“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).

America’s adventure with cities began in earnest during the four decades following 1820. There had of course been urban centers during the colonial and early national eras. But between 1820 and the onset of the Civil War, the proportion of the nation’s residents inhabiting communities of twenty-five hundred or more (the crude but conventional index of “urban”) jumped from about one in thirteen to one in five. Concentrated primarily in the North, the shift entailed natural reproduction of current city residents joined by the arrival of white rural folk searching for better (or at least different) opportunities. Especially in the North, however, it also entailed the presence of free blacks, of slave escapees from the South, and heavy infusions of newcomers from other countries. And with these heterogeneous demographic ingredients came other developments. Antebellum cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were arenas of remarkable (albeit remarkably uneven) economic growth, of frequent social and cultural reconfigurations, of appreciable tension and conflict—and above all of incessant changefulness. Such cities might be worrisome. Often they were puzzling. But they had to be engaged by contemporary Americans. And crucial to how they were engaged was a large and highly diverse assemblage of pictorial representations we may style city views of the antebellum North.

Two framing factors should be born in mind in discussing these images. First, they existed within an overall outpouring of pictures. After all, the 1840s and 1850s were the birth time in America of photography and the implantation of literally millions of photographic graphics within the milieu. But equally, it was a time of major growth in non-photographic images. Precise statistics are not possible. But it’s evident that more picture makers (both native-born and immigrants) were working fulltime (both as free-lancers and as more or less steady employees of image-producing enterprises) to turn out graphics, which, together with imports from overseas, ensured rising numbers of pictures made without cameras. There were paintings, drawings, and prints—including under this last heading images extending from lithographs and woodcuts to various engravings. The full inventory of antebellum pictures encompassed a spectrum of sophistication, prices, and accessibility. And prints in particular existed as both free-standing artifacts and as illustrations garnishing increasingly large and variegated arrays of publications: venues that included thick assortments of books, pamphlets, and periodicals, from cheap to elegant.

Indeed, taking antebellum picture making as a whole, it’s evident that the upsurge of pictures surrounding antebellum northern city views even included representations of other places. Though substantially less abundant than their northern-focused counterparts (and consequently not under immediate review here), there were some images of contemporary southern communities. Then too, and more notably, there were pictures of the hinterland. Notwithstanding the tilts toward urbanization, most Americans, including most northern Americans, continued to live in the countryside. And the rural retained enormous material and cultural importance. Landscape pictures emerged in these years as a dominant registration of how this nation hosted unrivaled God-sanctioned expressions of nature (of nature become Nature), while genre images of rustic mores provided soothing visions of harmony and stability.

A second framework for the views of the antebellum urban North was the backstory of earlier images treating American towns and cities. As there had been urban settings before 1820, so there had been city views. During colonial years, maps (some sporting figurative cartouches) had now and again provided representational “plans” of larger communities. And during both colonial and early national periods, there were townscapes (typically sighted across waterfronts) and streetscapes (figs. 1 and 2), as well as pictures of particular buildings and incidents (from “mobs” to parades) sufficiently associated with urban communities to comprise engagements with city panoramas.

Moreover, by the early 1800s communities like Philadelphia and New York were drawing upon the rich European tradition of “street cry” imagery to produce graphic records of their own street vendors that amounted to a further significant version of city views (fig. 3).

What were the goals behind these pre-1820 city views? Typically, these pictures sought to lay out information: to deploy facts about urban North America. Before the Revolution, however, city views were not uncommonly produced by Old World artists and aimed at Europeans skeptical that America even had cities of any note. Supplying information was thus at times combined with, and perhaps outweighed by, the goal of overcoming such doubts. And the images were consequently constructed less as rigorously accurate transcriptions of (say) Boston, New York, or Philadelphia than as loosely configured designations of some city. Accuracy grew more important in the years between 1783 and 1820. But city views crafted in this era often express other blendings, this time joining information giving with efforts to render their subjects interesting and amusing (via the street-cry imagery, for example) as well as—crucially—to deliver urban good news. The almost routine patriotism manifested by early national artists (not excepting the substantial roster entering the new nation from overseas) and used by them to gain acceptance in the early Republic, together with the ongoing belief that graphic arts should be inspirational and leavening (rather than critical and condemning)—all this fostered early national city views of a decidedly upbeat character. Specifically, such attitudes encouraged images that avoid depicting urban poverty and instead emphasize keys to urban prosperity—not just by showing prominent buildings and waterfront sightings of busy ships (as provincial images had now and again disclosed) but increasingly by stressing wealthy homes and, preeminently, bustling streets. Hence Francis Guy’s well-known painting of New York’s Tontine Coffee House (1797) gives as much attention to the hectically converging thoroughfares fronting the structure as to the coffee house itself (fig. 4).

Such, then, was the context for antebellum views of northern cities. And at one level these post-1820 pictures can be taken as simply fitting within this framework. Certainly they continued the formats already in play, for they were often configured as townscapes, streetscapes, and street cries, as pictures of incidents and of individual buildings. At the same time, these images demonstrably reflected the contemporary surge of graphics, for they made use of all the techniques of picture making available in the antebellum era, from painting to drawing, from photography and lithography to all manner of engraving. And produced through these techniques, antebellum city views likewise paralleled the broad range of formal refinement (and cost) characterizing pictures generally in these decades. Again, moreover, prints especially exemplified the spread. For antebellum city views rendered as prints ran the gamut from highly skilled images to less technically impressive lithographs and fairly crude woodcuts, from stand-alone images to pictures tucked into volumes and journals, both pricey and cheap (and including the newly popular digests known as city guides).

In several notable respects, however, antebellum city views actually went in new directions. Thus, alongside familiar configurations, we now find more fully developed genre treatments, such as images that go beyond street cries to depictions of so called street figures (fig. 5). So too, we find townscapes constructed as panoramic or hyper-elevated bird’s-eye views (fig. 6). And treatments of single buildings (and sometimes their surrounding streets) are now often cast as trade cards. Occasionally recycled into newspaper notices but for the most part published as single sheets meant to be posted publicly (sometimes in splendid color) or distributed free to the public, trade cards were advertisements that were commissioned by stores and manufactories and that generally centered around detailed pictorial representations of the sponsoring businesses.

