Irving’s Sketch Book, literary overproduction, and the politics of the “purely literary”

Most literary historians agree that the 1819 publication of Washington Irving’s collection of fiction and descriptive essays, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., marks the beginning of professional authorship in the United States. For the first time, the imaginative work of an American writer appealed to a broad, relatively affluent reading audience and sustained for its author a long-term publishing career. But if the appearance of the Sketch Book marked the economic development of American literary culture, it was also haunted by widespread economic unrest. Written in the wake of the 1818 bankruptcy of P. and E. Irving, his brothers’ import company, the first issues of the Sketch Book were sent hastily to a waiting printer in order to stave off Washington Irving’s personal financial ruin. Irving had intended Moses Thomas to publish the American edition; but after Thomas nearly became insolvent in early 1819, Irving asked his friend, Henry Brevoort, to take over. A year later, the publisher of the English edition, John Miller, went bankrupt before the first volume was completed, leaving John Murray, London’s “prince of book sellers,” to finish the job. Of course, the wider context for so many failures was the widespread economic distress that troubled the Anglo-American world. In Britain, a severe recession followed the War of 1812 and the victory against Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. In America, a series of bank failures led to the nation’s first financial crisis, the Panic of 1819.

The fact of Irving’s celebrated success and the tradition of classic American literature that it inaugurated make it easy to underestimate the impact of such economic turmoil on the social conditions of authorship. If domestic literary demand had become significant enough to encourage professional authors, however, it also required their dependence on both a highly competitive marketplace for books and readers whom they sometimes perceived as voracious, capricious, and vulgar. Writers like Irving saw themselves as disinterested gentlemen who wrote works of enduring cultural value, but their writing was often consumed by the same people who enjoyed cheaply produced books by less polite authors. Although the economic rewards of publishing enabled their writing, they took pains to deny their interest in financial remuneration. Yet their intimate relation to the risky, capital-driven business of publishing made them very much speculators on the tastes of a mass reading public, and even the most romantic of their writings often betray anxiety about this predicament. In some cases, this anxiety is expressed as a kind of panic about the status of authorship, literature, and books.

Compared with our own current economic recession, the cycle of boom and bust that led to the Panic of 1819 appears all too familiar. The economic expansion of the post-War period saw unprecedented growth in all aspects of American economic life: sharp increases in manufacturing and trade, the chartering of hundreds of new banks, near manic levels of investment, the entrance of many thousands of consumers into the middle class, and the expectation of an indefinite future of prosperity. This extraordinary growth, however, was facilitated by extremely easy credit and the over-production of currency, which by 1819 led to the collapse of America’s banking system and widespread economic depression characterized by glutted markets, falling prices and wages, large-scale capital losses, bankruptcy, unemployment, and an unprecedented number of citizens receiving poor relief (10 percent in New York City in 1820).

For many contemporary observers, the panic, whose effects lasted well into 1822, was a crisis of social stability, whereby the gothic specter of paper money and crushing debt signaled the demise of a land-based economy and a rank-based society and the arrival of a culture of indulgence and imposture (fig. 1). The Cincinnati Inquisitor Advertiser, for example, blamed the catastrophe on a “thirst for acquisition of riches without labor,” while the National Advocate complained of “loose and vulgar” young men who “plunge into the extravagance of the times,” such that “before they can earn a shilling by honest industry, they expend hundreds.” In the same vein, Niles’ Weekly Register expressed the hope that “honest men” would replace “speculating madman and visionary schemers,” and the Order of Tammany demanded a “fundamental change in morals and habits” and an end to “this factitious and preternatural accession of money.” Whatever their focus, most commentators emphasized the problem of an unstable currency. As William Tudor wrote in 1820, the “notion prevails, that a bank is to create wealth like a mine, and that the indefinite multiplication of engraven pieces of paper … is an actual increase of that property, though in reality it diminishes its value.”

If increasingly worthless paper money represented both a compromised social order and the compromised status of printed texts, it gave a certain aspect of perilous excess to the country’s rapidly expanding publishing industry and mass culture of reading. Since the 1790s, inexpensive sensationalist fiction had been available for purchase or through lending libraries in most American cities, and by 1800, urban printers were sending their wares (typically Bibles, devotional works, and cheap American editions of popular British authors) to rural markets across the ever-extending frontier. From 1810 to 1820, the total output of American presses grew by 50 percent; and by 1815, post-war affluence saw the emergence of well-stocked bookshops throughout the Atlantic seaboard and into the Ohio Valley. According to Mason Locke Weems, the influential southern book peddler, America in 1819 was “a Country of such boundless extent and rapidly growing population … where the passion of Reading is rising with a flood beyond all former notice of Man” (fig. 2).

Bookselling not only rose with the nation’s growing economy, its structure and business practices mirrored that of the unstable and illusory financial markets. The increasing availability of credit after the creation of the Bank of the United States in 1791 provided much of the capital necessary to print and sell books in what soon became a competitive and risky business. Although booksellers discovered various forms of cooperation to manage such risk in the short term, some of these had the long-term effect of merely disguising it. For example, they exchanged books with one another in order to diversify their offering and achieve better distribution. But because exchanges gave the false impression of actual sales, this practice quickly led to over-production and, despite rising sales, the inevitable devaluation of too many unsold books. Moreover, in order to raise capital and extend their credit over the long, unpredictable term of a book’s market life, they often endorsed or guaranteed each other’s promissory notes, in this way creating elaborate networks of mutual dependence. As a result, when one firm became insolvent, it often took several others down with it. But to make things even worse, many booksellers estimated their net worth based on unsold (and devalued) inventory rather than on a more realistic accounting of their assets. This meant that, at any given time, it was difficult for a bookseller to know either his own true financial position or that of the firms whose notes he’d endorsed. Thus, by 1819, with many thousands of worthless books circulating as inflated currency, the bankruptcy of a bookseller was a frequent occurrence.

Mathew Carey, the leading Philadelphia bookseller, lamented such problems in his 1813 Address to the Booksellers of America, and he blamed them chiefly on “delusive and pernicious speculations in extravagantly large editions.” Whereas London publishers typically printed small editions of 500 to 750, thereby keeping both demand and prices high, American publishers, in order to cover their higher production and distribution costs, often printed editions of 1,000 to 1,500. When such editions failed to find their audience, they were often sacrificed at book auctions or sold at “extravagant discounts.” But large editions also tied up booksellers’ capital, forcing them to borrow excessively and making them even more vulnerable to the “extreme fluctuations” of the market. As a result of such inefficiencies, a significant portion of booksellers’ assets lay “dormant,” much of it “not at present worth the price of the paper.” Indeed, Carey estimated that “two-thirds of the bankruptcies that have taken place among the booksellers, as well in Europe as in this country, have arisen from the immoderate extent of their editions.”

Yet overly large editions merely exacerbated what many American writers during the years surrounding the panic saw as the problem of too many authors. For some, such excess reflected a lack of originality. Edward Tyrell Channing’s 1816 essay, “On Models in Literature,” cautioned that if the enormous number of “borrowers and imitators are only encouraged, the swarm will go on thickening.” Others complained that intense competition made literary fame impossible. According to Richard Henry Dana’s 1821 Idle Man, “[B]ooks are multiplying so fast upon us, that they seem, at first sight, to be doing little else than crowding each other out of place.” Still others saw overproduction as symptomatic of a pandering, superficial literary culture. In his 1819 satirical poem, American Bards, Gorham Worth lamented the “contemptible catch-penny quackery” of the “glorious copartnership of Critics, Bards & Booksellers,” singling out for criticism the dubious practices of producing unnecessary second editions and “puffing” or promoting low-quality writing. In fact, Worth saw an explicit connection between such “inflations of folly” and those of America’s over-extended financial markets. “Let the old world compare with the new, if it can – / ‘Tis in vain! for America now leads the van, / And in bards, as in bankers, excels!”

The period’s most explicit fears of literary overproduction, however, were articulated in Irving’s Sketch Book. In one sketch, “The Art of Book Making,” Geoffrey Crayon’s musings on the “extreme fecundity of the press, and how it comes to pass that so many heads, on which nature seemed to have inflicted the curse of barrenness, should teem with voluminous productions” lead him to conjure a phantasmagoric scene of dispossession and revenge. Having wandered into the reading room of the British Museum library, he discovers “many pale, studious personages, poring intently over dusty volumes, rummaging among mouldy manuscripts, and taking copious notes of their contents.” These, he gradually discovers, “were principally authors and in the very act of manufacturing books” (fig. 3). But after musing on the ethics of literary borrowing, he falls asleep and dreams that these authors are “a ragged, thread bare throng” of untutored bumpkins, borrowing the “garments” of classic writers in a ridiculous display of “vulgar elegance” (fig. 4). The victims of this literary rapine, a cadre of long-dead authors arrayed in dour portraits on the library walls, then come to life and rise up in a fierce counterrevolution “to claim their rifled property” and chase the plunderers out of the library. Although, like Channing, Irving frames the sketch as a statement about literary originality, as a “getter up of miscellaneous works” himself and well accustomed to borrowing from classic authors, he appears to stage the imagined revolt of the portraits as an unconscious panic about literary overproduction and authorial dispossession.

In another sketch, “The Mutability of Literature,” Crayon has an imaginary “colloquy” with a dusty antique volume in Westminster Abbey about the morbid effects of time and social change on books, language, and literary reputation. At first, Crayon calls such mutability “the wise Precaution of Providence” to prevent “the creative powers of genius” from “overstock[ing] the world” and leaving the mind “completely bewildered in … endless mazes of literature.” But when he considers that in the modern age all former “restraints on this excessive multiplication” have vanished, he succumbs to a panic about overproduction and competition. The “inventions of paper and press,” he warns, “have made everyone a writer, and enabled every mind to pour itself into print, and diffuse itself over the whole intellectual world. The consequences are alarming. The stream of literature has swoln into a torrent—augmented into a river—expanded into a sea … Unless some unforeseen mortality should break out among the progeny of the muse, now that she has become so prolific,” Crayon worries, “I tremble for posterity.”

We can better understand the anxiety about authorship expressed in these sketches if we consider that, as Irving wrote them, he trembled more for himself than for posterity. In 1816, while living with his brother-in-law in England, he wrote to Brevoort that he was too “harassed & hagridden by the cares & anxieties of business” to produce anything literary; and in 1818, after the family firm had failed, he warned that “a much longer continuance of such a situation would indeed be my ruin.” When that year Thomas proposed his “getting up an original work,” however, Irving confessed he was “very squeamish on that point.” Desperate for money and capable of earning it only through his writing, he was nonetheless uncomfortable with the ungentlemanly idea of writing for money. “Whatever my literary reputation may be worth, it is very dear to me, and I cannot bring myself to risk it by making up books for mere profit.”

To write for “mere profit” was, for Irving, an unpleasant necessity. Born into New York’s commercial class, he had long mixed with his social betters and used his literary talents to claim a genteel place among them (fig. 5). But while he enjoyed the limited provincial success of his earlier works, Salmagundi and The History of New York, he was somewhat reluctant to participate in the increasingly unstable market for books and loathe to identify himself as anything but an amateur. Clinging to his gentlemanly status, he persistently declared that in publishing the Sketch Book he sought only a “scanty but sufficient means of support.” To “please the public and gain the good will of my countrymen,” he wrote, “is all I care about—I only want money enough to enable me to keep on my own way, and follow my own taste and inclination.” But in less guarded moments he made clear how important the financial success of this high-stakes venture was. “My fate hangs on it—for I am now at the end of my fortune.”

