of Virginia becomes very strange. Here, the false father figure does no direct damage to the true father’s son. Instead, he somehow manages to pass a physical deformity, a kind of family taint, onto the next generation. The chief feature of Fleetwood Peyton, the quality that lets us know he’s a bad guy (though not actually a Tory) is that he has a pronounced limp, in a world where everyone else, and especially Cary Grant’s Matt Howard, is vigorously able-bodied. The camera dwells lovingly on Grant moving giant boulders with his bare hands, hauling great wagonloads of furniture by himself, and performing other feats of strength and patriotic manliness. But when Grant’s first son is born, by some sort of twisted Lamarckian logic, he seems to have inherited Uncle Fleetwood’s gimpy foot—the boy limps. Consequently, Cary Grant can barely bring himself to look at the boy and instead dotes on his second son, a strapping and healthy lad like his father.

The climax of the movie comes when the father and sons have headed off to war, and in a moment of crisis, the limping elder son proves to be the military hero for the Continental Army. Thus Grant learns that a lame foot can hide a noble heart and that, in a larger sense, Americans won’t be tainted by their English inheritance—a glorious future lies ahead for the Anglo-Saxon race. The limping English father figure need not be killed off after all, just set aside from his position of power and helped along by his vigorous American frontier relations.

By the time (1959) and in the place (London) that our next film, The Devil’s Disciple, was produced, the burden of finding a plot appropriate for and acceptable by American audiences seemed to be fairly light. In addition, the fact that the movie was based on a play written by George Bernard Shaw in the 1890s seems to free it from these constraints as well. But for all that, The Devil’s Disciple presents us with yet another family drama. Kirk Douglas stars as the title character, Richard Dudgeon by name, a rebel seemingly without a cause, who owes not a little to Marlon Brando’s character in The Wild One (1953).

Female Admirer: “Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”

Brando as Johnny: “Whaddya got?”

In The Devil’s Disciple, the American rebellion seems like some kind of colossal misunderstanding, a stupid and incompetent blunder, with no specified origin. Unlike the rest of these films, in The Devil’s Disciple, we hear no crowd noise or stagey debates about “taxation without representation.” Kirk Douglas is in rebellion against the hidebound foolishness of the world—repressed New England Puritans on one side, ignorant British soldiers on the other. Douglas’s father is hanged as a rebel, but by mistake; he was nothing of the kind, just a farmer who lost his temper at the wrong place and time. Douglas had no love for his father but seeks vengeance as a matter of personal temperament—he steals the body from the gallows for the adventure of it all and leaves it to the preacher to give it a proper burial.

Burt Lancaster’s character, a Puritan minister with the unlikely name of Anthony Anderson (not many Anthonys or Andersons in colonial New England), is initially a pacifist—it’s not his fight either. The preacher just wants to avoid trouble. But he gets in trouble by standing up for simple decency and running afoul of the blundering underlings in the British Army. A warrant for Lancaster’s arrest goes out, but Kirk Douglas, mistaken for the preacher in yet another British blunder, is taken instead. And so, when an innocent (though not all that innocent) man has been wrongly arrested in his place, the Revolution finally becomes Lancaster’s fight. He joins the rebels attacking Burgoyne’s army in order to win Douglas’s release before the soldiers hang him too.

All the while, Laurence Olivier as General Burgoyne looks on with ironic detachment. Burgoyne can’t believe the stupidity—from the British high command’s poor strategic decisions to the incompetent soldiers who serve under him—that has gotten him into this dreadful place from which there is no way out. In the end, the film suggests, no one is really in charge. There is no father figure worth obeying or defying, nor any patriarchal morality to enforce. But in a rudderless world, it’s still best to do the decent and honorable thing. Lancaster takes up Douglas’s cause, essentially a personal cause, because Douglas has brains and wit and spirit and vitality, and these are worth fighting for.

The fact that the story is so far removed from the constraints that hobble the Hollywood Am-Rev films makes The Devil’s Disciple the best of the lot. It has the capacity to surprise and to draw the audience into moral dilemmas and dramatic situations without obvious and inevitable resolutions. It’s the Revolution movie most worth putting in your Netflix queue, perhaps because it cares the least about getting the American Revolution story “right” in a way that an American audience will accept.

