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.

“Wow, you must have a fun job! Archivists get to read everything in their collections, right?” This is a common question from individuals who want to know what I do on a daily basis as an archivist. I wish I could, and at one time I often did, read nearly every word of every document. Today, that luxury is just that—a luxury.

As Florence S. Marcy Crofut Archivist at the Connecticut Historical Society, I oversee manuscript collections numbering over one million items, accumulated since the institution was founded in 1825. Not surprisingly, given the extent and long period of collecting, these holdings are rich and varied, with locally and nationally significant items dating from the first experiences of European-Native American contact in Connecticut to present-day activities in the state’s cities and towns. However, it was not until recently that there was a trained archivist to manage those collections. When I arrived in 2004, one of my first major tasks was to inventory all of the manuscripts. The need to create a comprehensive record of holdings was given particular urgency by an impending heating, cooling, and storage renovation, which would require moving all of the manuscripts into temporary storage.

Over a third of the manuscript collections had no records in the online catalog; nine percent had no record at all; and ten percent had never been processed for researchers to use.

Armed with a pad of paper and several pencils, I systematically inspected every shelf in the manuscript stacks—43 ranges with approximately 1,276 shelves—which took a year to examine, record, and put into a searchable database of more than 18,000 records. That was while still doing my regular duties—answering reference questions and arranging and cataloging newly acquired collections. For the inventory, I opened every box and every volume to record very basic information, like the call number, the creator (author) of the collection, a brief title with dates (such as “Diary, 1750”), whether there was a record of this being a gift or a purchase, whether or not there was any organization to the collection, and a brief note on the size or extent (1 box; 30 volumes; 10 cartons). I also went through all 24 volumes of our accession records looking for manuscript gifts and purchases. Then I checked our card catalog and the online catalog (which has items added to the collection since 1984) to determine if researchers could find the collections using the tools already at hand. 

What I found during the inventory both fascinated and appalled me. Some collections with obviously early documents had never been touched! The papers were still folded into little tri-fold bits, tied together with string or ribbon. Who knew what they contained? I was also fascinated at how carefully certain collections were cataloged, down to the item level—each letter had been individually described in the card catalog and sometimes in the online catalog. These records were for letters or documents related to individuals like Silas Deane, Oliver Wolcott and other great white men. Other important collections had no catalog record at all. This lack of access astounded me, even though several cataloging projects had preceded me, such as reporting collections to the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, adding 96 finding aids (narrative guides) to Chadwyck-Healey’s National Inventory of Documentary Sources, OCLC (the national online database of library holdings) and 30 finding aids available on our website using special encoding, which was completed in 1999.

The inventory made it very obvious that over a third of the manuscript collections (5,542) had no records in the online catalog; nine percent (1,520) had no record at all; and ten percent (1,860) had never been organized (processed) for researchers to use. Unless you had access to browse the closed stacks, as I did, there was no way to know these collections existed, and there were no plans to provide non-staff access to the inventory. 

The inventory did provide a good internal tool, allowing us to keep track of collection locations during the renovation project. The information it contained also allowed staff to draw upon previously untapped resources to answer users’ questions. However, we knew we needed to do much more to realize the potential of our holdings—no one outside the institution knew these collections existed. Fortunately, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) had recognized that similar processing and cataloging backlogs challenged archives all over the country, and had created a grant program designed specifically to address this challenge. In 2007, we submitted to NHPRC a proposal for a two-year project aimed at creating, with the assistance of a full-time Project Archivist, online catalog records for 900 of the largest 18,000+ collections in our library, plus more than 200 account books, one of our strongest yet little-known or used collections. That project was funded, and work began September 1, 2008.

The collections targeted for this project included records of the colonial era: Roger Wolcott (governor), Joseph Talcott (governor) and William Samuel Johnson (legal agent for Connecticut at the British Court from 1767 to 1771); documents from the Revolutionary War period: the papers of Oliver Wolcott Sr. (signer of the Declaration of Independence, delegate to the Continental Congress and General of the state’s militia), Jeremiah Wadsworth (Commissary General for the Continental and French armies) and diplomat Silas Deane; Civil War soldiers’ letters and muster rolls of Civil War regiments; and twentieth-century collections like the papers of Florence Crofut (20 linear feet), who was active in the Colonial Dames and helped preserve manuscript collections related to colonial Connecticut. If these collections were processed and cataloged in the usual fashion—unfolding each item, making sure everything has a date, copying newsprint so it does not continue to stain materials around it, putting fragile documents in clear Mylar protective sleeves, carefully reading each item, and organizing each item according to creator or recipient, and then by date—it would have taken at least six years, working full-time to achieve even minimal control over the collections. Other necessary functions, like assisting researchers, would have suffered. 

Archivists love finding gems in collections they are processing, and the only way to do that is to read everything. However, in order to catalog 900 collections in two years, we had to implement what is called (and not necessarily widely accepted) in the archival field, “MPLP,” meaning “More Product, Less Process.” Using this approach, archivists do not remove every pin, paperclip or staple, do not copy newsprint, do not sleeve fragile items and do not read every item—only enough to get a sense of the type of document and the names that appear most frequently. The MPLP concept was originally developed by archivists at the Minnesota Historical Society, specifically for establishing control/creating access to modern, twentieth-century collections that already had some type of order and usually came to repositories in folders and boxes. Applying MPLP, the archivist processing the collection would make a list of folder titles, leave everything in existing containers, and create a collection level catalog record, which described the whole collection, and not individual items as my predecessors had done. What we proposed in our 2007 NHPRC grant application was applying the same approach to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections, which had traditionally been processed in the “old style,” or much more intensively organize down to the item level, catalog individual documents, and write a guide or finding aid in addition to the collection record. Item-level organization would require the archivist to look at every document in every folder and arrange those documents in some kind of order—usually chronologically. Individual items, such as a letter from Silas Deane found in the Oliver Wolcott papers, would, in the old style, have its own catalog record. A finding aid would provide a narrative biography of the creator of the collection (Oliver Wolcott) and another narrative, called a Scope and Content note, which would explain why the Silas Deane letter was in the Wolcott papers. 