Irving’s apprehensions about money and status pervade the Sketch Book‘s themes of loss and nostalgia too. These are nowhere more apparent than in the sketch about “Roscoe,” a destitute banker and forgotten writer whose library is sold at auction to a crowd of “wreckers” and “speculators.” In a more abstract way, we also see them in the book’s melancholy stories of untimely death (“The Widow and Her Son,” “The Broken Heart,” and “The Pride of the Village”), of virtuous forbearance (“The Wife” and “The Royal Poet”), and of earlier, more stable times (“Rip Van Winkle,” “Rural Life in England,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”). As Irving attempts with each sketch to escape from what he called “the common-place realities of the present,” he betrays an uneasy yearning for traditional forms of culture in a rapidly changing world.

Perhaps the most ironic by-product of Irving’s authorial panic was his invocation of the idea of a pure form of literature, untainted by money, commerce, and changing tastes, one that would allow the public to distinguish the Sketch Book from what Dana snidely referred to as “the trashy works which are daily turned out.” In “The Mutability of Literature,” for example, after his fear subsides, Crayon admits that certain authors, such as Shakespeare, survive the chaos of overproduction. “Because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature,” they “transmit the pure light of poetical intelligence from age to age.” The “true poet” will survive the “increase of literature,” he insists, because he “writes from the heart and the heart will always understand him” (fig. 6). Likewise, in “Roscoe,” despite the author’s sad fate and the volatility of the market, the value of great books remains. “When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value.” In fact, reviewers of the Sketch Book said the same of it. Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review dubbed it the first “purely literary” American book worthy of praise, and in the North American Review Dana declared Irving the “first to begin and persevere in works which may be called ‘purely literary.'”

Such praise was doubly gratifying to Irving. It helped not only to distinguish him from more mercenary and less talented writers but also to generate record sales. But, in fact, the idea of the “purely literary,” which first gained widespread currency in the early nineteenth century, was only possible in the context of mass literary culture. For it was precisely the excesses of the bookselling industry that made cheap books readily available and that eventually produced Irving’s enthusiastic middle-class readership. Moreover, in spite of his protests, he was remarkably adept at the game he claimed to be so reluctant to play. He demanded and received a higher price for the first edition of the Sketch Book than even his mentor Walter Scott could command from London booksellers, and he insisted that the book be made of the finest paper, ink, and boards, thereby establishing a new industry standard of luxury. Indeed, it was Irving’s financial success, along with that of Scott, Byron, Cooper, and other best-selling writers, that finally made professional authorship respectable.

Like the blurred distinction between real wealth and paper profits, American authors of “purely literary” texts found it increasingly difficult after 1819 to distinguish their literary art from mere print commodities. Forever after, elite literary culture would be inextricably tied to popular culture, despite many protests to the contrary. But when genteel literary authorship first confronted the realities of capitalist commerce, such confusion was both novel and, for some, shocking. In other words, when writers like Irving first considered that the independence of aesthetics from economics might be merely a convenient fiction, panic ensued.

Further Reading:

On the early nineteenth-century transformation of American book publishing and reading culture, see James N. Green, “The Rise of Book Publishing in the United States, 1790-1840,” in Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, eds., A History of the Book in America: Volume 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C, forthcoming); Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishing in the New Republic (Philadelphia, 1996); and Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York, 1993). A useful selection of relevant primary texts can be found in Scott E. Casper, Joanne D. Chaison, and Jeffrey D. Groves, eds., Perspectives on American Book History (Amherst, Mass., 2002). Although historical scholarship on the Panic of 1819 remains relatively thin, a technical overview is provided in Murray N. Rothbard, The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies (New York, 1962). For recent biographies of Irving, see Andrew Burstein, The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving (New York, 2006) and Brian Jay Jones,  Washington Irving: An American Original (New York, 2008).

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

Edward Cahill teaches American literature and culture at Fordham University in New York. He is completing a book on aesthetic theory and politics in the early republic.

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

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

When Charles Cora accompanied his mistress, Arabella Ryan, to the theater on November 15, 1855, neither had any idea that their choice of an evening’s entertainment would shape the future of San Francisco. During the play, the gentleman seated in front of the couple rose and demanded that Cora and Ryan leave the theater. Ryan, commonly known as “Belle,” was a prostitute, and the gentleman–U.S. Marshal William Richardson–felt her presence was an offense to his wife. Cora refused to leave. Two days later, when Richardson and Cora met and exchanged words over the incident, Cora pulled out a pistol and shot Richardson to death.

But what came to be called the “Cora Case” didn’t end there. It became a favorite subject in the city’s newest newspaper, the Daily Evening Bulletin.  The Bulletin had been established in October 1855 by James King of William (who adopted this patronymic to distinguish himself from other James Kings). Hoping to build a successful newspaper in a city that already boasted several other major papers, King made reform his watchword. He electrified the public through his personal attacks on politicians, priests, and prostitutes, his dramatic headlines, and his pull-no-punches editorials. King had a knack for finding San Francisco’s hot button issues and weaving them together to depict the city as being in grave danger from vice and political corruption.

Not that he had to make it up. King’s San Francisco was full of vice and corruption. When gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in January 1848, about one thousand Mexican and American settlers lived in the Mexican settlement on the bay. By 1855, nearly fifty thousand immigrants from China, Chile, Mexico, Ireland, Australia, France, and especially the United States had arrived in the city. Men outnumbered the first female arrivals by as many as ten to one. Meanwhile, tents outnumbered buildings. Gambling and prostitution were among the most lucrative businesses; hundreds of men could be found every evening in the gambling saloons, eating cheap meals, drinking hard liquor, playing cards, and paying an ounce of gold just to sit next to a woman. The boom-and-bust economy sent a few poor men to the pinnacle of success while merchants dreaded overstocked markets and plummeting fortunes. Widespread theft and arson, largely unchecked by the courts, provoked the formation of extralegal organizations to stamp out crime. One of these, the Vigilance Committee of 1851, involved seven hundred European and American merchants who hanged four men and exiled many others, mostly Australians, from the city on pain of death.

By 1855, the year Charles Cora shot and killed William Richardson, California gold production was in decline, and San Francisco had begun to take on the characteristics and aspirations of a more settled community. Some gold rush immigrants left, but others decided to settle permanently in San Francisco. They built brick houses and business establishments. Those men who could afford to, particularly middle-class Americans, sent for their wives and sweethearts until men outnumbered women only by three to two. The wives of merchants and artisans became the largest group of women in the city, outnumbering the prostitutes. Though San Francisco had changed a great deal since 1849, its most settled residents argued that vice, crime, an unstable economy, and an especially corrupt political system still threatened the security of business and family life. Prostitutes still sat, scantily clad, in windows of the city’s main thoroughfares; spectacular murders splashed across the front pages of the newspapers; well-established financial institutions crashed; and fraudulently elected city officials used their offices for personal gain.

It was in this context that James King of William, himself a family man, took up the cause of reform. Making the Cora case a symbol of San Francisco’s myriad problems, King argued that San Francisco’s most successful prostitutes, like Charles Cora’s mistress, Belle, worked hand-in-glove with gamblers, like Cora, and corrupt politicians to dominate and corrupt city politics. When Cora’s January trial resulted in a hung jury, King trumpeted: “‘Hung be the heavens with black!’ The money of the gambler and the prostitutes has succeeded, and Cora has another respite!” Throughout the winter and spring of 1856, King continued to combine attacks on prostitution with news stories alleging that Belle had bribed jurors to protect Cora. King attacked many other urban problems as well, but the Cora case effectively captured so many issues at once that King returned to it again and again.

To bolster his circulation and garner support for his reforms, King encouraged women to write to the Bulletin. The women who read the Bulletin, and probably those who wrote letters as well, were San Francisco’s newest immigrants: educated middle-class American wives from the Northeast. Recently arrived in the city, many such women were already organizing churches, sewing societies, and benevolent associations. Such activities were generally accepted in the eastern United States as appropriate public outlets for women; writing to the newspapers on political subjects was not. Yet middle-class women in San Francisco–who did not even form a women’s rights organization until 1868–seized this opportunity to participate in the public conversation over the future of the city in which they lived. As the reform movement built, in the spring of 1855, women’s participation in public political debate in San Francisco grew as well. But would this prove to be an anomaly? Would the changing and changeable culture of San Francisco allow women to participate in public politics, or would that opportunity be as short-lived as James King of William himself?

On May 14, 1856, as Cora awaited a retrial, King published a muckraking article on county supervisor and local newspaperman William Casey. As King walked home that evening, an incensed Casey shot him, and King died on May 20, a martyr to the reform cause in San Francisco. Outraged citizens organized a Vigilance Committee, which ultimately enrolled over six thousand men, particularly merchants, clerks, and skilled workers–groups whose members were likely to be permanently settled in San Francisco. These men included most of San Francisco’s white ethnic groups, with the notable exception of Irish Catholics who were virtually excluded. The vigilantes’ first act was to raid the jail, where they captured both William Casey and Charles Cora–King’s murderer and the man who best symbolized all that King had fought against in his reform rhetoric. As King’s funeral procession wound through the city on May 22, Casey and Cora were “tried” before the executive committee and hanged. Minutes before the hanging, Belle married Charles Cora in his cell inside vigilante headquarters. Afterwards, her fate, as well as that of James King of William’s broad-based reform crusade, hung in the balance.

During the next three months, the committee hanged two more men and exiled over two dozen others (mostly Irish-Catholic Democrats) for alleged political crimes. In addition, the vigilantes conducted illegal searches, suspended the law of habeas corpus, confiscated federal arms, subverted state and local militias, sought to oust elected city officials, and even imprisoned a justice of the state supreme court. In response, the governor of California declared the city of San Francisco to be in a state of insurrection and attempted to crush the committee by force. Certain prominent citizens of San Francisco, including many Irish-Catholic politicians, organized a Law and Order Party, insisting on the rule of law above all else. In their own defense, the vigilantes cited the right of revolution. A sovereign people, they argued, whose government is not only corrupt but has resisted reform, has the right to rise up and replace that government. They claimed that they had the nearly universal support of the people–the “respectable people of all classes.” To protect themselves from prosecution, the vigilantes supported the formation of the People’s Party in August 1856 (a major qualification for candidacy was public support of the Vigilance Committee), which dominated city politics for the next decade.

Both the supporters and detractors of the Vigilance Committee claimed to have not only God and the right, but also “the ladies” on their side. As Colonel Bailie Peyton put it, “The ladies are always right, and their endorsement of any cause would insure success; and it is enough to me to know that the ladies are with the Committee.” Similarly, the vigilantes’ opponents, particularly the Law and Order Party (led by John Nugent, editor of the Herald), claimed that “true women” supported their cause.

To strengthen these claims, nearly all the city’s major newspapers, even some that had never done so before, invited women to write letters on political subjects and printed them in the summer of 1856. Although women wrote on a variety of topics throughout the summer and showed their partisanship in other ways as well, the peak of women’s participation through the press coincided with the moment, in late May and early June, when the vigilantes themselves seemed uncertain about their moral authority and the direction of their movement. Needing to garner all the support they could, men on both sides of the struggle encouraged women to show their support. But some women seized the opportunity to advance an agenda of their own.