When these establishments were located in urban settings, and the representations focused on the buildings housing the businesses, the cards became, willy-nilly, important installments of antebellum city views.

Ultimately, however, the most trenchant shift in antebellum city views—and the one I’ll focus on for the remainder of this discussion—had to do with their purpose: with their cultural “work.” To be sure, earlier intentions, and mixings of intentions, did not disappear. There was a drive for information giving and for accuracy (as demonstrated in the painstaking draftsmanship of bird’s-eye views), for amusement (as evident in both the ongoing city cries and the new street figures), and for positive messages (as shown in renderings of crowded, in fact increasingly crowded, thoroughfares). Yet shifts in the goals of these images are no less manifest. There are instances, for example, when the push for precision clearly overcomes the priority of inspiration. For the first time city views start to examine poor neighborhoods, and as a result we begin to get judgments of cities that are cautionary—even alarmist—as well as upbeat (fig. 7). But pictorial registrations of urban destitution were hardly the only realignment of purpose in city views. In deeper, more systemic ways, the most trenchant alteration in the goal of these pictures seems to have been a heightened drive to explain.

Exactly because antebellum northern cities could be worrisome and puzzling, exactly because they were so incontestably changeful, and perhaps also because, as a result, urban vistas departed so dramatically from the iconic, reassuring visions of rural America—for such reasons, there was a generalized desire, indeed a broadly felt necessity, to develop firmer understandings of the urban milieu. And in that light, it’s not hard—on the contrary it makes considerable sense—to read antebellum city views as being especially about explicating the panoramas they displayed: as essaying not just to provide informative facts but to show how these facts constituted patterns and processes of urban life; as striving not just to deliver amusing vignettes or pass judgments (whether positive or negative) but to demonstrate how cities existed and how they worked. This is not to argue that pictures of rural America did not also embrace forays into explaining what was happening outside cities. Nor is it to deny that explanatory tropes used by city views do not show up elsewhere in the era’s graphic literature. But it is to suggest that antebellum city views can be reasonably seen as aiming, more centrally than ever, to comprehend urban terrains.

Thus, while overhead perspectives were hardly unprecedented in the history of graphic representations, the key function (and appeal) of panoramic and bird’s-eye city views in this period likely turned on their ability to make the total shape of urban settings readily comprehensible. And the individual structures often featured along the borders of bird’s-eye views (as in figure 6) would only have supplemented this legibility by joining particulars to the whole: by giving viewers the added leverage of understanding cities as both totalities and discrete elements. Similarly, we should not ignore the explanatory force of accuracy in these images. Now it is true that antebellum city views were not entirely devoid of intentional distortions; occasionally they privileged compositional balance or anticipated new construction that departed from the reality of a given moment. And it’s true as well that the accuracy they did exhibit in many ways simply continued the advancing commitment to truthful city views commenced in early national times. Still, the overall devotion to precision apparent in post-1820 pictures of cities—certainly in photographs but in non-photographic graphics also—held special meaning. Given the continuing rhythms of change sweeping through northern cities, the representational reliability of most antebellum urban images may well have provided those regarding these graphics with a pleasing cognitive anchor: the knowledge that amidst all the transitions, this building or that street looked just so. Such knowledge, in turn, could well have carried the implicit proposition that accurately depicting a building or street at a given pictorial moment would help explain the often disconcerting texture of the urban milieu.

More concretely, views of northern cities in these years offer explanatory guides to components of the urban economy. Trade cards were marvelously instructive along these lines. The interior and cutaway views they sometimes offer of manufacturing establishments, for example, go some way to displaying step-by-step narratives of production (fig. 8). And even trade cards that fix on the outside of businesses would almost certainly have carried instructive implications. For one thing, they likely provided clues to help urbanites locate various establishments. At a time when (reflecting the fluidity of urban centers) stores and workshops frequently changed locations within a city, pictures that (reflecting the accuracy of most antebellum city views) displayed recognizable portraits of business exteriors could only have facilitated locating a given store or workshop. Added to this, trade cards presenting outside views of stores now and then end up both illustrating what was for sale and providing primers in how to buy. The former project is often accomplished through careful inclusions of shop signs. The latter explanatory purpose is achieved by illustrating individuals moving through sequenced steps of purchase. Potential customers are sometimes shown engaged in the newly surfacing practice of window shopping or in the longer-standing tradition of examining goods piled on sidewalks, the pictured figures in effect initiating the process of buying by familiarizing themselves with the merchandise available. But then, using the vehicle of windows and open doorways, exterior views of stores also reveal the next phase, the stage involving individuals moving inside retail spaces to interact with clerks and actually acquire an item (fig. 9).

Following similarly concrete routes, the images we’re exploring make further explanatory use of the city dwellers they delimit. Thus, they mobilize the emblems of clothing and observable activities to document the cohabitation within cities of affluent folk and working people. And in doing this much they quietly suggest that urban environments are to be understood—indeed, can only be understood—in terms of both better sorts and laboring folk. But it is the case, too, that lesser-ranked figures are more present in post-1820 urban views than in earlier pictures of American cities, so that antebellum urban imagery softly advances the contention-registered throughout antebellum culture—that the visual presence of working people was becoming more established in America and more vital to understanding many facets of the Republic’s existence. Added to this, the presence of pictured figures of recognizably different standing in urban venues often serves to explain at least some of the complex choreography among socioeconomic strata in cities of the antebellum North. For, taken as a whole, the pictures reveal higher and lower ranks at once interacting and yet often remaining apart—salient features of what class meant in these places.

Another way figures in urban views were harnessed to an explanatory purpose was in their formulation as types. The urban genre imagery of the period, and most notably the graphics of street figures, took heavy advantage of tendencies in antebellum representations to situate individuals within groupings that go beyond class to encompass racial, ethnic, and even regional niches. Or (as evident in figure 5, above) even subniches: the poor, pathetic, waif-like street sweeper, for example, or the slightly menacing (because slightly weasily-appearing) youthful hawker of kindling. In any event, the result was that urban views deposit figures into easily comprehensible categories that, in company with class designations, enabled viewers of the views to more easily chart—and thus understand—the often confusing medleys of individuals encountered in places like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

The final explanatory dimension of antebellum city views we need to ponder relates to their observational strategies. And what is particularly important to consider here are the watching figures positioned inside the images. These individuals signal modes by which Americans actually regarded city settings, modes the views themselves seem on some level to take on as their points of view.