In contrast to twentieth-century papers, these earlier collections typically have no inherent organization since they were passed down from generation to generation, are rarely put into folders and certainly have no labels. The Town of Stonington records are a good example. The records were tied into bundles, each item in the bundle folded into thirds. One box might contain bundles dated from 1880-1885 mixed with other bundles dated 1840 and 1860. Because they were tied in bundles, we had no idea of the types of documents with which we were dealing. So, with volunteer help, we unfolded every document in the 24 boxes, made notes on the types of documents (mostly care for the poor and taxation) and organized them by year only. As a result, the collection grew from 24 boxes to 65!

MPLP is not embraced by the entire archival community. The primary concern is that using such a cursory approach will leave many important items “undiscovered,” to the detriment of researchers. There is also the possibility that personal documents requiring privacy restrictions could be overlooked. At CHS, Project Archivist Jennifer Sharp and I both found it initially rather difficult to adapt to the streamlined procedures dictated by the MPLP approach in the grant-funded cataloging project. The material we had to work with was more fragile than modern archives, implying the need for more care. Many collections had no logical order to them, requiring us to wade through documents in a folder or box in an effort to discern who and what the records were about. For example, the Meech and Huntington family papers (Ms 66235) consist primarily of the journals and correspondence of Preston, Connecticut, merchant and sea captain Appleton Meech (born 1790). It was not until we surveyed the collection that we realized these were mixed in with legal documents and financial papers of James Munroe Meech and Benjamin, Joshua and Andrew Huntington. Those additional individuals would not have been identified if we had not looked through the collection with some care. Most importantly, in order to write even the most basic catalog record, we still had to put our collections in context—determining where the people were located, when they existed, and perhaps what they were most noted for. For example, the collection of Baldwin family papers (Ms 67052) included letters between Elijah Baldwin, his son Elijah Baldwin Jr., and Elijah Sr.’s wife Hannah and their daughters Esther, Amy, and Hannah Baldwin Bishop. The only way to determine who was writing to whom was to gather the names that appeared on the signatures and the envelopes (if preserved with the letter), try to get a sense of the relationships, and then do some genealogical research to confirm those relationships.

Even though we are not scrutinizing every individual document, we still “discover” interesting items that no one currently at CHS knew we had in our collections. For example, in processing the extensive papers from the Clark and Hathaway families of New Haven, Connecticut, (Ms 98039) I was surprised to see detailed references to President James A. Garfield’s lingering death after being shot by Charles Guiteau in 1881. Frank wrote to My Own Dear Sweetheart, “The president had another taste of the knife today and it seems to have done him good. Such incidents keep me busy and anxious, and I so wish he was well and away from here, so that I could feel like getting away too” (August 8, 1881). I knew the collection contained the usual family letters containing news about daily activities such as who visited whom, the weather, etc., but I had no idea something as interesting as Garfield’s assassination would be included. Some research led to the discovery that the writer, Frank Trusdell, was a newspaper reporter most noted for his coverage of the Garfield assassination. While keeping watch at the White House until the President died, Trusdell wrote almost daily to his wife, Eugenia Hathaway Trusdell, in Haddam, Connecticut. About the same time as this discovery, I was reviewing scholars’ applications for New England Research Fellowships. D. Jaimez Terry, an undergraduate at the University of Maine, Farmington, was a successful applicant. His project was to research the changing public image of President Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau, by examining our holdings of Guiteau’s lecture transcripts. Now he had another resource, one neither he nor I had anticipated.

We occasionally get an “aha!” moment when we find the unexpected. In the 1852-1862 employee record book (Ms 73440) of Frederick Curtis & Co. of Curtisville (Glastonbury) we found reference to employee Albert Walker. We knew from his diaries (Ms 99732) that he worked for a silver spoon manufacturer, and here was corroboration! What is fascinating about this man is that we not only have his diaries and some correspondence, but we also have his magician’s paraphernalia. Walker was a puppeteer and magician in his free time, making him an unusual character study. We also went “aha!” when we discovered a reference to Prudence Crandall, the woman who ran a school for African American girls in Canterbury, in the account book of Stephen Coit, 1812-1835 (Ms Account Books).

Another important part of our grant-funded cataloging is the active search for connections between archival material and museum collections. As an example, in the archives we have papers and diaries belonging to Robert Hale Kellogg (1844-1922), a Sergeant Major with the 16th Connecticut Volunteers in the Civil War. Kellogg enlisted from Wethersfield, Connecticut. He was an unmarried apothecary when he enlisted in the Union Army on August 11, 1862. He was mustered—in as a private on August 24, 1862, was promoted to sergeant in May of 1863, and promoted again to sergeant major on December 7, 1863. Kellogg was captured on April 20, 1864, at Plymouth, North Carolina. He was held at Andersonville prison, but was paroled in November 1864 and was discharged June 1, 1865. Kellogg wrote a book about his experiences in the war, entitled Life and death in rebel prisons: giving a complete history of the inhuman and barbarous treatment of our brave soldiers by rebel authorities, inflicting terrible suffering and frightful mortality, principally at Andersonville, Ga., and Florence, S.C., describing plans of escape, arrival of prisoners, with numerous and varied incidents and anecdotes of prison life. By Robert H. Kellogg … Prepared from his daily journal, which is available in our library. Some of his notes used in preparing the book are included in this collection. The diaries cover his time in the war, between 1862 and 1865. The letters were sent to his parents, Silas and Lucy Kellogg, of Sheffield, Massachusetts. Other Civil War—related items include his enlistment, promotion certificate, discharge, a New Testament Kellogg carried with him, and a prayer book. Also included are correspondence, writings, and photographs.