In all, about thirty letters from women appeared in May and June supporting the vigilantes. (Although it is possible that the letters may have been penned by men, the style and subject matter of the letters, read over time, suggests otherwise.) Many such letters in the pro-vigilante press simply endorsed the vigilante movement. But others, aware that the vigilantes were somewhat at a loss for an agenda, challenged the vigilantes to include sexual politics in their reform agenda. The first such letter to appear after the hangings was published on May 26, and addressed,

TO THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE: Allow me to express to your respected body our high appreciation of your valuable services so wisely and judiciously executed. You have exhibited a spirit of forbearance and kindness that even the accused and condemned cannot but approve. May Heaven continue to guide you. But, gentlemen, one thing more must be done: Belle Cora must be requested to leave this city. The women of San Francisco have no bitterness toward her, nor do they ask it on her account, but for the good of those who remain, and as an example to others. Every virtuous woman asks that her influence and example be removed from us. The truly virtuous of our sex will not feel that the Vigilance Committee have done their whole duty till they comply with the request of MANY WOMEN OF SAN FRANCISCO

In follow-up letters, some pro-vigilante women broadened this argument to a general attack on prostitution, insisting as King had that political corruption and prostitution were interrelated. “Philothea,” for example, accused Belle Cora of killing King through her efforts to spare Cora “the just penalty of his awful crime.” Not just Belle, but prostitutes in general, inhabited a dangerous “sphere of influence, which has caused innocent blood to flow in our streets.” “Femina” took the argument even further. Making only veiled reference to Belle, Femina drew out the connections between prostitution and political corruption: “These evil and shameless women squander by thousands their ill-gotten gains to fee corrupt lawyers, to screen the criminal, whose hands are reeking with blood, from the award of justice, to uphold the gambling politicians, who in return fill their hands with plunder derived from, or stolen from, our public offices of trust . . . You can compel these women to leave our city; will you not do it?” By emphasizing that prostitution, crime, and political corruption were intertwined, Femina sought to make it difficult for the Vigilance Committee to ignore the issue of sexual politics.

Meanwhile, women writing in the anti-vigilante press also joined in the discussion of Belle Cora’s future. On June 4, “Gertrude” responded directly to “Many Women of San Francisco.” Less concerned with the standing of Belle Cora than with the legitimacy of the vigilantes’ supporters, however, Gertrude accused the pro-vigilante women of being unchristian, uncharitable, and unwomanly. Headlined “A True Woman’s Plea for the Frail Portion of Her Sex,” this letter first established Gertrude’s own credentials as a “true woman.” Modestly remarking that “although I am not a newspaper correspondent and have no desire to appear in print,” Gertrude added that, “I have no sympathy with Belle Cora or her calling (which is loathsome in the extreme).” Still, Gertrude felt that as a woman, she ought to take a more high-minded attitude. “I am a wife and a mother, and I have a woman’s heart and a woman’s feeling–a feeling that would prompt me to extend the hand of charity to Belle Cora or any of her class, as quick as to the most virtuous in the land, and feel then that I had done only my duty.” Secure in her own position, Gertrude argued that women ought not to persecute their own sex and wondered aloud whether Many Women of San Francisco feared that prostitution was contagious. Having thus subtly called these women’s virtue into question, Gertrude concluded, “I feel that every high minded, true hearted woman in San Francisco will agree with me, and for the remainder I value not their opinion.” Here Gertrude staked out the moral high ground. The true women of San Francisco would be on her side; no one else was worth listening to. Could such arguments topple the moral authority claimed by those women who supported the vigilantes?

Perhaps Thomas King (James King’s brother and his replacement as editor of the Bulletin) thought about the importance of women’s reputation, both as individuals and as Vigilance Committee supporters, when he prepared the June 2 issue of the Bulletin. Certainly that issue marked a turning point in the debate over Belle Cora as well as in the involvement of women in the vigilante movement. On page 3, King inserted a brief notice:

BELLE CORA.–We have received about a score of communications regarding this woman. We think that no good purpose can be served at this time by publishing another word about her.

Clearly, with twenty letters on the table, this subject remained important to King’s readers, especially women. But King no longer felt it deserved attention. After June 2, the number of women’s letters in the Bulletin on any subject, not just prostitution, dropped precipitously (from five per week to fewer than one per week and then to fewer than one per month). Apparently, Thomas King had not only had enough of the debate over Belle Cora, but also of women’s letters on political subjects.

In fact, the vigilantes were already turning their attention sharply away from Belle Cora and prostitution in favor of ballot-box stuffing and political corruption. As Femina’s letter appeared, the vigilantes discovered a false-bottomed ballot box, which became the preeminent symbol of their cause, fortifying the vigilantes’ claim that political corruption was rampant in San Francisco. A focus on the ballot box, however, shifted the reform agenda to traditional politics, a sphere inhabited only by male voters and officeholders, and away from sexual politics where women had been both encouraged participants in and the objects of reform.

Although the number of letters declined markedly in the Bulletin (once the most likely place for women’s letters to appear), a few women continued to publish political letters in other city newspapers. Of these, only two mentioned prostitution, and they sounded a new, more tentative, note as if questioning women’s right to be heard on this subject. “Laura Lynch,” for example, argued that while women ought to act against prostitutes, they were constrained by their “natural feeling of delicacy, which recoils from such public notice.” Still, she was not prepared to be entirely silent. “I want my say, that’s all,” she wrote.

Laura Lynch may have had her say, but in the end, the Vigilance Committee did not adopt the view of reform put forth by women like Femina and Many Women of San Francisco. Perhaps the Vigilance Committee, needing broad masculine support, did not want to alienate men by attacking prostitution. But sexual politics also played a different role in the vigilantes’ search for legitimacy than it had for James King of William. Whereas King needed sexual politics to build a broad-based reform consensus (and to attract subscribers), the vigilantes staked their futures on claims to legitimacy grounded in republican political ideals. The right of revolution existed for citizens whose government was corrupt, not for people concerned about morality, the cost of post office boxes, or other seemingly tangential reforms. Thus for its own survival, the Vigilance Committee had to demonstrate that the “ladies” were on its side, but to keep the focus of the reform movement squarely on political corruption.

The Vigilance Committee of 1856 is usually remembered for its role in reshaping San Francisco politics, attacking political corruption, and bringing the People’s Party to power. However, it is worth recalling that the Vigilance Committee reshaped gender politics in San Francisco as well. For a short time, as middle-class American women arrived in the city, ready to become active in their new community, women had a prominent place in public political discourse in San Francisco. Their opinions were sought out, listened to, and debated by other women and men. When the Vigilance Committee came to power, women continued for a brief time to have a say in public political debate. But the vigilantes set the agenda, not only for the summer of 1856 but for years afterward, and that agenda was about politics in deeply masculine terms. Vigilantes, who excluded women from committee headquarters and increasingly ignored or refused to print women’s letters in the newspapers, created a political climate in San Francisco that was anything but conducive to women’s political activism. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that no woman suffrage organization existed in San Francisco until after the Civil War and the demise of the People’s Party.

Further Reading:

The letters referred to in this essay may be found in the following locations: Bailie Peyton in the Alta California, June 15, 1856; “Many Women of San Francisco,” in Daily Evening Bulletin, May 26, 1856; “Philothea,” in Daily Evening Bulletin, May 29, 1856; “Femina,” in Daily True Californian, May 29, 1856; “Gertrude,” in San Francisco Herald, June 4, 1856; Thomas King’s notice, in Daily Evening Bulletin, June 2, 1856; “Laura Lynch,” in Daily Evening Bulletin, June 13, 1856. Too many historians have written about the San Francisco Vigilance Committee to list them all here. For a thorough treatment of the Vigilance Committee and an excellent bibliographic essay, see Robert M. Senkewicz, S.J., Vigilantes in Gold Rush San Francisco (Stanford, 1985). For more on the political culture of San Francisco and the vigilantes, see Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (Berkeley, 1994). Other recent treatments that address the role of women include Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore, 1990); Roger W. Lotchin, San Francisco 1846-1856: From Hamlet to City (Urbana, 1974,1997); and Michelle Jolly, “Inventing the City: Gender and the Politics of Everyday Life in Gold-Rush San Francisco, 1848-1869” (Ph.D. diss., U.C. San Diego, 1998).

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

Michelle Jolly is an assistant professor of early American history at Sonoma State University. She is working on a project entitled, “The Price of Vigilance: Gender, Reform Politics, and the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856.”

There was a time when I thought that African-American literature did not exist before Frederick Douglass. Then, in an introductory African-American literature course as a domestic exchange student at Spelman College, I read several poems from Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). I confess I had no idea who she was before I read her name, poetry, or looked on the frontispiece of the collection. Over the course of our classroom discussion, I learned that she was an enslaved (later freed) young woman and the first black person to publish a book of poetry in America.

Even after learning this brief history, I paid very little attention to the poems themselves because I was far more concerned with the frontispiece. On the front cover of my Penguin edition, there appeared the body of Wheatley. Because she was, in fact, a black woman, her body confirmed her place as the “inaugural poet” of African-American literature. I stared at the engraved image of a thoughtful young African woman with pen in hand, bounded by the words, “Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston.” I read the words again only to return to her body. Because I could see her—the complexion of her etched skin, her pensive gaze, her fingers bent slightly around her quill pen, her body poised and seated at a desk—she was not simply the words that meandered around her engraved image. She was real.

More than the words of the prefatory testimonials, the biographic information, or even the presence of her poetry, the frontispiece made Wheatley real to me. Despite her master John Wheatley’s account of young Phillis’ life and the preface’s obligatory mention of her intention in writing—”[t]he following Poems were written originally for the Amusement of the Author, as they were products of her leisure Moments. She had no intention ever to have them published…”—I imagined her as she was pictured there: a servant fixed in time, sequestered and forced to write even though her master’s prefatory comments suggest that she, while enslaved, had moments of leisure.

Out of this picture, I constructed a story. It began in Africa with her declaration, “‘[t]was mercy brought me from my Pagan land/Taught my benighted soul to understand/That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too.” It continued through the infamous Middle Passage that brought her to America (though an explicit reference to this fact is absent from Wheatley’s writing) and into Boston where a precocious young woman fought against her oppression by writing verses—like, “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain/May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train”—with a subtle irony that masked her resistance. My story ended with a celebration of a new literary tradition, African-American literature. This story was a memorial to a past that I presumed was dependent upon the emergence of texts that represented the suffering and resistance of a racial body (just like one that appears in the frontispiece of Wheatley’s poems).

This is a satisfactory story if we are to assume that race is Wheatley’s ultimate concern; that literary traditions emerge from a single point of origin (a collective racial identity, in this case); that such traditions are linear and therefore move seamlessly from one author to the next (for example, Phillis Wheatley gives rise to Frederick Douglass and then to Langston Hughes and on to Toni Morrison). Its simple narrative mobilizes a history, which understands race as a collective way of behaving that is loosely tied to a collective history of suffering. It is a story where the idea of race emerges out of a belief that privileges great suffering (for example, the physical privations of slavery) and ties it to “real” accounts of the “African-American experience” or “authentic” ways of behaving and acting black. Wheatley’s suffering inaugurates this literary tradition, this collective way of behaving, which is later marked by stories of suffering or resistance and heroic accounts of overcoming (see of course Frederick Douglass).

The assumptions that foreground this story are right in part. It is certainly the case that Wheatley is important to the history of African-American literature. Just as it seems plausible that Wheatley resisted her adverse circumstances, it also seems true that Wheatley experienced suffering, as evidenced by her testimonial:

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?…
Such, such was my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway.