Who were these watchers? Occasionally they were working people. But more frequently, and rather more defining of the perspectives city views themselves unfurled, they were figures of standing or authority (or both). So there are the instances of window shopping, with the window shoppers usually flagged as more or less genteel. And if we look closely at streetscapes, we can perhaps also find signs of the watchful promenades the upper ranks had begun undertaking in these years, coupled with the related custom of urban bystanding through which pedestrians (again usually upper-ranked) pause to observe street scenes or curbside events (fig. 10). And by the same token we can spot references to (or at least hints of) individuals engaged in oversight. Particularly apparent in depictions of ongoing labor (in the workrooms illustrated by figure 8, for example), suggestions of supervision grow generally more frequent in antebellum city views. And this was because such references in fact point to—were in fact part of—a broad reorientation in the nation’s post-1820 visual culture. Linked to shifts reaching from aesthetics to mounting controversies over slavery (and its systems of oversight) and connected to growth of reformative supervision on one side and to crescendos of bourgeois modesty (and more abstractly to the trajectories of rationality Michel Foucault has ascribed to Western modernity) on the other, the alteration in America’s visual culture in play here took different shapes. But as we come upon it in antebellum city views—as we can perhaps detect its imprint extending tangentially even beyond workplace supervisors to other regard-wielding figures in these images—the core nature of the change is clear enough. Simply put, in contrast to provincial or early national times, the act of regarding was becoming more expressive of elevated standing and power than the experience of being regarded.

As I have suggested, antebellum city views can be interpreted as adopting for themselves the stances of their observing protagonists, so that their efforts to explain in some measure unfold through the eyes of their own watchers. It is of course quite true that post-1820 city views were built on received conventions of pictorial viewpoints. And it is true as well that they appropriated angles of regard (like their panoramic and bird’s-eye standpoints) unrelated to their roster of interior observers. Still, it seems possible to inscribe into many of these images an outlook cast as middling or upper ranked, as carrying the distanced flavor of window shopping, bystanding, and promenading, and as touched by the authority exemplified by supervision. Indeed, it seems possible to go yet further and infer from these images tendencies to equate such an outlook with an assumed viewership. For while their divergent forms and prices make it all but certain a wide mix of people saw these images, it is not a large reach to understand views of antebellum northern cities as projecting an audience resembling the bulk of the viewers they picture.

There was, though, a complication to this fusion of pictured watchers, pictorial perspectives, and external viewerships. It was the complication of the flâneur. Long gestating in Europe, the flâneur surfaced in the antebellum Republic as another antebellum social type. Construed as typically male, usually—though admittedly not always—of upper rank, flâneurs were reckoned to traverse urban—not rural—territories. And while thought to occasionally respond to what they saw with interpretive (even intricately imaginative) narratives, flâneurs were more often registered as figures who only looked on, who surpassed other city observers by doing nothing but observing and who, moreover, observed not merely with distance but with thoroughly self-satisfied disengagement. Appropriated by journalists and by authors as different as Poe and Whitman, the flâneur posture was also present in city views, the persona characteristically presented as a stylish gent slouched watchfully against a lamppost (fig. 11).

But the flâneur raised problems. Inasmuch as he truly only watched, he was by definition unproductive. And in a republic dedicated to notions of virtue resolutely tied to productivity, he was thus anomalous—or worse. He was an “aristocratic” parasite, a potentially malevolent “lounger” or “loafer.” Other difficulties attended his role in city views. To start with, his determinedly total disengagement conflicted with the interest these images demonstrated in deploying judgments—by this time both negative and positive—about the cities they portrayed. Every bit as significant, however, the flâneur’s decided aloofness confined him mainly to surface impressions and, consequently, to an explanatory perspective on of urban life that was actually becoming suspect. For the fact is that in multiple and complicated ways—in ways we can only allude to in this essay—fair portions of antebellum Americans were finding outer (i.e., surface) manifestations of reality increasingly unreliable. Concern was deepening, for example, that physical self-presentations might be faked, that expensive-looking clothes might be only cheap ready-made knock-offs, that banknotes might be counterfeit, and that the most readily ascertainable aspects of cities might not tell the full story. And against that background, the flâneur’s surface-clinging viewpoint could well seem problematic.

Hence arose corrective responses. In the culture as a whole, there were efforts to assess external forms critically. From phrenology (which developed into an extraordinarily popular “scientific” tactic for connecting people’s outer physiologies with their inner temperaments), to calls for intense scrutiny of clothes (to distinguish tailor-made from off-the-rack and thus to determine an outfit’s underlying meaning), and on further to counterfeit detectors (for identifying false money)—making use of such techniques and technologies, good numbers of Americans set about to take account of what was without but then probe what lay within. Nor were cities excluded from this approach. Journalistic exposés and “Mysteries-of-the-City” stories sought to lay bare the underlying “truths” of major metropolises. And of direct relevance to our considerations, city views hosted their own penetrations of surface impressions. Which is to say, their quest to explain ultimately led these images to provide counterbalancings to the flâneur’s form of onlooking tout court, to offset the flâneur’s emphatically self-contented regard of mere surfaces. And so, while they might contain flâneurs, pictures of antebellum northern cities also, and more frequently, include images (some of them coordinated with journalistic pieces) expressly calculated to reveal the underlying (and often unsettling) portions of antebellum urban situations (fig. 12). Indeed, in light of this investigatory impulse, even images we remarked upon earlier take on new connotations. The confluence of trade cards that illuminate both exteriors and interiors of urban enterprises, for example, now acquires the feel of an aggregate perspective, rooted in joining the without to the within. And similarly, the coexistence of pictures glossing Broadway and New York’s notorious Five Points slum now takes on the sense of a composite viewpoint organized around treating both what the city wanted to display—its surface glitter, as it were—and the truth of its seamy underside.