To complement the archival materials, in the museum is Kellogg’s forage cap, a gold locket with a fragment of the 16th Regiment’s flag, and an 1894 commemorative G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) medal. Think of the possibilities here: we could examine the role of religion among the soldiers by highlighting the New Testament and prayer book, and look for references to God and faith in his letters, his notes, and his published book. We also have a selection of fragments of regimental flags from the Revolution and the Civil War. Kellogg’s fragment would help us explore why the men took these souvenirs, and perhaps tell the story of the pride the soldiers felt in fighting for their country, or the bonds formed with fellow soldiers in the regiment.

As of March 1, 2010, we have cataloged 1200 collections, well beyond our expected 900. It has been an education for us, as archivists, to unlearn many years of common practice. However, I find that I apply MPLP to most if not all incoming collections now. Each collection, whether part of the grant or newly arrived, is assessed on an individual basis, and if items really need extra handling, we will put them in protective sleeves or acid-free folders.

We have used this project as a basis for future planning. NHPRC also has a grant program for detailed processing, where narrative guides are created and published on the web. As we cataloged the 900 records stipulated in the grant, and the additional ones we have examined, we noted which collections required more processing, which ones needed conservation, and which had documents with valuable autographs that should be scanned for researchers so that the originals could be removed for security. I cannot wait to get started on the detailed processing, which is the “bread and butter” of archival work and how I was trained. However, I think we have done an immense service to researchers by letting them know what we have, even if we’ve only offered them a teaser. And as more researchers use these collections, we will rely on their growing expertise to let us know more about the materials. Catalog records and even guides can change to reflect new information. We may come to the end of the grant period, but our work will never end!

Further reading

If you are interested in reading more about the controversial MPLP approach to archives, see Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner’s article, “More Product, Less Process: Pragmatically Revamping Traditional Processing Approaches to Deal with Late 20th-Century Collections,” in American Archivist 68:2 (Fall-Winter 2005), Ê208-63. More information about the NHPRC Archives—Basic Grants program is available at http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/announcement/basic.html. A manuscripts blog highlighting CHS discoveries can be followed at manuscripts.wordpress.com.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.4 (July, 2010).

Barbara Austen, Archivist at the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford, Connecticut, dove into the archives full time after earning Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in History and a Master’s in Library and Information Science. She worked at the Fairfield Historical Society and the Connecticut State Archives before settling at the Connecticut Historical Society, where she has been since 2004.

Having been involved in different levels of reenacting for 30 years, from the French and Indian War to the Western fur trade era, my concern for greater authenticity has grown. In my early days of entertaining with an old time band at pre-1840 rendezvous, we never questioned our music, being a mixture of popular songs of string bands from the 1930s and fiddle tunes from anywhere. When the band dissolved and my interest deepened, I began to notice the absence of period music at these historical events. Here were some of the most dedicated proponents of period accuracy in everything from clothing to accouterments, yet not the music. To be sure, there were some trained musicians playing period violin compositions from the sheet music of the day, a necessary component of period accuracy. But my focus has been on vernacular tunes played by untrained fiddlers who had an intuitive knowledge of their tunes and traditions. So for the past 10 years I have studied, recorded, and performed archaic fiddle styles of early American fiddlers from the upper South. These were among the tunes that accompanied westward expansion.

One challenge to this approach is choosing which fiddle to use to recreate tunes of earlier time periods. All fiddles before the early 1900s had gut strings. Fiddles before the American Revolution were baroque instruments; fiddles from that time up to the Civil War were more modern looking, yet still had a shorter neck. In my days with the band, I had only one fiddle and didn’t know the history. Today I must limit the number of fiddles I take to a performance and trade some period accuracy for an archaic feel.

A further hurdle is the choice of tunes. Many are easily traced back to the Civil War. But for my time periods before 1840, I consult several printed sources. Knauff’s Virginia Reels, published in 1839, is a series of forty fiddle tunes collected in eastern Virginia and arranged for pianoforte.Then from the Cumberland Gap of western Virginia comes the Hamblen Collection of fiddle tunes from the early 1800s as played by David R. Hamblen (1809-1893) and son Williamson (1848-1920), arranged and copied by grandson A. Porter (1875-1958). Of the 700 tunes said to have been known by David R., only twenty-two are transcribed, along with fifteen from Williamson. I also seek recorded sources from the Library of Congress and other field recordings whose subject matter and style suggest an early provenance.

We will never know exactly how the fiddling forefathers sounded. But by listening to extant recordings of senior source fiddlers who can trace their tunes and playing styles back to a time before radio, before the minstrel stage, before modern notions of pitch, timing, and tonality, we can get significant clues to the sounds of those early fiddlers. For example, Emmett Lundy, a North Carolina fiddler born in 1864, was recorded for the Library of Congress in 1941. He learned many of his tunes from Green Leonard, born in 1810. He is but one of many from whom we get a concept of early playing styles. As re-mastering techniques improve, more old recordings are released for those on the quest for the sounds and tunes of those early fiddlers.