In this poem “To the Earl of Dartmouth,” Wheatley offers her readers a reconstructed memory—one of the few that appears in her poetry—that recalls her loss and her father’s suffering. Wheatley turns this memory into a “teachable moment,” by professing the origins of her desire for freedom; she recalls the “cruel fate” that snatched her from Africa and a past she no longer remembers. Wheatley, by way of her suffering, seeks to garner the attention of her audience to create a sympathetic connection with them.

But this story is too simple and ignores an obvious fact. Though marked by the racialized words (“African,” “Black,” or “Negro”) of the title page, eighteenth-century African-American authors rarely discuss what it means to be part of a cohesive racialized community. Moreover, when what could be classified as racial subjectivity—namely, an identification with those racial markers—appears in this literature, it is not tied solely to a collective bodily suffering.

Let’s consider for example the case of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African prince, former slave and friend of the Huntingdon Methodist Connection, the religious network of the Countess of Huntingdon Selina Hastings that included famed itinerant minister George Whitefield, Phillis Wheatley and several other notable anglophone black writers, such as the multifaceted Olaudah Equiano, and minister John Marrant. In his A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, Written by Himself (1774), Gronniosaw, after observing his master read, mimes the action he sees. But what he sees is not the practice of reading but rather the book talking directly to his master. He explains,

I open’d [the book] …in great hope that it would say something to me; but was very sorry and greatly disappointed when I found it would not speak, this thought immediately presented itself to me, that every body and every thing despised me because I was Black.

Gronniosaw sees his blackness for the first time because he is unable to hear the religious text (a prayer book) that he hopes would speak to him.

Though this failed dialogue might be read as a part of a racialized moment of becoming, he is not speaking of an embodied racial identity. What Gronniosaw actually does is admit to his sinfulness (albeit problematically tied to the word “black”) in a manner similar to St. John in Revelations 5 who writes of a book that is to be opened and read by those who are worthy. The worthy are called forth yet “no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon” (Rev. 5:4). Because Gronniosaw is a sinner like the unworthy of St. John’s story, he is unable to access the Word and to hear it as true believers can and do. Gronniosaw uses this encounter with the book, quite often referred to as the “talking book,” to criticize those who do not have a proper relationship with the Word of God. This “talking book” event appears with revision repeatedly in early African-American literature in the narratives of John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and John Jea. Much of the critical discussion of this scene focuses on the act of reading and by implication the desire to read even though in each version, a verbal conversation is expected between the book and “reader.” The result of this overemphasis on book reading and learning is a neglect of the religious intention of the author—to talk to and hear the Word of God.

As in the case of Gronniosaw, Wheatley does not write about race as a collective and embodied experience. As my fellow students observed in that introductory African-American literature course, Wheatley’s poetry mimes the poetic forms of dead white men like Alexander Pope and John Milton. Because her poetry lacks a historical sense of race that is fixed across time and geography, my peers argued that her mimicry of these men confirms that she was not “black” enough to be considered culturally important. When they searched for some reference to an acute desire for freedom from enslavement (the marker of authentic, enslaved black identity) as in the case of Frederick Douglass, they came up short. Wheatley does not narrate her plan to escape to freedom even though she does admit to a desire for freedom in both her poem, “To the Earl of Dartmouth” and in her letter to Samson Occom. Instead, she celebrates her enslavement because of the distance it creates between the “benighted” country of her birth and the redemptive nature of her American present (see “On Being Brought from Africa to America”).

Phillis Wheatley participates in and documents “something else,” as Ralph Ellison writes, “something subjective, willful and complexly and compellingly human.” When Ellison speaks of this “something else” in his essay, A Very Stern Discipline, he attempts to counter the literary emphases upon the “real,” the grit, the suffering of black life. Though he is unable to name this “something else,” Ellison admits there is a complexity that contrasts or exists alongside the simple sociological realities of twentieth-century black living, marked by the existence of suffering and that which he describes as “ruggedness,” “hardship,” and “poverty.” Ellison does not aim to say that the human (or in particular African-American) experience is without suffering. Rather, his choice of phrasing, “something else,” names an alternate possibility—in this case the possibility that Phillis Wheatley’s historical value is not tied to her raced body. Moreover, tradition-making is not her sole legacy. It begs the questions: How do we, at present, understand Phillis Wheatley if she is not to be remembered as a “first”? Who is Phillis Wheatley if her racial body—as it appears thoughtfully and writerly in the frontispiece—is not her single-minded concern?

What follows is my interrogation of these questions in Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral and letters. Though she is often touted as the first to jump-start the African-American literary tradition, Wheatley’s poetry actually confronts the limits of this idea because it lacks an interest in a racialized subjectivity. Her poems challenge the story that privileges her racial body and the scholarly expectation that race should operate as a governing principle in African-American literature. Her position as “first” is irrelevant when her writing is placed within the many communities that she wrote for, communities that included enslaved, Christian, Methodist, English, or free African populations. Wheatley inhabited multiple “writing communities,” to borrow a term coined by literary scholar Katherine Clay Bassard. Wheatley’s eighteenth-century writing communities created an imagined space, much like the cyberspace of today’s e-mails, text messages and Facebook, within which invention and conversation were possible. Such communities are structured by the bonds created through written exchange. Within the space of these written communities, networks are formed; ideas are discussed and traded; friends can talk amongst themselves. These networks are not based upon bodies or even experienced through bodies but instead by way of the words on the page or in a letter or a poem.

The result is what Bassard describes as a “rhetorical meeting place”—the site of these imaginary conversations—wherein Wheatley converses in writing with those who allow her to create and invent a self. There, she lays claim to the processes of renegotiation and revision out of which her intertextual communities emerge. Put differently, she is the author of this space. She not only writes poems and letters but also crafts an ideal self that is not bound to or by her body. At the site of this “rhetorical meeting place,” there is a body that does not matter. Therefore, it is not a necessary antecedent to the development of African-American literature. There is also textual revision and dialogue. Words, phrases, passages lifted out of other texts, particularly the Bible, enter into conversation and merge into her writing. The result is not mimicry but rather marks the boundaries of this writerly space and exchange.

No longer bound to a black body, an explicitly African body in this writing space, there is “something else” that matters more to Wheatley. It is her Christian faith. Wheatley uses her faith to counter the limits of her body: its flaws (“some view our sable race with scornful eye,/ Their colour is a diabolic die;”) its tendency towards sin and earthly pleasures (“Let us be mindful of our high calling, continually on our guard, lest our treacherous hearts/Should give our adversary an advantage over us”); and its sickliness (namely, asthma and consumption). The language of Christianity offers Wheatley a way to imagine a self that transcends the fleshly weakness of her body. This transcendence is not out of the body. Instead, it takes places inwardly. There, in the interior space of her heart, Wheatley experiences a transformation each time she opens this self to God. When she speaks of God and praises his name, Wheatley accepts the indwelling Spirit and admits to her desire to converse and fellowship with God. For Wheatley, desire is a religious imperative through which she is called to conversion, and subsequently, faith. The satisfying result of this desire is a pleasure—marked by her repeated use of the words “joy,” “enrapture,” “passion,” and “happy” that releases her completely from the confines of her body into a union with God.

In a July 19 1772 letter to her friend and fellow slave Obour Tanner, Wheatley speaks of the “poor state of health” that has claimed her body throughout much of the winter and spring. She asks Tanner to pray for her and offers the following prayer for herself,

While my outward man languishes under weakness and pa[in], may the inward be refresh’d and Strengthened more abundantly by him who declar’d from heaven that his strength was made perfect in weakness!

Wheatley calls upon Tanner to pray with and for her weak body. With Tanner, she enters into a rhetorical meeting place that begins a dialogue of fellowship with a friend that gives her body the strength to call upon God. By way of this prayer, Wheatley makes possible a mutual exchange between herself and God. When writing and speaking of God, Wheatley becomes present with God; there, she admits to her weakness and ties it to not only the pains of her illness but also to the “outward man” that is bound by the fallibility of the flesh.

Though Wheatley’s body languishes in pain and weakness, her prayer is not directed toward her flesh. Instead, Wheatley juxtaposes her weak and sickly body against an unnamed inward self, a self that can enter into dialogue with God, Tanner, and an imagined fellowship. Revising the language from St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, Wheatley calls attention to the ways in which this unnamed inward self might be strengthened—namely by receiving the Spirit (that which is eternal) inwardly through her senses of touch, smell and sight. She invokes 2 Corinthians 4:16 where Paul writes, “but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” Wheatley’s declaration, “his strength was made perfect in weakness,” borrows the wording of 2 Corinthians 12:9 and anticipates Paul’s charge to “take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, I am strong.” Wheatley strategically selects these passages for revision because they offer her a framework within which to strengthen this inward self that is renewed by the weakness of the flesh. That is to say, her personhood, or as she describes it her “outward man,” no longer matters because there is this interiority, this inward self with whom she can feel strengthened by God.

When Wheatley speaks of this inward self, she describes a space that is created by what she calls the “saving change”—that is, religious conversion. The “saving change” names the change of heart that occurs at the site of this inward self. This interiority possesses the open heart required to welcome the Holy Spirit. It is what Wheatley speaks of when she writes to John Thornton on December 1, 1773:

Therefor disdain not to be called the Father of Humble Africans and Indians; though despis’d on earth on account of our color, we have this Consolation, if he enables us to deserve it. ‘That God dwells in a humble & contrite heart.’

Once again, Wheatley views her outward man (African and “despis’d on earth on account of [its] color”) as weak, the opposite of the “humble & contrite heart” wherein God dwells. Despite the weakness implied by her skin color, she remains confident in the quality of her inward self. Therefore, she aligns her inward self with those who deserve God’s consolation—namely, the heart that is properly opened to receive his Spirit.

Her open heart appears again when she writes to Tanner, “[h]appy were it for us if we could arrive to that evangelical Repentance, and the true holiness of heart which you mention.” What she celebrates in this exchange is the “saving change” which produces the true holiness of heart. She understands that it is a fleeting sentiment that must be cultivated properly. Her attention to this interior and her allusion to its proper cultivation recall the words of Whitefield, who in his sermon The Indwelling of the Spirit, Common Privilege to all Believers, begs the question—”[b]ut unless Men have Eyes which see not, and Ears which hear not, how can they read the latter Part of the Text, and not confess the Holy Spirit, in another Sense, which is the common Privilege of all Believers, even to the End of the World?”

When Whitefield poses this question, he enjoins his reader or audience to make way to receive the Word of God into his heart. Though eyes and ears are often attached to bodies, what he describes is not a body but rather an ability to sense, namely hear and see, properly. It is what Wheatley imagines in her poem “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” when she writes, “Arise, my soul, upon enraptured wings arise/To praise the monarch of the earth and skies.” So enthused, she leaves her body in order to take up with her soul. Because her soul knows no bounds, it rises “upon enraptured wings” and celebrates God by hearing and seeing the works of providence. The world, through which her soul soars, is rife with wondrous sights—”morning glows with rosy charms”—and sounds—of “the winds and surging tides.” If the believer possesses the proper feelings (seeing eyes and hearing ears), she can then claim that she is a Christian who, as Whitefield explains, “in the proper Sense of the Word, must be an Enthusiast—That is, must be inspired of God, or have God in him.” Whitefield offers a charge—the Christian “must be inspired of God, or have God in him”—and enjoins his listeners to welcome the Spirit inwardly; the result, of course, of this inward dwelling of the Spirit, is a “new birth.”