All the movies I’ve discussed so far are fictional dramas, attempting to tell an American Revolution story largely through the actions of invented characters, interspersed with real events and actual figures in the traditional fashion of historical fiction. But film has often been used to dramatize real events in the lives of historical figures, with varying degrees of success. I’m not talking about Ken Burns-style documentaries, with talking-head historians, cameras swirling around still pictures or artifacts, and moving quotations from authentic sources read by professional actors over tinkly piano music. I mean films in which professional actors are cast to play historical figures like, well, John Adams. And Benjamin Franklin. And Thomas Jefferson. As in the HBO series, John Adams, or in the musical 1776.

The HBO series, with a large budget and many hours in which to tell its story, employs historical consultants, specialists in colonial American clothing, food, speech, architecture, music, wigs, warfare, and every other aspect of life that film can capture, in striving for authenticity. The musical 1776 did little of this sort of thing. The stage set reproduction of Independence Hall in 1776 wasn’t bad, and the costumes look about right, if a bit too clean. But really, if you’re going to have Richard Henry Lee sitting backwards on a horse and singing himself off to Virginia to get approval for a resolution for “Independency Immediate-Lee!,” then you’re already throwing historical authenticity overboard into such deep water that no one cares if the wigs are authentic.

Then why is it that I like 1776 better? And more to the point, why do I think it does a better, more compelling, and more economical job than HBO’s John Adams of teaching audiences some of the most fundamental aspects of the American Revolution?

First, let it be noted that, for all its vaunted authenticity, there are features that HBO’s John Adams shares with 1776. One is the similar way in which John Dickinson, the highly important delegate from Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress, is depicted. Though a major figure in the resistance movement (his Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer [1768] outlined the rationale for the non-importation movement, and he wrote the final draft of the Declaration of the Causes for Taking Up Arms [1775]), Dickinson’s strategic opposition to the movement in the Continental Congress to declare independence in July 1776 made him the perfect foil for both these films.

Since the dramatic design of both films requires that they stick close to the protagonists (and especially to John Adams), the presence of Dickinson in the Continental Congress and his opposition to Adams’s plan makes it possible to use Dickinson as a stand-in for Tories and Loyalists in general. Not only are the arguments of Tories put into the mouth of Dickinson, making it easy for the heroic Adams to swat them down, but the character of Dickinson is made to appear effete, cowardly, feminized, precious, dependent—everything that the rough-and-ready, tempestuous Adams is not. Both films make a point of showing the wives and families of Adams and Jefferson—but not of Dickinson. In short, for both of these films, the stylized musical as well as the authentic docu-drama, conflict within the Revolution must be between good and evil—or at least between the right sort and the wrong sort of men—and they must not dwell on matters as complex as conflicting strategies between equally well-intentioned antagonists. Although these films are not inventing fictional main characters, they are both still beholden to fairly stereotypical plot expectations in the way they choose to depict real historical figures.

In that light, I prefer the obviously stylized 1776 to the sneakily inauthentic John Adams. I’m often asked by students and auditors in my American Revolution class if I’ve seen John Adams, and if so, didn’t I love it? I suspect this is because the HBO filmmakers were trying to create the illusion that you were watching something that looked pretty much like the way it actually happened—movie-making after the Rankean fashion, wie es eigentlich gewesen war (how it really happened). But throughout the John Adams series, the demands of cinematic engagement require a curious kind of inauthenticity. To show historical motivations on film seems to require that the protagonists experience all relevant events directly. John Adams opens with the Boston Massacre as an event, not that Adams hears about after the fact or reads about in the newspapers, but that he stumbles upon only seconds after the shots have been fired, so that he can touch the bleeding wounds of the dying townsmen. When war breaks out at Lexington and Concord, the battle wounded and dying are strewn about on the road in front of the Adams’s farmstead in Braintree so that Abigail and the children can witness their sacrifice, despite the fact that this is miles and miles from Lexington and Concord, in the opposite direction from Boston.

Without this eyewitness, immediate experience, the film can’t trust the audience to believe that Adams’s defense of the British soldiers in the massacre trial or his movement to become a champion of independence has an adequate motivation. Similarly, when the dramatic moment of the massacre trial comes, the critical testimony is put in the mouth of an African American in Boston, as if it required a person discriminated against for his color to testify that white Boston workingmen were lying about the role of Captain Preston in the massacre. And as the Boston “tea party” is about to happen, Adams witnesses a man being tarred and feathered near the docks. Although plenty of mob brutality went on during the resistance movement, the so-called tea party was deliberately free of this sort of spontaneous crowd violence. East India Company tea, and that alone, was the target of destruction, making it patently clear that this was an organized act of protest and not a random crowd action.