Visit Christian Wig’s website.

Sound files:

“Gaston,” Christian Wig, fiddle, Whitt Mead, banjo. Track from Chadwell’s Station (2008). Courtesy of Christian Wig Ensembles.

“Pompey Ran Away,” Christian Wig, banjo. Track from Chadwell’s Station (2008). Courtesy of Christian Wig Ensembles.

“Betty Baker,” Christian Wig, fiddle, Mark Ward, banjo. Track from Come Back Boys & Feed the Horses (2011). Courtesy of Christian Wig Ensembles.

“Cluck Old Hen,” Christian Wig, banjo. Track from Come Back Boys & Feed the Horses (2011). Courtesy of Christian Wig Ensembles.

“Pride of America,” Christian Wig, fiddle. Track from Chadwell’s Station (2008). Courtesy of Christian Wig Ensembles.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

Dancers, Musicians, and Negro Jigs in Early America

I met ethnomusicologist Greg Adams at a conference on African Atlantic culture, history, and performance held in June 2012 on the University of Maryland’s College Park campus. He introduced himself as an “early banjo” player who was eager to hear what I had to say about “Negro jig dancing.” Greg introduced me to dancer-choreographer Emily Oleson, who combines historical and contemporary forms of vernacular dance. And when Roberta Perkins, Delaware state parks historian and student of the bones, joined us, we became an inseparable crew, hanging out between sessions talking about the sort of people who played and danced jigs. In 1840s America, those people were white and black, male and female, old and young, just like the four of us.

Negro jigs were produced by competition and cooperation among African and Irish musicians and dancers, who met and interacted throughout the Atlantic world. They represent one of many instances when white and black people communicated through culture and created something new to identify with individually and as communities. The exchange of dance practices among African and Irish Americans in the 1840s is the topic of my current research. However, meeting Greg and Emily, two young scholars who collaborate on historical music and dance projects for Harpers Ferry National Park, inspired me to look more closely at the relationship between musicians and dancers performing Negro jigs.

Unfortunately, recovering the history of music and dance is not easy. Part of the problem lies in the nature of the sources, which epitomize the inherent difficulty of putting will o’ the wisps like melody and movement into words. Dance scholars like Jacqui Malone and Constance Valis Hill have used their experience as performers to explain the non-verbal practices and lineage of moves and steps that dancers pass on one to another. They translate kinesthetic information into words that both historians and dancers can mine. Dancers and musicians, who work primarily with physical knowledge and sensation, perceive jigs differently than historians who rely on written evidence. They can break down a complex move or melody, analyze patterns, compare features, and, with enough historical knowledge, reconstruct performance styles and techniques.

Even more elusive are the meanings people gave to their music and dance. Most nineteenth-century documents describing Negro jigs are stained by the writer’s racial and class prejudices, or, even worse, written by someone with no dancing or music-making experience. While often rich in detail, these sources do not explain why people danced and played music the way they did. To find that out, we need the perspective of the performers, and since nineteenth-century jig dancers didn’t write very much, that evidence is meager. One way to enrich it is to communicate with today’s practitioners or, even better, experience the dancing and music-making ourselves. Performers versed in the parent forms of Negro jig dancing (African and Irish challenge dance) or its offshoots (tap and flatfoot dancing) will notice details that elude non-dancers, details that often counter the meaning attributed to Negro jigs by the authors of written sources. They recognize through experience something historians find tough to explain—that even in a society characterized by racial antipathies, black and white people willingly shared their cultural practices.

African and Irish emigrants uprooted from their homelands by economic and political aggression met and mixed in slave ships and plantation fields, city streets and cellar taverns, farmhouse kitchens and prison cells. But it wasn’t just poverty and displacement that brought them together in the New World. It was likenesses in their music and dance traditions. In western regions of Ireland and Africa, from which most of North America’s Irish and African populations came, dance and music were a part of everyday life. Not everyone in the old country was good at playing music or dancing, but everyone participated. These similar backgrounds offered people with different languages and cultures chances of communication.

But African and Irish musicians and dancers played and moved in very different ways. So how did they come together?

For one thing, their dance and music practices shared a variety of translatable elements. In both cultures, people trained with master dancers and musicians, learned to improvise, and held competitions. But what made them truly compatible was their understanding of the relationship between music and dance. To put it simply, in both African and Irish practice, music and dance were inseparable. Some music was sung or played unaccompanied by dancing, of course, but music meant for dancing was far more common. Melodies and rhythms intertwined with steps and moves. Tunes distinguished dances in Ireland, just as rhythms differentiated them in Africa. This connection made it easier for Irish and African migrants to merge their different practices. Negro jigs were one of their products.

American jig dancing was a creole form. The word jig refers to a competitive dance in 6/8 time with Irish origins, but in early America “jig dancing” and “Negro dancing” were synonymous terms, used interchangeably to describe the dance step, a style of dancing, the “set dance” format (which combines several different tune changes and steps), and competitive dancing (regardless of the tune or step being performed). Black people who performed jigs, reels, and hornpipes in an African style were called “Negro dancers and musicians” as were white people who adopted the African-American style (or performed their jigs in blackface). The Negro dancer I’m researching is an Irish American named John Diamond, who is known for a series of challenges he danced in the 1840s against an African American jig dancer called Master Juba. These rivals danced the same dance to the same tunes.

“I could bring my banjo to the conference tomorrow,” Greg suggested, “and play you ‘John Diamond Walk Around’.” “I’ve got my bones in my purse,” added Roberta.