As a faithful follower, Wheatley experiences this “new birth.” In his sermon The Marks of the New Birth, Whitefield outlines the ways in which an individual can recognize this inward regeneration. There are five “scripture marks”—praying and supplicating, not committing sin, conquest over the world, loving one another, and loving one’s enemies—that not only identify the conversion experience but also acknowledge the inward presence of the Holy Spirit. This birthing process can only occur when an individual accepts God inwardly. Whereas Whitefield emphasizes the importance of these acts (to pray, to commit no sin, to love), Wheatley identifies the feelings that result from these acts. She goes one step further and admits to the conversation that must occur between her inward self and God in order to feel so deeply. Thus Wheatley, reborn in spirit, rids herself of the limitations of her outward body. She nurtures the interiority wherein she feels the pleasure inspired by the presence of the Spirit. This pleasure confirms that Wheatley is one of the “[f]ollowers [who] might be united to him [God] by his Holy Spirit, by as real, vital, and mystical an Union as there is between Jesus Christand the Father.”

In an October 30, 1773, letter to Tanner, Wheatley imagines this union: “Your Reflections on the sufferings of the Son of God, & the inestimable price of our immortal Souls, Plainly dem[on]strate the sensations of a Soul united to Jesus.” Though it is uncertain what Tanner has said in her letter, Wheatley’s response commends Tanner’s union to Christ. When she speaks of these sensations, she alludes to the sensory, the inward, means by which this union manifests itself. The soul united to Jesus is one that has experienced the “new birth” and has established the religious dialogue between the inward self and God. It understands “[w]hat a blessed Source of consolation that our greatest friend is an immortal God whose friendship is invariable!”

Wheatley examines the invariability of God’s friendship in a curious confrontation between the allegorical figures, the immortal Love (see 1 John 4:8) and Reason, in her poem, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence.” The confrontation begins with a question from Love to Reason: “Say, mighty pow’r, how long shall strife prevail/And with its murmurs load the whisp’ring gale?.” Love, imagined as God, berates Reason, the mortal voice, for her failure to recognize Love’s divinity and her creative power. Love demands that Reason remember her power to regenerate and share herself with every thing: “Refer the cause to Recollection’s shrine,/Who loud proclaims my origin divine,/The cause whence heav’n and earth began to be,/And is not man immortaliz’d by me?” These questions articulate a desire to reunite with Reason to transcend the strife between Love and Reason. By asking her to remember God, Love persuades Reason to reinstate this “invariable” friendship. Reason is not concerned with her body and its union with God; instead, Reason speaks of her feeling and the means by which this feeling enthuses her inwardly. What results from this reunion is that Reason is “enraptur’d.” She feels the “Resistless beauty which thy [Love’s] smile reveals.” Reason feels this beauty because she can speak again to God; this allegorical conversation—this dialogue of feeling and this communal exchange—pantomimes the means by which the Spirit dwells inwardly.

Reason is changed yet again with the return of Love not only by this conversation but also the embrace that finalizes their confrontation. Reason’s words are “ardent” when she speaks and she burns at the charms of Love when she finally “clasp’d the blooming goddess in her arms.” The burn that Wheatley imagines in this exchange is both pleasurable and inspired by a conversion that takes place. When Reason “clasp’d” Love, she accepts Love inwardly and feels her as this burning desire. Together, they share their thoughts on the works of Love’s providence, which are heard as “Nature’s constant voice” and seen as the sun rises and the “eve rejoices.” This imagined conversation mimes the process of inward regeneration that results from the “new birth.” Wheatley imagines the inward self as it is transformed and reborn in Love and Reason. She captures the ways in which both converse in order to share deeply the experiences of the other. What she documents is an emergent community that not only represents an important textual moment but also her relationship to Tanner and the larger writing communities of which she is a part. Wheatley proffers a religious literacy wherein a true believer—one who possesses an open heart where Love and Reason coexist—can receive the Spirit and, subsequently, speak of the pleasure of this union.

Thus, what Wheatley documents in this exchange and, more generally, in her letters, is the journey of the inward self, united to God by a sincere faith. She makes clear that cultivation of a proper inner life is critically important to the experience of a good Christian. Her fellowship with Tanner, Thornton, Whitefield and others memorializes the actualization of her desire to converse with God and to experience the pleasure of this exchange. Her real and poetic descriptions of this relationship offer her readers a sense of her interior life—a life that supersedes a concern for her race. So strengthened, Wheatley divorces her weak fleshly body from the experiences of this inward self who delights in and is transformed by way of sharing deeply with God. Wheatley not only shares deeply with God but also makes her inward self, her interiority, accessible to a community of readers with whom she marks the site of those feelings (joy and pleasure) that result from her satisfied desire to praise God within a fellowship of believers. Wheatley leaves a legacy in print of this inward change that transforms her self and the way that we, as readers, remember her.

I wrote the earliest version of this essay as a response to my undergraduate students’ disdain for early African-American literature. After reading selections from Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative, my students were surprised and disappointed by what they described as complacency. They repeatedly questioned Equiano’s desire to readily accept his enslavement, and criticized his (mis)representation of a slave’s experience. Without the obvious brutality and violence that they had observed in Douglass’ Narrative and the Roots mini-series, Equiano represented an eighteenth-century “sellout,” a prototype for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom whose lack of resistance stripped him of the African identity that marks the full title of his narrative. It was clear that what my students wanted and expected to read were autobiographical accounts of the “real black history;” here, “real” invokes the modern-day colloquialism, “keeping it real.” To “keep it real” signifies the cultural practices, the ways of behaving, the performance of blackness that have come to inform my students’ understanding of race. Though they acknowledged that race is socially constructed, what they wanted was writing that “keeps it real”—that is, racially authentic, really “black.” Put differently, my students wanted texts which reinforced the misinformed idea, criticized by Ellison long ago, that “unrelieved suffering is the only ‘real’ Negro experience.” As the comedian Dave Chappelle observes in his comic skits, titled “When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong,”—that poke fun at the lives of men and women who decide to “keep it real” and suffer tragic consequences—keeping it real can and does often go wrong.

As I recalled their emphases on the “real black history” and subsequent criticisms of Equiano, Wheatley, and their contemporaries, I realized that the present essay is not merely a response to my students. It is not simply a nostalgic account of my earliest encounters with early African-American literature. Rather it is story about reading itself. For this reason, it begins with a misreading, an expectation that Phillis Wheatley and her literary successors must and will conform to my expectations for her legacy. Whereas my current students assume that Equiano and Wheatley are “sell-outs,” I, while in college, imagined a version of Wheatley that lived up to what I understood to be her legacy. Just like my students, I believed that her legacy was the very idea of black identity.

What a reconsideration of Wheatley reveals, as this story continues, is the extent to which she offers us (as her readers) a way to read her writing and imagine her legacy. Reading, in this instance, is not tied to an ability to pronounce sounds and identify letters and words. Rather, Wheatley asks her readers to adopt the religious literacy that makes salvation possible. It is inward transformation, a change of heart that is the result of her relationship to God. This change connects Wheatley (and as a consequence, her readers) to expansive writing and religious communities that intersect in the textual spaces of itinerant ministers, John Marrant and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, merchant and philanthropist John Thornton, the Countess of Huntingdon and many others. Out of this textual space, she creates and participates in a “rhetorical meeting place.” There, she writes a life, a legacy, which celebrates the “saving change,” the salvation that allows her to feel the pleasures of a freedom in God. What she experiences there is a pleasure that is the result of her satisfied desire to share deeply with God. Her writing documents this dialogue and the pleasurable experiences produced as the Spirit converses with her inward self. This interiority allows Wheatley to celebrate her self just as it also allows her to praise her God.

To imagine Wheatley as a receptacle for the pleasures of faith introduces new questions into scholarly and classroom discussions on this early period. Without knowing it, of course, Wheatley seems to write against the assumptions that begin this essay. In doing so, she crafts a way of being that makes possible the very notion of pleasure in the lives of eighteenth-century black women. If her faith offers her this type of experience, it admits to the fact that there is “something else” that willingly admits to the humanity of black life. When she writes,

“…yet I hope I should willingly Submit to Servitude to be free in Christ.—But since it is thus—Let me be a Servant of Christ and that is the most perfect freedom,”

Wheatley shares with us the way she would like to be remembered—as a servant of Christ. She admits to the good feeling that accompanies this freedom to worship.

Further reading

For Phillis Wheatley’s poems, see Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) edited by Vincent Carretta (New York, 2001). For writings by black authors that are both contemporaneous with Wheatley and members of the trans-Atlantic Huntingdon Methodist Connection, see Vincent Carretta’s Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the 18th Century (Lexington, 1996). On Wheatley and the origins of a black women’s “writing community,” see Katherine Clay Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations (Princeton, 1999). Henry Louis Gates Jr. first coins the term “the talking book” in his introduction to the anthology Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment, 1772-1815 (Washington, D.C., 1998) and Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literature (New York, 1988). For a well-articulated counter argument to Gates’s emphases on literacy and the “talking book,” see Frances Smith Foster’s article “Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture,” American Literary History 17.4 (Winter 2005): 714-740. See also Smith Foster’s article “Genealogies of Our Concerns, Early (African) American Print Culture, and Transcending Tough Times,” American Literary History 22.2 (Summer 2010): 368-380. For a discussion of the importance of the interiority (rather than the body) in early American literature, see Jordan Alexander Stein’s article, “Mary Rowlandson’s Hunger and the Historiography of Sexuality” American Literature 81.3 (September 2009): 469-495.

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

This labor note was created for Modern Times, a planned community founded in 1851 by Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrew, based on the idea of individual sovereignty. Like other utopian communities founded by Warren, the settlement used labor notes that enabled residents to trade their labor for the labor of their neighbors in a regulated system or through a time store, a shop run by Warren himself. The project sought to replace other forms of currency as part of Modern Times’ remaking of interpersonal economic relations. The community was located on ninety acres of land on Long Island about forty miles from New York City and its population had nearly peaked at about 150 people when this note was printed in 1857. Modern Times struggled through the Civil War years and eventually disbanded as a planned settlement, reincorporating as the town of Brentwood in 1864.

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[Top text “Not Transferable”] It was important to Josiah Warren that labor notes not just function as replacement bank notes, but rather tie each individual’s labor to the exchange. He wanted to ensure that unintended parties could not get possession of the note to exploit someone else’s labor and what he called their “right of sovereignty.” Warren also wrote that making the notes useful only to the person trading their labor was one way of getting the parties involved to contemplate their own labor decisions and their value. This was why he printed notes unsigned and only filled them in at the time of exchange. Warren specifically wanted to make sure that only those individuals would receive notes who “understand and appreciate them.” Recognizing that there would be objections to the labor note project, Warren observed that during the initial stages of circulation in any of the time stores he founded that making the notes not transferable would prevent someone from obtaining a note to merely “make trouble and embarrass the operations.” There was a good legal reason for including such a disclaimer; it preempted the argument that Warren was circulating the labor notes as unregulated, illegal shinplasters—private, small denomination currency issues banned in several states. Another strategic decision in the design of the note might have been to place their endorsements on the face, rather than on the reverse, like most bank notes of the time. Labor notes promise of transparency meant that all relevant information; text, imagery, and signatures all appeared up front, while the back of the note was blank.