To be sure, this tilt toward the darker underside did not appeal universally. Concerned to shield white society from criticisms, the South was relatively unreceptive to diggings beneath surfaces, with the result that views of southern cities, even those mixing exteriors and interiors, lacked the powerful investigatory drive present in the North. And likewise, endeavoring to learn what surface appearances might cover did not always make sense to working people. Antebellum lesser folk were by and large alert to the utility of masks, pretense, and outright dissimulation in dealing with difficult (and often patently unfair) economic pressures. And they were thus by and large open to making (and manipulating) their way along the byways of outer appearances. All of this ensured the regional flavoring of northern city views. And it also ensured that even when they rejected the flâneur, the outlook of these pictures was characteristically not from the bottom up but remained (in accordance with most of the more acceptable observers they depicted) aligned with middling or upper strata.

This brief survey scarcely exhausts all the ways northern cities were viewed in this period or all the ways viewing transpired within these communities. But it is perhaps sufficient to mark the pivotal part city views played in delimiting—and more generally engaging—key urban panoramas rising up in America between 1820 and 1861.

Further Reading:

Because this article roams across a variety of topics, the following is simply a sample of volumes that include images, and discussions of images, bearing on antebellum northern cities: Gloria Gilda Deák, Picturing America, 1497-1899: Prints, Maps, and Drawings Bearing on the New World Discoveries and on the Development of the Territory that is Now the United States (Princeton, 1988). E. McSherry Fowble, Two Centuries of Prints in America, 1680-1880: A Selective Catalogue of the Winterthur Museum Collection (Charlottesville, Va., 1987). Peter B. Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915 (Philadelphia, 1984). John A. Kouwenhoven, Columbia Historical Portrait of New York: An Essay in Graphic History in Honor of the Tricentennial of New York City and the Bicentennial of Columbia University (New York, 1953). John W. Rep, Lithographs of Towns and Cities in the United States and Canada, Notes on the Artists and Publishers, and a Union Catalog of their Work, 1825-1925 (Columbia, Mo., 1985). Nicolas B. Wainwright, Philadelphia in the Romantic Age of Lithography (Philadelphia, 1958).

This article originally appeared in issue 7.3 (April, 2007).

Jonathan Prude, a student of nineteenth-century American social, labor, and cultural history, teaches at Emory University. He is currently completing a book on The Appearance of Class; The Visual Presence of American Working People from the Revolution to World War I.

I’m not trained as a gender historian. I take for granted the fact that gender has always been a cultural construct and that it has influenced the behaviors of people in the past; I tend not to think too much about it otherwise. But when I started looking for information on early nineteenth-century army supplies in the papers of a United States War Department official at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, I found, interwoven in the correspondence about politics and conflict, references to binge drinking with male friends and hooking up with young women. Why was this the case, in a collection that included letters from senior army officers and four secretaries of war?

Daniel Parker (1782-1846), the son of an Army lieutenant and a descendant of one of the largest original landholders in Shirley, Massachusetts, became a clerk in the office of the War Department in 1810 (fig. 1). He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1801 and practiced law in the Boston area before moving to Washington. He was twenty-eight at the time, well into adulthood by historical standards. And certainly, Parker’s office in the War Department became a hub of very adult decision-making among generals, army contractors, and secretaries of war and state—decisions that determined national security. Parker was responsible for managing correspondence related to military legislation, and to army provisions, movements, and promotions. But in addition to the letters from high-ranking federal officials, Parker received a fair amount of correspondence from young, unmarried men whose inside jokes, social activities, and sexual exploits made me think of today’s bros—or at least something similar to the culture of “fratty masculinity” that is common among (usually) young, privileged, white men. They wove their homosociality and chauvinistic bragging so seamlessly into their discussions of financial matters, state and federal politics, and military service that it might have been easy to miss, were it not for the lack of polite euphemisms that I had assumed camouflaged most nineteenth-century misdeeds.

Participation in this privileged culture of masculinity was an important part of achieving and maintaining political power. As soon as Parker moved to Washington, his youngest brother and many of their friends began asking for favors. This in and of itself was not unusual. Patronage has existed in various guises throughout history, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it served, to quote historian Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, as the “social glue” of society. The communication among Parker’s cohort, however, suggests that insults, bragging, and lewd comments about women were what made this glue stick.

Daniel Parker’s younger brother Leonard was twenty-one when Daniel started his tenure in the War Department. Recently graduated from Dartmouth, Leonard took over Daniel’s law office in Charlestown. The first time we hear from Leonard is in June 1811, on a day that, according to Leonard, was so hot and humid, he couldn’t be bothered to write too much. He was cool enough, however, to accuse Daniel of not doing enough to drum up clients for him. The law office suffered, he said, because Daniel had left abruptly without advertising on his behalf. Also, Leonard needed money, and because Daniel was doing well, he should give his younger brother some. He complained to Daniel about his dire circumstances, even as he went out fishing and drinking and looking for girls. In one letter, we meet Leonard’s roommate, D.W. (Daniel Waldo) Lincoln, who had been “drunk nearly all week” while two of his siblings were in town. Lincoln was from a prominent Massachusetts family. His father, Levi, was a well-known judge with close ties to Thomas Jefferson, and his brother Levi Jr. would later serve as governor of the state. D.W., like Leonard, expected his family and friends to help him overcome professional difficulties. He worked in the same office as Leonard, and assumed his father’s status gave him license to continue his roguish ways. D.W.’s bad habits were, according to Leonard, another reason the law office wasn’t doing well. About D.W.’s drinking Leonard wrote: “Sunday while we were gone to meeting I think he began—drank on our passage home. This afternoon came over with intoxication. Tomorrow I expect he will be quite drunk.” Leonard claimed to his brother that, “seeing Lincoln trifling about the office frightened [clients] and carried them off.”

As Leonard and D.W. made clear in their letters, both men felt entitled to their jobs and to assistance from family and friends. D.W. wrote to Daniel for help with a client, and insisted that he “attend to this immediately!” Leonard, meanwhile, pestered Daniel into helping him get reappointed as army judge advocate (a position for which Leonard thought he had enough “leisure” time). Leonard actually drew a frowny face because there was another candidate who had more influence with the Secretary of War than he (fig. 2).