The problem with John Adams is that the filmmakers are trying too hard to insert the work of professional historians into the script, to take the historical knowledge that scholars have created—like the role of African Americans in colonial urban life or the emotional impact of violence on politics—and depict it through live action. In narrative film, it’s not enough to tell an audience some piece of information, the way a talking-head might do in a documentary. Movies have to show, not tell. But that’s not what historians mostly do. Much of the time, perhaps most of the time, we tell. When I stand before my class to give a lecture on the cost and aftermath of the Seven Years’ War or when I write an article about Phillis Wheatley and the American Revolution in Boston, I am not trying to create the illusion that my students or readers are actually watching history. I am using my stylized bag of historian’s tools—numbers and graphs, archival images, quotations from some sources, summaries gleaned from others, comparative analysis, etc., to encourage readers or listeners to think about the past in the way that I’m thinking about it. I don’t for a minute pretend that they’re “seeing” or “reliving” the past, and they don’t think they are either.

That’s why I like 1776. As soon as John Adams starts singing in the bell tower of Independence Hall in the opening scene or conducting an imagined duet with Abigail debating the importance of saltpeter and pins, we know we’re in the presence of a stylized genre, with all the conventions of movie musicals—different from but akin to the stylized conventions of academic history or the classroom lecture. No one imagines that Edmund Rutledge actually jumped up on the desks in Independence Hall and sang a dramatic song about New England’s trade while acting out the selling of slaves on an auction block. But when the actor playing Rutledge, John Cullum, sings “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” in 1776 it leaves an indelible impression on anyone who sees it, and it tells them that slavery was a major issue in the Continental Congress’s deliberations on independence, without leaving them thinking that they know, that they have seen, just what happened. Judging by the enthusiasm of some of my students, who were born long after the making of 1776, this stylized telling of the American Revolution opens a curiosity about what actually happened, and how, and why. John Adams, by contrast, tends to cut off curiosity by leaving the audience thinking that they already know wie es eigentlich gewesen war, because they’ve seen it. And it leaves them open to an odd kind of disappointment when they learn that for all its vaunted authenticity, John Adams is just another costume drama.

Let’s face it—our books and our lectures are actually better than movies at depicting and explaining what we can know about the past, because as a genre, they are better aligned with the limits of our knowledge about the past. When scholars write about the events of 1776, we don’t say what color suit Thomas Jefferson wore when he wrote the Declaration or what Franklin said to Adams at dinner unless we actually know these things. If we don’t know, nothing in the genre compels us to speculate, to make something up. But movies have to show this sort of thing and therefore have to invent it—in a movie, Jefferson’s clothes cannot be colorless, and no one would believe a silent Franklin. For this reason, historical movies are better when, as in 1776 or The Devil’s Disciple, they call attention to their own stylized qualities—to the fact that they are inventing and dramatizing in just the way that movies do, in a thoughtful and coherent way—rather than pretend, as John Adams does, that they are not. Now, if we can only come up with a good patricide plot, and some shady incompetent Patriots, and a kind-hearted and noble Tory or two …

Further Viewing:

The following YouTube links will allow readers to view for themselves some of the scenes described above. In this first clip, watch the sadistic British officer (Tavington) in The Patriot murder Mel Gibson’s son. Literally, within seconds of the boy’s dying in his arms, Gibson is up plotting his revenge.

Video clips of Pacino’s Revolution are harder to find—the movie was not, shall we say, a hit—but you can watch the original theatrical trailer.

In this somewhat lengthy scene from 1776, you’ll see John Cullum’s stunning rendition of Edmund Rutledge of South Carolina, making a mockery of New England hypocrisy, in “Molasses to Rum to Slaves.”

And here you can find the opening scene of John Adams, as our hero witnesses the immediate aftermath (and I really mean immediate—there’s still smoke in the musket barrels) of the Boston Massacre.

And here is a trailer in which the technical authenticity of John Adams is explained in loving, if not ecstatic, detail, and Tom Hanks’s poor history education is revealed.

Alas, The Howards of Virginia and The Devil’s Disciple seem to have no YouTube presence whatsoever. But, for a riveting account of the massacre in Nazi-occupied France that was inserted into the plot of The Patriot, see Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley, Calif., 2000).

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

Mark Peterson teaches in the history department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (1997) and is completing a book on The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic World, 1630-1865.