“That would be great,” I replied and turned to Emily, eyeing her high-heeled sandals, “and will you bring your dancing shoes?”

The musical instruments and techniques used to accompany jig dancing had European and African roots. Dancers usually performed with drummers in Africa, while pipers and fiddlers played for dancers in Ireland. But in early America, fiddles and banjos were the most common accompaniments. Fiddles played with horsehair bows (on the lap or against the chest) had European and African precursors, while banjos represented the innovative development of one or more West African instruments in the Americas. When the old tunes were played on these hybrid instruments, they made a new sound that inspired new compositions, tunes that became “American” dance music.

When no instruments were at hand, people used their bodies to accompany dancing. Irish dancers and musicians whistled or hummed the dance tune, a sean nós (old tradition) known as “lilting,” while African Americans beat their hands on the sides of their legs and their heel on the ground, a melodic drumming technique known as “patting juba” (fig. 1). These instruments and accompaniments were passed from one group to the other in North America. In the 1830s, a travel writer visiting Buffalo noted that “the beaten jig time” of the Irish boys dancing on the wharves “was a rapid patting on the fore thighs,” while a journalist in Philadelphia observed New Jersey slaves dancing jigs on market streets “while some darkies whistle.”

Until the 1840s, fiddles were more ubiquitous than banjos as dance accompaniment in America, and black fiddlers were by far the favorites. Bob Winans, another early-banjo player/scholar who joined our group at the “Triumph in my Song” conference, has collected hundreds of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century newspaper advertisements for slave sales and runaways that include “fiddler” in the description of the person. I’ve also found free African Americans advertising themselves as music and dancing masters. Fiddlers “able to play for dancers” needed a high proficiency, which suggests some trained with master musicians already versed in European dance music. Black fiddlers played for dancers in kitchens and barns, taverns and dance halls, circus tents and theaters. New York freeman Solomon Northup was lured into slavery by speculating kidnappers claiming they were agents hiring for a circus in the District of Columbia. Their proposal was not at all remarkable to Northup, who often played at private balls and public gatherings. These fiddlers influenced the style of all the jig dancers for whom they played.

Greg arrived at the conference the second morning toting an 1850s reproduction “minstrel banjo,” fitted with a calfskin head, four long gut strings and a short thumb string, and tuned a fourth below its modern equivalent. Banjos originated as an accompaniment for dancing among plantations slaves throughout the Americas. But it was “Negro musicians” (mostly white men in blackface) performing for itinerant circuses who spread them throughout North America. Banjo player Joel Walker Sweeney, an Irish American who cultivated his musical and dancing talents among “plantation and corn-field” slaves in Virginia, traveled with Rufus Welsh’s equestrian circus in the 1830s. Landing in dozens of towns and cities across the states and provinces, these travelers passed on and carried away local styles and skills developed wherever whites and blacks worked or lived in close proximity.

To recreate the tenor and flavor of the music that early Americans danced to, Greg uses a down-stroke technique (called Negro style in the 1850s and frailing or clawhammer style today). Fiddles and banjos are melodic instruments, but the way they were played could accentuate a dance tune’s rhythms. And like fiddles, early banjos have fretless necks, which means musicians playing either instrument could easily add the accents and slurs that give Irish dance tunes their enticing lift and African-American music its tantalizing swing.

In early America, good musicians did not just keep time for the dancer; they responded to the steps, inserting rhythmic and melodic passages of their own. Nor did good dancers just follow the music; they embellished it with their rhythms; they played a duet with the musician. That’s certainly what Emily did when Greg sat down to play for me that afternoon.

As Greg thumbed and stroked the strings and walked his fingers effortlessly across the banjo’s neck, Emily caught the melody and started to jig! She danced in sneakers, but you could still hear the beats of her steps, which Roberta amplified with the clacking of the bones. Emily shuffled and hopped and kicked from the knee, crossed her shin with her foot, jumped forward and skipped back, and swung her feet from side to side. Then the melody turned, as Greg danced his fingers up the scale and down in a clever passage, but Emily followed him up the floor, stepping and twisting her feet along with the notes. They laughed then, and caught each other’s eye, and Emily bounded with both feet into the air, landed on one foot, and brought the other down with a stamp that perfectly matched the end of the tune.

Irish dancers choreographed black moves into their steps, just as black musicians transposed Irish tunes to fit their playing styles. But the transfer of culture was a little more complex than that, since dancers also translated melodies and rhythms into movements, and musicians translated movement into music.

I don’t think Greg is a dancer. But because musicians often were in the nineteenth century, he’s trying to learn. On the cover of an 1840 song sheet for “Jenny get your hoe cake done,” Joel Sweeney is depicted in “Negro” costume strumming his banjo on a wooden ballast inside a circus ring (fig. 2). The soundboard (elevated by strips of wood) on which he stands and his high-heeled boots suggest Sweeney accompanied his singing and playing with acoustic dance steps, probably hornpipes. (Hornpipe dancers in Ireland sometimes danced on a wooden door taken off its hinges and laid on the floor.) “Hornpipe” was the name given to any solo dance in 2/4 or 4/4 time in which the percussive accompaniment of the dancer’s feet to the music was the main feature. For a musician like Sweeney, however, hornpipes were a form of music-making.

Dancers were also musicians. The prize awarded at a grand “Dancing Match” in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on a Saturday night in October 1858, was a “Violin, valued at $100,” indicating a contemporary expectation that competitive dancers could play music. The match was danced to tunes in “regular jig time. Mr. George Schaeffer being chosen as ‘Fiddler.’ At 8 o’clock, George struck up, and Frederick [Axe] simultaneously made his appearance—5 to 4 was offered on him and taken. His dancing was done ‘very agreeable.'” But Israel Huff, the dancer who “fairly won the prize,” was obviously a musician, for he “stepped into the arena and made his ‘Virginny’ steps tell a musical tale.”