This sense of entitlement extended to their relations with young women. D.W. was “making love to Miss Freeman,” but that didn’t stop him from “playing off his gallantry to” other women after a few drinks. This “gallantry” usually came out after Leonard decided he had no interest in pursuing the woman. One Sunday in July 1811, for example, a group of their friends was sailing home from a weekend in Hingham, and Leonard boasted that the daughter of a wealthy merchant was staring at him, but conceded that his alleged admirer may have been mistaking him for Daniel; at that point he left her to be preyed upon by a very drunk D.W. He wrote, “she again had her eyes fixed on me. I had like to have been vain enough to think her in love with me but on the whole I think it must have been you she had in view. I left it to Lincoln to play off his gallantry to and about her which he did up in great style under the excitement of 2 or 3 glasses.” Leonard was starting to think about marriage, and he wrote to Daniel that if any happiness was to be found in life, it was in a wife, and he “trust[ed] in God I shall find an inexhaustible stock of this life’s blessings.” He eventually contented himself with just one wife, when he married D.W.’s sister, Martha; his earlier determination to “find her in loose robes,” fulfilled.

“Rape culture” describes a society in which nonconsensual sexual acts are so common, so normalized, that people are desensitized to them. Although coined by feminists in the late twentieth century, the term is useful for understanding Daniel Parker’s early nineteenth-century social milieu and how the men in it understood their place in society. His letters contain frequent references to forced sexual acts, cheating, and the objectification of women. These references ranged from benign-seeming scenes of domesticity to more overt harassment. One Army contractor wrote to Parker that, “it may be at this time to let you into the secret—well then you know Mrs. B was so gratified on learning of the passage of a certain bill—that on about that time she concluded to become a mother.” He was basically saying, “my wife was so happy with the money I’ll get from Congress’s recent appropriations bill that she was eager for me to get her pregnant.”

A young army captain named John R. Bell, who bragged that women in Washington referred to him as “the handsome Mr. Bell,” was more aggressive. During the winter of 1812, the War Department sent Bell to Pennsylvania to recruit men for the army. He was enchanted by all the “dutch [i.e., German] girls” he saw, but disappointed that recruiting duties kept him from “becoming acquainted” with more of them. One night, he stayed at the home of a general whose fifteen-year-old daughter Bell found quite attractive. Bell bragged to Parker that, “like a solider I attacked her, à la militaire.” He “made approaches regularly to the breast work,” and “impressed a sweet goodnight upon her ruby lips” (figs. 3, 4) It’s unclear whether the general’s young daughter wanted the kiss or the groping. Either way, Bell felt entitled to whatever liberties he could take with her. In a departure from his usual boasts, Bell confided to Parker in one letter that he was “bashful among genteel virtuous and handsome ladies” (women who were his age), and unable to “squeeze a hand or steal a kiss without being almost asked to do so.” But even then Bell saw his biggest obstacle as “almost” having to ask for a kiss.

This culture of chauvinistic entitlement pervaded the War Department and its orbit. Elbert Anderson Jr., an Army contractor from New York, wrote to Parker about his “very handsome circle of female friends…gay as the lark yet chaste as Diana,” whom he wished Parker could “have his choice from”—as if the women were his to give. Anderson subcontracted beef and pork rations during the War of 1812 to a man named Sam Wilson, who some theorize became the namesake for “Uncle Sam.” Whether this is indeed true, I do not know. But judging from Anderson’s letters to Parker, his role as a husband and father did not stop him from working it with the ladies. Or from bragging about it. Anderson boasted to Parker about a fancy carriage he had built in New York and told him that “all the young girls and some young married ladies” wanted to ride in it.

This sort of subject-blending matters for historians because it reveals how the personal, however ignoble, was inextricably bound with these men’s understanding of their professional lives. For example, after telling Parker about the number of soldiers who had died near Buffalo, New York, Anderson wrote, “I am going to have the charge of a pretty woman in my baron’s wagon for five days—at least. Don’t you envy me.” In another letter, he gossiped about their friend’s new wife, speculating about whom she had slept with and whether she was pregnant, and then closed by saying he would be sending his bill for supplies to the War Department and asking Parker if he needed another loan. Parker himself similarly mixed the personal with the professional. In 1819, for example, he secured his friend Lieutenant Colonel E. Cutter a more lucrative post, which enabled Cutter, according to another friend, to “get, with some cash, a very amiable woman.”

Army advancement, however, often proved more challenging than exerting control over women. Bell, for example, was a young second lieutenant in a regiment of light artillery when he asked Parker to recommend him for the post of adjutant or quartermaster general. The best Parker could do in June 1812 was to get him appointed as paymaster to the regiment of light artillery. Bell sent Parker a letter thanking him for the appointment, but said that he planned to decline, owing to the position’s paltry compensation and his desire to devote himself to the company of light artillery in which he served. Bell was promoted to first lieutenant that August, and the following summer his request was granted when the War Department appointed him major and assistant inspector-general on July 29, 1813. After the war, though, he complained to Parker, who had since been made inspector- and adjutant-general of the Army, about the location of his post. For the remainder of the 1810s, Bell served as a captain of light artillery and an instructor at West Point. He grew restless, and wrote to Parker for an appointment in the west. Bell secured a position as interim governor of Florida in the summer of 1821, after the United States acquired the territory from Spain. The following year, however, he was passed over for the position of chief Indian agent in Florida.

By then, Bell was in his thirties and accustomed to getting what he wanted, which was evidenced in a letter he received from Secretary of War John Calhoun (fig. 5). On a separate research trip to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., I found Bell in a volume of confidential and unofficial letters sent by secretaries of war in the 1810s and 1820s (fig. 6). This letter and others in the volume suggest that for privileged War Department bros, there seemed to be an understanding that rejection be mitigated by compliments and explanation. Calhoun explained President Monroe’s decision by assuring Bell that the decision had nothing to do with qualifications: Bell, he said, was probably superior, but the other man had a large family. That man needed government patronage more than Bell, who already had a lucrative command position. Calhoun closed by reiterating how pleased the department was with Bell. This sensitivity to ego usually only extended to bros within the department. As a contractor, Anderson therefore wasn’t privy to the same fawning. He got angry when he wasn’t paid quickly enough, nor given a satisfactory explanation. Peace with Britain after the War of 1812 had barely been declared when he wrote to Parker that the amount he was owed was “enough to make one’s heart sick” and then said he would “unleash the dogs of war” on Secretary of War James Monroe if the government didn’t pay his balance soon. He snidely joked that once he was paid, he would establish his “Franklin magazine” for the poor. He wasn’t poor, and he didn’t care all that much about people who were. For this reason, I couldn’t help but feel a bit satisfied when I read that in June 1816, Parker learned that Congress hadn’t appropriated sufficient funds for army contractors.