I was recently invited to appear on television and provide the morning news audience with a historical perspective on the most recent global crisis to visit the industrial economy. The interview did not go very well. The show’s anchors kept pressing me to name names, to finger those villains responsible for past crises and the earlier misfortunes of millions. Who were the Madoffs of yesteryear, they wanted to know. Rockefeller? Carnegie? Jay Gould? Shylock?

Fortunately, I have a weak memory for names. And so, I tried to explain that assigning blame to this or that personality was liable to distract us from the actual sources of crisis, which are imbedded in the very structure of the economy. Even such “usual suspects” as underconsumption and overproduction, technology gaps, erratic price movements and soaring (or plummeting) interest rates, coupled with speculative frenzies and the abandonment of the monetary standards of old cannot explain the stubborn recurrence of crisis. Disorder, I declared, was essential to the normal workings of the system, the “price” we pay for capitalism’s breathtaking ability to reorganize itself in ever-more profitable incarnations of market-sponsored exchange.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Dickens wrote in a different context, but one that nevertheless provides us with an apposite slogan for modern economic life. That economy has been systematically built on borrowed money. It is fair to say, in fact, that the creation of credit is one of capitalism’s great production projects. But in contrast to other manufacturing efforts, credit can be conjured out of nothing, for it rests solely on the promise to pay sometime in the future. It is, as a consequence, a force that feeds upon itself, expanding without tangible limits, and so serving as a most dynamic engine of growth and enrichment. That is why conflicts over the production of credit—over control of the money supply—have accompanied the whole political history of America. But the system is no less vulnerable to economic than to political complications. Failure to pay one’s debts, for instance, or sudden shifts in the cost of credit—which soon becomes a commodity traded in its own right (representing “the value of things without the things themselves,” as Georg Simmel observed in his Philosophy of Money)—or the incessant movement of investment capital from one market to another in search of enhanced earnings can effectively destroy what the financial system was originally designed to create.

This is what brought Henry George to observe in Progress and Poverty (1879) that “the phenomena we class together and speak of as industrial depression are but intensifications of phenomena which always accompany material progress.” As such, the escalating competition, narrowing profits, and declining wages that portend crisis also constitute a “wonderful moment” for accumulating, innovating, and expanding the economy, according to the sociologist Giovanni Arrighi, who also argued that this pattern was already evident in early modern Europe. Nevertheless, industrial revolution altered the meaning of such moments. The social emergency that followed the economic downturns of 1819, 1829, 1837, 1847, and 1857 “was a new thing,” Charles Beard explained, signaling a changed relationship between culture and the material world. The modern experience of want could not be compared to the chronic shortages that had long characterized agrarian life precisely because it now occurred under the aegis of economic growth and physical abundance. More significantly, problems in liquidity, shortages in supply, or a decline in investment were no longer just the concern of merchant circles. They affected whole populations.

The resulting hard times are a highly discriminatory event, which found notorious expression at the pawnshop. This was where credit was supplied to a growing population of free men and women who otherwise had few assets with which to collateralize a loan. They consequently traded in the very stuff of their existence: their bed sheets, utensils, clothing, and jewelry. The pawnshop emerged as a unique kind of banking institution in the new economy, and a sordid site of industrial poverty. In fact, as Peter Stallybrass argued in an essay on “Marx’s Coat,” the indigent classes understand better than anyone else the “double life” of commodities by which the basic objects of everyday use keep mutating into the basic objects of exchange. The life of the poor, in other words, is saturated with market logic, a logic experienced as the perpetual loss of one’s possessions to the anonymous forces of greater purchasing power.

The “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” at the core of this system, Marx himself never tired of exclaiming, was not unknown to the propertied classes either. The “embarrassments and failures of sudden poverty falling on the opulent” was no less apparent to observers of nineteenth-century America than were the “thousands left destitute of employment, and perhaps of bread.” A glimpse of what this might mean in practical terms is provided by the diary entry of a failed businessman summing up the last five years of dashed ambition:

1852, July—for the first time in its great reality I am embarked in business, […] a few short months and destruction defines the position of my affairs—and (April 1853) sorrow commences—dread of offended creditors—hopes dashed to earth—the offer of compromise—the sympathy of friends—the hunger of creditors—all pass swiftly through my mind. Then the assignment—and the unburdening of a load of care—I look upon my children and bless them and their mother and depart, to find in Western lands what they could never give—a home and soon—the return … 1854, May 1—again in the field—a clerk—and in the old business in which I was reared—Flour—with a good honest quaker … here I find a stopping place until 1857 March 1st … May 1/57 John J. Marvin my brother enters into a limited partnership with our father and I am employed by him—a sorry year.