Methods for making music with the feet were shared by white and black dancers. On plantations in Kentucky, recalled ex-slave Robert Anderson, “we danced some of the dances the white folks danced, … but we liked better the dances of our own particular race.” These dances were “individual dances, consisting of shuffling of the feet, and swinging of the arms and shoulders in a peculiar rhythm of time [which] developed into what is known today as the Double Shuffle, Heel and Toe, Buck and Wing, Juba, etc. The slaves became proficient in such dances, and could play a tune with their feet, dancing largely to an inward music, a music that was felt, but not heard.” White dancers added the slaves’ sound steps to their jigs, and black dancers adopted the Irish custom of dancing on a wooden board to enhance the sound of their jigs.

Emily uses Constance Valis Hill’s term “orality of the feet” to describe these sound steps and techniques. In traditional Irish step dance, the tune (or figure) changes kept the dancers on their heels and toes, shifting from one rhythm to another. The most common dance tunes—jigs in 6/8 time, reels in 4/4 time, and hornpipes in 2/4 or 4/4 time—share a duple downbeat but have syncopated internal beats. Irish and African American percussive dancers combined and connected these rhythms, speeding them up, battering the boards, slowing them down, scraping the ground, and crossing them over with rippling taps that hit just outside the beat. Emily also swings her arms and sways her torso like Anderson did, making visual music that emanates from inside her body.

Not everyone could dance their music like Sweeney and Anderson, but dancers preferred musicians who knew some steps and musicians liked working with dancers who could play a tune. Jig dancers at matches sometimes brought their own violin or banjo player with them, since great dancing often depended on the musician’s ability to recognize and anticipate the dancer’s moves and steps. You can see this synergy in an 1846 drawing of banjo player William Whitlock and jig dancer John Diamond performing at a theater in New York (fig. 3). Diamond is in the middle of a “tailor’s leap,” a dynamic step in which the dancer “flings the right heel up to the ham, up again the left,” then lands and continues his steps without missing a beat. Whitlock’s hand is poised in the air, his eyes fixed on Diamond’s feet, preparing to strike the strings at the exact moment the dancer lands. Clean entrances and exits demonstrated the musical proficiency of both performers.

Some tunes were named after the musician who composed them, others for the dancer whose steps made them famous. Emily danced to “Briggs’ Jig,” named after Tom Briggs (stage name T. Fluter), a banjo player who accompanied Master Juba and John Diamond. Diamond’s signature step was “Camp Town Hornpipe,” named for Philadelphia’s Camp Town, an integrated suburb on the Delaware River (fig. 4). “John Diamond Walk Around” is not the same tune, despite the fact that American dancers often called their competitive hornpipes “Walk Arounds” (for their initial step) or “Camp Towns” (after Diamond’s dance).

The titles of tunes communicated particular rhythms, steps, and styles to musicians and dancers. Irish writer Patrick Kennedy depended on that knowledge when he described the exhibition hornpipe dancing he saw in County Wexford around 1818. First, the dancer

circumnavigated’ the floor twice, in opposite directions, and then with arms crossed, or poised, or whirled as he pleased he went through his stock performances, of which we give some of the names—triple hornpipes being slower in movement than the double, and those again slower than the single.

Single.—’The Leg of Muton,’ ‘Kate and Davy,’ ‘Garran Bui.’
Double.—’Planxty Carroll,’ …’Tatter Jack Walsh,’ ‘Haste to the Wedding,’ … ‘Unfortunate Rake,’ ‘Paddy O’Carroll.’
Triple.—’Flowers of Edinboro,’ … ‘Spencer’s Hornpipe,’ and ‘First of May.'”

The dancer walked around the floor to signal that what came next was his or her champion steps, and Kennedy named the tunes to give the reader a sense of the dancing. But as soon as the musician started up, the company would have known what to expect. The same was true of dancers in a Philadelphia tavern in 1848. When the black “fiddler strikes up ‘Cooney in de holler,'” noted urban writer George Foster, “the company immediately ‘cavorts to places.'” For this mixed crowd the tune and its name meant their favorite kind of jig dancing.

The close association between music and dance created a friendly rivalry between dancers and musicians, which could be heard in the increased tempo and intricate patterns of their embellishments. These contests were sometimes played out on the dance floor. At balls held on Saturday nights in a rented room at Tammany Hall in the 1840s, the couple left standing at the end of the sets challenged the fiddler to a duel to see who could hold out the longest.

It was muscle and sinew against horsehair and catgut. For a few minutes the race is as even as that of two steamers on the Hudson; but soon the elbow-power of the principal fiddler begins to relax—his tones come forth more and more feeble, and his tortured instrument gives a piercing and unearthly scream every time it comes to ‘the turn of the tune.’ Meanwhile upon the floor the fun grows ‘fast and furious’—the spectators applaud, the dancers redouble their exertions, their faces glowing like … lovers caught kissing. At last the despairing fiddler claps his left thumb and forefinger to the nut of his E string—snap! pop! It is gone—the dance is finished and he saves his reputation.

The lived experience of doing what you research, or at least fraternizing with people who do, can give you insight you can’t get pouring over the sources. Seeing Emily dance to Greg’s music was like finding a long-lost picture of these dancers and musicians, only better, because I could hear them and see them moving. I have to admit, tears welled up in my eyes, because that was it, that was why black and Irish musicians and dancers came together, because together they made something new and exciting, something the whole company enjoyed. I couldn’t help myself; I yelled out, just like the people in my documents: “Whoo Emily! That’s the girl; handle your feet, avoorneen! That’s it, Greg! Finger those notes; what a tune! You’re one of ’em!”