I don’t want to conclude with as unsavory a character as Anderson. To be fair, men more sensitive than he also appear in Parker’s letters, men who wrote about their infant sons’ teething and the guilt they felt subjecting their families to military life. But in general, Anderson, Bell, and Leonard Parker were more typical of the men with whom Parker corresponded; the chauvinist camaraderie they shared was, in fact, a big part of patronage. As Parker got older, the juvenile discussions of women abated, but there was a certain consistency among the letters he received at age thirty and age sixty in terms of insults: his colleagues took jabs at “foreigners” and questioned the sexuality of politicians they didn’t like. One man whom Parker stopped hearing from and about shortly after taking up residence in Washington was D.W. Lincoln, who, in an incident not unlike the sad news we sometimes hear about fraternities, drank himself to death. Leonard’s observation that “[D.W.] Lincoln drinks like hell … and always will I fear,” came true in the worst way. “He [D.W.] fell asleep and literally died without a struggle.”

Parker eventually married and had children, and after serving as adjutant and inspector general, returned to his position as chief clerk, which he held until his death in 1846. Over the course of his career in the War Department, Parker received many letters thanking him for various military posts and commissions. These letters suggest what would be lost if we only looked at official military correspondence. Patronage appointments were about more than partisan politics. They were also about bonding through masculine entitlement and the degradation of others, and if we skipped these personal papers, we might miss the fact that there were a bunch of dudes running the War Department.

Further Reading

This essay was based on the Daniel Parker Papers (Collection 466), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and Records of the Office of the Secretary of War, Confidential and Unofficial Letters Sent, RG107 Entry 11, Vol. 309, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Domonic A. Bearfield, “What Is Patronage? A Critical Reexamination,” Public Administration Review 69:1 (Jan.-Feb., 2009): 64-76; Brian W. Beltman, “Territorial Commands of the Army: The System Refined but Not Perfected, 1815-1821,” Journal of the Early Republic 11:2 (Summer, 1991): 185-218; Konstantin Dierks, In My Power—Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia, 2011); Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, Conn., 2002); Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters (New Haven, Conn., 1995); Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, 2005); Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, “’Auctioneer of Offices’: Patronage, Value, and Trust in the Early Republic Marketplace,” Journal of the Early Republic 33:3 (2013): 463-488; Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana, Ill., 1989); Lurton Dunham Ingersoll, A History of the War Department of the United States: With Biographical Sketches of the Secretaries (Washington, D.C., 1879); Albrecht Koschnik, “Young Federalists, Masculinity, and Partisanship during the War of 1812,” in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, David Waldstreicher, eds. Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004): 159-179; Sarah M. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2008); Steven Watts, Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Baltimore, 1987).

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2 (Winter, 2017).

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele is assistant professor of history at Miami University, Ohio. She received her PhD from Brown University in 2015 and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company in Philadelphia in 2016.

Over the past twenty years, with the help of dealers, bookstores, auction houses, and other collectors, I have collected more than 150,000 maps of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North and South America. Scores of scholars, researchers, and others interested in history and the humanities have viewed the physical collection housed in San Francisco, California. The collection also features world maps, and includes atlases, globes, school geographies, maritime charts, and a variety of pocket, wall, children’s, and manuscript maps. Driven by an intense desire to make the collection available to the public in an intimate setting, in March 2000, I launched www.davidrumsey.com, a Website that allows free viewing of my maps via high-resolution images on the Internet. The Web site now has over eight thousand historical maps available for close examination. The sophisticated, yet simplified software allows visitors to view maps side-by-side, zoom in for inspection of the smallest details, as well as save and print. A comprehensive catalog provides information about each map’s cartographic relevance and provenance, author, the publisher and date of publication, and other historical and geographic facts. Users can launch a simplified browser-based viewer or download and install a feature rich Java client. The Website also has a browser-based geographic information system (GIS) viewer. The interactive Web GIS allows geographers, cartographers, and researchers to integrate historical maps with modern satellite imagery, aerial photos, and other geospatial imagery.

When I began collecting maps in the early 1980’s, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American mapping was not a popular subject with most map collectors. Thus, I was able to assemble an expansive array of maps very quickly. As it happened, the cartographic publishing business in the United States was forming during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. American mapmaking businesses often were interconnected, such as those of Colton and Johnson, Melish and Tanner, and Finley and Mitchell. These relationships are important when trying to recreate a comprehensive cartographic history of the time.

Because I wanted to record these relationships and other information about the maps as I collected them, I used a catalog database. The database not only preserved important information about the collection, but also allowed me to shape the growth of the collection with truly contextual collecting–seeing the relationships between the collected maps by subject, graphic type, time period, author or publisher, or geographic location. The use of a catalog database allowed me to see the collection in a data space and this allowed the shaping of the collection into a coherent whole. It also laid the groundwork for building the online collection, although I did not realize that until much later, when the Internet came into existence. Beyond atlases, the collection consists of individual maps, globes, puzzles, books with important maps (such as Lewis and Clark’s published accounts), charts, and cartography in ephemera and unusual forms. Maps by their nature connote many forms of expression: William Henry Holmes’s 1882 topographic drawing of the Grand Canyon is as much art as it is a map, and Samual McCleary and William Pierce’s 1850 wood puzzle titled, Geographical Analysis of the State of New York, is the earliest known map and children’s puzzle in the United States. It was a tool for teaching geography. Maps were also used in historical accounts: a large number of exploration books, government documents, and reports are part of the collection. They detail the official exploration and surveys used to map the United States as it expanded westward.