The risk economy proves to be the least protective of all built environments. It offers no safeguards from its incessant agitations and uncertainties, not even to those who stand to gain the most from it since their gains are, of course, derived from those same agitations. This is why the bourgeoisie began to accouter their lives with personal bric-a-brac and family heirlooms, that which the poor were ever having to pawn, and why the pawnbroker himself emerged as a favorite object of polite revulsion who symbolized the degradation of the market (while subconsciously suggesting that the market itself might be the actual source of degradation). The capitalist classes, in fact, have their own version of the double life of things. It is manifest in the opposing meanings they assign to value, which simultaneously represents the price of something as adjudicated by the marketplace as well as that which is “priceless” or, in other words, immune to such adjudication. This duality effectively marks the boundary between rich and poor, between their respective ability or inability to keep their possessions—and themselves—safe from capitalism. Incorporation laws constituted the state-sponsored acme of such protection, as well as capital’s unconditional victory in the class war. It was a most unmagnanimous victory: many years would pass before government organized public welfare assistance for those who needed the most protection.

Defense from the market was such an urgent priority because the system kept crashing, like a “sudden and swift … typhoon,” a “whirlwind that wrecked and scattered the earthly fortunes and hopes of thousands,” subsequently leaving “the spinal nerve of all the great businesses of the world … paralyzed.” That was how things appeared in New York after the “sorry year” of 1857, as merchants, bankers, brokers, and “all the clerks they could spare for the hour” gathered at “change” every day at noon, not to do business but to pray. Could their supplications redeem the past sins of over-trading? Frankly, their contrition had a distinct air of opportunism about it. Or, as Baudelaire, no friend of the new ruling classes, remarked of such displays of bourgeois rectitude, “for the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.” And, indeed, the spiritual impoverishment of the propertied classes is the central theme of Dickens’s Hard Times (1853), a work dedicated to Thomas Carlyle, England’s leading agnostic regarding the new liberal religion of progress. Hard Times presents us with a gallery of industrial-age rogues, including Thomas Gradgrind, a devout disciple of “hard facts” for whom system and statistics were at once means and end, and Josiah Bounderby, the hard-hearted arrivisté who has invested all his personal capital in promoting his own self-made myth. Both were truly indigent, Dickens shows us, in ways that no economist could measure, but which bring to mind Tocqueville’s well-known description of Americans as “restless in the midst of abundance,” citizens driven by “distress, fear, and regret” in searching out the shortest route to prosperity and, once finding it, continuing to search. Speculative mania thus proves to be a personal as much as a social condition, and so panic and depression became psychological and not just economic categories for modern times.

But isn’t “acquisitiveness” a part of our very nature, Max Weber famously asked, and proceeded to answer in the affirmative. “It is and has been found among waiters, doctors, coachmen, artists, tarts, venal officials, soldiers, brigands, crusaders, frequenters of gambling dens, [and] beggars … in all ages and in all countries of the world.” Greed, Weber went on to argue in convincing fashion, has nothing to do with capitalism. If anything, the opposite might be the case: the industrial economy represented an unprecedented effort to rein in, or at least systematize, this most irrational and impulsive of human traits. But that is precisely what was so radical and subversive about the new market order, for it showed that rationality encouraged chaos. Despite all the images of typhoons, whirlwinds, and paralysis—and, more recently, tsunamis and toxic loans—capitalist crisis is clearly no natural disaster. Panics, crashes, depressions, sell-offs, bankruptcies, and lay-offs are insistently social events and industry’s astounding success in liberating humanity from the stinginess of nature only underlines the fact that indigence must also be of industrial origin. Society produces poverty in the same way—and at the same time—that it produces wealth.

And so, “Hard Times” emerge as a form of schizophrenia, diagnostic shorthand for an economy that is always in crisis, and subsequently never in crisis, whose life-granting profits are at once a paralyzing toxin. This is our double life of things, for better and for worse.

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

Michael Zakim is the author of Ready-Made Democracy (2003), a political history of men’s dress, and of a forthcoming study of the business clerk tentatively entitled “Accounting for Capitalism.” He teaches history at Tel Aviv University.