The interdependence of good dancing and good musicianship is captured in old sayings like “pay the piper” and “face the music.” In rural Ireland, old and young for miles around met at an alehouse or other “public place of resort” to compete in jig dancing contests, called “cakes” for the prize awarded the winner (as in “she takes the cake”). “At the end of every jig, the piper is paid by the young man who danced it, and who [enhanced] the value of the gift by first bestowing it on his fair partner, and a penny a jig is esteemed very good pay, yet the gallantry or ostentation of the contributor anxious at once to appear generous in the eyes of his mistress, or to outstep the liberality of his rivals, sometimes trebles the sum which the piper usually receives.”

This Irish tradition made playing for jig dancers good employment for African American musicians. In 1848, a reporter for the New York Tribune visited a groggery hotel in Philadelphia’s Southwark district where working-class men and women came to drink and dance. When the “old negro fiddler” strikes up a tune in a dancing-room upstairs, he says:

The dance proceeds for a few minutes in tolerable order; but soon the excitement grows, the dancers begin … accelerating their movements, accompanied with shouts of laughter, yells of encouragement and applause, … Affairs are now at their height. The black fiddler increases the momentum of his elbow and calls out the figure in convulsive efforts to be heard [while] the dancers, now wild with excitement, leap frantically about … and at length conclude the dance in the wildest disorder and confusion. As soon as the parties recover, the fiddler makes his appearance among them and receives from each gentleman a tip as his proportion of the ceremony of ‘facing the music,’ and the floor is cleared for a new set; and so goes on the night.

For black fiddlers and white dancers, adopting another group’s cultural practices did not have to mean oppression or loss. Negro jigs were the property of both. They represented the repositioning of old loyalties, the acceptance of new partners, and even at times increased affluence.

My paper was scheduled on the last morning of the conference. Our crew and a few other scholars who’d joined us along the way were in attendance. I’m no expert at performing Negro jigs, but I always dance a couple of moves to illustrate the difference between Irish and African style, play recordings of fiddle and drum music so people can hear twos crossing threes, and if I’m feeling brave, put on some banjo music and show them the “time step,” which combines these elements. It’s a little embarrassing since I’m never sure historians comprehend why I’m doing it. But Greg and Emily certainly did. So I asked them to perform for the people who came to hear my paper. And it was amazing. Their music and dance expertise enhanced the quality of my work. They clarified what I was saying about black-Irish exchange and Negro jigs, and that wasn’t all. They also demonstrated how the possibilities for understanding something as ephemeral as the past increase when unlike practices are given chances of communication. Musicians and dancers, historians and performers, minds and bodies, we all became partners in time.

Greg Adams and Emily Oleson, “Briggs Jig” (Briggs’ Banjo Instructor, 1855), filmed June 1, 2012.

Further reading

Scholars have gone far in uncovering the origins of African American dance. Recent works include African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, ed. Kariamu Welsh Asante (Asmara, Eritrea, 1998); Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana, 1996); Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (Da Capo, 1994); and Lynn Fauley Emery, Black Dance From 1619 to Today (Princeton, 1988). Unfortunately, we are far less familiar with the origins and influence of Irish American dance. Useful works include Close to the Floor: Irish Dance from the Booreen to Broadway, ed. Mick Moloney, J’aime Morrison, and Colin Quigley (Madison, Wis., 2008); Mary Friel, Dancing as a Social Pastime in the south-east of Ireland, 1800-1897 (Dublin, 2004); Helen Brennan, The Story of Irish Dance (Lanham, Maryland, 2001); Brendan Breathnach, Folk Music and Dances of Ireland (London, 1996).

Recent scholarship on creolization and cultural exchange among African and Irish Americans includes Christopher J. Smith, “Blacks and Irish on the Riverine Frontiers: The Roots of American Popular Music,” Southern Cultures (Spring 2011): 75-102; Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (Oxford, 2010); Robin Cohen, “Creolization and Cultural Globalization: The Soft Sounds of Fugitive Power,” Globalizations 4: 3 (September, 2001): 369-384; James W. Cook, “Dancing Across the Color Line,” Common-place (October, 2003); Shane White, “The Death of James Johnson,” American Quarterly 51:4 (December 1999); W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, 1998); Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly 53 (April 1996): 251-28; John F. Szwed and Morton Marks, “The Afro-American Transformation of European Set Dances and Dance Suites,” Dance Research Journal 20:1 (Summer 1988): 29-36; Greg C. Adams, “19th-Century Banjos in the 21st-Century: Custom and Tradition in a Modern Early Banjo Revival” (MA thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2012); and my forthcoming piece, “The Challenge Dance: Black-Irish Exchange in Antebellum America,” Cultures in Motion, ed. Daniel T. Rogers (Princeton, 2013).

Primary sources for this article include George G. Foster, “Philadelphia in Slices,” New York Tribune, Nov. 17, 1848 and New York in Slices (New York, 1849); Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (1853); “Dancing Match,” New York Clipper, Oct. 31, 1857; Robert Anderson, From Slavery to Affluence, Memoirs of Robert Anderson, Ex-Slave, ed. Daisy Anderson (Steamboat Springs, Colo., 1927); and “The Cake Dance,” Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society XI.1-11 (1941): 126-142.