[Top Text “Limit of Issue 100 Hours”] Each individual that issued labor notes at Modern Times was meant to have total control over his or her labor and therefore total control over the amount of their labor that they were willing to assign to the labor notes. Most participants limited their issues to 100 hours, but the space was left blank to be filled in by hand, so that individuals could choose a limit. Such control over one’s own labor was an important part of the community’s version of individualistic utopia. Moncure Daniel Conway, who visited Modern Times in the 1850s, was told that it was founded “on the principle that each person shall mind his or her own business.” This seemed to be true for both spatial and commercial senses of the phrase “business”. Warren added that the community principle was to leave “every individual at all times at liberty to dispose of his or her person, time, and property in any manner in which his or her own feelings or judgment may dictate.” The idea of retaining personal authority over business and labor decisions also informed a contemporary English analysis of Warren’s magnum opus, Equitable Commerce that argued that one of the unique features of the labor note system is that “being based on individual credit it makes every man his own banker.” While it is hard to imagine Josiah Warren approving of being labeled a banker, given his distrust of banks and his belief that they prized making money from shuffling paper over earning money through productive labor, he would have appreciated the notion of each labor note recipient as master of their own economy.

[Text “1857”] Modern Times was founded in 1851 by Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrew as a planned community based on the idea of individual sovereignty. It was located on ninety acres of land on Long Island about 40 miles from New York City and had a population of about 150 people in 1857, near its peak. The community struggled through the Civil War years and eventually disbanded as a planned settlement, reincorporating as the town of Brentwood in 1864.

[Note made out to J. Warren for Two Hours Labor in Sign Painting or 16 Pounds of Corn: Or with the consent of the holder 20 cents] Modern Times was not self-sufficient and needed to obtain goods from the outside world to sell in the community’s time store (Warren’s shop based on labor for labor pricing), so residents had to calculate prices and pay for goods with a hybrid currency. While bank notes or specie paid for the price of an item, labor notes covered the payment of the surcharge to the store proprietor for their time making the sale. Away from the time store, Modern Times inhabitants wrote and traded labor for labor notes for any goods or services they wanted just as they would have any other paper money (with the exception of its being backed by labor or corn and not specie). However, the notes did not seem to have any life outside of the community and functioned only because residents that had already bought into the idea of living at Modern Times had confidence in the equitable commerce idea and the promise of each other’s future labor. Warren wanted to make sure that everyone could compare the price of their labor to everyone else’s labor and explained that corn worked extremely well as “the basis of a circulating medium” because “everybody who has land can raise it,” “it will keep, of uniform quality, from year to year,” and “it is too bulky to be stolen or secretly embezzeled (sic).” The inclusion, albeit in small print, of a cash option for the labor note spoke both to Warren’s desire for people to have options when accepting a labor note and to the realities of life at Modern Times. More options were also needed in the area, because even bank notes did not always trade easily in that part of Long Island. Especially during the years surrounding the banking problems associated with the financial Panic of 1857, bank notes did not circulate at face value in the area and only traded at a discount when they traded at all. Such flexibility was anticipated by William Pare in his 1856 review of Modern Times. He wrote that one of the advantages of the way that that labor notes presented their value was that it “represents an ascertained and definite amount of labour or property, which ordinary money does not.”

[Note signed by Charles A. Codman, Manufacturer of Paper Boxes for Two hours of sign painting] Charles A. Codman worked at “sign and decorative painting,” before moving to Modern Times with his wife Ada in 1857 and spending the next fifty four years as a resident. In the 1860 census Codman and cabinetmaker William U. Dame appear as paper boxmakers, but it is unclear how much work they ever accomplished in this area. No large-scale factory existed at Modern Times; the plans for one to make boxes may have been curtailed by the financial Panic of 1857.

[Note printed by J. Warren] In addition to other roles that Josiah Warren performed as one of the founders of Modern Times, he spent much of his time writing and printing commentary about the equity movement and his theories on labor for labor. From Long Island, he published Periodical Letter on the Principles and Progress of the Equity Movement between 1854-1858, as well as short pamphlets on “Positions Defined” and “Modern Education.” Warren also appears in the 1860 census as a lithographer.

[Top Center quote “The most disagreeable labor is entitled to the highest compensation”] This quote was not included on the earliest versions of Josiah Warren’s labor notes and reflected the addition of a Fourierist component to Warren’s figuring of transparent labor exchange value by ensuring a more favorable rate for harder or dirtier work. French philosopher Charles Fourier’s plans called for reorganizing society to eliminate poverty by creating independent, self-contained utopian “phalanxes” (ideally of exactly 1620 inhabitants each) where workers would labor according to their interests and be rewarded for their contributions to the community. Warren assimilated some Fourierist notions of compensation from the writings of Albert Brisbane, Fourierism most outspoken messenger in America after Fourier’s death in 1837. Brisbane’s utopian communal plan included a system for inversely rewarding dividends for labor based on three classes of industry: Necessity, Usefulness, and Attractiveness. Warren also later published a short pamphlet with the title The Principle of Equivalents. The Most Disagreeable Labor Entitled to the Highest Compensation in 1865. The pamphlet was even adapted for a foreign audience a few years later by A.C. Cudden, one of Warren’s English followers. Interestingly, the Fourierist North American Phalanx in New Jersey (1843-1855) and the Brook Farm community in Massachusetts during their phalanx phase (1844-1846), both printed small denomination paper money for internal use, so like at Warren’s utopian communities, the desire to break away from the industrializing American economy did not seem to come with a full reject of all of the conventions of trade and currency.

[Lower Right Corner Clock Image] Warren wrote in his private journal about clocks, using an extended metaphor to declare that “Society is the clock; individual liberty is the pendulum.” He explained this relationship by noting: “we must have the pendulum, and that pendulum must be in proportion to the other parts, or else although the machine would go, it would not be a clock. It would not measure time, and although a little variation in its length from the true proportion would be to surrender ‘only a portion’ of right, yet at the end of the year the machine for all purposes intended, would be worse than no clock.” Nineteenth century utopian thinkers confronted the delicate balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the society and responded with a variety of answers. Warren’s program as enacted at Modern Times and his other communities shifted that balance as far as they could toward individual liberty and authority. While he acknowledged in his clock metaphor the clear link between society and the individual, he believed that it was the individual (as pendulum) that regulated the progress of society (the clock) and not the other way around. It also demonstrates that even for utopian communalists like Warren, the attempt to break free of the growing interconnected nature of industrial America’s market relations was not a simple project. It should be noted that the relationship of time to money was certainly not new to Warren; while few antebellum bank notes contained images of clocks, the Fugio cent, supposedly designed by Benjamin Franklin for the Continental Congress in 1787 featured an image of a sun over a sundial with the caption “Fugio,” Latin for I flee or hasten. Below the sundial were the words, “Mind Your Business.” Whether or not Warren was aware of the older coin, given Modern Times’ slogan of championing individual liberty and explicit call for everyone to mind their own business, the clock imagery seemed fitting.

[Left side top number 16 and left side bottom number 20] The numbers, mirroring the numerical values on a standard bank note of the era, showed exactly how much corn or potential cash the labor note was worth (other notes featured smaller amounts). For Warren it was necessary to have the numbers clearly printed on the note, so all of the parties involved in the transactions could be clear about the terms of the negotiation from the outset. He wrote that “all Labour is valued by the Time employed in it,”but was also insistent that assigning values for such labor was transparent, so that there were no questions of manipulation or fraud in the system. He noted that the “estimates of time cost, of articles having been obtained from those whose business it is to produce them, are always exposed to view, so that it may be readily ascertained, at what rate any article will be given and received.” Within this system of fair labor exchange, Warren believed, paper money was particularly useful because if a person deposited an item for sale, but did not want to make an equal withdrawal at the same time, they could receive “a Labour Note for the amount; with this note he will draw out articles, or obtain the labour of the keeper [of the store], whenever he may wish to do so.” This also helped facilitate trade with those who wanted to patronize the store at Modern Times, but did not have any labor to deposit for sale. Like every other transparent step in the process, Warren declared that “the keeper exhibits the bills of all his purchasers to public view so that the cost of every article may be known to all.”

[Left side Commerce Image] The vignette features a woman sitting on pile of crates and barrels with a transport ship in the distance and is meant to represent Commerce. The issue of rationalizing commerce and making it just preoccupied Josiah Warren, who wrote extensively on the subject in newspapers, pamphlets, and most notably the book seen as the main text on his political philosophy: Equitable Commerce: A New Development of Principles as Substitutes for Laws and Governments, for the Harmonious Adjustment and Regulation of the Pecuniary, Intellectual, and Moral Intercourse of Mankind Proposed as Elements of New Society. The first edition was published in 1846, with others following in 1849, 1852, 1869, and 1875. Warren’s notion of Equitable Commerce simply meant that labor should be properly respected and goods and services in the community should be traded at cost, eliminating any of the problems that arise from profit seeking, speculation, usury, or greed. Labor notes played a vital role in this plan because of their potential to replace money and make transactions more transparent and fair.

[Upper Right Atlas Image] While the vignette of Atlas holding the globe often symbolizes strength, constancy, and justice, another meaning of the image is related to production. Related to the burden that Atlas endures, he can be seen as a metaphor for the most productive segments of the population. It is also interesting here to think about the visual evolution of Warren’s notes from his initial attempts at labor for labor currency in Cincinnati in 1827 to this example from Modern Times thirty years later. The very first notes seem to be all text, while examples from the 1840s added a vignette of a blindfolded female statue holding scales and labeled “Justice.” The inclusion of the Atlas vignette and the one of Commerce on left side of the 1857 Modern Times note shows both a growing visual sophistication and more acceptance of the contemporary bank note style which usually featured vignettes and numbers on either side with text and a central vignette in the middle.

Further Reading:

The best modern treatment of Modern Times is Roger Wunderlich’s Low Living and High Thinking at Modern Times, New York (Syracuse, 1992); on Warren himself, see William Bailie’s Josiah Warren, the First American Anarchist (Boston, 1906). Albert Brisbane’s Association: or, A Concise Exposition of the Practical Part of Fourier’s Social Science (New York, 1843) provides a window to nineteenth-century communitarian thought. Warren laid out his own ideas in Equitable Commerce: A New Development of Principles as Substitutes for Laws and Governments, for the Harmonious Adjustment and Regulation of the Pecuniary, Intellectual, and Moral Intercourse of Mankind Proposed as Elements of New Society (New York, 1852) and True Civilization an Immediate Necessity, and the Last Ground of Hope for Mankind (Boston, 1863).

nb: In its original incarnation, this article featured an image of the note with roll-over textual explanations supported by qtip2 and jquery.maphilight.

This article originally appeared in issue 13.1 (October, 2012).

Joshua R. Greenberg is associate professor of history at Bridgewater State University. He is the author of Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840 (2009). His current work examines how early nineteenth-century Americans understood and used paper money.

Unreconstructed Southern Nationalism

Rigdon McCoy McIntosh, born in the trans-Appalachian Southwest, served in two capacities in the service of the Confederate Army. As a soldier, he was among the forces that defended Richmond, Va., and engaged in several key battles in its vicinity. However, he also served as music master and composer of religious music for various occasions while in camp. In contrast to many Southern sacred composers, McIntosh did not write in the more well-known Southern folk-based style of psalmody associated with a form of musical notation called shape-note music. Trained by the Everett brothers, who themselves had studied under Boston reform musician Lowell Mason, he composed psalm and hymn tunes, and extended sacred works that followed the orthodox rules of harmony, a style of music idealized among the genteel classes and polite society.