One of the special gems in the map library is John Melish’s Map of the United States published in 1816. This was the first large map to show the United States from coast to coast, and is considered a precursor of the later popular notion of Manifest Destiny. Melish was also a cartographic poet who, on the map, described the Texas panhandle as “Immense Plains of light salt sand mixed with fragments of Snail shells, moved with the wind, discovering Peaks of Volcanic Rock.” To make the collection available to a larger audience, I first considered publishing a print catalog, using the collection database as the source. However, this option would not allow people to truly study the original maps. With my growing interest in software and the Internet, around 1997 I decided to create a software program that would display my collection via the Internet, through collaboration with Luna Imaging. Placing the collection online and adding Internet GIS capability was no small feat. The site required years of time-consuming and careful scanning, experiments with several display and Web technologies, and GIS integration. During this time, I began the arduous process of converting historical materials to high-quality digital images, and converting my existing database catalog to an online catalog of my map library. My database catalog contains a detailed compendium of cartographic materials and notes to connect the items. This record was quite useful in developing the online cataloguing system during the scanning process. Complete atlases were scanned, as were covers for pocket maps, puzzles, and their cases. Folding globes were shown compressed and then opened, and maps were shown enclosed within books. Each subset or group within the collection has a unique number to tie all of its components together. Individual items in the group have derivations of the unique number, and by numbering each record sequentially, the items appear together and in the correct order. Thus, if one searches for an entire atlas, all of the pages will come up together and in the proper order. In addition, when browsing, the cover for a map will appear next to the map itself. I was also able to create digital composite images of maps that were intended to be joined by the cartographer and engraver but were separated in the bound books. An example is Henry Popples’s 1733 Atlas of the British Empire in America. On March 15, 2000, the map library site was launched on the Internet with more than twenty-three hundred maps. The number of visitors to the site in the first few months was astonishing: we averaged over ten thousand visitors a day. Feedback from users was immediate and revealed that a number of K-12 teaching resource groups, Civil War buffs, university map libraries and history departments, home schoolers, and the general public were keenly interested in this type of online library. Since the launch date over two million people have visited the site and used its resources. By 2001, I was working with Telemorphic, Inc., a GIS software developer, to modify their Web browser for general image analysis and visualization. We specifically tailored the software to allow people to see four different maps at the same time. The Quad View feature enables people to view a historical map next to other historical maps as well as contemporary satellite imagery or modern raster and vector data of the same area.

We decided to use the most readily available source of current map data: the United States Geological Survey (USGS). In addition, we faced another technical limitation in not being able to integrate current data with the thousands of maps on the site all at once. As a result, we decided to develop the Web GIS on a city-by-city basis, then move on to regional, state, and county levels. We focused on the San Francisco Bay Area first, obtaining digital orthophotos, topographic map sheets, digital elevation models (DEMs), and satellite imagery from the USGS Bay Area Regional Database. We quickly learned that just having the data wasn’t sufficient. We needed to rectify the digital images of the historical maps to an accurate geographic basemap so that they had common reference frames. This process of “warping” historical maps to modern geographic reference data was challenging. Many historical maps were created before the availability of modern mapping and surveying technologies, and some of the items were tourist maps that were visually surveyed or based on an artist’s rendering.

By December 2001, we had completed integration of eleven different maps of the San Francisco Bay Area, from the mid-1800’s through early 1900’s. Soon thereafter, we added Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. The site has a basic and professional GIS interface intended to allow people of various skill levels to move easily through a series of visualization processes and create, save, and print their own custom maps. Users can also download new image products with complete georeferencing information (world files) for integration into their preferred desktop GIS package. Adding the GIS feature to the online collection is giving mapping professionals a unique opportunity to learn from the past. Stephen Skartvedt, a GIS specialist for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, sees many advantages of the new GIS site for his organization. Because Golden Gate Park is now, to a large extent, an island surrounded by development, Skartvedt says the historical maps provide visual confirmation of the value of protected land and show the pace of development in a typical urban setting. Being able to share historical maps across the Web in an interactive environment has proven more rewarding then initially imagined. Response from cartographers, geographers, and GIS professionals has been very enthusiastic. The latest new dimension to the online GIS experience is three-dimensional viewing and fly-through sequences. Visitors can now fly-through parts of California in the late 1800’s such as Yosemite Valley and Los Angeles in 1883, and Lake Tahoe in 1876. Expansion of the current GIS data sets will continue, adding more cities and more historical detail, such as fire and insurance maps and hand-drawn land parcel/ownership maps, along with more current satellite and aerial imagery, topographic map data, and detailed street information. We also plan to increase the level of interoperability between the site’s Luna Imaging browser and the GIS service, so that users can click on a spatial feature in the GIS view and immediately launch the image browser to see a corresponding map or drawing with more detail.

Soon people will browse multiple map collections at once, comparing maps from widely dispersed institutions in a common Internet space. Currently, I am working with several major public map collections interested in achieving this broad goal. One of these joint ventures is with the University of California at Berkeley. A collaboration with the University of California’s East Asian Library has made their collection of rare and fragile historic maps of Japan, some of which date back as far as four centuries, available. More than two hundred maps, including examples of rarely seen woodblock print maps of the ancient city of Edo, modern-day Tokyo, are now available online. Thirteen of the Tokyo maps, dating from 1680 to 1910, were also added to the GIS browser. Additional historic maps of Osaka, Japan, and Kyoto, Japan, have been added to the site as well. I am also working to establish many different ways that the online map collection can be found and accessed by users. We have contributed most of our records to the Open Archive Initiative. Several OAI based search engines are developing, an example being the University of Michigan’s OAIster, where our maps can be found along with millions of other documents and images. Our records and images can also be found on popular search engines like Google. We create automatically an individual Web page for each of our records, and the Google data “spiders” catalog and index these records. Google currently has over sixty-five hundred record pages from my site. We contribute our data to the ESRI Geography Network, a shared GIS database, and to the ECAI Meta Data Clearinghouse, a GIS database for historians. With the help of the University of California, we are putting all our records with links to the map images into the OCLC catalog, where they can be downloaded and added to library OPACs–UC Berkeley has added over forty-five hundred of our records to their online catalog. We will continue to add new ways for people to find and intersect with our information via the Web. Historical maps reveal amazing tales about towns, boundaries, politics, geographic features and early landscape values, and how they changed or vanished with modern development. The very existence of high-resolution map imagery on the Web will bring these beautiful and important materials to the attention of the general public and scholars in ways that have not been possible before. Thanks to the Web and GIS, historians, artists, geographers, cartographers, and others can reconsider their understanding of history.