On using dance as a primary document for teaching and researching history see April F. Masten, “Dancing Through American History,” Common-place (October 2005).

This article originally appeared in issue 13.2 (Winter, 2013).

April Masten is associate professor of history at Stony Brook University. She is author of Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York (2008).

Revolution and Civil War

At one time the word revolution conformed to its literal meaning, as a rotation around a fixed point, like the orbits of planets around the sun or the rise and fall of Fortune’s wheel. By the end of the eighteenth century, a revolution was a transformative event that human beings created rather than endured.

To ask whether the American Revolution was a civil war is to resurrect a debate that helped give the word its new meaning. In the eighteenth century, political thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic debated long and hard about what form of government was most likely to prevent the fratricidal conflicts that sundered nations. Conservatives argued that monarchies were the most stable of governments. Champions of republics claimed the opposite. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine argued that “monarchy and succession have laid (not this or that kingdom only) but the world in blood and ashes.” Hence, for Paine and other republicans, the conflict that produced the American republic was not a civil war. It was a revolution.

As David Armitage has observed, “This conceptual opposition between revolution and civil war generated a set of preconceptions, even prejudices, which still endure. Civil wars appear sterile and destructive, while revolutions are fertile with innovation and productive possibility. Civil wars hearken back to ancient grievances and deep-dyed divisions, while revolutions point the way toward an open and expansive future.” Think, for example, of the way Americans have debated the current conflict in Syria. To call it a civil war is to suggest that it is simply another turn of the wheel in an ongoing struggle between factions. Only a revolution is worth supporting.

Dozens of topics can be folded into a symposium like this one. To ask whether a revolution is a civil war narrows the topic considerably, forcing us to focus on the war itself, the violent and more troubling part of the story. What appears most disturbing to Americans raised on stories of Minutemen is the notion that the lines between sides were ambiguous and shifting. One paper at the Philadelphia conference retold the story of how a Patriot troop captured British General Richard Prescott outside Newport, Rhode Island, in 1777 and spirited him away in his nightshirt. This story generated winks and laughter at the time, and it continued to do so, in local variants, well into the nineteenth century, either as a hero story about the exploits of the Patriot commander or as a farce about the General’s loss of his breeches. The author of the paper read it instead for clues to the adaptive strategies of people who did not seem to belong to either narrative—a Loyalist wife, an African American slave, and a trembling sentry.

Bill Pencak and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich discuss provisioning.

Another paper showed how coercive measures implemented by both parties in the conflict forced people to choose sides. Another revealed the way those who survived the war adopted multiple identities. Yet another saw in case studies like these a larger narrative about resistance. As disaffected Americans tacked back and forth between sides, ignoring militia calls, refusing to pay taxes, and harboring deserters, they resisted what we have come to think of as the Patriot cause. If we seldom hear such stories it may be because, after the war, even the Founding Fathers wanted to forget the many ways in which what they came to call a revolution was in truth a civil war. As Michael McDonnell said, “Today, in a new era when the American Revolution is often held out as the exception in the seamless transition from colonies to a new nation and invoked as a model for others, we would do well to remember.”

I think about the American Revolution when I read my daily newspaper. When I think about families fleeing besieged cities or nervous young men shooting into fractious crowds, I think of the strange contingencies that led to what we now consider a revolution. These stories undercut popular assumptions about that struggle. Both print and on-line reports of the bombings at the Boston Marathon in April 2013 noted that it occurred on “Patriot’s Day,” a holiday in Massachusetts honoring the shots fired in Lexington and Concord in April 1775. “The bombings at today’s Boston Marathon would be horrific on any day,” Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne wrote, “but there is something particularly disturbing that they happened on Patriots’ Day…. In a sense, it’s our first day as an independent nation.” We don’t like to remember that nobody knows who fired that first shot on Lexington Green.

Shortly after I came to Harvard in 1995, a story made the rounds of the Internet that the history department had replaced a venerable course on the American Revolution with one that focused on quilts. There was no question about what newly appointed faculty member was responsible for such a travesty. As a matter of fact, I did not mention quilts in my course on revolution. But I did build an entire lecture around an embroidery. It was a highly stylized pastoral embroidery filled with fruit, flowers, and happy couples. To me it represented the oft-repeated ideal that liberty meant each man might sit under “his own vine and fig tree.” Through a close examination of the embroidery and the context in which it was created, students came to understand how the pursuit of happiness for some people led to the enslavement or destruction of others. I don’t believe anyone who understands American history can ignore the ways in which our nation’s revolution, its civil war, and the long saga of its struggle against American Indians were deeply entwined.

To understand the American Revolution, I believe we need to understand these common threads.

Further Reading

See David Armitage, “Every Great Revolution is a Civil War” in Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, eds., Scripting Revolution (Stanford University Press, forthcoming). Michael A. McDonnell‘s essay “Resistance to the American Revolution,” in Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole, eds., A Companion to the American Revolution, reflects on the various communities who for a variety of reasons did not embrace the Patriot cause. (Oxford, 2000): 342-351.

My essay “‘Pursuits of Happiness’: Dark Threads in the History of the American Revolution” points to the ways in which the American Revolution was not an unalloyed good for many peoples in North America. See Jennifer M. Shephard, Stephen M. Kosslyn, and Evelynn M. Hammonds, eds., The Harvard Sampler: Liberal Education for the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2011): 341-366. For the quoted column on the significance of the Boston Marathon bombing taking place on Patriot’s Day, see E.J. Dionne Jr., “Patriot’s Day Defiled,” Washington Post, April 15, 2013.

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

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. Her books include A Midwife’s Tale (1990), The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (2001), and Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007).