Unique to sacred music publications in the South, McIntosh’s post-bellum publication Tabor: or the Richmond Collection of Sacred Music (1867) constituted a statement of Southern nationalism, although published belatedly in a Reconstruction-era South in the Confederacy’s most famous former capital city. In this publication, McIntosh invented single-handedly a new artistic medium for the forum for and expression of sacred music. The radicalness of McIntosh’s compilation has been completely overlooked as a result of a number of factors. He embraced theoretically correct harmony, promoted the use of standard musical notation, and was published after the end of the Civil War. Printed in a post-bellum Reconstruction-era South, its author, though born in southern Tennessee, embraced the genteel style of Northern reformers and Southern elites spearheaded by notable Northern musicians such as Lowell Mason, composer of the tune Bethany, commonly known as “Nearer my God to thee.”

McIntosh’s period of professional activity remains between two important periods of Southern sacred music: antebellum evangelical social singing and Southern gospel. Even though he was one of the earliest native-born Southern composers to write Sunday School-style hymnody and Southern gospel music, much of his work appeared too early to be considered directly related to the later gospel music industry. As a result of its notational method and musical style, McIntosh’s Tabor has remained outside the scholarly delineations of Southern-ness. It simply does not fit within current accepted notions of Southern identity. Despite its misunderstood status, McIntosh’s compilation constitutes a remarkable symbiosis of sacred music and secular politics. Through it, he invented a new genre proclaiming formal Southern nationalism, albeit in a post-Civil War environment, in the Confederacy’s former capital.

Rigdon McCoy McIntosh

Rigdon McCoy McIntosh was born in Maury County, Tenn., in 1836. An educated man, he found employment first as a schoolteacher in Triana, Ala., after graduating from Jackson College in Columbia, Tenn. He served in this capacity until the late 1850s when McIntosh met Leonard C. Everett (1818-1867) and his brother Asa Brooks Everett (1828-1875) on one of their teaching circuits throughout Tennessee and the Deep South. The Everetts promoted an elitist style of music that set the brothers apart from other local singing teachers and choir leaders. Falling under their sway, McIntosh quit his job and decided to devote his life to the practice of sacred music.

Rather than teaching, performing, and composing pieces in a traditional style of choral music favored by evangelicals and other enthusiastic denominations where the tenor or high male voice has the melody, the Everetts embraced the modish soprano-led form of four-part choral music identified both with progressive New Englanders, as well as Episcopalian and Catholic musicians in Baltimore and Philadelphia. The tenor-led style was also commonly associated with a form of musical notation called shape-note notation, where the note heads are given different shapes to indicate a note’s place within the solfege. In contrast, the Everetts promoted standard musical notation, disavowing notational shortcuts. Their musical taste reflected their upbringing. Raised in Virginia, the Everett brothers studied in Boston. Commencing their professional careers in the South, they brought to the rural South the most fashionable mode of sacred music then embraced among liturgical churches and a few Methodists and Presbyterians.

Through his exposure to the Everetts, McIntosh championed the soprano-led ensemble, softer singing style, proper enunciation, and a more affected style of performance characteristic of both liturgical-based denominations such as Episcopalians, Catholics, and Lutherans, as well as members of polite society. This style of music was considered scientific by nineteenth-century Americans because it employed a rigorous system of rules learned only through detailed study. Although prized as an ideal by the more genteel classes, this style of music in the twentieth century became a pariah because it appeared to eschew all of the features associated with twentieth-century American ideals. It promoted learning and study over self-reliance. Further, because many of the tunes followed similar melodic and harmonic patterns, all seemed to lack an American spirit of rugged individualism. Though composed in America, these pieces were not considered truly American, but rather vapid imitations of an imported European style.

McIntosh displayed a talent for this progressive style of sacred music and eventually became the Everetts’ colleague and fellow instructor in their various Southern teaching circuits. Although profiting from his association with the Everetts, McIntosh often functioned more as a symbol of Southern legitimacy. As a native-born Southerner, he noticed that at times he represented local authenticity, giving the Everett brothers a certain status that they might not have had otherwise. In contrast, the Everetts were born during the early nationalist period in Virginia, a state that identified as much with the middle Atlantic as its southern and western neighbors before the 1830s. McIntosh was from the trans-Appalachian southwest, and his connections and early professional career encompassed parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. These teaching circuits proved so successful that he moved to Richmond, Va., to become a partner in the L.C. Everett Company. By 1861, this company had extended networks throughout much of the south and middle Atlantic.

At the outbreak of war, McIntosh enlisted in the Confederate forces, joining the 18th Virginia Infantry, Company H, Appomattox County, on May 7, 1861. For a year, he served as a lieutenant before being discharged for a “personality difficulty” with Lieutenant William Gray of his unit. Soon thereafter, he joined the 25th Battalion Virginia Volunteers, a city guard unit formed after the first attack on Richmond by Union forces, then under General George McClellan (1826-1885). He served in this capacity until the war’s conclusion in 1865. By 1866, he had resumed his former career as a singing instructor and published his first collection, Tabor, or the Richmond Collection of Sacred Music. These compilations of sacred music were commonly known as tunebooks throughout the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Tabor as a Conceit for Southern-ness

McIntosh’s tunebook contains many direct and implied references to Southern identity, equated with formal Southern nationalism. As a way to demonstrate education and gentility, Southern intellectuals enjoyed creating elaborate conceits, constructed as metaphors for contemporary issues. The front cover of Tabor followed this established tradition and provided the first and perhaps most complex proclamation of Southern identity (fig. 1). Through it he established a metaphoric connection between Richmond, Va., and Mount Tabor, located southwest of the Sea of Galilee in the West Bank. Above the illustrated cover appeared a quotation from Psalm 89, verse 12: “Thou hast made the North and the South; Tabor and Hermon shall rejoice in Thy NAME.” From one perspective, McIntosh followed typical tunebook compilation conventions through his inclusion of the excerpt from the book of Psalms, the one selection of scriptural text universally accepted for musical performance by almost every denomination in the United States.

Although the use of a quotation remained a standard part of many tunebooks, this particular verse drove home the work’s political message. Of the two mountains listed in the passage, Mount Hermon is located to the north and Mount Tabor to the south. Significantly, McIntosh chose to name his collection after the southern mountain. Also, the engravings of the two mountains on the cover seem to relate to Civil War politics. Mount Hermon, located on the right, is depicted with a snow-capped peak, perhaps a reference to Washington, D.C., with its White House. In this sense, McIntosh referenced the two capital cities through the equation of Tabor with the Confederacy and Hermon with the Union. Below the title appears the compilation’s statement of intent: “[d]esigned for the various Religious Societies of the Southern and South-Western States,” again proclaiming its area of reception and intended public. Finally, though printed in New York City, the list of booksellers is limited to Philadelphia and important Southern cities, including Louisville, Richmond, Charleston, Nashville, Mobile, New Orleans, and Vicksburg.

Besides equating the geographic location of Mount Tabor with Richmond, McIntosh’s conceit extended to biblical and Classical history. Beginning in the Old Testament, Mount Tabor became a battleground for the war between the Israelites and Canaanites as described in Judges 4 when the Israelites had become slaves under Jabin, king of Canaan. Deborah, a prophetess and judge for the Israelites “sent and called Barak the son of Abinoam out of Kedeshnaphtali, and said unto him, Hath not the Lord God of Israel commanded, saying, Go and draw toward Mount Tabor, and take with thee ten thousand men of the children of Naphtali and of the children of Zebulun?” Barak responded by having his forces descend from the mountain and attack the Canaanites, destroying the entire army. Paralleling the Confederate perspective of Richmond’s military role during the Civil War, the city repelled an attack by McClellan in 1862, thereby driving off the army of the oppressors who had enslaved God’s chosen people. In this sense, McIntosh equated the plight of Southerners with that of the Israelites.

Displaying not only his knowledge of Old Testament history, McIntosh also demonstrated his mastery of ancient Greek through another reference to Mount Tabor, this time from The Jewish War by Flavius Josephus. Josephus was placed in command of the Jewish rebels entrenched on Mount Tabor during the First Jewish-Roman War in 66 C.E. Vespasian had sent 600 cavalry officers under the command of Platsidus to attack the Jewish forces. Apparently trying the same tactic as Barak, Josephus surprised the Roman army, which initially retreated. However, Platsidus rallied his troops and attacked the rebels, cutting off their line of retreat. The remaining Jewish soldiers surrendered. Again paralleling Confederate history, Richmond suffered a second attack by outside forces, this time under Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant in the nine-month Richmond-Petersburg Campaign (1864-65). As in Josephus, Union forces took Richmond, with Confederates surrendering on April 3, 1865. Like Mount Tabor, Richmond witnessed two major battles, the first a victory, the second a defeat. Displaying the education of its author and a fondness for biblical and classical allusion, Tabor proclaimed its Southern-ness through the mountain’s location and geography, and the political identity of the Israelites through their military campaigns at this location.

Tabor and the American Tunebook

Many of the 561 pieces that constitute the Tabor follow typical conventions of the time period. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a typical tunebook consisted of three main parts. It would begin with a section devoted to the rudiments of musical notation explaining melody, rhythm, time signature, and occasionally vocal production and other practical knowledge for singing. Because these books were intended for use in singing schools, the introductory material often served as a textbook. The second part comprised a selection of congregational metrical psalm tunes organized by poetic meter. This format paralleled the tunebooks by Northern progressives and members of liturgical churches.

Established over the course of the antebellum period, the musical portion of reform tunebooks began with a grouping of tunes in the three standard iambic psalm and hymn meters in the following order: (L.M. [8.8.8.8.], C.M. [8.6.8.6.], S.M. [6.6.8.6.]). Afterwards, the section continued with the particular meters characteristic of Methodist and other evangelical protestant denominations. These meters were originally associated with popular and theatrical song lyrics of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Following this congregational repertory, McIntosh included a final section of more extended pieces of choral music such as anthems whose texts consisted of biblical prose, and set pieces whose texts contained multi-stanzaic settings of poetry. Both of these types of pieces were intended for performance in church as well as for social-devotional occasions. McIntosh concluded Tabor with a selection of liturgical music, almost exclusively Episcopalian service music and Anglican chant for reciting the psalms.

Besides tune organization, many of the original pieces adopted the customs of other contemporary American tunebooks. For instance, new pieces appearing in this collection were almost exclusively by McIntosh, the Everett brothers, and other local Virginia musicians such as J.D. Hunt of Fredericksburg, W.L. Montague of Richmond, and Marcus Justin McGlasson of Farmville. Most compilers of the time operated within a network of regional musicians and professional colleagues. Thus, McIntosh, through the inclusion of his own tunes, and those by his business partners and other locally esteemed singing teachers and church musicians, created both a ready market for his fledgling publication and an informal but effective means for sales and distribution. Further insuring commercial success, this network also extended to a broader geographic area through the availability of Tabor in bookstores in all of the major cities of the Reconstruction-era South.