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

David Rumsey is the founder of the David Rumsey Map Collection and president of Cartography Associates. He is the author, with Meredith Williams, of “Historical Maps in GIS” and, with Edith M. Punt, of Cartographica Extraordinaire: The Historical Map Transformed (Redlands, Calif., 2003).

David Claypoole Johnston was an engraver, artist, and satirical commentator on American life, who can reasonably be called the best known and most popular American graphic artist of the first half of the nineteenth century (fig. 1). Born in Philadelphia, he apprenticed there, and moved to Boston in 1825, living and working in the city until his death in 1865. The cartoons, prints, and yearly satiric periodicals on which his contemporary reputation as “the famous caricature designer” rested were advertised, editorially noted, and sometimes extensively reviewed in the Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore and Charleston newspapers. Their circulation reached considerably farther—throughout the smaller cities of New England (Portland, Portsmouth, Providence, and Hartford)—and at times to Savannah, Cincinnati, and New Orleans. Love and marriage pulled this Protestant artisan and satirist, born into a family of performers, into the orbit of Boston’s tight-knit yet marginal Irish and Catholic community.

David Claypoole Johnston was no Irishman, but he married into the clan, and thereby hangs this tale. His own ethnicity was Scottish and English. Born in Philadelphia in 1798, he was the child of an Englishwoman, the young former actress Charlotte Rowson (the sister of the author Susanna Rowson), and William P. Johnston, an accountant, bookkeeper, and devotee of the stage, whose ancestors had come to New Jersey in the early eighteenth century from southern England and from Edinburgh in Scotland. Charlotte had been baptized in the Church of England, and by the mid-eighteenth century, members of the Johnston family were being married in the Anglican Church and buried in the Anglican cemetery. Indeed, Johnston’s great-grandfather, a Scotsman born in Edinburgh, had sought out the Anglican rather than the Presbyterian church when he arrived in his new homeland.

After their marriage, William and Charlotte became parishioners of old St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. Given Philadelphia’s high ethnic diversity by early American standards, David would have known a number of people of Irish descent, and more than a few Catholics; working as he did in the book trades, he surely would have known of, and perhaps met, the great publisher and printer Matthew Carey, the city’s most famous and successful Irish Catholic. Johnston’s master in the engraving trade, Francis Kearny, was himself the descendant of Irish Catholics who had come to New Jersey, but his family had shed its ancestral faith within a generation, also becoming Anglicans.

There is no reason to suspect Johnston of piety in his early life. He was a caricaturist from the time he could hold a pencil, and in his youth an accomplished mimic, an amateur musician with a predilection for comic songs, and as he recalled, “a nice man for a party.” His autobiography makes no mention of religious feeling or religious matters, and none of the work that he produced in Philadelphia between 1815 and 1825 had any religious content. Out of this religious genealogy, we can draw at least one conclusion: there is no evidence of any strain of Calvinist, Reformed, or Evangelical sentiment in Johnston’s background.

Human love, not a wrenching religious conversion or spiritual journey, determined Johnston’s trajectory. In this, he followed the path of his parents. Smitten by her appearances on the Philadelphia stage, William Johnston had pursued the eighteen-year-old Charlotte Rowson to Boston when her family had moved there to open the city’s first theater in 1797. He proposed, married her in Boston, and brought her back to his native city. Charlotte retired from the stage, but William maintained some involvement in theatrical business affairs in Philadelphia, eventually becoming treasurer of the Chestnut Street Theater. David, their oldest son, himself took a turn on the professional stage; as a young engraver looking for additional income, he spent three seasons as a part-time actor in Philadelphia and Baltimore.

In 1825, David Johnston moved to Boston, looking for a better reception from the city’s publishers than he had received in his turbulent early years in his home city. Shortly after his arrival, Johnston became a boarder at the Irishman Thomas Murphy’s well-known establishment on Federal Street—a seemingly small step that would prove momentous. The house was convenient to the Federal Street Theatre, where Johnston had “engaged with the Boston managers” for a year to finance his transition between the publishing worlds of Philadelphia and Boston. At that time, he met Murphy’s daughters, Mary Priscilla, then 17, and Sara Elizabeth, then 15. He seems to have been accepted quickly as a member of the household, to judge by a birthday acrostic he composed for Mary Priscilla in 1826. His theatrical background, which would have rendered him somewhat marginal in the eyes of most residents of respectable Boston households, and disqualified him from social contact with their young women, did not seem to have mattered.

Thomas Murphy had joined the campaign of the United Irishmen in County Wexford in the 1790s, and came to Massachusetts around 1798 after the crushing of the rebellion. Adapting well to his new country, despite the seemingly unpropitious religious climate of Massachusetts, he had become a prosperous innkeeper and then a boarding house proprietor in Concord, Woburn, and finally in Boston. He was a true pillar of both his community and his church: president of the Charitable Irish Society, founder and officer of the Vincent De Paul Society, the Roman Catholic Charitable Relief Society, and the Irish Orphans Annual Fair. His boarding house was a block or two from the Federal Street Theatre; far more important, it was next door to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, “the first house below the Catholic Church” as his advertisements always said. Priests were always traveling between the Bishop’s seat and their scattered flocks in the far-flung Boston diocese, which until 1843 covered all six New England states. Visiting priests were surely often part of Murphy’s extended household. Both proximity and devotion made Thomas Murphy an important layman.

By the end of the theatrical season of 1825, Johnston was able “to cut the boards,” as he put it, to go back to “cutting copper.” His plan to use the theater as a bridge to full-time engraving had succeeded. He “became known to the book publishers,” and opened a shop at 81 Washington Street, where his “abilities were more than appreciated” and “liberally rewarded.” Despite his growing success, Johnston did not leave the boarding house. In fact, he would never leave the Murphy household. Smitten by a beautiful young woman, as his father had been, David patiently courted Sarah Elizabeth, and married her in 1829, just after her nineteenth birthday; he was thirty-one.