Likewise, McIntosh’s tune naming followed the practice of the time period. Many of the pieces related to the Bible, being named after biblical place names, such as Horeb and Euphrates by A.B. Everett, and Mizpah by McIntosh. Other tunes were titled for Old Testament figures such as Zurishaddai and Boaz by McIntosh, and Esther and Shemariah by A.B. Everett. Still others referenced McIntosh’s colleagues and associates, including the tunes Brooks and Everett that reference his business parter, and two tunes named McIntosh by W.L. Montague and L.C. Everett. Finally, McIntosh featured tunes with American place names for their titles, including a number of Southern states and cities such as Georgia, Fayetteville, Fredericksburg, and Augusta by McIntosh, Richmond by A.B. Everett, and Beaufort by L.C. Everett.

Alongside these more commonplace conventions, McIntosh imbued his tunebook with a distinctively Southern nationalist sentiment through his naming of tunes after prominent Confederate generals, soldiers, politicians, battlefields, and military encampments. Antebellum Southern compilers did not proclaim Southern nationalism but rather placed their collections within their geographic or regional place within the country. Earlier collections with the word “southern” in their title were compiled only by evangelical musicians who embraced the tenor-led style in shape-note notation. These publications included The Southern Harmony (New Haven, 1835) and The Southern and Western Pocket Harmonist (Philadelphia, 1846) by William Walker of Spartanburg, South Carolina (figs. 2, 3), The Southern Minstrel by Lazarus J. Jones of Jasper County, Miss. (Philadelphia, 1849) (fig. 4), and The Southern Musical Advocate and Singer’s Friend (fig. 5), a periodical with shape-note tune supplements published by Joseph Funk of Singer’s Glen, Va., that began in 1859 and discontinued shortly before the battle of First Manassas in 1861. None of these sources proclaimed any specific Southern-ness other than their works’ titles. In this sense, these tunebooks constituted Southern regionalism, emphasizing their location of origin as a statement of the betterment of music and social singing within a larger American community.

In contrast, the contents of Tabor follow a distinctly Southern nationalist perspective. For instance, A.B. Everett titled one of his hymn tunes Lanier, presumably for the poet Sidney Lanier (1842-1881), who had been active as a soldier in Virginia during the war. McIntosh named his tune Davis after Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America. Camp Fairfax commemorated where McIntosh was stationed while in the 18th Virginia Infantry in 1861; Manassas was the scene of two major battles in Virginia. A few tunes are named after prominent generals, including Beauregard for Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard (1818-1893) (fig. 6), the hero of first Mannassas and defender of Petersburg during the Petersburg-Richmond Campaign, Longstreet after James Longstreet (1821-1904) (fig. 7), Robert E. Lee’s principal subordinate, and Lee by L.C. Everett.

McIntosh also included a few tunes composed while in camp, such as Claiborne (fig. 8), written at “Camp Fairfax, near Fairfax C. H. Va.; Oct. 3, 1861” and the extended choral piece “This is the Day” “[w]ritten in Camp, at Elliott Hill, Va. December 1864.” He also wrote a few tunes for prominent military events. As a symbol of his intimacy with some of the most notable Confederate officers, McIntosh composed the anthem, “I heard a voice in heaven” “upon the occasion of the death of Gen. T. J. Jackson (Stonewall) and used in the service of his funeral, May 17th, 1863” (fig. 9). Clearly, McIntosh remained well connected to many prominent Confederate figures and used these names for the promotion of his tunebook. He also musically enshrined and uplifted Jackson through his genteel use of harmony and compositional style. By composing a piece that employed all of the facets associated with Southern notions of high art, he ennobled Jackson with the politeness of his music.

Tabor and Southern Evangelical Music

McIntosh, though a member of the genteel educated elite of Southern society, attempted to market his concept of Southern-ness to other less polite denominations influenced by popular evangelicalism. As a Methodist, McIntosh included a number of contrafacta, or sacred appropriations of secular songs, a religious song type that descended from the tune collections associated with John Wesley and George Whitefield, and the First Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century. The contrafacta in Tabor were a mixture of older popular songs and arrangements of melodies from cultivated, more classically minded composers. As such, contrafacta of “God save the King” and “Rousseau’s Dream,” an early version of the melody known as “Go tell Aunt Rhody,” are contrasted with similar adapted settings of oratorio arias by English baroque composer George Frederick Handel and vocal arrangements of chamber music by Viennese musicians Ludwig Van Beethoven and Ignaz Pleyel.

Although most contrafacta were arrangements of tunes by prominent European composers of art music, a number of them were taken from shape-note publications. Though not original to the collection, one popular contrafactum, Autumn, was adapted from an instrumental march of possibly Spanish or Scottish origin. In its instrumental form, this tune appeared in arrangements for a variety of instruments, from solo piano to a full Civil War-era brass band, such as the version by J. Schatzman published in Peters Saxhorn Journal in Cincinnati (1859) (fig. 10, 11).

The earliest sacred contrafactum of this tune, Dunrossness, appeared in a northern source, The Haydn Collection of Church Music (Boston, 1850), compiled by Boston musicians Benjamin Franklin Baker (1811-1889) and L.H. Southard. This tune setting displayed all of the progressive features associated with the reformers of ancient-style psalmody (fig. 12). As a demonstration of his scientific attainment, the arranger employed figured bass, or numbers printed below the bass line, to provide a keyboard player with a harmonic outline of the tune for accompanying the singers. Many evangelical and enthusiastic religious groups in the United States at this time did not use keyboard accompaniment, both because of the traditional association of keyboard instruments with Episcopalians and Catholics, and also their high cost. Thus, the specification of keyboard accompaniment testified to the social status of the tunebook and its compilers. Other similar features in the score included its Italian tempo marking, crescendo and decrescendo dynamic markings found in every phrase (between the second and third staves), and a highly decorated or embellished form of the melody. All of these features would have appealed to elitist musicians of the time period.

Autumn, the earliest and only Southern version of this melody, was first printed in The Christian Harp (1865), a collection intended for social and domestic devotion, revivals, and the Sunday school. This tunebook was published by the most prominent shape-note publisher in Virginia: the sons of Mennonite evangelical shape-note singing teacher, musical arranger, and music publisher Joseph Funk (1778-1862), who lived in Singer’s Glen in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Autumn (fig. 13) reflects its more informal intent. It does not specify keyboard accompaniment. The melody is plainer, without any of the embellishments found in the earlier version from Boston, and the texture is reduced to two parts, melody and bass. The harmony is more simplistic, with the bass line limited to three or four notes for much of the piece.

Significantly, McIntosh arranged the Southern version of this tune and not those of earlier Northern reform and evangelical musicians. McIntosh’s arrangement of Autumn (fig. 14), though expanded to four parts, preserved many of the features that characterized Funk’s setting. The melody retains the same simplified melodic shape, and the bass line, though not identical, emphasizes the same clarity as that in Funk. In this sense, McIntosh arranged the tune in the idiom of his formal scientific training, but attempted to bridge the two prevailing styles of Southern sacred music. Perhaps as a symbolic gesture, McIntosh, a resident of Richmond, united the Tidewater and Piedmont areas of Virginia with the western part of the state through his arrangement of Funk’s version of the tune.

McIntosh also included a number of folk hymns, a related tune type to the contrafactum. Among the more enthusiastic and evangelical groups, folk hymns were hymn tunes with no apparent popular secular source for the melody. Sometimes termed spiritual folksongs, these tunes appeared in tune families, with individual variations in the melody paralleling the melody variants of different versions of contrafacta. Folk hymns apparently originated as sacred parallels to their secular cousins. As with the original pieces, many of the folk hymns were given a strongly defined though sometimes mistaken Southern identity regarding the tunes’ origins. McIntosh labeled a few folk hymns as Southern tunes or Southern melodies above the score, despite the fact that at least two of these pieces appeared first in northern evangelical tunebooks.

Of the folk hymns, a few had direct connections to the Shenandoah Valley through the efforts of some of its earliest singing teachers, Amzi Chapin (1768-1835) and his brother Lucius (1760-1842). McIntosh included two tunes associated with the Chapins, Forest better known as Rockbridge, and Memphis better known as Psalm 24th or Primrose. Similarly, he included Golden Hill, a Chapin tune that was arranged later by Ananias Davisson (1780-1857), a Presbyterian singing teacher who resided at Cross Keys outside of Harrisonburg, Va., in the Shenandoah Valley. Davisson published two of the most influential Early Nationalist shape-note tunebooks: The Kentucky Harmony (1816) and The Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony (1820). McIntosh even took the tune Pilgrim (fig. 15) from the first self-proclaimed Southern compiler, William Walker, a Calvinist Baptist and author of The Southern Harmony. Though this tune, more commonly known as Olney, appeared in other earlier tunebooks from the West, McIntosh specifically identified this tune with Walker, The Southern Harmony, and the South (fig. 16). As with the arrangement of Autumn, McIntosh featured the two main styles of Southern sacred music, uniting them under a common identity of Southern nationalism.

Though lying outside scholarly notions of Southern-ness, McIntosh’s Tabor, or the Richmond Collection of Sacred Music reveals his efforts to single-handedly invent a new forum for sacred music. Using psalmody as political ideology, McIntosh legitimized not only the struggle by Confederates to gain independence from the United States, but he also helped to promote the lost Southern cause at the beginning of the Reconstruction era. As an educated veteran living among genteel society, McIntosh demonstrated his taste and modishness through his elaborate metaphoric construct, his professional connections, and his style of composition.

At the same time, he attempted to bridge the two reigning styles of sacred music practiced in the South, thereby presenting a unified South, emblematic of Southern nationalism. Though the ideology behind his efforts remains misguided, injecting a Southern nationalist perspective into sacred music is without parallel in the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this episode in Southern history revolves around the seemingly contrary defining characteristics of the tunebook itself. Because of its style of notation, orthodox harmony, and the compilers’ pedigree of instruction, The Tabor, or Richmond Collection of Sacred Music defies current notions of Southern-ness. However, finding Southern-ness in Southern music often involves looking beyond the traditional, accepted, and ultimately constructed twentieth- and twenty-first-century notions of Southern identity in American sacred music.

Further Reading:

Several scholarly works have explored the concepts of Southern identity in the antebellum period including: William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: the nullification crisis in South Carolina 1816-1836 (New York, 1965, 1992), Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: the transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York, 2007), and John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern nationalists and Southern nationalism, 1830-1860 (New York, 1979). Although the literature on American sacred music of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is somewhat large, a few important works relevant to Rigdon McCoy McIntosh and Southern-ness in antebellum Southern sacred music include: David Brock, “A Foundation for defining Southern Shape-Note Folk Hymnody from 1800 to 1859 as a Learned Compositional Style” (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1996), Annabel Morris Buchanan, Folk-Hymns of America (New York, 1938), George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (Chapel Hill, 1933), Irving Lowens, “John Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second: a northern precursor of Southern folk hymnody” in Journal of the American Musicological Society 5, 2 (1952): 114-131, David Music, A Selection of Shape-note Folk Hymns from Southern United States Tune Books, 1816-61 (Middleton, Wis., 2005), Lewis E. Oswalt, “A Rare Book for Its Day: the 1874 hymnal and tune book of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South” in Hymnology in the Service of the Church: essays in honor of Harry Eskew, Paul R. Powell, ed. (Saint Louis, 2008).

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

Nikos Pappas, an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Alabama, is actively engaged as a scholar and performer of American music from the colonial, early nationalist, and antebellum periods. A recognized Kentucky master traditional musician, he is currently preparing a database of Southern and Western sacred music from 1750 to 1870. His research has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, the American Musicological Society, the Bibliographic Society of America, the Music Library Association, and the American Antiquarian Society.